So the Kids get energy regen but frames don't?

[ACULonSeer]

8 hours ago, (PS4)Chris_Robet said:

Look I've made (extremely) long posts in the past detailing why frames need an outside source of energy not tied to frames/Loadout. If you want a full list of my idea (again it's extremely long) here but most people just won't want to read that so here are the basic points. 

-Most games have innate mana regen and those who don't are balanced around it (such as Dark souls 3).

 

-The only non Loadout specific energy source(not including void orbs) is rng based and only enough for a single use of your first ability.

 

Now some potential solutions.

 

-Add an innate 1 energy a second Passive to all frames.

A much needed passive that can even be boosted because that is still a fourth ability a little over every minute and a half.

 

 

-As your operator uses energy your frame gets some.

This would do what they've been trying to encourage and make your kids useful in combat as a secondary battery of sorts.

 

-Killing enemies in certain ways nets energy such as multiple headshots in a row, killing several enemies with one shot, ground finishers, etc.

These could provide extra energy for being skilled.

 

-Add in more void orb like effects to missions where if you do certain interactions with stuff (like say hitting a bullseye on a target) you get energy. These can pop up every few minutes in endless missions and provide Rewards based on accuracy.

This can make the environment more alive by adding in interactive things for it.

 

Edit: No doing a tedious activity every couple of seconds is not a fun way of getting energy aka zenurik.

I suppose my only counterpoint is that people seem to be steamrolling every mission even with limited energy. Wouldnt this make the game even easier? (no, im not talking about sorties, im only on Europa) So far, i havent really seen many situations where i need an absolutely bottomless energy pool, and the times where i wanna use an ability but cant due to energy costs couldnt be solved by extremely slow regen. 

I will say, having all my energy sucked out by some friggin Eximus still annoys the hell out of me .

[Sasuda]

If Energy Siphon was a default I think that would be an appropriate amount of energy gained. Honestly the amount we get through zenurik is more than what it should be for one focus school. I think the end values gained from zenurik is good for balancing out negative/low efficiency builds, but that should be it's primary use. Rather it is the best focus option since massive energy regen is stored primarily in one node and almost every frame benefits immensely some level of energy regen. The regen should exist, it should be expensive and take a lot of work to get but basic levels of it should be distributed to other focus schools and partly on all Warframes as an earned default. It shouldn't be zenurik farming heavy. It should be a more natural part of Warframes progression.
This is kind of a yes but much more of a no answer. yes frames should have energy regen, no it should not be in addition to what we already have. Rather it should be redistributed from the single focus node with a little more here and there approach while remaining a viable option for those who choose to drop their energy efficiency.
The skill based suggestion is really the same tedium and monotony just easier since you maintain damage output. Mixed bag here too. A bit of the here and there approach applies to this I'd say. Again slightly yes, mostly no.
Energy orb drop rate is actually fine as well. It feels fairly consistent, it's actually one of the few cases of a healthy amount RNG in Warframe. Every tenth enemy actually seems specifically bad for a variety of loadouts, particularly less offensive ones along with creating potential squad energy distribution issues depending on implementation. Definite no in terms of this suggestion.

The inconsistency with gaining energy while channeling abilities isn't great, solving it isn't simple though. Orbs remain the best solution and the focus node in Zenurik should have a boost effect on energy gained I think.

Sorry I don't approve to much here, but there's some lines of thought that I think ring true in where you're coming from.

tldr; We shouldn't add all that stuff, but we should redistribute some of the Zenurik energy regen across other focus schools and stuff.

Edited December 11, 2017 by Sasuda
clarity

[Psycho-002]

I'm pretty sure they said something about not wanting players to only rely on ability casts for damage output, with the exception of Nidus because he was built to be self sustaining.

As frustrating as it can be sometimes to try and manage your Energy, it's not exactly unfair either. Some warframes have insane damage output when they have energy, so the downside is making them have to take extra steps to ensure they stay powered.

And what do you mean that you shouldn't have to rely on specific warframes if you want energy? Relying on them is the entire point. Warframe is a team-based game, even if it might not always seem so. If you want to stay healed, you need a healer or something with lifesteal. If you need energy, pizzas, Zenurik and support frames have that covered. If you need extra damage, then get a Buffer. If you need someone to tank, get an Inaros with Guardian Derision.

Obviously if the energy economy of a specific Warframe sucks, then that's something to be looked at separately. Otherwise, teaming up or equipping yourself to cover the bases you need covered is part and parcel of the Warframe experience. Like people have said, the plethora of people completely flattening high level missions is already indicative of the lack of the need for passive energy regen. And if for some reason you really, really, really need the energy regen but can't spare a Squad slot for a Trinity or a Gear slot for a pizza, then a squad-wide 4xEnergy Siphon will have to suffice.

It's just not needed. Players don't need to be so reliant on their Warframe's abilities. And if they want to play as a caster, then they'll have to equip and mod accordingly. The lack of innate passive regen isn't stopping them.

[Birdframe_Prime]

13 hours ago, (PS4)Chris_Robet said:

There is a single environmental trigger for energy and no energy should NOT be tied to frames and Loadouts.

There is only a single trigger for Energy Orbs, correct, but there are literally thousands of triggers that could also provide energy. You even pointed out three of them in your OP. How is it that you couldn't see what you're already suggesting?

As a note, I only replied to the passive energy regen because this is the one debate that has been consistently suggested since Zenurik existed. The idea that, instead of actually fixing the energy economy for Active play, they want it Passively. DE want it Active, by which we have to do things to get energy. All your other points have not actually fall in line with this, the idea of Active return of energy by doing things.

Thus, when you push for that single point in later comments rather than negotiating and accepting the points of contention, naturally people are going to react to that point.

Passive 1 energy per second is completely unnecessary and the one downfall of an otherwise fine thread about Active energy regen.

13 hours ago, (PS4)BlitzKeir said:

WF's gameplay is a cobbled-together mess that sorta somehow works. Energy economy is dependent on a combination of active and passive regen and pickups, all conditional, in such high quantities that minor tweaks to any of these can break the game by starving or overfeuling because the baseline is 0. No joke, my record for number of enemies killed with no orb drop is 106.

This is kind of the thing here. One of the things specifically holding back the energy system is how disparate the energy restore types are, rather than concentrating them into the same direction; do game related things, get energy for them.

There are so many aspects of the game, so many goals to achieve, why not adjust the goals themselves to reward us?

We have the first one in the form of resources and crafting; energy plates. That's as simple as it gets, play the game, grind the resources, earn the different levels of blueprints, build them in order to take gear with you. Standard function of gear-based energy/mana restoration used in hundreds of RPGs across the board. Of course, you could still respec energy plates to be single-deploy per use (as in only one at a time), but to provide their cap of energy as fast energy regen. So you get 5 Energy/second from them, or if you have other energy abilities on, like Zenurik, it adds 5/s to that for 10/s. This would then tie in to why Drain abilities can't restore energy from plates, and prevent people from just toggling them off every 7 seconds to get the 100 energy bursts.

Our second is in the form of Frames, and yes I've heard the tired idea of not being tied to specific loadouts, but the idea is that these frames by themselves are powerful anyway, they just have bonuses for a team that makes them more valuable than just another gun on the field. They're enablers. Harrow is a great example of this, as it's not that he specifically restores energy, but that he enables you to get your energy back by being active. Give Trin's Energy Vampire the same treatment as that? And it would be pretty fair as an ability, where it becomes an aura on a duration for her, and every enemy killed within it grants energy to the team. Encourage people to actually kill things more for the duration rather than focusing down a single target. Even Octavia is an example of 'good for them, but a bonus to the team' with her Inspiration passive, adding 1 energy per second regen to players in range of her passive for 30 seconds, which is additive to other energy regen abilities.

Our third is in the form of triggered events. Again, it's a frame, but Ember's passive of gaining huge energy regen for short duration when set on fire? What if we could set ourselves on fire? 10 Energy per second regen for every second she's on fire, but with the ability to set herself on fire, balanced by the fact that energy regen is blocked by her World on Fire drain meaning people can't just set themselves on fire constantly to sustain it.

There are plenty of other frames with similar trigger-style abilities, passives and so on. And it leads me on to the fourth method;

With frames like Harrow and Nidus gaining functionality for casting abilities and acting on enemies, there are plenty of in-mission triggers that could restore energy. Mobile Defense consoles could be 'overloaded' by plugging in the datamass, leaking energy to players within 10m or so of them at a slow rate, combo kills in a duration could trigger energy orb drops with increasing chance as you go, but it's not the number of kills at once, it's the consistent kills over time (meaning Nuke frames would not be able to spam their ability consistently enough to trigger this, but would instead have to use their nuke in tandem with weapon kills in order to maintain the higher energy orb drop chance.

Capture targets could top us up with energy as the target is 'absorbed', Survivals and Exterminates are literally run on killing consistently and quickly, hacking consoles could provide brief energy regen for Spy or other stealth missions...

All of these things in game that could supplement the energy economy for the different play styles. Even Operators, why can't we charge our Warframe by zapping it with our own Void Beams? They're literally made to turn that into other forms of energy...

Active participation in the game creating active energy generation. At this point, when you learn the different methods, even things like Zenurik wouldn't ever be actually needed, just a boost on top of what we already have.

Then we can look at the damage system.

Which has been a bit borked ever since Damage 2.0 came out.

This one's a subject I've looked at extensively, even started threads about, not that it ever gets anywhere. I even took a crack at it based on the AI team's abortive idea from a few months back, about immortal Eximus units with 'shoot to remove immortality' objects on them. Have a look;

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So back in DevStream... ugh, I can't even remember, the AI team debuted the possibility of Eximus units being Invulnerable until you shoot these little tags off them. It looked okay until we actually thought about this.

Actually invulnerable enemies. With their damage scaling so much that unless we're taking the exact shots at the exact right time, we can never kill them before they kill us? That's a pretty crap idea.

Nobody liked it.

But why is that? And when I ask people to explain their thoughts, it's because almost unanimously they believe no enemy in this game should be immortal by default, especially when the way to end that immortality is a combination of randomly generated location, making it very difficult to hit if it's, say, on the back of a limb, and also getting progressively more chance to spawn on progressively more and more dangerous opponents. Once you pass a certain point, 1 in 2 eximus units would be spawning invulnerable by default and at that point the amount of enemies, the amount of effects, the amount of interference from the game's general chaos will prevent access to, or successful location of these weak points on, the most dangerous units in the room. There are a few that allow for the idea of bosses being invulnerable, with specific weak points, but those are the specific, one-off cases where the game works around that fact.

None of them argue, however, that more skill and less sponge is necessary. Because all of them are aware of the problem of Armour Scaling and Damage Scaling.

So if players don't want totally immortal enemies that they have to 'unlock' in order to kill, what do they want?

What I came up with was...

Instead of total immortality until unlocked, why not logically placed sectioned areas of invulnerability?

The situation: An eximus Charger unit spawns at level 30, with this rank he has a chance to spawn with a logically placed area on his body that is impervious to damage. None of the rest of him is affected, just, for example, across his chest/face (which as we know isn't actually a Charger's head hitbox). This then means we have to use movement, skill, and/or abilities to shoot the Charger somewhere that isn't the exact front to kill it.

At higher levels, the chance to spawn with this invulnerable plate increases, and beyond that the chance to spawn with two appears, one on the front, one on the top, meaning that shooting full in the back, or in the legs, is the only way to kill them. And so on, and so forth as the levels progress.

Apply this to all Eximus types. And disallow the invulnerable area to ever get in the way of the Head hitbox (whichever that may be on the unit, on Chargers that appears to be the butt).

Instead of total invulnerability and a scaling amount of times we have to deactivate it, we are then treated to logically distributed partial invulnerability that encourage us to maintain headshots, limb shots, melee attacks, ground finishers or abilities in order to kill the enemy via skill, not brute force.

Abilities that strip armour, like Seeking Shuriken or Shield Polarise, will then have a perfect visual representation of their effects in game as an invulnerable plate (one or all plates depending on how strong the ability is) suddenly pings off thanks to a well-placed shot.

But Thaylien, I metaphorically hear you cry, what about Armour Scaling or Corrosive Projection/Corrosive Status, how are these things affected by this?

Indeed, in a game where scaling armour can reduce damage so far as to give an armoured unit effective health of over four million points, while an un-armoured unit only has four thousand or so plus a shield... why would this improve anything?

It wouldn't.

But then, the answer to the question really is... that I don't want to suggest only applying this effect to Eximus units.

In a world where this method exists, partial invulnerability that encourages movement and skill to make kills, it could be applied to almost every unit in the game instead of the pure scaling armour that we currently have.

Rather than becoming bullet sponges as they go, enemies all gain damage reduction and health as they go, scaling corpus shields, grineer armour and infested health so that at all times they have an equal amount to the equivalent units on either side, up to a point. Up to a cap.

After that point, enemies become skill based by developing these hard-points of invulnerability, that then make players have to abandon, more and more, the basic tactics they've had already and instead use more aggressive/faster/more varied forms of attack to get around the hard-points. Corpus could gain specific body-shield points, Infested gain chitin carapaces, grineer over-armour, and all of their resistances to damage would then start to taper off to be replaced by this.

Mods like Corrosive Projection would then be the specific faction debuffs, taking Grineer armour away would mean that only the base health scaled and lower-damage weapons with more precision would be just as viable for getting headshots on the higher level enemies as the boom-sticks we would use normally. Weapons of lower damage but easier control or better use for skill-shots would become just as viable with a team of CP's against grineer as a Tigris Prime is without the team.

(Note: This whole thing also opens up the idea that weapon damage could be re-balanced and mods like Pressure Point and Serration could be removed from the game without detrimental effect. In turn, this would mean that the more powerful a weapon was would depend as much on the accuracy, range and skill cap of it, rather than just the DPS. DPS, in fact, would have a genuine ceiling that could be raised or lowered by buffing or nerfing the amount of scaling resistance that enemies have in order to match how much damage the weapons in game could deal reliably to the head hitboxes. I mean, think about it, a weapon like the Buzzlok would now become end-game viable because you could mark a head-hitbox with it on an enemy that's nearly invulnerable and then guarantee damage, where other weapons couldn't.)

And the improvement to Status as a damage type could be even further highlighted by letting Status proc through the invulnerable plates (before anyone jumps in to say that Slash would be even more powerful now, no, it wouldn't be. Slash procs are based off the damage you deal, if you deal no damage because of an invulnerable plate, a slash proc deals no damage, so it would actually balance back the other way to allow puncture and impact to be more useful status procs overall) meaning that the earlier mention of Corrosive Status would still be viable because armour stripping would then bring the enemies with high resistances back down a bit to regular kill-able levels via their non-invulnerable parts.

In fact, the only draw back to this entire idea, as I can see so far, is that... it would take a fair bit of graphical clarity, a fair bit of work from DE, to show that the enemies had the over-plates on for players to be able to figure out which enemies needed to be killed with a headshot and which could be mowed down by regular shots.

So...

tl;dr

Since so many people hate the idea of scaling bullet sponges, and the game DEvs want to increase the skill cap, but people hate the idea of totally invulnerable enemies with specific weak-points even more than bullet sponges, how about making the skill-cap higher by using normal enemies with specific invulnerable points that are logically placed and able to be figured out and played around if you have the skill to do so?

It wouldn't remove any of the regular play we see today in lower level, and would then introduce a demand for skill past that, starting at a level that's within the Star Chart's usual scaling. In addition it would open up the entirety of the options for Damage 3.0 that we've actually wanted, where some weapons are preference-based side-grades to each other while Prime Weapons are the de-facto better class of weapon, and where our damage never actually drops off, only our skill does, allowing us to legitimately play for hours of endless missions as long as we have the team for it.

I often see this paired with ideas about the actual damage system we have and why it's so uneven.

For example, every enemy faction has four base types of 'substance' they're made from. And those four types have different strengths and weaknesses against all... wait, IPS, four base elements, combined elements, unique types... 15 damage types we currently have.

Not to mention all 15 of these have different Status effects connected with them. Like Slash is strong against some things, but weak against others, but the problem is that the Status of Bleed is Finisher, and has no weaknesses to anything.

Because of this, there's a pretty unbalanced worth between the elements. Corrosive, for example, will always be a great Status because it strips armour, but Corrosive damage itself is relatively useless against things like Robotics, Electronics, Shields and so on. Puncture Status creates a Weaken effect, which is great, but Puncture damage is not useful against any types of enemies that aren't armoured. Impact is a fair Status, staggering enemies and even possibly knocking them off their feet, but the damage type is not useful against enemies that are armoured.

Why? There's a rock-paper-scissors effect on all the damage types vs the enemy generic types, but the Status effects end up being very different stories, and some of the enemy 'substance' types end up being just... strange.

Why not simplify it?

Why not have all Flesh equally vulnerable against the same elements? Why is Cloned Flesh different from Corpus Flesh and different again from Infested Flesh? While the different Armour, Shield and Fossil protective types are rock-paper-scissors against the rest?

DE have already stated that they want to make things a little more fair, having the Status of the different types have a greater or lesser effect depending on the spread of that damage across the weapon (meaning that if you have a weapon that deals 90% impact compared to the slash and puncture, then the status proc scales from a stagger up to a full ragdoll etc.) so why not shift it further by adjusting what the enemies are made of to allow the damage types to be more logical.

...

......

We have all these possibilities... Change the game just a little, or change parts of it a lot, to make things better, to create a better game.

And yet everyone and their dog is saying we somehow need passive energy regen to cope with the game as it is.

[SweatyFalcon]

Correct me if I'm wrong

Energy Pad Spamming isn't common anymore?

[Andras61]

I'd think 1 energy per second universal could be okay. Like, I'm looking at newer players who join the game, spam their slash dash, their pull, their jolt, and then OH...I'm out of mana. Okay how do I get it back?....Chance on kill? wat

BUT is it okay to give this kind of addition when Energy Siphon is in the game already? How long really does it take the average new player to acquire their first aura, ideally Energy Siphon, and then get roughly half that effect (Maybe less until they upgrade it, of course), but for their whole team bulking up to 2.4 energy per second, on each person if everyone has one?

Well that won't happen because Corrosive Requirement exists and grineer armor can be just absurd sometimes.

I kinda wish Madurai focus school bonus damage affected more than just weapons. I wish it affected powers, the operator, sometimes even the sentinels and cats and dogs and things. Because if they did affect those things, I'd have a reasonable argument to say "sure, 1 energy per second universal is okay to have."

But no other focus school in the game affects energy besides Naramon. And does Naramon really have a place in the meta anymore? Combo duration mods exist, and they're not expensive. The operator potential in Naramon is laughable. Melee channeling isn't really a build unless you have to spam life strike like no tomorrow. So Zenurik is the only real choice if you want an operator school to enhance your power usage. And to that end: Doing a 1 second switch, crouch, jump, switch, in which you're borderline invulnerable (By the way did you know operators have free stealth? freaking sweet) doesn't seem like a tedious chore to me.

 

Functionally speaking Zenurik being the go-to focus for power use is fine and that's why it's so popular and that's why operators get to see the limelight right now. I'm not saying we don't need more changes. I'm not saying bonus energy is a bad thing. But if we're all just gonna stack it on top of Zenurik anyway, I don't see why it would help.

[(PSN)thefallenloser]

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IT'S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN

 

 

 

 

 

[TaylorsContraction]

While I agree with op, it's the same old arguments pro and against. I have been using zenurik over and over to sustain energy. I like operators, and there are times I like using them for various tasks. But having to pop out for zenurik constantly is annoying.

DE will either keep things as is, or consider our plea.

The thing is, not all frames need 1 energy /second, that'd be broken on loki for example making his unlimited invisibility easily available without having many of the mods needed to achieve this. So it should vary between a smaller value to a higher value for caster frames.

 

[Terrornaut]

14 hours ago, Sasuda said:

If Energy Siphon was a default I think that would be an appropriate amount of energy gained. Honestly the amount we get through zenurik is more than what it should be for one focus school. I think the end values gained from zenurik is good for balancing out negative/low efficiency builds, but that should be it's primary use. Rather it is the best focus option since massive energy regen is stored primarily in one node and almost every frame benefits immensely some level of energy regen. The regen should exist, it should be expensive and take a lot of work to get but basic levels of it should be distributed to other focus schools and partly on all Warframes as an earned default. It shouldn't be zenurik farming heavy. It should be a more natural part of Warframes progression.

Dropping the wisdom again, oho.
It would be great if each school offered some energy regen and Zen was refocused into something a little different.

I do like OPs suggestions for active energy regen.  Passive energy regen is silly/meh and honestly any time anyone brings Energy Siphon I'm silently annoyed that someone wasted a mod slot, whether I'm on an energy hungry frame or not.  Its not efficient unless 3 people have it and then you're not being efficient because you're wasting time scrounging for energy instead of just being efficient with what you have.

I run an Ember build with 240-270 power before growing power and passive.  Sometimes I'm running around with 300+ power and 80 efficiency.  I still do not have energy problems, even if I'm not filled up or even halfway up p Flow energy pool.  At pretty much all levels I can sustain off of energy orbs, and setting myself on fire if I bring stat stick, and would rather anything but a trinity take up a slot _{(incoming I prefer harrow>>>>trinity rant)} 

Spoiler

(give me Harrow pls, he's so much more fun and its a lot easier to disable wof, kill with weapons and get energy than it is to turn around only to find even at high levels I've instakilled trinity's EV target around the corner. Its also just boring as hell)

.I don't even use Zenurik. At high levels its more worth it for me to use Unairu and make my energy count for something, instead of having a metric ton of useless energy that does nothing to the enemy.

Tangent I guess, but, I would like energy alternative mods, as suggested.

Things like:
Ground finisher grants 50 energy/goes on CD for 5 sec
Dealing major damage via headshot guarantees 25% extra chance of energy dropS
Stealth finisher grants 50 energy that gets reduced by 10 for every additional stealth kill within 5 sec
Gain 10 energy for combo counter increase, etc.
Gain 3 energy for every status inflicted by a power, etc
(General Ideas, not hard numbers, don't focus on the numbers)

 

[(PSN)BlitzKeir]

5 hours ago, Thaylien said:

We have all these possibilities... Change the game just a little, or change parts of it a lot, to make things better, to create a better game.

And yet everyone and their dog is saying we somehow need passive energy regen to cope with the game as it is.

Well... I did ask for an explanation. But I wasn't expecting that.

I remember making a very similar case for environmental regen, looong ago. My main argument iirc was that it would give mission objectives a more engaging pace. I stopped making this argument when Zenurik happened, because it allowed me to play frames the way I'd wanted to.

(Maybe I should elaborate here, to substantiate my point of view. Gunplay doesn't interest me much. It's too straightforward. I like the more varied gameplay of power-centric builds. One of my favorite builds in the game is Anti-Armor Mag. Fracturing Crush > Polarize is a potent combo that can't be freely spammed. That, combined with radiation AOEs, elevates Magnetize to the nuke many people say is impossible for her. Reducing her vulnerability while managing this combo and your energy requires skill, awareness and mobility. It's a complicated setup with a satisfying payout. And you can't use high efficiency on an Anti-Armor Mag build, which suits me just fine because CC spamming bores me as much as pure gunplay.)

Back to my point. Although there are a lot of frames I greatly enjoy thanks to Zenurik, mission types are still unengaging despite the overhauls. There are no pacing mechanics, except timers which serve as a total failure condition. That sucks. So I can totally get onboard with more environmental regen. In fact, we're mostly in agreement, with regard to energy and damage.

[Etomb]

A rework is very possible and needed, yes, but it's not so straightforward-

Energy cost is meant to be the main downside to abilities. It limits their use; makes our god-like powers limited. Any form of regaining energy is tricky if we keep this as our main priority. So, when is it acceptable to empower players like this? And how often, or under what circumstances should this be limited? When and how should they be rewarded with this?

• I would like to point out that DE has experimented with an interactive energy puzzle in Lua missions, however the random generation of the related tile makes it undependable. I'm thinking of the Arboriform room in particular. There may be others.

@Thaylien 

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6 hours ago, Thaylien said:

There is only a single trigger for Energy Orbs, correct, but there are literally thousands of triggers that could also provide energy. You even pointed out three of them in your OP. How is it that you couldn't see what you're already suggesting?

As a note, I only replied to the passive energy regen because this is the one debate that has been consistently suggested since Zenurik existed. The idea that, instead of actually fixing the energy economy for Active play, they want it Passively. DE want it Active, by which we have to do things to get energy. All your other points have not actually fall in line with this, the idea of Active return of energy by doing things.

Thus, when you push for that single point in later comments rather than negotiating and accepting the points of contention, naturally people are going to react to that point.

Passive 1 energy per second is completely unnecessary and the one downfall of an otherwise fine thread about Active energy regen.

This is kind of the thing here. One of the things specifically holding back the energy system is how disparate the energy restore types are, rather than concentrating them into the same direction; do game related things, get energy for them.

There are so many aspects of the game, so many goals to achieve, why not adjust the goals themselves to reward us?

We have the first one in the form of resources and crafting; energy plates. That's as simple as it gets, play the game, grind the resources, earn the different levels of blueprints, build them in order to take gear with you. Standard function of gear-based energy/mana restoration used in hundreds of RPGs across the board. Of course, you could still respec energy plates to be single-deploy per use (as in only one at a time), but to provide their cap of energy as fast energy regen. So you get 5 Energy/second from them, or if you have other energy abilities on, like Zenurik, it adds 5/s to that for 10/s. This would then tie in to why Drain abilities can't restore energy from plates, and prevent people from just toggling them off every 7 seconds to get the 100 energy bursts.

Our second is in the form of Frames, and yes I've heard the tired idea of not being tied to specific loadouts, but the idea is that these frames by themselves are powerful anyway, they just have bonuses for a team that makes them more valuable than just another gun on the field. They're enablers. Harrow is a great example of this, as it's not that he specifically restores energy, but that he enables you to get your energy back by being active. Give Trin's Energy Vampire the same treatment as that? And it would be pretty fair as an ability, where it becomes an aura on a duration for her, and every enemy killed within it grants energy to the team. Encourage people to actually kill things more for the duration rather than focusing down a single target. Even Octavia is an example of 'good for them, but a bonus to the team' with her Inspiration passive, adding 1 energy per second regen to players in range of her passive for 30 seconds, which is additive to other energy regen abilities.

Our third is in the form of triggered events. Again, it's a frame, but Ember's passive of gaining huge energy regen for short duration when set on fire? What if we could set ourselves on fire? 10 Energy per second regen for every second she's on fire, but with the ability to set herself on fire, balanced by the fact that energy regen is blocked by her World on Fire drain meaning people can't just set themselves on fire constantly to sustain it.

There are plenty of other frames with similar trigger-style abilities, passives and so on. And it leads me on to the fourth method;

With frames like Harrow and Nidus gaining functionality for casting abilities and acting on enemies, there are plenty of in-mission triggers that could restore energy. Mobile Defense consoles could be 'overloaded' by plugging in the datamass, leaking energy to players within 10m or so of them at a slow rate, combo kills in a duration could trigger energy orb drops with increasing chance as you go, but it's not the number of kills at once, it's the consistent kills over time (meaning Nuke frames would not be able to spam their ability consistently enough to trigger this, but would instead have to use their nuke in tandem with weapon kills in order to maintain the higher energy orb drop chance.

Capture targets could top us up with energy as the target is 'absorbed', Survivals and Exterminates are literally run on killing consistently and quickly, hacking consoles could provide brief energy regen for Spy or other stealth missions...

All of these things in game that could supplement the energy economy for the different play styles. Even Operators, why can't we charge our Warframe by zapping it with our own Void Beams? They're literally made to turn that into other forms of energy...

Active participation in the game creating active energy generation. At this point, when you learn the different methods, even things like Zenurik wouldn't ever be actually needed, just a boost on top of what we already have.

Then we can look at the damage system.

Which has been a bit borked ever since Damage 2.0 came out.

This one's a subject I've looked at extensively, even started threads about, not that it ever gets anywhere. I even took a crack at it based on the AI team's abortive idea from a few months back, about immortal Eximus units with 'shoot to remove immortality' objects on them. Have a look;

  Reveal hidden contents

So back in DevStream... ugh, I can't even remember, the AI team debuted the possibility of Eximus units being Invulnerable until you shoot these little tags off them. It looked okay until we actually thought about this.

Actually invulnerable enemies. With their damage scaling so much that unless we're taking the exact shots at the exact right time, we can never kill them before they kill us? That's a pretty crap idea.

Nobody liked it.

But why is that? And when I ask people to explain their thoughts, it's because almost unanimously they believe no enemy in this game should be immortal by default, especially when the way to end that immortality is a combination of randomly generated location, making it very difficult to hit if it's, say, on the back of a limb, and also getting progressively more chance to spawn on progressively more and more dangerous opponents. Once you pass a certain point, 1 in 2 eximus units would be spawning invulnerable by default and at that point the amount of enemies, the amount of effects, the amount of interference from the game's general chaos will prevent access to, or successful location of these weak points on, the most dangerous units in the room. There are a few that allow for the idea of bosses being invulnerable, with specific weak points, but those are the specific, one-off cases where the game works around that fact.

None of them argue, however, that more skill and less sponge is necessary. Because all of them are aware of the problem of Armour Scaling and Damage Scaling.

So if players don't want totally immortal enemies that they have to 'unlock' in order to kill, what do they want?

What I came up with was...

Instead of total immortality until unlocked, why not logically placed sectioned areas of invulnerability?

The situation: An eximus Charger unit spawns at level 30, with this rank he has a chance to spawn with a logically placed area on his body that is impervious to damage. None of the rest of him is affected, just, for example, across his chest/face (which as we know isn't actually a Charger's head hitbox). This then means we have to use movement, skill, and/or abilities to shoot the Charger somewhere that isn't the exact front to kill it.

At higher levels, the chance to spawn with this invulnerable plate increases, and beyond that the chance to spawn with two appears, one on the front, one on the top, meaning that shooting full in the back, or in the legs, is the only way to kill them. And so on, and so forth as the levels progress.

Apply this to all Eximus types. And disallow the invulnerable area to ever get in the way of the Head hitbox (whichever that may be on the unit, on Chargers that appears to be the butt).

Instead of total invulnerability and a scaling amount of times we have to deactivate it, we are then treated to logically distributed partial invulnerability that encourage us to maintain headshots, limb shots, melee attacks, ground finishers or abilities in order to kill the enemy via skill, not brute force.

Abilities that strip armour, like Seeking Shuriken or Shield Polarise, will then have a perfect visual representation of their effects in game as an invulnerable plate (one or all plates depending on how strong the ability is) suddenly pings off thanks to a well-placed shot.

But Thaylien, I metaphorically hear you cry, what about Armour Scaling or Corrosive Projection/Corrosive Status, how are these things affected by this?

Indeed, in a game where scaling armour can reduce damage so far as to give an armoured unit effective health of over four million points, while an un-armoured unit only has four thousand or so plus a shield... why would this improve anything?

It wouldn't.

But then, the answer to the question really is... that I don't want to suggest only applying this effect to Eximus units.

In a world where this method exists, partial invulnerability that encourages movement and skill to make kills, it could be applied to almost every unit in the game instead of the pure scaling armour that we currently have.

Rather than becoming bullet sponges as they go, enemies all gain damage reduction and health as they go, scaling corpus shields, grineer armour and infested health so that at all times they have an equal amount to the equivalent units on either side, up to a point. Up to a cap.

After that point, enemies become skill based by developing these hard-points of invulnerability, that then make players have to abandon, more and more, the basic tactics they've had already and instead use more aggressive/faster/more varied forms of attack to get around the hard-points. Corpus could gain specific body-shield points, Infested gain chitin carapaces, grineer over-armour, and all of their resistances to damage would then start to taper off to be replaced by this.

Mods like Corrosive Projection would then be the specific faction debuffs, taking Grineer armour away would mean that only the base health scaled and lower-damage weapons with more precision would be just as viable for getting headshots on the higher level enemies as the boom-sticks we would use normally. Weapons of lower damage but easier control or better use for skill-shots would become just as viable with a team of CP's against grineer as a Tigris Prime is without the team.

(Note: This whole thing also opens up the idea that weapon damage could be re-balanced and mods like Pressure Point and Serration could be removed from the game without detrimental effect. In turn, this would mean that the more powerful a weapon was would depend as much on the accuracy, range and skill cap of it, rather than just the DPS. DPS, in fact, would have a genuine ceiling that could be raised or lowered by buffing or nerfing the amount of scaling resistance that enemies have in order to match how much damage the weapons in game could deal reliably to the head hitboxes. I mean, think about it, a weapon like the Buzzlok would now become end-game viable because you could mark a head-hitbox with it on an enemy that's nearly invulnerable and then guarantee damage, where other weapons couldn't.)

And the improvement to Status as a damage type could be even further highlighted by letting Status proc through the invulnerable plates (before anyone jumps in to say that Slash would be even more powerful now, no, it wouldn't be. Slash procs are based off the damage you deal, if you deal no damage because of an invulnerable plate, a slash proc deals no damage, so it would actually balance back the other way to allow puncture and impact to be more useful status procs overall) meaning that the earlier mention of Corrosive Status would still be viable because armour stripping would then bring the enemies with high resistances back down a bit to regular kill-able levels via their non-invulnerable parts.

In fact, the only draw back to this entire idea, as I can see so far, is that... it would take a fair bit of graphical clarity, a fair bit of work from DE, to show that the enemies had the over-plates on for players to be able to figure out which enemies needed to be killed with a headshot and which could be mowed down by regular shots.

So...

tl;dr

Since so many people hate the idea of scaling bullet sponges, and the game DEvs want to increase the skill cap, but people hate the idea of totally invulnerable enemies with specific weak-points even more than bullet sponges, how about making the skill-cap higher by using normal enemies with specific invulnerable points that are logically placed and able to be figured out and played around if you have the skill to do so?

It wouldn't remove any of the regular play we see today in lower level, and would then introduce a demand for skill past that, starting at a level that's within the Star Chart's usual scaling. In addition it would open up the entirety of the options for Damage 3.0 that we've actually wanted, where some weapons are preference-based side-grades to each other while Prime Weapons are the de-facto better class of weapon, and where our damage never actually drops off, only our skill does, allowing us to legitimately play for hours of endless missions as long as we have the team for it.

I often see this paired with ideas about the actual damage system we have and why it's so uneven.

For example, every enemy faction has four base types of 'substance' they're made from. And those four types have different strengths and weaknesses against all... wait, IPS, four base elements, combined elements, unique types... 15 damage types we currently have.

Not to mention all 15 of these have different Status effects connected with them. Like Slash is strong against some things, but weak against others, but the problem is that the Status of Bleed is Finisher, and has no weaknesses to anything.

Because of this, there's a pretty unbalanced worth between the elements. Corrosive, for example, will always be a great Status because it strips armour, but Corrosive damage itself is relatively useless against things like Robotics, Electronics, Shields and so on. Puncture Status creates a Weaken effect, which is great, but Puncture damage is not useful against any types of enemies that aren't armoured. Impact is a fair Status, staggering enemies and even possibly knocking them off their feet, but the damage type is not useful against enemies that are armoured.

Why? There's a rock-paper-scissors effect on all the damage types vs the enemy generic types, but the Status effects end up being very different stories, and some of the enemy 'substance' types end up being just... strange.

Why not simplify it?

Why not have all Flesh equally vulnerable against the same elements? Why is Cloned Flesh different from Corpus Flesh and different again from Infested Flesh? While the different Armour, Shield and Fossil protective types are rock-paper-scissors against the rest?

DE have already stated that they want to make things a little more fair, having the Status of the different types have a greater or lesser effect depending on the spread of that damage across the weapon (meaning that if you have a weapon that deals 90% impact compared to the slash and puncture, then the status proc scales from a stagger up to a full ragdoll etc.) so why not shift it further by adjusting what the enemies are made of to allow the damage types to be more logical.

...

......

We have all these possibilities... Change the game just a little, or change parts of it a lot, to make things better, to create a better game.

And yet everyone and their dog is saying we somehow need passive energy regen to cope with the game as it is.

 

This is amazing.

Basically, you propose we expand the way fighting Bursas works to all enemies, combined with the idea of shooting off corpus helmets.

Enemies currently have weak spots, for head-shots; why not give them all strong spots too?

Plate ideas:

• Corpus helmets, before being shot off.
• Charger carapaces
• Grineer helmets, specifically the area where the charger carapace is derived from.
• The decorative plate thing on the back of Infested ancients.

My suggestion:

Have the 'Invulnerability plates' be on almost every enemy, but...

• Don't make them invulnerable, unless in Sorties/raids, or on an eximus unit, etc.

I'm not saying have every body part take different amounts of damage, just specific areas, like you said.

Hitting an enemy on its plate gives a flat damage reduction, unrelated to armor/health type, only enemy type/faction and level. (This way, as enemy level increases, combat becomes focused on avoiding the plates.) Damage is then applied to health, as well as any procs.

• Shielding is treated as the barrier it is, and takes damage until it is gone, before plates are taken into account.

 

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 hour ago, Etomb said:

Have the 'Invulnerability plates' be on almost every enemy, but...

• Don't make them invulnerable, unless in Sorties/raids, or on an eximus unit, etc.

I'm not saying have every body part take different amounts of damage, just specific areas, like you said.

Thanks for the feedback, but I already had the answer in place for this too, on the original thread for it at least ^^

The idea is that there's still ways to bypass the armour. A way to think of it is that we already have a form of this in game; grineer Shield units, it's a mono-directional shield that you can't damage unless you have Punch Through.

This is what really clinched it for me, the idea that the plates would be invulnerable for most of everything except abilities. But they would only provide reduced damage if your weapon had decent Punch Through, which basically makes the new armour types act like the current armour; massive damage reduction, but instead proportional to your Punch Through.

Bows, which gain base punch through when fully charged, Snipers which have 1m default... easy to see where they'd be powerful. The balancing point is that the invulnerability only stops after 1m, you need a minimum of 2 meters of penetration before they actually deal even 50% damage, while 3m is full damage (or pick your balance for that). Similarly melee can gain the equivalent of Punch Through (call it Precision) with the Combo Counter, so as you scale up the counter you gain more and more ability to deal full damage.

See?

[Terrornaut]

12 minutes ago, Etomb said:

A rework is very possible and needed, yes, but it's not so straightforward-

Energy cost is meant to be the main downside to abilities. It limits their use; makes our god-like powers limited. Any form of regaining energy is tricky if we keep this as our main priority. So, when is it acceptable to empower players like this? And how often, or under what circumstances should this be limited? When and how should they be rewarded with this?

• I would like to point out that DE has experimented with an interactive energy puzzle in Lua missions, however the random generation of the related tile makes it undependable. I'm thinking of the Arboriform room in particular. There may be others.

@Thaylien 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

This is amazing.

Basically, you propose we expand the way fighting Bursas works to all enemies, combined with the idea of shooting off corpus helmets.

Enemies currently have weak spots, for head-shots; why not give them all strong spots too?

Plate ideas:

• Corpus helmets, before being shot off.
• Charger carapaces
• Grineer helmets, specifically the area where the charger carapace is derived from.
• The decorative plate thing on the back of Infested ancients.

My suggestion:

Have the 'Invulnerability plates' be on almost every enemy, but...

• Don't make them invulnerable, unless in Sorties/raids, or on an eximus unit, etc.

I'm not saying have every body part take different amounts of damage, just specific areas, like you said.

Hitting an enemy on its plate gives a flat damage reduction, unrelated to armor/health type, only enemy type/faction and level. (This way, as enemy level increases, combat becomes focused on avoiding the plates.) Damage is then applied to health, as well as any procs.

• Shielding is treated as the barrier it is, and takes damage until it is gone, before plates are taken into account.

 

I want to like this idea, but, in so many cases it may invalidate lots of weapons (my favorites actually) like the chain-link weapons, launchers, shotguns.  And if we counter this by giving them some armor piercing to account for their wide spread, we're halfway back to damage 1.0.

I would just like more mobile enemies, enemies that have periods of CC immunity or grant others very close to them temporary CC immunity, etc, rather than just raw damage immunity.  Interesting gameplay options rather than always needing precision, dealing with immunity.  More zanuka, less kril, basically.

But I have faith you have an answer.

[Birdframe_Prime]

8 hours ago, Terrornaut said:

I want to like this idea, but, in so many cases it may invalidate lots of weapons (my favorites actually) like the chain-link weapons, launchers, shotguns.  And if we counter this by giving them some armor piercing to account for their wide spread, we're halfway back to damage 1.0.

Not true, for the most part. See, shotguns, launchers and the chaining weapons like the Atomos are powerful for different reasons.

Shotguns because they can front-load so much power, Launchers for AoE and the chaining weapons because of their ability to spread Status (come to think of it, shotguns also fall into that category). More importantly, invulnerable plates wouldn't cover any Critical marked hitboxes, like the Head, only the basic ones, chest, shoulders, arms (although not arms on Ancients, those are crit areas for them) and so on. The suggestion to add the ability to shoot off helmets is okay, from a certain point of view, but it shouldn't be at the expense of having the damage areas available to players. An enemy would only become reasonably protected in the plates by level 100+ so star-chart and sortie level play would be differentiated by the level of skill or modding required to kill enemies.

For shotguns? Player movement and more skill in shot placement as you go through. They're powerful enough that a shot from the back, or headshot, is still going to be just as strong, plus elemental Status will still apply regardless, so everything except Slash, Fire and Toxin (the ones based on damage dealt) will only be affected in the areas of invulnerability. Every actual hit you place will still be just as viable, and some status types like Blast, Radiation and Corrosive will be still as viable as before as they'll affect regardless. A 100% status Tigris Prime will only lose out if you're aiming directly for those plates, if you aim for a headshot (ridiculously easy with that gun...) or non-covered area, it's exactly as strong as always.

Launchers are AoE, they can already hit headshots just by being in the general area, so again, player movement to kite enemies and shoot for the AoE not for direct center of mass.

And chaining weapons would only need one adjustment, at most; the chain links into the core of the enemy, usually the chest hitbox, if this is covered, link to another hitbox.

Overall, it's only once you pass the level 100-120 range that enemies start to become so armoured that a player would have trouble hitting an uncovered area. Especially if you had CC or an aggro draw.

There would be this kind of crazy balance where players would want to kill enemies while they're charging at an objective, like a Defense pod, because that way their normal damage areas will be most exposed. Which goes against the more usual turtling strategy of defense with Frost or Limbo or Gara...

But if the energy system is redone so that Defense pods actually generate low-level energy regen to add to your own, then staying close to them would be more desirable for casters or players with lower Efficiency.

And it'll all kick off from there!

What do you say?

[Andras61]

15 hours ago, Terrornaut said:

I would just like more mobile enemies, enemies that have periods of CC immunity or grant others very close to them temporary CC immunity, etc, rather than just raw damage immunity.  Interesting gameplay options rather than always needing precision, dealing with immunity.  More zanuka, less kril, basically.

I hope to god if these kind of enemies exist that they don't start putting out the damage of heavy gunners or bombards, or you know, make those enemies CC immune, pray tell Nullifiers already exist. *Shiver*

[Birdframe_Prime]

2 hours ago, Andras61 said:

I hope to god if these kind of enemies exist that they don't start putting out the damage of heavy gunners or bombards, or you know, make those enemies CC immune, pray tell Nullifiers already exist. *Shiver*

I'd agree, but damage scaling currently means that no matter what damage these enemies do, it will scale to lethal damage by level 120... so yeah... a lot of players would be screwed without the damage rework.

[Terrornaut]

My main concern is spread of shotguns being able to hit an exposed area the size of a saryn spore all the time on a common enemy that would force you to use -spread mods the majority of the time, or aoe damage not just taking a general -% to damage when armo plates are present (which makes sense, just is a bummer). Chain weps would be ok if they worked to that regard where if you hit an exposed area, they would link to an exposed area.

And yeah, difficult to target enemies don't need high damage unless they're prone to a moment of weakness or some kind of adjustable telegraph to an attack. Stupid leech ospreys and their bombs you can never kill with some weapons...

Manics were done pretty well, and even runners and chargers dodge to the side now and then, they just need to do it more. Need more interesting enemy types.

[Birdframe_Prime]

4 hours ago, Terrornaut said:

My main concern is spread of shotguns being able to hit an exposed area the size of a saryn spore all the time on a common enemy that would force you to use -spread mods the majority of the time

Ah, no, you're misunderstanding the basics here; the part that's invulnerable is small, each part is small and blocks a specific point from damage, it's only once you get six or seven of them on the same enemy that it becomes a reduced area. Once the head becomes the only reliable hitbox, you're right, that's difficult. But again, the whole point of this is about reducing the need for massive damage and instead focusing on skill.

Shotguns have fall-off damage for a reason, they're most effective in the 0-20m range, and with the right play style, or frame, or combination of frames, headshots are reliable with every shotgun in the game. Even the Phage.

The idea with reworking the damage system is that enemies don't scale up in health beyond a certain point, it gives diminishing returns, their resistances too. So instead of armour itself being the damage reducer, enemies just take flat reduced damage the higher up they level, and once you reach the point where all weapons would naturally fall off (if they didn't have Serration or Point Blank to modify base damage) their gains do too. After that it's skill based.

It would allow players who take things like 4x Corrossive Projection auras on their team to even use weapons like the Kraken, since enemy resistances would be removed by the Auras, to kill nearly infinitely as long as they could consistently hit weak points on the enemy once the armoured sections built up.

Damage types would become more important against enemies, rather than base damage, without the relevent Aura's or abilities to strip off enemy damage resistance, and then you could still carry on with builds that you might have anyway, such as Sonic Fracture Banshee for stripping off the Armour Plates, or her Sonar creating actual weak points by marking armour plates as non-invulnerable...

There's so much possibility ^^

[Ameijin-Grey]

On 12/10/2017 at 4:02 PM, Thaylien said:

Honestly speaking, this debate has got to stop.

DE have made it abundantly clear that passive energy regen for Warframes is not going to happen. They have shifted everything to active energy regen.

 

1

DE also said that there wasn't going to be dancing emotes in Warframe. Here we are. 

[Sintag]

If we're talking the energy bar, that's Amp ammunition.

 

If we're talking the radial ring that also regens for Blast, Dash, and Mode, that's to them what Stamina used to be for Parkour 1.0 (except needed because unlimited invisibility is rather broken, exhibit A: Octavia).

[Birdframe_Prime]

7 hours ago, Ameijin-Grey said:

DE also said that there wasn't going to be dancing emotes in Warframe. Here we are. 

Please, and I do mean that in the polite sense, read the rest of the thread before jumping on the first thing you see.

[kingdomeTHEMADcthulhu]

Simple  1 regain per 1 sec retool the aura to boost it by 1 or steal from hostiles

[Angelid]

Energy is one of the things I think is not only a hold back on a number of frames that have huge costs to begin with (Almost anyone with a toggle), and some others have ways of giving themselves and sometimes others energy other than with rage (Nidus, Octavia and Harrow jump to mind), but lets not forget Trinity. She's a staple for Energy for ALL the wrong reasons IMO.

[Ameijin-Grey]

2 hours ago, Thaylien said:

Please, and I do mean that in the polite sense, read the rest of the thread before jumping on the first thing you see.

Just pointing out how DE's word isn't law, is all. I needn't read  the whole thread to inform you of the nature of DE.

[Birdframe_Prime]

36 minutes ago, Ameijin-Grey said:

Just pointing out how DE's word isn't law, is all. I needn't read  the whole thread to inform you of the nature of DE.

Thanks for clarifying, but I'm well aware, and I go into detail of the explanations of this, I'm not just saying 'oh, DE's word is law' I've given a full explanation and argument of this point already and my point about reading the thread was to show you that you're neither the first person to point this out, nor are you actually contributing to the conversation that is already happening by doing so, because you obviously haven't seen the point/counterpoint discussion that happened since.

I was only hoping to not re-tread the same conversation with a new person just because they hadn't finished the context.