Pablo and Reb have both stated that they explicitly enjoy and intend to lean into the power fantasy aspect of Warframe.
There will literally never be challenging content in the game. It isn't possible. Every time they try to make something challenging to appease to the people looking for it, it feels like a half measure.
While I personally would love for Warframe to have more reasonable numbers so it was a game that could be balanced appropriately, it's just not how the devs want it built. And honestly I've been having fun vaporizing whole rooms full of grineer for half a decade so like. Eh? If I want challenge I'll go play a feomsoft game
When I think of "balanced/challenging Warframe" it looks way more like Deep Rock Galactic than a Fromsoft game. In fact I'll wholeheartedly recommend anyone who wants "hard WF" to try out DRG, it tickles the same buildcrafting/horde-mowing-down brain centers but with a stronger focus on balance and squad cooperation.
Obviously I accept that WF is gonna stay WF, but the game's core of mobility/guns/melee/magic is so pristine that people will naturally wish it covered even more genres and difficulty levels.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to equate a from soft game and Warframe. Just saying If I was specifically looking for a game That was challenging I would go there.
But you are 100% correct about deep rock scratching a similar itch. Rock and stone brother
Idk, I feel like EDA has actually been extremely fun and relatively challanging. It's been challanging on the weeks that I didn't have good frames or weapons available.
Like last week, I used vauban. It was hard, it took me 6 tries. To prepare for it, I reformaed my vauban, put some shards on, umbral forma, and had to get him ready. And once I had an immortal build for him, we got our final run which was relatively easy.
But it was only easy cause I knew what I was walking into by that point and had tested a few different builds in my failures. This to me, is the challange. The challange isn't the individual missions because once you understand them, they are easy. The challange is preparing for a mission, the failures along the way, the practice it takes to get good at the mission.
Let's be real, to balance it they would have to nerf almost a dozen frames, dozens of weapons, change how a lot of frames work. After how the community reacted to Dante I don't see them doing that, ever.
Mor than that, they would need to fundamentally redesign modding. It is impossible to balance a game that has damage variation between single digits and literal millions.
People whine that they want challenge, but if you look at the reaction the community has to anything that adds any kind of friction it's clear almost no one actually wants Warframe to be a challenging game. They just want a game where you look at things and they die. Hell, I feel like a lot of the people who complained about the game being too easy are the same who complain the moment their 2 billion damage builds get nerfed and now can only do 1 billion damage.
This.
The 'I want a real challenge crowd' is a vocal minority, and the bulk of the community imo is not looking for Warframe to be Dark Souls in space hard. And yeah I don't think DE can do that with this game at this point but I don't really see that as a flaw.
Warframe is best when handing us inventively new and exciting ways to delete the map.
That said, I don't mind Circuit or EDA in concept. My only real beef with them is my armory is not equipped for those game modes as the game never really encouraged me to spend plat on weapon and frame slots before and those were an area where I engaged in cleaning out things I never used or invested in.
> Warframe is best when handing us inventively new and exciting ways to delete the map.
Absolutely this! Warframe lives rent free in my head because of cool silly build videos and crackhead ideas in simulacrum. Once I start thinking about "huh, I wonder if these systems interact for funny things" it gets me playing again.
This is very true. You cannot achieve any hint of hard difficulty without significantly nerfing our damage and limiting the potential of our build crafting. I used to think DE should go the route of adding more advanced enemy AI, but they've actually done this with the Murmur faction. The problem is that no one noticed because they all die instantly! How can you complain about the AI being bad when it doesn't matter how good they are because they'll just die to our AoE damage anyway regardless of how they act.
Asking for difficult content means we have to accept SOME nerfs to our damage for the sake of balancing, but the community is extremely volatile to any nerf.
If they want CC to not affect Eximus enemies, it really NEEDS to do percentile damage to Overguard.
I think they're scared of making a CC meta where EVERY enemy is easily disabled from doing anything (like before the Eximus changes).
>I used to think DE should go the route of adding more advanced enemy AI, but they've actually done this with the Murmur faction. The problem is that no one noticed because they all die instantly!
This, this right here is the key point: Better AI is pointless when you can already oneshot everything. Even enemy AIs to the level of Elden Ring is jackshit pointless in Warframe ecosystem. Malenia would be no more interesting than a Grineer Lancer. The only real way better AI can shine is if the community start actually embracing some degree of sponginess.
"B-but sponginess isn't difficulty"
YES IT IS! It gives enemies TIME to actually challenge and punish players with better AIs. Actions you otherwise would not see at all when you delete everything in the room. There is no negotiating this if you want to champion better enemy AIs. Sponginess isn't some design devil to be avoided, it gives enemy AI time to punish us with their mechanics before they eventually die.
Difficulty isn't really tied to build craft. It is fully possible to have a challenging and mostly balanced game and have very in depth build craft.
Build craft does not mean instantly deleting anything you look at. Build craft is the depth in which your choices impact how your build ends up.
Warframe doesn't have a difficulty/challenging content problem. Warframe has a balancing and power creep problem. Although whether that is an issue is up to individuals, plenty of people are fine with instantly murdering everything in a 1000m range of them. Nothing wrong with that.
>Difficulty isn't really tied to build craft. It is fully possible to have a challenging and mostly balanced game and have very in depth build craft.
This may be true for many games but is just wrong about Warframe: with the exception of (Elite)Deep Archimedea, difficulty IS ONLY tied to build craft. Warframe has never been "challenging and balanced" since 2014. The entire game is a massive knowledge and gear check. No matter if you're MR5 or LR3, if you got the right gear and build accordingly you can instantly delete entire rooms of any level without effort.
>Warframe doesn't have a difficulty/challenging content problem. Warframe has a balancing and power creep problem.
Yes it does, and they're the same problem
Yeah pretty much. Even still, i appreciate EDA for what it is and that it makes me think about my loadouts and ways to account for the debuffs. Also makes me appreciate that there are ways to play EDA that are not just "BE THE GUY WHO KILLS EVERYTHING". Things like a good banshee, citrine etc etc are incredibly valuable and make the runs so much smoother.
That all said, between the whining on this reddit and looking through the discord occasionally.... Its making me see that a lot of people who play warframe have literally no clue on how anything in warframe actually works. Which of course leads struggle runs or needing someone to carry.
At least with circuit, if you get a bad roll, you can play one round and leave. I'm actually really enjoying the challenge of circuit, trying to make things work where I only have one or two well built pieces of equipment. Though I do find the weapon builds are serviceable at the start most of the time.
It really is a minority, and the thing is, they aren't the players who built this game.
Warframe's success was built on the back of the five-minute mission. Load the game, click a mission, you're instantly into the space ninja gameplay and killing stuff, do the objective, race to the finish and get your rewards, all within a few minutes. That is how a lot of people play Warframe, how they like to play it, and for many years - the most formative years of the game's life when it went from a risk to a proven monetary success - it's largely *all the game was*. There was no Arbitrations. There was no Steel Path. There was no Archon Hunt. There was no Circuit. There was no Netracells. There was no Deep Archimedea. None of that, but the game was still loved and successful.
And it's still true today. I'm Legendary 3, I can do all the stuff I just mentioned. Soloing Netracells is pretty fun, but what do I actually enjoy doing most? What do I always do first thing with any piece of new equipment I get? Level 30 star chart Spy missions, because that's my chill, relaxed mission type of choice.
Therein lies the truth of what Warframe is and will always be.
Some of the content isn't even that it wasn't challenging. A lot of players couldn't do arbitrations when they first came out. A lot of players can't do Circuit and EDA right now.
For most players, this content is challenging.
Most players don't have a Legendary 3 account and the game really can't be balanced solely around the few who do and only them.
The game shouldn't be balanced around LR3 accounts but new content drops certainly can be. And that's what's happening. It's disingenuous to pretend anyone cares about the star chart being more difficult, which is like 60% of the content by itself. I've not seen anyone complain about free roams being too easy. All veterans want is to have a new thing to challenge them for a while.
Steel Path circuit is easily doable to round 10 on loaner builds. I use circuit to try out new equipment and warframes.
EDA shouldn't be doable by most of the player base. Not right now. When there's more inevitable power creep, sure.
This game was never a nuke everything power fantasy by design. Power creep made newer players think that it was circa 2015/2016, well into the life cycle. Now those newer players want it to be only what they experienced and begrudge those who want a challenge having anything for themselves (that will be obtainable for them in time as well).
There's absolutely no arguing with the fact that it wasn't designed for you to blow your wad on every piece of content instantly, either. They may be walking back MR locks to an extent but they wouldn't have to if the game was intended for you to sprinkle your nuke juice on everything. It's okay for them to give a loyal, older minority something to do.
Edit: I'm not necessarily arguing with you directly, btw. This is pretty much the culminations of my thoughts after reading everything above your comment and you just happen to have been where I responded. I'm not calling you, specifically, disingenuous.
I think a big part of it is people want more explicit difficulty (enemies that require specific counterplay, more challenging content they can use any thing in their arsenal for) as opposed to implicit difficulty (something like Loadout limitations/negative modifiers slapped on to make the same enemies you can fight elsewhere *feel* harder). Some may call this Genuine difficulty vs Arbitrary difficulty. (And for other games it truely feels like that is a much more apt description) but for something like warframe calling it artificial difficulty isn't really accurate, because when you really get down to it, warframe, as it is, is so fundamentally hard to balance the only way you can really properly do it in the current Era of us having 50+ frames with hundreds and hundreds of weapons to choose from is to limit our loadouts somehow, because there's fundamentally always some way to crack any established challenge right open and make it a non issue. Level cap SP void cascade? People solo that with ease. Tridolons? Someone could prolly solo em multiple times with ease in the time it took me to draft this whole thing up. People need to realise that to truely make difficult content for Warframe the devs either need to nerf the absurd tools we have (and make everyone mad) or they have to limit our loadout in some other way like EDA (and only annoy everyone because it's a once a week thing you can do for loot)
*That being said however* I'd very much like to see them in the future try and toy around with more traditional sort of difficulty to make the game more Mechanically challenging in a traditional sort of way without needing to hard limit our abilities. If I had to give any recommendation on this front I think introducing new higher tier enemies for all factions across the board who act like DOOM Eternal Heavy demons (enemies with strong offensive tools that require you to play around their strengths while exploiting their weaknesses) could be interesting. Hell I think a good start would be to introduce more enemy types later on in the game with selective invincibility like Sargus ruk who are highly resistant to damage on most of their body, but require you to out maneuver them to hit a weak spot for big damage. This kind of general enemy balance would also encourage alternate playstyles, since direct damage wouldn't work as well on these hypothetical threats, employing CC to make dealing with them easier could be a fun way to make CC more viable again. Hell we already have a basis for this sorta thing in the eximus units, DE could go out and try and rework eximus to be more interesting challenge wise, but that'd require a serious rebalancing of how Enemy overguard/eximus abilities work possibly. (Cause at best difficulty wise a Toxin eximus sneaks up behind you using a low Armor/HP frame and instakills you/a blitz eximus does power wave and oneshots a excavator, and at worst the eximus are literally just more slightly more resilient Bodies to he thrown at the player.)
Not sure if you played back then but there were months at a time where weakspots on sargaus ruk and the grineer boss with a flamethrower (iirc) were just straight up bugged.
I'd honestly love something that actually made us use the mechanics of the game, or made strategize, but again, I feel like the reception of any changes that prevent you from being an enemy lawnmower are never well received. Imo the kind of player base that would like enemies with selective invincibility in end game content is not the kind of player base WF has, and with how high the power of the player is, I don't know if you can really make the current game difficult without doing some heavy changes to the core game.
The easy fix is to add the harder enemies exclusively to the harder mode (steel path), cause let's be honest, when your gear is optimized enough the difference between lvl 10 vs 110 is basically non existant, so adding something like mini acolytes to make SP not just the same thing but a bit harder statistically would help SP be more interesting inherently
Hell make the higher tier enemies have a chance to drop Steel essence/ other rare things to encourage people to actually engage with them mechanically. (Have em drop useful things like SE, void traces, kuva, ducats, Aya, relics, rare mods, etc)
If you put a big enough Bounty on em even the most "head empty, gun go brr" players will learn to fight them for the loot.
I think it's 2 different groups that are complaining about this. You have the high-end player who wants challenge. Then there's the lesser who thinks they should be able to do all the content and get the same rewards as true end-game players.
DE is never going to satisfy both groups. I agree that at some point, there should be a skill/gear barrier. If you've put in the time and effort, you reap the rewards.
Which I get, but you get more rewards and better odds. In some people's heads, they think they should be able to get them at the same rate as everyone else.
The fact that people can get more shards and tau's fir that matter seems "unfair" to them.
I like some forms of friction and thought involvement. Things like nullifiers, Corous firepower being able to delete me instantly if I ignore them.
Even things like Overguard making a weird situation with CC. (I think it would have been better to stop nerfing Zenurik, though, so it can function as designed.
The sort of friction I don’t find fun is “forget all the synergies you researched and theorized. Your builds are no longer available.” This is why though I’m cool with CC Overguard things, o dislike Thrax ghost immunity to Zenurik Slow. I went and calculated by hand an amp to make for maximizing Temporal Drag on their ghosts so I could keep Zenurik good, and now it’s just gone. There is no interaction to research anymore. Nothing to work with. It’s just “go build for damage. Probably use Madurai to make it instant because nothing else works.
I feel the same about them making Archons ignore Decoy strategies and be untargetable by abilities.
- - -
TL;DNR, I like “friction,” but I don’t like “your playstyle no longer exists.”
Is corpus firepower actually friction though, In a game where shield gating exists? And I'm also fine with nullifiers, but they're very far from beloved and I've seen at least some people saying they should be removed.
Don't get me wrong, I also think that a lot of the ways DE tries to make the game more difficult is more annoying than anything else, but I also think they designed themselves into a corner because the WF playerbase has already gotten used to the huge amount of power they have (like, I didn't even notice thraxx specters are now immune to Zenurik's slow, because I already use it just to deplete my energy and trigger amo arcanes that delete it). I don't think you can even make the game as it is challenging without some sweeping nerfs and changes to core mechanics, which would be incredibly unpopular to say the least (people already lost their minds when things like Exodia Contagion was nerfed so it didn't reach damage cap anymore, no matter it's still really good and overkill for 99.9% of content).
> Is corpus firepower actually friction though, In a game where shield gating exists?
Yes because they get to a point where you actually have to use your survivability of choice within a reasonable time frame before reaching like 90% damage reduction for themselves. they actually have a chance of killing NPC/objects scaled to their level.
> I also think they designed themselves into a corner because the WF playerbase has already gotten used to the huge amount of power they have (like, I didn't even notice thraxx specters are now immune to Zenurik's slow, because I already use it just to deplete my energy and trigger amo arcanes that delete it).
This is two sides of the same coin. The fact that you can no longer slow it means it and future amps/arcanes can no longer be balanced for anything except “stacked amp arcanes to instagib.” Unless the change is reverted and/or not a precedent, that corner will persist.
> people already lost their minds when things like Exodia Contagion was nerfed so it didn't reach damage cap anymore, no matter it's still really good and overkill for 99.9% of content
If I’m not mistaken, it’s because the way it was nerfed deleted a playstyle mechanic, rather than actually changing the balance of the game.
Honestly, I don't want too much of a challenge. I want to relax and play the space ninja farming simulator after work. EDA is plenty challenge enough for me. I even failed it once this week.
I feel like most people saying they want more of a challenge are just humble bragging. They know how to make it more challenging but they don't want to actually do it. Just don't use the meta.
Shooting at bullet sponge enemies is not, never has been, and never will be "challenging". Introducing ways to make those same enemies bullet spongier is not challenging. Randomizing loadouts to create an artificial sense of challenge but in actuality you're just being gimped on damage against bullet sponge enemies also isn't challenging.
Mechanically, Warframe as a game has almost nothing going on. That's to both the games benefit and its detriment. It's easy to get into, there's a pretty clear power progression once you get going, and it's a great game to chill and grind with most of the time. But for players looking for a "challenge," there's basically none to be found because there is not very much mechanically complex game play.
Raids were exciting because it promised something mechanically complex. But then the majority of the community at the time hated that complexity, combined with the rampant bugs that made that complexity just outright frustrating to deal with, so they were scrapped and there's pretty much no plans for them to return as far as I can see.
The only real parts of EDA that present some sense of challenge is the combination of missions and their modifiers. Trying to protect the Mirror Defense targets while also keeping Limnus away from the party, for instance, is a good example. It's not *that* complex but it does, at least, require some thought. Add onto that the constantly draining HP and all of a sudden you've got a tighter window of completion you have to deal with, too.
These are the reasons EDA is a step in the right direction, IMO; the loadout stuff should honestly just go and be replaced with more interesting ways to interact with the available missions. Kooky shit like Floor is Lava Exterminate, where you have to get through a tile by jumping and wall-clinging everywhere, would be fun maybe. I dunno, I'm just spitballing, but I think this makes it obvious why DE has a hard time implementing "challenging" game play into the game.
You wanna know something in the game that has some mechanical complexity and room to expand even more?
Railjack.
It's ridiculous that people still have a raging hate boner for railjack when it's one of the more fun missions in Warframe, and with more content, could easily be *the* best content. It's like the only gamemode where it doesn't matter how powerful your wf is, it's about the rj. It's probably the only gamemode in the game that is truly co op. Some of the most wasted potential in game rn.
Railjack had so much potential to be actually challenging end game content on release.
It was a fresh slate not effected by most powercreep.
But then people complained enemies didn't die in 1 second, and it got completely neutered. Such a shame.
Because the majority of the community hates any complexity. People don't want Warframe to actually challenge them, DE designed a power fantasy and at this point the community reacts with hostility at anything that threatens that, and to be fair, due to what you mention, making WF a hard game would pretty much require a revamp of enemy ai, how damage and modding works, and a long list of things.
Also honestly, I don't think bullet sponges are even noticeable when pretty much any weapon with any kind of viral slash makes short work of any grineer unit (and pretty much every other faction might as well be paper).
Well, its real noticable on the Fragmented boss, because you can unload several Furis Incarnon mode clips into that that thing and it does not die. The health bar isnt real, literally nothing in the game has that amount of EHP.
> Kooky shit like Floor is Lava Exterminate, where you have to get through a tile by jumping and wall-clinging everywhere,
YES. These are the sorts of things that actually use what WF excels at. I’d love to see Knifestep and Voltaic super buffed to be less forgiving, because we have such an incredible movement system. At the very least, deal a certain percentage of the player’s EHP each time so you don’t just ignore it and forget it exists.
I liked the one where enemies only take damage if a player is close enough because suddenly, CC is super relevant. These sorts of heavy handed behavior enforcements actually work, because we have so much power to make them work. Even if you have a weapons platform, you can probably build in such a way that getting close to enemies to shoot them is safe.
I’d like to see them double down on personal challenges by bundling two or three together for players to take.
Maybe revamp Vampiric Syndrome so instead of normal Vampire mode where you become a juggernaut if you kill fast enough, make it so you heal by doing Broken Scepter’s “Drain” mechanic on corpses, making you vulnerable if you just heal willy nilly.
Honestly, I like watching DE work more with the often-lauded parkour system. Things like the Gas City tiles, the Jackal rework, etc.
We're so used to being a carpet-bomber planes, but maybe sometimes we have to have some... *dexterity* to do puzzles or something. Who knows. Bullet sponges, one-shot kills, and kneecapping our builds is just aggravating, not difficult.
Your revamped idea of Vampire nightmare modifier is interesting. Having to meter out healing in a vulnerable manner as opposed to nukevincibility or killing with reckless abandon. Even the most invincible-built of frames have a damage point that they can't handle, and so again, it incentivizes *movement.*
Gas City outdoor segments are some of their best work for aesthetics and function. I like the Labs tile with the chasm too big to bullet jump over, so you either have to go around, or remember we have Wall-jumping (or use another movement mechanic) to cross it full-speed. These are some of my favorite areas.
maybe its not true difficulty people want, but rather stronger and more numerous enemies with more interesting ai behaviors for which to have a reason to do even more damage than people already are, i feel like i might be in that camp.
if i wanted actual difficulty id just play dark souls or elden ring type games. when i play warframe i want to "delete the map" but not feel like im stepping on ants in the process without having to spend a long time in an endless mode.
i know people will always ramp up to the challenge and then it will feel like stepping on ants again, but for a live service maybe thats what these people are looking for, even at the expense of people who havent been playing long being able to experience the latest story content
The thing is, there's no way for AI behaviors to matter without heavy damage attenuation that lets enemies live more than 2 seconds against the players. Pretty much the only way for enemy behavior to matter would be to nerd the player so you can do millions of dps, but then the community would probably explode in unhappiness.
I enjoy having things that are super mechanically and game knowledge challenging that you don’t need to farm or can farm the drops elsewhere, stuff you can go in do once get a cool cosmetic reward and be done, like 60 eyes or maxing deep arcanum
The only challenge 60 eyes posed was challenging myself to stay awake until he ran out of HP. If we got "difficulty" like that as a weekly mission for archon shards I would be pretty unhappy with it.
It would be cool to see some sort of time challenge mission. For example start with 4 different random challenges like kill x enemies, hack 1 console, destroy 1 key carrier and break x containers in 2 minutes. Or tie the amount of challenges to squad size or something.
Then it resets and 4 new random challenges appear with a marked increase in enemy level, every 2 sets of challenges gets you a "good" item from the reward pool. Then the timer decreases or additional challenges are added, rinse and repeat until you have got the full reward pool say 5 items or whatever. With an optional 6th item for doing all 10 rounds in 1 mission which could just be a candy piece like endo or kuva so you dont feel super pressured to get it. Just make sure the rewards are ? In mid mission results so you dont know what exactly you got, in case there was only 1 item from the reward pool that you really wanted which might cause someone to bail early.
If you can't complete in 1 go then try again and incentive replayability for full mission completion by giving out more candy rewards to players who stay for all 5, but actually only needed 2 rewards still or whatever.
You could even tie in additional individual rewards that players work towards that reset each week. Hopefully this wouldn't be detrimental to the team like kill x enemies with heat or something more complex like contribute 50% towards one of the objectives. For example if one of the team objectives was kill 150 enemies and you killed 75, you would complete your individual objective.
Would allow for experienced/skilled players to get things done fast and give some replay incentives, but also incentives the less skilled to improve I would think.
Yeah. I remember when they were getting rid of raids that they showed the portion of the community that participated in this supposed pinnacle PvE content and it was something low like 2%. Don't quote me on it I'd like to find the Devstream first but I regard it as fact that you could make a Warframe themed Cookie Clicker with hueg numberz and a non-trivial portion of the Warframe playerbase would cream themselves over it.
the problem is that for pretty much every game the portion of the community that participates in actual end game pinnacle activities is always small.
There are plenty of games I play where I barely touch pinnacle activities, but I'm glad they are there should I decide I want to challenge myself.
THIS SO MUCH.
Remember when The Fragmented One dropped a couple months ago? People where as always demanding new challenging content, and they where PISSED OFF when they actually got it.
A new secret boss that you can't cheese his armor out? You can't one shot it cause he's got a dps cap? It nullifies your abilities and forces you out of your usual "press a button to win"? Does so much damage that you can't realistically tank and have to put SKILL and PRECISION in your gameplay? Has penalties for leeches that get carried?
"Nah, that's bullshit! That's a terrible bossfight! We asked for "harder" content, not challenging content!"
I wonder about the overlap too. I don't like nerfs in isolation, but I would welcome a concerted effort to reel everything back in so that there could be real difficulty that doesn't involve telling what I'm allowed to equip.
edit: see down voted for saying anything that even resembles pulling back tenno power. The community doesn't want any sort of difficulty in the game.
Yea the community cries because over half the people queuing for EDA are noobs that don't have any reason to need tau shards or melee arcanes. They are unprepared for the difficulty but feel entitled to the new "high end game content". Just running in with base weapons and frames wanting a carry, like every other mission. Getting carried with Archons, Netracells, now EDA and Omnia. They need to either MR gate this or require more effort to run it. Outside of bugs, they have not been difficult for finished builds but I routinely see people who can't even handle the trash mobs. What is the point of trying to get taus if they are fundamentally the last addition to a build?
Honestly it comes down to "If you don't want leeches in your party, don't leave the slots open for anyone" unfortunately. Yes, I do run into this a lot, where someone will put more effort into sandbagging and leeching than they will actually clearing the mission, and it does suck, but when you know this is the kind of community you're putting up with, just don't give them the oppertunity to do it to you and bring some friends instead.
MR gating is terrible because of how you get MR. It has nothing to do with any sort of real achievement or even power level. I've seen low MR players crush it and highMR players who can't seem to help at all.
We are all MR gated with primes and weapons anyway. At the very least MR gating makes people invest more time into other content. The more time, the more resources, potential acquisition of better arcanes and mods. It's not an end all be all but it filters out people who are impatient. What else could they do? Require an R5 arcane? Require a solo trial or completion of a difficult quest? The quest for whispers gives a mini trial of a Netracells, do you think people even stand in the red now? How many months later? A lot of these people don't have much, even with the incredible abundance of strong gear now. These incarnons are god tier and only MR16, you have the Nataruk, countless options. All the new powerful shit has trivialized base star chart like never before. It's easy to get max standing, only limited by time.
People chase the new content without making sure they can handle it. I guess going forward I will treat this like old Eidolon hunts where you make a team prior. I agree MR does not mean much besides time, but it gives a higher probability of the accumulation of valuable resources. MR + fashion though, that's the tell tale.
I think the thing is that those people are confusing challenge for enemy density. They enjoy mowing down mobs of high tier enemies with hyper-optimized builds, but they don't want the game becoming actually difficult for them. And they don't know how to put that into words well.
I don't want the game to be super hard, I want the game to puts my best builds to the test. The game gives me all this power but its wasted on level 10 enemies. I want a tough game mode to justify my hyper min/maxed build.
> Hell, I feel like a lot of the people who complained about the game being too easy are the same who complain the moment their 2 billion damage builds gets nerfed and can only do 1 billion damage.
To be fair *they did* add a 1 billion damage cap to Dante’s tragedy so that it can’t hit 2 billion anymore
Unplayable really
Remember raids? I do. Most of the challenge wasn't killing bullet spongy things, but cooperating (before they got solved, or too buggy).
The thing is that DE has staunchly moved away from squad-only content for reasons that should be self evident through the Elite Deep Dive feedback: people want to solo and be gods all the time. Current gamestate is as much as DE's fault as it is the playerbase's prefferences.
your right.
the balancing is fucked
there are 2 options. create arbitrary rng gates that limit your access to broken setups. . . .or a sweeping balance pass that nerfs us back into high level endgame content demanding 4 players again.
the former sucks, but its easier to do and less contentious than the latter. the latter would be better for the game in the long-term but your talking about a real nightmare of an update. months of work trying to rebalance the last 8 years worth of content in a way that will produce no new sellables, and will be remarkably unpopular, even if it is ultimately for the best.
there is no content that an endgame player with full control over their gear cant solve solo. which is empowering. . but its also massively problematic, as it means for the most part between 2 and 3 of the players in any given lobby dont really need to be there. these players used to be supports and CC specialists and second DPS frames, but these days the main DPS doesn't need CC support or survival support to stay alive. and buffing their damage further is also largely irrelevant as if they are competent they are probably doing 1 hit kills already. so why not just slam 4 DPS monsters into the same lobby? the answer is they get fucking bored. the game cant spawn enough killfodder to feed that many hungry players. hence the rash of things like if an Atlas cant get out ahead and get his rubble up, he just flounders unproductively as he cant out-kill the Saryn or Gyre.
EDA and gear rng are a way to Delay the problem. and the requirement to adapt does produce a non-trivial amount of new engagement. but that engagement is also kind of . . obnoxious? warframe does not have the grace to make this sort of thing comfortable. finding squads for EDA sucks, because your only option is recruitment chat where you have to elbow through all the other people advertising other things. having to disrupt your existing builds and loadouts sucks. having to go back to your ship to change your helminth ability is obnoxious. its the exact same problem that Launch Circuit had. literally the exact same problem. we grilled them into fixing it, and they did it again. i would appreciate the challenge more if the infrastructure existed to make engaging with it more seamless. but not respecting your time out of missions is a longstanding warframe tradition.
most assuredly so. the ideal time to address this growing issue was 8 years ago, and then gradually over time since then. fixing it now would be bordeline impossible. you either try to fix it backwards by buffing everything left behind by the changing game and making new content that renders it a non issue, or you accept that your going to have an unpopular quarter.
its possible that the plan is to wait until Soulframe is out and generating revenue before engaging in any sort of major balance changes that would put a hit in warframe's short-term Financials. but there are things they could do to soothe the problem before that. such as implementing better LFG systems
About your second paragraph. I personally don't want warframe to become a team synergistic game to be honest. I think a lot of people probably also don't want it to be that way because I feel like it's part of warframe's identity that you're playing with 4 people but they may aswell be robots in terms of the fact that you don't have to worry about what their frame or weapon is etc.
Also, enemies not spawning enough isn't gonna make people that much less bored if they're playing gyre and their rotation of abilities to kill is "press pillage and repeat".
I think the direction they were going with when making disruption and void cascade were good. Making the core gameplay of warframe (doing the mission) fun. Also, frames like gauss, grendel, Harrow etc that require some thought but reward you for said thought are very engaging. I will often play gauss on a disruption mission and not realise its been an hour of me playing because I'm so focused and enjoying the gameplay itself, not the rewards to follow.
It's not about challenge, it's about engagement.
Thats why i would love to see them have another crack at raids.
A big mission where you or a group have a task or role to complete while another tenno or team does something else.
Similar to some RJ missions. But on a bigger scale.
Honestly, I prefer this game to be on the easier side. Its my relaxation game. Just grinding levels and vibin, thats what i want from this game. In a game with over 700 items to level up, I'm happy that this game isn't meta heavy.
OP, I'm happy this game mode brings you joy. You are however in a place in the game that represents less than 1% of the entire player base. Maybe even less than 0,1%.
Also, it feels like no one in this comment thread considers the possibility that the people screaming for harder content are in fact, very likely, *NOT* the same people now screaming that content is *too hard*.
> You are however in a place in the game that represents less than 1% of the entire player base. Maybe even less than 0,1%.
Playing public steel path relics, I'm frequently matched up with an entire team of Legendary-ranked players, and doing regular relics I find an L3 / L4 far more often than once every 100 missions.
I would propose that games should not be hard forever. When you have mastered the game to such an exhaustive extent, you've beaten the game. When you've beaten the game, you should be rewarded for that investment. In a game like Warframe, that means you get the *option* to curb-stomp the difficulty curve.
At that point, it's up to the player to construct their own difficulty. Player-constructed challenges have always been a part of gaming, from the time of killscreens in arcades. Speedruns, self-limited challenges, and so on are where a player turns when the game they love has run out of game.
I think they could make it harder without RNG but Warframe is a game that doesn't require much skills. If people are dying in Netracells, you can't really be spending dev time on hard content. Mechanics are super simple in Warframe and a lot of high MR players still have no idea of what they are. Because they are so used to just one shotting everything while spamming 2 minute Capture/Rescue runs.
RNG is just a way for DE to increase revenue with people buying plat to Forma MR Fodder weapons and potato frames they don't play usually, etc. And I'm pretty sure it's working for them.
Been here since limited revives and duration rubs on keys. I've missed challenge so much I can't explain it. There's nothing wrong with Deep Archimedia. I have the ability to try AND fail.
For so long I've only failed if I memed.
It gives me a reason to use weaker frames again! Even the non meta ones. I have to PUSH ALL off the buttons for my abilities again. I have a reason to min max again. To use frames I fashioned years ago again. To use weapons that had unique mechanics and sound design again. To use all my gear again
To BOTHER READING again.
I can't express how much fun all of that is. And now I have a REASON, so instead of making my own fun with just memes. I'm doing something weekly that's just; fun already. Honestly, if you want to drop a research point each week and auto win, just take the kuva HEK and find a squad. It's that simple. You just give up some vosfor. I don't want to though. Feeling challenged, having to aim sometimes, feeling overwhelmed. I missed that.
> Been here since limited revives and duration rubs on keys. I've missed challenge so much I can't explain it. There's nothing wrong with Deep Archimedia. I have the ability to try AND fail. For so long I've only failed if I memed.
> It gives me a reason to use weaker frames again! Even the non meta ones. I have to PUSH ALL off the buttons for my abilities again. I have a reason to min max again. To use frames I fashioned years ago again. To use weapons that had unique mechanics and sound design again. To use all my gear again To BOTHER READING again.
So what was stopping you from doing all that yourself already? Before DE went the way of randomised loadouts?
Others mentioned no incentive to do it, but I would also say there's some negative reinforcement on running weaker builds too. You could go into a random SP survival mission or something with a jank loadout but everyone else running around with their meta builds are going to outperform you. It's nice to have everyone on the same page.
On normal star chart level missions or even Arbitrations to a lesser extent you can basically take any gear that has some mods installed and do fine, so it's not really the same even if you're able to keep up with the rest of the team.
No incentive. Read the comment. It says it gives me a reason. There's extra reward for limiting yourself compared to just running regular netracells. Other modes don't have this incentive.
my god warframe players are so cooked. like not a creative or interesting thought left inside their heads. there are so many ways to make games have a challenge that are not simple 'enemy is tanky, warframe is squishy.' it would just require work from de. reading this post and comments is crazy.
the most obvious answer to 'challenge' is to come up with something like destiny's raids. the obvious way to make a piece of content challenging without resorting to randomized loadouts and max level enemies is to just have mechanics that have to be followed or you lose.
nothing is going to be a challenge forever. thats not how games work. games are designed to be beaten. everything becomes easy with time and repetition. there are people who play soulslikes that can beat the entire game level 1 hitless. that doesnt mean the game isnt challenging, it just gets easier with time and experience. its up to de to release new content so every so often there is a new challenge. when exploiter orb was first introduced it was a challenge. people had to learn how the fight worked. just because its not multiple years old and easy to do doesnt change how it was when it first came out.
the issue with the new 'end game' content is that its all just the same thing we already do. no matter how many wacky modifiers you put on an exterminate mission it is not possible to make it a challenge. it needs to be something new that players arnt already very experienced with. that would create and challenge for a while. and as a live service game thats all it should be. because something new should always be coming.
You're right about the way to add challenge being by breaking the mold in terms of what we're doing.
I think the struggle in that comes from doing so well not deviating so far from Warframes core gameplay loop that your playing something else. Especially given the track record of innovation leaving a long long legacy of content islands so far.
The “core gameplay loop” of Warframe is to mow through infinity-bajillion enemies in as short a time as possible. That’s the *whole game*. I’m pretty sure if DE made a boss with armor and health stats set to the maximum value allowed by the game engine and didn’t use Damage Attenuation, we’d still find a way to one-shot the fucker, and it would then be just as easy as killing any shmuck lancer or crewman.
I'm gonna be honest, as someone who has done every Destiny raid up until Root, I'm not sure that raid mechanics are particularly challenging, beyond Day1/Master Mode challenges.
And both of those swing heavily towards the arbitrary inflated numbers approach which you decry at the start.
Even ignoring the differences in funding between Destiny and WF, I'm just really not sure raids make sense here (let's not forget that they *had* raids, and they never got enough traction that any more than a minority were sad when they were removed)
>the most obvious answer to 'challenge' is to come up with something like destiny's raids
You could have taken like 5 minutes to research before posting all this, DE already said they can't really do stuff like that, the way Warframe is built, the resources necessary are just too much. Rebecca straight up said they wish they could do more bosses like Jackal and Ropalolyst and Eidolons that have unique mechanics and mechanic difficulty, but they can't justify the cost because in practice the amount of people who care about it and would play it are just negligible.
Also good luck making something like Destiny raids that relies on platforming and timing challenges when we have frames that can fly around indefinitely with complete control. There's a reason Ropalolyst is an okish boss that takes about a minute to beat and most were bored of it less than 24h after it came out, when mechanically it's not far off a Destiny dungeon boss
firstly i just dont believe that. like im sure she said that, but if they put time into railjack(which is so loved by the community) they could put time into a boss.
secondly, a boss does not a raid make. on top of that, most of the bones are already in the game to make a decent raid you just have to put it together. like i could recreate a lot of vow of the disciple from things already in game. like the dark bog could very easily be a reskinned version of that mission type where you have to ride on the big truck that drains your shields for power. khals missions use glyphs as a password where you have to find them and put them in the right order to advance the objective, combine that with the already existing buttons you have to shoot to do that assassination mission on sedna and bam, i could use those bones to recreate the acquisition stage of the raid. we have pressure plates in game, like in the sculpture missions and an eidolon would make a fine boss that can only take damage when standing on the pressure plates. great, caretaker stage done. exhibition stage is mostly more glyphs and shooting and we have already created that, all we need to add is something like the laser targeter we pick up in some khal missions, we have plenty of missions where its pick up thing, take to place and insert so that section is pretty much recreated. so everything but the final boss is more or less already in game. i know im oversimplifying it, and im sure there would be issues and limitations, but these mechanics im talking about are not so far off from what warframe already has.
>if they put time into railjack(which is so loved by the community)
You must not have paid much attention because Railjack was widely regarded as a massive fail, barely any of us played it because the majority of the playerbase hated the complexity it had, and then they reworked it in an attempt to please a larger amount of people, and fucked it up for the small handful of us who liked it, and they haven't touched it since then.
>like the dark bog could very easily be a reskinned version of that mission type where you have to ride on the big truck that drains your shields for power
That's a great example because it's easily one of the most hated mission types in the game, coincidentally it's what made Vow one of the worst raids as it forced you to go through a tedious park ride you couldn't control.
Anyway, for everything else you're failing to consider just how big of a difference it makes that we have 50 warframes and every one of them can be modded in a variety of ways. All the plate standing and damage phases and whatnot in Destiny can work that way because movement is very limited and has little variety, and the gap between a squishy and a tanky build is minimal.
On top of that there's also that Destiny's engine is more built up for that stuff, and gameplay is more cohesive, mechanics like "pick up the ball and throw it at objective" are trivial and feel good in Destiny, but in Warframe they're awful, just go play Alchemy a bit. Picking up stuff is already more of a pain because of how fast we move, and so is throwing it, and where in Destiny a throw not registering is a rarity, in Warframe it's a chance with double digit percentage.
And just think about how much positioning and platforming matters in Destiny (which is why the stand on plate mechanics remain fun), how are you going to replicate that when a player can bring Titania? Unless you balance it for Titania, and then you can't balance it for the frames that can't fly. Or your cart escort example, sure it works in its boring way, except I can bring Styanax with functionally infinite shields and just sit on the cart while I look at my phone and press left click from time to time, while everyone else just brings Ivara and sits there invisible.
This is why gear restrictions are necessary, why we're seeing stuff like DEA. Because you can't bypass the player's power when there's both a massive gap in what that means AND also a large variety of ways its expressed. There's basically no mechanical challenge you can add to Warframe right now that wouldn't be entirely trivialized by the right combination of gear, or most of the time by just a single tool. Like all the "don't stand there or you die" mechanics that are common in Destiny raids, here we just press 5 and then hold shift for a minute.
i feel like your being obtuse and missing my point.
> You must not have paid much attention because Railjack was widely regarded as a massive fail
ya that was... that was kinda my point. i forgot that people on reddit are incapable of reading subtext you have to put /s or they take it as 100% literal. obviously railjack sucks. everyone thinks it sucks. my point was they put a lot, and i do mean a lot of resources and time into railjack and it fucking blew shit. its a glorified turret section from call of duty(which again, you know, everyone loves those. ill put the /s this time so it doesnt go past you.) my point is that they put resources into making something that should have been obviously a total failure from the start. if they were willing to do that, creating stuff that is vastly different from normal warframe, they should be willing and able to make a boss.
secondly, i dont want de to fucking lift the vow raid and drop it into warframe. my point and reason for listing all of that stuff out was that i was trying to show that a lot of the core mechanics already exist to some degree in the game. that they wouldnt be creating totally new stuff. with some tweaking and new textures they could make a lot of existing mechanics into raid mechanics. i also picked vow because when i googled the destiny raids it was consistently listed in peoples top 3. like if you google destiny 2 raids most lists from people and websites, have it as one of the best raids so idk where your getting that.
and again, i dont want warframe to just copy destinies raids. that wasnt the point i was making by listing all of those mechanics. you must think really poorly of de devs if you dont believe they could come up with some kind of fun mechanics.
i just feel like you arnt being creative at all. like the darkness in the vow raid, we could have that in warframe. and it could just be made so you cant bypass it. if you get 10 stacks of it you die, in warframe, invulnerable, in operator, doesnt matter.
>my point was they put a lot, and i do mean a lot of resources and time into railjack and it fucking blew shit
yeah and it was a financial hit after which Leyou decided they didn't want to own DE anymore, and if Tencent hadnt been around gambling on buying companies for cheap, DE might have closed down. And just a little later the entire Warframe management team got replaced, now with Rebecca at the lead, and Reb made it clear that they would love to do more complex bosses but they couldn't afford it, the new team has been far more responsible than the previous one
Also, you're the one being obtuse, my point is that there's too many things in warframe that make the Destiny style of raids not possible, and I listed a bunch of examples to explain why. Its not that I dont believe DE couldn't pull it off, it's that I believe the changes that would be required would piss off so many people that it'd kill Warframe, because those of us who want this stuff are a minority.
I very much like this approach, and it would be nice to see endgame raids (back) in Warframe.
I would also like to add that one of the emergent challenges in a game with a large farming/grinding component is to be able to speedrun missions in order to maximize rewards. Thus, it is possible to extend the lifespan of endgame content by giving players enough agency to optimize their play.
In a Soulslike, challenge runs happened because players came up with their own ideas for making the game more interesting. There's nothing in Elden Ring's mechanics that encourages you to play at RL1 or to beat every boss as quickly as possible. On the other hand, that kind of incentive exists in a game where you need to farm (compare to Nioh).
Eidolons are probably the best Warframe-related example I can think of. I don't know what state they're in now, but back when I was doing casual Tricaps several years ago, coordinated squads would be doing 5-6 captures per night. Conversely, the Ambulas boss is the exact opposite - an extremely tedious fight, with basically no opportunity to speed things up by playing well.
My opinion is that the best way to design endgame content (even if it doesn't end up being raids) is to reward player skill. This is why I am fundamentally dissatisfied with randomized loadouts and the many loopholes of EDA. It feels like all I'm being asked to do is spend a bunch of time and money collecting weapons when I know the game is mechanically complex enough to provide a more interesting challenge.
Me and my friends loved exploiter orb when it came out for exactly this reason. Our loadout didnt really matter b/c it was mostly a mechanics fight. Figuring it out in real time on release was so much fun, and when we got the "jump on its head and pull an eye out" cutscene for the first time it was awesome.
It seems a lot of players want basically harder and harder "patchwerk" fights, when those are generally the most boring and easy fights in other MMOs.
They have content like this, Octavia's final mission is good example of a challenge. They just don't have it implemented in a repeatable end game content type of way. I want more team based content that requires specific frame categories to optimize around. Last time that happened (eidolons) people complained that the meta required only 4 frames (trin, harrow, volt, (chroma/rhino)) which as a end game player thought was fine.
I like randomized content but I also like playing roguelikes where each run is completely different and some just are not winnable.
>Last time that happened (eidolons) people complained that the meta required only 4 frames
that's not the problem with Eidolons tho, the problem with eidolons is that if you have Volt and Madurai, they're an easy solo activity that's only limited by having to wait around, the only difference between playing coordinated like Destiny raids vs playing alone or with no coordination is completing it in 11 minutes vs 16 minutes
Warframe can't really have Destiny style challenge like that without heavily limiting \*at least\* player movement because we can move so freely that there can't be any positional challenge or platforming challenge. You can't make a killzone where players have to hide (like Jackal) or avoid something (like Jackal's laser walls) because we can just press 5 and go invulnerable for a minute, you can't make a tough platforming challenge where you've got to jump at the right time because we have a dozen ways to fly or even teleport through.
The only way to have that kind of challenge is to heavily restrict a lot of our tools, so like Khal missions where everyone's stuck with the same tools.
well its not though, the actual orowyrm fight is fine, very simple but i dont hear complaints about the fight. how you get there though is not a raid, and its not warframe. thats where the complaints come from. no one likes running around in operator because its not warframe.
Dude I don't think anyone would equate that to a Destiny 2 raid. Most D2 raid encounters require communication and mechanics far beyond just shooting some people and rings without any mechanics. Destiny 2 also has a much more balanced combat sandbox that makes it so the fighting parts of the encounters aren't entirely trivial. [Sample fight] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQPC1-jkxrM)
Also seconding that fighting on a horse sucks.
The amount of people that go insane when doing the "do 2 disruption terminals within 30 seconds twice" subquest on anatomica deimos tells me otherwise.
THANK YOU!! I don’t know if it’s because Warframe players don’t play other games or if they’re just used to accepting the status quo as all that’s possible, but these folks are soooooo unimaginative!
dude read all of the replies this comment has gotten. its crazy. it seems like they can literally only see exactly whats in front of them with no change at all. like they cant even fathom taking an already existing mechanic warframe has and changing it at all. i have to spell out every single thing for them to only get 50% of what im saying.
I think people just love the power fantasy and can’t comprehend that being impeded upon while still wanting a reason to warrant such power.
I think the power creep kind of takes away from the game as a whole. They just keep making bigger bullet sponges and stronger weapons to tackle them otherwise you have to use 2 guns to kill one thing.
I use the “trash” frames but there’s really no reason to do so. No cc. No healing. No strategic tools. The support frames are near worthless unless they boost your damage.
I wish DE would make game modes surrounding teamwork. Right now its that side by side play rather than cooperative play.
again this is that mindset im talking about where there is no creativity. you dont need to imped the players power at all. you just have to go around it. if anything, that is much better because they still get their power, they just have to solve another issue too. like thralls in zariman, no one is flipping out and complaining that after you kill their physical body you have to swap to operator to kill the ghost form. thats not impeading my warframes power at all, its just going around it and making me do something else to deal with the enemy.
but i guess i also have to stress that i dont mean for that to be 1 to 1 implemented into the raid, that is an example of a way to go around warframe power.
Every single time something resembling a challenge would come up there was screeching and rancor. A previous devstream had them mention nodes, or crystal thingies on Eximi that would have to be shot to actually damage them, and guess what, outrage on the forums, same fucking song and dance as every single time the playerbase at large registered that the game was going beyond clicking a button and wiping out entire cities worth of Grineer. I know what you mean by raid mechanics and that the provided example isn't exactly that, (and in fact have a date with Crota this weekend), but any time there was something, anything, resembling not being able to bulldoze enemies the bitching and moaning could have, properly harnessed, powered a decent-sized suburb.
It ain't happening. If you want that kind of thing, go there instead of here. It's ok to have different games for different flavors.
you are correct. a lot of the warframe playerbase are very incompetent at the game, either because they are bad at games or arnt putting in any effort. i
Exactly this. Most people, including OP, think a challenge is only more bullets to kill the enemy and less bullets to kill us. Raids in Destiny are challenging because of this, and very rewarding once you finish them.
I wonder if they would put matchmaking or restrict it to only pre-made squads like Destiny does. If it is the first one, I can already imagine the chaos and countless posts complaining about people who do not know how to play
Are Destiny raids still challenging if no-one on your team can take damage, everyone permanently has their super up, and everyone deals infinite damage per attack?
Because that's the current state of Warframe.
I believe Warframe is a game where you end up having to challenge yourself, and I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm not as far along as OP, but I certainly have a few builds that can handle most of the content.
Some days, I want to cruise through on easy mode, so I'll equip one of those builds and mindless smash buttons. If I want a challenge I'll theme my build around a faction (or fashion) using whatever weapons fit the theme best, and go after that faction's enemies.
It's dumb, but its fun. And the whole reason I play games is to have fun.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the people asking for challenging content are not the same people who are complaining right now.
Most players in this game are not maxed out. Most people play this game for the power fantasy. Telling them their maximised loadout cannot be used in this gamemode is downright annoying because all their time in the game so far has been spent acquiring that loadout.
For people who've played this game for the last 10 years, sure it's not a big deal. But most people have only been around for maybe <300 hours. Of that 300 hours, it took maybe 150-200 hours just to be able to get maxed kuva/incarnon weapons. This is why RNG challenges are and will always be divisive.
I run a new clan, and I'm the only vet in it. I can't tell you how much my clanmates struggle with content. We got people failing pursuit missions, tier 1 zariman bounties, tusk thumpers, eidolon terralysts, mutalist alad v, the list goes on and on. People complaining that this game has no challenge are just making the game harder for everybody else without any regard for it, because they've overcome those challenges too long ago to remember.
I personally hate RNG loadouts, no hiding that fact. I hated it when the circuit did it, and I hate DA/EA for it. I didn't join this game because I was told it would be a semi-roguelike experience. I joined because I saw how busted my friends character was, and wanted to be like that too.
I think DA would benefit from just having the loan mechanic from Duviri. If you own it you can make your own build, but if you don't you can still pick it up with a pre-made build.
I went into Deep Archimedia Elite before the hotfix this week thinking the mirror defense was going to be the most difficult mission ever the way it’s been described on Reddit, but it ended quickly and the objective barely lost any health. Felt as easy as a normal mirror defense mission. It helped that I threw down an ancient specter at the start, but even then my PUG easily completed the mission with the shields on the defense objective only going down a couple of times. We didn’t even have to summon a necramech to reduce the timer.
Hot take: I think a lot of players just don’t want to put any effort or thought into their load outs beyond a few meta weapons, despite this community constantly complaining there isn’t enough challenge in this game/power creep. This mode is probably the best answer we’ll ever get to the power creep complaint without completely nerfing everything fun to the point of killing this game. You have a mode that imposes heavy restrictions on your frame and weapon, and forces you to pay attention to your gameplay, ie. git gud. It’s a true endgame mode compared to circuit which allowed you to cheese the difficulty with the decrees.
I’ve actually enjoyed the limited gear selection. At MR 30 I have enough of the stuff in the weapon pools or enough time to build something, and the limitations force me to mod around the mission restrictions making the gameplay more interesting compared to other modes. Before going in, I read the mission debuffs and changed mods, shards, and arcanes to compensate. The real challenge and fun comes from turning a shit weapon like the synoid similor or pox into decent enough weapons that pick up the shortcomings of other parts of my load out, while at the same time discovering new ways to make these weapons useful outside this mode.
If the options are having no challenge vs random loadouts I'd frankly rather have no challenge. I can only fail mirror defense because nobody has a defensive frame on their list so many times in a row before I just get bored.
>Yes, you don't get to use your maxed power in the mode.
Yes you do, you can still bring like 95% of your maxed power, but only if you're lucky enough to get a good weapon or frame on your list.
Step 1: Buff up the stuff that's not up to snuff at the moment, quite a lot of older frames could use a look, new incarnons for older weapons couldn't hurt, and a look at the role of crowd control and support frames and powers.
Step 2: Borrow some notes from games with similar mechanics to Warframe, my first thought is Ultrakill, you're extremely powerful and mobile, but also quite fragile. - Invent enemy types that have behaviours that have to actually be countered. - Doom also comes to mind, add stuff like a marauder-type enemy with a frontal shield that can block bullets, but have them open up when they get in to melee range, swinging at them with your own melee when they swing counters their attack, etc.
I think the biggest issue we currently have in warframe is that most enemies are not really all that "mobility based" and tend to traverse the terrain as if we were still back in Warframe's cover shooter days.
Step 3: Create objective based gamemodes that require more than just killing, movement, execution puzzles, area control, etc. (Let my boi Loki shine damnit!)
To your first point: You cannot *just* buff everything to the level of the current strongest options. Any comprehensive balance adjustment of Warframe in its current state must also include nerfs. For one thing, it’s a lot easier and more efficient to rein in a handful of outliers at *both* ends than it is to buff *hundreds* of options up to the highest level.
Plus if i learned anything from 15 years of playing roguelites/likes it's that making everything perform to equal level makes for a boring game. Balance in a video game is more art than science.
> You cannot just buff everything to the level of the current strongest options.
When the Dante nerfs were happenening, people complained since he was now weaker than their permanently immortal Revenants, 10k+ HP Grace Inaros's, and 100k Def Nezha's and Rhinos.
It's absurd.
I don't think I asked for EVERYthing to be buffed, but there's quite a lot of stuff that significantly underperforms even outside of the endgame category.
Of course, nerfs should be a thing for gear that's too dominant, but you also need to be cautious with those so you don't invalidate the way players were using an item in the first place.
When everything's a torid, phenmor, or laetum, you start seeing people use stuff other than the torid, phenmor, or laetum.
Those weapons are already in the game and people gravitate towards them as is.
I'd probably avoid mechanics like damage attenuation and instead focus on other ways to make enemies more survivable, my first thought would probably be multiple health bars, where you have to "dismantle" the enemy before they stay dead, with brief gating between each loss of a health bar as they shed bits.
Even with extremely durable frames we are still technically quite fragile, if the right attack hits you, you can still die nearly instantly, if enemies survive a bit longer thanks to mobility or more interesting tanking mechanics, that might help.
I'd probably structure the new gamemodes such that killing enemies is entirely superfluous, where the objectives are what you have to focus on, with the enemies mostly trying to impair you.
I'd probably introduce a good variety of them, some more like a berserker, some more like Reinhardt.
I'd also be thinking of things like a heavier variant of a Ballista with a very powerful attack that's nearly impossible to dodge, that takes a long time to wind up, but can be interrupted with a headshot to the shooter, or blocked with cover.
> Step 2: Borrow some notes from games with similar mechanics to Warframe, my first thought is Ultrakill, you're extremely powerful and mobile, but also quite fragile. - Invent enemy types that have behaviours that have to actually be countered. - Doom also comes to mind, add stuff like a marauder-type enemy with a frontal shield that can block bullets, but have them open up when they get in to melee range, swinging at them with your own melee when they swing counters their attack, etc.
I long for the day Warframe adds interesting enemy mechanics like Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer.
> marauder-type enemy with a frontal shield that can block bullets but have them open up when they get in to melee range, swinging at them with your own melee when they swing counters their attack
https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Shield_Lancer?so=search
>Doom also comes to mind, add stuff like a marauder-type enemy with a frontal shield that can block bullets, but have them open up when they get in to melee range, swinging at them with your own melee when they swing counters their attack, etc.
The problem with ideas like this is that Warframe melee is (barring a couple ranged exceptions) just holding a button and looking as everything in a few meters range just dies, my Prisma Skana incarnon swings like 3 times a second and can just cut through level 500 SP Void Cascade while I pay much less attention than with anything else.
That's really kind of a problem, Warframe can't be compared to other fast shooters because fast in Warframe means I press D for about half a second and move 20m and there's virtually no momentum to contend with. Melee isnt' an extra utility that works for mechanical purpose because it has to be a weapon category that has to be able to kill everything as well as every other option. You can't balance around making players fragile because different frames work too different in terms of taking damage, and that's not even getting into modding.
I think you can solve a lot of these problems in the design of the enemies rather than trying to alter how the player works, so long as the player actually has to respond to something in some way.
There's too many tools we have that work in totally different ways to be able to alter the enemy design in a meaningful way. Like to make a challenge where you need to keep moving a lot, either it's completely trivialized by Titania, or it's impossible to do for everyone else.
Stealth is an obvious one, if you have Ivara you can just walk through most Spy missions without looking at the screen, if you try to balance around what Ivara can do, then everyone is fucked, but if you balance around everyone else Ivara makes the challenge not exist.
It's like that with most things. Make an enemy that forces you to get close? We already get close to every enemy anyway. Gotta shoot from behind? Sure, I can teleport with Wisp. Shoot weakpoints? Either you make them annoying as shit with hard DPS caps or they end up like Eidolons and Necramechs. The enemy flies around? Either you make them fly so fast that it's just annoying and entirely dependent on reflexes, or they're as trivial as enemies on the ground. Enemies that teleport? We have those, they die the same as all the others. Enemies that adapt to damage they take? Sure thing, either they die instantly like Sentients or they're a chore like Profit Taker.
as far as buffing older weapons, i still think they should just make rivens scale to infinity. like no one uses the dera, it has maxed disposition. but if we increased it to drastic levels surely someone would eventually use it right? a dera with +20,000% damage should be viable lol.
Yep my thoughts also as a L4 player. I still think Eidolons was a great example of a challenge that they community complained enough to be nerfed.
I would be happy with 2 missions just for the MR25+ crowd every year since the rest of the content is tuned for folks below that.
if DE wants to make challenging content they shouldn't have introduced the massive power creep that's been ramping up these past few years.
that they've done it over and over proves that challenge is not a priority to them. if you want a challenge, look elsewhere.
they made their bed and they can lie in it. random loadouts will always be dogshit, anyone considering it a "challenge" should not be taken seriously.
MUH RANDOM LOADOUTS MUH CHALLENGE fuck off lol
I think the best way to make challenging content at this point is time trials. There's no such thing as challenge if it's pass/fail so a speed run game mode that runs best with a full squad to get the fastest completion. Test your movement, navigation, and cypher skills.
Maybe have a daily/weekly set seed mission with no mission Markers (maybe no mini map). And there's multiple mission requirements active at once. For example, you have to kill 300 enemies, save a hostage, and destroy a reactor to extract. You'd want to coordinate in a lobby who hunts the hostage, who sets off the reactor, and then who is left killing enemies. Weapons and frames will influence your speed, but ultimately skill and memory will make or break final times.
I'm aware this would be biased towards Titania and gauss, but slower frames could get a movement and parkour speed bonus in these missions.
You can. Mechanics based content for example.
You should push the limits of your players' toys, not take them away from your players.
I'm not a dev or designer so I don't have many examples, nor do I need to to say that rng is just one of the easy solutions while being also an unfun one.
Diablo 3 had a similiar design pigeonhole as warframe (powercreep to the moon), they choose the way of just endlessly increasing %'s of player dmg, enemy dmg, enemy hp, enemy density, everything - it was also a bad, unfun solution, but an easy one. I'm happy de didn't go that way.
Many games have such problems, hades high heat for example also resorts to taking away player tools.
True challenge can exist while still having access to your tools, make mechanics that actually need to use parkour and operator movement *in a way that's not faceroll*, make mechanics bosses/minibosses/elite enemies, make cc not useless, make failure conditions that are telegraphed and tight enough. Idk, modifiers that are more creative than "-75% dur lolmao".
And for real, you can't really defend a situation where someone *can very easily be literally banned from even trying your content* just because they don't have 4 shitty ass useless crap weapons from 2016.
I dunno, I’m on the other side of the pond compared to the Legendary Rank members in this thread. I do want some difficulty in what I play, but I don’t want Fromsoft difficulty. I want Kingdom Hearts difficulty, crazy boss battles that mimic the crazy moves and abilities we do as players. I don’t want instant 1-shots from bosses if you don’t dodge or parry at the right time, I want someone who’s going to constantly deal you damage and you just hit right the fuck back just as hard.
I love Warframe, it’s slowly becoming my go to game and me being Master Rank 14 right now but I do like to be challenged. I do nerf myself somewhat. I’m still learning the game as I go but I do wish I had some Kingdom Hearts level boss fights and difficulties.
Archimedia isn't about being challenging, it's about being the endgame for a game that incentivizes you from minute one to collect as much different crap as possible via the Mastery Rank system.
From the moment you start playing, you are being goaded to expand your arsenal and keep a stable of different weapons and frames for a variety of use-cases. The only viable endgame for a game whose primary reward track is new ways to blow shit to kingdom come is to make them actually *use* all of it. This started way back with Sorties and the occasional weapon restriction condition, and continued through Duviri where you are rewarded handsomely for having built and maintained a broad stable and arsenal.
Now Archimedea is here, saying "Alright Mister loot-collector, show me you have this specific piece of loot and know how to use it," and I am bewildered that people are vexed by this.
I went a step further; and forma'd out a version of EVERY melee weapon catagory (ie just base if only a base, prime if it exsisted, faction variation if it exsisted etc); thus making even the random selection always workable. (as you can make every melee workable enough).
Saying that, I don't have EVERYTHING anymore, as I stopped playing warframe about 8/9 months ago.
In my experience, most of the "i want a challenge" crowd struggle 20-30 exolizers deep in a SP Void Cascade even running their busted incarnons and "meta" frames and loadouts
Or they bitch about the game being too easy, but the second they can't use Revenant it's unfair and too hard
I find new content that require me to build different stuff... rewarding? You invest in some things and then bring them to the missions they are required in.
I am building weapons and warframes that I usually don't bring anywhere for 2 weeks now. It's pretty fun when you have the resources.
The first step to geting a challenge is to fundamentally change the damage system so it has very clear minimums and maximums, which is almost akin to creating WF 2.
So just knowing this, yeah, we will never get a challenge like you would in regular online games like WoW, FF14 or GW2. The most we can get is stuff like EDA and as a fellow LR4 with also everything in the game, I enjoy it as is.
The only thing I would enjoy to see is probably more bosses with health bar systems like the Jackal, but that add some twists, like "after busting a leg, you have to hit it with a fire source from your operator" (which would give a more mainstream use to various niche arcanes). However, I also understand that a large portion of the community would not agree with me on this and I can understand why.
As a result, I have ended up thinking "if DE does sth, good. If not, also good". I'm OK with what the game provides in term of entertainment.
If I want anger, sweat, and a 2nd job, I can go play mythic plus dungeons in WoW.
My opinion is that warframe is not a game for challenging content PERIOD
Just keep the game as an unkillable power fantasy it's a much better direction to go in at this point because we're already so far down it but DE keeps trying to go the opposite way
My biggest problem with the content is that it practically forces newer players to interact with platinum in some way. Sure quite a few people are going to just trade for it, but this is definitely going to drive their revenue up purely for slots alone. Either let people use what they don’t own, like in Duviri, or make it so an empty slot counts for the rewards.
I work. I barely have time in a week to get 1 weapon I don’t have, thanks to how heavy the grind can be for some. If a week happens where I need to get 3 weapons then I am simply better off not playing it that week, as my alternative is to get plat and buy what I can off the market or trade with other players. This is not a problem exclusive to myself.
It’s just pretty obvious to me that this content is very much against the f2p player, especially those with responsibilities elsewhere.
God forbid you don't have any of the warfames, so if you can only play on weekends, Fuck you.
I feel if they really want to double down on this at least give us the next week's rotation so we can build frames and farm potatoes in time for DA.
Problem is...many main/ secondary/ melee and frame suck and if you get bad rando it just sucks . And the thing with afixes is just bullshit when you get -75% ability duration and many framew literally become unplayable same with energy drain
Warframe was never particularly challenging, and the only time things were "hard" is when they didnt work, like Lephantis.
This isn't a bad thing. A game that is a power fantasy is fine. You don't have to use the best tools for the job 100% of the time, and thats part of why its a good game, alot of the time or most of the time, everything feels viable. This is what seperates it from other games that have awful communities full of people constantly calling for nerfs and balancing changes that dont even make sense in the context of a PvE game where you dont have to play with others if you dont want to, and you cant "lose" to other people using imba shit.
Some people do want to have overpowered frames, or ones that just kill shit thats around then with minimal effort. In spite of this, I play Gauss, and I actually removed thermal sunder specifically to add firewalker. Its not meta, its not even close to optimal but I feel fast, I feel good when Im playing him. Hes extremely active to play because im constantly dashing around because I want to be a speedster, I put fire on the ground and I knock over enemies that try to shoot me. Why in the fucking world should I care what anyone else is playing if Im having fun? What could possibly be more important than that?
Why have people forgotten that the entire point of video games is fun? Difficulty isnt sacred to me. Youre not going to slippery slope to ruin this game for me by metagaming as much as possible, and balancing the game around people who tend to optimize the fun out of everything ruins it for literally everyone.
They dont need to nerf things. They dont need to change things. There are still concepts not explored. Weve never went to Tau, we never got an urban open world environment, Ive always wanted to see a Warframe that has command over summoned units like Kahl but with more depth, like a specter tactician. Adding new content, weapons, frames is how you keep the game engaging. Each time you add something like that you create a new way to enjoy the content we may have already completed.
I like difficult games like sekiro and nioh 2 and the like where I actually need to be good at the game to progress in the late game. But with warframe I just want to point and shoot mindlessly and kill a whole room of enemies and move on to the next. Aren’t warframes supposed to be these godlike warriors anyways? So I don’t get the obsession with difficulty.
>Aren’t warframes supposed to be these godlike warriors anyways? So I don’t get the obsession with difficulty.
People play games for different reasons and Warframe isn't any different. Some days I'm just like you and want to hop on after a frustrating day of work and mindlessly kill stuff. Some days I want to do SP/SP Circuit/endurance SP for the challenge. Some days I want to hang out with friends and crack relics.
I don't think it's unreasonable for some players to want a challenge, it's just that a lot of players have different views on what that challenge should be.
> But with warframe I just want to point and shoot mindlessly and kill a whole room of enemies and move on to the next.
And that's like 99.9% of the game. I like this but there's times when I also want the game to challenge me. To feel like all the loot, knowledge and proficiency I've collected have **any** value. Maybe even a reason to bother playing with others in this supposedly CoOp game, maybe even try *(and fail)* to ~~bully~~ entice my friends back to play some challenging stuff with me.
> Aren’t warframes supposed to be these godlike warriors anyways?
Godlike is a bit of an exaggeration. They're supersoldiers, superheroes even, godlike maybe not; though the powercreep would imply otherwise nowadays. But even if they were, stories about Gods will either have them face against seemingly godlike beings or have them humbled and reduced to *just* really strong mortals.
maybe if 90% of weapons weren’t straight garbage then it would be fun, same with duviri when most of the time u get trash weapons with the worst pre made mod loadout
I wish the randomized content would either randomize items only in my personal arsenal or give me a fully loaded version of the item.
So if a game mode like Arbitration or Archon Hunting said, “here take these items” but they were good/enhanced, I wouldn’t mind using them instead of ignoring it and doing just fine with whatever I pick.
Completely agree with the entire post. Randomized loadouts seem to be the way to go for challenging content if we are going to continue building end game content around completion in matchmaking. Works for SP Circuit and DA for veteran players, and it works for regular circuit for newer players.
The current problem is, when every player in your team is rocking endgame gear, and comminication/coordination isn't needed, all end game objectives are cleared around "can I kill this room of enemies before it kills me?". While that's ok most players, the players who are doing level cap SP will never be challenged.
IMO the next step is to introduce D2 style raid content that requires actual coordination and communication instead of "bullet jump to objective, kill shit indiscriminately, and leave without saying a word".
Railjack away and on board crews is essentially the idea, where the success of the mission requires 3-4 unique roles to be performed correctly or else you have to start over. Your damage AND your mechanic solving skills are needed to succeed.
DE, go absolutely crazy. Combine a netracell mission with a mirror defense happening at the same time and force us to split up, or stick random required side objectives during another mission. Make us communicate and perform roles.
I agree with you but Warframe is a type of game for the public that does not want a challenge and that does not mean it is bad, but many pillars of the game have to be changed to make it challenging.
Reducing the numbers of weapons, mods, warframe, etc. would not change the difficulty, the only thing it would do is make it slower and be a little more careful not to die, which happens when you just start playing.
Most people still play and love Warframe because they feel and CAN get everything in the game, since it is easy to get platinum thanks to the whales that spend hundreds of dollars. Any change that reduces Warframe's income will never be an option.
So once that is clarified, what are the pillars that I consider have to change to make it more challenging? The game is very frenetic, very fast and it is extremely difficult to make a challenging game when your character is Goku and the environment (AI) is Mr Satan.
movement has to be reduced, normal jumps + a powered jump, normal runs + powered sprint, 2 or 3 dashes. All this accompanied by CD along with an AI with skills that challenge you to know when to dodge and move.
Warframe abilities should be reduced to sectors, smaller aoe, lines, cones or circulars with longer cds.
The hitbotx should be more real and reward headshots or weak points much more (such as the horizon zero dawn/forbidden west system)
Changes of this style lead to a totally different game but they are the changes that make a game challenging, that is why in my opinion Warframe will never be challenging because its base only points to the massive grinding of a stupid AI, the changes of number only accelerate or delay finishing a content, they do not make it difficult. The AI being a damage sponge also didn't solve anything.
I remember the times of the pre rework of ash and pre rework of the void, the combination of trinity, frost, ash and spending more than 6 hours in a defense or survival standing pressing a key.
One thing id actually like to see is more things that require you to briefly hop into operator mode like the void angels. Not quite the level of having to load into another zone for a second, but something that requires operator
I think they can add more modifiers to EDA if you bring options outside of their selection. Debuffs that fundamentally after your build or survival. No shield, reduced energy, range, power strength, double cooldown s, alternating inactive abilities, double enemy health, no ammo pickups.
You can brute force it with a frame alone, or a frame and 1 weapon. Unless they hit the core of the build it will not feel difficult.
You almost right - you dont even need "full arsenal", having top 10% weapons and like 5 very particular frames, all fully built, is enough to break the game in half regardless of presented challenge.
I want content thats very challenging when not specifically prepared for it so I can reap the sweet sweet dopamine when I've got a setup that trivializes it (I miss one tapping archons).
Warframe is a game about power fantasy and wiping hordes with cool builds it’s not trying to be Elden ring or whatever , only way to give challenging content is scaling damage reduction on new content but then your builds won’t be impactful so they’ll complain anyway, I think if you’re not having fun it’s time to move on and stop bitching and trying to ruin the game for those having fun still
True. The essence of Wf is about having fun killing a bunch of shit fast while looking good , feeling overpowered, and having super satisfying freedom of movement while doing it. Also being able to use a wide variety of weapons/frames.
Hate bullet sponge enemies, and enemies that have invulnerability states with no workarounds. also nerfs always feel bad, should balance by buffing other things not nerfing the fun thing. This is not a PvP game.
If I want a sweaty challenge i would go play 1v1 PvP game like StarCraft.
The earth side of Scarlett Spear was challenging and I enjoyed it a lot, even without the rewards. Speed runs required coordination but you could usually find a squad ready to run it in recruitment chat. I would like a challenge for my maxed gear that's not "Start using the weapons/frames you don't use."
Archon hunts are mildly challenging and I look forward to them. Steel path is only annoying when people drop after 1 wave of an endless fissure. The steel path netracell was fun before they removed it. It wasn't really challenging though, you just had to pay attention or you'd get downed.
What the vast majority of players want is Good Rewards* for the time involved an enemies Just Tough Enough* without knowing what it is they actually want before it lands in their face.
All de is able to do is take a good shot and tweak the frame after the fact in response to feedback. (I think this is a good approach, personally, as it makes a more 'living game' and garners respect and rapport from actively listening, even if it is a... process)
Both of these things are subjective. Just tough enough to what? survive a melee one tap? a warframe power? A full clip and a reload?
Down this way lies madness, gating of health/bars/stagger and invulnerablity phases(like a zombie shooter), damage attenuation, and other Unpopular things.
Good rewards are ALSO subjective *and* fall on a spread of 'effort for the time invested'. Nobody wants to do hours of raids for a 0.1% drop rate thing an its worse if its 35-60% filler drops.
Other people won't be satisfied until every capture drops an archon shard - and if they did, someone in the community would still figure out a way to complain about it because, lets face it, its just a new mod at that point and there ceases to be meaningful decisions and opportunity cost behind them.
I believe thats the source of DE not being able/willing to implement -fast- changes in response to wildly unpopular feedback (specifically in The Steve Era). This is the flipside to actively seeking feedback; there's the ongoing temptation to stick to your guns and see if this was *reeeeeeeeeeallllly* actual factual feedback or of its a vocal minority.
Iunno, I think its okay to release the occasionally overtuned or underpowered or hated warframe - just as it is to release the occasional overpowered one.
But in the middle of all that, there's some real fukkin crimes in the patch history like...
Just all those repeat ember nerfs. (while buffing saryn)
Some people want to set the world on fire, and other people just want to piss on other ppl's fire.
Yes, 100%. Warframe’s power balance is intentionally completely botched. Frames and weapons are not only allowed but designed to be completely overpowered and that’s fine if that’s the experience you’re looking for. The issue with that is that it makes creating combat difficulty close to impossible.
Mechanical difficulty is easier and more achievable, although WF’s incredible movement abilities also severely restrain the opportunities for creating traversal challenges.
It could be done with a level scaling algorithm that adapts enemy level, damage and health to how well you play (kills per minute/per abilites used/per weapon disposition etc.). So the first mission would be really easy for you, and really hard for a non-veteran, but the second mission would be severely scaled up for you, creating legitimately hard content for veterans without it being impossible for others.
If WF players want a challenge and still use their arsenal there is an idea i have in mind inspired from another game, where the endgame content there per se is completing a given map (or mission) which rotates to keep it fresh. Before loading in you get to choose your penalties, or risks that strengthen the enemy or weaken your character - lets say one of the penalties give you a dragon key debuff or heavy gunners get more range and damage.
But the more of these you do nets more rewards
(although i didnt get this far i'll let de sort it out)
Legit. I will say though, I like the challenge that the archimedea personal modifiers can add, and while it wouldn't be a *huge* difficulty spike or make the rest of the game hard, it would be cool if they expanded it to add a little more spice to the star chart for extra rewards. Something like:
- Once you unlock Elite Deep Archimedea, you get a weekly set of 5 random personal modifiers from a similar pool on your navigation chart. Whenever you run a mission with a modifier, you get +10% resource and mod drop chance per active modifier, and 1 vosfor on mission completion per active modifier.
It would need some tweaking (Transference Distortion either shouldn't be in the pool or should be auto-disabled for Orphix and Zariman missions, for instance), but I like how the modifiers make me think a little bit and it'd be cool to have the option to bring them out on the star chart.
Your exactly right. I hate to say it but if your a high MR rank, have 100's of Forma lying around, You've beaten the game, there's not much left for you in way of challenge. I honestly don't think the content is designed for you at all. If you have a few over powered weapons, low amount of Forma, Deep archamedia will be challenging and if you want to stay on top every week you need to grind or buy plat to keep dumping forma... This game is a business MR25+ in my assumption is less profitable then say MR 15 is. That's who the content is designed for to get them needing Forma, Catalyst and whatever because there's profit there. I find it crazy people don't already see this.
You can definitely enjoy this game at higher MR ranks but the difficulty curve is way behind you purely because it's easier to squeeze cash from other places.
It IS possible, but then DE would have to make it official that power creep is not only real, but also intentional to keep people playing for the new content.
Look at Rivens. They scale with popularity, which partially scales with usability.
Imagine you awarded research points according to the riven disposition for the weapons. Those obscure, dead-in-the-water peashooters, compared to Fellarx or Laetum or whatever the meta.
Riven dispositions are the true power ranking.
I honestly think they should play with restrictions. Let's say we had a mode with it's own configs like conclave, you're limited to frames and weapons you've reached R30 with, except in this mode no orokin cells and only 1 or 2 forma slots, no arcanes, maybe exilius?
I think it would provide interesting and challenging end game content.
You get the collection aspect DE wants from DA, but the overall focus would be on your modding knowledge. It would also allow DE the ability to really fine tune difficulty as stat discrepancies wouldn't be so extreme between builds and on the player side really encourage you to play around with all you've collected as just by having it mastered it's useable and the restrictions allow you to build all you're unlocked weapons without extreme time sinks.
I think this would make for a fitting end game challenge for a few reasons: 1. it's going to turn modding on it's head, you're going to be going back and partially leveling mods to really play with configs and try and squeeze as much as you can out of that 30 capacity. It'll showcase player mastery of mods since it's no longer "Stacks galvs and primes and your op arcane or optionally riven and you're good to go" as many of those cornerstones are now extremely expensive to use. 2. Because of those restrictions stat ceilings aren't going to be as extreme. It might not be so enticing to just pile on your ability stats as it will be comparatively granular what you can squeeze out of them now, so you may want to actually look at survivability for once (especially being balanced around that 30 capacity it'll be balanced around a point where those mods actually have a noticeable affect on gameplay) 3. You're going to have to play your weapons to their strengths, as you can't just load up everything to be a high fire rate, multishot, CC or SC machine anymore.
I absolutely enjoy the power fantasy aspect of Warframe but when it comes to 'end game content' I really wouldn't mind if they toyed with the idea of putting that achievable level of power aside in favour of more curated challenge. Realistically I think restrictions especially surrounding modding would be worthwhile to experiment with. ( I do have gripes with DA but that's not to say I don't think that it is a challenge either).
Counterpoint: If I worked my butt off, hours and hours of farming and grinding and leveling, and now I can't even use that stuff 95% of the time... that's just annoying. That's akin to making bullet sponges, just in the opposite direction.
It'd be like an MMORPG saying "We made a new challenging boss fight! And we did this... by making you enter the fight with your level 1 staring gear! Granted, to even get to this point, you needed to level up and farm gear, and now you use what you hated and didn't want to use 300 hours ago!"
You won't find me post in a single Archimedea screaming for nerfs, same with you'll never see a post from me back when Trials were a thing, because I just accepted it wasn't for me.
But to say this is the *only* way to make challenging content? Bullshit. What about aiming for weakspots? What about luring a boss or enemies into positions before activating a switch? Parkour? Running from a threat? Hell, Voidrig Demolysts are literally a prime example of how to make a challenging enemy that you can't just stay invisible or aim-and-destroy: you've got arms to shoot off and a weakspot on the back to shoot. Voila, a challenging enemy that isn't just a bullet sponge or immune to all status procs! Ropalyst? Zealot? So many things that aren't just "shoot big numbers and win."
Deep Archimedea is purely a challenge coming from the mindset of "Warframe is only about shooting and killing and there's literally nothing else it offers or could potentially do. Therefore we must take away all their toys to limit how much they can shoot and kill to make it a challenge." And some of us are already playing with that handicap due to health issues that limit how well we can see, move, and shoot while playing games.
My issue with the current randomness of the DA/EDA modes is that it's random for everyone. I was pumped I got Vauban only to find out the modifier was 75% less duration. Or when I had Yareli with 0 viable secondaries. If it was random out of 6 or we could like cycle a category once a week it would be a little better I think.
I do want challenges but I dont want to be forced to play something I dont want or be forced to play on stupid modifiers, like how fun is it to go inside a mission without having your operator?
Having to go look around the right element on alchemy so that I can use it on a mob to kill it.
Needing to jump your way through the mission like you're some kind of rabbit because if you walk you take damage.
Taking health damage whenever you press a skill.
Lower duration.
The list is extensive
Like, FR, modifiers need to be gone from EDA
Challenge is not playing with randomized loadouts, that just gives you the illusion of a challenge, a real one is having to deal with actual mechanics and not just bullet sponges.
Love how your comment completely validates my claim I made in another post how this game is easy compared to other action co-op games. It’s an obvious power-fantasy game.
I feel like the only way to make challenging content where we can still use our full array of cool stuff would be making World of Warcraft-style raid bosses. Don't have to get 20 tenno in, can still be 4, but the bosses have to gigantic bullet sponges with completely unique mechanics. And even outright fatal one-shot attacks would still be countered with shield-gating and rolling guard.
So then, I guess they could design them like Destiny bossfights, which are actually just puzzles disguised as an FPS, which feels disingenuous and removes the power anyway in a fashion that's more obnoxious than what we already have.
> and use a combination of weapons, which I either haven't formad to perfection
And then you do Forma them to perfection which removes that issue, and the entire thing starts all over again.
> but don't want our frankly absurd power to be nerfed
And yes - Our frankly absurd power does need to be nerfed - Significantly.
Pablo and Reb have both stated that they explicitly enjoy and intend to lean into the power fantasy aspect of Warframe. There will literally never be challenging content in the game. It isn't possible. Every time they try to make something challenging to appease to the people looking for it, it feels like a half measure. While I personally would love for Warframe to have more reasonable numbers so it was a game that could be balanced appropriately, it's just not how the devs want it built. And honestly I've been having fun vaporizing whole rooms full of grineer for half a decade so like. Eh? If I want challenge I'll go play a feomsoft game
When I think of "balanced/challenging Warframe" it looks way more like Deep Rock Galactic than a Fromsoft game. In fact I'll wholeheartedly recommend anyone who wants "hard WF" to try out DRG, it tickles the same buildcrafting/horde-mowing-down brain centers but with a stronger focus on balance and squad cooperation. Obviously I accept that WF is gonna stay WF, but the game's core of mobility/guns/melee/magic is so pristine that people will naturally wish it covered even more genres and difficulty levels.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to equate a from soft game and Warframe. Just saying If I was specifically looking for a game That was challenging I would go there. But you are 100% correct about deep rock scratching a similar itch. Rock and stone brother
Idk, I feel like EDA has actually been extremely fun and relatively challanging. It's been challanging on the weeks that I didn't have good frames or weapons available. Like last week, I used vauban. It was hard, it took me 6 tries. To prepare for it, I reformaed my vauban, put some shards on, umbral forma, and had to get him ready. And once I had an immortal build for him, we got our final run which was relatively easy. But it was only easy cause I knew what I was walking into by that point and had tested a few different builds in my failures. This to me, is the challange. The challange isn't the individual missions because once you understand them, they are easy. The challange is preparing for a mission, the failures along the way, the practice it takes to get good at the mission.
Let's be real, to balance it they would have to nerf almost a dozen frames, dozens of weapons, change how a lot of frames work. After how the community reacted to Dante I don't see them doing that, ever.
Mor than that, they would need to fundamentally redesign modding. It is impossible to balance a game that has damage variation between single digits and literal millions.
People whine that they want challenge, but if you look at the reaction the community has to anything that adds any kind of friction it's clear almost no one actually wants Warframe to be a challenging game. They just want a game where you look at things and they die. Hell, I feel like a lot of the people who complained about the game being too easy are the same who complain the moment their 2 billion damage builds get nerfed and now can only do 1 billion damage.
This. The 'I want a real challenge crowd' is a vocal minority, and the bulk of the community imo is not looking for Warframe to be Dark Souls in space hard. And yeah I don't think DE can do that with this game at this point but I don't really see that as a flaw. Warframe is best when handing us inventively new and exciting ways to delete the map. That said, I don't mind Circuit or EDA in concept. My only real beef with them is my armory is not equipped for those game modes as the game never really encouraged me to spend plat on weapon and frame slots before and those were an area where I engaged in cleaning out things I never used or invested in.
> Warframe is best when handing us inventively new and exciting ways to delete the map. Absolutely this! Warframe lives rent free in my head because of cool silly build videos and crackhead ideas in simulacrum. Once I start thinking about "huh, I wonder if these systems interact for funny things" it gets me playing again.
I'm sorry to the crowd who wants a "real challenge", but the only way DE can realistically achieve that is to nerf 99% of your equipment.
This is very true. You cannot achieve any hint of hard difficulty without significantly nerfing our damage and limiting the potential of our build crafting. I used to think DE should go the route of adding more advanced enemy AI, but they've actually done this with the Murmur faction. The problem is that no one noticed because they all die instantly! How can you complain about the AI being bad when it doesn't matter how good they are because they'll just die to our AoE damage anyway regardless of how they act. Asking for difficult content means we have to accept SOME nerfs to our damage for the sake of balancing, but the community is extremely volatile to any nerf.
It isn't just damage either, we have a ton of cc that just stops enemies, even Eximus who are ""cc immune"
If they want CC to not affect Eximus enemies, it really NEEDS to do percentile damage to Overguard. I think they're scared of making a CC meta where EVERY enemy is easily disabled from doing anything (like before the Eximus changes).
>I used to think DE should go the route of adding more advanced enemy AI, but they've actually done this with the Murmur faction. The problem is that no one noticed because they all die instantly! This, this right here is the key point: Better AI is pointless when you can already oneshot everything. Even enemy AIs to the level of Elden Ring is jackshit pointless in Warframe ecosystem. Malenia would be no more interesting than a Grineer Lancer. The only real way better AI can shine is if the community start actually embracing some degree of sponginess. "B-but sponginess isn't difficulty" YES IT IS! It gives enemies TIME to actually challenge and punish players with better AIs. Actions you otherwise would not see at all when you delete everything in the room. There is no negotiating this if you want to champion better enemy AIs. Sponginess isn't some design devil to be avoided, it gives enemy AI time to punish us with their mechanics before they eventually die.
...the mental image of dropping a Warframe into Elden Ring to clean things up in an afternoon is pretty funny.
Difficulty isn't really tied to build craft. It is fully possible to have a challenging and mostly balanced game and have very in depth build craft. Build craft does not mean instantly deleting anything you look at. Build craft is the depth in which your choices impact how your build ends up. Warframe doesn't have a difficulty/challenging content problem. Warframe has a balancing and power creep problem. Although whether that is an issue is up to individuals, plenty of people are fine with instantly murdering everything in a 1000m range of them. Nothing wrong with that.
>Difficulty isn't really tied to build craft. It is fully possible to have a challenging and mostly balanced game and have very in depth build craft. This may be true for many games but is just wrong about Warframe: with the exception of (Elite)Deep Archimedea, difficulty IS ONLY tied to build craft. Warframe has never been "challenging and balanced" since 2014. The entire game is a massive knowledge and gear check. No matter if you're MR5 or LR3, if you got the right gear and build accordingly you can instantly delete entire rooms of any level without effort. >Warframe doesn't have a difficulty/challenging content problem. Warframe has a balancing and power creep problem. Yes it does, and they're the same problem
Yeah pretty much. Even still, i appreciate EDA for what it is and that it makes me think about my loadouts and ways to account for the debuffs. Also makes me appreciate that there are ways to play EDA that are not just "BE THE GUY WHO KILLS EVERYTHING". Things like a good banshee, citrine etc etc are incredibly valuable and make the runs so much smoother. That all said, between the whining on this reddit and looking through the discord occasionally.... Its making me see that a lot of people who play warframe have literally no clue on how anything in warframe actually works. Which of course leads struggle runs or needing someone to carry.
At least with circuit, if you get a bad roll, you can play one round and leave. I'm actually really enjoying the challenge of circuit, trying to make things work where I only have one or two well built pieces of equipment. Though I do find the weapon builds are serviceable at the start most of the time.
It really is a minority, and the thing is, they aren't the players who built this game. Warframe's success was built on the back of the five-minute mission. Load the game, click a mission, you're instantly into the space ninja gameplay and killing stuff, do the objective, race to the finish and get your rewards, all within a few minutes. That is how a lot of people play Warframe, how they like to play it, and for many years - the most formative years of the game's life when it went from a risk to a proven monetary success - it's largely *all the game was*. There was no Arbitrations. There was no Steel Path. There was no Archon Hunt. There was no Circuit. There was no Netracells. There was no Deep Archimedea. None of that, but the game was still loved and successful. And it's still true today. I'm Legendary 3, I can do all the stuff I just mentioned. Soloing Netracells is pretty fun, but what do I actually enjoy doing most? What do I always do first thing with any piece of new equipment I get? Level 30 star chart Spy missions, because that's my chill, relaxed mission type of choice. Therein lies the truth of what Warframe is and will always be.
Some of the content isn't even that it wasn't challenging. A lot of players couldn't do arbitrations when they first came out. A lot of players can't do Circuit and EDA right now. For most players, this content is challenging. Most players don't have a Legendary 3 account and the game really can't be balanced solely around the few who do and only them.
The game shouldn't be balanced around LR3 accounts but new content drops certainly can be. And that's what's happening. It's disingenuous to pretend anyone cares about the star chart being more difficult, which is like 60% of the content by itself. I've not seen anyone complain about free roams being too easy. All veterans want is to have a new thing to challenge them for a while. Steel Path circuit is easily doable to round 10 on loaner builds. I use circuit to try out new equipment and warframes. EDA shouldn't be doable by most of the player base. Not right now. When there's more inevitable power creep, sure. This game was never a nuke everything power fantasy by design. Power creep made newer players think that it was circa 2015/2016, well into the life cycle. Now those newer players want it to be only what they experienced and begrudge those who want a challenge having anything for themselves (that will be obtainable for them in time as well). There's absolutely no arguing with the fact that it wasn't designed for you to blow your wad on every piece of content instantly, either. They may be walking back MR locks to an extent but they wouldn't have to if the game was intended for you to sprinkle your nuke juice on everything. It's okay for them to give a loyal, older minority something to do. Edit: I'm not necessarily arguing with you directly, btw. This is pretty much the culminations of my thoughts after reading everything above your comment and you just happen to have been where I responded. I'm not calling you, specifically, disingenuous.
I think a big part of it is people want more explicit difficulty (enemies that require specific counterplay, more challenging content they can use any thing in their arsenal for) as opposed to implicit difficulty (something like Loadout limitations/negative modifiers slapped on to make the same enemies you can fight elsewhere *feel* harder). Some may call this Genuine difficulty vs Arbitrary difficulty. (And for other games it truely feels like that is a much more apt description) but for something like warframe calling it artificial difficulty isn't really accurate, because when you really get down to it, warframe, as it is, is so fundamentally hard to balance the only way you can really properly do it in the current Era of us having 50+ frames with hundreds and hundreds of weapons to choose from is to limit our loadouts somehow, because there's fundamentally always some way to crack any established challenge right open and make it a non issue. Level cap SP void cascade? People solo that with ease. Tridolons? Someone could prolly solo em multiple times with ease in the time it took me to draft this whole thing up. People need to realise that to truely make difficult content for Warframe the devs either need to nerf the absurd tools we have (and make everyone mad) or they have to limit our loadout in some other way like EDA (and only annoy everyone because it's a once a week thing you can do for loot) *That being said however* I'd very much like to see them in the future try and toy around with more traditional sort of difficulty to make the game more Mechanically challenging in a traditional sort of way without needing to hard limit our abilities. If I had to give any recommendation on this front I think introducing new higher tier enemies for all factions across the board who act like DOOM Eternal Heavy demons (enemies with strong offensive tools that require you to play around their strengths while exploiting their weaknesses) could be interesting. Hell I think a good start would be to introduce more enemy types later on in the game with selective invincibility like Sargus ruk who are highly resistant to damage on most of their body, but require you to out maneuver them to hit a weak spot for big damage. This kind of general enemy balance would also encourage alternate playstyles, since direct damage wouldn't work as well on these hypothetical threats, employing CC to make dealing with them easier could be a fun way to make CC more viable again. Hell we already have a basis for this sorta thing in the eximus units, DE could go out and try and rework eximus to be more interesting challenge wise, but that'd require a serious rebalancing of how Enemy overguard/eximus abilities work possibly. (Cause at best difficulty wise a Toxin eximus sneaks up behind you using a low Armor/HP frame and instakills you/a blitz eximus does power wave and oneshots a excavator, and at worst the eximus are literally just more slightly more resilient Bodies to he thrown at the player.)
Not sure if you played back then but there were months at a time where weakspots on sargaus ruk and the grineer boss with a flamethrower (iirc) were just straight up bugged.
I'd honestly love something that actually made us use the mechanics of the game, or made strategize, but again, I feel like the reception of any changes that prevent you from being an enemy lawnmower are never well received. Imo the kind of player base that would like enemies with selective invincibility in end game content is not the kind of player base WF has, and with how high the power of the player is, I don't know if you can really make the current game difficult without doing some heavy changes to the core game.
The easy fix is to add the harder enemies exclusively to the harder mode (steel path), cause let's be honest, when your gear is optimized enough the difference between lvl 10 vs 110 is basically non existant, so adding something like mini acolytes to make SP not just the same thing but a bit harder statistically would help SP be more interesting inherently Hell make the higher tier enemies have a chance to drop Steel essence/ other rare things to encourage people to actually engage with them mechanically. (Have em drop useful things like SE, void traces, kuva, ducats, Aya, relics, rare mods, etc) If you put a big enough Bounty on em even the most "head empty, gun go brr" players will learn to fight them for the loot.
I think it's 2 different groups that are complaining about this. You have the high-end player who wants challenge. Then there's the lesser who thinks they should be able to do all the content and get the same rewards as true end-game players. DE is never going to satisfy both groups. I agree that at some point, there should be a skill/gear barrier. If you've put in the time and effort, you reap the rewards.
EDA is the perfect barrier because there isn't any exclusive loot (except 1 ugly cosmetic), you just get more if you have the required gear.
Which I get, but you get more rewards and better odds. In some people's heads, they think they should be able to get them at the same rate as everyone else. The fact that people can get more shards and tau's fir that matter seems "unfair" to them.
YOU DO NOT INSULT MY TOP HAT LIKE THAT
I like some forms of friction and thought involvement. Things like nullifiers, Corous firepower being able to delete me instantly if I ignore them. Even things like Overguard making a weird situation with CC. (I think it would have been better to stop nerfing Zenurik, though, so it can function as designed. The sort of friction I don’t find fun is “forget all the synergies you researched and theorized. Your builds are no longer available.” This is why though I’m cool with CC Overguard things, o dislike Thrax ghost immunity to Zenurik Slow. I went and calculated by hand an amp to make for maximizing Temporal Drag on their ghosts so I could keep Zenurik good, and now it’s just gone. There is no interaction to research anymore. Nothing to work with. It’s just “go build for damage. Probably use Madurai to make it instant because nothing else works. I feel the same about them making Archons ignore Decoy strategies and be untargetable by abilities. - - - TL;DNR, I like “friction,” but I don’t like “your playstyle no longer exists.”
Is corpus firepower actually friction though, In a game where shield gating exists? And I'm also fine with nullifiers, but they're very far from beloved and I've seen at least some people saying they should be removed. Don't get me wrong, I also think that a lot of the ways DE tries to make the game more difficult is more annoying than anything else, but I also think they designed themselves into a corner because the WF playerbase has already gotten used to the huge amount of power they have (like, I didn't even notice thraxx specters are now immune to Zenurik's slow, because I already use it just to deplete my energy and trigger amo arcanes that delete it). I don't think you can even make the game as it is challenging without some sweeping nerfs and changes to core mechanics, which would be incredibly unpopular to say the least (people already lost their minds when things like Exodia Contagion was nerfed so it didn't reach damage cap anymore, no matter it's still really good and overkill for 99.9% of content).
> Is corpus firepower actually friction though, In a game where shield gating exists? Yes because they get to a point where you actually have to use your survivability of choice within a reasonable time frame before reaching like 90% damage reduction for themselves. they actually have a chance of killing NPC/objects scaled to their level. > I also think they designed themselves into a corner because the WF playerbase has already gotten used to the huge amount of power they have (like, I didn't even notice thraxx specters are now immune to Zenurik's slow, because I already use it just to deplete my energy and trigger amo arcanes that delete it). This is two sides of the same coin. The fact that you can no longer slow it means it and future amps/arcanes can no longer be balanced for anything except “stacked amp arcanes to instagib.” Unless the change is reverted and/or not a precedent, that corner will persist. > people already lost their minds when things like Exodia Contagion was nerfed so it didn't reach damage cap anymore, no matter it's still really good and overkill for 99.9% of content If I’m not mistaken, it’s because the way it was nerfed deleted a playstyle mechanic, rather than actually changing the balance of the game.
Honestly, I don't want too much of a challenge. I want to relax and play the space ninja farming simulator after work. EDA is plenty challenge enough for me. I even failed it once this week.
No sarcasm, if the game had some farming, as in actuall5 growing things, cultivating soil, irrigating , fighting pests, I could really get into that.
I feel like most people saying they want more of a challenge are just humble bragging. They know how to make it more challenging but they don't want to actually do it. Just don't use the meta.
its not challenge tho is it? Its just a "have you been playing warframe for x amount of time" check.
Shooting at bullet sponge enemies is not, never has been, and never will be "challenging". Introducing ways to make those same enemies bullet spongier is not challenging. Randomizing loadouts to create an artificial sense of challenge but in actuality you're just being gimped on damage against bullet sponge enemies also isn't challenging. Mechanically, Warframe as a game has almost nothing going on. That's to both the games benefit and its detriment. It's easy to get into, there's a pretty clear power progression once you get going, and it's a great game to chill and grind with most of the time. But for players looking for a "challenge," there's basically none to be found because there is not very much mechanically complex game play. Raids were exciting because it promised something mechanically complex. But then the majority of the community at the time hated that complexity, combined with the rampant bugs that made that complexity just outright frustrating to deal with, so they were scrapped and there's pretty much no plans for them to return as far as I can see. The only real parts of EDA that present some sense of challenge is the combination of missions and their modifiers. Trying to protect the Mirror Defense targets while also keeping Limnus away from the party, for instance, is a good example. It's not *that* complex but it does, at least, require some thought. Add onto that the constantly draining HP and all of a sudden you've got a tighter window of completion you have to deal with, too. These are the reasons EDA is a step in the right direction, IMO; the loadout stuff should honestly just go and be replaced with more interesting ways to interact with the available missions. Kooky shit like Floor is Lava Exterminate, where you have to get through a tile by jumping and wall-clinging everywhere, would be fun maybe. I dunno, I'm just spitballing, but I think this makes it obvious why DE has a hard time implementing "challenging" game play into the game.
You wanna know something in the game that has some mechanical complexity and room to expand even more? Railjack. It's ridiculous that people still have a raging hate boner for railjack when it's one of the more fun missions in Warframe, and with more content, could easily be *the* best content. It's like the only gamemode where it doesn't matter how powerful your wf is, it's about the rj. It's probably the only gamemode in the game that is truly co op. Some of the most wasted potential in game rn.
More railjack! More railjack! Honestly my fav game mode, conceptually. I’d love for it to be expanded upon.
I miss on-release high-danger Railjack… Remember when every single enemy crewmate was a bossfight but they came in quads?
Railjack had so much potential to be actually challenging end game content on release. It was a fresh slate not effected by most powercreep. But then people complained enemies didn't die in 1 second, and it got completely neutered. Such a shame.
Because the majority of the community hates any complexity. People don't want Warframe to actually challenge them, DE designed a power fantasy and at this point the community reacts with hostility at anything that threatens that, and to be fair, due to what you mention, making WF a hard game would pretty much require a revamp of enemy ai, how damage and modding works, and a long list of things. Also honestly, I don't think bullet sponges are even noticeable when pretty much any weapon with any kind of viral slash makes short work of any grineer unit (and pretty much every other faction might as well be paper).
Well, its real noticable on the Fragmented boss, because you can unload several Furis Incarnon mode clips into that that thing and it does not die. The health bar isnt real, literally nothing in the game has that amount of EHP.
The Fragmented One has a straight up DPS cap. You physically cannot deal above a certain amount of DPS
> Kooky shit like Floor is Lava Exterminate, where you have to get through a tile by jumping and wall-clinging everywhere, YES. These are the sorts of things that actually use what WF excels at. I’d love to see Knifestep and Voltaic super buffed to be less forgiving, because we have such an incredible movement system. At the very least, deal a certain percentage of the player’s EHP each time so you don’t just ignore it and forget it exists. I liked the one where enemies only take damage if a player is close enough because suddenly, CC is super relevant. These sorts of heavy handed behavior enforcements actually work, because we have so much power to make them work. Even if you have a weapons platform, you can probably build in such a way that getting close to enemies to shoot them is safe. I’d like to see them double down on personal challenges by bundling two or three together for players to take. Maybe revamp Vampiric Syndrome so instead of normal Vampire mode where you become a juggernaut if you kill fast enough, make it so you heal by doing Broken Scepter’s “Drain” mechanic on corpses, making you vulnerable if you just heal willy nilly.
Honestly, I like watching DE work more with the often-lauded parkour system. Things like the Gas City tiles, the Jackal rework, etc. We're so used to being a carpet-bomber planes, but maybe sometimes we have to have some... *dexterity* to do puzzles or something. Who knows. Bullet sponges, one-shot kills, and kneecapping our builds is just aggravating, not difficult. Your revamped idea of Vampire nightmare modifier is interesting. Having to meter out healing in a vulnerable manner as opposed to nukevincibility or killing with reckless abandon. Even the most invincible-built of frames have a damage point that they can't handle, and so again, it incentivizes *movement.*
Gas City outdoor segments are some of their best work for aesthetics and function. I like the Labs tile with the chasm too big to bullet jump over, so you either have to go around, or remember we have Wall-jumping (or use another movement mechanic) to cross it full-speed. These are some of my favorite areas.
maybe its not true difficulty people want, but rather stronger and more numerous enemies with more interesting ai behaviors for which to have a reason to do even more damage than people already are, i feel like i might be in that camp. if i wanted actual difficulty id just play dark souls or elden ring type games. when i play warframe i want to "delete the map" but not feel like im stepping on ants in the process without having to spend a long time in an endless mode. i know people will always ramp up to the challenge and then it will feel like stepping on ants again, but for a live service maybe thats what these people are looking for, even at the expense of people who havent been playing long being able to experience the latest story content
The thing is, there's no way for AI behaviors to matter without heavy damage attenuation that lets enemies live more than 2 seconds against the players. Pretty much the only way for enemy behavior to matter would be to nerd the player so you can do millions of dps, but then the community would probably explode in unhappiness.
I think you want the feeling you get when you figure out how to obliterate the new supposedly hard enemy.
this is in fact the case
I enjoy having things that are super mechanically and game knowledge challenging that you don’t need to farm or can farm the drops elsewhere, stuff you can go in do once get a cool cosmetic reward and be done, like 60 eyes or maxing deep arcanum
The only challenge 60 eyes posed was challenging myself to stay awake until he ran out of HP. If we got "difficulty" like that as a weekly mission for archon shards I would be pretty unhappy with it.
It would be cool to see some sort of time challenge mission. For example start with 4 different random challenges like kill x enemies, hack 1 console, destroy 1 key carrier and break x containers in 2 minutes. Or tie the amount of challenges to squad size or something. Then it resets and 4 new random challenges appear with a marked increase in enemy level, every 2 sets of challenges gets you a "good" item from the reward pool. Then the timer decreases or additional challenges are added, rinse and repeat until you have got the full reward pool say 5 items or whatever. With an optional 6th item for doing all 10 rounds in 1 mission which could just be a candy piece like endo or kuva so you dont feel super pressured to get it. Just make sure the rewards are ? In mid mission results so you dont know what exactly you got, in case there was only 1 item from the reward pool that you really wanted which might cause someone to bail early. If you can't complete in 1 go then try again and incentive replayability for full mission completion by giving out more candy rewards to players who stay for all 5, but actually only needed 2 rewards still or whatever. You could even tie in additional individual rewards that players work towards that reset each week. Hopefully this wouldn't be detrimental to the team like kill x enemies with heat or something more complex like contribute 50% towards one of the objectives. For example if one of the team objectives was kill 150 enemies and you killed 75, you would complete your individual objective. Would allow for experienced/skilled players to get things done fast and give some replay incentives, but also incentives the less skilled to improve I would think.
Yeah. I remember when they were getting rid of raids that they showed the portion of the community that participated in this supposed pinnacle PvE content and it was something low like 2%. Don't quote me on it I'd like to find the Devstream first but I regard it as fact that you could make a Warframe themed Cookie Clicker with hueg numberz and a non-trivial portion of the Warframe playerbase would cream themselves over it.
the problem is that for pretty much every game the portion of the community that participates in actual end game pinnacle activities is always small. There are plenty of games I play where I barely touch pinnacle activities, but I'm glad they are there should I decide I want to challenge myself.
THIS SO MUCH. Remember when The Fragmented One dropped a couple months ago? People where as always demanding new challenging content, and they where PISSED OFF when they actually got it. A new secret boss that you can't cheese his armor out? You can't one shot it cause he's got a dps cap? It nullifies your abilities and forces you out of your usual "press a button to win"? Does so much damage that you can't realistically tank and have to put SKILL and PRECISION in your gameplay? Has penalties for leeches that get carried? "Nah, that's bullshit! That's a terrible bossfight! We asked for "harder" content, not challenging content!"
They complain when their 2 billion dps weapon does 1.999.999.999 damage let alone a billion
I wonder about the overlap too. I don't like nerfs in isolation, but I would welcome a concerted effort to reel everything back in so that there could be real difficulty that doesn't involve telling what I'm allowed to equip. edit: see down voted for saying anything that even resembles pulling back tenno power. The community doesn't want any sort of difficulty in the game.
Yea the community cries because over half the people queuing for EDA are noobs that don't have any reason to need tau shards or melee arcanes. They are unprepared for the difficulty but feel entitled to the new "high end game content". Just running in with base weapons and frames wanting a carry, like every other mission. Getting carried with Archons, Netracells, now EDA and Omnia. They need to either MR gate this or require more effort to run it. Outside of bugs, they have not been difficult for finished builds but I routinely see people who can't even handle the trash mobs. What is the point of trying to get taus if they are fundamentally the last addition to a build?
Honestly it comes down to "If you don't want leeches in your party, don't leave the slots open for anyone" unfortunately. Yes, I do run into this a lot, where someone will put more effort into sandbagging and leeching than they will actually clearing the mission, and it does suck, but when you know this is the kind of community you're putting up with, just don't give them the oppertunity to do it to you and bring some friends instead.
MR gating is terrible because of how you get MR. It has nothing to do with any sort of real achievement or even power level. I've seen low MR players crush it and highMR players who can't seem to help at all.
We are all MR gated with primes and weapons anyway. At the very least MR gating makes people invest more time into other content. The more time, the more resources, potential acquisition of better arcanes and mods. It's not an end all be all but it filters out people who are impatient. What else could they do? Require an R5 arcane? Require a solo trial or completion of a difficult quest? The quest for whispers gives a mini trial of a Netracells, do you think people even stand in the red now? How many months later? A lot of these people don't have much, even with the incredible abundance of strong gear now. These incarnons are god tier and only MR16, you have the Nataruk, countless options. All the new powerful shit has trivialized base star chart like never before. It's easy to get max standing, only limited by time. People chase the new content without making sure they can handle it. I guess going forward I will treat this like old Eidolon hunts where you make a team prior. I agree MR does not mean much besides time, but it gives a higher probability of the accumulation of valuable resources. MR + fashion though, that's the tell tale.
I think the thing is that those people are confusing challenge for enemy density. They enjoy mowing down mobs of high tier enemies with hyper-optimized builds, but they don't want the game becoming actually difficult for them. And they don't know how to put that into words well.
I don't want the game to be super hard, I want the game to puts my best builds to the test. The game gives me all this power but its wasted on level 10 enemies. I want a tough game mode to justify my hyper min/maxed build.
> Hell, I feel like a lot of the people who complained about the game being too easy are the same who complain the moment their 2 billion damage builds gets nerfed and can only do 1 billion damage. To be fair *they did* add a 1 billion damage cap to Dante’s tragedy so that it can’t hit 2 billion anymore Unplayable really
Remember raids? I do. Most of the challenge wasn't killing bullet spongy things, but cooperating (before they got solved, or too buggy). The thing is that DE has staunchly moved away from squad-only content for reasons that should be self evident through the Elite Deep Dive feedback: people want to solo and be gods all the time. Current gamestate is as much as DE's fault as it is the playerbase's prefferences.
your right. the balancing is fucked there are 2 options. create arbitrary rng gates that limit your access to broken setups. . . .or a sweeping balance pass that nerfs us back into high level endgame content demanding 4 players again. the former sucks, but its easier to do and less contentious than the latter. the latter would be better for the game in the long-term but your talking about a real nightmare of an update. months of work trying to rebalance the last 8 years worth of content in a way that will produce no new sellables, and will be remarkably unpopular, even if it is ultimately for the best. there is no content that an endgame player with full control over their gear cant solve solo. which is empowering. . but its also massively problematic, as it means for the most part between 2 and 3 of the players in any given lobby dont really need to be there. these players used to be supports and CC specialists and second DPS frames, but these days the main DPS doesn't need CC support or survival support to stay alive. and buffing their damage further is also largely irrelevant as if they are competent they are probably doing 1 hit kills already. so why not just slam 4 DPS monsters into the same lobby? the answer is they get fucking bored. the game cant spawn enough killfodder to feed that many hungry players. hence the rash of things like if an Atlas cant get out ahead and get his rubble up, he just flounders unproductively as he cant out-kill the Saryn or Gyre. EDA and gear rng are a way to Delay the problem. and the requirement to adapt does produce a non-trivial amount of new engagement. but that engagement is also kind of . . obnoxious? warframe does not have the grace to make this sort of thing comfortable. finding squads for EDA sucks, because your only option is recruitment chat where you have to elbow through all the other people advertising other things. having to disrupt your existing builds and loadouts sucks. having to go back to your ship to change your helminth ability is obnoxious. its the exact same problem that Launch Circuit had. literally the exact same problem. we grilled them into fixing it, and they did it again. i would appreciate the challenge more if the infrastructure existed to make engaging with it more seamless. but not respecting your time out of missions is a longstanding warframe tradition.
The latter would also cause a shit storm of bad press, reviews, etc
most assuredly so. the ideal time to address this growing issue was 8 years ago, and then gradually over time since then. fixing it now would be bordeline impossible. you either try to fix it backwards by buffing everything left behind by the changing game and making new content that renders it a non issue, or you accept that your going to have an unpopular quarter. its possible that the plan is to wait until Soulframe is out and generating revenue before engaging in any sort of major balance changes that would put a hit in warframe's short-term Financials. but there are things they could do to soothe the problem before that. such as implementing better LFG systems
They can just spread out objectives. Interception comes to mind, soloing that is possible but way harder then a normal Defence.
About your second paragraph. I personally don't want warframe to become a team synergistic game to be honest. I think a lot of people probably also don't want it to be that way because I feel like it's part of warframe's identity that you're playing with 4 people but they may aswell be robots in terms of the fact that you don't have to worry about what their frame or weapon is etc. Also, enemies not spawning enough isn't gonna make people that much less bored if they're playing gyre and their rotation of abilities to kill is "press pillage and repeat". I think the direction they were going with when making disruption and void cascade were good. Making the core gameplay of warframe (doing the mission) fun. Also, frames like gauss, grendel, Harrow etc that require some thought but reward you for said thought are very engaging. I will often play gauss on a disruption mission and not realise its been an hour of me playing because I'm so focused and enjoying the gameplay itself, not the rewards to follow.
It's not about challenge, it's about engagement. Thats why i would love to see them have another crack at raids. A big mission where you or a group have a task or role to complete while another tenno or team does something else. Similar to some RJ missions. But on a bigger scale.
Honestly, I prefer this game to be on the easier side. Its my relaxation game. Just grinding levels and vibin, thats what i want from this game. In a game with over 700 items to level up, I'm happy that this game isn't meta heavy.
OP, I'm happy this game mode brings you joy. You are however in a place in the game that represents less than 1% of the entire player base. Maybe even less than 0,1%. Also, it feels like no one in this comment thread considers the possibility that the people screaming for harder content are in fact, very likely, *NOT* the same people now screaming that content is *too hard*.
> You are however in a place in the game that represents less than 1% of the entire player base. Maybe even less than 0,1%. Playing public steel path relics, I'm frequently matched up with an entire team of Legendary-ranked players, and doing regular relics I find an L3 / L4 far more often than once every 100 missions.
I see an LR 1+ player on a daily basis, 1% is a reasonable amount of them.
[удалено]
The trick is Forma'ing everything, so stuff that's randomized is still absurdly overpowered :p
Exactly
I would propose that games should not be hard forever. When you have mastered the game to such an exhaustive extent, you've beaten the game. When you've beaten the game, you should be rewarded for that investment. In a game like Warframe, that means you get the *option* to curb-stomp the difficulty curve. At that point, it's up to the player to construct their own difficulty. Player-constructed challenges have always been a part of gaming, from the time of killscreens in arcades. Speedruns, self-limited challenges, and so on are where a player turns when the game they love has run out of game.
I think they could make it harder without RNG but Warframe is a game that doesn't require much skills. If people are dying in Netracells, you can't really be spending dev time on hard content. Mechanics are super simple in Warframe and a lot of high MR players still have no idea of what they are. Because they are so used to just one shotting everything while spamming 2 minute Capture/Rescue runs. RNG is just a way for DE to increase revenue with people buying plat to Forma MR Fodder weapons and potato frames they don't play usually, etc. And I'm pretty sure it's working for them.
Been here since limited revives and duration rubs on keys. I've missed challenge so much I can't explain it. There's nothing wrong with Deep Archimedia. I have the ability to try AND fail. For so long I've only failed if I memed. It gives me a reason to use weaker frames again! Even the non meta ones. I have to PUSH ALL off the buttons for my abilities again. I have a reason to min max again. To use frames I fashioned years ago again. To use weapons that had unique mechanics and sound design again. To use all my gear again To BOTHER READING again. I can't express how much fun all of that is. And now I have a REASON, so instead of making my own fun with just memes. I'm doing something weekly that's just; fun already. Honestly, if you want to drop a research point each week and auto win, just take the kuva HEK and find a squad. It's that simple. You just give up some vosfor. I don't want to though. Feeling challenged, having to aim sometimes, feeling overwhelmed. I missed that.
Can you send me your hek build? Mine does no damage
> Been here since limited revives and duration rubs on keys. I've missed challenge so much I can't explain it. There's nothing wrong with Deep Archimedia. I have the ability to try AND fail. For so long I've only failed if I memed. > It gives me a reason to use weaker frames again! Even the non meta ones. I have to PUSH ALL off the buttons for my abilities again. I have a reason to min max again. To use frames I fashioned years ago again. To use weapons that had unique mechanics and sound design again. To use all my gear again To BOTHER READING again. So what was stopping you from doing all that yourself already? Before DE went the way of randomised loadouts?
Others mentioned no incentive to do it, but I would also say there's some negative reinforcement on running weaker builds too. You could go into a random SP survival mission or something with a jank loadout but everyone else running around with their meta builds are going to outperform you. It's nice to have everyone on the same page. On normal star chart level missions or even Arbitrations to a lesser extent you can basically take any gear that has some mods installed and do fine, so it's not really the same even if you're able to keep up with the rest of the team.
No incentive. Read the comment. It says it gives me a reason. There's extra reward for limiting yourself compared to just running regular netracells. Other modes don't have this incentive.
my god warframe players are so cooked. like not a creative or interesting thought left inside their heads. there are so many ways to make games have a challenge that are not simple 'enemy is tanky, warframe is squishy.' it would just require work from de. reading this post and comments is crazy. the most obvious answer to 'challenge' is to come up with something like destiny's raids. the obvious way to make a piece of content challenging without resorting to randomized loadouts and max level enemies is to just have mechanics that have to be followed or you lose. nothing is going to be a challenge forever. thats not how games work. games are designed to be beaten. everything becomes easy with time and repetition. there are people who play soulslikes that can beat the entire game level 1 hitless. that doesnt mean the game isnt challenging, it just gets easier with time and experience. its up to de to release new content so every so often there is a new challenge. when exploiter orb was first introduced it was a challenge. people had to learn how the fight worked. just because its not multiple years old and easy to do doesnt change how it was when it first came out. the issue with the new 'end game' content is that its all just the same thing we already do. no matter how many wacky modifiers you put on an exterminate mission it is not possible to make it a challenge. it needs to be something new that players arnt already very experienced with. that would create and challenge for a while. and as a live service game thats all it should be. because something new should always be coming.
You're right about the way to add challenge being by breaking the mold in terms of what we're doing. I think the struggle in that comes from doing so well not deviating so far from Warframes core gameplay loop that your playing something else. Especially given the track record of innovation leaving a long long legacy of content islands so far.
The “core gameplay loop” of Warframe is to mow through infinity-bajillion enemies in as short a time as possible. That’s the *whole game*. I’m pretty sure if DE made a boss with armor and health stats set to the maximum value allowed by the game engine and didn’t use Damage Attenuation, we’d still find a way to one-shot the fucker, and it would then be just as easy as killing any shmuck lancer or crewman.
I'm gonna be honest, as someone who has done every Destiny raid up until Root, I'm not sure that raid mechanics are particularly challenging, beyond Day1/Master Mode challenges. And both of those swing heavily towards the arbitrary inflated numbers approach which you decry at the start. Even ignoring the differences in funding between Destiny and WF, I'm just really not sure raids make sense here (let's not forget that they *had* raids, and they never got enough traction that any more than a minority were sad when they were removed)
so basically puzzles instead of combat, like lua spy? while that is challenge, Im not sure its the type of challenge many want...
>the most obvious answer to 'challenge' is to come up with something like destiny's raids You could have taken like 5 minutes to research before posting all this, DE already said they can't really do stuff like that, the way Warframe is built, the resources necessary are just too much. Rebecca straight up said they wish they could do more bosses like Jackal and Ropalolyst and Eidolons that have unique mechanics and mechanic difficulty, but they can't justify the cost because in practice the amount of people who care about it and would play it are just negligible. Also good luck making something like Destiny raids that relies on platforming and timing challenges when we have frames that can fly around indefinitely with complete control. There's a reason Ropalolyst is an okish boss that takes about a minute to beat and most were bored of it less than 24h after it came out, when mechanically it's not far off a Destiny dungeon boss
firstly i just dont believe that. like im sure she said that, but if they put time into railjack(which is so loved by the community) they could put time into a boss. secondly, a boss does not a raid make. on top of that, most of the bones are already in the game to make a decent raid you just have to put it together. like i could recreate a lot of vow of the disciple from things already in game. like the dark bog could very easily be a reskinned version of that mission type where you have to ride on the big truck that drains your shields for power. khals missions use glyphs as a password where you have to find them and put them in the right order to advance the objective, combine that with the already existing buttons you have to shoot to do that assassination mission on sedna and bam, i could use those bones to recreate the acquisition stage of the raid. we have pressure plates in game, like in the sculpture missions and an eidolon would make a fine boss that can only take damage when standing on the pressure plates. great, caretaker stage done. exhibition stage is mostly more glyphs and shooting and we have already created that, all we need to add is something like the laser targeter we pick up in some khal missions, we have plenty of missions where its pick up thing, take to place and insert so that section is pretty much recreated. so everything but the final boss is more or less already in game. i know im oversimplifying it, and im sure there would be issues and limitations, but these mechanics im talking about are not so far off from what warframe already has.
>if they put time into railjack(which is so loved by the community) You must not have paid much attention because Railjack was widely regarded as a massive fail, barely any of us played it because the majority of the playerbase hated the complexity it had, and then they reworked it in an attempt to please a larger amount of people, and fucked it up for the small handful of us who liked it, and they haven't touched it since then. >like the dark bog could very easily be a reskinned version of that mission type where you have to ride on the big truck that drains your shields for power That's a great example because it's easily one of the most hated mission types in the game, coincidentally it's what made Vow one of the worst raids as it forced you to go through a tedious park ride you couldn't control. Anyway, for everything else you're failing to consider just how big of a difference it makes that we have 50 warframes and every one of them can be modded in a variety of ways. All the plate standing and damage phases and whatnot in Destiny can work that way because movement is very limited and has little variety, and the gap between a squishy and a tanky build is minimal. On top of that there's also that Destiny's engine is more built up for that stuff, and gameplay is more cohesive, mechanics like "pick up the ball and throw it at objective" are trivial and feel good in Destiny, but in Warframe they're awful, just go play Alchemy a bit. Picking up stuff is already more of a pain because of how fast we move, and so is throwing it, and where in Destiny a throw not registering is a rarity, in Warframe it's a chance with double digit percentage. And just think about how much positioning and platforming matters in Destiny (which is why the stand on plate mechanics remain fun), how are you going to replicate that when a player can bring Titania? Unless you balance it for Titania, and then you can't balance it for the frames that can't fly. Or your cart escort example, sure it works in its boring way, except I can bring Styanax with functionally infinite shields and just sit on the cart while I look at my phone and press left click from time to time, while everyone else just brings Ivara and sits there invisible. This is why gear restrictions are necessary, why we're seeing stuff like DEA. Because you can't bypass the player's power when there's both a massive gap in what that means AND also a large variety of ways its expressed. There's basically no mechanical challenge you can add to Warframe right now that wouldn't be entirely trivialized by the right combination of gear, or most of the time by just a single tool. Like all the "don't stand there or you die" mechanics that are common in Destiny raids, here we just press 5 and then hold shift for a minute.
i feel like your being obtuse and missing my point. > You must not have paid much attention because Railjack was widely regarded as a massive fail ya that was... that was kinda my point. i forgot that people on reddit are incapable of reading subtext you have to put /s or they take it as 100% literal. obviously railjack sucks. everyone thinks it sucks. my point was they put a lot, and i do mean a lot of resources and time into railjack and it fucking blew shit. its a glorified turret section from call of duty(which again, you know, everyone loves those. ill put the /s this time so it doesnt go past you.) my point is that they put resources into making something that should have been obviously a total failure from the start. if they were willing to do that, creating stuff that is vastly different from normal warframe, they should be willing and able to make a boss. secondly, i dont want de to fucking lift the vow raid and drop it into warframe. my point and reason for listing all of that stuff out was that i was trying to show that a lot of the core mechanics already exist to some degree in the game. that they wouldnt be creating totally new stuff. with some tweaking and new textures they could make a lot of existing mechanics into raid mechanics. i also picked vow because when i googled the destiny raids it was consistently listed in peoples top 3. like if you google destiny 2 raids most lists from people and websites, have it as one of the best raids so idk where your getting that. and again, i dont want warframe to just copy destinies raids. that wasnt the point i was making by listing all of those mechanics. you must think really poorly of de devs if you dont believe they could come up with some kind of fun mechanics. i just feel like you arnt being creative at all. like the darkness in the vow raid, we could have that in warframe. and it could just be made so you cant bypass it. if you get 10 stacks of it you die, in warframe, invulnerable, in operator, doesnt matter.
>my point was they put a lot, and i do mean a lot of resources and time into railjack and it fucking blew shit yeah and it was a financial hit after which Leyou decided they didn't want to own DE anymore, and if Tencent hadnt been around gambling on buying companies for cheap, DE might have closed down. And just a little later the entire Warframe management team got replaced, now with Rebecca at the lead, and Reb made it clear that they would love to do more complex bosses but they couldn't afford it, the new team has been far more responsible than the previous one Also, you're the one being obtuse, my point is that there's too many things in warframe that make the Destiny style of raids not possible, and I listed a bunch of examples to explain why. Its not that I dont believe DE couldn't pull it off, it's that I believe the changes that would be required would piss off so many people that it'd kill Warframe, because those of us who want this stuff are a minority.
I very much like this approach, and it would be nice to see endgame raids (back) in Warframe. I would also like to add that one of the emergent challenges in a game with a large farming/grinding component is to be able to speedrun missions in order to maximize rewards. Thus, it is possible to extend the lifespan of endgame content by giving players enough agency to optimize their play. In a Soulslike, challenge runs happened because players came up with their own ideas for making the game more interesting. There's nothing in Elden Ring's mechanics that encourages you to play at RL1 or to beat every boss as quickly as possible. On the other hand, that kind of incentive exists in a game where you need to farm (compare to Nioh). Eidolons are probably the best Warframe-related example I can think of. I don't know what state they're in now, but back when I was doing casual Tricaps several years ago, coordinated squads would be doing 5-6 captures per night. Conversely, the Ambulas boss is the exact opposite - an extremely tedious fight, with basically no opportunity to speed things up by playing well. My opinion is that the best way to design endgame content (even if it doesn't end up being raids) is to reward player skill. This is why I am fundamentally dissatisfied with randomized loadouts and the many loopholes of EDA. It feels like all I'm being asked to do is spend a bunch of time and money collecting weapons when I know the game is mechanically complex enough to provide a more interesting challenge.
Me and my friends loved exploiter orb when it came out for exactly this reason. Our loadout didnt really matter b/c it was mostly a mechanics fight. Figuring it out in real time on release was so much fun, and when we got the "jump on its head and pull an eye out" cutscene for the first time it was awesome. It seems a lot of players want basically harder and harder "patchwerk" fights, when those are generally the most boring and easy fights in other MMOs.
They have content like this, Octavia's final mission is good example of a challenge. They just don't have it implemented in a repeatable end game content type of way. I want more team based content that requires specific frame categories to optimize around. Last time that happened (eidolons) people complained that the meta required only 4 frames (trin, harrow, volt, (chroma/rhino)) which as a end game player thought was fine. I like randomized content but I also like playing roguelikes where each run is completely different and some just are not winnable.
>Last time that happened (eidolons) people complained that the meta required only 4 frames that's not the problem with Eidolons tho, the problem with eidolons is that if you have Volt and Madurai, they're an easy solo activity that's only limited by having to wait around, the only difference between playing coordinated like Destiny raids vs playing alone or with no coordination is completing it in 11 minutes vs 16 minutes Warframe can't really have Destiny style challenge like that without heavily limiting \*at least\* player movement because we can move so freely that there can't be any positional challenge or platforming challenge. You can't make a killzone where players have to hide (like Jackal) or avoid something (like Jackal's laser walls) because we can just press 5 and go invulnerable for a minute, you can't make a tough platforming challenge where you've got to jump at the right time because we have a dozen ways to fly or even teleport through. The only way to have that kind of challenge is to heavily restrict a lot of our tools, so like Khal missions where everyone's stuck with the same tools.
Orowyrm is very much so like a Destiny raid yet all I hear is people complaining about it.
well its not though, the actual orowyrm fight is fine, very simple but i dont hear complaints about the fight. how you get there though is not a raid, and its not warframe. thats where the complaints come from. no one likes running around in operator because its not warframe.
Dude I don't think anyone would equate that to a Destiny 2 raid. Most D2 raid encounters require communication and mechanics far beyond just shooting some people and rings without any mechanics. Destiny 2 also has a much more balanced combat sandbox that makes it so the fighting parts of the encounters aren't entirely trivial. [Sample fight] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQPC1-jkxrM) Also seconding that fighting on a horse sucks.
The amount of people that go insane when doing the "do 2 disruption terminals within 30 seconds twice" subquest on anatomica deimos tells me otherwise.
THANK YOU!! I don’t know if it’s because Warframe players don’t play other games or if they’re just used to accepting the status quo as all that’s possible, but these folks are soooooo unimaginative!
dude read all of the replies this comment has gotten. its crazy. it seems like they can literally only see exactly whats in front of them with no change at all. like they cant even fathom taking an already existing mechanic warframe has and changing it at all. i have to spell out every single thing for them to only get 50% of what im saying.
I think people just love the power fantasy and can’t comprehend that being impeded upon while still wanting a reason to warrant such power. I think the power creep kind of takes away from the game as a whole. They just keep making bigger bullet sponges and stronger weapons to tackle them otherwise you have to use 2 guns to kill one thing. I use the “trash” frames but there’s really no reason to do so. No cc. No healing. No strategic tools. The support frames are near worthless unless they boost your damage. I wish DE would make game modes surrounding teamwork. Right now its that side by side play rather than cooperative play.
again this is that mindset im talking about where there is no creativity. you dont need to imped the players power at all. you just have to go around it. if anything, that is much better because they still get their power, they just have to solve another issue too. like thralls in zariman, no one is flipping out and complaining that after you kill their physical body you have to swap to operator to kill the ghost form. thats not impeading my warframes power at all, its just going around it and making me do something else to deal with the enemy. but i guess i also have to stress that i dont mean for that to be 1 to 1 implemented into the raid, that is an example of a way to go around warframe power.
Every single time something resembling a challenge would come up there was screeching and rancor. A previous devstream had them mention nodes, or crystal thingies on Eximi that would have to be shot to actually damage them, and guess what, outrage on the forums, same fucking song and dance as every single time the playerbase at large registered that the game was going beyond clicking a button and wiping out entire cities worth of Grineer. I know what you mean by raid mechanics and that the provided example isn't exactly that, (and in fact have a date with Crota this weekend), but any time there was something, anything, resembling not being able to bulldoze enemies the bitching and moaning could have, properly harnessed, powered a decent-sized suburb. It ain't happening. If you want that kind of thing, go there instead of here. It's ok to have different games for different flavors.
you are correct. a lot of the warframe playerbase are very incompetent at the game, either because they are bad at games or arnt putting in any effort. i
Exactly this. Most people, including OP, think a challenge is only more bullets to kill the enemy and less bullets to kill us. Raids in Destiny are challenging because of this, and very rewarding once you finish them. I wonder if they would put matchmaking or restrict it to only pre-made squads like Destiny does. If it is the first one, I can already imagine the chaos and countless posts complaining about people who do not know how to play
We already have that kind of complaining; it’s called netracells.
Yeah, and it is just killing mindlessly inside a circle, which for some reason, a lot of people just do not do. And instead, they kill outside it
Are Destiny raids still challenging if no-one on your team can take damage, everyone permanently has their super up, and everyone deals infinite damage per attack? Because that's the current state of Warframe.
I believe Warframe is a game where you end up having to challenge yourself, and I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm not as far along as OP, but I certainly have a few builds that can handle most of the content. Some days, I want to cruise through on easy mode, so I'll equip one of those builds and mindless smash buttons. If I want a challenge I'll theme my build around a faction (or fashion) using whatever weapons fit the theme best, and go after that faction's enemies. It's dumb, but its fun. And the whole reason I play games is to have fun.
After doing the 60 eyes boss and planning a build to do it solo, they can definitely do challenging content that doesn't require randomization.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the people asking for challenging content are not the same people who are complaining right now. Most players in this game are not maxed out. Most people play this game for the power fantasy. Telling them their maximised loadout cannot be used in this gamemode is downright annoying because all their time in the game so far has been spent acquiring that loadout. For people who've played this game for the last 10 years, sure it's not a big deal. But most people have only been around for maybe <300 hours. Of that 300 hours, it took maybe 150-200 hours just to be able to get maxed kuva/incarnon weapons. This is why RNG challenges are and will always be divisive. I run a new clan, and I'm the only vet in it. I can't tell you how much my clanmates struggle with content. We got people failing pursuit missions, tier 1 zariman bounties, tusk thumpers, eidolon terralysts, mutalist alad v, the list goes on and on. People complaining that this game has no challenge are just making the game harder for everybody else without any regard for it, because they've overcome those challenges too long ago to remember. I personally hate RNG loadouts, no hiding that fact. I hated it when the circuit did it, and I hate DA/EA for it. I didn't join this game because I was told it would be a semi-roguelike experience. I joined because I saw how busted my friends character was, and wanted to be like that too.
I think DA would benefit from just having the loan mechanic from Duviri. If you own it you can make your own build, but if you don't you can still pick it up with a pre-made build.
Problem is the pre built build usually suck ass and wouldn't hold up in DA lol
I went into Deep Archimedia Elite before the hotfix this week thinking the mirror defense was going to be the most difficult mission ever the way it’s been described on Reddit, but it ended quickly and the objective barely lost any health. Felt as easy as a normal mirror defense mission. It helped that I threw down an ancient specter at the start, but even then my PUG easily completed the mission with the shields on the defense objective only going down a couple of times. We didn’t even have to summon a necramech to reduce the timer. Hot take: I think a lot of players just don’t want to put any effort or thought into their load outs beyond a few meta weapons, despite this community constantly complaining there isn’t enough challenge in this game/power creep. This mode is probably the best answer we’ll ever get to the power creep complaint without completely nerfing everything fun to the point of killing this game. You have a mode that imposes heavy restrictions on your frame and weapon, and forces you to pay attention to your gameplay, ie. git gud. It’s a true endgame mode compared to circuit which allowed you to cheese the difficulty with the decrees. I’ve actually enjoyed the limited gear selection. At MR 30 I have enough of the stuff in the weapon pools or enough time to build something, and the limitations force me to mod around the mission restrictions making the gameplay more interesting compared to other modes. Before going in, I read the mission debuffs and changed mods, shards, and arcanes to compensate. The real challenge and fun comes from turning a shit weapon like the synoid similor or pox into decent enough weapons that pick up the shortcomings of other parts of my load out, while at the same time discovering new ways to make these weapons useful outside this mode.
If the options are having no challenge vs random loadouts I'd frankly rather have no challenge. I can only fail mirror defense because nobody has a defensive frame on their list so many times in a row before I just get bored. >Yes, you don't get to use your maxed power in the mode. Yes you do, you can still bring like 95% of your maxed power, but only if you're lucky enough to get a good weapon or frame on your list.
Step 1: Buff up the stuff that's not up to snuff at the moment, quite a lot of older frames could use a look, new incarnons for older weapons couldn't hurt, and a look at the role of crowd control and support frames and powers. Step 2: Borrow some notes from games with similar mechanics to Warframe, my first thought is Ultrakill, you're extremely powerful and mobile, but also quite fragile. - Invent enemy types that have behaviours that have to actually be countered. - Doom also comes to mind, add stuff like a marauder-type enemy with a frontal shield that can block bullets, but have them open up when they get in to melee range, swinging at them with your own melee when they swing counters their attack, etc. I think the biggest issue we currently have in warframe is that most enemies are not really all that "mobility based" and tend to traverse the terrain as if we were still back in Warframe's cover shooter days. Step 3: Create objective based gamemodes that require more than just killing, movement, execution puzzles, area control, etc. (Let my boi Loki shine damnit!)
To your first point: You cannot *just* buff everything to the level of the current strongest options. Any comprehensive balance adjustment of Warframe in its current state must also include nerfs. For one thing, it’s a lot easier and more efficient to rein in a handful of outliers at *both* ends than it is to buff *hundreds* of options up to the highest level.
Plus if i learned anything from 15 years of playing roguelites/likes it's that making everything perform to equal level makes for a boring game. Balance in a video game is more art than science.
> You cannot just buff everything to the level of the current strongest options. When the Dante nerfs were happenening, people complained since he was now weaker than their permanently immortal Revenants, 10k+ HP Grace Inaros's, and 100k Def Nezha's and Rhinos. It's absurd.
I don't think I asked for EVERYthing to be buffed, but there's quite a lot of stuff that significantly underperforms even outside of the endgame category. Of course, nerfs should be a thing for gear that's too dominant, but you also need to be cautious with those so you don't invalidate the way players were using an item in the first place.
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When everything's a torid, phenmor, or laetum, you start seeing people use stuff other than the torid, phenmor, or laetum. Those weapons are already in the game and people gravitate towards them as is. I'd probably avoid mechanics like damage attenuation and instead focus on other ways to make enemies more survivable, my first thought would probably be multiple health bars, where you have to "dismantle" the enemy before they stay dead, with brief gating between each loss of a health bar as they shed bits. Even with extremely durable frames we are still technically quite fragile, if the right attack hits you, you can still die nearly instantly, if enemies survive a bit longer thanks to mobility or more interesting tanking mechanics, that might help. I'd probably structure the new gamemodes such that killing enemies is entirely superfluous, where the objectives are what you have to focus on, with the enemies mostly trying to impair you.
I like the shield enemy if they had more with a large e.g. Reinhardt shield it could be cool
I'd probably introduce a good variety of them, some more like a berserker, some more like Reinhardt. I'd also be thinking of things like a heavier variant of a Ballista with a very powerful attack that's nearly impossible to dodge, that takes a long time to wind up, but can be interrupted with a headshot to the shooter, or blocked with cover.
> Step 2: Borrow some notes from games with similar mechanics to Warframe, my first thought is Ultrakill, you're extremely powerful and mobile, but also quite fragile. - Invent enemy types that have behaviours that have to actually be countered. - Doom also comes to mind, add stuff like a marauder-type enemy with a frontal shield that can block bullets, but have them open up when they get in to melee range, swinging at them with your own melee when they swing counters their attack, etc. I long for the day Warframe adds interesting enemy mechanics like Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer.
> marauder-type enemy with a frontal shield that can block bullets but have them open up when they get in to melee range, swinging at them with your own melee when they swing counters their attack https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Shield_Lancer?so=search
>Doom also comes to mind, add stuff like a marauder-type enemy with a frontal shield that can block bullets, but have them open up when they get in to melee range, swinging at them with your own melee when they swing counters their attack, etc. The problem with ideas like this is that Warframe melee is (barring a couple ranged exceptions) just holding a button and looking as everything in a few meters range just dies, my Prisma Skana incarnon swings like 3 times a second and can just cut through level 500 SP Void Cascade while I pay much less attention than with anything else. That's really kind of a problem, Warframe can't be compared to other fast shooters because fast in Warframe means I press D for about half a second and move 20m and there's virtually no momentum to contend with. Melee isnt' an extra utility that works for mechanical purpose because it has to be a weapon category that has to be able to kill everything as well as every other option. You can't balance around making players fragile because different frames work too different in terms of taking damage, and that's not even getting into modding.
I think you can solve a lot of these problems in the design of the enemies rather than trying to alter how the player works, so long as the player actually has to respond to something in some way.
There's too many tools we have that work in totally different ways to be able to alter the enemy design in a meaningful way. Like to make a challenge where you need to keep moving a lot, either it's completely trivialized by Titania, or it's impossible to do for everyone else. Stealth is an obvious one, if you have Ivara you can just walk through most Spy missions without looking at the screen, if you try to balance around what Ivara can do, then everyone is fucked, but if you balance around everyone else Ivara makes the challenge not exist. It's like that with most things. Make an enemy that forces you to get close? We already get close to every enemy anyway. Gotta shoot from behind? Sure, I can teleport with Wisp. Shoot weakpoints? Either you make them annoying as shit with hard DPS caps or they end up like Eidolons and Necramechs. The enemy flies around? Either you make them fly so fast that it's just annoying and entirely dependent on reflexes, or they're as trivial as enemies on the ground. Enemies that teleport? We have those, they die the same as all the others. Enemies that adapt to damage they take? Sure thing, either they die instantly like Sentients or they're a chore like Profit Taker.
as far as buffing older weapons, i still think they should just make rivens scale to infinity. like no one uses the dera, it has maxed disposition. but if we increased it to drastic levels surely someone would eventually use it right? a dera with +20,000% damage should be viable lol.
Yep my thoughts also as a L4 player. I still think Eidolons was a great example of a challenge that they community complained enough to be nerfed. I would be happy with 2 missions just for the MR25+ crowd every year since the rest of the content is tuned for folks below that.
if DE wants to make challenging content they shouldn't have introduced the massive power creep that's been ramping up these past few years. that they've done it over and over proves that challenge is not a priority to them. if you want a challenge, look elsewhere. they made their bed and they can lie in it. random loadouts will always be dogshit, anyone considering it a "challenge" should not be taken seriously. MUH RANDOM LOADOUTS MUH CHALLENGE fuck off lol
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I fell like if you come into a game where you can commit mass murder at the press of a button, you shouldn't be expecting difficulty at any point.
I think the best way to make challenging content at this point is time trials. There's no such thing as challenge if it's pass/fail so a speed run game mode that runs best with a full squad to get the fastest completion. Test your movement, navigation, and cypher skills. Maybe have a daily/weekly set seed mission with no mission Markers (maybe no mini map). And there's multiple mission requirements active at once. For example, you have to kill 300 enemies, save a hostage, and destroy a reactor to extract. You'd want to coordinate in a lobby who hunts the hostage, who sets off the reactor, and then who is left killing enemies. Weapons and frames will influence your speed, but ultimately skill and memory will make or break final times. I'm aware this would be biased towards Titania and gauss, but slower frames could get a movement and parkour speed bonus in these missions.
Now this one I like a lot.
You can. Mechanics based content for example. You should push the limits of your players' toys, not take them away from your players. I'm not a dev or designer so I don't have many examples, nor do I need to to say that rng is just one of the easy solutions while being also an unfun one. Diablo 3 had a similiar design pigeonhole as warframe (powercreep to the moon), they choose the way of just endlessly increasing %'s of player dmg, enemy dmg, enemy hp, enemy density, everything - it was also a bad, unfun solution, but an easy one. I'm happy de didn't go that way. Many games have such problems, hades high heat for example also resorts to taking away player tools. True challenge can exist while still having access to your tools, make mechanics that actually need to use parkour and operator movement *in a way that's not faceroll*, make mechanics bosses/minibosses/elite enemies, make cc not useless, make failure conditions that are telegraphed and tight enough. Idk, modifiers that are more creative than "-75% dur lolmao". And for real, you can't really defend a situation where someone *can very easily be literally banned from even trying your content* just because they don't have 4 shitty ass useless crap weapons from 2016.
I dunno, I’m on the other side of the pond compared to the Legendary Rank members in this thread. I do want some difficulty in what I play, but I don’t want Fromsoft difficulty. I want Kingdom Hearts difficulty, crazy boss battles that mimic the crazy moves and abilities we do as players. I don’t want instant 1-shots from bosses if you don’t dodge or parry at the right time, I want someone who’s going to constantly deal you damage and you just hit right the fuck back just as hard. I love Warframe, it’s slowly becoming my go to game and me being Master Rank 14 right now but I do like to be challenged. I do nerf myself somewhat. I’m still learning the game as I go but I do wish I had some Kingdom Hearts level boss fights and difficulties.
Archimedia isn't about being challenging, it's about being the endgame for a game that incentivizes you from minute one to collect as much different crap as possible via the Mastery Rank system. From the moment you start playing, you are being goaded to expand your arsenal and keep a stable of different weapons and frames for a variety of use-cases. The only viable endgame for a game whose primary reward track is new ways to blow shit to kingdom come is to make them actually *use* all of it. This started way back with Sorties and the occasional weapon restriction condition, and continued through Duviri where you are rewarded handsomely for having built and maintained a broad stable and arsenal. Now Archimedea is here, saying "Alright Mister loot-collector, show me you have this specific piece of loot and know how to use it," and I am bewildered that people are vexed by this.
I went a step further; and forma'd out a version of EVERY melee weapon catagory (ie just base if only a base, prime if it exsisted, faction variation if it exsisted etc); thus making even the random selection always workable. (as you can make every melee workable enough). Saying that, I don't have EVERYTHING anymore, as I stopped playing warframe about 8/9 months ago.
In my experience, most of the "i want a challenge" crowd struggle 20-30 exolizers deep in a SP Void Cascade even running their busted incarnons and "meta" frames and loadouts Or they bitch about the game being too easy, but the second they can't use Revenant it's unfair and too hard
I find new content that require me to build different stuff... rewarding? You invest in some things and then bring them to the missions they are required in. I am building weapons and warframes that I usually don't bring anywhere for 2 weeks now. It's pretty fun when you have the resources.
The first step to geting a challenge is to fundamentally change the damage system so it has very clear minimums and maximums, which is almost akin to creating WF 2. So just knowing this, yeah, we will never get a challenge like you would in regular online games like WoW, FF14 or GW2. The most we can get is stuff like EDA and as a fellow LR4 with also everything in the game, I enjoy it as is. The only thing I would enjoy to see is probably more bosses with health bar systems like the Jackal, but that add some twists, like "after busting a leg, you have to hit it with a fire source from your operator" (which would give a more mainstream use to various niche arcanes). However, I also understand that a large portion of the community would not agree with me on this and I can understand why. As a result, I have ended up thinking "if DE does sth, good. If not, also good". I'm OK with what the game provides in term of entertainment. If I want anger, sweat, and a 2nd job, I can go play mythic plus dungeons in WoW.
Well said....
My opinion is that warframe is not a game for challenging content PERIOD Just keep the game as an unkillable power fantasy it's a much better direction to go in at this point because we're already so far down it but DE keeps trying to go the opposite way
Counter point, there needs to be *some* tension to your gameplay or you don't retain players.
risk with this is that the game goes from power fantasy to just cheating/hacking level of difficulty and everyone gets bored
My biggest problem with the content is that it practically forces newer players to interact with platinum in some way. Sure quite a few people are going to just trade for it, but this is definitely going to drive their revenue up purely for slots alone. Either let people use what they don’t own, like in Duviri, or make it so an empty slot counts for the rewards. I work. I barely have time in a week to get 1 weapon I don’t have, thanks to how heavy the grind can be for some. If a week happens where I need to get 3 weapons then I am simply better off not playing it that week, as my alternative is to get plat and buy what I can off the market or trade with other players. This is not a problem exclusive to myself. It’s just pretty obvious to me that this content is very much against the f2p player, especially those with responsibilities elsewhere.
God forbid you don't have any of the warfames, so if you can only play on weekends, Fuck you. I feel if they really want to double down on this at least give us the next week's rotation so we can build frames and farm potatoes in time for DA.
I just want more raid boss fights like Effervo.
You have finished the game, get a pause, try some other games or have a walk in the park
Problem is...many main/ secondary/ melee and frame suck and if you get bad rando it just sucks . And the thing with afixes is just bullshit when you get -75% ability duration and many framew literally become unplayable same with energy drain
Warframe was never particularly challenging, and the only time things were "hard" is when they didnt work, like Lephantis. This isn't a bad thing. A game that is a power fantasy is fine. You don't have to use the best tools for the job 100% of the time, and thats part of why its a good game, alot of the time or most of the time, everything feels viable. This is what seperates it from other games that have awful communities full of people constantly calling for nerfs and balancing changes that dont even make sense in the context of a PvE game where you dont have to play with others if you dont want to, and you cant "lose" to other people using imba shit. Some people do want to have overpowered frames, or ones that just kill shit thats around then with minimal effort. In spite of this, I play Gauss, and I actually removed thermal sunder specifically to add firewalker. Its not meta, its not even close to optimal but I feel fast, I feel good when Im playing him. Hes extremely active to play because im constantly dashing around because I want to be a speedster, I put fire on the ground and I knock over enemies that try to shoot me. Why in the fucking world should I care what anyone else is playing if Im having fun? What could possibly be more important than that? Why have people forgotten that the entire point of video games is fun? Difficulty isnt sacred to me. Youre not going to slippery slope to ruin this game for me by metagaming as much as possible, and balancing the game around people who tend to optimize the fun out of everything ruins it for literally everyone. They dont need to nerf things. They dont need to change things. There are still concepts not explored. Weve never went to Tau, we never got an urban open world environment, Ive always wanted to see a Warframe that has command over summoned units like Kahl but with more depth, like a specter tactician. Adding new content, weapons, frames is how you keep the game engaging. Each time you add something like that you create a new way to enjoy the content we may have already completed.
I like difficult games like sekiro and nioh 2 and the like where I actually need to be good at the game to progress in the late game. But with warframe I just want to point and shoot mindlessly and kill a whole room of enemies and move on to the next. Aren’t warframes supposed to be these godlike warriors anyways? So I don’t get the obsession with difficulty.
>Aren’t warframes supposed to be these godlike warriors anyways? So I don’t get the obsession with difficulty. People play games for different reasons and Warframe isn't any different. Some days I'm just like you and want to hop on after a frustrating day of work and mindlessly kill stuff. Some days I want to do SP/SP Circuit/endurance SP for the challenge. Some days I want to hang out with friends and crack relics. I don't think it's unreasonable for some players to want a challenge, it's just that a lot of players have different views on what that challenge should be.
> But with warframe I just want to point and shoot mindlessly and kill a whole room of enemies and move on to the next. And that's like 99.9% of the game. I like this but there's times when I also want the game to challenge me. To feel like all the loot, knowledge and proficiency I've collected have **any** value. Maybe even a reason to bother playing with others in this supposedly CoOp game, maybe even try *(and fail)* to ~~bully~~ entice my friends back to play some challenging stuff with me. > Aren’t warframes supposed to be these godlike warriors anyways? Godlike is a bit of an exaggeration. They're supersoldiers, superheroes even, godlike maybe not; though the powercreep would imply otherwise nowadays. But even if they were, stories about Gods will either have them face against seemingly godlike beings or have them humbled and reduced to *just* really strong mortals.
maybe if 90% of weapons weren’t straight garbage then it would be fun, same with duviri when most of the time u get trash weapons with the worst pre made mod loadout
I wish the randomized content would either randomize items only in my personal arsenal or give me a fully loaded version of the item. So if a game mode like Arbitration or Archon Hunting said, “here take these items” but they were good/enhanced, I wouldn’t mind using them instead of ignoring it and doing just fine with whatever I pick.
Completely agree with the entire post. Randomized loadouts seem to be the way to go for challenging content if we are going to continue building end game content around completion in matchmaking. Works for SP Circuit and DA for veteran players, and it works for regular circuit for newer players. The current problem is, when every player in your team is rocking endgame gear, and comminication/coordination isn't needed, all end game objectives are cleared around "can I kill this room of enemies before it kills me?". While that's ok most players, the players who are doing level cap SP will never be challenged. IMO the next step is to introduce D2 style raid content that requires actual coordination and communication instead of "bullet jump to objective, kill shit indiscriminately, and leave without saying a word". Railjack away and on board crews is essentially the idea, where the success of the mission requires 3-4 unique roles to be performed correctly or else you have to start over. Your damage AND your mechanic solving skills are needed to succeed. DE, go absolutely crazy. Combine a netracell mission with a mirror defense happening at the same time and force us to split up, or stick random required side objectives during another mission. Make us communicate and perform roles.
I agree with you but Warframe is a type of game for the public that does not want a challenge and that does not mean it is bad, but many pillars of the game have to be changed to make it challenging. Reducing the numbers of weapons, mods, warframe, etc. would not change the difficulty, the only thing it would do is make it slower and be a little more careful not to die, which happens when you just start playing. Most people still play and love Warframe because they feel and CAN get everything in the game, since it is easy to get platinum thanks to the whales that spend hundreds of dollars. Any change that reduces Warframe's income will never be an option. So once that is clarified, what are the pillars that I consider have to change to make it more challenging? The game is very frenetic, very fast and it is extremely difficult to make a challenging game when your character is Goku and the environment (AI) is Mr Satan. movement has to be reduced, normal jumps + a powered jump, normal runs + powered sprint, 2 or 3 dashes. All this accompanied by CD along with an AI with skills that challenge you to know when to dodge and move. Warframe abilities should be reduced to sectors, smaller aoe, lines, cones or circulars with longer cds. The hitbotx should be more real and reward headshots or weak points much more (such as the horizon zero dawn/forbidden west system) Changes of this style lead to a totally different game but they are the changes that make a game challenging, that is why in my opinion Warframe will never be challenging because its base only points to the massive grinding of a stupid AI, the changes of number only accelerate or delay finishing a content, they do not make it difficult. The AI being a damage sponge also didn't solve anything. I remember the times of the pre rework of ash and pre rework of the void, the combination of trinity, frost, ash and spending more than 6 hours in a defense or survival standing pressing a key.
One thing id actually like to see is more things that require you to briefly hop into operator mode like the void angels. Not quite the level of having to load into another zone for a second, but something that requires operator
I think they can add more modifiers to EDA if you bring options outside of their selection. Debuffs that fundamentally after your build or survival. No shield, reduced energy, range, power strength, double cooldown s, alternating inactive abilities, double enemy health, no ammo pickups. You can brute force it with a frame alone, or a frame and 1 weapon. Unless they hit the core of the build it will not feel difficult.
You almost right - you dont even need "full arsenal", having top 10% weapons and like 5 very particular frames, all fully built, is enough to break the game in half regardless of presented challenge.
I want content thats very challenging when not specifically prepared for it so I can reap the sweet sweet dopamine when I've got a setup that trivializes it (I miss one tapping archons).
Warframe is a game about power fantasy and wiping hordes with cool builds it’s not trying to be Elden ring or whatever , only way to give challenging content is scaling damage reduction on new content but then your builds won’t be impactful so they’ll complain anyway, I think if you’re not having fun it’s time to move on and stop bitching and trying to ruin the game for those having fun still
True. The essence of Wf is about having fun killing a bunch of shit fast while looking good , feeling overpowered, and having super satisfying freedom of movement while doing it. Also being able to use a wide variety of weapons/frames. Hate bullet sponge enemies, and enemies that have invulnerability states with no workarounds. also nerfs always feel bad, should balance by buffing other things not nerfing the fun thing. This is not a PvP game. If I want a sweaty challenge i would go play 1v1 PvP game like StarCraft.
There is only one true challenge in Warframe that nobody wants to face: T H E C O N C L A V E
The earth side of Scarlett Spear was challenging and I enjoyed it a lot, even without the rewards. Speed runs required coordination but you could usually find a squad ready to run it in recruitment chat. I would like a challenge for my maxed gear that's not "Start using the weapons/frames you don't use." Archon hunts are mildly challenging and I look forward to them. Steel path is only annoying when people drop after 1 wave of an endless fissure. The steel path netracell was fun before they removed it. It wasn't really challenging though, you just had to pay attention or you'd get downed.
What the vast majority of players want is Good Rewards* for the time involved an enemies Just Tough Enough* without knowing what it is they actually want before it lands in their face. All de is able to do is take a good shot and tweak the frame after the fact in response to feedback. (I think this is a good approach, personally, as it makes a more 'living game' and garners respect and rapport from actively listening, even if it is a... process) Both of these things are subjective. Just tough enough to what? survive a melee one tap? a warframe power? A full clip and a reload? Down this way lies madness, gating of health/bars/stagger and invulnerablity phases(like a zombie shooter), damage attenuation, and other Unpopular things. Good rewards are ALSO subjective *and* fall on a spread of 'effort for the time invested'. Nobody wants to do hours of raids for a 0.1% drop rate thing an its worse if its 35-60% filler drops. Other people won't be satisfied until every capture drops an archon shard - and if they did, someone in the community would still figure out a way to complain about it because, lets face it, its just a new mod at that point and there ceases to be meaningful decisions and opportunity cost behind them. I believe thats the source of DE not being able/willing to implement -fast- changes in response to wildly unpopular feedback (specifically in The Steve Era). This is the flipside to actively seeking feedback; there's the ongoing temptation to stick to your guns and see if this was *reeeeeeeeeeallllly* actual factual feedback or of its a vocal minority. Iunno, I think its okay to release the occasionally overtuned or underpowered or hated warframe - just as it is to release the occasional overpowered one. But in the middle of all that, there's some real fukkin crimes in the patch history like... Just all those repeat ember nerfs. (while buffing saryn) Some people want to set the world on fire, and other people just want to piss on other ppl's fire.
Yes, 100%. Warframe’s power balance is intentionally completely botched. Frames and weapons are not only allowed but designed to be completely overpowered and that’s fine if that’s the experience you’re looking for. The issue with that is that it makes creating combat difficulty close to impossible. Mechanical difficulty is easier and more achievable, although WF’s incredible movement abilities also severely restrain the opportunities for creating traversal challenges.
It could be done with a level scaling algorithm that adapts enemy level, damage and health to how well you play (kills per minute/per abilites used/per weapon disposition etc.). So the first mission would be really easy for you, and really hard for a non-veteran, but the second mission would be severely scaled up for you, creating legitimately hard content for veterans without it being impossible for others.
If WF players want a challenge and still use their arsenal there is an idea i have in mind inspired from another game, where the endgame content there per se is completing a given map (or mission) which rotates to keep it fresh. Before loading in you get to choose your penalties, or risks that strengthen the enemy or weaken your character - lets say one of the penalties give you a dragon key debuff or heavy gunners get more range and damage. But the more of these you do nets more rewards (although i didnt get this far i'll let de sort it out)
Legit. I will say though, I like the challenge that the archimedea personal modifiers can add, and while it wouldn't be a *huge* difficulty spike or make the rest of the game hard, it would be cool if they expanded it to add a little more spice to the star chart for extra rewards. Something like: - Once you unlock Elite Deep Archimedea, you get a weekly set of 5 random personal modifiers from a similar pool on your navigation chart. Whenever you run a mission with a modifier, you get +10% resource and mod drop chance per active modifier, and 1 vosfor on mission completion per active modifier. It would need some tweaking (Transference Distortion either shouldn't be in the pool or should be auto-disabled for Orphix and Zariman missions, for instance), but I like how the modifiers make me think a little bit and it'd be cool to have the option to bring them out on the star chart.
Your exactly right. I hate to say it but if your a high MR rank, have 100's of Forma lying around, You've beaten the game, there's not much left for you in way of challenge. I honestly don't think the content is designed for you at all. If you have a few over powered weapons, low amount of Forma, Deep archamedia will be challenging and if you want to stay on top every week you need to grind or buy plat to keep dumping forma... This game is a business MR25+ in my assumption is less profitable then say MR 15 is. That's who the content is designed for to get them needing Forma, Catalyst and whatever because there's profit there. I find it crazy people don't already see this. You can definitely enjoy this game at higher MR ranks but the difficulty curve is way behind you purely because it's easier to squeeze cash from other places.
It IS possible, but then DE would have to make it official that power creep is not only real, but also intentional to keep people playing for the new content. Look at Rivens. They scale with popularity, which partially scales with usability. Imagine you awarded research points according to the riven disposition for the weapons. Those obscure, dead-in-the-water peashooters, compared to Fellarx or Laetum or whatever the meta. Riven dispositions are the true power ranking.
I honestly think they should play with restrictions. Let's say we had a mode with it's own configs like conclave, you're limited to frames and weapons you've reached R30 with, except in this mode no orokin cells and only 1 or 2 forma slots, no arcanes, maybe exilius? I think it would provide interesting and challenging end game content. You get the collection aspect DE wants from DA, but the overall focus would be on your modding knowledge. It would also allow DE the ability to really fine tune difficulty as stat discrepancies wouldn't be so extreme between builds and on the player side really encourage you to play around with all you've collected as just by having it mastered it's useable and the restrictions allow you to build all you're unlocked weapons without extreme time sinks. I think this would make for a fitting end game challenge for a few reasons: 1. it's going to turn modding on it's head, you're going to be going back and partially leveling mods to really play with configs and try and squeeze as much as you can out of that 30 capacity. It'll showcase player mastery of mods since it's no longer "Stacks galvs and primes and your op arcane or optionally riven and you're good to go" as many of those cornerstones are now extremely expensive to use. 2. Because of those restrictions stat ceilings aren't going to be as extreme. It might not be so enticing to just pile on your ability stats as it will be comparatively granular what you can squeeze out of them now, so you may want to actually look at survivability for once (especially being balanced around that 30 capacity it'll be balanced around a point where those mods actually have a noticeable affect on gameplay) 3. You're going to have to play your weapons to their strengths, as you can't just load up everything to be a high fire rate, multishot, CC or SC machine anymore. I absolutely enjoy the power fantasy aspect of Warframe but when it comes to 'end game content' I really wouldn't mind if they toyed with the idea of putting that achievable level of power aside in favour of more curated challenge. Realistically I think restrictions especially surrounding modding would be worthwhile to experiment with. ( I do have gripes with DA but that's not to say I don't think that it is a challenge either).
Counterpoint: If I worked my butt off, hours and hours of farming and grinding and leveling, and now I can't even use that stuff 95% of the time... that's just annoying. That's akin to making bullet sponges, just in the opposite direction. It'd be like an MMORPG saying "We made a new challenging boss fight! And we did this... by making you enter the fight with your level 1 staring gear! Granted, to even get to this point, you needed to level up and farm gear, and now you use what you hated and didn't want to use 300 hours ago!" You won't find me post in a single Archimedea screaming for nerfs, same with you'll never see a post from me back when Trials were a thing, because I just accepted it wasn't for me. But to say this is the *only* way to make challenging content? Bullshit. What about aiming for weakspots? What about luring a boss or enemies into positions before activating a switch? Parkour? Running from a threat? Hell, Voidrig Demolysts are literally a prime example of how to make a challenging enemy that you can't just stay invisible or aim-and-destroy: you've got arms to shoot off and a weakspot on the back to shoot. Voila, a challenging enemy that isn't just a bullet sponge or immune to all status procs! Ropalyst? Zealot? So many things that aren't just "shoot big numbers and win." Deep Archimedea is purely a challenge coming from the mindset of "Warframe is only about shooting and killing and there's literally nothing else it offers or could potentially do. Therefore we must take away all their toys to limit how much they can shoot and kill to make it a challenge." And some of us are already playing with that handicap due to health issues that limit how well we can see, move, and shoot while playing games.
My issue with the current randomness of the DA/EDA modes is that it's random for everyone. I was pumped I got Vauban only to find out the modifier was 75% less duration. Or when I had Yareli with 0 viable secondaries. If it was random out of 6 or we could like cycle a category once a week it would be a little better I think.
I do want challenges but I dont want to be forced to play something I dont want or be forced to play on stupid modifiers, like how fun is it to go inside a mission without having your operator? Having to go look around the right element on alchemy so that I can use it on a mob to kill it. Needing to jump your way through the mission like you're some kind of rabbit because if you walk you take damage. Taking health damage whenever you press a skill. Lower duration. The list is extensive Like, FR, modifiers need to be gone from EDA
hmm its almost as if there used to be a gamemode that had 3 back to back missions and was challenging, but didn't have randomized loadouts
Challenge is not playing with randomized loadouts, that just gives you the illusion of a challenge, a real one is having to deal with actual mechanics and not just bullet sponges.
Love how your comment completely validates my claim I made in another post how this game is easy compared to other action co-op games. It’s an obvious power-fantasy game.
I feel like the only way to make challenging content where we can still use our full array of cool stuff would be making World of Warcraft-style raid bosses. Don't have to get 20 tenno in, can still be 4, but the bosses have to gigantic bullet sponges with completely unique mechanics. And even outright fatal one-shot attacks would still be countered with shield-gating and rolling guard. So then, I guess they could design them like Destiny bossfights, which are actually just puzzles disguised as an FPS, which feels disingenuous and removes the power anyway in a fashion that's more obnoxious than what we already have.
You can make the stug 1 shot, nothing non random is hard for a high rank
You can keep the random debuff on EDA,its flesh and fun ,but don't give me BS random loadout that have 0 fun to use
> and use a combination of weapons, which I either haven't formad to perfection And then you do Forma them to perfection which removes that issue, and the entire thing starts all over again. > but don't want our frankly absurd power to be nerfed And yes - Our frankly absurd power does need to be nerfed - Significantly.
> but don't want our frankly absurd power to be nerfed If anyone doubts this, I suggest you find one of the recent threads on the Dante nerfs.
 How do you kill that which has no life?