Okay. You can make yourself invulnerable, heal from mele strikes and gain a mele damage bonus?
Yeaaaah. My Penta-using Trin would like a word with you.
Except at higher levels, invulnerability is worth gold. Granted, she can't do anything with it at higher levels because enemies will crush her after the 45 seconds of flailing. But if staying alive is a necessity, Hysteria is pretty helpful.
And really, you have to separate frames from weapons. Almost no damage abilities scale. They do flat, inconsequential damage at higher levels compared to best possible combination weapon. So yes, while Valkyr has nothing in that department that really helps (a minor armor debuff, a good melee attack speed buff that no one tries to take advantage of) so do very few other frames. I'm not saying she's a great frame. But I think she can hold her own in higher level games, much like Ash. But again like Ash, because she doesn't have one of the in-demand powers, she's considered trash.
(bar on a stealth frame, and good luck playing 4 of those in a long defense or survival)...
Actually, a friend and I have worked out some Smoke Screen/Bladestorm Ash builds that would pretty easily allow us to stay invis or permanently Bladestorming as long as we need. Haven't put it to practical application though since they essentially killed infested survival.
... the level design being constrictive and enemies being able to take out massive chunks of health/shields when they get over lvl40, the entire metagame revolves almost solely around damage negation: CC abilities, invulnerability and damage canceling. It's why everyone and their dog in Recruitment wants Trins, Vaubans and/or Frosts....
Frost just got Snow Globe switched to a health pool instead of a timer, like Rhino's Iron Skin. So, he's now officially "worthless."
Other than that I agree with your overview of the situation.
Again, I'll say the same thing here as I've said there. Fixing the systemic failings of the metagame would require a massive reworking of what Warframe actually is, and perhaps it isn't worth it. Bringing frames into alignment with the metagame, however, can be done. Make Decoy and Molt not useless and give other frames more inventive or at least convoluted cheap CC. Give more frames party-wide damage amps, because zapping one perma CC'd Bombard for half a minute until it decides to relent and fall over dead is the antitheses of fun. Fix damage scaling on abilities etc.
But I absolutely disagree with this sentiment. The metagame we have is the product of poor balancing and no real plan for the future. Doubling down on the current metagame, which I believe we've arrived at by accident rather than some sort of deliberate planning on the part of DE, will lead to the game stagnating because it can't go anywhere other than new ways to CC and finding ways to trivialize challenges. Because that's what the current metagame is: trivializing enemies who are otherwise too broken to fight on even terms. That's not really the game I want to play, one of hosing down level 200 enemies with clip after clip after clip who are slowed, confused and vortex'd. It's almost starting to be an MMO RPG at that rate. The range of acceptable Warframes and Weapons would only get narrower.
Damage and enemy scaling needs to be brought into alignment so all frames make sense on a fundamental performance level. Right now scaling makes no sense after level 40 some odd because DE is afraid of the guys who are doing survivals so long they're encountering lvl 8000 enemies. DE is afraid of them making their game look like a joke (for fucks sake, they gained so much xp
the game displayed it in scientific notation. Do you think DE
ever planned on that happening?)
And do you want to know why these things are happening?
inventive, convoluted, cheap CC
Enemy and Damage Scaling is the real root of the problem. DE simply hasn't thought that far ahead even though probably 80% of their playerbase has run up against the soft level cap. So they're currently treading water by leaving higher level scaling ridiculous so most of the playerbase can't exploit the shit out of their game. Which is why it's all about Trinities, Novas, Vaubans and up until a day ago, Frosts. Breaking the game post-40 is really the only challenge left to a lot of people not farming. Meanwhile, DE spends the bulk of their energy doing the weekly update schedule and filling a game already loaded up with content with yet more crap to farm, or live testing a new event idea, so they can continue to tread water.
There's talk they've started thinking about the end game, but I wish we didn't have to wait for it before we get a damage scale that makes sense. Because of the over-reliance on CC, what people consider good is very narrow and the different nuances of what frames can do are completely lost in the noise of NERF THIS or BUFF THAT. The metagame is broken and it's going to continue to be broken until they address the underlying things that are driving player behavior.
----
Meanwhile, Interception is pretty meh. As predicted, it's built on the framework of Endless Defense. 4 points, you stand in them to capture them and the enemy captures them if you're not standing inside when they are. Guys trickle in while completion bars fill up, and when one side gets 100, the round is over and you vote like ED to stay or go. If you hold all 4 points, it takes like 4 minutes.
Unfortunately, there are too few enemies to entertain 4 players. Everyone just kinds of stands on their cap point and shoots guys as they come in, with one side or spawn getting a disproportionate number of guys. You can't leave the circle because the instant you do and there's a guy standing in it, the capture counter has to go all the way down....then all the way up....then all the way back down, adding a good 45 seconds to the end of the round each time it happens. So you have to stay in your circle. If people decide to run hot laps around the arena, it takes closer to 8 to 10 minutes.
On the flip side, I've heard it's difficult to impossible to solo. Classic DE balance.
It's a decent start but it needs a lot more tweaking, because anything less than Survival levels of activity isn't going to get played by me much.
In another classic example of DE balance, The Ties That Bind Darvo mission. Actually kind of amusing, Darvo acting like a 15 year old kid getting balled out by his dad in front of his friends. But the new model Hyenas in the mission? Not so amusing. It's a level 10 - 15 mission, and 4 of these things just absolutely spam the shit out of you with every elemental combination under the sun. Fire to knock you down and ignite you, cold to slow you, electricity fields scattered everywhere, an energy and shield drain attack, all of it AOE. These guys fucking dog piled me and three other pubbies, all decked out, and we spent about 8 minutes running around snapping off a couple shots between chain rezzing each other like crazy. There were so many particle effects on my screen my FPS took a big hit throughout the entire fight.
I'd actually failed the mission once prior and beaten the Hyenas with relative ease....when it was just me and one other guy. Ah DE. When are you guys going to test
anything before going live with it.
Author
Topic: Warframe - F2P Sci-fi L4D-like (Read 245159 times)