Improving the Infested

[Red_Tesseract]

First of all, let me get one thing out of the way: I am not complaining. I love this game, have been playing it for a long time and will continue doing so. This is not meant to be a "rant", but more of a constructive set of ideas that DE can (or not) use if they want, even if I think they may have thought about this already.

Second: please forgive me if I make any mistakes, english is not my mother tongue and it's more noticeable when I try to talk a bit more technical.

 

Problems with Infested:

• Lack of Variety: The infested have a lack of variety in their appearances. This is just a visual/artistic problem, i am not talking about their abilities here, but it is a problem that can change how you play the game.
  Let me explain: you have enemies that do completely different things but look exactly the same except maybe for some change in colors. This prevents you from making informed decisions on who to kill first and why, or on who to avoid and why.
  
  Yes, I am aware that grineer and corpus have more or less the same problem, but here is the thing: grineers are clones, and corpus crew are robots, so to and extent this makes sense, and even their important units are usually recognisable from each other. For example: heavy gunners and bombards, or nullifiers with their backpacks, and the other corpus members thanks to their very distinguishable colors.
  
  But on the other hand, infested are supposed to be a faction where the creatures are growing uncontrolably, even more so the ancients ("age and feeding have made them stonger"), and right now you don't get that feeling when playing against them, specially the ancients.
   
• Knockback: In my opinion this is a problem of the game in general and not the infested themselves, but for the moment I only have ideas for improving the infested. Knockback is a mechanic of the game and I understand why it exists, as sometimes you need to stop the warframes/players and CC them so that the enemies are able to deal some damage, but the current knockback is not fun for anyone: it prevents you from doing ANYTHING. And there are a lot of enemies that knock you down, specially when you start getting levels higher than 30-ish where those enemies start spawning quite more often. And if you add the arson eximus that can spawn in any faction, the problem gets even worse.
  
  With the infested this happens when a lot of ancients and moas are spawning at the same time, being able to just keeping you knocked down, unless you play with invulnerability like Rhino, Wukong or Valkyr, restricting your choices.
  I know blocking with melee can prevent some of this knockbacks, but again this would restrict your choices to just melee. The other ones can be avoided jumping around, and in my opinion those are less of a problem, because Warframe is supposed to be a very active and "parkour-like" game, but when you have shockwave after shockwave in confined places you still get knocked down, as you have to touch the ground at some point.

 

Solutions: I know these are not simple, and require a lot of work, but they are meant to be solutions on the long term, not so much on the short term.

• Variety: It sounds easy, but isn't: adding different aspects to the infested, to achieve the same we already have with the boiler and the brood mother. They have distinctive powers with distinctive aspects. You see them, you know what they are and can now take a decision if you want to kill them or not based on that information. The ones I think need this change are (from most important to less important):
  
  Ancients: All of them: healer, toxic and disruptor. They need to be distinct, and if possible represent their powers. The toxic ancient could have a bigger back, with spore-releasing fungus on the back, the healer could look thinner and the disruptor bulkier, for example. The specifics are not so important as long as you can distinguish between them quite easily, not like now where the biggest clue is usually the toxic aura of the toxic ancient (yes, they have different tentacles colors, but when surrounded by an aura, it's quite difficult to see).
  Volatile runner: To make them distinct from the leapers, or just from the infested in general because they are the only ones to suicide themselves. One idea would be keeping the same creature but adding an infested tumor on his back similar to the ones in the hive sabotages. This would make them recognisable while giving a reason why they explode, and allowing to add a little color change on that tumor when they are charging the explosion.
  Crawlers: These are less important because of their little impact, but at least being able to tell the toxic and maybe the electric appart would be nice to know when you have to avoid AoEs.
  
   
• Knockback: This comes back to making the ancients unique and more consistent with their powers. The moas in my opinion need less of a change because they are already quite unique, but the knockdown should still be taken care of in one way or another in the future to not have players feeling "i can't do anythig".
  
  Toxic Ancient: This is the one that doesn't need to change that much, because dragging the enemy close to get them in the toxic cloud makes a lot of sense, i would only make it that the dragging goes a little faster, buy you are still able to shoot and attack while being dragged.
  Ancient Healer: They shouldn't be dragging the enemies to them, to just get killed at the end of the knockdown. They are the healers and protectors, and should feel like it. They could for example make a slime-ish area around them that slows the warframes that are inside of it, making it more difficult to get to them and kill them, but that could be a bit too similar to the tar mutalist moa. I would also make the aura they grant to their allies easier to see, a bit more like the disruptor's aura.
  Ancient Disruptor: These are a bit more difficult to get in the right spot and not make them too powerful, because a slight change may just make it impossible to even use abilities when around them. One idea could be that they have projectile attacks that steals energy, but then remove their magnetic proc. Another one would be to make each attack grant a temporal debuff to power stength, but then reducing the buff they grant to their allies. This is more a question of testing and balance, but i would remove their grappling hook/knockback and add an ability in the same general idea of "anti-powers ancient".

 

These are my ideas, based on my opinion. I would love to hear what other players think about this, just don't be an a**hole critizicing just for the sake of it without explaining why you disagree, thanks.

 

tldr: Make ancients unique from each other, both in aspect and powers. This would already improve the infested by a lot.

 

Thanks for reading, and big thanks to DE for making this game.
Signed: Niko, alias Red_Tesseract.

[wanderere]

I reckon it sucks how rarely you see the juggernauts or maybe have like baby juggers that arent quite so gnarly yet. 

you see bursas in corpus missions quite regularly and rarely juggs in infested missions. always thought juggernauts as the infested equivalent.

but yeah more creepy infested would be great

Edited April 25, 2017 by wanderere

[Fiftycentis]

26 minutes ago, Red_Tesseract said:

but when you have shockwave after shockwave in confined places you still get knocked down, as you have to touch the ground at some point.

i agree that getting knockbacked in a corridor can be istant death if you are a squishy frame, but still, it's the only way with ancient grab that they can hope to kill us
 

21 minutes ago, Red_Tesseract said:

Volatile runner: To make them distinct from the leapers, or just from the infested in general because they are the only ones to suicide themselves. One idea would be keeping the same creature but adding an infested tumor on his back similar to the ones in the hive sabotages. This would make them recognisable while giving a reason why they explode, and allowing to add a little color change on that tumor when they are charging the explosion.

really? they are the only orange enemy and are easy to see, imo leaper and runner are more hard to distinguish
 

22 minutes ago, Red_Tesseract said:

Crawlers: These are less important because of their little impact, but at least being able to tell the toxic and maybe the electric appart would be nice to know when you have to avoid AoEs.

they all have different colors, but it's hard to see them because they are small

23 minutes ago, Red_Tesseract said:

Ancients: All of them: healer, toxic and disruptor. They need to be distinct, and if possible represent their powers. The toxic ancient could have a bigger back, with spore-releasing fungus on the back, the healer could look thinner and the disruptor bulkier, for example. The specifics are not so important as long as you can distinguish between them quite easily, not like now where the biggest clue is usually the toxic aura of the toxic ancient (yes, they have different tentacles colors, but when surrounded by an aura, it's quite difficult to see).

aaand, i agree at all, it's easy to know which one you are facing in a 1v1, but in a horde, when everyone has around an healer+disruptor+toxic aura it's really hard to understand when the healer is (that's why i bring my rad ignis); and same happens with venomous eximus, that in a group of eximus you can know which one is only by pointing them all until you find the right name

[Red_Tesseract]

8 minutes ago, Fiftycentis said:

i agree that getting knockbacked in a corridor can be istant death if you are a squishy frame, but still, it's the only way with ancient grab that they can hope to kill us

That was the point i was trying to make: knock back isn't and shouldn't be the only way to kill us. For example the leech/parasitc eximus are a very efficient way to make us harmless and defenseless (at least in regard of powers, not weapons), but it just makes the game harder, it doesn't remove the fun out of it. The knockback is just a: "you can't do anything, just hope you don't die" kind of situation, specially when it was already difficult for you to avoid that situation by itself if there are lots of enemies trying to knock you down.
There are a lot of different options: slows, snares and temporal disarm for example are all better than the knockdown because you still have something to do: attacking or moving, but slowly, attacking but you cannot move, or moving but you cannot attack (at least until you change weapons or something). This doesn't make you powerless, it makes you think what is the best you can do in any one of those situations, unlike the knockdown.

 

16 minutes ago, Fiftycentis said:

really? they are the only orange enemy and are easy to see, imo leaper and runner are more hard to distinguish

they all have different colors, but it's hard to see them because they are small

In the case of the volatile runners it wasn't because they are not easy to distinguish, but more because of the complete different mechanic they have, they should have a look that fits it. The animation is also similar tho the leapers jump. They should have a unique feeling.

On the crawlers part, again, I know that they have different colors, and they are not very impactful, that's why their changes are less important. But you should still feel a "this one is going to blow up" feeling with the toxic crawlers, for example, or make their colors easier to distinguish (green and yellow are similar, and the blues too).

 

31 minutes ago, wanderere said:

I reckon it sucks how rarely you see the juggernauts or maybe have like baby juggers that arent quite so gnarly yet.

I agree, but at the same time making them appear too often could make some missions quite more difficult, specially on higher levels. For example, on a defense mission you cannot stop killing the enemies or they will destroy the objective. But if you kill them the juggernaut spawns, and he deals a lot of damage and could possibly one-shot the objective. It's something to be considered, though.

On the other hand, baby juggers could be an option, but i was trying not to add new kinds of enemies, just improve the existing ones.