Focus 2.0 grind and annoying mechanics

[Borg1611]

I really hope focus 2.0 isn’t left in this state for as long as 1.0 was left untouched. There are a lot of major issues with it. This will probably seem rather negative, but there are a lot of negatives to point out in the focus system. 
 
First, I have to mention the absolutely INSANE grind. If the numbers in this reddit post are accurate, we are talking about hundreds of days of focus needed to complete the grind IF YOU HIT THE 250k CAP EVERY DAY.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/76373l/data_dump_focus_20_all_perkway_costs/

If that were the only “problem” with the system, we might actually be OK with it and just accept that it’s meant to be a very slow progression. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of other frustrating design elements on top of an extremely long grind which just don’t feel right.

Hitting the Focus Cap:

One major problem is hitting your daily focus cap. One might think that when PoE came out, it would be the most rewarding place to be. DE obviously wants us to be there, so the rewards must be best there, right?! Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case at all. The rewards from doing PoE content are frankly terrible currently. The affinity/focus gains are laughable. Doing existing boring affinity farms on the star chart are still far more efficient in terms of focus gained per time spent compared to running around on the plains or doing bounties. Maybe there’s some secret affinity farm spot somewhere on the plains that I don’t know about yet, but just doing normal content on the plains should be a great source of rewards and affinity/focus and it just is not at all.

I think even casual players just running around doing whatever they find fun on the plains should be getting decent focus rewards. Even if you hit the cap every day, we’re again talking about HUNDREDS OF DAYS required to finish the focus grind. It should NOT be hard to cap daily focus when the total grind is that long.

Lenses:

For me the biggest issue with the system is lenses. Lenses are terrible. We hated them in focus 1.0, but we only had to grind for a small amount of time to get the very small number of useful nodes so many of us just ignored them after unlocking those few things. Now, even just getting the operator waybound nodes and the small number of useful nodes in each tree will take a long time. Managing lenses is completely obnoxious and detracts from the overall experience of the entire game.

Imagine you have a massive arsenal of weapons and warframes. You occasionally like to change things up for fun or because X is better at Y. Now you have to avoid swapping your arsenal around as much because your horrid focus cap hasn't been hit today, so you don't want to waste XP by not having the right lenses equipped. Terrible. It’s a completely unnecessary limitation forced onto us in a game where most of all we do is farm new weapons and frames. Now we simply won’t use as many elements or our arsenal because the focus lens nightmare is back in play. 
 
I understand that this may be part of your design. You want us to want to stick lenses on everything because you hope we'll buy some for plat. Unfortunately, the more likely result is disgust and frustration and driving people away. The entire focus system is an obnoxious very very long chore and for its duration you want us to deal with the additional frustration of worrying about what lenses I stuck on what weapons and what frames? 
 
The game would be far better off if you removed lenses from the game entirely. I don't care how many people have bought lenses for plat. I've bought some myself. Get rid of them. Give people endo or some random crap as compensation and get rid of this horrid system. It's not good for the game. It never was and never will be. Just make it so max level frames and weapons earn focus points (or rename them something else if the name "focus" no longer fits). Have them go into a general pool and let us spend them on whatever school we want to spend them on. Simplicity would go a long way in making the focus system less of a clunky mess, which is what it currently is. 
 
If you removed the horrid lens aspect of focus people could just go about their business and not have to worry about making sure they have the right things equipped to optimize their focus farming. Make it less of an obnoxious chore that also gets in the way of other aspects of the game thanks to lens management. 
 
 Convergence:
 
Sorry, but convergence is also terrible and always has been. It’s really bad and really annoying. Most feedback I have ever seen about this buff since the very day you added it back in focus 1.0 has been mostly negative. People do not like this. Most people hate it, some people are neutral, very few, if any, actually really love it and would actually miss it if it were gone. It is not fun to interrupt what’s going on to chase this pickup. It was not fun in the much smaller star-chart missions, it is even less fun now. I have no idea why you ignored all that negative feedback during 1.0 and actually made the buff more important in 2.0 by increasing its value, but I wish you’d re-consider and get rid of this entirely and re-balance focus gains without it. 
 
In existing affinity/focus farms this at least can yield a decent chunk of focus because in the places we go to farm affinity/focus, there is a lot of constant killing. This doesn’t seem to happen frequently even in the middle of say a defense objective on the plains (though I’ve mostly been doing things solo, so there may be a lot fewer mobs).
 
Another major issue I’m sure you’re already aware of is where this buff spawns on the plains. It can spawn inside a dropship and then be left hovering way up in the air. It can spawn way down a hill when you’re in the middle of focusing on a bounty objective. It’s just extremely inconvenient to deal with when we have a lot of other things we’re doing while in combat in a giant open area where you can’t even see what’s shooting at you half the time. Also, many of us are now randomly having to dash in our teen-freak form to maintain a short duration buff on top of everything else since you thought that that would be more compelling and exciting than passive energy regen. 
 
Reward:

I don’t really feel like doing a review of every focus node. A lot of other people already have and as you can see, many people do not feel that many of the nodes are particularly useful. Given the massive time investment, that should not be the case. 

Edited October 14, 2017 by Borg1611

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

That's what happens where the devs and the streamers they invite use cheated accounts with 50 million in focus schools to showcase their new feature ... When in reality, based on PS4 trophy data, only 0.2% of the userbase has unlocked all nodes in a single focus tree (mind you, unlocked, not maxed, just a single point in all abilities).

Can't stress that enough. 99.8% of the PS4 userbase has NOT even unlocked all nodes in a single focus tree, yet the devs are confident that asking players to max out focus on five different trees to improve upon the default operators they released a year ago and that everyone complained were - Too Slow -Too Squishy - Not fun to use - Had energy Issues.

Shows a misunderstanding of what the fanbase wants and their commitment to focus imho. Putting operator improvement under such a grind wall is frankly insane, especially since most of these chances were almost mandatory (like making operators having more than 100 hp in a game with lvl 100+ enemies).

 

 

Edited October 14, 2017 by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra

[MayssonFairbanks]

22 minutes ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

Putting operator improvement under such a grind wall is frankly insane

 

Agreed, this is mindboggling. we're talking about base stats here, Health, Mana, Armor, run speed. This is the first game that I know of where players are required to massively grind if they want to SLIGHTLY improve their character's base stats. Requiring players to grind for special powers and abilities, sounds fine. But having to grind just to make the operator actually interesting, and fun to play is ridiculous. For instance, why sould I have to spend thousands of points just to make the operator run 20% faster?  At least give us +100% run speed, or something along those lines; something that's actually worth the time and effort.

[Mewvg2]

Like many things in the Plains, it seems like a hopeless grind where hitting the cap in any reasonable amount of time is only doable by the .1%. Especially since nerfing Naramon has made the best way to grind focus more punishing.

[Recel]

Before Focus 2.0, I didn't really care farming focus. But with it, now I'm kind of worried.

The amount of focus required is insane overall. And since they introduced the whole AMPs system and what not, I fear there will be content later on that absolutely requires the operator and some focus nodes unlocked to do it.
I don't farm focus in one of the "loot caves", I just gather it passively as I go, which nets me a few thousand of it at best, and I never hit the daily cap, ever.

I don't want to be forced into specific nodes with specific builds, standing around for hours every day for god knows how many months to get enough focus to unlock most of the nodes in one tree just to gain access to possible future content...

[Borg1611]

They really desperately need to add a reasonable way to earn focus at a decent pace outside of sleep farming in Adaro or doing 4 player hydron. It's ridiculous. Without an affinity booster even Adaro is over an hour to cap, despite having insanely higher values than any other farm I've seen. That's over an hour of farming focus PER DAY while you're gaining NOTHING else during that focus farming period. Per day... for hundreds of days if you want to finish the grind. 

If you watch some of the videos of streamers doing this farm, it's so obnoxious that some of them are using macros to auto spam Equinox's 2 automatically so they don't have to mash the key manually the entire run. People should not have to do this kind of crap to cap out on focus every day. If you're playing a decent amount of time a day, your focus should be getting capped while you're doing other things. Considering the insane overall grind, there is no reason to make daily capping such an obnoxious chore. 

I also think they should increase the cap based on MR possibly. IE: baseline 250k daily cap + something like an additional 10k (or more) per mastery rank. Even those of us who did not actively farm focus after we unlocked the very small number of useful nodes in focus 1.0 don't want to go back to daily focus capping. Been there, done that. I capped focus in Draco a lot back when that was the XP farm. Got the nodes I needed and never touched my lenses or focus farming again. Now here we are and they are trying to make it seem like it's some new content to do. It's not. It's the same old thing. Those of us who experienced focus farming before don't care to do it again for hundreds of more days in Xp farms that are less fun and/or slower than Draco used to be. Increase the cap and make it easier to hit the cap. Please...

Edited October 19, 2017 by Borg1611

[Eating_Paste]

Focus grind is the one major issue that is dissuading me from spending any more money on warframe. I actually LIKE the operator system, and I can see it having potential to open up more diverse and flexible builds. But with the current numbers, it is something I will never be able to use. If I want to make progress into the focus trees, I'd have to spend the entire amount of time I have to play warframe in a manner that I dont enjoy. Even then, my progress would be incredibly slow.

 

There are many, many good options that people here have suggested, from direct gains from operator use, convergence orbs giving chunk rewards in addition to the buff, or just flat out adjusting the numbers.  Warframe is a daunting beast already, and making it even less approachable is putting people off.

 

I'd love to hear DE's opinion on the focus grind situation, but I am worried that it will be similar to their stance on the hema or universal vacuum.  

[Sunder]

Remove convergence orbs. Make it a "Press 6 to activate focus". Operates the same once it's meter is filled.

Remove the "Pool". Honestly, what is the point of this? Just a focus dump to make things take longer. Get rid of it.

Have someone sit down and do the math for how long it'll take a dedicated person to max every tree (hitting focus cap every day)

Also how long it'll take a casual player to do so through normal play. (Alerted enemies, no stealth multiplier, etc)

Find a comfortable spot in-between.

[LordLokai]

They need to just reduce the costs back down to the way they were... was absolutely NO reason to increase the caps by 3-4x's what they were... this punishes everyone... the players that had maxed trees now have to farm again ... and those who didn't are looking at a daunting task ... that will kill there desire to play.

[ArbitUHM]

On 10/13/2017 at 7:22 PM, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

That's what happens where the devs and the streamers they invite use cheated accounts with 50 million in focus schools to showcase their new feature ... When in reality, based on PS4 trophy data, only 0.2% of the userbase has unlocked all nodes in a single focus tree (mind you, unlocked, not maxed, just a single point in all abilities).

Can't stress that enough. 99.8% of the PS4 userbase has NOT even unlocked all nodes in a single focus tree, yet the devs are confident that asking players to max out focus on five different trees to improve upon the default operators they released a year ago and that everyone complained were - Too Slow -Too Squishy - Not fun to use - Had energy Issues.

Shows a misunderstanding of what the fanbase wants and their commitment to focus imho. Putting operator improvement under such a grind wall is frankly insane, especially since most of these chances were almost mandatory (like making operators having more than 100 hp in a game with lvl 100+ enemies).

 

 

I imagine the vast majority of users haven't unlocked every node in one tree because clearly some of the nodes are complete garbage.

I mean, that's not great obviously, but I think you're making a pretty big assumption that people haven't done it because they hate operators as a concept.

[Shryoss]

Honestly, Focus would be much more bearable if you would passively gain it after you level an equipment to lvl 30 and install a lens. I never understood why you have to go out of your way to pick up something. Not sure why DE is forcing this gimmick and restricts their players so much. There's a daily cap. Why do they care how quick a person maxes their daily Focus if you can't get any more than a certain amount anyway?

I believe a player should be able to max out their cap if they put in effort while playing the game normally without having to use boosters, specific frames and setups on specific nodes. Obviously, you would still have to play and it wouldn't just fill after a single mission, but you shouldn't have to go out of your way this much.

I also find it weird how DE approaches every update in the game. I get it that they want to make players play their game longer and they make you work for things, which is fine, but I feel like they really went over the top with it this time around. It's just too much. They really need to dial back and take a hard look at this. Not just the ludicrous amounts of Focus you have to farm so you can make your space emo kid slightly stronger, but the whole update with the new syndicate standing gains and resource farming.

This update is just too frustrating...

[Shockwave-]

On 10/13/2017 at 10:09 PM, Borg1611 said:

I really hope focus 2.0 isn’t left in this state for as long as 1.0 was left untouched. There are a lot of major issues with it. This will probably seem rather negative, but there are a lot of negatives to point out in the focus system. 

Hitting the Focus Cap:

Lenses:

 

 Convergence:
 
 Reward:

Focus cap- yeah you pretty much never will but that's ok as long as it is balanced around that, peopel shouldn't be hiiting the focus cap every day as that means the cap is too lwo, but the system shouldn't be balanced around 250K every day for X days, the target days shoudl be like 150K a day for X days and some will go faster and some slower.

 

Lenses - been screaming about this one since focus 1.0. I used the same frames and weapons because they were my lensed gear, hardly used much else, it was terrible in this game. Lenses should go on the operator. 5 slots. Put a lens in each, and you get your focus from any level 30 gear you use. Which lens you "use" on a mission is determined by which focus school you are using - you only get the focus for using a school no farming focus for a school you don't use. The downside - lenses break after focusing X amount of focus. So you need to do sorties or buy more lenses (now they are gone from sorties). With that setup lenses can be a bit more common a reward, still incentive to farm or buy them (good for DE) but you can use any gear (good for players).

Convergence - it's really an anti AFK measure I think, and could be fixed if the orb spawned near you. Going half way across the map for an ob on a survival because someone else is way off on their own is nutty. Yeah it still sucks to have to run for it but if it spawned individually for each player (1 for each player, very near them) it would solve a lot problems with it.

Reward - well most nodes were unused in the last version too so it is still a step up... at least they don't increase the wait time. If they aren't useful then you stop caring about the grind even if you don't have them, so that's a win kind of.

[Jhura]

I don't mind lenses so much in that I mind the way focus is gained. Since it is such a small amount gained from just playing the game people resort to these farms with very specific builds and does that really help? I mean, it should just be something we can cap by playing, not have to go to Adaro with sleep Equinox and get stealth kills for an hour, give or take, that just seems a bit counterproductive. Like others have pointed out, with the cap the way it is it will take at minimum 52 days (Vazarin) to 74 days (Zenurik) to unlock a tree fully. If it takes that long then why is focus so slow to build unless you go do the aforementioned focus farms? I am glad they update focus but damn, this still seems pretty darn half-baked. I mean, I feel bad for newer players because this will only be harder on them.

[Shockwave-]

2 minutes ago, Jhura said:

I don't mind lenses so much in that I mind the way focus is gained. Since it is such a small amount gained from just playing the game people resort to these farms with very specific builds and does that really help? I mean, it should just be something we can cap by playing, not have to go to Adaro with sleep Equinox and get stealth kills for an hour, give or take, that just seems a bit counterproductive. Like others have pointed out, with the cap the way it is it will take at minimum 52 days (Vazarin) to 74 days (Zenurik) to unlock a tree fully. If it takes that long then why is focus so slow to build unless you go do the aforementioned focus farms? I am glad they update focus but damn, this still seems pretty darn half-baked. I mean, I feel bad for newer players because this will only be harder on them.

well it took over 100 days to unlock some of the trees in focus 1.0... so that's not bad, but the 250K cap is much more daunting in that they new lenses don't give us 250% gains over what the old lenses did... so it's a much harder grind, but 52 days, even if you get 125 a day it's the same as the old tree. I would have thought it was much more to get it all unllocked just glancing at it.

[Jhura]

6 minutes ago, Shockwave- said:

well it took over 100 days to unlock some of the trees in focus 1.0... so that's not bad, but the 250K cap is much more daunting in that they new lenses don't give us 250% gains over what the old lenses did... so it's a much harder grind, but 52 days, even if you get 125 a day it's the same as the old tree. I would have thought it was much more to get it all unllocked just glancing at it.

Yeah, it is 52 days if you hit cap for those 52 days. Again though, should we really have to resort to Adaro focus farming to hit cap? I mean shouldn't this be something we can gain at a reasonable rate for just playing the game and actively doing stuff?

[Shockwave-]

Just now, Jhura said:

Yeah, it is 52 days if you hit cap for those 52 days. Again though, should we really have to resort to Adaro focus farming to hit cap? I mean shouldn't this be something we can gain at a reasonable rate for just playing the game and actively doing stuff?

but at 125K a day that's 104 days... exactly what some of the trees took in the old focus system. 125 is pretty similar to 100K cap with the increase in convergence. It's still slightly more but not THAT much more. you don't HAVE to hit the 250 cap per day to make it last the same amount of time as it did in focus 1.0 was the point. the costs should come down a little, no question.

[Jhura]

7 minutes ago, Shockwave- said:

but at 125K a day that's 104 days... exactly what some of the trees took in the old focus system. 125 is pretty similar to 100K cap with the increase in convergence. It's still slightly more but not THAT much more. you don't HAVE to hit the 250 cap per day to make it last the same amount of time as it did in focus 1.0 was the point. the costs should come down a little, no question.

Yeah I get that, I just hate feeling like I HAVE to do the Adaro farm. It would just be nice if I could gain a decent amount of focus in PoE or doing any other content really. I mean doing a Derelict exterminate with Harrow nets me around 5k to 7k focus, if I do Adaro with sleep Equinox I can get 20k+ per run depending on how well the run goes. If I could get the 125k a day just from doing my void relics, PoE, and other activities then it would be fine with me. As it stands though, I won't hit even 125k unless I do some Adaro runs.

[Azuset]

I didn't focus grind in the first place. It's not worth it. 

[Shockwave-]

5 minutes ago, Jhura said:

Yeah I get that, I just hate feeling like I HAVE to do the Adaro farm. It would just be nice if I could gain a decent amount of focus in PoE or doing any other content really. I mean doing a Derelict exterminate with Harrow nets me around 5k to 7k focus, if I do Adaro with sleep Equinox I can get 20k+ per run depending on how well the run goes. If I could get the 125k a day just from doing my void relics, PoE, and other activities then it would be fine with me. As it stands though, I won't hit even 125k unless I do some Adaro runs.

I got 100K a day all the time and never once did adaro, endless relic missions are gret for focus, a 50 min surivival is 10 relics and most of your 100K focus without a booster.

[Jhura]

1 minute ago, Shockwave- said:

I got 100K a day all the time and never once did adaro, endless relic missions are gret for focus, a 50 min surivival is 10 relics and most of your 100K focus without a booster.

I will check that out, I mostly play solo so those long survival missions alone can get rough but it is worth to give it a go if I can kill two birds with one stone.

[(XBOX)INe Saninus]

1 hour ago, Shockwave- said:

Convergence - it's really an anti AFK measure I think, and could be fixed if the orb spawned near you. Going half way across the map for an ob on a survival because someone else is way off on their own is nutty. Yeah it still sucks to have to run for it but if it spawned individually for each player (1 for each player, very near them) it would solve a lot problems with it.

I like this...! Prevents the AFKers, but eases the frustration. Very nice.