Armor Scaling

[Kharn]

I'm trying to understand why armor doesn't scale with a multiplier on harder difficulties.

The fact that there are so many discussions in how best to farm armor should be a tip-off to the developers that there is something fundamentally wrong.

Now, don't get me wrong. I actually don't mind grinding a little and would not want it to disappear altogether, but this is ridiculous. I have over 160 hours in EDF2025 and have only been able to get the Ranger to about 90% completion (around 1-5% for the other classes) and a good part of that is because it takes so damn long to get such small amounts of Armor.

I know of the techniques where you can play split screen to "farm armor", but that is exactly what I am pointing out. There is a fundamental flaw when I have find ways to "cheat" the system while at the same time not getting to enjoy my game on my full 50" screen. Just seems ridiculous to me.

I've been playing EDF4.1 for about 50 hours now and have about 1000 Armor for the Wing Diver and about 1300 for the Ranger. This Armor rate is fine for Easy, Normal, and perhaps Hard, but I really think they should add a multiplier to at LEAST Hardest and Insane.

I'd love to see something like this.

Easy x1 (No change)
Normal x1 (No change)
Hard x1.2 (20% increase over Normal)
Hardest x1.5 (50% increase over Normal)
Insane x2 (Double the Normal rate)

What this would mean is if I played a Wing Diver at Hardest difficulty and collected 26 Armor on a level, I would get:
(0.232 * 26) * 1.5 = 9.048 HP (Otherwise would have been 6.032 HP)

Getting only 23 HP on 100 armor pickups in Insane is bascially useless especially when single hits from an enemy can be 500+ HP! I'd have to grind 25(!!!) levels to get to that amount.

I wouldn't mind even higher values, but I don't want to necessarily ruin the grinding aspect...just give the harder difficulties a reason to bother grinding in. Currently it really kind of ruins the game when you have to spend 100s (thousands?) of hours to get full completion.


Any thoughts on this?

Am I the only one who finds this nuts?

[Gills Du'Tweeb]

I've thought about this too and I agree, having an incentive to collect armor on hdst/inf would be a really good idea, even if it wasn't a huge difference. Sandlot has never done it in the whole series. And it's not like having a lot of AP makes one win automatically, anyway. Let's hope they add something like this to EDF 5! (Hopefully they also add different radar icons for armor/wep and hp boxes)

In older games it was understandable, when there were only 1 or 2 classes

[Kharn]

Radar Icons would be fantastic. Plus a cross in the middle of the radar showing where I am standing. I have a really hard time telling where I am in that radar screen when trying to locate pickups. I digress, though, as we are getting OT.

[Squirting Elephant]

Yeah I'm running inferno with < 400 armor because of this. Mostly this means: Don't get hit, ever. I noticed my vehicles taking like 4000+ damage per hit. So getting some armor doesn't feel useful at all. Would take forever to farm useful amounts.

As wing you can dodge a lot, as air raider you don't need armor as long as you got vehicles, as ranger you steal another air raider's vehicle ^^ and as fencer... well.... you are in a bad place :P

The worst part is that indeed, armor is best farmed at easy difficulty, there is no bonus on inferno difficulty... So when you see an armor box on inferno it's still only 1 armor...

If you are bored on the lower difficulties and you wanna play inferno w/o afk farming or cheating, you just gotta take wing or air raider (best).

[Zeddy]

Originally posted by Squirting Elephant:

I noticed my vehicles taking like 4000+ damage per hit. So getting some armor doesn't feel useful at all.

Your vehicles are far, far larger than the characters you can play as, and almost every enemy attack in the game is scattershot meaning larger targets are guaranteed to take more damage.

Fencers are actually incredibly good at running inferno with low amounts of health, possibly the best at it. This is because they have amazing mobility and shields capable of reflecting attacks back at their attackers. Fencer can defeat a king spider in a single blow using only level 0 weapons. I doubt any other class can pull that off.

[Kharn]

Originally posted by Squirting Elephant:

Yeah I'm running inferno with < 400 armor because of this. Mostly this means: Don't get hit, ever. I noticed my vehicles taking like 4000+ damage per hit. So getting some armor doesn't feel useful at all. Would take forever to farm useful amounts.

As wing you can dodge a lot, as air raider you don't need armor as long as you got vehicles, as ranger you steal another air raider's vehicle ^^ and as fencer... well.... you are in a bad place :P

The worst part is that indeed, armor is best farmed at easy difficulty, there is no bonus on inferno difficulty... So when you see an armor box on inferno it's still only 1 armor...

If you are bored on the lower difficulties and you wanna play inferno w/o afk farming or cheating, you just gotta take wing or air raider (best).

Yeah, you pretty much hit everything on the head. Very frustrating how little armor you get in the higher difficulties.

I'm beginning to think it should almost be:

Easy x1 (No change)
Normal x1 (No change)
Hard x1.5 (50% increase over Normal)
Hardest x2 (Double the Normal rate)
Insane x3 (Triple the Normal rate)

[Squirting Elephant]

Ah I forgot the fencers' shields.

Double the rate should be more than enough. But only for the higher levels like lvl28+.

[Kharn]

Originally posted by Squirting Elephant:

Ah I forgot the fencers' shields.

Double the rate should be more than enough. But only for the higher levels like lvl28+.

Yes, the shield helps a little, but once you get swarmed the attacks come from every direction and severely lessens the effectiveness of it.

Either way, I'm more interested in just making the harder difficulties worth farming in.

[Zephyr]

I honestly think it would be far better if all non-health crates were autocollected at the end of the mission. Not only does it serves no purpose to make player collect armor and weapons crates, but having them in the field actually slow downs the game by forcing the engine to calculate not only their locations but the physics for them, seeing they are physic objects.

The whole dropping system is done extremely poorly to boot, with ranges making no sense, and the capacity to get duplicate weapons, which is completly stupid.

Wing diver also doesn't get enough armor by crate, the mobility doesn't justify the low armor.

Not only that, but having to actually physically collect crates break the flow of the game greatly. Usually it means leaving a few ennemies alive while you painfully move around the map to collect everything. Or do so between ennemies groups. We're here for the action, not the crate collecting. Just give us all our rewards at the end of the mission automatically instead, and everyone will be happy.

[Squirting Elephant]

Yeah you just leave like 1 enemy at the end and let it attack some balam or other big thing while the divers&fencers collect crates.

And of course people who skip the first 3-4 difficulties (too boring) will find that they simply can not get hit in inferno AT ALL due to low armor and no armor scaling in higher difficulty.

[Kharn]

Well I don't mind the duplicate weapons part. It's no different than say the Diablo games or Borderlands where most of it is junk then AHA! I have found a new weapon! It makes it a bit more exciting when new ones are rare. However, the number of weapon crates that drop feels high ESPECIALLY since you rarely get a new one. I'd rather more Armor ones dropped.

I'm more miffed about the poor weapon balance. There are tons of weapons that are just downright useless in this game. I would guess close to 70-80% I have never used more than once after realizing how terrible they were.

I guess collecting armor doesn't bother me too much, but it IS super annoying to beat one of the "bosses" and never have the chance to collect what they drop since the level ends immediately after they die. Plus, the amount they drop should be 2-3x as much.

I get why the Wing Diver gets so little for each Armor; they can easily gather ALL of them on a level whereas the others have a harder time doing so.

[Zephyr]

Both Diablo and Borderlands are terrible because all you mostly find is junk, and you have to go back to town to sell it... It's not exciting at all to find something good, it's more "FINALLY SOMETHING DECENT!".

And actually saying that WD should get less armor because they can actually pick up the crate is ludicrous. That's justifying a serie of poor design decisions in one fell swoop. Rangers should never have been so slow, and walking/running speed in general, especially seeing how large the maps are. Crates should never have been able to fall in places where you can't get them. You shouldn't even have to pick up crates. Thoses are the big low points of the games, and issues that need adressing.

Ergonomy is the second most important thing a game must have after stability. Even before it has a good/cool concept.

[Kharn]

I understand what you are saying and the underlying theme I can pull from it as that you don't like to grind for loot. I get it, it's not for everyone. But seeing how wildly successful the Borderlands and Diablo series (and various clones) were I don't think it's fair to say they were terrible or that the mechanic of grinding isn't enjoyed by many (which is essentialy playing slot machines at the casino...only you pay just once and the rewards are virtual). You just happen to not be one of those people. Different strokes for different folks.

That said, I think there is some common ground/solutions that needs to be found in this game.

There is currently absolutely no benefit to grinding for armor in the harder difficulties (I), grinding for some classes (especially Ranger) is very hard because of their low mobility (II), and crates can sometimes be inaccessible (III).

(I) The first, I think, should be resolved with a difficulty multiplier as suggested in the OP (original post).

(II) The second issue regarding mobility, thankfully, sounds like it will be somewhat addressed in EDF 5 with the ability to sprint for the Ranger. I wish it was coming in EDF 4.1, but it doesn't appear that they are too interested in changing or adding anything to the game. They have our money already...sorry suckers. I still feel like more should be done, but I don't know how to do that without fundamentally changing the mechanics of the different classes. I ahve some ideas that tie in with the third issue of crate accessibility.

(III) The third could use some finesse.

*** Out of Bounds ***
First of all, they did addresss some issues going from 2017 -> 2025. That being crates will no longer spawn out of bounds when an eneamy is killed out of bounds. Instead it spawns at the closest in-bounds location.

*** Buldings ***
However, what about crates that fall on top of buildings? Only wing divers can access those, though, the other classes could blow up the building if they brought explosive weapons. Two solutions I can think of is either have crates only spawn around buildings or have the crates bounce of an invisible slopped wall that is added to the top of every building.

*** Climbing ***
Another issue is crates spawning in mountanous areas that are hard/impossible for the other classes to reach. One thought I had is make the "sprint" funcitonality added in EDF 5 ALSO act as a "climbing" functionality. Once they reach a wall they will begin to climb it (though weapons will be disabled). If they stop "climbing" to shoot, then they will slide down as usual.

*** Crate Physics ***
A possible aid to everyone would be to "doctor" the physics of the falling crates. Any time a crate falls make it so that it has a tendency to bounce towards the nearest player on impact. This would reduce how far apart the crates tend to fly and give less mobile classes an easier time at crate collection.


I really hope Sandlot does indeed read these forums. I would love to see a game series I love continue to grow and increase in its fun factor