Here's the problem - after a certain point there is no challenge at all to any of the new game content. I hit the point a long time ago where most of the level 1-40Ish missions on the star chart cannot deal enough damage to kill me unless i stand still and do nothing, and even then with armor and dr they might not be able to manage it.
So from there you go to steel path, right? Enemies get +100 added to their level, tons of extra armor, health, and shields.
So what does that mean? Will, a lot of grineer enemies have something like 90+% damage reduction from armor so to kill them you need a gun throwing out at least five figures of damage, if not six. Same with corpus bc you need to get through their massive shields.
So you basically need to rip a gun off of a star destroyer (ironically your actual space ship guns for fighting space ships in space cannot be modded to do enough damage to reliably do steel path without blowing through their very limited ammo in a minute or two) to do enough damage. Unless you have armor strip or defense strip. Because then your anti-tank rifle is back to ohking everything like it does on the level 30 content. So now the challenge is mostly a few special enemies that have mechanics that prevent them from being ohk'd by any means, and that enemies throw out so much damage that some of them can drop your shields in one shot them kill you with the next no matter how ridiculously hi you pad your effective hit points with hp, armor, and damage reduction. So to survive you have to abuse a mechanic where you get 1.3seconds of i-frames when your shields drop, or a mod that gives you i-frames when you roll. Is your frame's theme having lots of armor or hitpoints? Doesn't matter, there's no amount of hp that will keep you alive and the frames that don't have shields at all bc of massice hp are mostly useless. Even capped out Damage resist won't stop you from getting two-shot at a certain point, you must use hard cc, shield gate abuse, or dodge i-frames to stay alive. The game turns in to rocket tag where you one-shot everything with weapons through out sic or seven figures of damage but anything can 2-tap you. Tons of warframe abilities become useless because they just don't scale high enough. A skill that strips 50-75 percent of an enemies shields is great for all normal content, but in the really late eng game where I'm largely stuck enemies will still have incredibly effective hp and dr.
It's very frustrating. There's been enormous, enormous power creep over the years to the point that there simply is nothing that could be reasonably called balance. I play a frame called Trinity and one of her key abilities is being able to restore mana to the team. Well, thanks to power creep, not only are there half a dozen frames that do team mana regen better than trinity (remember this is one of her core abilities as a support caster), but there are now multiple ways to get unlimited free mana that don't even rely on your warframe! so now any punk ass on the street can do one of the most important things my class/warframe does, often better. And that sweet sweet 75% damage resist that trin can give the entire team with her ult? Fails to scale and falls off drastically in the late end game.
It's so frustrating. And you don't even need to necessarily do the hyper meta bs, bur if you don't you're going to get left behind by players who have ultra-mixmaxxed gear that can clear entire rooms in seconds and lay down hard cc that incapacitates every enemy currently spawned indefinitely.
There's a mode called "sanctuary onslaught" which is basically a horde mode with endlessly scaling enemies and people farm it by building a frame that can stand in the center of the room and ohk every enemy on the map by just casn't their 1 or 3. And it's not just one frame, there's like half a dozen that can do this. So there's no gameplay in this horde mode. You just stand around with your thumb up your ass bc the nuke frame is killing things as fast as they spawn.
I really like warframe in theory, i've been playing it on and off for ten years, but the totally unfettered power creep is so frustrating.
The nuke frames in the Sanctuary can be annoying if you show up to either finish incarnon challenges or nightwave challenges, they hadnt been showing up run.
It can be exhausting staying on top of the powercreep, i myself havent used Trinity, more maining Wisp since I built her.
But i think with Duviri and the random selection, they kinda have to make a balance pass on all 52 frames, cause no one wants to be stuck with Hyroid as their only viable option of The Steel Path Circuit.
Also I have a solo clan, and other warframe players on hexbear should totally join it
Wisp is a great example of the creep. Reservoir alone gives speed, +attack speed, +health and heal over time, and gives every player in the squad an aoe hard cc with the electric procs that leaves enemies helpless. And that's just her 1. She has passive invis which is extremely powerful survivability with no investment at all. Two different teleports, and that surge breach spark ability is quite powerful.
Hydroid and some other frames do need some love, especially to gix hydroid's puddle.
I think it says a lot about Wisp that she has literal invulnerability on her 2 and nobody ever remembers she has it.
It’s all how you build it i guess, but 3 ticks of < 25 shock damage isnt what I’d call powerful.
I subsumed Will O’Wisp cause i dont really use to except if I wanna go scurrying around the hard to reach spots of the void towers.
Really i’d say the newer frames benefit from the plethora of modding capability better than old ones, but there used to be builds like the invincible Loki Prime that they should’ve leaned more into instead of nerfing them. It’s been 10 years and 2 different leads, I’d imagine they’ll want their legacy frames to feel just as good as the new ones eventually
Apparently most of the old guard has moved on to Soulframe. I'm a little worried that they're going to slow down Warframe development in preparation for putting it on maintenance in a few years and transitioning to soulframe. The codebase must be nightmarish to maintain at this point.