Dev Workshop: The Features of Focus 2.5

[(PSN)Agent_CHAR]

19 hours ago, [DE]Connor said:

In an update coming soon, we will be launching Focus 2.5.

How is this Focus 2.5, you barely changed anything.  This is hotfix Focus 2.0.1 at best.

Don't get me wrong I really appreciate the change to a global pool and an overall reduction in node cost.  But that is just scratching the surface on fixing the issues with the focus system.  The real focus 2.5 update will (and must) include changes to the acquisition of focus points.  GET RID OF CONVERGENCE!

[Kalvorax]

19 hours ago, [DE]Connor said:

 

why cant you guys make everything a 0 at the end....why does it have to be odd numbers?

meh...its still nice to see decreased costs.

[Zahnny]

18 minutes ago, [DE]Connor said:

Morning guys! I tried my best to clear up some misunderstandings I saw in the first half of the responses, will get through the rest today :)

I don't think the problem wasn't we couldn't understand you, rather we're displeased with these answers. This clarifying just seems more insulting in the same way TheFineBros "clarified" by rephrasing the same infomation hoping it'd dull public anger/annoyance.

[(PSN)BlitzKeir]

• Remove Convergence Orbs.
• Give "Convergence" status directly to players, under the conditions that would normally spawn a Convergence Orb.
• Convergence adds a 2x affinity multiplier (multiplicative with normal boosters) in addition to 8x Focus point conversion.

Your "change of pace" is preserved, helps lighten the chore that is leveling, and gives a very satisfying amount of Focus without grinding popular leveling nodes or waiting for an eximus sortie.

[Marthrym]

There are several very simple ways to make Focus a fun, interesting, and rewarding experience, that quite a few players have shared on these forums and on reddit. You just need to keep it simple, free of pointless slapped on mechanics. this is what I would do (of course it's just one personal take on what to do to make things better, and I'm fairly sure other players have better and more interesting ideas) : 

 

- Get rid of Focus lenses ENTIRELY. Just give us Focus when we play the game, for Lotus' Sake. Stop adding pointless, tedious additional layers of grind.

- Get rid of cenvergence orbs. Again, Focus should be earned innately and naturally, just by playing, no matter which frame or weapon we use to get affinity. This current "system" of yours goes against everything the "Ninjas Play FREE" motto supposedly stands for. It's boring, tedious, hurts teamwork, it brings nothing good or interesting to the game.

- No more 5 different Focus pools for 5 different schools. Make all Focus gained go in a SINGLE pool, useable in ANY school. Once again, pointless layers of grind and separation just there to slow us down are just plain wrong.

 

You can easily tweak Focus costs and gains to balance the whole thing, make it an investment in terms of time, all that without any needlessly, painfully boring and tedious systems slapped on the thing just for the sake of slowing players down. That way everyone wins. The caps still stop us from maxing out everything too fast, you have simple yet effective tools at your disposal on your end to tweak the experience, and players don't have to jump through pointless and tedious hoops just to have a go at this part of the game. Just keep it simple, that's all you need to do. What you're proposing right now is just a half-measure, a hastily and poorly applied bandaid. Again. Stop it already, you can do so much better!

Of course reshaping each Focus school into something that offers more than little to no reward in exchange for a huge time investment is another story entirely.

And please don't call it Focus 2.5... It's embarrassing really. You're better than this guys, come on.

[Kinetos]

1 hour ago, Kinetos said:

So Naramon still lacks any nodes useful for the Teralyst that are unique to itself and not waybound?

What about having its nodes affect both Warframe melee and Operator amps? 

I just realized I didn't take into account that amps don't use combo, so maybe if using the combo node, amp damage resets the decay timer? (but doesn't add to the counter like a melee hit (unless we get melee amps then it would just because it's melee)) so using the amp helps maintain the melee combo. 

[ENGINEEEEER]

Why not reduce the waybound node costs too? Between these costs being insane and focus gains not being changed this is still a painful system. 

[paul5473]

1 hour ago, [DE]Connor said:

Morning guys! I tried my best to clear up some misunderstandings I saw in the first half of the responses, will get through the rest today :)

I get that it's just 2 things one we need greater lens back in the game as a drop and two we need a distiller or something allowing us to remove the lens 

[Kinetos]

18 hours ago, Rydian said:

Using Zenurik as an example, getting the full benefits of Energy Pulse and Energizing Dash costs 17 points together.  If I also wanted Mind Step (and thus Affinity Spike) from Naramon as a passive, that's 24 points in Zenurik, and 8 points in Naramon, totaling (163,659 + 13,503) = 177,162 affinity in both schools total for the pool cost.  However, if the pool was shared, the 32 capacity (24+8) cost 303,074 points, 71% more!

You don't need to buy capacity for nodes in a secondary school. 

Unlock Affinity Spike, immediately deactivate it. Unlock, upgrade, and unbind the waybounds without buying any capacity. 

[LSG501]

20 hours ago, [DE]Connor said:

-Waybound nodes are not subject to the cost reduction.

so they're still going to be 1 MILLION focus points ON TOP of the other costs of getting there... that's stupidly high if that is the case if I'm honest, I'm hoping this is just in reference to the eidolon shard cost, which is fine. 

[SasoDuck]

17 hours ago, AuroraSonicBoom said:

Guess what? Operators aren't and shouldn't be designed around being able to compete with frames in every part of the game. They need their own way of standing out, which is Sentient combat and some support abilities for general combat. I'd never want hem to be able to to regular sortie content, that just erodes mechanical uniqueness from them.

Are you for real? Dude, almost every node that isn't the passives or waybounds is a complete waste of focus. There is no point getting things like the Madurai fireball or the Zenurik lightning balls. They do f---all for all damage. They are WORTHLESS. Just like with Focus 1.0, there is no incentive to get anything besides the passives because any further upgrades are a waste, and now with some of the nerfs to things like Zenurik's abilities, they not only give you nothing of value, they actively hurt you, making it detrimental to actually activate them.

[Maercurial]

vor 2 Minuten schrieb LSG501:

so they're still going to be 1 MILLION focus points ON TOP of the other costs of getting there... that's stupidly high if that is the case if I'm honest, I'm hoping this is just in reference to the eidolon shard cost, which is fine. 

I honestly think it's okay for them to stay there, remember we're also going to get the increased rate of Focus gain at some point, and the cap lifted into a soft cap.

The Waybound Nodes are the ultimate upgrade, the part of an RPG Progress System where you are so powerful that you're no longer just a Caster, Tank or Rogue, you're all of that combined. That should rightfully be locked behind some serious grind to get there, they need to be careful not to overshoot here, and will definitely have the upcoming changes to focus gain in mind as well. I certainly don't want Focus to become the next "Farm for a week, unlock everything there is and forget about it" kind of thing. Focus is aimed to become a long term incentive for players to grind and play missions while passively progressing towards a future goal, and then for the next once they unlocked the node they wanted to, and I hope they can make that grind feel worthwile. 

[Circle_of_Psi]

1 hour ago, Marthrym said:

There are several very simple ways to make Focus a fun, interesting, and rewarding experience, that quite a few players have shared on these forums and on Reddit. You just need to keep it simple, free of pointless slapped on mechanics. this is what I would do (of course it's just one person take on what to do to make things better, and I'm fairly sure other players have better and more interesting ideas) : 

And please don't call it Focus 2.5... It's embarrassing really. You're better than this guy, come on.

 

I have to agree with Marthrum here.

[Circle_of_Psi]

3 hours ago, Bibliothekar said:

Focus you collect still goes into the schools according to the lenses you have on your gear. Only the pool for way points (i.e. the points you need to activate new and higher levels of Focus abilities) works for all schools now. At the moment, all schools start with 5 points, but over time you might have 20 points in Vazarin, 13 in Zenurik and so on. With Focus 2.5, all schools will always have the same amount. So when you increase your pool for Vazarin to increase your rank of Mending Unity, it increases the capacity for all schools. If you don't have enough Vazarin points to increase your pool and rank up the ability, you could use Unairu points to increase your capacity instead.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks, Kar, this makes way more sense.

@[DE]Connor

I'll give some props to DE, this is a good change, I like this however they are missing a few key things.

• Removal Of Daily Cap (They said this, is gonna happen, but I don't see it in the OP )
• Removal Of Focus lenses ENTIRELY. (DE said that there was gonna be a universal pool of focus, Still, don't see it in the OP)
• Removal Of Convergence Orbs (Whatever happened, doing each mission, over and over, gives diminishing returns?, Not in the OP as well.)
• Lower the cost of "Waybounds" 1Mil IS TOO DAMM MUCH.

 

 

[ReiiAnn_]

No weapon lens removal :((((((((((((( sad. But thx for update !!!!!

[(XBOX)N7 Tigger]

If there is no cost reduction of Waybound Passives then this is worthless. No one cares about the cost of the other nodes because 90% of them are still trash.

[Bibliothekar]

vor 7 Minuten schrieb Circle_of_Psi:

Removal Of Daily Cap (They said this, is gonna happen, but I don't see it in the OP @[DE]Connor)

It's right there:

vor 21 Stunden schrieb [DE]Connor:

On the topic of Focus acquisition, some of you may also remember the daily cap removal mentioned in a recent devstream - we are still working out how best to implement this change, so it will not be included in this update. We appreciate your patience in this matter.

 

[PhiZero]

The majority of focus 2.0 is iteresting to begin with, but its great to see additional quality of life tweeks.

Though I have some feedback and a few questions:

- Will Stone Skin's flat 60 armor increase apply before or after mods? Ex. Being increased to 126 flat armor with steel fiber, or function similar to Arcane Avenger and apply it as a flat 60 regardless.

- Will Void Spines see further adjustments to bring it in line with other initial passives? As all other initial focus passives scale fairly well with the exception of Unairu, as Void Spines vastly under preforms mechanically due to damage mitigation and scaling. Ex. Reflection suffers immensely from diminishing returns as enemy health and armor scale higher, and the benefit of 100% damage reduction is reduced a second time by player damage reduction through armor, abilities, and mods; which, encourages lowering your durability to see any meaningful return on a defensive oriented tree.

[Airwolfen]

why not increase the base focus multiplier by 5x (-6x) (current convergence is 8x) and get rid of the orb entirely? It simply feels really bad to kill units now without the orb active is its a huge loss in focus.

A 5x multiplier will be quite a bit lower then the orb and in net worth may even equal out in a lot of cases but the QoL of such a change will be huge.

TL;DR

Requesting:

• BB convergence orb
• normal lens 1.25% > 6.25%
• Greater lens 1.75% > 8.75%
• Eidolon Lens 2.25% > 11.25%

 

[Circle_of_Psi]

19 minutes ago, Bibliothekar said:

It's right there:

 

Well, I'm clearly blind...

HOW DID I MISS THAT?

[LSG501]

49 minutes ago, Maercurial said:

I honestly think it's okay for them to stay there, remember we're also going to get the increased rate of Focus gain at some point, and the cap lifted into a soft cap.

The Waybound Nodes are the ultimate upgrade, the part of an RPG Progress System where you are so powerful that you're no longer just a Caster, Tank or Rogue, you're all of that combined. That should rightfully be locked behind some serious grind to get there, they need to be careful not to overshoot here, and will definitely have the upcoming changes to focus gain in mind as well. I certainly don't want Focus to become the next "Farm for a week, unlock everything there is and forget about it" kind of thing. Focus is aimed to become a long term incentive for players to grind and play missions while passively progressing towards a future goal, and then for the next once they unlocked the node they wanted to, and I hope they can make that grind feel worthwile. 

It's not just doing all this on just one node though, if all we had to do was one node it wouldn't be an issue but there's 5 nodes so thats 5 MILLION points just to unlock waybound skills.... that to me defeats the point in having focus share buffs for the operators.  On top of this we'll need to run 5 different sets of lenses to get these points rather than being able to share excess focus standing from all our excess naramon lenses...

Many of us don't even like operators (I don't for one) but DE seems intent on forcing them onto us more and more yet the one aspect which is needed to make them more viable is locked behind a massive grind wall.  You would think that they'd want us to be able to get access to these parts of the focus schools to help encourage us to use the operator. 

I'll put it into context, I don't specifically farm focus (which I'm sure is the majority of players), I just play the game and I'm pretty sure I won't have enough to unlock one waybound node on ANY of the 5 schools and thats after over 550 days of play.....now the changes to gathering focus might speed things up but I very much doubt that it will make it so much faster that we'll be getting 1 MILLION points (closer to 2 million if you're new to the game) in any sort of speedy fashion, let alone the 5x that you would need for all 5 schools.  It doesn't need to be something we can complete in a week like you're implying but it needs to be something that can be achieved in a 'reasonable' time frame. 

[RAZORLIGHT]

alteast it is a beginning but still a loooong way to go

[(XBOX)N7 Tigger]

10 minutes ago, LSG501 said:

It's not just doing all this on just one node though, if all we had to do was one node it wouldn't be an issue but there's 5 nodes so thats 5 MILLION points just to unlock waybound skills.... that to me defeats the point in having focus share buffs for the operators.  On top of this we'll need to run 5 different sets of lenses to get these points rather than being able to share excess focus standing from all our excess naramon lenses...

Many of us don't even like operators (I don't for one) but DE seems intent on forcing them onto us more and more yet the one aspect which is needed to make them more viable is locked behind a massive grind wall.  You would think that they'd want us to be able to get access to these parts of the focus schools to help encourage us to use the operator. 

I'll put it into context, I don't specifically farm focus (which I'm sure is the majority of players), I just play the game and I'm pretty sure I won't have enough to unlock one waybound node on ANY of the 5 schools and thats after over 550 days of play.....now the changes to gathering focus might speed things up but I very much doubt that it will make it so much faster that we'll be getting 1 MILLION points (closer to 2 million if you're new to the game) in any sort of speedy fashion, let alone the 5x that you would need for all 5 schools.  It doesn't need to be something we can complete in a week like you're implying but it needs to be something that can be achieved in a 'reasonable' time frame. 

Err... yeah... there are two waybound passives in each focus tree so... ouch. Sorry.

[Maercurial]

vor 4 Minuten schrieb LSG501:

It's not just doing all this on just one node though, if all we had to do was one node it wouldn't be an issue but there's 5 nodes so thats 5 MILLION points just to unlock waybound skills.... that to me defeats the point in having focus share buffs for the operators.  On top of this we'll need to run 5 different sets of lenses to get these points rather than being able to share excess focus standing from all our excess naramon lenses...

I think that's a wrong Mindset when dealing with Focus, I've been a Naramon main from the start, that's what I've been working towards while slowly getting some other schools up as well, but they weren't much of a concern. As I see it, you shouldn't worry about other schools until you've mastered the one you've chosen (which means getting everything valuable out of it that you want to try out/maximize). 

Only after I pretty much got everything I wanted from Naramon, I started looking for other schools and which ones might be worthwile. Now, there's much more worthwile options now than back then, but the mindset should stay the same. Pick one, that's your role (just like in an RPG, you pick one class that fits your playstyle, like a Rogue or Mage). Only once you've mastered that class you start branching out, working towards other schools to become more versatile, and eventually a master of every school. Connecting the schools (i.e. the Waybound nodes) should naturally be the last step to complete that journey, not something you already go for when you're starting to chose classes or the school that fits you best. 

It's the end of the Operators evolution into a master of all arts, not the beginning. You don't need 5 different sets right from the get go. That's like trying to be a Mage that also is a Tank that also is a sneaky Rogue. Pick one goal after the other, not everything simultaneously.

vor 12 Minuten schrieb LSG501:

Many of us don't even like operators (I don't for one) but DE seems intent on forcing them onto us more and more yet the one aspect which is needed to make them more viable is locked behind a massive grind wall.  You would think that they'd want us to be able to get access to these parts of the focus schools to help encourage us to use the operator. 

I'll put it into context, I don't specifically farm focus (which I'm sure is the majority of players), I just play the game and I'm pretty sure I won't have enough to unlock one waybound node on ANY of the 5 schools and thats after over 550 days of play.....now the changes to gathering focus might speed things up but I very much doubt that it will make it so much faster that we'll be getting 1 MILLION points (closer to 2 million if you're new to the game) in any sort of speedy fashion, let alone the 5x that you would need for all 5 schools.  It doesn't need to be something we can complete in a week like you're implying but it needs to be something that can be achieved in a 'reasonable' time frame. 

I do like the Operator, and I'm excited to see how they're improving the system in the future to make it feel more fluid, and the duality between Warframes and Operators connected in a way that makes them feel like the perfect synergy. Still a long way to get there, but I think there's so much potential and they're slowly making the right moves in that direction.

I'd really wait for those changes to hit before re-evaluating how much 1 Million points really is, if it's still way to much without dedicated farming, they can then adjust it. I don't think it's too much, and Brilliant Shards are already one option to get there much quicker than before if you don't like running specific farming builds. With more Eidolons added, and the inevitable addition of more Shards and Gain increases accross the boards, 1 Million is going to be much less than it sounds right now.

[Nitro747]

One of the things that is really bad about this new focus system is because you can't choose whether or not to activate certain abilities. For instance: Zenurik's void singularity is fun, but it costs basically 4 energy per second since you need to activate the previous node that also costs 2 energy per second. That means that my survivability time will be greatly reduced and I would have to bother to unequip it when going Teralyst hunting or simply not use the ability at all (which is currently the case for me).

Asking lightining dash 10 energy per cast will just do that: people simply won't do it because it totally kills the purpose of using zenurik and having a lot of energy. People will simply prefer to use void dash 8 times to travel quickly across tricky terrain or stay in void mode for longer periods of time.

If there is anything that Focus and Operators don't need right now is a nerf. They are already tricky AF enough to use decently in combat, even less in high level content.

Same goes for Void Strike: you can't use that without having to activate the radial blind node that costs a whopping 25 energy per cast. And you can't choose whether or not you want to use that at that moment or not.