Abilities should scale better

[Aetrion]

I think there is a problem with how abilities in this game scale. Pretty much every single warframe ability that deals damage can currently only be described as "Garbage disposal", because they only work against enemies that are relatively weak to begin with. The moment you start going up against seriously tough opponents the hitpoints of your enemies outscale the damage of your abilities very rapidly.

That kind of leads to a point where instead of actually having a reason to use the different abilities on your warframe situationally you just sort of end up settling on one ability that actually reliably helps you and never use the rest. The general damage abilities are always the first to be kicked out of rotation, because they don't really work on anything but weak enemies you could just plow through with melee anyways.

It feels like the more you get to the "endgame" content of this game the whole thing just runs off the rails. Dozens of the weapons in the game just aren't competitive anymore, most abilities never get used, the builds people use end up purely revovling around the one ability or two that still work. In some weird way the higher the level of play becomes the less interesting the actual builds become. You end up with Frosts just being on Snowglobe duty because all the other stuff is irrelevant. You end up with Mirrage clones being the highest damage ability in the game, simply because it clones the weapon, while all other damage abilities stop being useful.

It just seems incredibly broken. The game has a problem to begin with in the fact that limited energy and no cooldowns means it's best to simply only use your strongest ability while disregarding the others, but on top of that it settles into a place where tons and tons of abilities just stop being useful alltogether, because unlike weapons which can be modded to do easily ten times their base damage abilities can only be boosted by maybe twice of what they do, and have comparable base damage to weapons to begin with.

I feel like a lot of potential in this game is wasted simply because of the energy system and the poor scaling of abilities. Instead of encouraging people to use all their abilities and mix it up and really utilize the full potential of their warframe it encourages people to pick their frame pretty much only for one single ability, build completely around it, and neglect the others. With dozens of MOBAs on the market that do 4 ability characters where the four abilities are all useful and you want to use and combine them for best effect you would think that we could get the same in Warframe.

[TyresTyco]

While I agree with you completely... I can see that you are new to warframe.

DE already knows that and that's why they slowly tweak all warframe skills, to scale better. Be it with melee mods or a combo counter which adds dmg (ashs 4).

I advice you to watch some old warframe videos on youtube or/and some devstreams and look how they improved the game .. the last 2 years. Then you know how they work and what they are planning.

[GamingSanta]

1. You could shorten this a lot, the last paragraph is enough.
2. Yes the damage scaling is a problem
3. DE is working on making it better
4. If the abilities scaled infinitely the game would be easy and if they scaled slower it'd be a step in the right direction, but people would still complain

Quite frankly I think DE should focus more on making the combat system tighter in general: shorter casting animations, quicker holstering (like it used to be) where players can switch between guns, melee, and powers quickly and reliably.

[Aetrion]

Originally posted by TyresTyco:

While I agree with you completely... I can see that you are new to warframe.

I played the game way back in the day when the Void was just barely getting released and you could still buy a Snipetron for like 35000 credits. I've been gone for a long time, and yea, a lot of it is significantly improved, but this aspect is something they really haven't touched unfortunately.

I mean, the energy system is just crappy, because a game should never be built in such a way that it actively discourages you from using all your abilities because every use of the weaker ones eats into your ability to use the stronger ones. That's just poor design. Even in games that use Mana as a casting resource they usually do that in conjunction with cooldowns or synergies so that it doesn't create a situation where you spend all your mana on only spamming your strongest spell.

There is also a reason why so many games that are built around gear scaling have adopted the standard of making abilities deal a percentage of your weapon DPS in damage instead of having their own fixed numbers, because designers have long since learned that having abilities scale on level while your actual power level scales on gear is extremely fickle and rarely ever works out well.

I think it's not unreasonable to expect Warframe to get with it and fix this stuff.

Originally posted by GamingSanta:

4. If the abilities scaled infinitely the game would be easy and if they scaled slower it'd be a step in the right direction, but people would still complain

I guess the problem is that they only feel useful as long as they produce instakills, but instakills are easy. The solution is to put more status effects on the abilities rather than just damage.

For example, if a Vauban's Tesla ability stunned enemies for a few seconds after getting zapped with it it would remain a perfectly useful ability even at higher levels. It would create opportunities to land high damage shots more easily, and thereby always be useful.

Or if Ember's Accellerant simply increased all damage by it's respective amount it would be a fantastic ability at all times, but since it's only fire damage nobody is going to have pure fire damage in an endgame scanrio.


I mean, it really doesn't take a lot to think about ways in which abilities can have effects that keep them meaningful. It hasn't really happened for a looong tim though.

[Forblaze]

Does DE even acknowledge what gets called end game? As far as I can tell, we aren't really meant to last 2 hours in survival or 100 waves in defense.

[Aetrion]

Originally posted by Forblaze:

Does DE even acknowledge what gets called end game? As far as I can tell, we aren't really meant to last 2 hours in survival or 100 waves in defense.

Yea, but when the core motivator of your entire game is "Make a stronger space ninja" it'd be kind of silly not to have content that requires that kind of power.

[GamingSanta]

Originally posted by Aetrion:

Originally posted by GamingSanta:

4. If the abilities scaled infinitely the game would be easy and if they scaled slower it'd be a step in the right direction, but people would still complain

I guess the problem is that they only feel useful as long as they produce instakills, but instakills are easy. The solution is to put more status effects on the abilities rather than just damage.
For example, if a Vauban's Tesla ability stunned enemies for a few seconds after getting zapped with it it would remain a perfectly useful ability even at higher levels. It would create opportunities to land high damage shots more easily, and thereby always be useful.
Or if Ember's Accellerant simply increased all damage by it's respective amount it would be a fantastic ability at all times, but since it's only fire damage nobody is going to have pure fire damage in an endgame scanrio.
I mean, it really doesn't take a lot to think about ways in which abilities can have effects that keep them meaningful. It hasn't really happened for a looong tim though.

Yes, but you see, that's what they've been doing. That's what we mean when we said they're working on it. There are plenty of augments that do this. Plenty of warframes like mirage have a blind or something that happens after the ability is taken out of effect. Ember got a mini rework a while back that made a wall of fire around her in addition to casting the original ability, which knocked enemies down, the augment for World on Fire has a 100% knock down effect. DE is taking their time in reworking everything because they want to keep producing new content in addition to improving the frames and they want to solve it with a very long term solution that will last until they change a core element of the game. Another example is Frost, his Avalanche reduces enemy armor by 60% now, regardless of damage. Oberon also got a bunch of Radiation procs tagged onto his abilities a while back. I don't know when exactly you left and came back to the game, but if you haven't familiarized yourself with all of the changes, you really should.

[Aetrion]

Well, whatever they are doing, they aren't quite there yet.

[GamingSanta]

Originally posted by Aetrion:

Well, whatever they are doing, they aren't quite there yet.

Just give them time is what I'm saying, they're working on it.

[Aetrion]

I don't doubt that they are working on the game, I'm just giving feedback to let them know what seems like a priority issue to me personally.

[Arafura]

Originally posted by Aetrion:

I don't doubt that they are working on the game, I'm just giving feedback to let them know what seems like a priority issue to me personally.

Post it on the offical forums.

[Arafura]

Also we all know the best damage abilty is EV.

[kenzha]

It's not really the design fault when you think about it but the players' mentality. It's players who like to think of other abilities as useless. It's not that those skills aren't useful, but for other reasons like e.g 1st skill usually got no aoe etc, or like OP said "I'm frost and no reason other than to cast globe in higher lvl, or I'm rhino and I just press 4 if there's many enemies and 2 if it runs out."

Actually I find the opposite to be true for some frames. Like Frost in higher lvl void def needs to utilise all of his skills to be more useful even if his ultimate doesn't reduce armor. His ultimate has the ability to freeze them for some time, his 2nd skill can slow many enemies coming from the long straight direction towards spawn or other directions and his 1st can freeze parasitic eximus or other high priority enemies and also buff his teammates' pwr str which means a lot to some frames.

It is a good thing that frame powers get weaker at higher lvls cos then the game wouldn't become press 1, 2, 3 or 4 to win at high lvl. It also makes the game more interesting. If frame powers skill well into higher lvls, it would be very lame and also make your 5 or 6 forma weapon pretty much useless cos its main use is for shooting/killing nullifier bubbles. And it doesn't really bring out the teamwork needed and quick decision making or your fps skills into that is needed in higher lvls.

It's all in the player's mindset. Like nekros' ultimate can be very good in def too and you can always tell how good the nekros player is by looking at when and where he casts it.

Although I must agree that there are some frames whose skill utilities and dmg needs to be buffed, players should also realise that frame abilities are not useless. It's more of how u use them in situations.

Just like mesa's peacemaker changes which many players see it as a nerf, you can also think of it as a buff cos now u can choose where to shoot first and to a certain extent, who to shoot first with it.

[Aetrion]

Sure, wanting to optimize your performance is a mindset, but it's a mindset that does produces a specific result, and because of that has a measurable return on how you spend your energy.

So sure, if you don't like oodles of powerful mods you don't have to use your energy in the most efficient way, just don't act like every approach to playing the game has equally desirable results, because that's simply not the case.