@C_Kiri

1 month ago

So here's the thing I find awkward about the conversation regarding CC: The decisions to build counters into the game around CC was made with the understanding that CC is actually fucked-up powerful. It's like you said; it doesn't matter if the enemy is level 1 or level 1,000, an infested charger or a Corrupted Bombard, they are all equally declawed by being disarmed and equally useless if slept or timestopped. I think the single biggest change the game made against CC was Overguard. Overguard utterly kneecaps a couple of older frames who don't work without their grouping tools (hi Nidus), it obliterates poor Limbo because now enemy abilities pierce the rift and they're not even stopped by Stasis, and you need an absurd checklist of what does and does not pierce Overguard just to keep track of what you can actually throw at the only enemies you care about which will matter, and the items on this checklist are not at all related to their power level. Why does Breach Surge's blind work through Overguard when it's one of the strongest abilities in the game? Why do only some forms of distraction work? Who knows. Now, here's the thing I want to highlight, actually: The entire reason Overguard was introduced, which stems from the entire reason we have spent a decade nerfing CC to begin with, is to have enemies you are forced to interact with. Nullifiers, and later Arbitration Drones, were designed to present you a cloud of enemies that were a problem you needed to stop, think, and answer, without hitting an ability that could otherwise turn them off with a press of a button. Eximus units getting overguard and having their abilities buffed is the same thing; a VIP target that has to die yesterday, and you can't one-button tell them to fuck off, and they have a huge chunk of their health bar that's thick and resistant to damage and doesn't even feel status as strongly. And here's the problem: You actually can still one-button tell an Eximus to fuck off, it's just that button is the fire button. By weakening Control, players turned to Kill. By turning to Kill en masse, the game is now about Kill. Now that the game is about Kill, they started releasing mostly more and more Kill-focused game modes and frames, ultimately resulting in Kullervo's goofy ass being able to literally kill any enemy in the game by thinking about it hard enough, resulting in all other enemies in a fifteen mile radius dying as well. And the thing is, Kill is and has always been better than Control, because a dead enemy requires less thoughts per second than a stunned one. The one thing holding back the power level of Kill was that Kill had fixed output while Control scaled inifinitely. Now that we have equally infinite means to scale Kill, either by bypassing armor which is the game's means to scale or by simply cranking the damage so high that infinite armor doesn't mean anything, Control is literally both weaker and slower than Kill. And I think now, we need to actually step back and not just ask 'what does it take to make an enemy you must respect in Warframe', I think we need to entirely re-evaluate the question. What is 'respecting an enemy' in Warframe? Because I think recognizing a priority target and spending energy to either stun it and put it in a tidy little box to be dealt with later, strip it of its means to threaten me, or convincing it to attack something else, is a lot more respectful than 'left-clicking it with slightly more authority'. Just to be clear: Sure, Limbo Stasis Cataclysm turning off entire missions for two button presses is a problem. That is a unique can of worms. But I think we and DE need to think harder about CC on a case by case basis with regards to what should and should not work on VIP targets, especially when the alternative is 'idk just fucken kill em'. I have my own opinions of blanket changes vis a vis 'what should happen when I press which CC buttons on what', but I'm not DE. I'm just some dude who thinks Nidus not being allowed to play the game in the Circuit is kinda sad.

292 |