Why Raising The Levels Was A Bad Idea

[DAWGUNITALPHA]

Raising the enemy levels in most planets seemed like a great idea, people wanted challenge they got it! Except DE seemed to have forgotten about armor, a property that already made most weapons in this game far less useful than armor-ignoring counterparts. While many weapons before were hindered by armor but could still perform decently in mid-range planets now most planets are high levelled enough that unless you're bringing something crazy strong like the ogris, armor ignoring weapons and other specialty types is basically the only real way to go with this game, further limiting and gimping the weapon selection for people who don't want to be doing 15 damage a shot.

 

To emphasize this, I got a bronco prime. The bronco was one of my favorite guns, dual broncos were fun as hell and I used them up until I Got the crazy whack acrid. But the bronco prime, it just feels weak and useless because unless I'm doing an extremely low level planet everything has such high armor now that it just feels like there's just no point in using it.

 

Armor ignore is a cool and useful damage type, but the way DE goes about armor makes it seem like people have to use it unless they have something as strong as the ogris. I like weapon variety and it's a shame that most of the weapons in this game are going to get sidelined just because they don't ignore armor or have a special damage type to compensate for it.

[Lady_Khaos]

Agreed. This goes hand in hand with the lack of affinity scaling with level increase. Enemy leveling is all around ridiculous. Resistances need to increase by lower amounts. If they want to increase difficulty they need to have more unique enemies show up. Have them do more damage, have different abilities, etc. But just ramping up their armor and other resistance levels is terrible. Currently "difficulty" just means more and more enemies that are harder to kill. They took a step in the right direction with the introduction of Elite Lancers (though their shields are incredibly hindering to things like Nova's Molecular Prime).

Edited July 21, 2013 by Khaos_Zand3r

[J.C.Santos]

Although I want to remain neutral on this matter, you made a good point. Only after reading what you said I understood why the hell my Boltor and my Snipetron Vandal perform quite better in higher level planets than my other weapons.

Maybe we this should indeed be discussed.

[ALL.CAPS.GUY]

i completely agree. but i do feel DE needs more time for these to happen. adding new mobs to X planet is nice, but adding them to X-Y lvl range would be better. they'd have to spit ball ideas for a while on what types of mobs, how they'd act, etc.. then design, "polishing" of their abilities and/or actions in battle, then add them into the game while keeping them within power range (armor vs atk dmg and proper level / power scaling)... etc.

 

game is still technically "beta" - for all intensive purposes - so time to do the right stuff is a key issue.

 

they do, however, seem to have a few features' priorities a little backwards, but all in due time things should be worked out and on the up and up.

 

just for example, dojo statues are nice, but i'm not IN the dojo enough to notice (now that everything's built) or enough to care, to be perfectly honest. i'd rather have 100% fully and properly functioning skills before dojo statues. just saying.. excal prime's slash dash works, but he holds whatever gun i'm using at the time during skill animation and not my melee (or even the skana as radial javalin uses, regardless of what wep i actually have.. not to mention it should have at least the skana prime skin that he comes with.. or for that matter, skana prime only if player has master founder as without that, u wouldn't have the skana prime..)

 

..just kind of pointing out minor bugs that, well, bug me.

 

IMO..

bug fixes >>> new "minor" stuff..

        ( ^ much greater ^ )

[Shion963]

More health is okay, but armor and other elemental scaling needs to be toned down a few notches.

 

People running with 100% normal damage with 60% of all elemental damage expects to deal 60% ADDITIONAL effective damage from elementals on top of armor-reduced 100% normal damage, not AT MOST 60% because only one part of the damage that are a certain element actually deals any significant amount.

 

game is still technically "beta" - for all intensive purposes - so time to do the right stuff is a key issue. they do, however, seem to have a few features' priorities a little backwards, but all in due time things should be worked out and on the up and up...just kind of pointing out minor bugs that, well, bug me.

 

IMO..

bug fixes >>> new "minor" stuff..

        ( ^ much greater ^ )

 

Just FYI, the people who fix bugs and the ones who are making new content are rarely the same people.

 

And if they are, (if the map/tile design team are anything to go by) they'll dedicate some of their time to review bugs that were pointed out in the forums, instead of just soldiering on with new content and turning a blind eye on the bug reports.

Things they've talked about, specially regarding weapon updates.

There's one team working on weapon and models. This team works on weapons. The team that makes maps is different. The team that makes sounds gets screwed by everyone else.
[...]

Making brand new features takes time. And a lot of people. Adding a new sword takes much less time and people who WOULD NOT, either way, be working on the new features.

Edited July 21, 2013 by Shion963

[Matusware]

I Agree..

[bluehawk1976]

Well, this is a topic (armor and leveling enemies) that was done before. Many good ideas to deal with it are out there and I believe that DE will address this eventually. I think I'm lucky that most of my favorite weapons are also the more effective ones.

[ALL.CAPS.GUY]

Just FYI, the people who fix bugs and the ones who are making new content are rarely the same people.

 

And if they are, (if the map/tile design team are anything to go by) they'll dedicate some of their time to review bugs that were pointed out in the forums, instead of just soldiering on with new content and turning a blind eye on the bug reports.

now, i'm not saying that DE only has X ppl to spread out and work on everything. what i'm saying is that DE is dedicating X resources to ABC and Y resources to DEF.. whereas their resource share should be altered just a hair.

 

e.g. instead of having a crew of 35 people to do the entire "bug-fix" portion and 100 for "new content" they should have 55 for bug fixes and 80 for new content. i fully understand that there's different departments and everything, but take into consideration dept. size. one may be too big while the other is too small. not enough in the bug-fix dept. would put DE further and further behind in bug fixes with each content release. new content always comes with bugs. just because it's fine how it is doesn't mean every aspect of it's inter-connectivity with all the other content is.

 

as i mentioned before, full spectrum of animation for excal prime's slash dash isn't 100%.

idk, maybe there's something wrong with my mentality, but i personally feel that content we have should be fully functional (small graphical bugs happen), but as well, i want to be free of suspicion that the next content update will include features that just don't work with 20% of what we currently have. (e.g. XYZ frame cannot use half the melee weps, or new rifle cannot use rifle mods, because of a bug in it's design or some random thing like that)

 

just for clarification on dept size and what i mean.. i have 2 tickets that are both 2 weeks old, yet still

 

Awaiting assignment to a support agent

Edited July 21, 2013 by BIackLotus

[TheHeraldXII]

Yup, I think the game would be better off without armour scaling at all. You can just increase their health instead.

[NexionSE]

i think the lvl bump was a nice thing realy

[cary2010haha]

thats why i suggest make every enemies at least have one armor-0 weak point

 

 

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/82767-de-you-keep-pull-up-the-lvl-on-ai/

[silentdrumr]

I'm glad we can all agree on something in the forums.

 

OP said it right.

[GallyYum]

does everyone in this thread forget a single max rank corrosive projection shaves 30% off enemy armor?  Also that it stacks?  My clan has been running through Tier 3 defenses with 2 corrosive projections and 2 energy siphons and we can use all sorts of weapons effectively.  If your entire team plays conservatively with their energy, you can do 3 corrosive projections for -90% armor reduction.

 

Now if we want to talk about weapon balance, how about we start with the weapons that are actually worse than the starting weapons.

[DAWGUNITALPHA]

does everyone in this thread forget a single max rank corrosive projection shaves 30% off enemy armor?  Also that it stacks?  My clan has been running through Tier 3 defenses with 2 corrosive projections and 2 energy siphons and we can use all sorts of weapons effectively.  If your entire team plays conservatively with their energy, you can do 3 corrosive projections for -90% armor reduction.

 

Now if we want to talk about weapon balance, how about we start with the weapons that are actually worse than the starting weapons.

This runs two problems though. One being that again: While optimal is great, people shouldn't have to equip certain things just to get by. Corrosive projection is great but it seems DE is admitting armor is a problem with it, and instead of fixing the problem they just toss us another artifact which mucks things up because maybe I like rifle amp or something. Not to mention it's still reasonably rare, so telling someone to get corrosive projection is about as effective as telling someone to get handspring when the subject of DE's reliance on stunlock comes up.

 

Second issue being, you still can't see what auras other people have and it's still slow and clunky to swap them out now. If I had a dollar for every time a game started while someone was quickly trying to swap some mods because someone else wasn't paying attention and hit start then I'd probably be able to get myself grand master with the spare cash. While it's great if you have a solid group and you all know exactly what you're doing and can plan ahead, not every group has the means or communication to do so. Especially the people out there who still have to play with randoms.

[NexionSE]

that is why i play in a small clan and with ppl i know mostly so we can know what we have on the map at all times

[JustDont]

From what I see, U9 difficulty actually making people LEARN where to shoot (i.e. weakpoints), and not just spray bullets in general direction of the enemy.

 

Which is good. Even with weakpoints not being 100% weak to damage.

[Urash]

In my opinion; level should not equal stats-times-X-multiplier, but AI. Obviously that's not coming anytime soon, but considering that DE seems to realize that bosses aren't interesting when they make them "hard" by turning them into bullet sponges I am surprised they seem to think that it isn't the same for normal mooks.

 

Why not make everything a reletively consistant health -a marginal scaling if you must- and only bust out the better equipped and or armored enemy types based on level. Maybe set the DPS output of enemies based on this level scaling. That would promote more of that fast paced gameplay this game implies rather than the Chest High Wallframe combat that comes hand in hand with hp-times-level "difficulty" scaling used all too often by developers reaching for the quickfix to calm the braying mules complaining the game is too easy.

[Destro6677]

+1 for OP

 

Maybe we should have different sets of scaling based on enemy type?

 

For example, Grineer have low base health scaling but higher armor scaling, so you have to headshot them.

 

Let the Corpus have higher shield points scaling (harder to break without cold/electric damage)

 

And the infested have higher health but lower armor scaling.

[WhiteWoman]

Yeah I hate how this mainly makes every pistol that's not kunai, despair, or acrid worthless since the pistol ap mod is straight &#!.

[ALL.CAPS.GUY]

since the pistol ap mod is straight &#!.

LOOL

 

i don't use it on my akbolto, but that's kinda cheating lol. i primarily run with it since it's a nice backup when my rifle is straight &#! (since it's not armor ignore, it's near impossible to kill without "POTATO PLUS FORMA PLUS FORMA PLUS FORMA PLUS RIFLE AMP AND WOOO KILL ME SOME MID RANGE BADDIES XD" )

[Loswaith]

The problem with armour is its generaly a percentage based reduction.  More damage you do the more that gets mitigated and through.

The other factor is a sufficiently high level enemy will eventually hit 100% damage reduction, so no normal damage will be done.

 

Add to that health increasing with levels, it means that as enemeis level up you actually do less and less effective damage (as based on a percentage of their total) unless you bypass armour entirely, even though your weapons are increasing in damage as well.

 

While it would be nice for some rationale for armour to increase it realy shouldnt.  Whether a grineer lancer is level 10 or 50 its still wearing lancer armour.

 

Unfortunaly the 'meat shield' enemies, the infested, particularly the Anchients have some of the best armour (and hardest to hit weak points), though they would be better to just have heaps of health so they can soak up lots of damage reguardless of its actual type.  Typically for a balance purpose high damage weapons should be better than armour ignoring ones if that was the case.  While armour ignoring weapons should be better for use against grineer.

 

 

+1 for OP

 

Maybe we should have different sets of scaling based on enemy type?

 

For example, Grineer have low base health scaling but higher armor scaling, so you have to headshot them.

 

Let the Corpus have higher shield points scaling (harder to break without cold/electric damage)

 

And the infested have higher health but lower armor scaling.

This is acutually not a bad idea, though does have that inconsistency of "why is the same armour better on that novice guy than the veteran one".

Though armour on others would be best to be very marginal scalling.

Edited July 23, 2013 by Loswaith