Before We Start Thinking About Warframe And Weapons Balancing, We Should Fix This

[lautalocos]

there´s hundreds of topics speaking about nerfing this, buffing the other, yadda yadda, etc. but how can the game be balanced if the combat is broken?

 

first, we have enemies dumb as...ehm...something....dumb, kinda like me, but with so much armor that most weapons and skills are useless. this leads to every "end game content" player to not care about low damage skills, the question always is "does it ignore armor?", "does it do stupid amounts of damage so that armor doesn´t matter?" or "BUT WILL IT WORK ON 1000000 LVL. ENEMIES?!"

until we fix these things, every balance change that is done is pointless. volt shock can be buffed to do 1000, it will still be not enough because of damage scaling

 

(this will maybe be fixed with that mod auction house, but who knows)

second, we are always thinking on the so called "end game" content, if you can call bullet-sponges end game. only if you where lucky enough to get crazy amounts of serration, redirection, flow, multishot, etc. mods and fully level them up, or just play defense missions over and over again to get them you can even think of getting on the glorified "end game" content.

we should think too of early and mid-game content. if DE buffes warframes skills a lot, mid and early content is a cake-walk (of course, some people love cake walkes, they should just add difficulty settings with different rewards to each mission besides nightmare mode and everyone will be happy), but then, end-game content will be incredibly hard (they could lower the difficulty, but they wouldn´t get the same reward). a simple solution to this would be adding more levels to the warframes skills, like 5 or 10 levels instead of 3

 

TL.DR:

change damage scaling and make better AI, add difficulty settings, then we can start making changes to weapons and warframes

 

 

[Trollin4ThePrimes]

For the most part and 90% of people don't get to see enemies over 80 unless its a T3 defense. Armor scaling and health is mainly fine until it gets into the extreme levels, in which people want challenge so I don't see that being as big of a issue as people make it. I feel like the next update needs to be a major fixing/balancing. Also corrosive project is very useful for high levels without armor ignoring weapons.

 

On the other hand a lot and I mean a lot of Warframes abilities should be looked over again. At least one of each Warframes abilities should be a utility. 75% of abilities should ignore armor for them to be useful.

[Lady_Khaos]

Yeah this topic keeps coming up but the devs still have yet to address it. Boggles my mind as to why they haven't...

[Hipolipolopigus]

Both points overlook the fact that Warframe is a dungeon crawler that's still in heavy development.

[lautalocos]

For the most part and 90% of people don't get to see enemies over 80 unless its a T3 defense. Armor scaling and health is mainly fine until it gets into the extreme levels, in which people want challenge so I don't see that being as big of a issue as people make it. I feel like the next update needs to be a major fixing/balancing. Also corrosive project is very useful for high levels without armor ignoring weapons.

 

On the other hand a lot and I mean a lot of Warframes abilities should be looked over again. At least one of each Warframes abilities should be a utility. 75% of abilities should ignore armor for them to be useful.

see, thats the thing! we are already thinking about armor!

this week, i got 3 new weapons and formae´d my warframe 2 times because of the affinity weekend, and i noticed how horrible the armor is in this game. even on the easiest planet, mercury, non-armor ignoring weapons have a hard time. armor simply makes most weapons useless.

[lautalocos]

Both points overlook the fact that Warframe is a dungeon crawler that's still in heavy development.

that´s why im giving feed-back. without feed-back it will never develop

[lautalocos]

Yeah this topic keeps coming up but the devs still have yet to address it. Boggles my mind as to why they haven't...

hopefully update 10 will fix these issues

[MetalGerbil]

they are actively addressing those issues.

focus too much on one thing and the rest will slip. there isnt going to be anybody around to give feedback about these issues if they leave cause everything else is ignored.

it should not boggle your mind that game development is a complex balancing act.

if it looks simple, you dont know enough about it.

[Hipolipolopigus]

that´s why im giving feed-back. without feed-back it will never develop

"Never".

 

My point is, what do you expect from end-game content in a dungeon crawler? They're limited in scope by design, so I doubt you'd get relatively complex fights like MMORPG-esque raids unless DE pull out something unique. 

[DAWGUNITALPHA]

Yeah this topic keeps coming up but the devs still have yet to address it. Boggles my mind as to why they haven't...

Why polish your game when you can dangle a new weapon in front of the community's face and call it a week.

[lautalocos]

they are actively addressing those issues.

focus too much on one thing and the rest will slip. there isnt going to be anybody around to give feedback about these issues if they leave cause everything else is ignored.

it should not boggle your mind that game development is a complex balancing act.

if it looks simple, you dont know enough about it.

think of this as cutting an extremiti (correct grammar?) so that the disease doesn´t spread. if the hand is infected, you don´t cut the fingers, you cut the whole hand.

yeah, im not good with examples

[madlydevoid]

well from what i can tell it all depends on what you are fighting. One may complain "ohh dera doesnt do any thing vs grenier its use less," solution, dont use it on corpus. This game is only shooting sponges if you make it that way. If your in t2-t3 defense, couple dera with nova and prime enemies and shoot the corpus corrupted and then your ability takes out the greneir. Also your meant to be in groups of 4, plan ahead and bring what will work the best, its what happend in WOW and many other games. , But i get what your saying, more of a normal game where as you progess (new areas etc) enemies get harder, like in every mmorpg, so it get harder regaurdeless of the frame, but harder for some easier for others. Now as for endgame, is there an endgame where boss isnt just a bullet sponge? all games just have a boss thats level is 20x all others an require just a repetative motion which causes kids with adhd or add to become obsessed and farm for hours. this games isnt that much different is it?

[Loswaith]

AI is a double bladed sword unfortunatly, the more complex it gets the more resources it takes up.  So far if you look at what the individual units can do they arent that bad where AI is concerned.  Sure they do some moderatly intelligent stuff, sometimes they do some realy dumb stuff too (maybe they are that silly).  It could use some tweaking and as shown DE is adjusting boss AI too.

 

Unfortunatly armour scalling with levels is a big issue, especially since its a percentage thing.  As a percentage it naturally will scale some as you do more damage, enough so that the health scalling on enemies should be enough to compensate for the added damage getting through (much like it is for warframes).

Some armour piercing weapons make less sence too, I mean why do throwing weapons ignore armour (especially the grineer hardened stuff) when high speed ballistic rounds dont.  Are they mono-fillement edged?

 

That said different units should have different armour styles.

 

It also means that with static armour types on enemies they can be a bit more distince in nature.

Take grineer with good armour, in general it would be good against balistics, some would have good elemental resistances too.

Melee grineer may have moderate balistic armour but great melee armour (no armour ignoring heavy hits on these guys), so you are better off shooting the melee guy rather than hitting them with a melee weapon.  Togeather with heavier units having higher armour irrelevant of actual level, even if they have lower armour otherwise.  Like flamers, mini-gunners and rocket guys is realy heavy balistic armour but low melee armour. 

 

Corpus focusing more on shields and low armour, so armour ignore isnt as great (excluding their head, as thats a visual obvios).  While walkers would have both moderate armour and shields. 

 

Leaving infested as the damage sponges, but not a great deal of armour (including anchients having maybe moderate armour but not the insane armour they can have now).

 

While armour piercing damage should be exactly that.  Not damage on top that ignores armour but reducing armour affecting the normal damage, so good against grineer but less usefull against the corpus and infested with lesser armour.

 

Elemental damage could be tweaked too, with fire damage being applied as a dot where the damage is done over say 3 seconds, while cold stays slowing (maybe reducing shield regeneration as well) and shock being good vs damaging shields (overloading them) and stuns, with smaller dots to that of fire.

Edited August 5, 2013 by Loswaith