Sanctuary Onslaught could be true endgame, and here's what it needs!

[Senguash]

A few years ago I played a lot of Diablo 3, and in D3 there's a thing very much like Sanctuary Onslaught called Greater Rifts.

A greater rift is a dungeon that consist of multiple floors that are each a random tileset from the game with a random type of enemies.
There's no loot in a greater rifts, but they're a great source of XP and there's a leaderboard for how well you do in them.

Greater rifts aren't exactly like onslaught of course. You have 15 minutes to complete a greater rift, and they're based on tiers. The higher the tier is, the better you place on the leaderboard.
Regardless of those differences to the rules, the core objective remains the same: Kill as many enemies as possible as fast as possible.

Competing for leaderboard ranks is the endgame in D3, and that's part of the reason I think onslaught has the potential to be a significant part of the endgame in warframe as well.
But there's a few things that make Sactuary Onslaught less fun for leaderboard pushing than Greater Rifts...
 

The speed at which you can kill enemies should be the final decider. In sanctuary onslaught that's never really what prevents a good squad from continuing, instead the only thing that prevents you from going on forever is the steady increase to the rate at which efficiency decays. Even when you keep oneshotting enemies instantly as they spawn, the amount of kills you need to continue will get lower than the rate of enemies spawning.

In Diablo 3 it's very much not like that.

For reference, this is an example of what normal gameplay looks like:

 

And this is an example of what a high level greater rift looks like:

 

The thing that eventually stops you from progressing further is the point at which enemies become too hard to kill, nothing else.

I think it would be amazing if onslaught scaled the same way.

Elite Onslaught should still start at lvl 75-90, but at zone 10 enemies should reach roughly lvl 200. At zone 20 enemies should be lvl 500+ and at zone 25, 1.000+
To compensate, reduce the scaling on the increase to efficiency drain so it caps out at 4x the initial value and takes 15-20 waves to get there.
 

That's one of two main things I believe should be changed to make leaderboard pushing in Sanctuary Onslaught as fun as it is in Greater Rifts.

The other thing, is the locked map rotation in Elite Onslaught...

Greater Rifts in D3 is more competitive than I fear Sanctuary Onslaught will ever be, and every grift is random, just like normal onslaught.

I understand the idea in keeping Elite Onslaught on a weekly (or is it monthly?) rotation and then having it be same everytime, but in the name of fairness it kills one of the most fun aspects of pushing for a record run.

There's 3 things that go into a world record in D3. Gear, skill and persistence. Persistence comes from the way you counter RNG. The more runs you do, the greater your chances of getting a rift you can work with, and then it comes down to execution.

Pushing leaderboards every week, won't be fun unless we bring the RNG into Elite Onslaught.
 

That was my 2 cents on how to improve Sanctuary Onslaught.

I think heavier restrictions on warframe abilities should be considered as well, but there are arguments both for and against that, so I'll leave it out for now.

[AdunSaveMe]

Except then it just becomes a matter of how hard you can cheese the game, since the majority of Warframe's challenge comes from level scaling and artificial difficulty. Warframe is a bit too broken to allow for any sort of endgame that relies on levels since it's so easy to invalidate and so boring to play against. We can't have a decent endgame until that's fixed. Limiting loadouts or abilities is always easy to work around and it's also boring as hell.

Edited April 26, 2018 by AdunSaveMe

[Voltage]

I think the locked weekly tiles for Elite make it less interesting in terms of map layout compared to Normal. The only gripe I have with normal is low enemy level. I agree, the challenge should come from high level enemies, not an efficiency meter. The Warframe ability restriction I could get behind as it would promote Riven Mods and make them more meaningful outside of the simulacrum.

I would also add boss waves to Onslaught. This prevents players from using Scoliac for every wave and allows them to think effectively about their gear setup to take down different enemy intensities and tiers.

Edited April 26, 2018 by --Q--Voltage

[Senguash]

1 minute ago, AdunSaveMe said:

Except then it just becomes a matter of how hard you can cheese the game, since the majority of Warframe's challenge comes from level scaling and artificial difficulty. Warframe is a bit too broken to allow for any sort of endgame that relies on levels since it's so easy to invalidate and so boring to play against. We can't have a decent endgame until that's fixed.

Make my proposed changes, let people cheese the content and then slowly start nerfing the cheese.

Doing it in that order, is the only way to change things.

[AdunSaveMe]

2 minutes ago, Senguash said:

Make my proposed changes, let people cheese the content and then slowly start nerfing the cheese.

Doing it in that order, is the only way to change things.

Except you'll be nerfing constantly because there's always going to be cheese, and the only solution is an overhaul of mod scaling, ability design, and enemy design. There is no bandaid. There is no quick fix. That's the only solution.

Otherwise you're just going to keep making the game significantly less fun and putting in constant work just to pretend it's an endgame mode.

[AdunSaveMe]

10 minutes ago, --Q--Voltage said:

I would also add boss waves to Onslaught. This prevents players from using Scoliac for every wave and allows them to think effectively about their gear setup to take down different enemy intensities and tiers.

Translation: "bring a meta gun to instakill the boss, and punish everyone who doesn't because lol artificial difficulty". That's how it would turn out, guaranteed. Not to mention the fact that it would just be like a brick wall to have a random bullet sponge boss in the middle of a horde mode mission in a horde mode game.

[Senguash]

2 minutes ago, AdunSaveMe said:

Except you'll be nerfing constantly because there's always going to be cheese, and the only solution is an overhaul of mod scaling, ability design, and enemy design. There is no bandaid. There is no quick fix. That's the only solution.

Otherwise you're just going to keep making the game significantly less fun and putting in constant work just to pretend it's an endgame mode.

I thought I made it explicit I'm not looking for a bandaid or a quick fix either, but you're making it out to be hard than it is.

You don't need to overhaul mod scaling or enemy design to nerf and OP build.

[geo223]

3 minutes ago, AdunSaveMe said:

Except you'll be nerfing constantly because there's always going to be cheese, and the only solution is an overhaul of mod scaling, ability design, and enemy design. There is no bandaid. There is no quick fix. That's the only solution.

Otherwise you're just going to keep making the game significantly less fun and putting in constant work just to pretend it's an endgame mode.

what you're proposing is a new game. Warframe was built on power player fantasy and know its come back to bite them in the ass. So they have to find a way to fix that without breaking the game that many people have come to love. Which isn't as easy as it sounds.

[Hyro1]

2 minutes ago, Senguash said:

I thought I made it explicit I'm not looking for a bandaid or a quick fix either, but you're making it out to be hard than it is.

You don't need to overhaul mod scaling or enemy design to nerf and OP build.

Well then how do you go about nerfing them then?

[AdunSaveMe]

Just now, geo223 said:

what you're proposing is a new game.

Incorrect.

[geo223]

Just now, AdunSaveMe said:

Incorrect.

please elaborate

 

[Vohim]

12 minutes ago, AdunSaveMe said:

Except you'll be nerfing constantly because there's always going to be cheese, and the only solution is an overhaul of mod scaling, ability design, and enemy design. There is no bandaid. There is no quick fix. That's the only solution.

Otherwise you're just going to keep making the game significantly less fun and putting in constant work just to pretend it's an endgame mode.

your problem is assuming all cheese is game breaking

 

for example stuff like ember's world on fire and banshee's pre nerf soundquake  would still be cheese   in the sense  they would cc lvl 500+ enemies nonstop however they wouldnt be able to kill them  and if they did it would still be so slow they'd lose too much  efficiency  to be worthwhile

[PrivateRiem]

D3 is an awful game. The less Warframe shares with D3, the better.

[Voltage]

8 hours ago, PrivateRiem said:

D3 is an awful game. The less Warframe shares with D3, the better.

Great criticism! I do hope DE never shares any similarities to a game I dislike just because! /s

The D3 comparison is to show how leaderboards in a horde arena mode can be more interesting. Whether you like or dislike D3, you still should be curious about improving Onslaught and looking at other examples (such as Greater Rifts in D3).

8 hours ago, AdunSaveMe said:

Translation: "bring a meta gun to instakill the boss, and punish everyone who doesn't because lol artificial difficulty". That's how it would turn out, guaranteed. Not to mention the fact that it would just be like a brick wall to have a random bullet sponge boss in the middle of a horde mode mission in a horde mode game.

Do people bring the same gear for every boss? Kela De Thaym you can bring Ignis for buttons. Eidolons use snipers, Vay Hek can be killed with Euphona Prime. Just because you don't have variety in your gear, doesn't mean there can't be a variety of bosses to kill that require multiple types of weapons and gear items.

[PrivateRiem]

15 hours ago, --Q--Voltage said:

Great criticism! I do hope DE never shares any similarities to a game I dislike just because! /s

The D3 comparison is to show how leaderboards in a horde arena mode can be more interesting. Whether you like or dislike D3, you still should be curious about improving Onslaught and looking at other examples (such as Greater Rifts in D3).

If anything, Greater Rifts are a good example of what leaderboards do to a RPG. Diablo 3's entire game shifted from having a few difficulties with a quest for gear, to doing nothing but pushing further and further for an arbitrary spot on a leaderboard with no care for anything else the game has to offer, especially not story.

 

But I'll bite. If I was DE for a day, here's what I would do.

• Put back Khora in Onslaught Elite.
• Remove Regular Onslaught.
• A--- Remove Leaderboards from Onslaught Elite. (And have map rotations change every playthrough)

OR

• B--- Make Onslaught Elite map rotations change every day, with best score weekly on the leaderboard.
• Add a new Onslaught "Hardcore" with significantly higher enemy levels. Add Leaderboards to it.
• Significantly increase enemy spawns on the tilesets that sorely need it.
• Increase back the starting enemy levels on Onslaught Elite to 80, scaling to 150 by round 8.

 

There. Cheese-addicted vets get something for them, those that prefer actually fighting and not watching enemies swim in jello have a mode for them too. As for everybody else, your have your starchart, leave my endgame alone.

Edited April 27, 2018 by PrivateRiem