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.
I do love the idea of railjack, but yeah it just really needs more content
Naz Nob is my guy on repairs and he is such an essential member of my railjack family if anything happened to him I would kill everyone in this room and then myself
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.
I played her for a long time due to just liking her theme and aesthetics. Even when Tornadoes were roaming only and Airburst was knock away only I had a lot of fun with her. The Tornadoes still worked then as they do now, just aiming down sights to direct them to groups of enemies was more important. I always thought her 3 was kinda bonkers, just like Revenant’s Mesmer Skin, but she was pretty slept on. Revenant likewise was slept on for a long time, but I guess in pre-SP days people cared a lot less about survivability and cared a lot more about damage and nuking
The little rework she got was so great, just fixed everything up and brought so much QOL. My only lingering complaint is if her 1, when used for movement rather than hover, would get a similar treatment like Gauss’ dash where faceplanting a wall instantly cancels it so you don’t get an awkward second or two where you’re stuck
The Eximus do pose her a bit of a threat, which is why Silence is my most commonly used subsume with her hahahaha. But with that and melee vulnerability I enjoy still having some threats while her 3 is up, unlike Revenant who gets super boring super fast
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.
Secondary Gaze is incredible too. It’s a high crit heat ray with innate Radiation, so it legitimately just does everything (kills, stacks status with Encumber, pops bubbles). Except stack Cold on demos. It’ll kill them fine though if you have a slow or a root elsewhere on your kit. Empirically I’d say it’s about triple the DPS potential of the Tenet Cycron, although you lose being able to double up on Mag/Viral, and the effective range is 12m vs 30m if you’re doing a Splatmaker build.
Still, it kills everything you point it at, and chains too. Absolutely incredible weapon. Basically the only secondary I use unless I’m running Hystrix for Disruption, or doing a theme set.
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.
The Steel Path one is definitely valid, I do it for incursions and for some farming like the Voruna node but I am out on farming relics on it
Shield gating is a really fun and engaging playstyle that the devs support! I love it. I enjoy building around it and playing around it.
I dont like Titania. I don’t think she’s fun, I don’t like her abilities, her gun is generic bullet hose, and there are other fast frames that feel better to control. I avoid using her in just about every scenario.
Oh I adore Titania, understand she is not for everyone though, nothing quite like running her augment that gives speed on ability cast and clipping into the wall
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.
I pretty much just use praedoes on everything because of the movement speed. Incarnon primaries are so insane, I don’t have much need for melee weapons.
It’s not a problem anymore because nova is the frame now but nidus was the new player frame you’d get for purchasing the starter pack. Absolutely insane to give new players a frame that can do so much content with almost no mods.
While the helminth system is a great boon for several squishy frames, the instant desire and meta advice to put Roar/Eclipse on just about every frame that has an ability that isn’t related to DPS is incredibly boring and sucks a lot of the fun out of a warframe’s kit.
Also the number one thing that DE could do to make gameplay more engaging is to fix the bone stupid enemy AI.
Light attack (12x combo count) melees need a Reach/Primed Reach buff. Prenerf memeing strike would be too high but what we have now is too low. Melee was once the go-to scaling option before weapon arcanes and galvanized mods. Now primaries and secondaries have similar scaling, more aoe/killrate, and less button spam. Only heavy attack melees that delete hallways in a few keypresses (Glaive Prime, Cerata, Stropha) can compete with all that.
I also feel like Contagion Zaws are too good. Balla, Sepfahn and Dehtat/Keewar all let you mix a ridiculous viral/tox nuke with a powerful forced slash heavy, and ridiculous finishers for Balla and Dehtat/Keewar.
I basically stopped using anything but Balla because it just solves every problem in the game. I don’t think it needs to be nerfed, I think other melees need to be brought back up somehow. The only dedicated melee frame I still play is Ensnare Loki.