Review on Build 22.18.7

[ShinTechG]

After playing several runs of Elite Sanctuary Onslaught as of build 22.18.7, here is my review and constructive criticism. I will be rating this based on the key features of the mode. Note that bugs were not part of this review

Enemy Scaling 10/10

Enemy difficulty now scales to their proper level which is a good thing as Elite Sanctuary Onslaught is meant to give a challenge. The enemies hit harder, have more health and other base stats. With Digital Extremes announcing they were lowering the enemy level, many players, including myself, thought that this was a nerf to enemies, which was not the case after actually playing the mode. 

Enemy Spawning 9/10

The spawning of enemies has improved. There are definitely a lot of heads to bash! I believe all except for Zone 12

Mechanics 2/10

While the enemy difficulty scaling seems to be heading in the right place, something still feels wrong with the mode and combat. The Efficiency mechanic, which is basically a race against the clock, forces players to resort the cheapest, most overpowered, broken tactics in the game. Elite Onslaught was advertised as a way for the strongest players to test their skill and builds. So far, from what I have seen, many players usually just end up using one tactic to nuke everything as fast as possible, since the true enemy here is Efficiency. In order to get full reward rotations, you must be able to beat Mr Efficiency without necessarily having fun or using the weapons and play styles you may actually want to use. From slide attacks, to Equinox Maim, Wukong Nuking, and more, these things shouldn't be "mandatory" and is not a way to test "skill". I am a melee styled player who does love slide attacks as much as the next guy, but at this point, it's just down right getting boring, rather than being challenging. To the hard-working developers at Warframe, my suggestion is to remove this enemy called Efficiency all together, end the zones at a certain number since we are not meant to stay long, and come up with another way to truly test the skill level of players. Perhaps bosses at the level of the enemies in onslaught may pose a challenge?

Rewards 5/10

It is good to see that some rewards added so far have been rewards players the community have suggested, however, the rewards still feel incomplete and unrewarding for some, especially to veteran players. Having to place a reward table that pleases everyone is impossible, but feel like it can be improved. How do you satisfy a Mastery Rank 25 player who has everything? How do you keep him/her coming back to this mode? Well, I can think of only one answer here; new rewards. By new, I mean something that has never been added before. Whether it be new weapons, mods, cosmetics, or a whole new system for players to keep getting better gear. 

At one point, it came across my mind for Digital Extremes to add a new rare resource in the game to grind for that could be used to re-roll the base stats of weapons. Maybe every time you use the foundry to craft an item, you can mix in this rare resource to have the weapon come out with either an added elemental stat or random re-rolled based stats (keeping the regular IPS ratio the same, but just maybe a chance to be higher). But this is a whole other thing for another day.

 

Overall 6.5/10

While many things have improved since the original release of Elite Sanctuary Onslaught, I feel like the mode that was meant to test the skill level of players is still not where it needs to be. I do have hope that as long as Digital Extremes continues to actively shape this mode around community feedback, this will get better as this is the closest thing we have to true endgame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 26, 2018 by ShinTechG
Grammar