Making The Game Harder Without Making Every Enemy A Meat Sponge!

[RunaCarbuncle]

Okay, so I've seen some various complaints about difficulty in the game lately, honestly I agree with a lot of them, the endgame was really easy assuming maxed out gear, and still can be depending on your loadouts.  Now, with update 9.0 and the tweaked lategame difficulty we observed a (hopefully temporary) fix tot his in the form of simply increasing enemy levels in later game content, I think high level enemies and stuff scaling up to meet the people playing against content is an overall good idea, but also that there are many mechanical changes that should be implemented to both increase build diversity and making the game difficult in an engaging fashion. My post here already is and will continue to be long-winded, but I hope people that share my interests will bear with me and possibly even contribute their own ideas!

 

Shields vs Health and Armor:

PROBLEM: Right now the only highly appealing defensive mod is Redirection, as players can simply manage their shields, take cover when they go down, rejoin fights when necessary, and generally not take very much long-term (health) damage, making Steel Fiber and Vitality feel very lackluster in comparison.

 

SOLUTION: Grineer weapons and Infested attacks get their own variants on "armor piercing" damage that will ignore a portion of a Tenno's shielding, this will encourage players to consider picking up additional armor and health to ensure they don't take too much chip damage while playing through a mission, health overall becomes more important and thoughtful to manage.

 

Now, there are a lot of extra things I'd like to see added in addition to this change, I really want to amp up build variety quite a bit in addition to making enemies more of a threat, and thus propose the addition of various mods that will help Tenno keep their life pool up during combat.

 

Vampirism (melee weapon mod): 5%/10%/15%/20%/25% drain damage. Drain-type damage is to be treated as a new element, my intention is to keep it exclusive to melee weapons to help mitigate the extra risk of playing in close-quarters, and make sure that no primary/secondary weapons becomes totally absurd with it (all of them would, afer all). Basically this mod will add a tiny bit of extra damage to your attacks, although a big use for this will be to let a Tenno charge in to strike a fatal finishing blow on a weakened enemy to help restore themselves before the next fight.

 

Medical Index (warframe mod): Health globes recover 50%/100%/150%/200%/250%/300%/350%/400% more health. This mod is pretty straightforward, it'd be a common and inexpensive mod players could get rather early into the game to help them deal with the damage they'll be taking.

 

Replenishment (warframe mod): Killing an enemy instantly restores 3%/6%/9%/12%/15% of your warframes maximum shield. This is also a very simple mod, you can either be the person that hides behind cover and waits for their shield to return to them, or you can be the guy that uses this, charges right into the fray, and uses the power granted to them by this mod to stay alive for a much longer duration.

 

Life Support (sentinel mod): Sentinel will channel a healing beam, restoring 10/20/30/40/50 + 2.5%/5%/7.5%/10%/12.5% of a Warframe's health over 5 seconds. This ability can only be used on a Warframe while it is stationary, and any movement or damage dealt to the frame or sentinel will interrupt the channel. This would be a very expensive, rare mod that has to take up one of a sentinel's ability slots, the purpose of this is to help reduce tension between engagements, making it so that you can take a few more risks while in combat with the expectation that you'll get some definite healing between each fight, while making it has hard to abuse as possible during combat.

 

With all of the above changes in mind, it would be possible to start tweaking the difficulty of enemy units, as well as how many of them spawn at a time, after all, any damage you take will have a small impact on you for the remainder of the mission, making a smaller squad of grineer much more of a threat than before!

 

What about the Corpus, you ask? Well, I sort of want to keep them like they are, a group that gets really annoying and swarms you with a bunch of fodder that shoots you from every angle. In light of these changes I'd consider perhaps making their weapons deal bonus damage to shields while dealing less damage to health, thus also promoting the use of my new healing mods and making players "accept" that to fight them, they'll need to sort of play Rambo and just take damage, or else it'll become a big slog to keep taking cover every time your shields get melted.

 

So basically I propose the implementation of 4 new and impactful mods, as well as a big mechincal change to how taking and managing damage works, which will allow for further fine-tuning of how enemies work to eventually create a FUN challenge!

Edited July 26, 2013 by Rixile

[grillv20]

Cool ideas. Yeah, I would like to see the game rely more on health and armor and stuff like that. It would definitely make the game more interesting. Shields are useful but having a ton of them sometimes negates the entire point of health and armor.

[RunaCarbuncle]

Cool ideas. Yeah, I would like to see the game rely more on health and armor and stuff like that. It would definitely make the game more interesting. Shields are useful but having a ton of them sometimes negates the entire point of health and armor.

Definitely. I've played this game a lot and the first and only defensive mod I ever use is a somewhat high-level redirection. I wish it weren't as good as it is!

[Paradoxbomb]

Some great ideas here.  It would make frames like Trinity and Rhino all the more useful. Trinity would finally have a reason to heal people since health would be of concern, and Rhino + High armor + Health bonus from melee kills = actual tank.

[Bigbizz44]

meat sponge eh? incoming meat gun?  :O

[RunaCarbuncle]

meat sponge eh? incoming meat gun?  :O

I don't quite mean that, no!

[RealityMachina]

Vampirism (melee weapon mod): 5%/10%/15%/20%/25% drain damage. Drain-type damage is to be treated as a new element, my intention is to keep it exclusive to melee weapons to help mitigate the extra risk of playing in close-quarters, and make sure that no primary/secondary weapons becomes totally absurd with it (all of them would, afer all). Basically this mod will add a tiny bit of extra damage to your attacks, although a big use for this will be to let a Tenno charge in to strike a fatal finishing blow on a weakened enemy to help restore themselves before the next fight.

Can we take this idea and make it a general game mechanic?

 

I mean, games like Space Marine, Metal Gear Rising, and even DE's own Darkness II used similar mechanics to encourage the player to take the risk of getting into the thick of things since each enemy shooting at them was also an enemy that could give them some of their health back.

 

Like, say, make it so that at very low health, enemies get temporarily dazed for say...20 seconds, and during that dazed animation "Press X to Execute" appears, and killing them restores a variable percentage of your health back depending on your enemy. (Mooks give a bit back, specialist mooks a bit more, heavies give a decent chunk, bosses are basically full heals, etc.)

 

Now, on the other hand, I think the level scaling increases are terribad. Mainly because of this:

Like, the levelling curve really needs to be smoothed out at higher ends, and the game just needs to provide incentive for exposing your &#! in the fire.

 

And make dodges actually worth using in combat. And have at least the first power be unlocked by default because in a game where we have warframes who are meant to be casters, them being unable to use any powers without external assistance seems really weird.

[ler110]

I like all of these mod ideas. As well as the general feedback. The mod sound like they would improve the state of melee combat which disappears in the later parts of the game due to the sheer risk of being roflstomped by a high level mob or a pack of them before you even get there. Overall I really like all the ideas here.

[RunaCarbuncle]

I like all of these mod ideas. As well as the general feedback. The mod sound like they would improve the state of melee combat which disappears in the later parts of the game due to the sheer risk of being roflstomped by a high level mob or a pack of them before you even get there. Overall I really like all the ideas here.

Thanks! I put quite a bit of thought into all of this and hopefully someone from DE will swing by and tell me what they think of all of this. :D