My 2 cents how I'd fix the issue with powercreeping

[Yanzoo]

"Powercreep has practically been a big problem in warframe since primes were first thought of" - Rahetelius, 2016

^{The rest of this topic will center around what Rahetelius has said about powercreep, so do watch it fully in case you're not familiar with the concept.}

Honestly, this kind of issue is much more easier to fix than many others that the game currently faces, at least in my opinion. DE holds the biggest power here, and the problem is simple: older weapons are becoming obsolete and not able to compete with newer, shinier and also harder to get weapons. So a thing that DE should do is make those older weapons more powerful to be able to compete with the newer ones.

I'm not saying to remake all weapons completely, few tweaks in their stats can do god's work if done correctly. But one thing is certain: primes need to become sidegrades, not direct upgrades. This will only be worse in case the Umbra frames are also just direct upgrades, they also should just be sidegrades, to compensate, just make primes already come with naturally enhanced energy for the hassle of farming for them, so no need to also put potatoes on them.

To make primes be less essential to keep up with the difficulty curve, it's better to make the non-prime ones just be stronger instead of primes themselves to be weaker. I do not have an answer on how to change every single weapon, after all I have not even got to play with half of them. But surely through some community feedback, DE can figure out most of the kinks with our help, this is just not the topic to go through with specifics.

Also, DE, stop focusing in just making new content. We already have a ton of it to go through, try making smaller improvements with the quality of life for the game, bigger content has to be released, but don't try to rush it out. We will be much more grateful with less frequent but more polished updates than we will ever be with rushed and/or unfinished content.

Fix weapons first, please.

Check my other topic, for some other 2 cents I dropped:

 

Edited May 1, 2017 by Yanzoo

[Elvangreen]

New powercreep gun > buff old stuff > new big OP gun > buff old stuff > .....  > ad inifinitum?..

 

 

[Fallen_Echo]

3 hours ago, Elvangreen said:

New powercreep gun > buff old stuff > new big OP gun > buff old stuff > .....  > ad inifinitum?..

 

 

Still better than

New powercreep gun->old stuff becomes obsolete->newer powercreep gun->less old stuff becomes obsolete

[Elvangreen]

Just now, Fallen_Echo said:

Still better than

New powercreep gun->old stuff becomes obsolete->newer powercreep gun->less old stuff becomes obsolete

Yup, but why not bring in a new and interesting gun that is not necessarily better then everything else?..

Yes we really need to buff some stuff, but a continuous cycle of buffing wont help at all.

[Fallen_Echo]

Just now, Elvangreen said:

Yup, but why not bring in a new and interesting gun that is not necessarily better then everything else?..

Yes we really need to buff some stuff, but a continuous cycle of buffing wont help at all.

Whenever someone suggested that a bunch of guys came up and downvoted it because "it makes all guns the same".

[Elvangreen]

2 minutes ago, Fallen_Echo said:

Whenever someone suggested that a bunch of guys came up and downvoted it because "it makes all guns the same".

Cernos Prime (though that one does need a little love)

Edited May 1, 2017 by Elvangreen

[Fallen_Echo]

Just now, Elvangreen said:

Cernos Prime

Isnt thats the weapon most players hate with passion becuase of its useless mechanics?

[Djego27]

What you suggest is more or less just giving into power creep as a solution to unneeded power creep, what is kind of just increases the problem.

Glaive prime got a buff a while ago and people complained that it does not have enught crit, because everybody knows that a melee weapon must have crit to scale well with her blood rush and all other weapons are just bad. Right? Right? Guys? While the design is not perfect and it still struggles being A useless as throwing weapon or B useless as melee weapon depending on how you mod it, you can do 1h survivals with it now on Ember melee only, that is pretty much the same ballpark of most good melee weapons in the game and only outdone by a few if you do not use cheese or much stronger scaling mechanics like rag doll effects, invisibility to the ability to do on demand finishers(like with radial blind or inaros).

Most old weapons that are considered bad actually still work, I did a L80 sorti interception vs corpus with Rino and my first formaed weapon the Tiberon solo a few days ago and it is doable, it is just not as easy as doing a left click on everything no matter what level number and how you mod your weapon and it will die, because the community is always very loud in demanding stronger weapons for the same content, acts like the end of the world just happens when they hear the word "nerf", while also demanding more difficult content because everything is so easy if you utilize all the overpowered tools they wished for and DE followed suit to put in the game.

After spamming 2 and 4 while one shooting everything(also doing the most kills and highest damage of the team, close to doing solo what all others did together) with my puncture modded vhek as Frost with a saryn spamming spore and misasma, a mag spamming polarise and a atlas spamming petrify in the extra elemental damage defence sorti I took my Ember and did level my Tenora in some solo syndicate missions with 2 mods on it and no WoF. I for myself liked that a lot more and put on some sentential music on thinking about a time when warframe was a fun co op shooter instead of a press 1 to 4 simulation and enemy level had any kind of meaning to it.

What DE should do is balance gear roughly around the same level of power(like it is done in some cases like soma prime vs boltor prime or prisma grakata vs braton prime, brakk vs mara detron and so on), sure people will always go after the newest shiny tools but it also gives a reason for people to go back and check out older weapons and frames. Especially for newer players, that demand massive buffs to frames like Ember at higher levels, not because the frame does need them(Ember works totally fine in all but elemental resist sortis solo) but because it is more difficult to play for them compared to all the infinite damage and semi god mode the game happens to suggest to them as balance baseline to compensate for all the incredible poor mechanics at higher levels that DE refuses to address since years.

Edited May 1, 2017 by Djego27

[DSpite]

Hold on a sec. In this game "powercreep" seems to exist because we start with guns that do 100 damage, then mod them to do 10000, THEN start stacking every ability we can think of of on top to add an extra x2-x5 to that number.

Should we not just compress the percentages on the mods to not cause these massive multipliers to start with?

If all-Forma Frames and guns were only a x10 increase in power compared to non-Forma setups, then the whole Forma argument turns into an optimization curve, not a powercreep curve.

[(XBOX)Onyx Schnee]

I'm one of the few that likes the miter....its my inaros' primary.

its dmg isn't much, but innate punch on enemies and ricochete rounds? That 50% status becomes 100% and i'm stripping armor and watching those slash procs do the rest.

[Death_Master_]

Totally biggest powercreep i see here is enemy scaling - form some hundreds of HP/armor/shields up to literally dozens of millions HP/armor/shields.

 

[JalakBali]

"It's easy guys, instead of upgrades, just have sidegrades!"

Yea, sure. Here's the thing though: What are "sidegrades"? What would be considered a sidegrade? Something that does the exact same thing but only slightly different? But if they're only slightly different, like, say, Ignis and Ignis Wraith, why would you use one over the other? Let's take another weapon: Tigris Prime and Sancti Tigris. Side grades? Not at all. You bring Tigris Prime if you want to kill a god. You bring Sancti Tigris for the proc to deal with mooks. Those are not exactly "side grades" unless that is how you would define it. But then it becomes "an added feature that is good for specific thing or situation". But even this is overly simplifying it. Just like your posts. Just this sentence about sums it up:

On 5/1/2017 at 0:52 PM, Yanzoo said:

I'm not saying to remake all weapons completely, few tweaks in their stats can do god's work if done correctly.

Sure. "Few tweaks". The problem is figuring out WHICH thing to tweak and by how much. "It's easy to make great food, you just have to cook them correctly". No, it's more like "it's easy to say things need improving, it's a different matter to figure out what to improve and how".

 

On 5/1/2017 at 0:52 PM, Yanzoo said:

But surely through some community feedback, DE can figure out most of the kinks with our help, this is just not the topic to go through with specifics.

Do you even read these forums? After the design council challenge, half are complaining about how hard it was while the other half are complaining how it's too easy to choose and the reward was not good enough. The community here is more noise than actual helpful feedback. And telling the devs they just need to "tweak some numbers" to make things good is not helpful at all. You want to help improve things, be more specific, bring some evidence by testing to the discussion.

 

Also, this:

On 5/1/2017 at 0:52 PM, Yanzoo said:

Also, DE, stop focusing in just making new content. We already have a ton of it to go through, try making smaller improvements with the quality of life for the game, bigger content has to be released, but don't try to rush it out. We will be much more grateful with less frequent but more polished updates than we will ever be with rushed and/or unfinished content.

Fix weapons first, please.

is dumb. The people working on new contents are not the ones fixing or balancing things. You're also assuming there will be a state where weapons are "fixed". There won't be. There will always be players whining about the state of things. The forums are not the best place to gauge what is broken and what is not. DE can only focus on their own data mining. Like they did with the balance pass, they just pick the ones least used or with least kill stat.

[Redhux]

Easy to fix!

 

Quit complaining about Power Creeps and use them!

 

Problem solved.

[DSpite]

On 19/05/2017 at 7:09 AM, Redhux said:

Easy to fix!

 

Quit complaining about Power Creeps and use them!

 

Problem solved.

I'm going to take that statement as humor.

I've made "hacked guns" in Borderlands for a few laughs, and even THOSE were not as much of a room-cleaner as some of the weapons in this game.

There is no point calling it a "team game" if one unbalanced gun allows 10x the killing power of the other three members of the team. A solution of "well, then make all 4 members of the team get that gun" would be as asinine as just saying "lets ALL run wall-hacks in Call Of Duty 4, then it's balanced again".

The "game" is no longer the intended game, it has turned into something else.