Sanctuary Onslaught: Difficulty Changes!

[[DE]Rebecca]

Sanctuary Onslaught is where we play by Simaris' rules. You already know by now the jist of our Khora plans, but we also have to do some tweaks to Onslaught.

Here's what we're doing with ELITE Sanctuary Onslaught!

Our plans with this are a bit tougher to map out succinctly because the mode still needs attention to fixes. However, some data has come back that we don't want to keep to ourselves.

Enemy scaling is broken. If things felt too easy compared to normal-gameplay, it's because they are. Take a look at the way an Infested Charger's health behaves - this discrepancy applies to all enemies, not just the Charger!:

This is semi-complicated to fix, because in a way this has led to hollow gains - enemies are providing significantly more Affinity (and thus, Focus) but in reality they are much weaker than they should be. To maintain the current difficulty of the mission type as best we can, we will have to lower enemy levels, which will impact Focus gains. We absolutely intend on this mode still being a Focus boon, and playtesting shows that gains are still enormous compared to normal play elsewhere (with Adaro strategies being the exception).

We understand the importance of reaching Zone 8, and will tweak numbers carefully to ensure that mark is still reachable before enemy difficulty is too high. But as a mode intended to offer bite-sized “arcade style” type gameplay, we are adjusting the later stages to further limit run duration: Efficiency Stimuli will no longer appear past Zone 15, and Efficiency drain reaches 10x normal rate by Zone 20, instead of capping at 6x.

Leaderboards will also be completely reset soon as we continue to fix up the issues and they won't see a real role until we're ready.

The Hotfix notes (either today or tomorrow) will have full details this is just a TLDR!
TL;DR That enemy scaling is broken and difficulty changes will follow!

P.S I thought I was actually really good at making builds, but sometimes, the scaling is just simply not working.

[Emperrier]

But will the rewards get better

 

Like ok, you're going to preserve difficulty up until zone 8... Will there be a reason provided for me to be passing zone 8? Because otherwise this fix seems purely academic.

[Synpai]

Incoming oofs:

Player: "Yay capping my focus is so easy no--"

DE: "It's a bug, not a feature."

 

[Valiant]

I don't mind lower enemy levels... Provided we have enough spawns. Some maps just have terrible spawns and that affects efficiency and affinity gain.

Apart from that, this isn't the only issue with this mode. The rewards still feel rather hollow.

[Cradicias]

Yeah, this gameplay mode feels like a waste of time... Focus is nice and all, but once you hit the cap, what's the point of doing this? It's mindless and not very engaging. It's not entertaining, there needs to be special mechanics and enemies we haven't seen before that require more thought than just SMASH CLICK. Thought this was gonna be more strategic =(

[MightyWolf_]

Eh... just... don't make the focus income from this gamemode lower.

[OHKOBunny]

aren't people literally asking for the opposite of quicker drain though?

if you want to limit things just put a cap on how far people can go. This whole super fast drain will just force people who want to stay to find that 1 thing that kill everything fast enough to sustain it, and goes against the "arcade style" challenge mode thingy I thought you guys were going for. It's basically going to be another unfun game mode because like 1 oe 2 frames will be able t push it's limits. Intention?

[Asdryu]

Aayyyy just stop it with the Adaro hate.
It's stealth strategies. Give the exp that Grineer give to other factions as well and you won't see people just running adaro anymore.

You enhanced grineer's exp to match some needs yourself. Don't forget it

[Konachibi]

So basically you're going to adjust it so enemy scaling works correctly, and now Grineer are going to be bulletproof and have way too much armour just like they do in sorties!

Yeah, great idea, people complain about armour scaling, so you make it EVEN WORSE!

[(PSN)s3d_sas]

Well since you take about scaling ... 

when can we see armor scaling fixed out of sanctuary onslaught ?

[Hixlysss]

IMO Elite mode the challenge should be the enemies themselves, not the efficiency counter...

[xanzath]

Efficiency drain makes it already near-impossible to go far because sooner or later you get a bad tile (like the Kuva Fortess one in zone 11 in current set of Elite) and yet it's still being increased? Are we just supposed to always stop after getting to rotation C?

[Asdryu]

Just now, (PS4)s3d_sas said:

Well since you take about scaling ... 

when can we see armor scaling out of sanctuary onslaught ?

When people will learn to use corrosive projection for once...
"physique" there are still people using this....

[Emperrier]

Also, you're saying you want to not impact Focus gains too much from lowering the mob levels... While simultaneously making it greatly more difficult to reach the higher focus multipliers?

 

???

[Asdryu]

1 minute ago, Hixlysss said:

IMO Elite mode the challenge should be the enemies themselves, not the efficiency counter...

I would've in fact preferred if this was more of a diablo rift thing where you have to kill a lot before the timer runs out

[(PSN)s3d_sas]

Just now, Asdryu said:

When people will learn to use corrosive projection for once...
"physique" there are still people using this....

I always equip that but you know it’s hard to kill enemies when you reach 300..

[Damocles]

If the portal doesn't remove my buffs/energy/combo, I see there to be no issue to allow the scaling to occur. THIS is what end-game could have been.

[BenThePoofle]

23 hours ago, Asdryu said:

Aayyyy just stop it with the Adaro hate.
It's stealth strategies. Give the exp that Grineer give to other factions as well and you won't see people just running adaro anymore.

You enhanced grineer's exp to match some needs yourself. Don't forget it

Adaro w/ Equinox only exists because DE broke the stealth system a while back, ruining stealth in a game about spce ninjas. Enemies are almost always alerted unless put to sleep by Equinox, they have buggy alerted states, and you cannot stealth without every enemy being asleep by equinox.

[UprightMan]

Why bother with increasing Efficiency drain to 10x?.  This is just more artificial difficulty in an already bad gameplay.  Just cap the game mode to just hard stop at wave 8.  This is not endgame just another recycled game play loop move people away from what you deem as problem with Adaro.

[OkamiA]

If you want to hard cap it at 8, then hard cap the stupid mission at 8. There's no real reason to go beyond that, upped scaling or no.

[DustyFlash]

14 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Efficiency Stimuli will no longer appear past Zone 15, and Efficiency drain reaches 10x normal rate by Zone 20, instead of capping at 6x.

Bad move, this makes zone 8 even harder to reach.

Also please make so we can see health armor and shields like in the image, thanks.

[DeMonkey]

28 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

and Efficiency drain reaches 10x normal rate by Zone 20

April fools day was several weeks ago guys.

6x is already unsustainably fast for anything but cheese, and even then dodgy spawns can easily end a run. Doing this just encourages cheese all the more. 

I highly doubt we'll be seeing people reaching Zone 20 after this change anyway.

I'll elaborate rather than just sounding salty, I don't want to be forced out of an endless mission based on a timer despite the fact that I'm teased with progressing.

Do I hate being forced of a mission by someone sitting at extract in a survival? Honestly, not really. I'm given a timer, I have definitive 'x' seconds before the mission ends. 

But this timer isn't that, this timer is "you might be able to stay, you might not, who knows". It's a tease, and I do not care for it.

[Helch0rn]

please no.

 

Sanctuary onslaught makes focus farming fun instead of a tedious grind

I prefer a gamemode that allows for some variety when choosing frames over one that only one cheesy setup can run to get focus

[Katinka]

I can't really judge the pros and cons of tweaking the efficiency timer while I'm still reeling from the bugged zone I had yesterday with no more than 2 enemies at a time.  I need enough enemies for me to actually gain efficiency.

[Aldrr]

I thought the Onslaught enemies were "given the squishy treatment" because - at the numbers they spawn at - normal scaling would be overkill O.O

Guess I was wrong >.<