Warframe VS challange, ideas how to make the game less "easy"

[Fallen_Echo]

I think everybody knows what i think when i say warframe is an easy game. Unless people take the time to go up to lv 150 where enemies start to get threatening you can casually sleep your way thorught most missions because the age where lv45 was hard are long gone.

There were many suggestions on how to fix this:

1. nerf damage
2. make lv 100 nodes
3. remove X mods

And soo on but most of them were either hit a brickwall with DE or were just too stupid to begin with.

Whenever someone makes an idea on how to make a challanging enemy encounter the "filthy casuals!" crowd comes in and claims it wont work because we will either perma CC it or nuke it from the orbit.

Im here trying to pass through an idea of some new enemy units to spice things up without creating obnoxius annoying encounters, the corpus doesnt get any as they are already have enough defense against us especially at hogher levels.

 

The first 2 class comes for the grineer.

Grineer legionnaire:

The grineer legion, mutants among the army who are resistant to genetic degradion. There existence was only known by the Queens and now they are deployed to fight the tenno menace.

Features: Medium health, no armor, base 50% damage reduction, this unit stays under crowd control effects for 90% less time including warframe effects, fodder unit appears on every 4th spawn around the same level where bombards start to appear

Variants:

Javlok legionnaire: These units are armed with a Javlok and an alloy strike shield. The shield in itself has 50% of the total health of this and is destroyable. These units try to charge up to the enemy while spamming attack to make the enemy retreat. When an enemy get close they throw their javloks infront of themselves. 

Phalanx legionnaire: These units are armed with a special kuva alloy riot shield and a grenade roller dispenser. The shield cannot be destroyed, its approx 1.5 meter wide and 2.5 meter high covering the unit from aerial attacks too. This unit tries to stay away from the fight generating explosive rollers every sec and swarming the enemy with it. They have a slow turn rate and always try to face the closest enemy. Other units try to use them up as cover. If someone gets close they try to use a sheev to drive them away as these shields are not made to be able to bash.

 

Grineer infestor:

"You dont know fear till you seen an infestor aiming at you" unknown butcher. The grineer infestor is a bio-weapon specialist made for the purpose to genetically update the grineer units in the heat of the battle.

Features: High health, no armor, base 25% damage reduction, immune to damaging warframe powers, battle enchants allied units with various effects based on the enemy. Same rarity as bombards.

Battle behaviour:

When entering alerted state the grineer infestor aims at the closest ally and lauches a dart of genomorph poison to them. Getting in contact with this dart is deadly to anything but the grineer and even they will suffer severe effects. The infestor can have maximum 3 mutants at the same time and can shot again every 30 sec. The infestor never shots its dart at an enemy.

The infestor stays in cover always and is armed with low damage gas grenades and an emergency teleporter prototype. The teleporter has 50% chance of sending the infestor to a spawn point when taking fatal damage or blows it up creating a magnetic energy wave dealing minor damage with 100% proc chance. The teleport only works once and leaves the infestor with a new behaviour to charge and kill with a sheev.

Genomorph dart effects:

IPS defense: the target hit by the dart grows an additional layer of flesh armor. Gaining 50% defense against a random IPS damage but slowing down and getting an accuracy debuff.

Elementalist form: the target loses most of its flesh and generates a bright aura of elemetal energy. The element choosen is always used by atleast 1 player and grants 50% defense against it while also making the mutant deal that choosen damage. The target loses 50% of its current health and its attack changes into a slow moving elemental beam.

Overcharged one: sometimes things doesnt work, this units loses shape and starts to inflate. Soon his life ends in the least desirable way, by blowing up from rapidly growing tissues so it charges into the enemy. When reaching maximum size it blows up creating bone sharpnel (richocheting projectiles, puncture damage) and an impact based 4m wide aoe.

Each variant has maximum 2 minute before they "expire" with the expection of the overcharged one who only stays alive for 20 second. Every variant is immune to crowd control effects and gain 25% damage reduction.

 

The next ones go for the infested:

Horrors:

"These things are the reason why we have wall penetrating napalm cannons" Grineer commander Kar. Drifting between the planes these infested have formed groups to take down their prey faster.

Features: Low health, fast movement, sudden teleportation attacks (see lower), aoe resistance (see lower), spawns in groups of 10 horrors, semi- common unit.

Attack behaviour:

These units are spawn in the air near players (1-5m). Before spawning the players can here a quiet hissing noise and at the moment of the spawn the light flicker creating 0.5 sec total darkness to cover the spawn of horrors. They always spawn in a group of 10 and go for the player with the lowest current health.

Defenses:

Unless its a projectile direct hit or the aim reticle directly targets them horrors take 90% less damage from all attacks. Horrors immideatly shift planes when they are hit by warframe powers gaining 0.5 sec invincibility every time they are hit by one.

 

The turned:

"Please end it, i dont want to turn into one of those.....things." Unknown corpus trapped in a circular room on an infested ship to a Tenno purge squad.

Features: Medium health, area specific apperance and bonuses(see lower), 10% damage resistance, hard to kill (see lower), common unit, starts to spawn at lv 35.

Apperance:

Depending on the tileset these units look like slightly infested grineer or corpus units using mutalist weaponary. They randomly spawn with a choosen apparance and get the special abilities of the unit they choosen. For example they can be nullfiers, lauch a mutalist ossprey or jump up and shoot out a swaem of projectiles.

Attack behaviour:

These units use the general ai system what their normal variant use with the difference that if an enemy gets close instead of bash they release a cloud of acid dealing high damage with 100% proc chance. They never use the acid cloud on non-player targets.

Defenses:

These units due to the ongoing mutation are harder to kill. Their health is evenly distributed between 5 parts: head, arms and legs. All of them can be attacked but only one can take damage from a single attack. When one is shot down it dettaches and the infestation rapidly grows a new "limb" in place of the lost one.

 

 

 

[RayxAyanami]

Forma Everything so that normal missions become harder 
ᕕ( ಠ‿ಠ)ᕗ

[Volinus7]

Inb4 WF needs to be autoplay level easy because there are a lot of repetitive grinding. 

[Gandergear]

Wf needs challenging missions that can be seperated from normal ones, like nightmare but permanent except without the awful modifiers. Specifically we could use a new planet in the 60-80 range with a level 80-100 area in the void

 

I like your enemy ideas too

[INight00]

32 minutes ago, Fallen_Echo said:

Grineer legionnaire:

Grineer infestor:

Horrors:

The turned:

No armour on Grineer units? A bit odd.
Ability resistances are a strange thing, but if its kuva related, then maybe it could pass. Although it is a bit odd that we don't see the disruptor drones outside of raids.
Enemies with abilities are rare outside of special game-modes. I don't see why not.
Would be cool if the infestor turns its units into a collaborative squad.
If we the warframe get cheesey tactics, so should the enemy eh?

A Xenomorph style enemy is just what the infested needs.
But I don't know what to say about an enemy that can dismember itself. Cool?

Corpus need new enemies as well. Maybe some melee types that aren't Comba and Moas. Or the low level prodman.

[chaotea]

I dont think nerfing or anythings a good idea, because you still have alot of players coming in new to the game. Also, the entire point of WF is the power trip. Still, the devs did say they wanted to so more challenging enemies, i think the edilons are the start of that.

[Thrymm]

More challenging enemy interaction is really the key to more challenge, in my opinion.  Simply increasing enemy level, removing mods, or nerfing damage does nothing in particular except create a more "bullet sponge" atmosphere.  Bullet sponges aren't challenging because TTK does not necessarily equal difficulty(and in this game, it adds very little).

The Ghouls displayed a good potential.  They had a bit too much "elemental proc in your face" for my tastes, but their horde mentality, tendency to come out and attack immediately as a varied group, and general synergy with one another is pretty encouraging from a challenging play standpoint.  Ghouls at level 100, compared to the rest of the enemies, might be challenging.

[Fallen_Echo]

31 minutes ago, INight00 said:

No armour on Grineer units? A bit odd.
Ability resistances are a strange thing, but if its kuva related, then maybe it could pass. Although it is a bit odd that we don't see the disruptor drones outside of raids.
Enemies with abilities are rare outside of special game-modes. I don't see why not.
Would be cool if the infestor turns its units into a collaborative squad.
If we the warframe get cheesey tactics, so should the enemy eh?

A Xenomorph style enemy is just what the infested needs.
But I don't know what to say about an enemy that can dismember itself. Cool?

Corpus need new enemies as well. Maybe some melee types that aren't Comba and Moas. Or the low level prodman.

The reason for no armor is to not create another endgame bulletsponge enemy. Since armor scales having simple flat damage reduction is much better for a stable experience.

I always found it strange that the grineer has access to nullfier tech but doesnt use it and spec units only appear on some quests and events when they can be regular encounters.

 

The horrors was inspired mainly by these creatures:

 

Just imagine taking a casual stroll on an infested ship when the light start to flicker. You think its just another hit squad when suddenly the screen becomes black and 10 of these things appear around you one literally infront of your face.

Even if you escape you are trying to run down something with the speed of a volt hopping around the map trying to claw your face down.

[bad4youLT]

we need to

- remove rivens ( or rework whem into something what dont give stats increase )

- remove prime mods

- cap power range / duration / strength  to 75 % just like power efficiancy

- nerf loki

 

Spoiler

just kidding

Spoiler

except the part about loki

Spoiler

lets be honnest here , the guys needs to be hit with the nerf hammer

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

[Synpai]

This is actually a much more complex  problem that you touched on lightly.

The game needs so much work to even get adjacent to balance.

 

Things like:

1. Damage types - Not just what they do, but the type of damage weapons can do (S. Tigris doing 1k+ of each), such that there's thought into what primary, secondary and melee a player is bringing in order to handle different enemy "Resistances." Not to mention status effects should affect enemies and players the SAME, it's one of the things that made Halo so great. Just like you could get your shields murdered by a plasma pistol, you could do the same to the enemy (It's actually weird how well Halo exemplifies Warframe's 3 weapon combat in a different style/context).

-Divinity 2/DMC/Halo Reach have good examples of damage types and enemy resistances. I don't really agree with Armor/level scaling for difficulty, but at the very least Divinity 2 is turn based and uses armor to balance status effects.
-I think the DMC/Halo Reach style of more enemies and enemy immunity/behavior changes is the golden apple of enemy design. Harder levels of DMC mix enemy types with different resistances (angel vs demon weapons) and behaviors.

2. Coop damaging/mechanics - It's a team game, but isn't really designed around it. (If I ice proc and you heat proc that should be a blast proc otherwise you get the one man army builds).

3. Mod balance - Our frames and weapons are just all over the place in terms of power. Mods have no correlation [Insert Magnum Force vs Augur Pact meme here] and really there's no reason to use 75% of the mods that exist. Wish mods would augment frame/weapon abilities and utility. I.E: More reload speed vs magazine size, adding alternate fires, changing bullet types, etc. (Or at the least balanced with all weapons in mind)

 

At least in my opinion, but I wont hold my breath for any of these XD. I'll just hope they DElay the inevitable so I can keep playing Divinity 2.

[Synpai]

@bad4youLT 

If only.

Don't even get me started on Rivens (I dont even...) and Primes (in general).

 

Rivens and Primes will likely never leave considering the amount of investment players have put into them thus far.

There's no integration in the upgrades (regular weapon -> prime/wraith/vandal) nor coordination Synapse (and other infested weapons) still being basic Lenz being stronger than most primes as a basic.

Edited January 11, 2018 by Synpai
I got started.

[(PSN)HurricaneHugo76]

There is a core problem with this conversation about dofficulty. It's basically DE never put up serious progression walls, you have access to most content in the game by the time you hit MR10. It's been such a core aspect of the experience that any deviation from that will always appear more unfair to newer players.

 

At this point, and looking how De handles most issues like this, I would suggest several things:

I partly have an idea that all new players start out in a solo campaign mode where the goal is to unlock the starchart and finish all the core quests in the game. It's not until you finish the last lore quest that the star chart opens up to you and you can go back and grind for the rest of the items available, which will require MR to equip. You can play in groups, but only with other player in single player mode if veterans play there would be a spectre like system which would allow you to create a loadout based upon MR restricted items(they could even allow the option of allowing to select whichever specific weapon you used in those MR ranks) then you can jump in and help you friend if they are still starting out, you'd be pretty powerful as you already had the best equipment to beat the content the first time, but the difficulty scales appropriately with whoever is hosting the mission.

Enemies scale on any mission that can spawn higher levels endlessly. You can go to Mercury and end up with lvl 150 mobs if you stuck around long enough. Now I know it technically does this though I do believe there are spawn restrictions by starting level and planet. But what I propose is changing the enemy AI to not only scale in difficulty, but react to your playstyle and loadout and tried to challenge you the higher in MR you are playing in. I always point out that something like The Director AI in the original Left 4 Dead is a great idea to copy and would be a great tool in level design and scaling difficulty. Having the Game AI be aware of your actions and have logic to counter them would increase the dofficulty in a way that would feel organic and require conscious human thought to compete against, not just repetitive muscle memory and basic research skills.

Another aspect that I feel would also add to the complexity and dynamic nature of the game would be to increase the level of procedural generation and once again allow for logic which challenges the player. Spy/Rescue missions should be maze hunts, involving labyrinthine level designs full of shortcuts and environmental and platform puzzles. Capture missions should be a branching race line where time is off the essence and if you don't discover which way to go and get there fast enough to capture the target you fail the mission, it should resemble a cat and mouse game. Endless wave mission should be on par with Left 4 Dead horde modes except with more disciplines organized adversaries, it should be tactical and strategic but orchestrated to always be intense and thrilling, sometimes the AI is challenging you, other times it's helping you with more combat drops or making certain parts easier.

And the player should decide at what level they feel comfortable with and that level should be represented by Mastery Rank. The drop chances scales with difficulty but that is only advantageous after you hit a high enough rank to unlock most of the top tier content(arcanes, rivens, primes, etc). This creates an incentive to give people to justify going through things like the core quests and unlock content but prevents the locking out of players playing with each other, though the nature of pugs would probably change, but I feel towards the better. It would allow for DE to better guide new players through the core game which teaches them the basics without it being just another tutorial level. And once everyone finishes the single player game they start out on the same level in terms on access to content that partying and playing together becomes more even and effective.