Why many abilities do NOT scale for later content?

[SmoothPanic]

Hi all. I'm three weeks in to my new Warframe habit.  Before I get too involved in the game (too late...) I wanted to ask why so many Warframe abilites seems to become useless in late game content? Is there a game design reason? For instance, Mag has Polarity, that strips a flat number instead of scaling, so this ability which seems useful at first becomes pointless later. I read that the dev radically changed Mag and purposefully made that ability weak for late game stuff. Why? I got Mag and Rhino Prime in a vault pack, and have enjoyed playing Mag. Reading up on builds it seems apparently that she become marginal in late game raids and experienced players recommend skipping Mag entirely since "there are so many better frames..." That's very disappointing. I'm glad I didn't use a Forma on it. I have Rhino Prime, too which by all accounts shines throughout the game, but Rhino isn't really interesting to me.

Or Excalibur's Radial Javelin.  There seem to be many examples of abilities become useless late game. I mean, design choice like these must have some rhyme or reason aside for a profit motive, right?  As I read about the ups and downs of various warframes, its very disappointing that there are so many abilities called useless or poorly scaled on so many warframes.  I am still very new to WF, but this seemingly persistent tendency and seemingly poor design may have me go sooner than I would otherwise. The game is very fun so far, but I must remain on the fence due to these considerations.

Do you all think this will be a constant problem with Warframe? 

 

Thanks for you time.
 

[Evultis]

Abilities that deal damage tend to fall of in usefulness due to how quickly health and armor scales up for enemies.

As for why Mag was nerfed, her Polarize ability used to be able to just nuke anything in the Corpus faction, trivializing game content.

[Kaotyke]

So not to break the game.

For newer frames, there is some matter of scalling, but its usually 1 of all powers, otherwise they get CC.

R. Javelin is... just a stun at higher levels, yeah. Not very usefull when R.Blind does much more. But I would like for Javelin to be an mook killer.

And about Mag... Well, her Magnetize is what scales but she is very energy needy if you use it a lot. It is a power that turns damage back to the enemy, but since the pull of it is low, enemies can run out of it.

Polarize strips Armor and Shields. Shield stripping is not very impactfull because Toxin, but Armor stripping is a serious thing if you are not in an Organized Squad, then they will bring 4 Corrosive Projections, redering the greatest use of Polarize moot.

[DrBorris]

Scaling damage makes enemies' "scaling" irrelevant. The point of having enemies scale up is to provide more of a challenge as you face higher levels, if abilities scaled with enemy levels than the gameplay would never change as you can just keep spamming buttons to the same reward at level 100 or level 10. 

 

And Mag is actually very capable of "end-game" damage with Magnetize as its damage scales with how much damage you, and enemies, are able to pump into the bubble. The rest of her kit is pretty meh but Magnetize does have its uses. 

[PoisonHD]

5 minutes ago, Antaeon said:

Abilities that deal damage tend to fall of in usefulness due to how quickly health and armor scales up for enemies.

As for why Mag was nerfed, her Polarize ability used to be able to just nuke anything in the Corpus faction, trivializing game content.

^^ This. They don't balance the game for super late game content, the scaling on enemies is ridiculous. If they balanced around this content, it would make the star chart a walk in the park for even a new player.

And for mag, the nuke wasn't the problem, it was how you could nuke any corpus enemy at any level.

Edited July 14, 2017 by PoisonHD

[Ceryk]

That's a really difficult question due to all the variables... The short version is that the game was once a completely different game and it had drastically evolved over the years into what it is now. In the process of getting to this point, the game's balance has been changed. There wasn't any need for damage scaling back when a lot of frames were made. DE also never expect the game to get as big as it did, so they didn't plan for any of this. So now they're having to rethink the game entirely. Damage scaling seems to be a bandaid they're using for the short term.

After PoE and Umbra, hopefully they will get going on the long anticipated Damage 3.0, which they've always said when they get around to it, the goal is overhaul every system that is related to combat so they can re-balance it all at once and do it properly.

Edited July 14, 2017 by Ceryk

[Robolaser]

9 minutes ago, DrBorris said:

Scaling damage makes enemies' "scaling" irrelevant. The point of having enemies scale up is to provide more of a challenge as you face higher levels, if abilities scaled with enemy levels than the gameplay would never change as you can just keep spamming buttons to the same reward at level 100 or level 10. 

Exactly.

This community has a very strong aversion to any kind of even remotely challenging content.

Edited July 14, 2017 by Robolaser

[Ceryk]

4 minutes ago, Robolaser said:

Exactly.

This community has a very strong aversion to any kind of even remotely challenging content.

No, not really. What people have an aversion to is "challenge" that comes from cheap mechanics like unnecessarily ridiculous scaling. When ever you see the devs talk about challenge, they frequently mention that players want it, but in a legitimately challenging way that isn't just turning enemies into ever stronger bullet sponges that can one shot you.

Edited July 14, 2017 by Ceryk

[CrazyCatLad]

Atlas' landslide scales well since it uses Melee stats (can easily decimate lvl 100 enemies in sorties).

 

[Rakiss]

In the end, even abilities that do scale suffer late-game.
Having lots of eximus units makes some abilities weaker.
Having ancients buffing everything weakens abilities.
Nullifier/comba/scrambus/bursa spam denies abilities in large areas.
Ehp scales faster than damage, so nyx's abilities become less effective.

Grineer can't really do anything to counter anything though.

[SmoothPanic]

22 minutes ago, DrBorris said:

Scaling damage makes enemies' "scaling" irrelevant. The point of having enemies scale up is to provide more of a challenge as you face higher levels, if abilities scaled with enemy levels than the gameplay would never change as you can just keep spamming buttons to the same reward at level 100 or level 10. 

Understood, but it's the players goal to keep on top of the scaling curve and to use skill and imagination to move to the top. Then why enable weapons to be improved? It's poor design if an ability has no way to be consciously scaled and thus just becomes a light show, right? It's a bit sad that if Mag was too much at one point, to instead just give her one and a half abilities (Mag and Pull). Maybe I misunderstand. Does Polarity just become a way to refresh ally shields late game and provide a bit of punch for Magnetize?  

I don't really want this to become a Mag thread, but she's a good example of poor design choices before and after the rework. And that enemies can just walk out fo the Mag ability, or that the Magnetize is hard limited to 4 enemies and can't be cast stationary or the 'popped' at will instead of always reaching max duration.

Path of Exile is much like WF in some ways, but is notoriously unforgiving and made for super hard core action gamers and doesn't really suffer the same flaws I am seeing here in WF.  In PoE, if a skill becomes pointless late game, you just remove it for something else.

Edited July 14, 2017 by SmoothPanic

[aligatorno]

7 minutes ago, Robolaser said:

Exactly.

This community has a very strong aversion to any kind of even remotely challenging content.

How exactly being one shot from the other side of the room by a Tech/Bombard/Combra/Napalm etc challenging? Having something only do tons more damage and getting tons more health is not challenging,  enemy devising strategies against you and countering your actions is. 

[Jangkrik]

8 minutes ago, Robolaser said:

Exactly.

This community has a very strong aversion to any kind of even remotely challenging content.

No. Jumping to conclusion are we?

The community has an aversion to challenges that rely on cheap mechanics like one shot kill, invincibility frames, enemies that can't die unless you spend 9999 seconds hitting them, enemy that spawns 20 other enemies to try to kill you, annoying restrictions that makes even regular Dark Souls bosses (regular means the run-of-the-mill ones, not the ones that you see in "omgwtfsohard" posts every once in a while) seem easy such as a Juggernaut in a melee only mission and CoH final part, etc.

[Testostzzet]

Like others have said, the game is generally balanced around a cap of level 30-40 enemies, which are still perfectly susceptible to most Warframe abilities, or at least their additional effects. Damage does fall off rapidly around the level 30 mark, but if you absolutely want to keep wrecking stuff with a single ability, you can do it once you've acquired and upgraded the right mods. A lot of people insist endgame content is at a certain tier that's only accessible after playing an hour straight of a single endless mission, but personally I think that's kind of silly for obvious reasons. If you're not the kind of person with the patience or time to sit in the same mission doing the same thing until your brain melts out, the abilities you've mentioned will work fine for you if modded correctly.

The exception to this is Sorties, which if you don't know about yet you'll find out about later. Enemies can get to over level 100 in those, but they're meant to challenge players who have themselves extremely well kitted out, so balancing to make it easier to oneshot those enemies doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. That's not to say Warframe doesn't have balance issues, but I think, as a new player, you'll find for the content you run you won't have many problems. As far as the abilities you mentioned:

Shield Polarize is primarily a shield restoration ability, which doesn't really need to scale in that department. When it comes to damage, I agree it's incredibly weak after her rework and I hope they go back to tweak it at some point. However, in being damage nerfed it also gained the ability to strip armor, which is a huge bonus at high levels, and it also causes enemies to drop fragments that can be sucked into her Magnetize ability to make it even more powerful- and Magnetize became amazing in the rework.

Radial Javelin will do just fine against most enemies until about level 30, at which point it primarily becomes a stun, and a fairly useful one if you can situate yourself properly. There's also an augment for it that gives you additional combo counters for each enemy hit, which is fantastic if you run a melee-centric loadout for Excalibur, which you probably will to some degree anyway given how his kit scales with your melee mods. I think it could use another look as well, but it's far from useless.

Ultimately it's about perspective. If you expect Warframe to be balanced around endless missions and want every single one of your abilities to shine solely on its own, Warframe's probably going to suck for you. If you're more interested in running missions with more finite objectives, and find worth in frames/loadouts as a whole instead of their component parts, you might find one or two things that bug you but it really isn't that bad. I highly suggest playing around with the abilities yourself once you have a wide variety of upgraded mods and can better see all of their effects. There's a lot of (not necessarily undeserved) salt when it comes to certain things in the Warframe community. Try not to let it sway your opinions until you've been playing for a couple of months and really explored the game on your own.

Edited July 14, 2017 by Tavanaka

[Robolaser]

"Bullet sponges" become easy to dispatch with a bit of thinking, cooperation and synergy instead of brute force and stacking numbers. At least until very very high levels, far beyond sorties. Also many people forget this is a coop game, not a race for mvp and bragging rights.

In most mission we don't need to kill everyone, or even anyone, to complete the objective.

One shot kills from the toughest units aren't an issue really, and are also avoidable most of the time. What do you expect from being hit by a homing missile? Anyway, there's no shame in being downed once in a while.

Your reactions just prove my point imo.

That said, i wouldn't mind enemies getting smarter at some point, and i agree that invincibility phases are annoying and cheap.

[(PSN)horridhal]

2 minutes ago, Robolaser said:

One shot kills from the toughest units aren't an issue really, and are also avoidable most of the time.

I feel like you haven't really been playing the game for very long if this is your observation.  It happens, literally, all the time and is rarely avoidable.

[13QZXXTTX]

@SmoothPanic

Start From Chroma Frame and beyond, Frames released after Chroma were more Scaled or specialist for what were designed for.

Most Frames before Chroma do need to be looked at, not every Frames, but the Frames that is not being played to often by observation.

Yes, Rhino Scale is another matter, you end up having to spam Iron Skin. Excalibur? Well as long damage can go through and wipe clean enemies, that a great thing for Excalibur.

3 hours ago, (PS4)horridhal said:

I feel like you haven't really been playing the game for very long if this is your observation.  It happens, literally, all the time and is rarely avoidable.

Spoiler

@Robolaser

Nope, unless you were around for Level 200~Level 9999 Enemies, no one could survived(without Invincibility? The whole Mission proved one thing: Scaling doesn't make sense if your Frame can't compete).

Getting surrounded by a hand few Cold Eximus Nullfiers was sure fun though. Still not even talking about Scramblers.

Avoiding probably mean to run far away and do damage from behind, that doesn't always work. As I remember the HIgher Level the enemies are, the more accurate their shot are and more damage it is.

 

 

Edited July 14, 2017 by DesFrSpace

[SmoothPanic]

I appreciate all the comments.  As some have noted, my perspective is naive due to inexperience with WF.  I mention Path of Exile since it is famously difficult, famously grindy and punishing. For instance, you spend days or weeks getting a character to level 83 and realize your grind resulted in a char hitting "The Wall" and will not advance any further.  WF is no where nearly that harsh.  WF seems more like PayDay2 in that the Deathwish mode is so difficult, the fun is lost for most. It seems like Sorties are the Deathwish of WF.

I am glad I came to WF at this late date as it appears to be constantly maturing. I'm enjoying i a great deal.

[45neo]

1 hour ago, SmoothPanic said:

Hi all. I'm three weeks in to my new Warframe habit.  Before I get too involved in the game (too late...) I wanted to ask why so many Warframe abilites seems to become useless in late game content? Is there a game design reason? For instance, Mag has Polarity, that strips a flat number instead of scaling, so this ability which seems useful at first becomes pointless later. I read that the dev radically changed Mag and purposefully made that ability weak for late game stuff. Why? I got Mag and Rhino Prime in a vault pack, and have enjoyed playing Mag. Reading up on builds it seems apparently that she become marginal in late game raids and experienced players recommend skipping Mag entirely since "there are so many better frames..." That's very disappointing. I'm glad I didn't use a Forma on it. I have Rhino Prime, too which by all accounts shines throughout the game, but Rhino isn't really interesting to me.

Or Excalibur's Radial Javelin.  There seem to be many examples of abilities become useless late game. I mean, design choice like these must have some rhyme or reason aside for a profit motive, right?  As I read about the ups and downs of various warframes, its very disappointing that there are so many abilities called useless or poorly scaled on so many warframes.  I am still very new to WF, but this seemingly persistent tendency and seemingly poor design may have me go sooner than I would otherwise. The game is very fun so far, but I must remain on the fence due to these considerations.

Do you all think this will be a constant problem with Warframe? 

 

Thanks for you time.
 

Actually, the reason there is little scaling for warframe abilities is because DE was not thinking about endgame when they made them. The first ability that has scaled ever in the game was mag's polarize but at that time you could only use it against corpus (mind you the scaling caused polarize to insta kill enemies so in some ways it's a good thing they removed the scaling). Now while reworking weaker warframes they are trying to add some scaling but most of the problem is in the exponential enemy scaling.

[Rekkou]

There is a core difference with how abilities and weapons scale in this game. In many games abilities or weapons simply scale with your level. But In this game even if level increases the abilities damage, the damage increase is very small so you'll need mods to increase your damage further. But here's the problem, the mods for abilities damage are also small. You'll struggle to get +100% damage while weapons can easily reach +165% damage with a single mod and you still have elemental mods, multi shot mods, crit mods and rivens. For example 1000 damage Radial Javelin at most can only reach 3490 damage but 1000 damage Tigris can easily reach 30.000 damage.

Gradually DE works around this by making "abilities are meant for utility so damage does not matter", "Make abilities scale with weapons mods" ,"make abilities scales with other stats" , etc. It's not optimum and it might change/stay in the future but for now It's worth noting the basic function of the abilities like CC or utility and rely on that instead of trying to use them like damaging spells

Edited July 14, 2017 by Rekkou

[Kyronz]

They kept accidently making mag useful, which explains the multiple nerfs on that frame.   She once got nerfed because of a different frame's ult :P

[Volinus7]

Keep questioning about balance and difficulty in this game and you will find yourself in another game lel

[Miser_able]

In many cases, such as Ember, it's because they were older than that high level content so they weren't created to handle it. 

[Legion-Shields]

None of Mag's abilities are intended to be used to deal damage in the same vein as Ember. She is a utility frame who relies on her weapons to deal damage while her abilities tip the scales massively in her favor. That's how it's always been. I don't understand what's so hard to understand about that when her description clearly paints her as a manipulator and not a walking nuke.

 

 

[blackheartstar_pc]

6 hours ago, DrBorris said:

Scaling damage makes enemies' "scaling" irrelevant. The point of having enemies scale up is to provide more of a challenge as you face higher levels, if abilities scaled with enemy levels than the gameplay would never change as you can just keep spamming buttons to the same reward at level 100 or level 10.

Not sure how others don't get this and is one of the things that irks me when I see requests for more scaling damage output options.