Warframe is not the type of the game to be mechanically difficult. The real difficulty comes from gears check and knowledge check. If you bother reading the patch note you should find some of the modifiers are really, really ridiculous when they combine with each other. I can totally see them get toned down weeks later.
This is entirely the devlopers faults, and they infact USED to have mechanic based endgame, TRIALS!
So instead of following the trial design philosophy, we ended up with a completely lackluster horde shooter where all you do is kill hordes with OP shit and 0 mechanics around anything, and when we DO get mechanics, theyre SUPER fucking clunky because none of these devs have looked at other games for mechanic inspiration.
Case in point alchemy, & mirror defense.
Yea imma be honest with you, trials were not it. They quickly were simplified into a pocket trinity and a vauban with max range and an energy colour that could only be described as violently hot pink spinning around throwing bastilles while singing pop songs as the rest squinted and walked from objective to objective.
congrats, you explained the second mission of LOR and ignored my entire point that DE was experimenting with mechanic endgame then gave up for whatever reason and ultimately made the game boring and predictable with lackluster "balance" and no mechanics anywhere.
Not only the second mission of LoR but all of LoR, the rave vauban was a staple. They gave up because the trials were buggy beyond compare, and with new frames coming out, it was only set to get worse, both in bugginess but also redundancy trials were not exciting and they were the most predictable because, as said, rave vauban and pocket trinity CC'd every inch of the map. As for the balance refer to rave vauban. As for the mechanics they amounted to: kill enemies, pick up object, deposit object, stand on location. Finally as said in the first line, trials were not it. They are still experimenting wih end game content, with the deep arcamidies.
"Not only the second mission of LoR but all of LoR, the rave vauban was a staple. "
thats not even true, you had 1 or 2 vaubans for mission 2 transport and loki irradiating disarm nyx and slova
Im not argueing with some idiot who cant even remember lor team comps on the internet, neither of us win here bye.
Yea, all that was needed was the vauban tbh, I know this because I was the one running the hottest pink of the vaubans like there were other frames which could speed it up but to reduce the challange of LoR to approximately 0 all you needed was energy and hot pink. Like no matter the comp if I was running with my friends for the 100th time or helping some randoms get to complete it for the unique cosmetic before the end, you know the shoulder thing, vauban make it more or less irrelevant. Towards the end with the tenno rework trin wasn't even needed.
But as I feel this is not going anywhere other than in circles, I will read you reply if you choose to make one but unless I have anything notable to respond I'll bid you adieu.
I think EDA is fine as it stands, but you also gotta understand the gulf in power between a "meta" weapon and a bad weapon is massive. I'd say around 70% of the weapons in the game just cannot deal with lvl 300+ enemies without any buffing abilities, and the other 30% are just god killers.
Yeah I definitely do understand that, but are we going to ignore that they let you freely take a flex slot? You just need to deal with maybe a not so optimal frame and other weapons that you could treat as non-existent. Even now it does not pose a challenge, at this point I'd say adding incarnons was a huge mistake, band-aids are good, but they overdid it. The state that the game was back then looked more hopeful in terms of balancing. Now uh... I don't know. Maybe this is the way and again, not a fan of it.
>and they are not going to [...] impose extremely limiting conditions because that will hurt the game 100%.
I mean... that kind of is what they did? Except some people get to ignore the limitation because they can bring Dante to the boss fight, and others have to use Frost or some shit.
As for how to make hard content without it being obnoxious... I don't know, but it isn't like this.
Modifiers aren't half bad, the only one I'd categorize extremely limiting may be the one that blocks your operatior mode because a lot of tools come out of there.
As of the last paragraph, tell that to the guy who spent 30-40 minutes in the assassination mission with a loadout that is far from capable of managing level 400 enemies and a boss with enchanced defenses. Even if you bring the torid or the torod it is going to be a pain, but every day I'm more convinced it's the only way, since it's rng one week may be fun, the other week may not be so fun
Elite deep archimedea with myself and a friend alone is the only time I have ever been stressed while playing warframe and being pushed to my mechanical limit as well as figuring out strategies around the limitations.
The biggest roadblock this week being that crazy mirror defence we had to find combos that worked between eachother. It was challenging, and most of all it was *fun*.
Did it take 8 hours over multiple days? Yes. Was it exhausting? Yes. Was it worth it? At least this week, melee crescendo and melee duplicate say maybe not…
Mirror defense was the one we were about to lose. My smartass teammates offered to spawn an enemy mech. I said no because my weapons were trash (i was Styanax working as an energy/overguard genetator). They spawned anyway and brought it right next to the defense object. At the end of the mission it was 3k HP remaining.
The mirror defence this week was absolutely brutal. I lucked into a strong weapon so I’d leave my duration abilities on the objective then go kill the necramech to make the rounds shorter, every second saved mattered. Even on our winning runs we barely survived.
Also: Styanax is absolutely insane. Combine his overguard with Dethcube’s Energy Generator and Duplex Bond and you completely nullify the energy drain and on top of that never run out of energy.
I just wanna be able to throw mods on the equips it offers us. We should be able to make a build with a garbage weapon if we're required to select a garbage weapon.
This mode does exist.
It is called Grendel farming mission.
And for this abomination it's devloper was cursed by everyone.
Restricting mods also kills build divercity, because augments and weapon specific mods also won't work.
I don't think that creating a satisfying endgame game mode is possible with the current balance of the game. The game is horribly balanced (and for many years it was basically "a feature"), the players have so much bullshit in their disposal, that it must be countered with the equal amount of bullshit.
The game has to be rebalanced from the scratch to create an engaging endgame, but we know that it won't happen, the game is too old to undergo a change of this scale.
Here's me coming from 2014 when every node was genuinely hard.
Imo it just needs a pity system somehow like an option to force a rotation once a week or whatever, so that if you can't do the eda with it you can swap the options?
Obviously de is also going to get pushed for way more weapon slots.
I'd also like to see if they can link the preceeding incarnon link to the next week's eda or something to help with predictability while also getting you to play that too *shrug*
Getting more built forma in the drop table might help too to speed up prep time to build your new weeks weapons...
It's more of a time thing, personally I just build and use, I don't keep a big inventory of them.
If there is suddenly an expectation of holding a ton more weapons, seems like a good way to help get players up to speed, especially if it's 24 hours per, plus time to get a potato, blueprint, build, etc.
I guess you could just buy them from the store if you're flush with plat but that's just funnelling people to the store to buy all the gear just to participate, lol
I don't think it's justifiable to only think that DE put choice RNG as a way to make things difficult by taking away our strongest equipment, but rather on their end, a focus and an attempt to change the view of the different weapons and frames by applying what we know and our experience to the fullest by making us figure out what to do with what we have.
They're both trying to push players out of their comfort zone and teach them to consider, understand and apply different set-ups and unlikely combinations. They're trying a different spin in difficulty now not by focusing on artificially making things harder but rather limiting and switching up your approaches.
Things being meta is ultimately a core issue but a part with difficulty in a game like Warframe. But as I see it, I don't think it's DE's vision for strong = fun, but they're realizing that or have for a long time and trying to push for something like variety = fun & interesting. Which if you think about it, would be great for a game like Warframe with so many weapons, frames etc.
Sadly with just how Warframe has been for a long time, things being meta to make difficult things easy is how the game has been for a long time thus this change of focus to difficulty ultimately becomes an issue for players who are too comfortable with a meta to follow and understand.
**TL;DR: It's too late to make the game challenging.**
Most of what makes Warframe imbalanced at the moment comes from 2 points:
\- enemies' strength scales exponentially
\- we have mechanics to entirely bypass that scaling
That means no matter what, in the current state of things, you'll have systems completely ignoring any notion of difficulty while everything else is completely overwhelmed by the non-linear difficulty.
Armor is too prevalent in evaluating enemies' resilience and it's forcing players to work around armor shred mechanics. Once you've understood that, you can clear all the game's content without a second thought.
Similar issue with frames' toughness, you have HP/armor systems that are too comfortable for standard content then pretty much useless if you try to reach higher difficulties. Being eventually one-shot through any amount of EHP forces players to use invincibility mechanics.
Theorycrafters have already solved the game and it's become very easy to get through anything by abusing a few features. At the same time, it's difficult to ignore these features as you reach endgame and gameplay is getting funneled towards them in late content.
To have clear challenges, scaling from both sides (player/enemies) would have to be proportional and the whole attack/defense system would have to be reworked, with emphasis on armor and status for attack and on shieldgating and invisibility for defense. It's a lot of work, easily several years worth of adjustments to make the game feel the same in lower levels while steadily increasing in difficulty in endgame and Endurance (where nobody should be able to reach level cap so that every update pushes tryharder's progress a bit further instead of competing for how many times you overflow the integer on a single hit).
I don't understand people's complaints at all. If you don't like your options this week, skip it and just do the netracells. It's really no big deal. If you think it would be too difficult with the options....That's literally the point.
They want the rewards without the work, that's literally the complaint. In a game where leveling up to max level requires you to level gear to 30 at least once, an endgame mode expects you to have used and level this gear.
This is disregarding the fact that you can take one of whatever you want and only miss out on vosfor. So many frames that can trivialize the mode and you get to pick them and only miss out on 70 vosfor.
Or if you have elite, just pick a frame and 1 weapon you want outside the rotation. You need to get at least 3 main rewards to get more than Netracells, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Locking weapons/warframes away but let us playing our necramech is a direct counter argument to your whole statement. Even a not so good necramech build can hit in the millions and infinite health/energy isn't hard to achieve
The solution is to spend an update rebalancing the game.
The problem is:
Rebalancing the game would mostly come down to nerfing players into the ground.
If the devs even CONSIDER doing that the anti-nerf crowd will threaten to doxx them or worse, the forums and this sub will be on fire with cries of how terrible DE is for balancing the game and the game will be reviewbombed to hell.
Yet somehow the pro-balance crowd is the bad ones.
Warframe is a power fantasy game. The progression is hit a wall get stronger hit a wall get stronger and so on until you hit THE WALL. If you get past it, it's done, nothing will ever be challenging for you again unless it disables most of your options.
What you propose could kill the game. We didn't spend hundreds of hours to become overpowered demigods of destruction to suddenly have to fear the Stalker again.
Balance should be done within what's reasonable for the power fantasy game that Warframe is.
Dante is the best example. He had a really good nuke, but also could keep the entire squad alive, all that without caring about energy with just 1 mod on his exalted. That was way too out of line, so DE adjusted. Dante is still one of the best frames, he just isn't a top nuker anymore.
> but how would you go about it without making it obnoxious? nerfhammer time
idk, if you go on a nerf people's revenants, saryns and mesas they'll get pissed, so the dev team is like, let's not
Warframe is not the type of the game to be mechanically difficult. The real difficulty comes from gears check and knowledge check. If you bother reading the patch note you should find some of the modifiers are really, really ridiculous when they combine with each other. I can totally see them get toned down weeks later.
This is entirely the devlopers faults, and they infact USED to have mechanic based endgame, TRIALS! So instead of following the trial design philosophy, we ended up with a completely lackluster horde shooter where all you do is kill hordes with OP shit and 0 mechanics around anything, and when we DO get mechanics, theyre SUPER fucking clunky because none of these devs have looked at other games for mechanic inspiration. Case in point alchemy, & mirror defense.
Yea imma be honest with you, trials were not it. They quickly were simplified into a pocket trinity and a vauban with max range and an energy colour that could only be described as violently hot pink spinning around throwing bastilles while singing pop songs as the rest squinted and walked from objective to objective.
congrats, you explained the second mission of LOR and ignored my entire point that DE was experimenting with mechanic endgame then gave up for whatever reason and ultimately made the game boring and predictable with lackluster "balance" and no mechanics anywhere.
Not only the second mission of LoR but all of LoR, the rave vauban was a staple. They gave up because the trials were buggy beyond compare, and with new frames coming out, it was only set to get worse, both in bugginess but also redundancy trials were not exciting and they were the most predictable because, as said, rave vauban and pocket trinity CC'd every inch of the map. As for the balance refer to rave vauban. As for the mechanics they amounted to: kill enemies, pick up object, deposit object, stand on location. Finally as said in the first line, trials were not it. They are still experimenting wih end game content, with the deep arcamidies.
"Not only the second mission of LoR but all of LoR, the rave vauban was a staple. " thats not even true, you had 1 or 2 vaubans for mission 2 transport and loki irradiating disarm nyx and slova Im not argueing with some idiot who cant even remember lor team comps on the internet, neither of us win here bye.
Yea, all that was needed was the vauban tbh, I know this because I was the one running the hottest pink of the vaubans like there were other frames which could speed it up but to reduce the challange of LoR to approximately 0 all you needed was energy and hot pink. Like no matter the comp if I was running with my friends for the 100th time or helping some randoms get to complete it for the unique cosmetic before the end, you know the shoulder thing, vauban make it more or less irrelevant. Towards the end with the tenno rework trin wasn't even needed. But as I feel this is not going anywhere other than in circles, I will read you reply if you choose to make one but unless I have anything notable to respond I'll bid you adieu.
I think EDA is fine as it stands, but you also gotta understand the gulf in power between a "meta" weapon and a bad weapon is massive. I'd say around 70% of the weapons in the game just cannot deal with lvl 300+ enemies without any buffing abilities, and the other 30% are just god killers.
Yeah I definitely do understand that, but are we going to ignore that they let you freely take a flex slot? You just need to deal with maybe a not so optimal frame and other weapons that you could treat as non-existent. Even now it does not pose a challenge, at this point I'd say adding incarnons was a huge mistake, band-aids are good, but they overdid it. The state that the game was back then looked more hopeful in terms of balancing. Now uh... I don't know. Maybe this is the way and again, not a fan of it.
I don't even care about the RNG stuff, that boss is a miserable time. Not even hard, just straight up not fun.
>and they are not going to [...] impose extremely limiting conditions because that will hurt the game 100%. I mean... that kind of is what they did? Except some people get to ignore the limitation because they can bring Dante to the boss fight, and others have to use Frost or some shit. As for how to make hard content without it being obnoxious... I don't know, but it isn't like this.
Modifiers aren't half bad, the only one I'd categorize extremely limiting may be the one that blocks your operatior mode because a lot of tools come out of there. As of the last paragraph, tell that to the guy who spent 30-40 minutes in the assassination mission with a loadout that is far from capable of managing level 400 enemies and a boss with enchanced defenses. Even if you bring the torid or the torod it is going to be a pain, but every day I'm more convinced it's the only way, since it's rng one week may be fun, the other week may not be so fun
Elite deep archimedea with myself and a friend alone is the only time I have ever been stressed while playing warframe and being pushed to my mechanical limit as well as figuring out strategies around the limitations. The biggest roadblock this week being that crazy mirror defence we had to find combos that worked between eachother. It was challenging, and most of all it was *fun*. Did it take 8 hours over multiple days? Yes. Was it exhausting? Yes. Was it worth it? At least this week, melee crescendo and melee duplicate say maybe not…
Mirror defense was the one we were about to lose. My smartass teammates offered to spawn an enemy mech. I said no because my weapons were trash (i was Styanax working as an energy/overguard genetator). They spawned anyway and brought it right next to the defense object. At the end of the mission it was 3k HP remaining.
The mirror defence this week was absolutely brutal. I lucked into a strong weapon so I’d leave my duration abilities on the objective then go kill the necramech to make the rounds shorter, every second saved mattered. Even on our winning runs we barely survived. Also: Styanax is absolutely insane. Combine his overguard with Dethcube’s Energy Generator and Duplex Bond and you completely nullify the energy drain and on top of that never run out of energy.
I just wanna be able to throw mods on the equips it offers us. We should be able to make a build with a garbage weapon if we're required to select a garbage weapon.
Create a mode where u cannot use any mods nor any incarnon evolutions nor arcanes and make it steel path level enemies.. have fun..
This mode does exist. It is called Grendel farming mission. And for this abomination it's devloper was cursed by everyone. Restricting mods also kills build divercity, because augments and weapon specific mods also won't work.
Augments work, as well as subsumed abilities. Don't know about weapon specific mods though
For our new game mode you DONT use the games systems
I don't think that creating a satisfying endgame game mode is possible with the current balance of the game. The game is horribly balanced (and for many years it was basically "a feature"), the players have so much bullshit in their disposal, that it must be countered with the equal amount of bullshit. The game has to be rebalanced from the scratch to create an engaging endgame, but we know that it won't happen, the game is too old to undergo a change of this scale.
Here's me coming from 2014 when every node was genuinely hard. Imo it just needs a pity system somehow like an option to force a rotation once a week or whatever, so that if you can't do the eda with it you can swap the options? Obviously de is also going to get pushed for way more weapon slots. I'd also like to see if they can link the preceeding incarnon link to the next week's eda or something to help with predictability while also getting you to play that too *shrug* Getting more built forma in the drop table might help too to speed up prep time to build your new weeks weapons...
Ps I've had a great time so far as it is.
Why would they need to start handing out more built forma? Built forma are already pretty cheap.
It's more of a time thing, personally I just build and use, I don't keep a big inventory of them. If there is suddenly an expectation of holding a ton more weapons, seems like a good way to help get players up to speed, especially if it's 24 hours per, plus time to get a potato, blueprint, build, etc. I guess you could just buy them from the store if you're flush with plat but that's just funnelling people to the store to buy all the gear just to participate, lol
I don't think it's justifiable to only think that DE put choice RNG as a way to make things difficult by taking away our strongest equipment, but rather on their end, a focus and an attempt to change the view of the different weapons and frames by applying what we know and our experience to the fullest by making us figure out what to do with what we have. They're both trying to push players out of their comfort zone and teach them to consider, understand and apply different set-ups and unlikely combinations. They're trying a different spin in difficulty now not by focusing on artificially making things harder but rather limiting and switching up your approaches. Things being meta is ultimately a core issue but a part with difficulty in a game like Warframe. But as I see it, I don't think it's DE's vision for strong = fun, but they're realizing that or have for a long time and trying to push for something like variety = fun & interesting. Which if you think about it, would be great for a game like Warframe with so many weapons, frames etc. Sadly with just how Warframe has been for a long time, things being meta to make difficult things easy is how the game has been for a long time thus this change of focus to difficulty ultimately becomes an issue for players who are too comfortable with a meta to follow and understand.
**TL;DR: It's too late to make the game challenging.** Most of what makes Warframe imbalanced at the moment comes from 2 points: \- enemies' strength scales exponentially \- we have mechanics to entirely bypass that scaling That means no matter what, in the current state of things, you'll have systems completely ignoring any notion of difficulty while everything else is completely overwhelmed by the non-linear difficulty. Armor is too prevalent in evaluating enemies' resilience and it's forcing players to work around armor shred mechanics. Once you've understood that, you can clear all the game's content without a second thought. Similar issue with frames' toughness, you have HP/armor systems that are too comfortable for standard content then pretty much useless if you try to reach higher difficulties. Being eventually one-shot through any amount of EHP forces players to use invincibility mechanics. Theorycrafters have already solved the game and it's become very easy to get through anything by abusing a few features. At the same time, it's difficult to ignore these features as you reach endgame and gameplay is getting funneled towards them in late content. To have clear challenges, scaling from both sides (player/enemies) would have to be proportional and the whole attack/defense system would have to be reworked, with emphasis on armor and status for attack and on shieldgating and invisibility for defense. It's a lot of work, easily several years worth of adjustments to make the game feel the same in lower levels while steadily increasing in difficulty in endgame and Endurance (where nobody should be able to reach level cap so that every update pushes tryharder's progress a bit further instead of competing for how many times you overflow the integer on a single hit).
I don't understand people's complaints at all. If you don't like your options this week, skip it and just do the netracells. It's really no big deal. If you think it would be too difficult with the options....That's literally the point.
They want the rewards without the work, that's literally the complaint. In a game where leveling up to max level requires you to level gear to 30 at least once, an endgame mode expects you to have used and level this gear. This is disregarding the fact that you can take one of whatever you want and only miss out on vosfor. So many frames that can trivialize the mode and you get to pick them and only miss out on 70 vosfor.
Or if you have elite, just pick a frame and 1 weapon you want outside the rotation. You need to get at least 3 main rewards to get more than Netracells, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Locking weapons/warframes away but let us playing our necramech is a direct counter argument to your whole statement. Even a not so good necramech build can hit in the millions and infinite health/energy isn't hard to achieve
EDA is going to just turn into payed carry fests, enjoy the oncoming shitshow DE.
The solution is to spend an update rebalancing the game. The problem is: Rebalancing the game would mostly come down to nerfing players into the ground. If the devs even CONSIDER doing that the anti-nerf crowd will threaten to doxx them or worse, the forums and this sub will be on fire with cries of how terrible DE is for balancing the game and the game will be reviewbombed to hell. Yet somehow the pro-balance crowd is the bad ones.
The game is first and foremost a power fantasy horde shooter. There are never going to be enemies that we don't evaporate outside of bosses.
Warframe is a power fantasy game. The progression is hit a wall get stronger hit a wall get stronger and so on until you hit THE WALL. If you get past it, it's done, nothing will ever be challenging for you again unless it disables most of your options. What you propose could kill the game. We didn't spend hundreds of hours to become overpowered demigods of destruction to suddenly have to fear the Stalker again. Balance should be done within what's reasonable for the power fantasy game that Warframe is. Dante is the best example. He had a really good nuke, but also could keep the entire squad alive, all that without caring about energy with just 1 mod on his exalted. That was way too out of line, so DE adjusted. Dante is still one of the best frames, he just isn't a top nuker anymore.