General Gameplay, Weapons, And Enemy Feedback: Infested Primarily.

[Diseenith]

I was going to break this up, but decided against it since I have difficulty seperating things into different topics. I've been playing Warframe almost excessively now... its a fun game after all! However, it is still in beta. Given the amount I've put into this game, both in time and money, I figured it'd be a good idea to at least give some feedback on things. Most of these are opinions, and I'm not strongly tied to any of them, but they are simply experiences on feel and experience in gaming as a whole.

 

 

Abilities:

 

To start off, I'd like to mention abilities and their uses. When playing the game the first thing I noticed was the lack of passive regeneration on energy. Its a pretty interesting change compared to most games, but at the same time it seems fit since it promotes a highly aggressive and less 'wait for energy' gameplay. It surprised me, but now that I've played it its a lot of fun.

 

I also noticed that the ability costs did not make sense as a whole. A large number of abilities are essentially 'useless' outside of very, very small circumstances (And sometimes less than that). Some of these are Bounce, Super Jump, and Overload. Others however, are extremely powerful for the cost such as Frost bubble, Chaos, and Bastille. I'm certain the balance team is aware of these issues, but having played games for awhile I figured I'd try my hand a few ideas.

 

Frost Bubble - An essential in defense missions, and incredibly powerful for its low cost. When combined with bastille it literally trivializes any defensive content to a bullet soaking competition. One way to make this not as apparent is to make it so that heavy units can sometimes 'puncture' the shield.Enemies like the Rocket Grinneer, Rail Moas, and perhaps 10% of a heavy grinneer's shots puncturing it. This would promote leaving the safe zone to take them out before they could start dealing damage from outside the bubble.

 

Bastille - This one is tricky, its incredibly powerful, but at the same time something remarkably useful. I don't feel that on its own its the most powerful, but its the combination of it and stretch that make it so powerful. Really the only way to nerf it without making it incredibly weak is to remove stretch's ability to affect it and reduce the energy cost slightly. This would prevent vauban from having absolute control of a map with less than 60 energy.

 

Chaos - Unfortunately, this ability feels good and works well, but has the side effect of not being recastable if not everything is dead. I don't know a way to balance this further.

 

Bounce - Perhaps give this unlimited bounces, and leveling the mod instead increases the 'force' of each bounce. Or keep the limited number of bounces and make it deal MASSIVE damage to enemies (2-5k). But also make it so you can't just throw it under and enemy, require them to enter it from the outside to actually be affected. This would make working as a team with mag effective for boss killing, and really profess the 'trap' gameplay of Vauban.

 

Telsa - For this, instead of making it a lightning strike why not make it two connecting balls that create a laser that cuts enemies (and vauban) when walking through it? This would also reinforce his gameplay as a trapping character, while allowing laser damage to scale effectively into late game content. It might also compensate for his loss of instant-win bastille but still make him very strong in defensive settings.

 

Super Jump - No idea, I can't think of anything that would justify the high energy cost of this ability outside of parkour riddles.

 

 

Weapons:

 

To start I would really like to mention the starting weapons. They're weak, incredibly weak. Yes they are starting weapons, but they are so weak that most people I invite to the game feel trapped and useless until they can figure out how to build a new weapon. Most of the time without outside help they won't know what to buy and (like one friend of mine) buy something like a Vasto blueprint and not be able to build it for a tremendous amount of time. I'd think it'd be kind of nice if they were buffed a bit, but have stats designed in falling off late game. 

 

Most weapons in this game are really nice, but there is very little communication on what they do. The weapon design in itself is good (I'd love to recolor my DERA projectiles though), but there is so little feedback on 'what' they do you oftentimes are gambling when buying a weapon. Does this one ignore armor? What element is the damage? Having an 'advanced information' tab with all of the weapons information displayed would be highly effective for players who like to min-max, and understand what they are crafting.

 

Enemies: (Crit area means headshot area)

 

A lot of enemies in this game are fun, fulfilling, and have a meaningful theme. However, there are a few things that I've found irritating that seems to take away from the gameplay experience.

 

Infested:

 

Lack of range on infested is nasty, it makes them very easy to control, and takes away from most of the gameplay against them. The ancients being bullet soakers also takes away from them, making them instead only difficult in what they do to your ammunitions. There is very little tactical play against them, but there are a few things that could help remedy this.

 

Ancients becoming more diverse: This one is pretty big for me, most of the ancients feel the same and when I see them I often can't even tell which is which without reading the name. They all feel like bullet soakers that I don't want to stand next to or get hit by. Possibly diversifying them with abilities would be nice. For example, disrupters could feel more disruptive if they had an increase in armor, reduction in health, and instead had bullet attractor on themselves at all times. This would promote pulling them away from other infested and taking them out from melee since they'd soak non-crit gunfire from allied ancients.

 

Toxic ancients losing the aura of poison and instead lobbing poison grenades. Toxic ancients also losing a large amount of armor, and having a more obvious critical area (Possibly on an arm where they throw the bombs from). This would nerf a lot of 'safe zone' tactics against them. It'd make it fun to try to fight them, but without them bullet soaking it'd also make it fulfilling to try to snipe one. Combined with a disrupter could cause a dangerous situation to fight against.

 

Healing ancients: These feel pretty fine, but a more obvious and better crit area would be better. One of my biggest beefs with ancients is how non-communicative the crit areas are, it feels like I"m better off just hsooting them wildly or using abilities to kill them.

 

Grineer: 

 

Not a lot of feedback here, only it'd be kind of nice to have better communication on which grineer are which. Bombards having a more diverse model, pyros could have huge backpacks that could be shot for bonus damage and pyros could also have a fire aura similar to the current toxic ancient aura... but lose the knockback in melee, etc. Also, please remove the rollers or make it... simpler to fight them. At the moment they are simply fustrating and lacking anything fulfilling when fighting them. They simply feel like a massive annoyance.

 

Corpus:

 

Same as grineer, but with perhaps better communication on crit areas, and a bit of power shifted into making fewer corpus units but each unit stronger. At the moment they feel more zerglike than the infested while being so individually weak. Giving them a tanklike unit would be beautiful (Very High shields, low health, Rail gun, powerful melee, slow moving.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

That all my feedback for now! I'm a bit tired so I'll write up more later. As I said most of these are opinions, so I can understand reasonable dismissal of some.

Edited August 1, 2013 by Diseenith

[Madotsuki]

You should've split this into 3 different threads and elaborated a bit more on each part instead. This is the internet, people are too stupid/lazy to read wall-of-texts. Better formatting works too, since your thread right now looks pretty messy. Personally I type my large threads on Word with bullet points and everything before i copy-paste it over to the browser. Putting spoiler tags for each section also makes the thread seem more clean.

Regarding abilities, Frost's Snowglobe isn't really that powerful on anything other than Grineer/Corpus defense, and since enemies can in fact walk into the globe to shoot, it's not overpowered at all. Instead of allowing certain enemies to pierce the globe from outside, it would be better to just give the AI the ability to realise that the Globe is there neutralizing their guns, and, depending on the enemy type, either retreat and take cover somewhere so players in the globe can't shoot them easily, or go on the offensive and attempt to charge into the globe. Not a lot of comments on the other abilities.

As for weapons, the game suffers heavily from the problem of Power Creep right now, with some weapons being clearly better than others, and many weapons being obselete and only used for the sake of Mastery Ranks. Giving different weapons more special abilities such as allowing the Cleavers/Machete to inflict "bleed" on enemies or re-making the laser damage type into something more unique would help a lot, but that is something complicated that would require an entire thread to delve into properly.

For enemies, right now the Corpus is the best faction due to relative lack of stunlock and using projectile guns instead of hitscan. Grineer are more boring due to their hitscan guns and armor, as well as the presence of such abominations as the Scorpion and Roller, while the Infested are the worst faction due to relying on stunlock, zerg rush and bullet sponging, not to mention Ancient Disruptors. Again, it would take at least a whole thread for EACH faction to suggest good re-works of them. I'd do it, but I'm still waiting for DE to fix the general difficulty that they screwed up with Update 9.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Madotsuki

[BadAimbot]

I like the Corpus because while their units are individually weak, when combined they become harder to deal with because they all have diverse tactics. Grineer are good but I think their heavy units need to be found in more areas as they're the funnest part of fighting them. The Grineer that can stun you not so much. Scorpions I don't mind but Rollers need to go to hell. Infested need so much love. More diverse units, better readability on weak points and Disruptors that aren't just the other Ancients but with the fun mechanics removed. And RANGE.

[Doubtfulblaze]

I agree Bastille is too strong at the moment.  It outshines all of Vauban's other abilities (and most other frames' abilities) to the point where it may as well be the only one you take (considering the 'Vortex affecting players' bug and perhaps excluding Tesla when fighting corpus).  I like the ideas for Bounce and Tesla, they sound like they would add much more depth and variety to what is pretty much a one trick pony frame at the moment.

 

Also what Madotsuki said: add spoiler tags if you want people to read your post (that's the internet we live in I'm afraid).

[Diseenith]

I agree Bastille is too strong at the moment.  It outshines all of Vauban's other abilities (and most other frames' abilities) to the point where it may as well be the only one you take (considering the 'Vortex affecting players' bug and perhaps excluding Tesla when fighting corpus).  I like the ideas for Bounce and Tesla, they sound like they would add much more depth and variety to what is pretty much a one trick pony frame at the moment.

 

Also what Madotsuki said: add spoiler tags if you want people to read your post (that's the internet we live in I'm afraid).

 

 What do you mean by adding spoiler tags?

 

And I'll possibly break this up and rewrite it in another forums sometime. Working pretty long shifts at the moment so I'll have to wait till monday.