This week has been filled with hotfixes and tweaks following Khora’s release last Friday, so the team is here to talk more about our plans to change her kit, in addition to the Sanctuary Onslaught rebalancing and more! We won’t just be reflecting on what came, of course, so keep on reading for news and updates on what is currently being worked on as well.
If you want to watch the entire livestream and see the full discussion, you can do so in the YouTube embed below, or simply our overview for all the highlights.
https://www.warframe.com/news/devstream-110-overview
Housekeeping:
· As usual, the Gift of the Lotus alert is live on all 3 Platforms for 24 hours following the stream!
· TennoCon 2018 is on July 7 in London, Ontario Canada! Tickets are almost sold out – get yours here: warframe.com/tennocon
The Sacrifice
Here’s a teaser for the Sacrifice quest: Geoff acting like a column for one arrogant-looking character.
Here’s a bigger tease, a look at some of our keyart for the Quest:
Venus Landscape
Here’s another quick tease of the very work-in-progress Civilian Hub of our Venus Landscape:
We’ve talked about this in previous Devstream but you can hear the team go over what was previously discussed in the clip above. Here’s an interesting, unfamiliar figure walking through some coolant:
Equinox Alt Helmet
If you’ve been watching our Devstreams for a while, you might remember a previous Equinox Alt Helmet that was lost to the Void (i.e. its file was corrupted). Ray is back with another iteration of an Equinox helmet that has been properly backed up and hopefully will be released sometime this year!
Combined:
Day Form:
Night Form:
Nul Scrambus Changes
These enemies will now show a charge up animation and release a dome showing the area of effect of their aura. This way players won’t be blind-sided by their Scrambus abilities and instead can play around them:
Khora’s Kit Changes
As indicated in a Dev Workshop posted earlier this week, Khora’s kit is getting some tweaks! Her casting times have been shortened across the board, but here’s a breakdown of the changes per ability:
Whipclaw and Ensnare
· Improvements to Whipclaw’s accuracy!
· Ensnare now pulls in multiple enemies at a time. Upon casting on a foe, the living metal will propagate and pull in every enemy within range. The living metal ensnaring enemies will then propagate a second time to pull in another wave of enemies within range.
· Hitting an Ensnared enemy with Whipclaw will cause the living metal to propagate again. The more you smack the more it spreads.
Venari
· Venari is now a passive ability. You can now use Khora’s 3 on an enemy or ally to command Venari to focus on them.
Strangledome
· Once an enemy dies in the Strangledome, they will drop to the floor, making room for new victims.
· All enemies caught in the Strangledome will take half of Whipclaw’s attack damage when one enemy in the Strangledome is hit with Whipclaw.
Anticipating another round of Khora changes after these adjustments go out, so please be sure to share your feedback with us after we iterate!
Sanctuary Onslaught
There have been a lot of changes and tweaks made to this new gamemode in the past week and we still have many more planned. If you didn’t catch our latest Dev Workshop on the topic, these are our current plans for the next patch:
· Efficiency drain is being reverted to a cap of 6x in both modes. Furthermore, the Efficiency drain at the start of regular Onslaught has been reduced, allowing players to reach wave 8 more easily.
· Enemy scaling is now being capped at 280 in Elite mode, instead of the previous 180.
· We are aware of and are working to addressing spawning issues on a variety of tiles.
· The Focus cap is increasing! Its base will be 250,000, with an additional 5000 added per Mastery Rank.
There was also some discussion about potentially changing the Sanctuary Onslaught drop table rotation to reflect the extra effort of the harder zones. It’s a difficult concept to balance – this isn’t talking about scaling rewards specifically, as that is already accomplished to a degree with the affinity and Focus gains that come with higher level enemies. The goal behind any sort of change in this regard would be to allow for more precision in rewards the further you go while still maintaining that “bite size” content intent.
Nothing concrete came out of this conversation but if you’d like to hear the team’s different thoughts on this topic, you can listen in by clicking here.
Peculiar Mods
We released our first Peculiar Mod with Khora’s release to positive reception from the community, so we’re looking at what the next one could be. When designing these, we want to stray away from overly “Loony Tunes” like effects while still offering a peculiar result. Currently there are no plans to offer this outside of a unique mod.
Here’s our next planned Peculiar mod:
Weapon PBR and Ceramic Dagger Model Change
We’re revisiting the model of the Ceramic Dagger to differentiate it from the Cronus. Here’s what its new look will be:
The Karak, the Gram and the Kronen are also getting a PBR pass, which you can see here.
UI Remaster
We’re expecting some parts of this remaster to come before TennoCon. Here’s a look at a seamless transition between mouse and controller that we’re hoping to ship with the new UI:
Other Tidbits
· The Hydroid Prime and Zephyr Prime trailers are on hold while Steve works on the Sacrifice.
· No ETA on Frame Fighter’s release but it might be playable at TennoCon!
· The Operator Hair from a previous Devstream is on hold with all the other character art we’re working on.
· Except a tease of the Nidus Deluxe Skin soon!
· No current plans to add boss music, but it’s up to George!
· We’re expecting some parts of the UI remaster to come before TennoCon.
· Here’s a look at a seamless transition between mouse and controller that we’ve been working on. There’s no news if this is coming with the first release of the UI remaster or not.
· You will be able to shoot Dargyn Pilots out of their Dargyns to steal the vehicle itself! Here’s it in-action:
THE REMOTE OBSERVER – VOL 27.5.5
Last Friday, we held off on a Remote Observer as there’s no use recapping an update that launched the day-of. This edition will include items from Update 22.18.0 and all of the subsequent hotfixes.
If you want to see what came this week in addition to the bug and crash fixes, we’ve compiled highlights below:
PC – WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED
Our changes to Sanctuary Onslaught and Khora have not stopped here, so please be aware of future planned changes in addition to the ones included in this volume (and the general crash/bug fixes that came with our hotfixes).
Sanctuary Onslaught Dev Workshop | Khora Abilities Dev Workshop
Sanctuary Onslaught
· Khora Blueprints have been removed from Elite rewards and replaced with Radiant Axi Relics. Other Relics have moved around rotations to fit – see our drop-table site for full drops!
· Removed the Rank 30 Warframe requirement from Sanctuary Onslaught – remains a requirement for Elite Onslaught.
· Certain Onslaught tiles now have a 20% chance of having an environmental hazard.
· Increased Specimen spawns in a variety of tiles.
· We now give Zone rewards the moment the Conduit portal appears instead of requiring at least one player to transition through.
Miscellaneous
· Quill Onkko has added a Cetus Wisp to his Offerings in Cetus. These can be purchased with Quill Standing for Architect level Tenno.
· Only a maximum of 4 Mine Ospreys will spawn at any given moment.
· Removed Excalibur’s 3 second cooldown on Radial Blind.
· Fixed Frost’s Snow Globe disappearing if a large amount of damage is taken during its invulnerable phase.
