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.
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Ahh, yeah, I can see that. I hadn't thought about it but I can see that. Warframe hits harder emotionally than most games in a way you wouldn't expect just looking at the basic gameplay loop.
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I thought of it more as integrating them with the Helminth. The Helminth strain made up a large part of their composition, and I just kind of assumed whatever awareness survives in the frames is part of Helminth now, rather than having been destroyed or killed. The Infestation has always been scared and confused by the warframes because it knows they're infested creatures but can't understand why they won't join with it. I figure being subsumed by Helminth is like re-integrating with the Helminth mind, a sort of going home rather than a destruction. The Tenno, Ordis, the Warframes, and Helminth all continue to be a weird little family/composite being that all need each other. I think a lot of it is the flowers. Every Warframe grows in to a flower that retains it's colors and emissive, reminding me that they're still there. I always make sure to pick pretty, vibrant colors before I subsume a frame
And, i just thought about this, we're still near them all the time. We're in the transference chair in the orbiter almost all the time. I don't think we technically leave the chair physically when we use transference out in the field, I think that's kind of a void projection thing.
Plus Helminth will play with your dog so while it's unnerving I can't really see any malice in it.
I'm in the minority, but I believe the warframes retain the mental structure and some of the habits and personality of the warriors the originals were made from. The Orokin are masters of memory manipulation and can transfer and overwrite a human mind, so it seems reasonable to me to say that when they built the frames they integrated the combat experience, training, and expertise of the victim in to the resulting mass production frames. So an Ivara frame isn't a blank slate, it is whoever the original Ivara was, a clone or mental fork. She's quiescent when she's chilling in storage in the orbiter, but when the Tenno takes over via transference it's not really taking over, but rather the Tenno and the Warframe combining to form one composite person. What really has me convinced is the tics the Warframes have. They all hold themselves differently, they all have idiosyncratic things they do when they're idle. If it was just the Tenno in there the Tenno would always stand they way they do when they're just walking around. Things like stance, gait, unconscious movements, they're all very idiosyncratic to the individual. Those habits are coming from somewhere, and it's not the Tenno.
For a while they were talking about having a system where you could use a consumable to make your warframe act independently like Umbra, but they scrapped it because their plan would make the consumable difficult to farm but only last for a day or an hour or something, and players said it was a bad idea. I'd really like to see something like it, though. I think it'd be really, really cool to have a quest to help your warframe "Wake up" and become more of a partner and a person with some agency instead of being a passive puppet. The warframes were all skilled warriors in life, and they've been joined with the Tenno for millennia, so I'd think there would be a lot of convergence of goals - two minds, one heart kind of thing. Like with Umbra the whole arc was that we could empathize with each other, and recognize that through trauma we had kinship, and through our warrior spirit we had shared values and goals. I think it'd be really neat if you could do that with your favorite frame, maybe have a miniquest where you dig around in old Orokin archives and piece together information about the person who was subjected to the transformation to make the first prime of that Frame.
Uft, really though, that's something I'd never considered. It's a really heavy way to consider it. thank you for sharing.
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Yeah, that's fair. I get what you're saying.