On mobbing and random walk of ideas.

[(PSN)teacup775]

Warframe is fun. It delivers content and mostly it respects peoples grind, in contrast to AAA titles that never lived up to their hype, but the meat and potatoes farming of the game is hoard mode. 

The problem with warframe hoard mode is the utter lack of interesting progression in enemy types. Compare to Reaper of Souls where elite mobs appear larger group sizes (3->5+) sporting increasing numbers of modifiers (linked health/aoe attacks/debuffs) and as well as quantity of groups, which requires players to counter and adapt their attacks. A pack of nullifiers or scrambus like spammy meh in comparison. Scattering one type of mob weakens their synergy and in another case strengthens it.

Onslaught, for example, is it isn’t enough or different as a modality. Despite Simiaris’ comments, the elite we’ve been collecting and now fight are nothing new nor anything interesting. Onslaught is basically warmed over survival with more balance issues and bugs.

Overall though I get the sense that DE is struggling to modify damage and melee or knee jerking to nerf warframe abilities because spam in one mode, but these don’t get at the problem. DE needs to rethink enemies and the damage system together in such a way that no one approach can utterly dominate (or at least provide for a fix other than nerf).

Suggestions: develop elite packs for the factions and put effort into their attributes that force players to adapt to them in mission. Give them interesting drops. Build an updated damage system around it, with rock/paper/scissors game play for elite pack qualities. Have impact and puncture do something functional and attacks, a different function based on mob vs elites. Eample: impact and puncture should be necessary to break defenses, create or reveal weaknesses and open to finish on flesh. Each attack should have a different role for faction kit (shields and armor, circuitry).

If a player is spinning to win through a wall, have the AI adapt to it by going around the player, deploying an aoe or jumping over obstacles. Or maybe they can dodge roll.

For melee, different combo types could made effective circumstantially mob vs single target, and/or deploy debuf, cc, disable and damage. Each faction should require different approaches to melee attack styles (slash applies elemental effect to faction A vs “bleed” to faction B) or rotations.

Other comments. Stealth has been left to rot. Thereis no challenge to stealth or precise attacks that stealth could deploy. Is there anything like an eidelon or new missions where a party of stealth can shine in the works?

 

Now rip apart this crappy post.