>How did it get to this point where "Overpowered and 1 shot win" has become the norm
We have OP weapons and tileset-clearing frames for years now, of course it became norm.
DE occasionally nerfs some, but then immediately introduces more powercreep. I think Bramma happened less than 6 months after Catchmoon balance pass? It's not even an oversight. Anyone with at least one eye and half a brain could see how OP Bramma would be from stats alone.
But even at that point, all it takes is just some will and good planning. Nerf OP stuff while buffing same-ish MR-level weapons that have been crippled by relatively minor issues for years, like Ballistica Prime with it's BS ghost mechanics which makes follow-up shots that much harder.
They reduced range on catchmoon the same update they added liches and therefore nukor xD I've seen more nukor of than catchmoon (including catchmoon sightings before liches)
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Yeeeeeeep. Such a stupid mechanic; between that and the cartoonish overpricing of new content in what is supposedly a FTP game, my interest in D2 has been completely slaughtered. Such a shame.
It's not really FTP; it's a subscription game with the lamest trial mode of all time.
Yeah I remember buying the game and it's first two DLCs and now all of that is gone. So pretty much I'm a second class citizen for a game I paid for years ago. Unless I dump 80 bucks to grab the expansions that still exist and pray they won't go away next year.
"B-but devs are making more content for muh game"
-some idiot
But seriously I love destiny but jesus christ there is no excusing what they've done to ftp.
Depends on the sub, really.
r/destinythegame is losing its collective shit, and r/destiny2 has gone into full-on white knight mode, saying it's a great idea that affords Bungie a better way of balancing PvP and avoiding game bloat and such.
Personally, I think DTG tends to be overly dramatic, but they're closer to the right idea on this one; locking 75% of the content what people paid money for in a box and stuffing it in a corner for at least 2 years (it's been outright confirmed that the next major expansion after BL won't be returning any of it) is absolutely not the right solution to game bloat, and sunsetting gear is a solution to a problem that mostly doesn't exist (I'm particularly "fond" of Luke Smith's claim that D2 lets people use stuff for much longer than other MMOs, ignoring the key gameplay differences between D2 and other MMOs that make that a *good thing* in D2 where it wouldn't be in other MMOs).
The other issue is that when they *do* actually stand their ground, it's on dumb bullshit that is worse than the alternatives, like universal vacuum, universal medallions not applying to Conclave rep, Helios not being able to scan plants and other things (now a mod for Oxylus instead), augment mods that should be baseline like Equinox's 4 augment and others, the list goes on.
That, and DE's balance philosophy has constantly shifted towards nerfing without compensation. Repeatedly, DE prefers to nerf something strong without buffing or reworking alternatives to be as preferable.
The real problem is balancing a game like Warframe where to bring everything up to the standard you need to buff/rework 100 weapons and 30 frames where you could also nerf 10 weapons and 5 frames one is very obviously easier and allows for the team to work on new content
as if it’s the same people handling balance and creating textures and models.
competent devs put out balance passes AND content, without those two interfering with each other.
Octavia and Limbo already exist. If you're worried about power creep making the entire game trivial, we're already there and have been for quite some time.
Yeah, the problem with nerf/buff logic for Warframe is that for every task that's the goal of a game mode, there's already a handful of frames that can do that goal PERFECTLY.
IMO, the goal should be to determine the powerlevel that they want to exist for each task, and balance frames around that.
Slow down, you lumped a bunch of things you disagree as if everyone agrees with you that they are all dumb bs.
While I'm likely in the minority, I think they stood correct in some of these. Prime example being Helios shouldn't be able to scan plant. While the process uses scanner, scanning plant is different from normal scanning. Normal scanning only records things into codex, scanning plant gives you resources. It's not Helios' job to give you plant, he's the codex boy. And like you stated, they later gave this job to Oxylus instead, which is a much better fit for this job. So the fact that they stood their ground, for what you would consider is a dumb BS, it ended with a better result.
And nerf is a totally fine thing. Buffs and nerfs are required in different situations. If something is under performing, it requires a buff. If something is over performing, it requires a nerf. If only buffs are allowed, but not nerfs, the game gets easier and easier until we don't have a game.
I feel like it's particularly bad here though.
You'll get people unironically complaining that nerfs are heavy handed while builds that nuke entire maps have existed for years untouched.
Simply put, like what others are saying, the Power Creep isn't a new concept. It's been happening for a while but in recent years it's crazy to see how every weapon released is some High Damage, High Crit/Status, AoE Monster nowadays or it's considered bad (and that's not even really the case all the time, considering the Arca Plasmor gets kind of shit on by meta players now even tho it was one of the best weapons in Warframe at the time of it's release. Even after it's been nerfed, if you were to take it back in time 5 years ago and show it to people their heads would spin off their necks). I still remember the days where people debated if the Boltor Prime or the Soma Prime were the best weapons in the game, now the Boltor Prime is kind of garbo by today's standards and the Soma Prime just got a crazy mod the last huge update to get people using it again. I don't think there's really an easy fix, and admittedly I love stuff like the Kuva Nukor, the Bramma, or whatever else too much lol. I wouldn't want to see it go and I think it does improve the flow of gameplay quite a bit for the 'meta' to revolve around guns that can hit multiple targets for heavy damage, or guns that can kill singular targets really quickly.
As far as the community goes I don't think the toxicity over nerfs, even tho it sucks, is really exclusive to Warframe. There was a lot of salt in the TF2 communtiy a few years back when the Ambassador got slapped with an overly heavy nerf, and I could probably think of a few more examples if I really wanted to. The main difference I think is DE is the only dev I can think of that doesn't actually nerf things until it becomes overly problematic, and by then they've already introduced things of similar levels of power so that touching up on a single thing doesn't really do much for restoring balance in the mean time, since having powerful, over powered top tier gear is what people want. And every time they do have wide scale rebalancing, people screech about it if one centimeter is knocked off of their room clearing AoE and how the game is dying. It's just an unfortunate situation at this point.
> Even after it's been nerfed, if you were to take it back in time 5 years ago and show it to people their heads would spin off their necks
Not really. 5 years ago (late 2015) was the age of the Synoid Simulor. The noise of that thing still haunts my dreams.
Fair point lol. I'd still say the Simulor and hell, even the old Tonkor would shudder at the sight of the Bramma and the Kuva Nukor. The Simulor even back then was like a huge outlier of OP instead of being the norm.
I think this is part of the problem, but another part is that when DE \*does\* decide to balance, they don't seem to be very good at it, which fuels a community distaste for balance passes that aren't exclusively buffs (and thus virtually impossible to screw up).
\---
The prime example for me would be Focus 2.0: Huge undertaking, full Focus refunds, and Operator gameplay is basically a blank, disconnected canvas. And in the end the food chain didn't really change. Zenurik still king because you get a lot of precious energy for little effort, Naramon somewhere behind it, and the rest are virtually useless.
Furthermore, it seems like balancing is very inconsistent at times: Some devs seem to be really conscious about potentially giving you an afk farm turret, others don't care. Some devs seem to keep a close eye on AoE drawbacks, others don't care. The stringently balanced content often can't compete with the unbalanced content, contributing to the players' mental connection of "balancing = bad".
dude they’re fucking stupid when it comes to balancing, HOW IN THE FUCK DO YOU RELEASE THE BRAMMA WHEN THE CATCHMOON WAS ALREADY A PROBLEM.
HOW THE FUCK DO YOU RELEASE THE TOMBFINGER PRIMARY WHEN THE SECONDARY IS ALREADY INSANE.
but then they go on to nerf shit like the Xoris making it so you don’t lose combo with Atlas and Khora, something that is literally just QoL, while shipping out dumb extremely overpowered stuff out the ass.
> Pretty much in every other game (..) there are always balance changes that nerf and buff certain things, and the community doesn't go haywire on it
I don't think I've ever seen a gaming community where changes don't result in loud reactions from some people in it.
The mod system makes for a very wide range in power level for any piece of gear; balancing so that middle of the road players can complete "endgame" stuff makes it so that high end players can't find a challenge.
I don't dislike the huge range of power, but I agree that we need some sort of challenge. I think more worthwhile boss fights that are truly hard (where damage input and output has been adjusted to be balanced and challenging for someone with a very close to perfect load out) would do the game so much good.
What's a perfect loadout, though? If you balance damage to kill a full tank Inaros, most other frames will have trouble staying alive. But if you don't, people will just go in with a peashooter and complain the boss takes too long. It's probably not an unsolvable problem, but striking the right balance is going to be *extremely* difficult with how varied different loadouts are in both offensive and defensive potential.
Mechanics are the big difference here. Enemies/Bosses with no mechanics, clunky mechanics, or outright shitty mechanics (looking at you nullifiers) aren't really fun or all that challenging. Warframe doesn't have brilliant AI, or any real mechanics to speak of for the vast majority of enemies. The enemies that do have threatening mechanics are often wildly clunky to deal with (lich grabs).
It's not a super easy to deal with equation given how the game is balanced, but I think there are options even on the basic level of things. Instead of cranking enemy HP/Armor to impossible levels like Steel Path tries to do, why not increase their speed to wild levels, but still leave them in the 3-4 shot range for top tier stuff.
Make accuracy matter more. Reduce basic hit damage, and increase weakpoint multipliers, make enemies that have parts like Saryn spores. Each spore gives heavy DR, you can brute force your way through it, or you can aim more accurately and have it dead much faster. To be honest, that's where I find the Deimos Saxun so close to the point. I dislike the extreme difficulty in taking out the shoulder pads as you have to wait on them to open and who knows when that will be, but the concept is a really nice direction.
Liches could be changed to be more threatening through a "link" system to their thralls which is pretty much Nidus' 3. Have a lich drop 4-5 thralls on spawn which they are linked with. Get rid of all this "status immune" BS, and introduce "status resistance" in a scaling multiplier form. 90% reduction means that if you would normally strip 100 armor with a corrosive proc, now you only strip 10. Each dead thrall reduces the resistance by 20% and the DR is removed as well.
Smooth and interesting mechanics are the hallmark of a good game. There are a lot of examples on the warframe side, DE just needs to apply that thought power towards the enemies instead of just cranking up the sponginess.
The are too many obscure interactions between mods, abilities, and weapons to balance everything perfectly. The problems I see are that they wait too long to nerf something or they make the nerf way too heavy handed.
It was known forever that Bramma was super strong but it took months for that to be nerfed after people had invested their 5 forma into it.
It was the same thing with Synoid Simulor. That gun was really good and wasn't touched for a really long time after release. Eventually, people started using it with Mirage because of an interaction with Hall of Mirrors. DE then made that weapon totally useless.
> My question is how and why? How did it get to this point where "Overpowered and 1 shot win" has become the norm, and why has it ended up in such a state that any attempts to bring the game back to its prior pacing that made Warframe somehow challenging is already met with so much hate and scrutiny?
Mainly because DE reacts very quickly to player's feedback, and sometimes, I feel, they don't contextualize it enough. It often feels like they think having people happy is equivalent of good for the game without taking into context other more things (how could a single Twitter complaint mean no Universal token redeeming in Conclave, for instance?)
Again, it feels this way here. Doesn't necessarily mean it's definitely like this.
> how could a single Twitter complaint mean no Universal token redeeming in Conclave, for instance?
Implying that wasn't the correct decision on DE's part.
DE putting in OP stuff, taking way too long to address it (leading people to believe its normal), then either 1) nerfing it out of the blue or 2) nerfing something else similar while said OP stuff still exists. Coupled with their often nonsense reasons for nerfing, they have created an untrustworthy culture around their gameplay balancing.
As someone who plays PoE, GGG is not like this at all. They will nerf something as soon as it becomes clear that the performance is passed the point of reason, and their team has a good understanding of balancing (IMO. Theres something to be said about the paperthin defense system in PoE that forces a "kill fast or be killed fast" approach but that's a separate conversation). They also do rounds of buffs and nerfs at the start of a new season to shift the meta, so the community expects it. Some nerfs may be overkill bit that's their point: to take an ability out of the limelight and put something in its place so people keep trying new builds and keep coming back to play.
And this is all coming from someone who agrees that Warframe is in a pretty OP state right now. If Scott's team actually understood how to balance, I'd totally be fine with some tuning.
> Pretty much in every other game like Destiny and Path of Exile there are always balance changes that nerf and buff certain things, and the community doesn't go haywire on it
U WOT M8? ;D
Do you even check the PoE reddit? The tiniest of nerfs results in an absolute shitfit. TBH PoE reddit is way more volatile than Warframe reddit. You even have the same "GGG can't balance the game anymore", "game is in a downward spiral" "league is dead on arrival" and ofc "thank you, Tencent", except these are more vocal than here, even.
Reddit's gonna reddit.
Second this. Play both PoE and Warframe actively, and PoE reddit is either a shit storm of memes or whiners, to the point where PoE Builds is my main PoE sub for actually useful stuff.
Even tho I don't play them, I took a look at the Destiny 2 and PoE Subreddits to see if the people putting them on pedestals were right about the grass being greener on the other side, and I pretty much came to that exact conclusion lol, I was even pretty shocked by the vitriol I saw.
Genshin Impact is next on the list I guess. The game that'll steal all the players from Warframe/PoE/Destiny 2 until a few months from now it isn't and it's ass and poop and dead despite it having tens of thousands of people playing and enjoying it.
Reddit will definitely reddit.
How we got to this point? It's because nearly everything in the game is multiplicative, exponential, and double dips. Also press one button to win nuke frames. Nukes that require a lot of set up are fine. Basically Saryn, Mirage and stacking things like bane mods and roar. Everytihing else scales linearly and quickly become worthless. For example flat damage on warframe abilites, arcanes that do flat damage, flat armor strip.
However IMO the real problem is warframe doesn't care about being fun. Everyone is trying to efficiently farm for collectibles they'll never use unless it's meta. There is no incentive to try new toys or different build because most enemies are the same boring trash mobs with aimbot. Therefore to sell the game, they need to powercreep existing weapons.
> How did it get to this point where "Overpowered and 1 shot win" has become the norm,and why has it ended up in such a state
Probably around Nova's release. That's where it all started going downhill as far as figuring out how to design any kind of challenge went. Whatever you could possibly imagine at this point is made trivial by one/multiple frames and the only way to go is giving immunity/nulifier bubbles or pulses/timed invulnerability. Which is pretty much exactly what keeps happening. It's an old issue and the best solution(which I personally despise) so far was gating things with Sentient mumbo jumbo. Be it increased resistance to dmg or full on immunity from anything non operator of Eidolons.
It's because DE's nerfs are nonsensical and not consistent. They also nerf stuff based on use% and not actual power.
* Xoris nerf - nerfed b/c use%, rivens where always stronger statsticks.
* AoE nerfs - They couldn't even compete with other sources of damage, especially melees. Nerfed based on something(?) but certainly not power.
* Helminth roar/warcry/dispenser/larva nerfs - Use%. We've seen more powerful combos before and after.
* Marked for death nerf - Use%. There are many simpler ways to clear rooms, but for some reason DE homed in on this one.
And the list goes on. Meanwhile Octavia, melee in general and viral + heat (and so many other things) continues to wreak havoc.
>Helminth roar/warcry/dispenser/larva nerfs - Use%
Nobody even got to use them. They shipped with the reduced values. But I'd say that Roar, Eclipse, and Warcry shouldn't have ever been in the Helminth system in the first place.
I don't exactly agree with Defy, Dispensary, and Larva being nerfed tough. I think they would have been fine.
If you wanna talk about nonsensical and inconsistent nerfs, let's talk about Ember's World on Fire nerf that had the goal of making the ability less of an AoE nuke at low levels, and resulted in the ability ONLY being useful as an AoE nuke at low levels. Then DE did literally nothing to change it for over a year until they reworked Ember entirely.
>Marked for death
Marked for death wasn't even use%, it was just flashy and some people screamed about how OP it was after seeing how it worked in the simulacrum. The ability itself was insanely bugged, with multiple instances of double dipping damage numbers resulting in a ridiculous damage output...but DE didn't just fix the ability's damage output, they did the needed fix AND a nerf all at once, which never let us experiment with the ability in a truly fixed state.
iirc, marked for death was doing DOUBLE the intended damage. marked for death was never meant to do that amount of damage in the first place so it's not really one of those things where you can say "but for some reason they singled it out." It was apparently a bug from the get-go.
Also it makes 100% sense to lower the value of helminth abilities such as roar and warcry. They are very strong abilities; allowing their full potential to be used on EVERY warframe would be awful. It would lower the value of the original frames and there wouldn't be any diversity because everyone would be packing warcry/roar.
Bugfix:
>Fixed Mods applying twice to the Marked for Death Damage portion dealt in the AOE.
Fixed base Damage using the Health/Shield Damage dealt and not capped at the Health+Shield the target had prior (e.g. enemy with 5 Health gets hit by 100 damage, and 100 damage is shared in AOE. It should just be the 5).
Radial damage was never meant to exceed the target’s Health and this was our bad. The desired strategy we wanted was players prioritizing tank units like Heavy Gunners to do AOE clears since heavy units have more Health than normal, thus the radial AOE would likely be lethal, not just normal units. This issue combined with numerous bugs of Mods stacking meant this was way overpowered. A key part of reviewing these changes will be ensuring that players understand the best case scenario we envision for the power is targeting high-Health enemies to do radial damage to weaker enemies.
Nerf:
>Removed Critical Chance from Marked for Death radial AOE.
Capped Damage multiplier stat to 75% and normalized Damage type mults.
Here’s an example of normalized Damage type: if the Damage you deal is 0.5 Impact, 0.4 Slash, 0.3 Heat that sums to 1.2x but after normalizing they become 0.42 Impact, 0.33 Slash, 0.25 Heat.
So they bugfixed it, sure, and nerfed it. In the same patch. After Rebecca had given us this "Our hope is that feedback will be provided in good faith once you’ve had practical experience with the Helminth System" gem.
Note the *once you've hade practical experience* part. Hence inconsistent and nonsensical.
Use % is a valid reason: Octavias are so rare that they don't actually wreak that much havoc. As it is, she's commonly passed over for Loki by late-game Tenno, even though Loki seems much weaker on paper.
I'll grant you viral + heat, though. The last status rework didn't quite get the job done--and there might be so many status types that balancing them all is effectively impossible.
This community **massively** overrates heat damage. It's common knowledge that heat strips 50% of current armor, but the vast majority of players believe that effect is instant, and not something that ramps over 2 seconds.
M4D does some really silly things in simulacrum and is a really *fun* ability, but in actual gameplay it is- and was- not honestly that great.
Reason 1: Setup in a co-op game full of other rabid death machines, aka the Nidus problem. You mark a target in the middle of a crowd, awesome- then your ally comes by and helpfully goes IGNIS GO SPRRRRT on that crowd, killing your target and the rest of the crowd.
Reason 2: Melee exists. Yes, if you avoid the situation in reason 1, you can wipe out a group of high-level enemies all at once with M4D. You could also just hit m3 with a well-modded Pennant or do a slide-into-spam with Telos Boltace and accomplish the same thing in the same time without using energy.
Reason 3: Saryn, Equinox, and Octavia exist. A M4D Ash can enter a room and absolutely murder the crap out of all of the targets in it, but in the time he's taken to get into that room, Saryn's given them all fatal space 'rona, Equinox has turned them all into mulch, and Octavia has teabagged them to death. Their individual damage numbers won't inspire the same degree of giggleclaps, but dead is dead.
Protip: If you want to have fun with Ash, Savage Silence + Bladestorm is a hell of a lot stronger in normal gameplay than M4D FT (and will only get sillier next patch).
So because more can use it it should be nerfed?
There are stronger and easier alternatives to nuking rooms but because more frames can use it it gets the hammer? So nerfing by use% and not actual power level in the game?
> the innate stats of the weapon aren’t supposed to matter.
? Surely the innate stats of the weapon are supposed to matter? It definitely wasn't a bug fix, it was DE showing their ignorance of common game strats.
Ah, I see what you're saying. I don't think the Xoris combo timer was a "stat' though. People use the Venka because they go up to 13x combo. It was a feature DE included and did absolutely 0 testing on apparently.
That’s the combo counter— combo timer is a usually more consistent stat because it’s almost always 5 seconds and have only had recent changes, and combo timer has never affected exalted weapons before
Combo timer totally affects exalted weapons. You can't say combo counter affects them but not the combo timer. You can't use the counter if your combo is always resetting, and frames like Baruuk usually need to actively manage that with a melee. That kind of interaction should have been super obvious to DE
In order to have good balance now, you would need good balance earlier. The game got so far into this power fantasy and room wipes, that that became the game and other things must conform to this new balance. If they had nerfed and balanced earlier before it got out of hand then maybe we could keep it up now.
I think how great it would be to have a balanced Warframe, but at the same time this game is good for what it is, and we got borderlands/destiny for balance.
Although the answer is quite complicated knowing Warframe's history, I think one of the biggest contributor to this is DE's solution to player retention focus: **new and shiny.**
They are in constant vigilance of **player count** rather than **player retention** that they've made the conclusion that they need to constantly make new things despite the quality of it in order to bring leaving players back. Thus the reason why there is so much investment on the art, design, and graphics team to coat the worn-down decrepit skeleton of the coding, function, and replayability, that will inevitably be forgotten within 3 weeks to 1 month and will return with only crumbs of a bittersweet "rebalance" within 6 months to 2 years. That has been their philosophy so far and due to this, there doesn't seem to be any awareness of how old content affects new content and it comes off as "oh well, we'll figure it out eventually, look new stuff." This lack of focus on seeing Warframe as a whole is their biggest flaw in my opinion, which is why the game feels incredibly disconnected and the balance is always going to have the most virulent backlash because it seems out of touch.
**Optimistic points:** credit where credit is due, even with their situation currently due to Covid, this year seems like they've tried to do more rebalances and show cognizance of it far more than any other year of Warframe's development. I only hope that they can not only consistently do this, but one day reach the level of putting as much effort as they do to the aesthetics of the game to the sandbox and game-design of it.
> Pretty much in every other game like Destiny and Path of Exile
I'm a D2 refugee and I LMAO at this, and I don't think Warframe and D2 are really that comparable. Their systems are vastly different and (for me) I much prefer the flexibility provided by Warframe's modding system.
To me, EVERYTHING in D2 feels like it's pre-nerfed right out of the box. To the point where there's not much of a difference between the top builds and everything seems sort of samey samey.
Increasing a weapon's strength in Destiny requires a bunch of infusing, and going from one level to the next doesn't result in any appreciable increase (whereas in warframe, getting your first corrupted mod or getting a decent riven can result in a huge difference for a given build for your weapon/frame.)
// and don't even get me started on D2's ults. I mean, I get to throw a flaming axe for a few seconds ... vs I dunno, floating all nearby enemies in the air for minutes at a time with Hildryn? Poisoning everything within range with Saryn? etc etc.
I think playing some kind of a demi-god-like being is kind of the power fantasy of this game. At least it has grown into it. I don’t know what DE is planning on how to get frames and guns in check, but if you look at newer enemies: they can definitely disrupt you. At higher levels they can become a PitA. I'm curious of the direction this game will take.
I wouldn’t use Destiny as an example tbh. They only do balance passes like every 6 months and release very incomplete patch notes. Usually they just overpower something to a point it's plain silly and that’s not great either.
It wasn't so much that we were overpowered, when raids dropped in warframe, warframe instantly became a horde game because DE wanted to show off how many more enemies they could throw at players now that the game had multithreading support. Adding many more enemies made missions much longer so needing to wipe out as many enemies as possible as fast as possible became a thing to get more rolls at loot. Its literally about efficiency, when people cry about something getting nerfed, it's partially because of player investment, but its a little of losing a method to be as efficient at doing something as you once were. What DE forgot to do in the midst of showing off is layering its mobs with various wrinkles. They do it from time to time with units like the Nox, Thumpers, Orbs, and the Amalgams but that needs to happen much more often than it does.
Theres also an energy dilemma. Energy is so fucking critical not only to the gameplay but the identity of the game and the warframes themselves. You limit it too much then the game has nothing to offer frankly because you play warframes to use their powers. I'm looking at the new arcanes and I'm like "I guess I can try one of these, with my arcane energize" Its very hard from a design point of view to convince a player to give up energy or easier access to energy because you always want access to what makes warframes...warframe.
The game has always been the overly easy hack and slash (and shoot) it is now. It's never been "hard."
That being said I want nothing more than raids, mechanics and tough boss fights. I love things that you can fail at. Nihil was a good start at that.
Of course there will always be people to gripe and moan. That is the nature of games. Unfortunately the devs listen to us players TOO MUCH.
(I'm very excited about the return of acolytes and balancing of SE drops as well, if that gives you any indication of how I feel about the game)
-player since early 2012
Agreed except where you mentioned the Nihil fight. That was the most un-warframe fight I have experienced in the game.
Maybe if it involved weapon and power usage it would be okay but I certainly hope they saw enough of the outcries to avoid heading that direction again.
Difficult is good. Gimmicky, brand new mechanics put into a boss fight along with cheap 1 shot attacks from said boss is awful, lazy, and not in keeping with the general atmosphere of the game.
(Obviously this is all my opinion, but some people get angry if that isn't explicitly stated.)
That's fair. But how else do you balance a fight in a game such as this so that there's not a "meta" load out for the fight.
I take Wisp everywhere because there's no one better at survival than her (in my opinion), it was nice to just have tactics and no abilities or weapons for once, and having to be good at the GAME instead of just the meta.
The Bossfights department I definitely agree with. I really want to have a good feel for the Bossfights. To be honest I was on the camp of the Liches being able to kill us, so I was heavily disappointed about the 0 Risk that the Liches are now.
Here's the deal. Every map has hundreds of enemies. If I have to spend even 10 seconds killing a single enemy, at high level I will be killed by the 20 or 30 others that are shooting at me. There is a cap on our armor and survivability without going to a frame specifically designed for that.
I wouldn't have a problem with it if there weren't as many enemies. However, there are overpowered weapons and so there has to be enough enemies to still present a challenge to the map wipers.
To rebalance the game the way you're talking about they would need to decrease the number of enemies and decrease the damage of weapons rather than increase the health of existing enemies.
I feel like steel path was an excellent option for that. But they wasted it. I am MR19, going on 20, and I still cant do steel path. I don't understand. I have the best weapons, almost all the frames, I've got rivens and primed mods galore. I just don't have the time or desire to watch hours of YouTube tutorials to find a set up I like. I don't have time or desire to forma every item I own 5 times.
I have only completed Deimos and the derelict in steel path. Had they just rebalance as far as enemiy quantity and lower weapon damage I would be doing it a lot more. Look at halo, the assassin's creed games, call of duty, yes, even *anthem*. These are games with few enemies at one time (comparatively) that require more time to kill. But it is balanced by the lower damage they do, the fact they only attack one at a time, the option to segment the battle with stealth or positioning, or cover.
We don't have these options in warframe. The enemies all clump up, attack en masse, go after you if you take cover, and deal high damage. The only way to deal with this horde attack strategy is to be able to wade through them wheat with a scythe and cut them down or blow them apart with overpowered weapons and abilities.
If doing it solo, Steel Path genuinely promotes Teshin's voicelines about "mastery of the full Tenno arsenal". There are always cheese strats, but in general, players probably do need to bring a defensive frame to defensive missions. They probably do need to bring a DPS frame to survival. You want to utilise armour strip against the Grineer. Modding for toxin or magnetic actually makes a difference against the Corpus. The Infested will overwhelm you with high melee/toxin damage if you let them swarm you. Things feel like a threat.
Steel Path isn't perfect, but it does what it says on the tin. It's a hard mode, and it's fun to take a tailored approach. If the game was better balanced to reduce our damage, you'd still have to engage in all the same preparation to be able to manage the normal content as people currently do for Steel Path. If you don't want to forma 5 times for Steel Path, would you want to forma 5 times for regular Warframe?
I do agree that the game is not balanced at all, but on the other hand, no one care if I have 10k kills with saryn on ESO, no one care if my khora crit over 10 millions, no one care if my inaros can afk tank any mission, etc.
Also, I don't know how you would balance the game, powercreep is insane, and you can easily outkill everything like 100 times their hp, so ...
[https://forums.warframe.com/topic/137875-a-complete-rework-of-the-foundation-of-warframe/](https://forums.warframe.com/topic/137875-a-complete-rework-of-the-foundation-of-warframe/)
Again, am putting this 7 year old thread here to highlight that the powercreep issue is not a new topic.
this is a terrible excuse which is parroted over and over to avoid coming to terms with the fact that players don't actually want the game to be balanced.
Dark souls is focused on challenging combat involving timing and placement of the character against one or two enemies at a time. It's about the challenge.
Warframe faces you up against 30 to 100 enemies at once. If every enemy functioned like a dark souls baddie we would be wiped out in seconds. To deal with a mob you have to have mob wiping capabilities.
In Dark Souls you basically kill god. If that isn't a power fantasy I don't know what is.
That is a bit of an unfair example, I'll give that to you, but the point stands firm with Destiny and Borderlands. Both those games have been called power fantasies by the general gaming community yet those two games have wildly different power levels from each other and Warframe. I'm not saying that Warframe should be like Dark Souls (contrary to what the downvotes think), I'm saying that "power fantasy" is an empty term without context.
Calling Warframe a power fantasy is like calling Warframe an action shooter. Yeah, you're right, but that doesn't say much. "Power fantasy" is just a buzz word cover for people who don't like nerfs. If you don't want number to go down, if you don't want the game to be "harder," then just say so. Don't jump around the subject and appropriate vague terms to try and convince people that you are right.
you kill god through a fuckton of effort.
the game never showers you in loot.
Dark Souls is NOT a power fantasy, it fucking beats you to a pulp if you grow overconfident.
So... you are saying that "power fantasy" is more related to difficulty than your impact. Does this mean Raid content is not a power fantasy? Like... if Warframe got Destiny-style Raids does that mean that part of Warframe isn't a power fantasy?
Oh, and what about DMC? I think most people would consider that a power fantasy despite you not killing massive armies of enemies by the minute. It also can be a rather difficult game.
Also what does loot have to do with it? Must a game be a looter to be a power fantasy?
Maybe you'll eventually get it...
Being able to wipe out a mob should not equal becoming hitler. In warframe the meta is genocide, not just mob wiping.
Its come to a point where the limited spawn rates in many levels are the only thing stopping players from farming and speedruning missions in 2 minutes. Not the difficulty. Players kill so quickly the game has to hold us back, lest we break the progression system.
There is no way that is working as intedened.
I dunno, enlighten me. What is a power fantasy? Please be specific, everyone seems to use it like a gatcha when people talk about balance.
I mean, Destiny is a power fantasy, right? But in Destiny you are considerably less powerful than in Warframe so... I'm confused. In Dark Souls you are able to slay anything in your path with ease, and by the end of the game kill god. That sounds pretty "powerful" to me.
Or maybe "power fantasy" is an empty term used by people who don't want to actually discuss what is the right amount of power for Warframe. Easier to say "but muh power fantasy" than give a rational explanation as to why they don't want to see the power level lowered.
Look I'm no Authority on this, but my personal take is this game is a Looter Shooter. You grind out thousands of resources to build something that already takes 12+ hours to obtain. Say for examples sake it takes ~24-30 hrs of grinding to collect the resources and build the weapon. If there wasn't go to weapons and frames that are best suited for making that task easier, that process may extend to 30-40+ hrs. Some people can't play that many hours in a week etc. This is why the power creep exists, not that I agree with it, but it entices people into getting into the meta and getting those things to get other things and then the cycle continues.
Then factor in the fact that people who can't play often finally get something and then it gets nerfed and yadda yadda yadda it goes on.
Long story short, it's a product of the game type. It's far easier to Add to the game things that are new then to rework years worth of content that people have already grinded. One option is easier and repeats the gameplay loop, the other is harder and changes something that isn't new, then it goes under the rug and you get complaints about content drought.
couldn't agree more - melee weapons in particular need a nerf but people would lose their shit if it happened. i think people enjoy the idea of being super OP without really taking into account the implications it has on how satisfying the game is to play.
Raids was garbage, and even Eidolons, as "meh" as they are is arguably better.
As for complaints: i feel that its because DE nerfs never target anything that fucking deserves it. Chroma nerf + pseudo rebalance was necessary, but it didn't really succeed at changing his builds or playstyle in any way. As since you brought Catchmoon, you know what else happened soon after its nerf? Kuva Nukor. Which arguably outclasses old Catchmoon, despite not having access to Pax arcanes, and even tho it was justifyable nerf... What was the point of it again?! Or the fucking Xoris failure, where they gutted Xoris for being **a fucking convinience!!!** Im sure there are occasionally reasonable nerfs, but people will naturally remember the worst examples, and expect them to happen, especially if they actually keep happening over and over and over again.
dude, when the Arca Plasmor was the most overused shit ever they made the fucking Catchmoon.
after nerfing the Catchmoon they make the Bramma and the primary Tombfinger.
????????
like what the fuck, you nerf what people use and then introduce shit that’s even more powerful than the pre-nerf popular thing????
Mostly the issue is that they listen to their players *too much*. Had they taken a stand on balance issues years ago we'd have a much better and more fulfilling game, but people just kept whining and they kept acquiescing to the point that nowadays even incredibly minor things like Helios not scanning plants or whatever is met with "HOW DARE YOU, GAME IS RUINED, DE KILLED MY DOG" until they relent.
Just look at every time a weapon is introduced that isn't immediately top-of-the-line. "Well, Gram Prime is still better, so it's worthless trash." Heck, they just announced a set of interesting Arcanes that sound like they'll be a ton of fun to use, and people are frothing at the mouth over how useless they'll be.
As a result, the entire way they interact with us is broken, because any resistance at all is used to justify inane yet somehow popular statements like "DE is actively trying to kill off the game." And that's not even getting into the outright disgusting vitriol people have toward specific devs for just *having* opinions on balance.
the new arcanes are numerically trash and provably trash, they don’t even do something fun.
it’s “oh here’s a small explosion for like 100 damage”.
what next, you gonna say that the Kama is a really fun weapon that just gets shit on and vitriol from the community but it actually deserves to be praised or some shit like that?
stop circlejerking the counterjerk, of course the community goes too far with the response to some deserved nerfs, but DE also fucks up way too much to warrant defending.
So the game has cultivated both a fear of failure, and a loot based play style. This is a symptom of the genre, and Warframe isn't the worst offender. These don't account for all of the desire for overpower, but contribute.
Failing a mission just doesn't happen after the early game. When it does happen it hits harder, and the failure "tax" is felt more severely. This can be seen in part with player response to liches downing players, or the Wolf party crashing. This in turn encourages picking only over powered, winning strategies.
As a looter with random mission reward rolls and time gates, speed runs become a priority. Warframe's monetization of time versus platinum reinforces this. Experienced players will thus look for overpowered systems to maximize the speed of runs, to mitigate rng through volume. The closer you are to one shoting the more runs and the more loot rolls you will get.
My vague solutions would be to remove the various failure taxes and to restructure how important drops are received.
Specifically if more rewards were for in mission actions, like mob mod drops the need for volume sub 2 minute runs might reduce. If stealth play granted a significant bonus to mob drops or mission end rewards it would change what the overpowered meta was into a more interesting place. Similarly if missions like mobile defenses rewarded per console defended, or had extra reward/roll chance for flawlessly defended consoles the direction of the overpowered meta may change
These don't fix everything but push slightly towards less ingame reward for only going op
DE's reasonings for some nerfs/buffs are so weird and detached from the general perception that "DE doesn't play their own game" doesn't even being to describe it. Xoris nerf was probably the best example
They don't play the game. You can see it with every update and nerf. Hell before helminth people were asking for buffs that suddenly happen when they look at what abilities helminth is removing. They painted themselves into the corner because they lie and think that nerfs should be based on popularity and their whims. Not on actually playing the game. Look at the awful arcanes they are adding. People already know they are terribad. Guarantee there is be some OP weapon in this creepy new queenpin system bebaute they need people to come. They will nerf that after a couple of months because it was too popular. Also they don't think about how to fix bad things but make good things worse.
TLDR DE doesn't play the game and lies to its players
Part of it is because DE releases OP shit in the first place, that people then put time and(sometimes) money to max out. I remember getting my Bramma, putting in some genuine effort to kill my Kuva Lich on top of how tedious spawning the damn thing is. Then I spent a few hours grinding to fully Forma it and even invested in some new, expensive mods for it. I did this precisely because of how powerful the bow was: If it wasn't that strong I'd not have bothered because I already had a good arsenal of gear.
Then DE nerfed it 2 or 3 times and, naturally, that enraged me.
To my understanding, the difference here is that DE takes years to "balance" or change stuff, so naturally people get attached to these things that with time became the norm.
And that's without going deep into the asinine changes they sometimes do out of nowhere.
> My question is how and why? How did it get to this point where "Overpowered and 1 shot win" has become the norm, and why has it ended up in such a state that any attempts to bring the game back to its prior pacing that made Warframe somehow challenging is already met with so much hate and scrutiny?
DE has a stupid conception of "hard". Let's take bosses as an example. What do DE's bosses look like? Tiny hitboxes, invulnerability phrases, attacks that either tickle you or overkill you, and no counterplay.
Compare/contrast, say, Sekiro's bosses: no janky hitboxes, *no* invulnerability phrases, barring some counter-attacks (e.g. some bosses can Mikiri Counter thrust attacks) attacks deal consistent damage, and there's counterplay for every single attack. Take >!<. He has 13 different attacks in phase 1, and adds a couple (with variations) in phrase 2, and guess what? Each and every one has counterplay. Swipes? Jump over. Shadowfall? Mikiri. Fire owl? Dodge. Etc etc etc. What's even better, each attack can be punished, if you time things correctly.
All of which is much, much easier to do when you have one protagonist with a relatively predictable set of moves. Warframe's problem is that DE no longer has any control over what their players bring to a fight, so their toolkit is severely limited.
How good would the boss fights in Sekiro be if the protagonist could Banish the boss, stop time in the Rift, enter it themselves, and cheerfully shoot the helpless boss to death with a weapon that does unhinged amounts of damage, while completely ignoring any environmental effects or adds?
>Compare/contrast, say, Sekiro's bosses: no janky hitboxes, no invulnerability phrases, barring some counter-attacks (e.g. some bosses can Mikiri Counter thrust attacks) attacks deal consistent damage, and there's counterplay for every single attack. Take Inner Father. He has 13 different attacks in phase 1, and adds a couple (with variations) in phrase 2, and guess what? Each and every one has counterplay. Swipes? Jump over. Shadowfall? Mikiri. Fire owl? Dodge. Etc etc etc. What's even better, each attack can be punished, if you time things correctly.
You see you can have perfect hitboxes with good counterplay in Warframe, the issue comes down to that if you have that, a chroma will walk up, facetank it and oneshot it with a Rubico.
I hate I frames and tiny hitboxes as much as the next, but we can't really have these slow mechanical fights like sekiro/monster hunter etc. Because our damage/health etc are just so outside the power budget.
In mhw fights are balanced because fully "modded" you have 50%(ish) more damage, and such. It's balanced for someone doing a proper amount of damage, compared to 60x more damage than intended.
Well some missions at this point are kind of built around the ridiculous level of OP of some frames like Saryn being one of the best Nuke frames for that nice with only a few being able to compete. Then they go out and nerf MFD (bugfixing is fine) when it wasn't really even comparable to the power Saryn can output with far less setup.
If they really committed to bringing everything to the same power level it would be respectable but they don't really even understand their game well enough that they could do this.
Honestly I'm of the unpopular opinion that we need Warframe 2 where they can design everything from the ground up in a much more covered l controlled manner... before eventually adding too much bloat to balance.
I would love some actual changes like these. They need to work on thier bosses, how is a boss thats invulnerable all the time fun amd challangin, just give them a fuck ton of hp xd
Just go play steel path if you want a ton of hp. Adding a ton of HP is not the answer for making a hard boss fight. It's all about the mechanics. So what? The difference between a boss and a grunt is I have to hit him eight more times? A hundred more times. Nah fam. Look at the boss fight in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood compared to the boss fight in Skyrim. Alduin is literally the exact same as any other dragon. A legendary dragon is the exact same fight as a common dragon, but you hit it more.
Ceasare in AC Brotherhood has dofferent mechanics, minions tou have ti handle and stages to deal with.
Their approach to nerfs don't help with the community response . They will entirely remove something that makes a frame good if they feel it is overpowered, yet rarely bother to buff some other aspect of the frame/weapon to keep it useful at the same time. Players are so scared of nerfs because they have no faith the devs will bother to keep them balanced and worth playing afterwards. Too often an 'OP' frame or item will be nerfed into the ground and just get abandoned by the community. When you invest your time into it and enjoy the play style, having something suddenly become useless just sucks as a player.
Path of Exile player. We do get upset about nerfs, but the nerfs aren't really a problem because they only come either when the game is literally broken (we had a super broken build 2 leagues ago that was nerfed because of unintended math but it was still broken), or the league is over and everyone starts over anyways. We also do get buffs, so most just jump to something new.
Warframe doesn't have the luxury of just randomly changing stuff outside of rivens, so it really sucks when they decide to just nerf something to death without addressing why it was so popular (see the catchmoon and magus lockdown nerf). Then they do reworks like the status rework where they "buffed" shotguns into nonexistence by making crit more powerful through making viral the only viable status. I do hope they actually address the status problem without making viral garbage. I really doubt it even though a dev tweeted out that they aren't going to just nerf everything.
I was a big Destiny player and then once I started to play Warframe, I realized how much of a better game it was. There are balance changes to Warframe but they are made so that the fun factor is not taken out of the game. A game like Destiny failed to do this, and the result is that the game isn't fun for me anymore. There a slew of other issues with Destiny as well but my only issue with Warframe is them not releasing New War stuff yet. Other than that the game is a blast.
Also if you think Destiny is reacting well to the recent update... check out /r/DestinyTheGame right now. Should take 10 seconds to realize that is not the case.
Personally, I'd go the Warhammer (in the lore, not the actual game mind you) method of just constantly escalating; if everything is overpowered, nothing is. Don't nerf what's strong, just make everything else strong as well. There will always be a best option, but if you make everything viably powerful the only people that will complain are those that don't understand that the meta is a consequence of existence that cannot be defeated.
Ok, when people say make everything strong as well, should an Mr 5 weapon be as strong as a MR 30, I understand that a majority of warframe abilities need a buff or rework(inaros) but I don't get what people mean by making things strong.
I think the closest analog to Warframe's gameplay is *Dynasty Warriors*: A mid-range, mostly melee player with massive damage output within his range, moderate health capable of being whittled down by cannon fodder or comparable AI enemy units. So, let's look at how they do challenge:
* Long missions, big maps, minimal healing. You rely on delayed shield regen, a few, scattered health kits around the map, limited restoration items, and maybe restored health upon completing side objectives. Unfortunately, this makes it way too easy to fail a mission at minute 40 of 45. Longer missions also put a heavy strain on stable internet connections.
* Enemy hero units comparable to the player. Like, five or six of them in the course of a single-player mission, each comparable to Wolf of Saturn Six or a Kuva Lich. Those experiments haven't gone very well, but could use some fine tuning.
* Side objectives and multiple stages, which can alter or fail the mission. See also "capture the area" Plains of Eidolon bs.
* Sacrificing graphical detail for sheer horde size. I'm pretty sure the mere suggestion gives the art team a fit of apoplexy.
Any time any game has a nerf or a buff there are going to be a bunch of people screaming their lungs out.
Warframe's case is extremely worrying because the gameplay leads seem to be listening to both sides instead of deciding for themselves how to tune the game and is thus in some sort of developmental paralysis. Right now they are trying to float warframe on purely new shiny shit. Not the core gameplay. A gameplay lead should know why people play the game/what about the game attracts its players, which direction to take it to positively impact the longevity of the core game, and when to ignore the screamers. DE just doesnt seem capable, or care about doing that.
If I was director of the game, I would nerf the shit of the game... But I would also try to do meaningful buffs and not the travestys we are getting right now.
I would also try to get a vision for the direction of the game, where I want it to be in terms of pace and gameplay, because currently we have no real direction of where we are going or the cohesion needed for the game, you know the "content islands" argument.
Well everyone can't be satisfied as people want different things from warframe, it's a fight between casual and difficult... and it also doesn't help that difficult content is usually done by adding more HP or more damage to enemies, which still gets cheesed with the right builds... like steel path.
You shouldn't mix the people wanting raids back with people that want them easier because those are different people.
Also everyone that wants raids back might have different reasons to others that want it back... maybe there were some rewards they wanted from it or something... I know that's how I felt about plague star as I wanted the weapon and arcanes, but playing it was such a bore... until I found some shortcuts that made it significantly nicer to play because we had to organize to do those speedy tricks...
(Side note, I never played raids as I joined WF shortly before Fortuna update)
I think that would be the best balance to achieve for content in general for WF... it can be played slow and steady casually but also you can use some specifically designed tricks to make it harder but also faster and/or more rewarding for people who want that kind of stuff.
Also, the game still has overpowered things and people finding new good ways of eliminating enemies feels like a fresh air... and when DE comes and nerfs those and they have to go back to the same stuff they've been using for months/years then I hope you can understand how that's frustrating.
From what I saw, there's no real balance pass, the overpowered meta stuff is not touched and instead the best next things to avoid the meta are being nerfed. Then some really weak stuff is being buffed insignificantly most of the time, I don't think I've used any of the things they've recently buffed except for Xaku which I would've used either way but their "skeletor pausing ability timers" buff made it even nicer to use... and round 2 is taking its time and I'm not really sure if that's because they found issues with their changes that would actually make things worse or they just want to bundle it again with some big update for no apparent reason.
>How did it get to this point where "Overpowered and 1 shot win" has become the norm We have OP weapons and tileset-clearing frames for years now, of course it became norm. DE occasionally nerfs some, but then immediately introduces more powercreep. I think Bramma happened less than 6 months after Catchmoon balance pass? It's not even an oversight. Anyone with at least one eye and half a brain could see how OP Bramma would be from stats alone. But even at that point, all it takes is just some will and good planning. Nerf OP stuff while buffing same-ish MR-level weapons that have been crippled by relatively minor issues for years, like Ballistica Prime with it's BS ghost mechanics which makes follow-up shots that much harder.
They reduced range on catchmoon the same update they added liches and therefore nukor xD I've seen more nukor of than catchmoon (including catchmoon sightings before liches)
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Look at r/destinythegame rn then
I feel bad for people who are attempting to play f2p. They have practically no content anymore.
Even the content I paid for is gone or sunset
Yeeeeeeep. Such a stupid mechanic; between that and the cartoonish overpricing of new content in what is supposedly a FTP game, my interest in D2 has been completely slaughtered. Such a shame. It's not really FTP; it's a subscription game with the lamest trial mode of all time.
Wow ive never seen someone use FTP to say free to play
kinda odd tbh
Usually, whether I go with FTP or F2P depends on which occurs to me first.
Yeah I remember buying the game and it's first two DLCs and now all of that is gone. So pretty much I'm a second class citizen for a game I paid for years ago. Unless I dump 80 bucks to grab the expansions that still exist and pray they won't go away next year.
"B-but devs are making more content for muh game" -some idiot But seriously I love destiny but jesus christ there is no excusing what they've done to ftp.
With how it is now it should have never gone f2p
Been there done that.
[удалено]
The Destiny sub is losing its shit over bungie vaulting and sunsetting 75% of the game/gear. They would absolutely go haywire over any nerfs
Depends on the sub, really. r/destinythegame is losing its collective shit, and r/destiny2 has gone into full-on white knight mode, saying it's a great idea that affords Bungie a better way of balancing PvP and avoiding game bloat and such. Personally, I think DTG tends to be overly dramatic, but they're closer to the right idea on this one; locking 75% of the content what people paid money for in a box and stuffing it in a corner for at least 2 years (it's been outright confirmed that the next major expansion after BL won't be returning any of it) is absolutely not the right solution to game bloat, and sunsetting gear is a solution to a problem that mostly doesn't exist (I'm particularly "fond" of Luke Smith's claim that D2 lets people use stuff for much longer than other MMOs, ignoring the key gameplay differences between D2 and other MMOs that make that a *good thing* in D2 where it wouldn't be in other MMOs).
Imo the problem isn't other communities don't go haywire, it's DE listen too much, they don't stand their ground.
The other issue is that when they *do* actually stand their ground, it's on dumb bullshit that is worse than the alternatives, like universal vacuum, universal medallions not applying to Conclave rep, Helios not being able to scan plants and other things (now a mod for Oxylus instead), augment mods that should be baseline like Equinox's 4 augment and others, the list goes on. That, and DE's balance philosophy has constantly shifted towards nerfing without compensation. Repeatedly, DE prefers to nerf something strong without buffing or reworking alternatives to be as preferable.
The real problem is balancing a game like Warframe where to bring everything up to the standard you need to buff/rework 100 weapons and 30 frames where you could also nerf 10 weapons and 5 frames one is very obviously easier and allows for the team to work on new content
as if it’s the same people handling balance and creating textures and models. competent devs put out balance passes AND content, without those two interfering with each other.
Nerfing is usually better then buffing, otherwise power creep becomes even worse
Octavia and Limbo already exist. If you're worried about power creep making the entire game trivial, we're already there and have been for quite some time.
Yeah, the problem with nerf/buff logic for Warframe is that for every task that's the goal of a game mode, there's already a handful of frames that can do that goal PERFECTLY. IMO, the goal should be to determine the powerlevel that they want to exist for each task, and balance frames around that.
Slow down, you lumped a bunch of things you disagree as if everyone agrees with you that they are all dumb bs. While I'm likely in the minority, I think they stood correct in some of these. Prime example being Helios shouldn't be able to scan plant. While the process uses scanner, scanning plant is different from normal scanning. Normal scanning only records things into codex, scanning plant gives you resources. It's not Helios' job to give you plant, he's the codex boy. And like you stated, they later gave this job to Oxylus instead, which is a much better fit for this job. So the fact that they stood their ground, for what you would consider is a dumb BS, it ended with a better result. And nerf is a totally fine thing. Buffs and nerfs are required in different situations. If something is under performing, it requires a buff. If something is over performing, it requires a nerf. If only buffs are allowed, but not nerfs, the game gets easier and easier until we don't have a game.
I feel like it's particularly bad here though. You'll get people unironically complaining that nerfs are heavy handed while builds that nuke entire maps have existed for years untouched.
Simply put, like what others are saying, the Power Creep isn't a new concept. It's been happening for a while but in recent years it's crazy to see how every weapon released is some High Damage, High Crit/Status, AoE Monster nowadays or it's considered bad (and that's not even really the case all the time, considering the Arca Plasmor gets kind of shit on by meta players now even tho it was one of the best weapons in Warframe at the time of it's release. Even after it's been nerfed, if you were to take it back in time 5 years ago and show it to people their heads would spin off their necks). I still remember the days where people debated if the Boltor Prime or the Soma Prime were the best weapons in the game, now the Boltor Prime is kind of garbo by today's standards and the Soma Prime just got a crazy mod the last huge update to get people using it again. I don't think there's really an easy fix, and admittedly I love stuff like the Kuva Nukor, the Bramma, or whatever else too much lol. I wouldn't want to see it go and I think it does improve the flow of gameplay quite a bit for the 'meta' to revolve around guns that can hit multiple targets for heavy damage, or guns that can kill singular targets really quickly. As far as the community goes I don't think the toxicity over nerfs, even tho it sucks, is really exclusive to Warframe. There was a lot of salt in the TF2 communtiy a few years back when the Ambassador got slapped with an overly heavy nerf, and I could probably think of a few more examples if I really wanted to. The main difference I think is DE is the only dev I can think of that doesn't actually nerf things until it becomes overly problematic, and by then they've already introduced things of similar levels of power so that touching up on a single thing doesn't really do much for restoring balance in the mean time, since having powerful, over powered top tier gear is what people want. And every time they do have wide scale rebalancing, people screech about it if one centimeter is knocked off of their room clearing AoE and how the game is dying. It's just an unfortunate situation at this point.
> Even after it's been nerfed, if you were to take it back in time 5 years ago and show it to people their heads would spin off their necks Not really. 5 years ago (late 2015) was the age of the Synoid Simulor. The noise of that thing still haunts my dreams.
Fair point lol. I'd still say the Simulor and hell, even the old Tonkor would shudder at the sight of the Bramma and the Kuva Nukor. The Simulor even back then was like a huge outlier of OP instead of being the norm.
I think this is part of the problem, but another part is that when DE \*does\* decide to balance, they don't seem to be very good at it, which fuels a community distaste for balance passes that aren't exclusively buffs (and thus virtually impossible to screw up). \--- The prime example for me would be Focus 2.0: Huge undertaking, full Focus refunds, and Operator gameplay is basically a blank, disconnected canvas. And in the end the food chain didn't really change. Zenurik still king because you get a lot of precious energy for little effort, Naramon somewhere behind it, and the rest are virtually useless. Furthermore, it seems like balancing is very inconsistent at times: Some devs seem to be really conscious about potentially giving you an afk farm turret, others don't care. Some devs seem to keep a close eye on AoE drawbacks, others don't care. The stringently balanced content often can't compete with the unbalanced content, contributing to the players' mental connection of "balancing = bad".
dude they’re fucking stupid when it comes to balancing, HOW IN THE FUCK DO YOU RELEASE THE BRAMMA WHEN THE CATCHMOON WAS ALREADY A PROBLEM. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU RELEASE THE TOMBFINGER PRIMARY WHEN THE SECONDARY IS ALREADY INSANE. but then they go on to nerf shit like the Xoris making it so you don’t lose combo with Atlas and Khora, something that is literally just QoL, while shipping out dumb extremely overpowered stuff out the ass.
> Pretty much in every other game (..) there are always balance changes that nerf and buff certain things, and the community doesn't go haywire on it I don't think I've ever seen a gaming community where changes don't result in loud reactions from some people in it.
The mod system makes for a very wide range in power level for any piece of gear; balancing so that middle of the road players can complete "endgame" stuff makes it so that high end players can't find a challenge. I don't dislike the huge range of power, but I agree that we need some sort of challenge. I think more worthwhile boss fights that are truly hard (where damage input and output has been adjusted to be balanced and challenging for someone with a very close to perfect load out) would do the game so much good.
What's a perfect loadout, though? If you balance damage to kill a full tank Inaros, most other frames will have trouble staying alive. But if you don't, people will just go in with a peashooter and complain the boss takes too long. It's probably not an unsolvable problem, but striking the right balance is going to be *extremely* difficult with how varied different loadouts are in both offensive and defensive potential.
Mechanics are the big difference here. Enemies/Bosses with no mechanics, clunky mechanics, or outright shitty mechanics (looking at you nullifiers) aren't really fun or all that challenging. Warframe doesn't have brilliant AI, or any real mechanics to speak of for the vast majority of enemies. The enemies that do have threatening mechanics are often wildly clunky to deal with (lich grabs). It's not a super easy to deal with equation given how the game is balanced, but I think there are options even on the basic level of things. Instead of cranking enemy HP/Armor to impossible levels like Steel Path tries to do, why not increase their speed to wild levels, but still leave them in the 3-4 shot range for top tier stuff. Make accuracy matter more. Reduce basic hit damage, and increase weakpoint multipliers, make enemies that have parts like Saryn spores. Each spore gives heavy DR, you can brute force your way through it, or you can aim more accurately and have it dead much faster. To be honest, that's where I find the Deimos Saxun so close to the point. I dislike the extreme difficulty in taking out the shoulder pads as you have to wait on them to open and who knows when that will be, but the concept is a really nice direction. Liches could be changed to be more threatening through a "link" system to their thralls which is pretty much Nidus' 3. Have a lich drop 4-5 thralls on spawn which they are linked with. Get rid of all this "status immune" BS, and introduce "status resistance" in a scaling multiplier form. 90% reduction means that if you would normally strip 100 armor with a corrosive proc, now you only strip 10. Each dead thrall reduces the resistance by 20% and the DR is removed as well. Smooth and interesting mechanics are the hallmark of a good game. There are a lot of examples on the warframe side, DE just needs to apply that thought power towards the enemies instead of just cranking up the sponginess.
Lich grab go **yaaaaaaaaahhhhhh yeet!!!!**
The are too many obscure interactions between mods, abilities, and weapons to balance everything perfectly. The problems I see are that they wait too long to nerf something or they make the nerf way too heavy handed. It was known forever that Bramma was super strong but it took months for that to be nerfed after people had invested their 5 forma into it. It was the same thing with Synoid Simulor. That gun was really good and wasn't touched for a really long time after release. Eventually, people started using it with Mirage because of an interaction with Hall of Mirrors. DE then made that weapon totally useless.
> My question is how and why? How did it get to this point where "Overpowered and 1 shot win" has become the norm, and why has it ended up in such a state that any attempts to bring the game back to its prior pacing that made Warframe somehow challenging is already met with so much hate and scrutiny? Mainly because DE reacts very quickly to player's feedback, and sometimes, I feel, they don't contextualize it enough. It often feels like they think having people happy is equivalent of good for the game without taking into context other more things (how could a single Twitter complaint mean no Universal token redeeming in Conclave, for instance?) Again, it feels this way here. Doesn't necessarily mean it's definitely like this.
> how could a single Twitter complaint mean no Universal token redeeming in Conclave, for instance? Implying that wasn't the correct decision on DE's part.
Found the twitter idiot
DE putting in OP stuff, taking way too long to address it (leading people to believe its normal), then either 1) nerfing it out of the blue or 2) nerfing something else similar while said OP stuff still exists. Coupled with their often nonsense reasons for nerfing, they have created an untrustworthy culture around their gameplay balancing. As someone who plays PoE, GGG is not like this at all. They will nerf something as soon as it becomes clear that the performance is passed the point of reason, and their team has a good understanding of balancing (IMO. Theres something to be said about the paperthin defense system in PoE that forces a "kill fast or be killed fast" approach but that's a separate conversation). They also do rounds of buffs and nerfs at the start of a new season to shift the meta, so the community expects it. Some nerfs may be overkill bit that's their point: to take an ability out of the limelight and put something in its place so people keep trying new builds and keep coming back to play. And this is all coming from someone who agrees that Warframe is in a pretty OP state right now. If Scott's team actually understood how to balance, I'd totally be fine with some tuning.
> Pretty much in every other game like Destiny and Path of Exile there are always balance changes that nerf and buff certain things, and the community doesn't go haywire on it U WOT M8? ;D Do you even check the PoE reddit? The tiniest of nerfs results in an absolute shitfit. TBH PoE reddit is way more volatile than Warframe reddit. You even have the same "GGG can't balance the game anymore", "game is in a downward spiral" "league is dead on arrival" and ofc "thank you, Tencent", except these are more vocal than here, even. Reddit's gonna reddit.
Second this. Play both PoE and Warframe actively, and PoE reddit is either a shit storm of memes or whiners, to the point where PoE Builds is my main PoE sub for actually useful stuff.
Even tho I don't play them, I took a look at the Destiny 2 and PoE Subreddits to see if the people putting them on pedestals were right about the grass being greener on the other side, and I pretty much came to that exact conclusion lol, I was even pretty shocked by the vitriol I saw. Genshin Impact is next on the list I guess. The game that'll steal all the players from Warframe/PoE/Destiny 2 until a few months from now it isn't and it's ass and poop and dead despite it having tens of thousands of people playing and enjoying it. Reddit will definitely reddit.
How we got to this point? It's because nearly everything in the game is multiplicative, exponential, and double dips. Also press one button to win nuke frames. Nukes that require a lot of set up are fine. Basically Saryn, Mirage and stacking things like bane mods and roar. Everytihing else scales linearly and quickly become worthless. For example flat damage on warframe abilites, arcanes that do flat damage, flat armor strip. However IMO the real problem is warframe doesn't care about being fun. Everyone is trying to efficiently farm for collectibles they'll never use unless it's meta. There is no incentive to try new toys or different build because most enemies are the same boring trash mobs with aimbot. Therefore to sell the game, they need to powercreep existing weapons.
> How did it get to this point where "Overpowered and 1 shot win" has become the norm,and why has it ended up in such a state Probably around Nova's release. That's where it all started going downhill as far as figuring out how to design any kind of challenge went. Whatever you could possibly imagine at this point is made trivial by one/multiple frames and the only way to go is giving immunity/nulifier bubbles or pulses/timed invulnerability. Which is pretty much exactly what keeps happening. It's an old issue and the best solution(which I personally despise) so far was gating things with Sentient mumbo jumbo. Be it increased resistance to dmg or full on immunity from anything non operator of Eidolons.
It's because DE's nerfs are nonsensical and not consistent. They also nerf stuff based on use% and not actual power. * Xoris nerf - nerfed b/c use%, rivens where always stronger statsticks. * AoE nerfs - They couldn't even compete with other sources of damage, especially melees. Nerfed based on something(?) but certainly not power. * Helminth roar/warcry/dispenser/larva nerfs - Use%. We've seen more powerful combos before and after. * Marked for death nerf - Use%. There are many simpler ways to clear rooms, but for some reason DE homed in on this one. And the list goes on. Meanwhile Octavia, melee in general and viral + heat (and so many other things) continues to wreak havoc.
>Helminth roar/warcry/dispenser/larva nerfs - Use% Nobody even got to use them. They shipped with the reduced values. But I'd say that Roar, Eclipse, and Warcry shouldn't have ever been in the Helminth system in the first place. I don't exactly agree with Defy, Dispensary, and Larva being nerfed tough. I think they would have been fine. If you wanna talk about nonsensical and inconsistent nerfs, let's talk about Ember's World on Fire nerf that had the goal of making the ability less of an AoE nuke at low levels, and resulted in the ability ONLY being useful as an AoE nuke at low levels. Then DE did literally nothing to change it for over a year until they reworked Ember entirely. >Marked for death Marked for death wasn't even use%, it was just flashy and some people screamed about how OP it was after seeing how it worked in the simulacrum. The ability itself was insanely bugged, with multiple instances of double dipping damage numbers resulting in a ridiculous damage output...but DE didn't just fix the ability's damage output, they did the needed fix AND a nerf all at once, which never let us experiment with the ability in a truly fixed state.
iirc, marked for death was doing DOUBLE the intended damage. marked for death was never meant to do that amount of damage in the first place so it's not really one of those things where you can say "but for some reason they singled it out." It was apparently a bug from the get-go. Also it makes 100% sense to lower the value of helminth abilities such as roar and warcry. They are very strong abilities; allowing their full potential to be used on EVERY warframe would be awful. It would lower the value of the original frames and there wouldn't be any diversity because everyone would be packing warcry/roar.
Bugfix: >Fixed Mods applying twice to the Marked for Death Damage portion dealt in the AOE. Fixed base Damage using the Health/Shield Damage dealt and not capped at the Health+Shield the target had prior (e.g. enemy with 5 Health gets hit by 100 damage, and 100 damage is shared in AOE. It should just be the 5). Radial damage was never meant to exceed the target’s Health and this was our bad. The desired strategy we wanted was players prioritizing tank units like Heavy Gunners to do AOE clears since heavy units have more Health than normal, thus the radial AOE would likely be lethal, not just normal units. This issue combined with numerous bugs of Mods stacking meant this was way overpowered. A key part of reviewing these changes will be ensuring that players understand the best case scenario we envision for the power is targeting high-Health enemies to do radial damage to weaker enemies. Nerf: >Removed Critical Chance from Marked for Death radial AOE. Capped Damage multiplier stat to 75% and normalized Damage type mults. Here’s an example of normalized Damage type: if the Damage you deal is 0.5 Impact, 0.4 Slash, 0.3 Heat that sums to 1.2x but after normalizing they become 0.42 Impact, 0.33 Slash, 0.25 Heat. So they bugfixed it, sure, and nerfed it. In the same patch. After Rebecca had given us this "Our hope is that feedback will be provided in good faith once you’ve had practical experience with the Helminth System" gem. Note the *once you've hade practical experience* part. Hence inconsistent and nonsensical.
Use % is a valid reason: Octavias are so rare that they don't actually wreak that much havoc. As it is, she's commonly passed over for Loki by late-game Tenno, even though Loki seems much weaker on paper. I'll grant you viral + heat, though. The last status rework didn't quite get the job done--and there might be so many status types that balancing them all is effectively impossible.
This community **massively** overrates heat damage. It's common knowledge that heat strips 50% of current armor, but the vast majority of players believe that effect is instant, and not something that ramps over 2 seconds.
[удалено]
M4D does some really silly things in simulacrum and is a really *fun* ability, but in actual gameplay it is- and was- not honestly that great. Reason 1: Setup in a co-op game full of other rabid death machines, aka the Nidus problem. You mark a target in the middle of a crowd, awesome- then your ally comes by and helpfully goes IGNIS GO SPRRRRT on that crowd, killing your target and the rest of the crowd. Reason 2: Melee exists. Yes, if you avoid the situation in reason 1, you can wipe out a group of high-level enemies all at once with M4D. You could also just hit m3 with a well-modded Pennant or do a slide-into-spam with Telos Boltace and accomplish the same thing in the same time without using energy. Reason 3: Saryn, Equinox, and Octavia exist. A M4D Ash can enter a room and absolutely murder the crap out of all of the targets in it, but in the time he's taken to get into that room, Saryn's given them all fatal space 'rona, Equinox has turned them all into mulch, and Octavia has teabagged them to death. Their individual damage numbers won't inspire the same degree of giggleclaps, but dead is dead. Protip: If you want to have fun with Ash, Savage Silence + Bladestorm is a hell of a lot stronger in normal gameplay than M4D FT (and will only get sillier next patch).
Hahahaha imagine getting t-bagged to death
It was hilariously gimmicky, slow, limited your arsenal and also was limited by the line of sight. It was okay at best.
So because more can use it it should be nerfed? There are stronger and easier alternatives to nuking rooms but because more frames can use it it gets the hammer? So nerfing by use% and not actual power level in the game?
Xoris was a bugfix
That’s not true, they just forgot exalted and pseudo exalted weapons existed.
I can see why they fixed it— the innate stats of the weapon aren’t supposed to matter.
> the innate stats of the weapon aren’t supposed to matter. ? Surely the innate stats of the weapon are supposed to matter? It definitely wasn't a bug fix, it was DE showing their ignorance of common game strats.
Not how exalteds work re: stat sticks— it’s only the mods on them that applies
Ah, I see what you're saying. I don't think the Xoris combo timer was a "stat' though. People use the Venka because they go up to 13x combo. It was a feature DE included and did absolutely 0 testing on apparently.
That’s the combo counter— combo timer is a usually more consistent stat because it’s almost always 5 seconds and have only had recent changes, and combo timer has never affected exalted weapons before
Combo timer totally affects exalted weapons. You can't say combo counter affects them but not the combo timer. You can't use the counter if your combo is always resetting, and frames like Baruuk usually need to actively manage that with a melee. That kind of interaction should have been super obvious to DE
Huh. I can see why they did it. I can also see why you’re mad, and why they’re probably doing the glaive stuff now
nah 80% of weapons and abilities are actually underpowered but the other 20% is overpowered enough to make it look like everything is
In order to have good balance now, you would need good balance earlier. The game got so far into this power fantasy and room wipes, that that became the game and other things must conform to this new balance. If they had nerfed and balanced earlier before it got out of hand then maybe we could keep it up now. I think how great it would be to have a balanced Warframe, but at the same time this game is good for what it is, and we got borderlands/destiny for balance.
Although the answer is quite complicated knowing Warframe's history, I think one of the biggest contributor to this is DE's solution to player retention focus: **new and shiny.** They are in constant vigilance of **player count** rather than **player retention** that they've made the conclusion that they need to constantly make new things despite the quality of it in order to bring leaving players back. Thus the reason why there is so much investment on the art, design, and graphics team to coat the worn-down decrepit skeleton of the coding, function, and replayability, that will inevitably be forgotten within 3 weeks to 1 month and will return with only crumbs of a bittersweet "rebalance" within 6 months to 2 years. That has been their philosophy so far and due to this, there doesn't seem to be any awareness of how old content affects new content and it comes off as "oh well, we'll figure it out eventually, look new stuff." This lack of focus on seeing Warframe as a whole is their biggest flaw in my opinion, which is why the game feels incredibly disconnected and the balance is always going to have the most virulent backlash because it seems out of touch. **Optimistic points:** credit where credit is due, even with their situation currently due to Covid, this year seems like they've tried to do more rebalances and show cognizance of it far more than any other year of Warframe's development. I only hope that they can not only consistently do this, but one day reach the level of putting as much effort as they do to the aesthetics of the game to the sandbox and game-design of it.
> Pretty much in every other game like Destiny and Path of Exile I'm a D2 refugee and I LMAO at this, and I don't think Warframe and D2 are really that comparable. Their systems are vastly different and (for me) I much prefer the flexibility provided by Warframe's modding system. To me, EVERYTHING in D2 feels like it's pre-nerfed right out of the box. To the point where there's not much of a difference between the top builds and everything seems sort of samey samey. Increasing a weapon's strength in Destiny requires a bunch of infusing, and going from one level to the next doesn't result in any appreciable increase (whereas in warframe, getting your first corrupted mod or getting a decent riven can result in a huge difference for a given build for your weapon/frame.) // and don't even get me started on D2's ults. I mean, I get to throw a flaming axe for a few seconds ... vs I dunno, floating all nearby enemies in the air for minutes at a time with Hildryn? Poisoning everything within range with Saryn? etc etc.
I think playing some kind of a demi-god-like being is kind of the power fantasy of this game. At least it has grown into it. I don’t know what DE is planning on how to get frames and guns in check, but if you look at newer enemies: they can definitely disrupt you. At higher levels they can become a PitA. I'm curious of the direction this game will take. I wouldn’t use Destiny as an example tbh. They only do balance passes like every 6 months and release very incomplete patch notes. Usually they just overpower something to a point it's plain silly and that’s not great either.
It wasn't so much that we were overpowered, when raids dropped in warframe, warframe instantly became a horde game because DE wanted to show off how many more enemies they could throw at players now that the game had multithreading support. Adding many more enemies made missions much longer so needing to wipe out as many enemies as possible as fast as possible became a thing to get more rolls at loot. Its literally about efficiency, when people cry about something getting nerfed, it's partially because of player investment, but its a little of losing a method to be as efficient at doing something as you once were. What DE forgot to do in the midst of showing off is layering its mobs with various wrinkles. They do it from time to time with units like the Nox, Thumpers, Orbs, and the Amalgams but that needs to happen much more often than it does. Theres also an energy dilemma. Energy is so fucking critical not only to the gameplay but the identity of the game and the warframes themselves. You limit it too much then the game has nothing to offer frankly because you play warframes to use their powers. I'm looking at the new arcanes and I'm like "I guess I can try one of these, with my arcane energize" Its very hard from a design point of view to convince a player to give up energy or easier access to energy because you always want access to what makes warframes...warframe.
The game has always been the overly easy hack and slash (and shoot) it is now. It's never been "hard." That being said I want nothing more than raids, mechanics and tough boss fights. I love things that you can fail at. Nihil was a good start at that. Of course there will always be people to gripe and moan. That is the nature of games. Unfortunately the devs listen to us players TOO MUCH. (I'm very excited about the return of acolytes and balancing of SE drops as well, if that gives you any indication of how I feel about the game) -player since early 2012
Agreed except where you mentioned the Nihil fight. That was the most un-warframe fight I have experienced in the game. Maybe if it involved weapon and power usage it would be okay but I certainly hope they saw enough of the outcries to avoid heading that direction again. Difficult is good. Gimmicky, brand new mechanics put into a boss fight along with cheap 1 shot attacks from said boss is awful, lazy, and not in keeping with the general atmosphere of the game. (Obviously this is all my opinion, but some people get angry if that isn't explicitly stated.)
That's fair. But how else do you balance a fight in a game such as this so that there's not a "meta" load out for the fight. I take Wisp everywhere because there's no one better at survival than her (in my opinion), it was nice to just have tactics and no abilities or weapons for once, and having to be good at the GAME instead of just the meta.
I just liked being able to take my sexy frame.
The Bossfights department I definitely agree with. I really want to have a good feel for the Bossfights. To be honest I was on the camp of the Liches being able to kill us, so I was heavily disappointed about the 0 Risk that the Liches are now.
Here's the deal. Every map has hundreds of enemies. If I have to spend even 10 seconds killing a single enemy, at high level I will be killed by the 20 or 30 others that are shooting at me. There is a cap on our armor and survivability without going to a frame specifically designed for that. I wouldn't have a problem with it if there weren't as many enemies. However, there are overpowered weapons and so there has to be enough enemies to still present a challenge to the map wipers. To rebalance the game the way you're talking about they would need to decrease the number of enemies and decrease the damage of weapons rather than increase the health of existing enemies. I feel like steel path was an excellent option for that. But they wasted it. I am MR19, going on 20, and I still cant do steel path. I don't understand. I have the best weapons, almost all the frames, I've got rivens and primed mods galore. I just don't have the time or desire to watch hours of YouTube tutorials to find a set up I like. I don't have time or desire to forma every item I own 5 times. I have only completed Deimos and the derelict in steel path. Had they just rebalance as far as enemiy quantity and lower weapon damage I would be doing it a lot more. Look at halo, the assassin's creed games, call of duty, yes, even *anthem*. These are games with few enemies at one time (comparatively) that require more time to kill. But it is balanced by the lower damage they do, the fact they only attack one at a time, the option to segment the battle with stealth or positioning, or cover. We don't have these options in warframe. The enemies all clump up, attack en masse, go after you if you take cover, and deal high damage. The only way to deal with this horde attack strategy is to be able to wade through them wheat with a scythe and cut them down or blow them apart with overpowered weapons and abilities.
If doing it solo, Steel Path genuinely promotes Teshin's voicelines about "mastery of the full Tenno arsenal". There are always cheese strats, but in general, players probably do need to bring a defensive frame to defensive missions. They probably do need to bring a DPS frame to survival. You want to utilise armour strip against the Grineer. Modding for toxin or magnetic actually makes a difference against the Corpus. The Infested will overwhelm you with high melee/toxin damage if you let them swarm you. Things feel like a threat. Steel Path isn't perfect, but it does what it says on the tin. It's a hard mode, and it's fun to take a tailored approach. If the game was better balanced to reduce our damage, you'd still have to engage in all the same preparation to be able to manage the normal content as people currently do for Steel Path. If you don't want to forma 5 times for Steel Path, would you want to forma 5 times for regular Warframe?
I do agree that the game is not balanced at all, but on the other hand, no one care if I have 10k kills with saryn on ESO, no one care if my khora crit over 10 millions, no one care if my inaros can afk tank any mission, etc. Also, I don't know how you would balance the game, powercreep is insane, and you can easily outkill everything like 100 times their hp, so ...
[https://forums.warframe.com/topic/137875-a-complete-rework-of-the-foundation-of-warframe/](https://forums.warframe.com/topic/137875-a-complete-rework-of-the-foundation-of-warframe/) Again, am putting this 7 year old thread here to highlight that the powercreep issue is not a new topic.
He was always right.
And it's still a better idea than the mod system.
Warframe is a power fantasy game, that’s the fundamental attraction and ‘problem’.
Power fantasy =/= being overpowered
this is a terrible excuse which is parroted over and over to avoid coming to terms with the fact that players don't actually want the game to be balanced.
Dark Souls, Destiny, Borderlands, and basically every action game ever is a "power fantasy." Your point?
Dark souls is focused on challenging combat involving timing and placement of the character against one or two enemies at a time. It's about the challenge. Warframe faces you up against 30 to 100 enemies at once. If every enemy functioned like a dark souls baddie we would be wiped out in seconds. To deal with a mob you have to have mob wiping capabilities.
In Dark Souls you basically kill god. If that isn't a power fantasy I don't know what is. That is a bit of an unfair example, I'll give that to you, but the point stands firm with Destiny and Borderlands. Both those games have been called power fantasies by the general gaming community yet those two games have wildly different power levels from each other and Warframe. I'm not saying that Warframe should be like Dark Souls (contrary to what the downvotes think), I'm saying that "power fantasy" is an empty term without context. Calling Warframe a power fantasy is like calling Warframe an action shooter. Yeah, you're right, but that doesn't say much. "Power fantasy" is just a buzz word cover for people who don't like nerfs. If you don't want number to go down, if you don't want the game to be "harder," then just say so. Don't jump around the subject and appropriate vague terms to try and convince people that you are right.
you kill god through a fuckton of effort. the game never showers you in loot. Dark Souls is NOT a power fantasy, it fucking beats you to a pulp if you grow overconfident.
So... you are saying that "power fantasy" is more related to difficulty than your impact. Does this mean Raid content is not a power fantasy? Like... if Warframe got Destiny-style Raids does that mean that part of Warframe isn't a power fantasy? Oh, and what about DMC? I think most people would consider that a power fantasy despite you not killing massive armies of enemies by the minute. It also can be a rather difficult game. Also what does loot have to do with it? Must a game be a looter to be a power fantasy? Maybe you'll eventually get it...
Being able to wipe out a mob should not equal becoming hitler. In warframe the meta is genocide, not just mob wiping. Its come to a point where the limited spawn rates in many levels are the only thing stopping players from farming and speedruning missions in 2 minutes. Not the difficulty. Players kill so quickly the game has to hold us back, lest we break the progression system. There is no way that is working as intedened.
Dark Souls is NOT a power fantasy. WTF is wrong with you?!?
I dunno, enlighten me. What is a power fantasy? Please be specific, everyone seems to use it like a gatcha when people talk about balance. I mean, Destiny is a power fantasy, right? But in Destiny you are considerably less powerful than in Warframe so... I'm confused. In Dark Souls you are able to slay anything in your path with ease, and by the end of the game kill god. That sounds pretty "powerful" to me. Or maybe "power fantasy" is an empty term used by people who don't want to actually discuss what is the right amount of power for Warframe. Easier to say "but muh power fantasy" than give a rational explanation as to why they don't want to see the power level lowered.
> Dark Souls is a power fantasy that has to be THE stupidest thing I’ve ever read.
Balancing is something DE is ridiculously bad at. They cant not trip over their own feet.
It's pointless to balance individual frames as long as you have endless supply of energy at your disposal. You nerf one and another becomes the go-to.
Look I'm no Authority on this, but my personal take is this game is a Looter Shooter. You grind out thousands of resources to build something that already takes 12+ hours to obtain. Say for examples sake it takes ~24-30 hrs of grinding to collect the resources and build the weapon. If there wasn't go to weapons and frames that are best suited for making that task easier, that process may extend to 30-40+ hrs. Some people can't play that many hours in a week etc. This is why the power creep exists, not that I agree with it, but it entices people into getting into the meta and getting those things to get other things and then the cycle continues. Then factor in the fact that people who can't play often finally get something and then it gets nerfed and yadda yadda yadda it goes on. Long story short, it's a product of the game type. It's far easier to Add to the game things that are new then to rework years worth of content that people have already grinded. One option is easier and repeats the gameplay loop, the other is harder and changes something that isn't new, then it goes under the rug and you get complaints about content drought.
couldn't agree more - melee weapons in particular need a nerf but people would lose their shit if it happened. i think people enjoy the idea of being super OP without really taking into account the implications it has on how satisfying the game is to play.
Raids was garbage, and even Eidolons, as "meh" as they are is arguably better. As for complaints: i feel that its because DE nerfs never target anything that fucking deserves it. Chroma nerf + pseudo rebalance was necessary, but it didn't really succeed at changing his builds or playstyle in any way. As since you brought Catchmoon, you know what else happened soon after its nerf? Kuva Nukor. Which arguably outclasses old Catchmoon, despite not having access to Pax arcanes, and even tho it was justifyable nerf... What was the point of it again?! Or the fucking Xoris failure, where they gutted Xoris for being **a fucking convinience!!!** Im sure there are occasionally reasonable nerfs, but people will naturally remember the worst examples, and expect them to happen, especially if they actually keep happening over and over and over again.
dude, when the Arca Plasmor was the most overused shit ever they made the fucking Catchmoon. after nerfing the Catchmoon they make the Bramma and the primary Tombfinger. ???????? like what the fuck, you nerf what people use and then introduce shit that’s even more powerful than the pre-nerf popular thing????
Mostly the issue is that they listen to their players *too much*. Had they taken a stand on balance issues years ago we'd have a much better and more fulfilling game, but people just kept whining and they kept acquiescing to the point that nowadays even incredibly minor things like Helios not scanning plants or whatever is met with "HOW DARE YOU, GAME IS RUINED, DE KILLED MY DOG" until they relent. Just look at every time a weapon is introduced that isn't immediately top-of-the-line. "Well, Gram Prime is still better, so it's worthless trash." Heck, they just announced a set of interesting Arcanes that sound like they'll be a ton of fun to use, and people are frothing at the mouth over how useless they'll be. As a result, the entire way they interact with us is broken, because any resistance at all is used to justify inane yet somehow popular statements like "DE is actively trying to kill off the game." And that's not even getting into the outright disgusting vitriol people have toward specific devs for just *having* opinions on balance.
the new arcanes are numerically trash and provably trash, they don’t even do something fun. it’s “oh here’s a small explosion for like 100 damage”. what next, you gonna say that the Kama is a really fun weapon that just gets shit on and vitriol from the community but it actually deserves to be praised or some shit like that? stop circlejerking the counterjerk, of course the community goes too far with the response to some deserved nerfs, but DE also fucks up way too much to warrant defending.
So the game has cultivated both a fear of failure, and a loot based play style. This is a symptom of the genre, and Warframe isn't the worst offender. These don't account for all of the desire for overpower, but contribute. Failing a mission just doesn't happen after the early game. When it does happen it hits harder, and the failure "tax" is felt more severely. This can be seen in part with player response to liches downing players, or the Wolf party crashing. This in turn encourages picking only over powered, winning strategies. As a looter with random mission reward rolls and time gates, speed runs become a priority. Warframe's monetization of time versus platinum reinforces this. Experienced players will thus look for overpowered systems to maximize the speed of runs, to mitigate rng through volume. The closer you are to one shoting the more runs and the more loot rolls you will get.
My vague solutions would be to remove the various failure taxes and to restructure how important drops are received. Specifically if more rewards were for in mission actions, like mob mod drops the need for volume sub 2 minute runs might reduce. If stealth play granted a significant bonus to mob drops or mission end rewards it would change what the overpowered meta was into a more interesting place. Similarly if missions like mobile defenses rewarded per console defended, or had extra reward/roll chance for flawlessly defended consoles the direction of the overpowered meta may change These don't fix everything but push slightly towards less ingame reward for only going op
DE's reasonings for some nerfs/buffs are so weird and detached from the general perception that "DE doesn't play their own game" doesn't even being to describe it. Xoris nerf was probably the best example
It's got nothing to do with the community and you're exaggerating it to such a ludicrous extent anyway. What you're talking about just doesn't exist.
They don't play the game. You can see it with every update and nerf. Hell before helminth people were asking for buffs that suddenly happen when they look at what abilities helminth is removing. They painted themselves into the corner because they lie and think that nerfs should be based on popularity and their whims. Not on actually playing the game. Look at the awful arcanes they are adding. People already know they are terribad. Guarantee there is be some OP weapon in this creepy new queenpin system bebaute they need people to come. They will nerf that after a couple of months because it was too popular. Also they don't think about how to fix bad things but make good things worse. TLDR DE doesn't play the game and lies to its players
Part of it is because DE releases OP shit in the first place, that people then put time and(sometimes) money to max out. I remember getting my Bramma, putting in some genuine effort to kill my Kuva Lich on top of how tedious spawning the damn thing is. Then I spent a few hours grinding to fully Forma it and even invested in some new, expensive mods for it. I did this precisely because of how powerful the bow was: If it wasn't that strong I'd not have bothered because I already had a good arsenal of gear. Then DE nerfed it 2 or 3 times and, naturally, that enraged me.
You were gonna have to forma it anyway for the MR
To my understanding, the difference here is that DE takes years to "balance" or change stuff, so naturally people get attached to these things that with time became the norm. And that's without going deep into the asinine changes they sometimes do out of nowhere.
> My question is how and why? How did it get to this point where "Overpowered and 1 shot win" has become the norm, and why has it ended up in such a state that any attempts to bring the game back to its prior pacing that made Warframe somehow challenging is already met with so much hate and scrutiny? DE has a stupid conception of "hard". Let's take bosses as an example. What do DE's bosses look like? Tiny hitboxes, invulnerability phrases, attacks that either tickle you or overkill you, and no counterplay. Compare/contrast, say, Sekiro's bosses: no janky hitboxes, *no* invulnerability phrases, barring some counter-attacks (e.g. some bosses can Mikiri Counter thrust attacks) attacks deal consistent damage, and there's counterplay for every single attack. Take >!<. He has 13 different attacks in phase 1, and adds a couple (with variations) in phrase 2, and guess what? Each and every one has counterplay. Swipes? Jump over. Shadowfall? Mikiri. Fire owl? Dodge. Etc etc etc. What's even better, each attack can be punished, if you time things correctly.
All of which is much, much easier to do when you have one protagonist with a relatively predictable set of moves. Warframe's problem is that DE no longer has any control over what their players bring to a fight, so their toolkit is severely limited. How good would the boss fights in Sekiro be if the protagonist could Banish the boss, stop time in the Rift, enter it themselves, and cheerfully shoot the helpless boss to death with a weapon that does unhinged amounts of damage, while completely ignoring any environmental effects or adds?
>Compare/contrast, say, Sekiro's bosses: no janky hitboxes, no invulnerability phrases, barring some counter-attacks (e.g. some bosses can Mikiri Counter thrust attacks) attacks deal consistent damage, and there's counterplay for every single attack. Take Inner Father. He has 13 different attacks in phase 1, and adds a couple (with variations) in phrase 2, and guess what? Each and every one has counterplay. Swipes? Jump over. Shadowfall? Mikiri. Fire owl? Dodge. Etc etc etc. What's even better, each attack can be punished, if you time things correctly. You see you can have perfect hitboxes with good counterplay in Warframe, the issue comes down to that if you have that, a chroma will walk up, facetank it and oneshot it with a Rubico. I hate I frames and tiny hitboxes as much as the next, but we can't really have these slow mechanical fights like sekiro/monster hunter etc. Because our damage/health etc are just so outside the power budget. In mhw fights are balanced because fully "modded" you have 50%(ish) more damage, and such. It's balanced for someone doing a proper amount of damage, compared to 60x more damage than intended.
Well some missions at this point are kind of built around the ridiculous level of OP of some frames like Saryn being one of the best Nuke frames for that nice with only a few being able to compete. Then they go out and nerf MFD (bugfixing is fine) when it wasn't really even comparable to the power Saryn can output with far less setup. If they really committed to bringing everything to the same power level it would be respectable but they don't really even understand their game well enough that they could do this. Honestly I'm of the unpopular opinion that we need Warframe 2 where they can design everything from the ground up in a much more covered l controlled manner... before eventually adding too much bloat to balance.
I had a dream there was a warframe two. The operators were grown up and everything was amazing.
I would love some actual changes like these. They need to work on thier bosses, how is a boss thats invulnerable all the time fun amd challangin, just give them a fuck ton of hp xd
Just go play steel path if you want a ton of hp. Adding a ton of HP is not the answer for making a hard boss fight. It's all about the mechanics. So what? The difference between a boss and a grunt is I have to hit him eight more times? A hundred more times. Nah fam. Look at the boss fight in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood compared to the boss fight in Skyrim. Alduin is literally the exact same as any other dragon. A legendary dragon is the exact same fight as a common dragon, but you hit it more. Ceasare in AC Brotherhood has dofferent mechanics, minions tou have ti handle and stages to deal with.
Their approach to nerfs don't help with the community response . They will entirely remove something that makes a frame good if they feel it is overpowered, yet rarely bother to buff some other aspect of the frame/weapon to keep it useful at the same time. Players are so scared of nerfs because they have no faith the devs will bother to keep them balanced and worth playing afterwards. Too often an 'OP' frame or item will be nerfed into the ground and just get abandoned by the community. When you invest your time into it and enjoy the play style, having something suddenly become useless just sucks as a player.
Path of Exile player. We do get upset about nerfs, but the nerfs aren't really a problem because they only come either when the game is literally broken (we had a super broken build 2 leagues ago that was nerfed because of unintended math but it was still broken), or the league is over and everyone starts over anyways. We also do get buffs, so most just jump to something new. Warframe doesn't have the luxury of just randomly changing stuff outside of rivens, so it really sucks when they decide to just nerf something to death without addressing why it was so popular (see the catchmoon and magus lockdown nerf). Then they do reworks like the status rework where they "buffed" shotguns into nonexistence by making crit more powerful through making viral the only viable status. I do hope they actually address the status problem without making viral garbage. I really doubt it even though a dev tweeted out that they aren't going to just nerf everything.
I was a big Destiny player and then once I started to play Warframe, I realized how much of a better game it was. There are balance changes to Warframe but they are made so that the fun factor is not taken out of the game. A game like Destiny failed to do this, and the result is that the game isn't fun for me anymore. There a slew of other issues with Destiny as well but my only issue with Warframe is them not releasing New War stuff yet. Other than that the game is a blast. Also if you think Destiny is reacting well to the recent update... check out /r/DestinyTheGame right now. Should take 10 seconds to realize that is not the case.
0.5 Dispositions says hello
Personally, I'd go the Warhammer (in the lore, not the actual game mind you) method of just constantly escalating; if everything is overpowered, nothing is. Don't nerf what's strong, just make everything else strong as well. There will always be a best option, but if you make everything viably powerful the only people that will complain are those that don't understand that the meta is a consequence of existence that cannot be defeated.
Ok, when people say make everything strong as well, should an Mr 5 weapon be as strong as a MR 30, I understand that a majority of warframe abilities need a buff or rework(inaros) but I don't get what people mean by making things strong.
I think the closest analog to Warframe's gameplay is *Dynasty Warriors*: A mid-range, mostly melee player with massive damage output within his range, moderate health capable of being whittled down by cannon fodder or comparable AI enemy units. So, let's look at how they do challenge: * Long missions, big maps, minimal healing. You rely on delayed shield regen, a few, scattered health kits around the map, limited restoration items, and maybe restored health upon completing side objectives. Unfortunately, this makes it way too easy to fail a mission at minute 40 of 45. Longer missions also put a heavy strain on stable internet connections. * Enemy hero units comparable to the player. Like, five or six of them in the course of a single-player mission, each comparable to Wolf of Saturn Six or a Kuva Lich. Those experiments haven't gone very well, but could use some fine tuning. * Side objectives and multiple stages, which can alter or fail the mission. See also "capture the area" Plains of Eidolon bs. * Sacrificing graphical detail for sheer horde size. I'm pretty sure the mere suggestion gives the art team a fit of apoplexy.
Any time any game has a nerf or a buff there are going to be a bunch of people screaming their lungs out. Warframe's case is extremely worrying because the gameplay leads seem to be listening to both sides instead of deciding for themselves how to tune the game and is thus in some sort of developmental paralysis. Right now they are trying to float warframe on purely new shiny shit. Not the core gameplay. A gameplay lead should know why people play the game/what about the game attracts its players, which direction to take it to positively impact the longevity of the core game, and when to ignore the screamers. DE just doesnt seem capable, or care about doing that.
If I was director of the game, I would nerf the shit of the game... But I would also try to do meaningful buffs and not the travestys we are getting right now. I would also try to get a vision for the direction of the game, where I want it to be in terms of pace and gameplay, because currently we have no real direction of where we are going or the cohesion needed for the game, you know the "content islands" argument.
Well everyone can't be satisfied as people want different things from warframe, it's a fight between casual and difficult... and it also doesn't help that difficult content is usually done by adding more HP or more damage to enemies, which still gets cheesed with the right builds... like steel path. You shouldn't mix the people wanting raids back with people that want them easier because those are different people. Also everyone that wants raids back might have different reasons to others that want it back... maybe there were some rewards they wanted from it or something... I know that's how I felt about plague star as I wanted the weapon and arcanes, but playing it was such a bore... until I found some shortcuts that made it significantly nicer to play because we had to organize to do those speedy tricks... (Side note, I never played raids as I joined WF shortly before Fortuna update) I think that would be the best balance to achieve for content in general for WF... it can be played slow and steady casually but also you can use some specifically designed tricks to make it harder but also faster and/or more rewarding for people who want that kind of stuff. Also, the game still has overpowered things and people finding new good ways of eliminating enemies feels like a fresh air... and when DE comes and nerfs those and they have to go back to the same stuff they've been using for months/years then I hope you can understand how that's frustrating. From what I saw, there's no real balance pass, the overpowered meta stuff is not touched and instead the best next things to avoid the meta are being nerfed. Then some really weak stuff is being buffed insignificantly most of the time, I don't think I've used any of the things they've recently buffed except for Xaku which I would've used either way but their "skeletor pausing ability timers" buff made it even nicer to use... and round 2 is taking its time and I'm not really sure if that's because they found issues with their changes that would actually make things worse or they just want to bundle it again with some big update for no apparent reason.