Anything that you think is unpopular about balance, story, or just any changes you would like to see
Personally my biggest one might not even be controversial, but I don’t like shield gating being used as a primary method of survivability and I don’t like seeing people recommend it to new players when they reach the point where staying alive is a concern. I know it’s “optimal” for some frames but just feels cheesy to me.
Crew for railjack. I know a lot don’t like railjack but having a good pilot that actually works would make it more fun. Also having crew in the forward artillery would be amazing.
I do love railjack, I wish the missions leaned into actually flying the ship more but thats a common complaint. I definitely agree, wish there was a setting for gunners to stay on the artillery and for pilots to just go towards the objective
I still hope one day they go back to railjack and rework it. It is such a huge piece of amazing content but it just requires further polish and content in order to carry the game on its own if needed. At the moment it just boils down to zooming around the map at stupid speeds, spamming abilities and having someone sit in forward artillery which is boring AF, but the concept of a starship in WF itself is just amazing and there could be so much done with it.
Instead of adding NPC crew they should have just improved the matchmaking experience and network stability (although maybe that wasn’t possible so npc crew was a bandaid). We have too many railjack nodes and too few players so you’re stuck either soloing or relying on absolutely atrocious ingame LFG chat.
That being said, I am glad to have the NPC crew since I’m mostly a solo player anyway and if they can’t make railjack a satisfying coop experience (and if anything they made it less fun when they streamlined everything and power crept it), its good they at least make it less painful to solo.
I really don’t like how Shield Gating (chaining it with dragon keys) works currently. It feels like it’s just hiding issues with survivability instead of fixing it. It obscures how useless barriers have become when trying to protect objectives because players can instantly reset their shield gate to absorb any amount of damage. When an Eximus’ attacks go through Frost’s Snow Globe, the defense objective is taking the full damage from the attack, but a player can instantly reset their invulnerability, allowing them to absorb any amount of damage from follow up attacks while the actual issues of barrier abilities do nothing now, and how much damage enemies are doing is ignored because players dying is the metric used when balancing enemies not the defense objective dying in 3 hits.
I’d like to see better survival orientated mods for warframes/companions and changes to healing objectives and being able to buff them defensively. As it is now, it feels like because protection can be reset instantly for players, the damage everything else takes has been getting ignored. Messages that a companion is bleeding out are so common that I’ve accidently left people bleeding out in Archon Missions thinking it was just a Vulphyla dying for the 10th time.
Other than that, I also don’t like the Incarnon Weapons. They feel like they’re just unrelated weapons arbitrarily slapped onto a preexisting weapon, and that the base weapon seeing an increase in usage is only a side-effect, kind of like the “Amalgam Furax Body Count” situation before the nerf to ammo. You could glue a Kuva Ogris Incarnon to the Stug, and it would probably become one of the most overused weapons in the game, not because people actually want to use the Stug but because the Ogris is (or was) one of the most broken weapons in warframe. There are some random useless evolution options as well like “+ Damage while using a channeled ability” which seems to ignores how few warframes actually have a channeled ability and even fewer are able to use a weapon while using a channeled ability i.e. Mesa’s Peacemaker/Titiania’s Razorwing.
The Incarnons are getting really repetitive too. I am so over Heat being on everything. Some of them were really poorly thought out too. Gammacor just straight up gets worse as a utility weapon when you shift it, due to losing its ROF and Magnetic.
Gammacor and Atomos also have a bit of Tetra Syndrome in that I feel you have to either build them hybrid (and make compromises for both), or for one form or the other. Feels very anti-fun to me, I prefer to have a flexible and adaptable loadout.
My counter-take to yours = I find shield gating builds incredibly fun and love using/playing them. They bring together everything that is best about the game, combining the movement system and soft/hard crowd control into a speedy “can’t touch this” playstyle
My otherwise hot take, is that in the current modern state of the game, the ever-enduring advice to newbies of “Get Rhino and Hek” is extremely boring, outdated, and unhelpful
I do think the push for telling noobs to play Rhino does have the issue of becoming a crutch, instead of learning how to dodge and stay alive they get used to invincibility and have to learn way later
The Iron Skin is definitely a part of it, but it’s also because the advice is too narrow/specific and makes a huge assumption about the interests or ability of the newbie. Of all the new players I’ve helped in the game, either real life friends/family who I convinced to play, or newbies I met organically while playing, absolutely none of them enjoy playing Rhino and very few of them enjoy shotguns. If I had been insistent that they must get this one frame and weapon because it was their “best” choice, they probably would’ve stopped playing
I think it’s much better to ask people what their preferred playstyles are, and point them towards a few suitable options so they can decide for themselves. And it’s very important now to make new players aware of the Circuit, so they can keep an eye on the 3 cycling frames and grab something they like the look of that may be locked quite a bit further back in the starchart otherwise
That’s a smart way to go about it. I love shotguns and tanking, but when I helped out a buddy starting out he couldn’t stand Rhino. I’ve talked about circuit in another post, it really helps out the new player experience I think, just due to the accessibility of it and getting new frames.
I appreciate your well thought out reply on this too, thank you
Zephyr+Xoris+kitgun might not be the fastest to get,but take you from deimos to basically SP.
I’d recommend Zephyr to everyone I come across, but I am very biased there hahahaha!
I was a Zephyr player back when she was a mediocre CC tank, so I made a beeline for her when I restarted, and got my friends playing her too. I still remember how delighted one of my friends was when she got a 10k crit through the tornadoes with Xoris.
She’s definitely a lot more rough to play on SP after Eximus Reborn, but man, you can’t argue with her dreamlike movement and ludicrous damage buffing. Easy carry through the whole star chart.
Any recommendations on kitguns? I’ve only just made 1 after hundreds of hours, secondary rattleguts, and it seems ok
Secondary Catchmoon is a pocket Arca Plasmor that force procs Impact (cough Hemorrage cough) and can take both the Primed Pistol Crit mods. Primary force procs Impact too, but is a Shotgun so can’t take Internal Bleeding.
Primary Tombfinger is a Bramma if you squint really really hard (Charge up your shot to do a big AoE on impact)
If you’ve got access to the Deimos Kitguns, they’re both actually nuts. Primary Vermisplicer is a Kuva Nukor/Tenet Cycron that has huge Slash weighting and innate Toxin, making Viral + Slash super easy to mod for and spray down a room with without trying to aim. Secondary Sporelacer is one of the few kitguns who’s Riven dispo is significantly worse than its primary form, because it’s that much more popular/busted. It blasts a huge spray of Toxin damage in an AoE, reminicient of how Kuva Zarr sprays a similar massive explosion.
TheKengineer has a phenominal video on Youtube about each Kitgun type, and how to best build it (Primary vs Secondary, which other parts to use, etc) if you want to find out more. These are just the ones I found myself enjoying the most.
This might be a two-in-one kinda thing but…
Im not a fan of Steel Path. Like, it’s fine, I guess, but “make enemies tankier” just isn’t a lot of fun IMO.
That said, here’s my “hot take”, Steel Path Circuit is a blast.
I’ve only got a few hours to play each week so I’ve pretty much stopped doing Archon hunts, Khal’s thing, Nightwave, etc.
I play with rando’s and, while sometimes frustrating, once things click it’s just fun. Hell, even when RNG curses me, I can still run support (picking up fragments standing folks back up, grabbing energy cells, etc.)
Its nice to go in and know, no matter the reward I might get, the game mode itself is fun to play.
Fortuna is the worst grind in Warframe that doesn’t even give that much in return.
Shield gating is good, as it makes it way easier for new players to survive on higher levels and it removes some bullshit 1hits on higher levels.
Railjack is really fun
I mean fortuna gives you access to a really good secondary and then once you’re rank 5 and unlock vox solaris you get access to the best operator amps. I’d say it’s a way better farm than ostron standing and actually has a significantly higher payoff.
Ostron is worth it due to how good Zaws are, especially with the limited availability of Glaive Prime. I commented elsewhere, but Balla, Sepfahn, and Kripath and Dehtat all give you really high forced slash, viral, and tox on the same weapon if you run Contagion. They have very easy access to rivens too due to the small pool of weapons to roll on.
