[Beta] Patch Notes for April 4th, 2020

[Faultline]

Enhancement Upgrades

• Added an "Upgrade" button to the Enhancements management screen. You can use that button anywhere in order to enhance your store-buyable enhancements (TOs, DOs and SOs) to +3 (maximum level 50) immediately, paying the regular store price. Hamidon, Titan, Hydra and Invention enhancements are not affected.

• The aim is to get rid of the annoyance of your enhancements turning yellow or red in the middle of a Task Force and forcing you to run with no enhancements or take a long time to replace every single enhancement.

General

• Improved the loading time and stability of Architect missions with a large number of custom critters.
• Fixed an issue with custom critters and path auras that caused some arcs to give a "MADoorInvalid" error
• Fixed a display issue where costume parts from an old costume could sometimes linger for other players after switching costumes

Powers

• Electrical Affinity
  • Players should now be able to cancel the following Electrical Affinity Buffs:
    • Energizing Circuit
    • Empowering Circuit
    • Insulating Circuit
  • Faraday Cage no longer shows a buff icon on the caster while the sphere is active.
• Savage Melee
  • Savage Melee's power set description has been updated to no longer state that Shred is empowered by consuming Blood Frenzy, and instead that it builds Blood Frenzy.
  • Set description no longer states that Blood Frenzy adds a damage buff, it now accurately states Blood Frenzy adds a recharge buff and endurance discount.
  • Blood Thirst description updated to highlight the power increases Bleed DOT to 100%
• Other
  • Fixed a bug where the highest tier Incarnate Hybrid Support was not granting Endurance Discount.
  • Stalker > Weapon Mastery > Shuriken: This version of the power was missing the recharge change from Page 5
  • Radiation Melee > Fusion: This power should no longer play the Build Up sound twice.
  • Atomic Manipulation > Ionize: This power should no longer play the Build Up sound twice.

[summers]

This might be a crazy idea, but why not just remove SOs from the game and make everything drop basic IOs, and allow them to be purchasable.

 

Everything else is just patching obselete content that extracts fun from new players who don't know better.

 

Just my five cents 🙂

[Faultline]

1 minute ago, summers said:

This might be a crazy idea, but why not just remove SOs from the game and make everything drop basic IOs, and allow them to be purchasable.

Because until level 30, SOs are better than basic IOs (level 40 if you keep your SOs at +3).

[summers]

3 minutes ago, Faultline said:

Because until level 30, SOs are better than basic IOs (level 40 if you keep your SOs at +3).

I'd like to see, if this gets implemented, figures on the amount of times this feature gets used in game. SOs are almost wholely obselete, they are available for only a very short time for when they are marginally better, and they cost a fortune to maintain. They are a tax on new players.

 

I'll stop making this a back and forth, I just see the whole TO/DO/SO setup as is to be a trap and better off being swept away for something new.

[Doc_Scorpion]

56 minutes ago, Faultline said:

Added an "Upgrade" button to the Enhancements management screen. You can use that button anywhere in order to enhance your store-buyable enhancements (TOs, DOs and SOs) to +3 (maximum level 50) immediately, paying the regular store price. Hamidon, Titan, Hydra and Invention enhancements are not affected.

Tested , level 30 toon with level 30 (grey) enhancements.  After clicking "upgrade", nothing happened.  After exiting the enhancement screen, received a mapserver error.  This happened three times.

 

[Doc_Scorpion]

1 hour ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

Tested , level 30 toon with level 30 (grey) enhancements.  After clicking "upgrade", nothing happened.  After exiting the enhancement screen, received a mapserver error.  This happened three times.

I should correct/clarify this report...  

After clicking "upgrade", I got the popup window asking if I wanted to upgrade to level 33 enhancements and giving the cost.  When I clicked "yes", the popup closed and there was no change to the enhancements.  Then I exited the the enhancement screen and received the mapserver error.  This happened three times.

[siolfir]

6 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

I should correct/clarify this report...  

After clicking "upgrade", I got the popup window asking if I wanted to upgrade to level 33 enhancements and giving the cost.  When I clicked "yes", the popup closed and there was no change to the enhancements.  Then I exited the the enhancement screen and received the mapserver error.  This happened three times.

Replicated this in PI with a level 50 Defender. Clicked upgrade, was asked if I wanted to upgrade 7 enhancements to level 50, clicked Yes. Nothing happened at all. Exited enhancement screen with a mapserver error and then was disconnected from the server. The character has mostly IOs with some blank slots and 7 SOs that were never replaced because the intent was to replace them with IOs once the bids went through, so I thought she would be a good test case for "typical" usage.

[nyttyn]

11 hours ago, Faultline said:

Because until level 30, SOs are better than basic IOs (level 40 if you keep your SOs at +3).

Would it not just make more sense to buff low level IOs to match SOs...?  Or just make SOs/DOs/TOs not fall off with levels too, they get outpaced anyway in the end (or really, just both). This seems like a unnecessarily complicated workaround to keep in what is still a major annoyance.

[Hedgefund]

Will this work for lowbie SO drops (from AVs)?  If so I'm a-ok with this.  I hate that the lvl 4 SO from fighting the Vaz AV becomes useless in about 5 minutes but with this change... me likey.

[Number Six]

1 hour ago, Hedgefund said:

Will this work for lowbie SO drops (from AVs)?  If so I'm a-ok with this.  I hate that the lvl 4 SO from fighting the Vaz AV becomes useless in about 5 minutes but with this change... me likey.

Yes, it will. I believe it will also with with the specialty SOs likes the ones from Yin’s market.

[Number Six]

Just deployed a new build to beta that should fix this feature.

[krj12]

I don't understand the disdain for DOs and SOs,  they work just fine at lower levels considering the mobs you're facing.

My suggestions would go in a different direction:

Make them drop much more often ( like they used to );  make more or all of them usable by my origin when they do drop.

Make the level range where they become useless a bit wider,  ( like 5 vs the 3 we have now ).

Reduce their cost from the vendor.

 

 

Edited April 4, 2020 by krj12

[AgentForest]

2 hours ago, krj12 said:

I don't understand the disdain for DOs and SOs,  they work just fine at lower levels considering the mobs you're facing.

My suggestions would go in a different direction:

Make them drop much more often ( like they used to );  make more or all of them usable by my origin when they do drop.

Make the level range where they become useless a bit wider,  ( like 5 vs the 3 we have now ).

Reduce their cost from the vendor.

I generally dislike basic enhancements now that crafting exists, but your solution combined with the "upgrade all" from the enhancement screen feature actually would make me use them again.

If they were cheaper (since they're short-term and disposable, needing replaced frequently), and the need for replacing them was less frequent, and the ones I could use dropped more, then I honestly would use them again.  As it stands right now, I tend to just team on missions and TFs until 27 or so, without any enhancements, just selling my loot to stores or the AH, then I make a checklist and send money to my crafter.  I have 80+ characters across 4 shards, lol.  I have one person do all the crafting and email them back.  Most of my money goes to him.  I just skip getting enhancements at all until then, short of any useful ones I find dropped.  If I can get close to level 30 fast enough, I never need the disposable enhancements.

But under your suggestions, I wouldn't hesitate to use them again.

[Doc_Scorpion]

And the latest patch did indeed fix the problem, tested as described above and it worked gangbusters.

Still needed to test: TO->TO, TO->DO, DO->DO, DO->SO if anyone else is interested in taking a swing at things.  (Currently groggy from nap and have to start dinner soon.)

[Razor Cure]

Wow, holy shit. I mean..I dont use SOs, but THAT is totally and insanely awesome!

[Oubliette_Red]

18 hours ago, summers said:

This might be a crazy idea, but why not just remove SOs from the game and make everything drop basic IOs, and allow them to be purchasable.

 

Everything else is just patching obselete content that extracts fun from new players who don't know better.

 

Just my five cents 🙂

Because the game is balances around SOs. It would be a lot of unnecessary work for the devs to rework the entire system just to nix SOs.

 

[Oubliette_Red]

18 hours ago, summers said:

I'd like to see, if this gets implemented, figures on the amount of times this feature gets used in game. SOs are almost wholely obselete, they are available for only a very short time for when they are marginally better, and they cost a fortune to maintain. They are a tax on new players.

 

I'll stop making this a back and forth, I just see the whole TO/DO/SO setup as is to be a trap and better off being swept away for something new.

I slot SOs when they start dropping, so L25 and up. I don't even bother with IOs until 45-50. So this QoL improvement is a Devsend!

[Yoru-hime]

Neat idea. Assuming the upgrade costs reflected in that screenshot are in the ballpark of what goes live, this could change the Enhancement math for me. I might consider bypassing the usual set of level 25 generic IOs and simply riding SOs until I can get set pieces.

 

My one concern is the availability of very low level SOs. Unless there are further alterations planned, you're further over-incentivizing DfB. Those players go from getting a few SOs to tide then over for a few levels to getting SOs that they can upgrade throughout their early career while those poor schmucks who go out and play story arcs have to suffer through TOs/DOs until 22.

[JayboH]

Reminder that the devs actually want more inf spent in general.  Inf sinks are a never-ending goal of development, so asking that they be cheaper at vendors and such is unlikely to ever happen.  It's healthy for the market and economy.

[XaoGarrent]

25 minutes ago, JayboH said:

Reminder that the devs actually want more inf spent in general.  Inf sinks are a never-ending goal of development, so asking that they be cheaper at vendors and such is unlikely to ever happen.  It's healthy for the market and economy.

Unhealthy for new players, though, as it always rapidly turns into an arms race as players seek more and more efficient methods of farm to keep ahead of the curve.

 

As someone who came into the game Warframe late, a game that saw years of inflating credit sinks before I even started, I can tell you that the experience of hitting a brick wall price meant to drain people with massive "warchests" is incredibly discouraging to the will to keep playing. Luckily the Index had been implemented already by that time, but god, I must have spent a hundred hours grinding credits in that boring and frustrating game mode, just to get things that vets could and already did build or rank up, on their day of release.

 

Currency and resource sinks don't really work the way people want them to in practice, and they come with tradeoffs. I mean, I guess it's fine if you're trying to build a stable farming meta to center the economy around, but that's the reality of what comes with this particular solution. If that's the goal, that's fine, most modern games do that eventually. But it's still a bad idea to put the sinks in line with non-farm non-endgame content, because at that point you're basically forcing people to build a farm character just to, for instance, alt effectively.

 

Placing a large inf sink on the market itself, or on the creation of end game upgrades, is more in line with how you do this, because it doesn't have any effect on your more casual or new players... Which aren't going to have the want or tools to generate piles of inf anyway. ...Endgame and market sinks is something they've already implemented in game. So I fail to see why, in the current state of the game, it isn't simply rational to cut the price down some. Primarily since it would go a long way towards encouraging people to *actually use* SOs, so this new feature doesn't just go ignored in favor of the still more convenient set and forget basic IOs.

Edited April 5, 2020 by XaoGarrent
Something needed clarification.

[JayboH]

This was in relation to the request to make it cheaper at vendors specifically - which would affect this feature since it uses those as a base.

[XaoGarrent]

1 minute ago, JayboH said:

This was in relation to the request to make it cheaper at vendors specifically - which would affect this feature since it uses those as a base.

Your post went well outside of that just that topic, and that's what I was addressing.

[Sir Myshkin]

On 4/4/2020 at 12:42 AM, summers said:

This might be a crazy idea, but why not just remove SOs from the game and make everything drop basic IOs, and allow them to be purchasable.

A reasonable portion of the player base still use the SO system, especially for leveling up, and in some cases just to enhance a low-use character once it hits 50.

 

On 4/4/2020 at 12:49 AM, summers said:

and they cost a fortune to maintain.

How so? A new set maybe costs 1-3 million every... what six levels? I mean, I'll be honest, I haven't used an SO since 2007, but even at ~45,000 INF average per SO, and 67 max slots, that's just a hair over 3,000,000 total investment, which isn't what a player is going to average leveling up, each replacement threshold. If they start at 20 (23), and +3 every... lets say five levels 25 (23, -2), that's six resets with level 20 being 720,000 (again at ~45k a hit average since they're all over the place as you level). I'm going to really simplify this breakdown to 51 slots over 6 sets, 8.5 added per shift (which is downward shifting a lot of cost earlier than it should be): 1,102,500, 1,485,000, 1,867,500, 2,250,000, 2,632,500, and lastly 3,015,000 for a grand total of 13,072,500.

 

That's cheap. Heck, if a player came up to me right now in the game and asked me for SO money, I'd probably give them 2-3x that amount without a second thought.

 

Edit to add, on relevance to the patch: If this gets in and works, I'd actually consider revisiting SO's just for simplicity sake. Right now I bend the P2W buffs and the DFB buffs until a character hits 26-32, if I could get some of those early level SO's to fill, and boost them in batch? Yeah... I'd actually probably start using them again.

 

Edited April 5, 2020 by Sir Myshkin

[Doc_Scorpion]

Setup a level 25 character (that I'd copied over) with a mix of DO's (both kinds she's eligible to use), leveled her to 30, and upgraded...   Ended up with level 33 DO's.  Leveled her to 40, upgraded, and ended up with level 43 DO's.  Leveled to 50, upgraded, and ended up with level 50 DO's.

So the upgrade routine is creating DO's outside of the normal/expected ranges.  It would make sense that it could be difficult coding to determine the character's Origin and upgrade to the proper SO's, but just to double check - working as intended or broken?

Also, could you put the cheat slash command for granting XP back into the FAQ?  The freebies menu jumps by 10 levels, and sometimes that's way too coarse.  Sometimes you want to move 3-4 levels or hit a specific level.

[Rathulfr]

The enhancement upgrade feature looks neat!  Definitely a boon for new players or players that like to use regular enhancements.  I'll definitely be making use of this feature on some of my alts.

 

One concern though: DFB.  If I run DFB often enough and with the right amount of luck, I could get SOs at levels 1-15 and then just keep upgrading them forever?  That seems like a pretty good deal.  Maybe too good?  Or am I overthinking this?