Eximus Stronghold Missions are the gold standard for difficulty

[Kezriak]

In all honestly and with all due respect, this game is lacking in difficulty, or so I thought till I played yesterdays Sortie mission entitled Eximus stronghold. That was insane and I loved it, dial back on the knockdown spam and energy vampire enemies that leech your energy pool and honestly you might have something there, maybe even take it a step further and introduce corrupted mods into the rewards pool or something, I'm looking for a challenge and some fun, and as much as it pains me to say this, the Ambulas event is a snoozefest honestly, can we have a hard mode option with some increased rewards?

[redeyedtreefrog]

honestly, it's not that the ambulas event is boring or too easy(I find it rather fun myself), it's just that the point at which the ambulas event becomes properly difficult is at and above sortie 3 leveled enemies... that took over an hour to reach when I ran an outer terminus(corpus defense on pluto) mission earlier this morning.

I'll mention that both oberon and inaros can achieve knockdown invulnerability. Oberon can grant it team-wide, though inaros needs an augment. Atlas also gets it passively, but only on the ground.

I also agree that the sortie survival was a pretty fun amount of difficulty, in that I did struggle slightly to complete it even though I was killing enemies fairly efficiently(I had to resort to melee finishers with inaros, which are effective, but too slow to gain life support steadily).

[S0VEREIGNSK]

I use loki with invisible and i can say it is a good exp farm :)

Comes with Focus bonus

Edited May 5, 2017 by System.Lord.Ra

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

I found the recent Eximus Stronghold Survival very annoying as I failed several times with different frames and then wound up simple cheesing it with Valkyr and Naramon and an Atterax. Maybe if the Arson/Arctic exemi didn't stack their damage reduction it could have been fun.

[StinkyPygmy]

I'd rather well designed enemies and not poorly crafted mechanics blended together with "how far can we push scaling" tactics. What you described isn't difficulty to me. Its easy enough to work around and incredibly boring. You can use the exact same tactics people use for pretty much anything in WF.

[[DE]Momaw]

There is too much of a range in player capability to say for sure what is difficult and what is not. The enemy that puts up a good long fight for the player with the Boltor doing 5K DPS doesn't even exist for the player with the Tigris Prime that does 50K DPS, much less the player with the Rubico doing 500K per shot.  The enemy that hits hard and requires lots of dodging and good reflexes for the player who is not invulnerable, is Just Another Bag of Hitpoints for the Valkyr or Wukong that can't actually die to it.  The enemy that has interesting and varied attacks for the player that fights interactively with it, is more of the same for the person who uses Shadowstep or Avalanche or Sleep to prevent it from fighting back.

You can't have meaningful and well tuned difficulty unless the designer can make certain assumptions about the player's capabilities, for example: player is not permanently invulnerable, player has to actually engage with enemies to hurt them, and player does somewhere between X and Y damage per second.  All of these problems can be individually overcome (e.g. the problem of player DPS, where some players are doing 5K and others are doing 500K is fixed by invulnerability stages), but they have different solutions that aren't universally fair.

[Kezriak]

47 minutes ago, Momaw said:

There is too much of a range in player capability to say for sure what is difficult and what is not. The enemy that puts up a good long fight for the player with the Boltor doing 5K DPS doesn't even exist for the player with the Tigris Prime that does 50K DPS, much less the player with the Rubico doing 500K per shot.  The enemy that hits hard and requires lots of dodging and good reflexes for the player who is not invulnerable, is Just Another Bag of Hitpoints for the Valkyr or Wukong that can't actually die to it.  The enemy that has interesting and varied attacks for the player that fights interactively with it, is more of the same for the person who uses Shadowstep or Avalanche or Sleep to prevent it from fighting back.

You can't have meaningful and well tuned difficulty unless the designer can make certain assumptions about the player's capabilities, for example: player is not permanently invulnerable, player has to actually engage with enemies to hurt them, and player does somewhere between X and Y damage per second.  All of these problems can be individually overcome (e.g. the problem of player DPS, where some players are doing 5K and others are doing 500K is fixed by invulnerability stages), but they have different solutions that aren't universally fair.

So have the same system in place that Diablo 3 does for difficulty maybe? A slider which increases difficulty by way of enemy level and resistences+droprates of rarer mods and/or resources n credits. Dont wanna face difficulty, tone down the slider maybe? I'm just brainstorming here cause honestly outside of sortie missions and 40min+ defense/survival I can faceroll and still come out on top

[DSpite]

11 hours ago, Kezriak said:

In all honestly and with all due respect, this game is lacking in difficulty, or so I thought till I played yesterdays Sortie mission entitled Eximus stronghold. That was insane and I loved it, dial back on the knockdown spam and energy vampire enemies that leech your energy pool and honestly you might have something there, maybe even take it a step further and introduce corrupted mods into the rewards pool or something, I'm looking for a challenge and some fun, and as much as it pains me to say this, the Ambulas event is a snoozefest honestly, can we have a hard mode option with some increased rewards?

"Difficulty" should not mean "spam a million units and a million effects, then counter with OP weapons".

You are only calling things "snoozefests" because you have a weapon modded that can kill everything on the Star Chart with ONE round of ammunition. Strip all your gear to 30 mods points max then do a L40 mission, it's "challenging" again, then breaks again if you just handpick a specific 4 FOTW Frame team.

You want increased rewards for exactly the same level of effort new players experience with inferior gear on lower level planets, against the same units.

If you want examples of how other games scale "difficulty" then see an MMO like Guild Wars 2, where at least the high level units are TOTALLY different units with unique mechanics, not the SAME units with the SAME AI and the SAME tactics, only with more hit points and damage output.

If you can kill a level 30 Bombard with no Forma, you will then kill a L150 Bombard with Forma and maxed Mods in the same IDENTICAL way, with ZERO change in effort, other then they spam more units at higher levels.

"More hit points/armour/damage resistance" is not "more challenge", when you just counter with "more DPS".

[DSpite]

10 hours ago, Kezriak said:

So have the same system in place that Diablo 3 does for difficulty maybe? A slider which increases difficulty by way of enemy level and resistences+droprates of rarer mods and/or resources n credits. Dont wanna face difficulty, tone down the slider maybe? I'm just brainstorming here cause honestly outside of sortie missions and 40min+ defense/survival I can faceroll and still come out on top

I think we need more then that. Unfortunately the level of work might be too high for DE. If they could make better AI, they would of done it by now. If they could pump out more dynamic units, I'm also sure they would have done it by now.

What they have HAD to do so far is being forced to make contrived units to plug holes that we create when we go out of the box and make weird builds they had not accounted for.

When you have this many variables in the form of Frame abilities working together ... players will find ways to break things.

 

Edited May 5, 2017 by DSpite
speeeeelling

[Ventura_Highway]

Firmly disagree.

Eximus strongholds should not be considered "properly difficult" when the issue from them comes only from dealing with constant knockdown spam and near-total deprivation of energy.

[Kezriak]

3 hours ago, Ventura_Highway said:

Firmly disagree.

Eximus strongholds should not be considered "properly difficult" when the issue from them comes only from dealing with constant knockdown spam and near-total deprivation of energy.

Both are points I stated should be scaled back or reduced.

The game has a difficulty problem, cap out with prime weapons+catalsyts and forma and you have to sit through 20 waves on akkad before things start to get a touch heavy, why not just let people skip straight to wave 20 or 30 and get what they want?

 

I get it, people don't agree with my take on things, I don't see anyone else pointing out a better alternative, and the whole "I disagree but offer no reasonable or practical solution as a replacement" isn't helping anyone. 

[Ventura_Highway]

2 hours ago, Kezriak said:

 "I disagree but offer no reasonable or practical solution as a replacement" isn't helping anyone. 

I went into Sortie 3 today with only an Ack and Brunt. Try that.