Sanctuary Onslaught: Difficulty Changes!

[Rawbeard]

isn't an "arcade style" game mode supposed to be fun?

[DrBorris]

20 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

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.

I am not sure how I feel about this part. In general, I would much rather feel forced out due to being overpowered by the enemy than because of some arbitrary timer. I do understand wanting to push back on players going 30+ zones though.

 

What about rather than just forcing people out add some tougher enemies? Level 200 G3 would honestly be kinda terrifying. Or any of the other mini-boss types for that matter. Throw in some Hyenas and Bursas. Let Corrupted Vor pay us a visit. I want to be defeated by the enemy, not by Simaris.

 

Edit: Another note is on rewards. If the difficulty is going to be scaled up, it would be nice to have a tweak to rewards. What about giving a reward every zone (no, not just double drop tables). Have the even zones be 100% relics and the odd zones be mostly endo along with Khora/Vandals/Scenes/Peculiars. This would really help with the long term replayability of the node as getting repeat "useless" rewards would be massively cut back on.

[PrincessMittens]

15 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

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.

I have a wonderful solution that everybody, including you peeps at DE will like.

Just make it so each zone is a rotation. Zone 4 will be the new C. 1-A 2-A 3-B 4-C. Just do it that way. Then the level scaling doesn't even matter much. 

 

Furthermore, increasing the efficiency drain by almost double is a dumb move. I realize this isn't intended to be, like, normal endless missions. But that just means there's no real reason to play it much after you get what you want. 

 

I don't care so much about the scaling and stuff, just change how rewards are given and leave the efficiency drain alone. This whole TL;DR reads as "No fun allowed" with the proposed changes.

[IceColdHawk]

What? Why? I mean i appreciate difficulty but not when i have to rely on RNG for that.

The problem outside of crashes and usual bugs were, that the efficiency drop was getting so high that you had to RELY on spawnkilling enemies with the most brutal cheese strats available. Furthermore, coupled with some enemy spawning delays and some not so optimal tiles, not even spawnkilling gets you far enough.

I find it lame, really lame, that people have to resort to such hard cheese in order to do more than just a single rotation. Where is the endless feel in it? Where is the actual DIFFICULTY in it? You don't lose because it's too hard or because the enemies outdamage or outtank you, no, you lose because the game literally FORCES you out at some point! And even earlier when you DON'T use instaspawnnuke strats!

It'd be way better to fix what is causing players to be able to spawnkill enemies (since it's obviously VERY cheap) and TONE DOWN the efficiency drop so you don't just get forced out no matter how good you play. But what you're doing seems to be quite the opposite of what was causing the problems, by making the efficiency drop even more brutal. Hell, i didn't even know it capped but i knew that at one point we got forced out due to not enough enemies spawning...

Please think about it more carefully. I really enjoy the concept and idea of this new game mode, i really do. And i really don't want to see this game mode die after people got their shiny loot out of it. It has potential, you just gotta make correct use of it :/

[Cimbro94]

Can you simply upgrade our scanner to show the actual health shield armor and xp of the enemies?

[xXDeadsinxX]

I find the game mode fun, but to be honest, I don’t really see why you guys are changing it, the only real change Sanctuary Onslaught needs is that it needs better rewards.

[Voidforged]

Really?

You're utterly incapable of providing a node/mission type that provides any kind of challenge beyond life-support/efficiency degrading too quickly.. 

So, frustrating.

[Thesiobhan]

Here's the thing... You are trying to design us away from something we want to do (go deep) We're going to do what we want to do, we're just going to find new ways to go around your design. Period. This is why people look at game development as adversarial, you're trying to stop your playerbase from doing something they CLEARLY want to do, OR are failing to recognize that they're doing this because of some flawed system *cough*focus*cough*. If the system were correctly set up, farms would not exist, if you could actually gain a real useful amount of focus from just playing the game there would be no farms. You wouldn't have to run adaro or onslaught for focus because you'd just get focus while doing other stuff. And if you want Focus to be a daily chore like sorties FINE, just make it so that you can get your focus capped in 3 or so missions.

Setting a hard limit on wave 8 is fine, get rid of the leaderboard and do that then, but don't set this bs soft cap when people CLEARLY want to go deeper. Let them go as deep as they want, enhance that playstyle don't try to design it out of the game. Just because timmy and his 3 friends want to go to wave 30 doesn't mean I can't stop at wave 8 if I want to.

There is room for both and we don't impact each other.

[SSI_Seraph]

Why are you so adamant on killing longer runs. Just make people exit at zone 8 tbh since x10 drain basicly means that they can't keep up and you clearly don't want them to for whatever reason.

[Iv99an19]

21 minutes ago, Konachibi said:

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!

This pretty much sums up grineer in this mode, even as it is now. Armor is by far the worst scaling health type in the game, spiking up so harshly it feels almost impossible to kill high level grineer unless you build SPECIFICALLY for this ONE enemy type, which goes counter to the fact this mode has multiple types.

 

21 minutes 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

This is something i agree on. DE staff is always complaining about players cheesing adaro, yet fail to realize the main reason this is the case is because the cost of unlocking focus is too bloody high at a certain point. Players are always looking for ways to min/max gains in warframe, and unless the standard focus gain is increased tremendously or the focus gain from convergence is multiplied even further, this is the only effective way to gain focus efficiently

And no, not even elite onslaught is worth it to farm focus as it is now with all it's current issues

The final issue with this mode is that the rewards are absolutely abysmal. Khora seems to be the absolute hardest frame in the game by far to obtain, Endo rewards have too high a chance and there are too many damn relics. If this was to help newer players get more relics, the shagged scaling makes this impossible and vets have no need to farm for more relics. Even if this mode is tweaked to perfection, there's still barely any incentive to play this mode aside from getting the peculiar mod and the lato and braton vandal parts.

[Sumarbrandr]

I like the enemy status upgrade a lot.

However...

Please don't. The 6x is already mostly manageable by cheese - and people who do endure higher levels on Elite Onslaught are doing that mostly for fun than anything since you cap your focus WAY before that. By doing those changes you are, in just one hotfix, limiting how much higher (>>>>ELITE<<<< onslaught) geared players can make in the same time (thus counting on spawns that are several times bugged) and limiting the squad build variety. Limiting run duration is useless since we don't gain anything extra by going further since the rotations repeats itself and no one minds that since what we have in rotation is already pretty good - people just want to go higher against stronger enemies, that's it. 

Doing that is obsession with RNG even for difficult content and it's bizarre IMO.

Elite Onslaught is going one of the right ways towards endgame, there's no need to go back three steps behind. 

[RyuhoTheDragon]

Does this mean you will also look into drop rates for that mode?

[ShinTechG]

19 minutes ago, Hixlysss said:

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

This is a VERY interesting point.

[Malziel]

So let me get this straight. You release a fantastic, if buggy new game mode, fix most of the bugs... and now you want to ruin this new game mode? Just... why? The balance, the focus, the rewards... they're all amazing! Actually getting a group together to go for long runs is some of the most fun I've had in Warframe for months, but now you're saying my fun is invalid and we should all have to reset at wave 8?

Honestly, why would you go about sabotaging the best gamemode you've released in ages? This is so close to being perfect, please, please I beg of you: Leave Sanctuary Onslaught as it is. Maybe some bug fixes, that's grand. But please don't nerf this.

[Cloudy_KiTeer]

This is great and all and I know that these changes will be for the better. But I would love for it to get to the point where the enemies get so hard to kill that the reason your efficiency goes down because you cant kill them fast enough instead of the screwed up spawns.

[Konachibi]

I think we can clearly see from the responses so far that what you're proposing is a REALLY bad idea.  Onslaught isn't fun to begin with.  You should work on making it fun, not making it worse. 

Adjusting enemy scaling to work more like it does outside the sanctuary will have an extremely negative effect on how many people will bother doing it.  If you increase the difficulty like this then only certain warframes will be viable for it.  I can see a meta revolving around Frost or Gara with Trinity, Ash and Speed Nova.  No other warframes will be invited to groups for it because no other warframe will be able to survive against tanky enemies that hit so hard.  Because of that, nobody will ever bother doing it anymore, and it'll become as dead and unused as Lunaro.

If that's what you want, another dead game mode, then by all means go right ahead!  If you want to make it so people actually go there and play it, then improve the terrible spawn rates, ease off on the efficiency drain, improve the drop rates on some things (such as Khora's parts), and make the enemies spawn closer to the player so that frames like Nyx aren't completely useless there.

[DrBorris]

2 minutes ago, Hunt3rK11l3r said:

This is something i agree on. DE staff is always complaining about players cheesing adaro, yet fail to realize the main reason this is the case is because the cost of unlocking focus is too bloody high at a certain point. Players are always looking for ways to min/max gains in warframe, and unless the standard focus gain is increased tremendously or the focus gain from convergence is multiplied even further, this is the only effective way to gain focus efficiently

I am pretty sure the only reason DE has left Adaro in is because they know it is the only reasonable way to unlock Focus. If DE wanted Adaro gone, it would be gone.

[NDCoten]

i would honestly prefer getting one-shot by a tough enemy repeatedly than be unable to fight the efficiency timer drain without a mass-AOE-damage frame.

[Hyohakusha]

Without buffing the drop rates, this is going to kill the mode. It's already annoyingly repetitive, and I'm ignoring the bugs while making that statement. With a higher efficiency drain, there's absolutely no reason to go past z8, and once people have Khora and the Vandals, if the focus gain goes down, SO has literally no point. So much for a challenging endgame, when the "challenge" is Simaris locking off your powers and weapons while complaining at you to keep up an efficiency bar that runs down even faster.

[Naesqr]

DE:

33 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

We absolutely intend on this mode still being a Focus boon

Also DE:

33 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

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.

???

How about working on actual ESO bug fixes and not nerfing the mode before people can actually experience and enjoy it bug-free?

[Error989]

Can you just remove Khora drops from Elite? Regular mode drops parts at much higher chance so why have her in Elite? By removing her you'd be able to increase the chance Lato/Braton Vandal 

[Shrek]

If it’s supposed to be the elite onslaught why not just make the difficulty to where it was intended? I get trying to make things more accessible to newer players but why not make the grind harder not longer for the veteran intended game mode

[---Dradon---]

So you are making thing drain faster but won't fix the current game breaking bug. Sound about right for me.

Honestly, before doing ANYTHING, fix the game breaking bug at very least to make this mode at least playable without having crash or eternal host migration.

Pls fix spawn to, it's really annoying.

[Iv99an19]

5 minutes ago, DrBorris said:

I am pretty sure the only reason DE has left Adaro in is because they know it is the only reasonable way to unlock Focus. If DE wanted Adaro gone, it would be gone.

I did not at any point state that DE would remove adaro, i only pointed out that they keep saying they don't like seeing players cheesing the node.

 

And you state they know about it, yet hardly anything has been done about it and the only thing that seemed to acknowledge it turns out to have been a  bug that's going to be removed.

[Aerofare]

33 minutes ago, Cradicias said:

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 =(

You get to kill endless hordes for the Blood God and gain his favour so much so that you get to contribute to his ever growing Skull Throne.