Sanctuary Onslaught: Difficulty Changes!

[ShinTechG]

13 minutes ago, Thep10xer said:

Rage and Quick Thinking shouldn't be mandatory ,and even then still plenty of frames that die almost instantly. Volt with 4k overshields shouldnt die in zone 6 in 2 seconds that the enemies aren't cc'd in some way. Meanwhile Mesa is projectile immune pretty much and killing the whole screen with great scaling for her damage as well on the other end.

When you have armour mod, heath mod, shield mod, all maxed out, a frame shouldn't die in almost 3 bullets. and shouldnt have to rely on a "energy on damage, energy stops you from dying" gimmick bandaid mod set up.

In order to a lot of high level enemies, you have to be in line of sight, and they take more damage , So you end up killing the whole screen for a while then suddenly enemies dont die instantly and you get shot literally a few times and you realize the damage has been creeping up this whole time to insane levels. 

But several Warframes and set ups just completely negate this scaling , some into their favor, so technically things arent impossible and things never get changed because it's "possible", despite more than half the warframes and weapons being unviable by huge margins after a certain level.

I agree with certain frames and weapons being unviable for the mode, but going back strictly to  my point on surviving. I actually wasn't even referring to the mods you mentioned as there are way better things. I would explain but I don't want to create spoilers and it is best you play more or check out guides

TBH, I and many other players can go in Elite onslaught with ANY frame and survive longer than another person with a Tankier frame. At the end of the day, it not only comes down to builds and base stats of frames, but pure skill. 

Please don't take this the wrong way and think I am trying to say you don't have skill or anything because i have no idea your play style. Just giving feedback from my experience and making a point, regarding survability,that a frame is only as good as you make it.

[Wandering_Sun]

I have never ever made it past zone 8 the efficiency just drains way to fast and you are.. making it harder? what why? I actually like this game mode please don't screw with it.

[Madway7]

1 hour ago, [DE]Aidan said:

An interesting idea Tenno! We are currently working on removing Khora from the Elite Sanctuary Onslaught drop tables in order to replace her with some Radiant Axi Relics. We still want to maintain the challenge/rarity of Vandal parts but agree that maybe the reward double dip with Khora was a bit much. Thanks for the feedback!

My heart sank when I read this...

Yes, getting radiant axi relics is far more useful than getting Khora parts (especially duplicates), but I feel that the vandal drop chances are abysmal as it is now...

Unless you're planning to make us get rewards per zone instead of per 2 zones I don't see myself playing onslaught anymore after getting the last Khora parts I need.

[HyokaChan]

2 hours 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.

Here, again, DE attempts to fix a problem by addressing the completely wrong factor.

 

A lot of the time we can't move onto another zone and the run ends if we're given too large a tileset (one of the kuva fortress ones being a big culprit) due to bad enemy spawns combined with them hiding behind walls and in certain rooms and whatever.

[Rythiman]

And here this whole time I thought I had an unusually strong Paris build and an unusually tanky Limbo build.

This bug makes more sense.

[EighthGear]

Quite possibly the worst possible changes you can make. Instead of accordingly upping the health values of Onslaught enemies, fix enemy pathing and adjusting enemy types to the rising difficulty of the game mode (as in, get rid of the Grineer workers), THIS Workshop is what you come up with? I'm actually floored.

[Warfoki]

Congratulations on nerfing a liked new gamemode into the next Infested Salvage that everyone hates and only ever plays to get the mode-exclusive frame (and vandals) out of it. Good job at ignoring pretty much EVERY major request and doing the exact opposite of what everyone wanted. "DE listens to the playerbase"... yeah, suuuuure.

Also, focus gain MUST be comparable to Adaro for people to care. Nobody cares if it's better than normal play, as normal basically gives no focus. You grind Adaro, Tridolons or ignore the system. Onslaught was a finally a fun way to grind it, but with the expected decrease now it will take 3 8 wave runs on elite to get it done (with a booster mind you). That's an hour. On Adaro I get it done in 25 mins. Why bother with your new mode for focus? And nobody plays Adaro because it's fun. It's the most tedious garbage in the game. But outside of tridolons it is the ONLY way to farm focus. Maybe fix that, and people won't cheese it. 

[SordidDreams]

3 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

We unintentionally made the new mode too fun, so we're making changes to fix that.

Seriously with this...

[Gene_Freak]

There's something I vaguely remember from a stream you guys did a few weeks back. You were talking about the development process of one of the new game modes - might've been Onslaught, maybe Endless Kuva - and you mentioned that sometimes people will deliberately propose terrible ideas during brainstorming, because opposition to bad ideas can help clarify good ideas.

Is this an example of that?

What you're proposing could not be more in opposition to your base's needs. Make the enemies appropriately challenging for an elite mode. Dramatically increase the spawn rates and reliability. Have the rewards be varied and fulfilling. Have rounds end because the game broke the players, not because you broke the game.

[Erebus_Nacht]

I honestly feel very misplaced as a vet player at this point, elite onslaught was the first place since void 1.0 that I had a place for endless runs again.

This mode was great with the only issue being the crashes and host migration, then we get the recent hotfix and it felt it was broken by mistake.

What's with the hatred for endless missions and high level/content for vets?  If it's too rewarding early on put a higher MR lock on the mode.

[CorerMaximus]

Please don't go through with this- rather- amp up enemy health and armor to reflect what they should be than hurting the levels. As a veteran player, I acknowledge that sanctuary onslaught isn't perfect, but seeing my weapons mow through "high level enemies" gives me a certain rush that lower level enemies don't. Furthermore, the drain is too high as it stands anyways- going beyond zone 14 is nire impossible even in well equipped squads.

For me though- here's what I'd love to see changed about onslaught-

• Faster ability neutralizes- I despise that people take DPS frames and cheese through this mode. Granted- it is rewarding in terms of focus- what I liked about onslaught on launch was that I was dealing the damage; I hate that it has turned into an overglorified Bere, even when I get a free pass at it. Simaris should bring the hammer down on any ability used more than 3 times a minute.
• Give an incentive to kill- after you reach your focus cap- the only reason to kill is to not let the efficiency run out which is boring. It's just holding down a button like your LMB or hacking away with your E to kill enemies without any attachment to what's going on. Try playing after capping your focus cap to reach rot C- there's a lingering feeling of emptiness- I'm not how this can be fixed- perhaps efficiency after 100% lowers the timer? Rotations after 8 are shorter by 30 seconds? I don't know- but its pretty annoying.

On a parting note- elite onslaught is the reason I've started returning everyday- to max my focus cap. Sorties don't attract me anymore and I have nothing to farm and level- don't take this away from us veterans please. Don't make it more tedious or less fun- while it's imperfect as is- these changes, if not done carefully, may end up crippling the gamemode. I don't want to go to Adaro and focus farm- I never have and never will. Onslaught is attractive with the loot and incentivizing with the focus- it is fun. Please don't take away the reason I log in everyday.

[GaerthGL]

Please just fix the scaling so the mobs have the stats they should have. More difficulty isn't a bad thing. If you're concerned that it would be too hard to farm Khora or whatever just implement slower scaling for the regular version of the Onslaught.

 

Also please investigate the possibility of making efficiency scale with the number of live enemies.

The base drain would go up as it does now as you go deeper, but it's multiplied by the number of enemies alive. This on it's own could fix many issues with Onslaught.

 - For whatever reason the tileset only spawn a few enemies at a time? No problem, the efficiency drain is also very slow.

 - You killed everything and are just waiting for the portal to spawn? No enemies, zero drain.

- Playing solo and you have less enemies spawn? Less enemies, less efficiency drain. Efficiency drain now scales automatically with the number of players.

You want to implement bosses? With the drain as it is now players would get totally hosed. Scale it by number of enemies and it should be fine as long as players prioritize killing adds. Could also make it easier to implement other wacky stuff.

 

[Revanchism]

I would like to say I'm surprised that you chose the worst possible way to go about this.

But that would be a filthy lie.

[Ascarith]

3 hours 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 think it might be helpful to hear some more detail on what exactly "arcade style" gameplay means to DE. I can certainly see a lot of arcade-style elements in the mode, but it seems to be a strange mix of traditional arcade game elements that feel weird together (at least to me). Moreover, I think the "bite-sized" piece is really rubbing some people the wrong way. 

The mode feels like it should be a "kill things until they kill you" mode, but it plays more as a "score as many points as you can before you run out of time" mode. "Kill all the things" feels more like something from Gauntlet, whereas "score all the points" feels more like Tetris (i.e. puzzle games). Onslaught is almost like Tetris Gauntlet, where we're supposed to score points by killing things before time runs out. 

I suspect this would have acceptable to many as a game mode, except there's this whole Efficiency thing (which appears to be how "bite-sized" applies), which very quickly becomes the principal "challenge" in the game.

I think a lot of people have a conceptual revulsion to losing to Efficiency loss. It's not like Gauntlet, where you died because you weren't strong enough to fight the enemies (or because Warrior needs food badly but your jerk teammate ate it instead). It's not like Tetris, where the pieces are literally under your control you just can't manipulate them fast enough. In Onslaught, you lose because the game gives you a tile that's too big to cover effectively, enemies that literally will not spawn fast enough, and/or enemies that spawn too far from you to feasibly reach in time. 

In both Tetris and Onslaught, the game is trying to screw you over, it's just way more heavy handed in Onslaught. If you lose in Tetris, you feel like you can beat your previous score if you move faster and make less mistakes. In Onslaught, you just kind of assume you hit a wall, because you lost to elements that are essentially out of your control. 

3 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

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).

One thing I will say I particularly enjoy about Onslaught is that you don't have to chase down a focus orb. You just get the bonus at the start of the round so you can keep doing what you're doing without interruption. In theory, I (think I) kind of understand why focus orbs exist, but in practice I just hate the things (because they are rarely in convenient places are often force people to choose between the mission objective (e.g. guard your interception point) and "better" focus gains).

[Tyler811]

my biggest issue with this post is the "other than adaro strategies" interjection when talking about it being faster than most grinds. you've supposedly repeatedly stated how you don't like people farming adaro for focus. ESO being faster than adaro has put a massive curb on that because people don't have to do that anymore.

[Redeye]

Turn down the focus/affinity gains a bit (not too much, please. By too much I mean something like dividing by ten. Sounds like a bad idea), if you think it's too much. But don't. Please, don't. Change. Anything else. I'm enjoying this (minus the spawn fiasco) right now. Planning and running with my own alliance. Hell, I'm even enjoying running it on PUG. Please don't take away that tasty beer- I mean candy you gave to me. ._.

[Tyler811]

my suggestion to make this mode better is to make enemy spawn rates scale alongside efficiency drain, so at high levels, you have 10x the drain rate but there are so many mobs around that if you can effectively kill them they still keep the efficiency up.

[RoomofR]

May I suggest that after 8 waves or so that we fight a random boss from the star chart at that level? I understand that might seem bonkers, but I feel that might bring some more strategy and fun to the mode. But first as a priority, fixing the bugs, crashing, and increased enemy spawning (for some maps because they are criminally low) before adding any more features. Thanks :D

[Lahared]

We can kick and scream all we'd like, but most of us know how this will end.

[Senguash]

These are good changes, but I would much rather see that the enemy level remained as is after the scaling is fixed.

It would be more fun if some of the difficulty was switched from keeping up kills per minute to enemies being hard to kill.

Right now enemies hardly ever get tankier than just sortie level enemies. It would be cool if sanctuary onslaught could be the place where we can get to face real lvl 200+ enemies within a reasonable amount of time.

I really like onslaught, but it's not perfect, and it won't be after these fixes either.

 

[--END--Rikutatis]

I'm usually pretty optimistic and enjoy most of the stuff you guys release, but honestly this is just a horrible solution. I don't care about affinity or focus farming, I already maxed all my schools on tridolons. I just wanted an endgame challenge, that's what you guys advertised Elite Sanctuary as. So instead of fixing the enemy scaling or at least patching it up somehow so that we are given the challenge that lv 80+ enemies should have been since the beginning, you're just going to lower their levels to match their current challenge level (which is basically one-shot cannon fodder).

Honestly, I'm done with Onslaught after this. It was already very disappointing that enemy levels were capped at 160-180 and didn't go up after that no matter how far you got, but now the levels are going to be lowered instead of fixing the bugged scaling. So much for endgame challenge. As others have pointed out, making efficiency loss go down faster is just an artificial way to kick us out of the match. I want to have to extract when I can no longer handle the level of the enemies, not because my efficiency is going down artificially fast no matter how well I'm killing. Players want agency, not a situation they have no control over. 

Kuva survival was so much better than this (except again, no reason to stay longer than 20 min there, and no challenge whatsoever because of that). 

DE, some of us just want endgame challenge and to fight high level enemies in a rewarding game mode that doesn't take 3 hours to get there, that's all. 

[ToxiCsisM]

1 minute ago, Lahared said:

We can kick and scream all we'd like, but most of us know how this will end.

Yeah, DE digging their own grave. DE; The Rise of a Company that Listened to their Players, and then Died After Ignoring their Players.

Why can't western game companies make games that are fun anymore? Sooner or later after bleeding everything your going to find out that the tap has run dry.

[DienesToo]

Good lord don't lower their levels to fit their challenge raise their stats to properly match their current level (and focus gain). Warframe doesn't really have hard endgame content other than long endless missions which are 1) mostly pointless and 2 ) take a lot of real world time to get to a difficult level.. Please let us have this. Focus was finally not something that made me want to play a different game instead.

Why do you have to make it so hard to go past zone 15? Is doing two full reward rotations really a big game breaker? Its pretty common in excavation missions to go for 2000 cryotic without having to stack the team comp. If you raise enemy strength it will naturally get harder to keep going. I was really excited at the idea of horde mode where killing the enemies and staying alive was the main challenge not trying to find enough enemies to keep efficiency from plummeting. Hell I'd much rather have zones be gated by gain x efficiency to open the conduit which would make it easier to blast through early zones and be a natural incentive to leave when you can't kill fast enough to make staying worthwhile.

 

P.S. please no more zones like this week's elite onslaught 1.

[Kaminarion]

Ok can elite onslaught start from lvl 120 without lowered difficulty / bad efficiency? Also EXIMUS.

I don't care about normal onslaught really..

Btw what are your playstats about kuva survival? People still playing that? Or is it another dead gamemode..

[Scarlet78]

3 hours 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.

 

Are you kidding me?  This is insanity... bite-sized arcade style???  Since when???  The whole point of this game mode was to do long runs, see how far we could get, it was sold that way from the very start... are you now trying to tell us that you've changed your mind because you didn't balance it right?    FINALLY having something to do at higher levels other than snore through sorties once a day and you are going to make it so we can't keep going past a certain point?  Why?  You have lost your minds... this is what the veterans of warframe have been crying out for since you took away the old void system!!

Increasing the efficiency drain to inane levels especially when some of the tile spawn rates are already gimped is just gonna be the end of ever going past rotation C and just resetting. 'Limit run duration'??  Why on earth would you want to do that?  Focus is already capped at 250k anyway, what does it matter if I want to spend 3 hours in there?  Whats the difference, apart from more fun and more of a challenge instead of just resetting every 20 mins .... yet another farm snore fest.

Don't make it easier, but don't make the efficiency impossible... let us go long... PLEASE