[PC] Beasts of the Sanctuary: Sanctuary Onslaught Feedback Megathread

[Max7238]

Crashes galore, can't use our frame abilities unless we're using Mesa, the only good rewards are locked far enough into the mission that you're probably going to crash before you get there and lose all the progress anyway... Good for EXP, if you MANAGE TO EXTRACT.

[Urlan]

I agree that I am still looking for that reduction of grind that DE said was coming a few years back now; but I think this is aiming at those players that constantly say they need a challenge more than they need fun or rewards. Masochistic, Sadistic, or whatever you want; the players that get bored after only the playing the accepted 'best' play style or bandwagon onto Metagame directions like the acolyte and other conditional mods. Either way, its hard to make anything truly interesting to such a vocal minority of the players, stuff like Onslaught I feel is an attempt.

[m0b1us1]

Let me start out by saying that I did not try casual onslaught, I went straight to elite. I have to say that overall, I am extremely disappointed. I went in with my typical set up (Inaros, vectis prime, akstilleto prime, a plague zaw), nothing special, and got to round 6 or 7, just over 246k points completely solo, and didn't even need to use my abilities for the most part. Towards the end I started trying to spam them just to see what would happen and how much I needed to use an ability for me to get a penalty, but I only needed to use my 1 ability once so I had enough time to charge my 4.

 

The problem with "Difficulty"

Let's not beat around the bush here. DE released this mode as a way to try to appeal to the raid community. Eidolons are nothing but a gear check and bored a lot of players and had terrible rewards until they made them into a focus farm and put arcanes on the drop tables. However, as a supposed replacement of raids, DE clearly does not fully understand why people played raids. DE must understand that the best thing about raids was that they had AUTHENTIC difficulty. I still think it's hilarious that DE used the play rate of a mission type that was gated by a key that took 6 hours to build, no public queue system, and only gave rewards once a day to justify removing raids. Then they lazily "thanked" us by giving everyone a flashy version of the normal LoR emblem. Didn't even put forth the effort to make something new, or anything to differentiate those who had played them a ton vs someone who just played once and only for the emblem. Anyway, let me continue to the meat of my opinion.

What is authentic difficulty? Well that is the idea that the difficulty is increased to require more skill. Example, Super Smash Brothers Melee or Chess. If you set the AI to the lowest level, it gives you ample opportunities to win and does not punish your mistakes. When you start increasing the difficulty, the AI makes faster decisions, gives you less time to react, punishes your mistakes, but the overall game does not change the advantages.

Artificial difficulty is the opposite. The difficulty is increased such that your skill does not require change. Take SSBM for the same example and increase it's handicap to max and yours to lowest, but keep it's difficulty at minimum. You will find that the lowest difficulty is insanely hard to KO, yet does not require any change up in skill if you are good at the game already. What the handicap does is make the AI (or player controlling that character) experience less knock back while giving more. So you go from being able to stomp this easy AI, to having to beat on him like a sandbag for a while before knocking him off or using a cheese strategy. Imagine if a chess AI was instead starting to replace pawns with queens. Or if pokemon got tougher by just giving increased stats (even beyond what is "possible") instead of just improving the AI to make better decisions. So no dragonite spamming agility against a venomoth because the attack type is super effective against venomoth.

"But what does that have to do with raids and onslaught?"

Excellent question! Raids, as buggy as they were, were difficult because it required more than just a gear check. To complete any raid, team work wasn't an option, it was a prerequisite. Standing on the buttons in LoR was boring sure, but your team HAD to cooperate so then another player could escort the core down the line or open doors for you to access where you needed to drop batteries. In JV, you had to shoot buttons to drop a force field or to open the head on the golem so then someone else could push a spore to where it needed to go. This required actual team work as one person could not do it alone. The artificial difficult of raids can't be ignored either. In NMLoR, standing on pads would drain your energy. Did this make the raid more challenging? Of course not. All it did was require you to rely on an EV trin more or if you were speed running it then just use more energy pizzas. The electrified rail would basically one shot the core, did that make the raid more challenging? Nope. All it did was make that section unforgiving. If you ran everything smoothly, with a team that knew what they were doing, then one wouldn't really be able to tell the difference between NM and normal LoR at all.

Now, onslaught... it's purely artificial difficulty and its terribly boring as a result. DE is essentially giving the mobs a handicap boost and calling that "elite". Does the requirements to beat the enemy change? Nope. Does the game require you to adapt and improve? Nope. It's the exact same thing as beating up the easiest CPU is SSBM, but them having a huge handicap. It's just yet another gear check. The only challenge I had was navigating some weird tile sets so I could kill enemies quickly and didn't have to waste time running around to find the 2 focus things.

It seems like DE doesn't fully understand just how powerful you can get in this game. If you watch their streams, it looks like they use partially modded equipment. What might be "challenging or elite" for DE is more than likely a cake walk for an older player. This doesn't apply to just DE however, this is a problem that every developer faces. What one thinks of as "challenging" might be easy for someone else. There is a game that talks about this very idea perfectly. In the game, "Getting Over It", the creator tells us a bit about how he developed the game as we are playing it. He talks about how he made the game in parts, he would make once section, try for hours to get past it, and once he got past it, develop the next without having to repeat the prior parts. He continues by saying that what might have taken him hours, someone else will be able to beat that particular section in mere minutes within an hour of releasing the game. He understood the fact that what the developer thinks is hard might not be hard at all to other people. So he didn't make any changes even if it took him hours and hours to get past a section. DE must learn to accept this fact, what they think is challenging or hard can and will be considered easy by some players. So when designing the concept behind "elite" onslaught, they should have kept that in mind.

So what does all this mean? "Elite" onslaught is not elite at all. It is purely an timed exterminate mission with purely artificial difficulty. There is nothing about it that will put your skills to the test. Unlike in raids where at least you had to have team work.

 

What is the point of doing anything difficult?

Now, one must answer the question of WHY would one do high difficulty stuff at all? Of course one easy answer is for rewards, another is for prestige, and the last is because they want a challenge. The rewards of raids were arcanes. In a large number of ways, having 2 sets of arcane grace or a set of energize showed prestige (or a nice wallet) since you can only gain arcanes from raids once a day. Having a large number of arcanes showed that you had beaten the best the game had to offer and gave you rewards for it. 

What does onslaught have to offer for rewards in terms of prestige? Nothing. Peculiar mods are fun sure, but overall are worse than worthless. They take up a mod slot which stops that slot from being used for something that will help your performance. So the only value peculiar mods have is to WORSEN your performance. If you have max focus, then you don't benefit from the focus farm. Raids gave you not only a cosmetic that would show off what you did (that wouldn't harm your game play), but also reward you with arcanes that could be used to push you to the next level. So realistically, the only reason to do "elite" onslaught is for the radiant relics.

 

Ideas and concepts that direct how things should be changed

Those are the problems with onslaught and DE's recent decisions. Now what can be done to fix those problems? I think it can be boiled down into 2 major solutions.

1. Make "elite" onslaught worth it's name. Collecting 2 objects and killing a bunch of stuff isn't hard at all. Even putting restrictions on abilities doesn't make it hard unless you are using an ability reliant frame like Mag or Nova. Don't focus on artificial difficulty, put time and effort to make it actually difficult. If playing solo, have optional areas that slowly shrink while you are standing in, that give you extra efficiency, focus, w/e, but as it shrinks your movement is limited. This would make it require you to adapt your play style. Or make it so that you gain extra focus when getting kills with either only your primary, secondary, or melee. You can even get more creative and have zones that grant more efficiency based on how much damage you can tank/mitigate, how many enemies you can CC, how many enemies you can kill with abilities only, you get the idea. When playing with a team, make zones pop up that require you to split up or group. If you split up then different zones can have different changes, or if grouped up will modify the enemies that spawn to have more AoE coverage. You can even go into the silly route by having zones that invert controls! There are so many possibilities to make the game authentically difficult that it makes me sad to see DE take such a lazy design route.

2. Give "elite" onslaught rewards that are worthwhile. Peculiar mods are terrible, let's not sugar coat it. Raids could give you lots of credits (500k if you found a credit booster), all sorts of boosters, COMPLETE detonite injectors, arcanes, emblems, and a unique experience that required team work that isn't found anywhere else without relying on artificial difficulty. Improve drop tables as we get further. Like Kuva survival, if we can make it 2 hours in, 300 endo (200 kuva) reward is simply a slap in the face. Eidolons took arcanes because without them, the only reason you have to kill eidolons is to get amps, which are only used to kill more eidolons, and focus farming. Give the veterans something that is worth going to this mode. Give us a drop that let's us IMPROVE our game play. NOTE: THE FOLLOWING SUGGESTIONS ARE BASED ON A FAR MORE DIFFICULT AND CHALLENGING MODE AND ARE JUST USED FOR EXAMPLES. Like a reward for breaking some set score that let's us add arcanes back to cosmetics (under the condition that no more than 2 sets can be used on one frame). Give us SOMETHING that makes us feel like our dedication was rewarded. Peculiar mods make it seem like all our work is being made fun of. Here is one idea, give us some currency from this mode "onslaught points" that can be used to buy stuff like focus, endo, credits for relatively low amounts of points. Stuff like relics, mods, rare resources (injectors, mutagen mass, etc) for a "medium" amount of points. Finally some major stuff like cosmetics, boosters, items that lock in stats for rivens, and the ability to use arcanes on a cosmetic.

 

At long last, a conclusion

Overall, there is only 1 lesson to learn here. DE, you must realize that what you think is hard is not hard at all to many players. I remember when you claimed beating eidolons would be like beating raids. Nothing further could be from the truth as we have people solo'ing the tridolons TWICE in a single night, teams beating them four times in one night. The hardest thing about eidolons is not getting one shot by harry's instant magnetic pulses if you don't have a trin on your team (not the ones from taking out a limb). I, like so many veterans, want a challenge. Giving us yet another gear check is not a challenge. DE, throw your worst at us. If you think it's hard, ramp it up two fold at least. "Elite" onslaught at the moment does not give us a challenge. Already the record is 3 million points and its not even been out for more than a few hours. Give us something that will truly put us to the test, not just what gear we have, but our experiences and skills as a whole, and reward us based on that.

When you do that, then we will at long last have a true end game.

[DemonicHuntress]

Being able to extract without waiting for the efficiency to hit 0% would be very helpful.

[FollowTheFaceless]

Another Raid-whining...

 

[Ecliptix]

That is a big post. My only issues really other than the crashing is the curve at which the efficiency decays ramps up pretty quick and that some maps just do not have enough spawns. I never expected this to be an end game mode unless you just really were super competitive to be at the top on the leader boards. I just dont have aspirations of being that cool so Im relatively happy with it although it is really one dimensional.

[KennBone]

yah.. pls stop cry for raids those was anoying runs always,, and u say elite mode not dificulty?.. yeah till u get stage 15 + efi go down so fast.

[Myrkek]

I've played a few runs of the elite today, overall I'm fairly happy with what it is. I like that it starts off at high level and climbs pretty quickly. And I think that after some tweaking, this will be a gamemode that I could see myself replaying on a regular basis. (Honestly if it weren't for having to keep the efficiency meter full I'd be playing this constantly)

That being said, the efficiency loss seems to be a bit off, it needs to either drop slower (or fill faster, however it works) or there needs to be a higher spawn rate.

Also, I really don't appreciate having my iron skin stripped, my energy depleted, and being dropped right in front of a lv 115 bombard. It made for a very awkward situation. Keeping buffs active between zones would help, or dropping people in somewhere they have at least a good half second to prepare instead of the middle of a group of enemies. Nevermind, I realized that if it happened to someone else I'd think it was funny af, so it's fine.

I have a few other issues, drop rates, over reliance on relics to flesh out drop tables (although it looked like they might have been upgraded already? I didn't double check but the light things were lit up on the mission rewards page, and if so... well that's pretty great actually), etc., but enough people are jumping on those things that I really don't need to go into any kind of detail there.

[HumanAvenger]

7 hours ago, Late.for.tea said:

Overall my first run was a pleasant experience. It was fun to just hack, slash and shoot away at hordes of endless enemies.

The primary issue I have with the mode is that there are no standard drops from enemies. While its nice that the mode drops exclusive rewards such as Orbiter decorations and Vandal parts (?), once you get those (or don't care about them) the rewards may feel lackluster.Resource drops would of course have to be scaled down to account for the massive number of enemies, and I don't care if the average drop rate is well below that of other mission types. Getting these drops in addition to rewards from the loot table will give incentive to play this mode over others (e.g. Survival).

In the end I play for fun of course, but rewards are always nice. Especially resources that always seem to run out (e.g. Oxium), or even credits & endo.

 

It would also be nice to have some kind of extraction. I played until efficiency ran out, but if one wants to quit early it would be helpful if they can do so without having to wait for efficiency to deplete.

Or ruining the whole run, in my case.

[BloodiedBlade]

What if it was something along the lines of you got a bonus reward based on your grade instead of their performance and the actual rotation stayed the same?

[FollowTheFaceless]

Honestly, C rotation is little insulting on rewards(mostly for Khora parts with their definitely lower chance of dropping), plus intensity of efficiency decay after 8 zone is forcing  to abuse wide area one-button-frames which makes this mode unbalanced and boring.

[rmac306]

Idk, i feel like this mode was created for the literal 1% of the players that like to play "endurance" mode.
They claim (and must be the case) that reward is not why they do it, after all, except some boosts during the mission, you don't get anything "special" staying 6 hours on it.
They created a mote that just escalates quickly, while giving you no reward.

Not fun

[sixmille]

Well it seems you need a break with warframe right now as you don't even enjoy the core gameplay anymore. That being said, the title of this topic is right, onslaught just highlights what's wrong with the game: infinite damage scaling and map clearing every 5s with equinox and maiming strike spam. This is super boring, but the devs refuse to nerf that so what can we do? That being said, when there are no equinox or meme strike in sight, I'm having fun with it.

Edited April 20, 2018 by sixmille

[ljmadruga]

14 minutes ago, FollowTheFaceless said:

Another Raid-whining...

 

 

11 minutes ago, davej83 said:

yah.. pls stop cry for raids those was anoying runs always,, and u say elite mode not dificulty?.. yeah till u get stage 15 + efi go down so fast.

You two should not be talking bad about raids when I can count on one hand the number of raids you have attempted between the two of you.

(Not to mention that every single one of the attempts was AFTER the raids were announced to be removed. Hmm, I wonder why? /s)

Raids had their own dedicated community that, despite the aforementioned obstacles to even start one, grew and stuck together since they were introduced.

Using Eidolons and Sanctuary Onslaught as a replacement for raids is comparable to using a bandaid to heal a severed limb.

[HunterCat]

if remove worthless piece of crap endo packs from drop list it will be better gamemode, or just make them drop from enemies with pathetic chance of khora part drop % like in Sedna arena

or just making % of drops for Khora abit more higher, else it will be same as Harrow grinding getting wich == BORING 

also 2 stages per 1 drop is kinda awful choice of drop for this gamemode, i dont want waste my time on unrewarding stages

Edited April 20, 2018 by HunterCat

[Urlan]

26 minutes ago, rmac306 said:

Idk, i feel like this mode was created for the literal 1% of the players that like to play "endurance" mode.
They claim (and must be the case) that reward is not why they do it, after all, except some boosts during the mission, you don't get anything "special" staying 6 hours on it.
They created a mote that just escalates quickly, while giving you no reward.

Not fun

I like playing endless, but this doesn't really seem geared to me either to be honest.

[Abyssshy]

It feels like in solo the spawn rate gets super slow especially on more open tiles and the drain on efficiency goes down way to fast where I can barely get to round 8 and finish it even though I'm killing fast, maybe the spawn rate should be adjusted on the more open tiles to make it more manageable.

[Ricknir]

The only feedback I have to give at the minute is the game mode doesn't feel like an "arcade mode" at all really. 

The rewards seem ok for a mode that you run on the star map. Understand the drop rate of the new frame Khora. Its seems ok as its something you don't want people to get overnight. 

Many complaints are from people who want it right away without spending plat on her. Not understanding its a game you play over a long period time if you want the free route. 

Its just the game mode is lacking that arcade feel. Something it was described as. You could just drop this on the star map and it would look and play no different from other mission types. 

Its meant to be a score attack mission. There is no feedback at all from points gained and it has no effect on anything at all. No "the bigger the score the more reward" thing going on. Just your standard A A B C rewards. 

Was expecting something like project gotham racing were your actions (in the case how you kill) determine your score. Headshot kills. Kills while parkouring. Headshot while parkouring. Then the bigger the score you get more stuff. It could be as hard as you could make it to reflect that.

Bulletstorm is the perfect example of what I think of when arcade gameplay comes up. 

Of course, I could have gotten it wrong. The game mode could use some feedback to make the player go that little bit extra to push him to a higher level. At the minute it's just "A A B C, right kill me know".    

[ImJustCherry]

Ok now I can truły say what I meant after comments. Firstly untill 15 years old there wasn't day when people didn't shown me how they hate me. I live in Poland country where hate is natural and I'm above it. I know that i'm salty and i don't care about its because I wanted to be in that post. I truly think that's unfair and unplesant from de because there isn't anythink what should Give me feeling like "Hey! Thank you for that you are with us for 5 years". I'm very sensitive and after mode than half of my life (in july i will be 19)(i know I'm no more than the child) was hate from people arround me. it's nice to see that vandal weapons what Give me feeling "ok. I'm playing this game since very beggining and i have weapons what very small amount of players have". Now little comment to that beautiful information that I was salty: I know I was, I wanted to be. So@[DE]Rebecca i realy want to know from you why you stabbed me from back. Now to those who know Polish my favorites quotation-> "Wszystko ciągle mnie mija bo ciągle mnie-mi-ja"

[Sardaukar66]

I've been crashing between transfer of new tile while doing Onslaught mode. Its tend to be random at time, some runs I'll be perfectly fine, and sometimes I will crash out to the point, where I need to kill Warframe. Not sure if this is the right place to report it, so I'm sorry if I posted in the wrong thread.

[RappyJedas]

I'll say this flat out. I enjoy the new gamemode. It's a nice variance.

It's just there's no reason for anyone to go longer than zone 8 or zone 20 (if you wanted to do the Pablo challenge)

Allow for a choice - select the reward you are ultimately going for in every drop table before you go in with the ability to change once you receive that drop. (EX: A table: Lato Vandal Receiver  / B table: Khora Neuroptics Blueprint / C Table: Peculiar Bloom) Once you have selected what you want, with the higher in zone you go and the higher in points that you accrue, the higher the drop chance you have.

Or, you could scale the rewards. I.e. if you're getting 300 Endo from rotation A on zone 10, why not give them a 25% bonus for continuing on past zone 8 instead of restarting?

Other than that, the mode needs some variety and way more bugfixing in terms of crashing.

[Damocles]

Remove that energy reduction when you enter the portal! I feel like the only reason onslaught mode will die is because the portal has all these conditions nobody who wants to have fun would want to deal with. Skews warframe popularity towards stack-keeping Nidus. Rip Chroma recastable buff rework(debuffed+reset), Iron skin (debuffed), Hysteria(no energy+debuff), Defiance(debuffed). I mean the buff+energy reset is bane of all survive-ability except Nidus

Edited April 21, 2018 by Descent-of-Damocles

[GravityGear]

 

5 hours ago, sixmille said:

Ha no, I'm happy that for once a game mode can't be ruined by someone with the attention span of a goldfish. There are enough game modes for this kind of players. I don't mind people who just want to do quick 5 minute matches, but I'm also happy that there's something like this for longer runs.

This. The speed runners have kind of ruined this game. Sanctuary onslaught is my chance to make long ass runs for once. Everyone that disagrees has every other game mode to play. That should be a risk of running an onslaught... long runs and time. None of the other game modes have any sort of mechanic where players have to think to themselves "Will this be worth it?" before dropping in. Every other game mode is always, drop in, speed run, extract. I'm tired of that noise and Sanctuary Onslaught will by a sanctuary from that.

 

[SteamlordD]

Listen to some of the feedback you keep asking for for once.

[XenoPredAlien]

so i got her to Rank 15 i can summon her Kavat but i can not rotate the 3 abilities from her 3