On No Longer Worrying About Balance

Back when Deimos first cane out, the infested room in the back of our ships was reworked. After obtaining a module from Son, one of the Entrati family on Deimos, we could rework the fleshy infested space into a way to, well, change things. By sacrificing a Warframe to the Helminth, we could take one of that Warframe’s abilities, then put it on another Warframe. The Helminth system ended up proving to be be quite popular. While it is a pain having to re-farm for Warframes we already had or needed to subsume, we gained the ability to be quite useful in making our frames more useful too.

The downside to the Helminth systems? They were locked behind a pretty long grind. And, well, some Warframes are just really, really hard to get.

However, while the ability to add one ability from another frame did a lot of wonders for all sorts of Warframes, there was still imbalance within the Warframe roster. The effectiveness of a Saryn or a Mesa was still much more useful than a Banshee for example. Warframes’ base stats were still important, and in this case, squishier frames struggled.

However, this was about to change.

In the new Veilbreaker update, Digital Extremes added a new system to the Helminth’s chamber. After you build the new Helminth component, you gain access to a whole other system that can boost our Warframes even further.

By completing what is basically a “super Sortie”, you can obtain a shard of sentient energy, the same energy used to power Sentient Archons. Back in the New War, we used these shards of energy to revitalize the Lotus, after brutally ripping the shards out of the Archons. However, after the New War, the Archons (and Sentients and Narmer in general) disappeared. Now though, you can shove these into your Warframes to boost the base stats of said Warframes.

So, when it comes to balance, we kinda have everything to make a Warframe perfect. What’s that? Banshee has no health? Then a shard can be stuffed into her to increase her health. And what’s that, you think Proteas’s fourth is pointless? Well you can replace it with something like Rhino’s Roar for more gun power.

The sentient shards and helminth abilities combine very nicely, and, as you obtain more shards, you can tweak your Warframe, any Warframe, to make them better and stronger. There are so many things you can do to further customize your Warframes, that balance kinda goes out the window.

And because these effect base stats, you can do some pretty interesting things. For example, Inaros has suddenly reappeared since the shards can buff his health even further, and he can also swap out his third ability for something useful, like Protea’s dispenser to easily gain more health.

However, all of these changes do kinda throw overall balance out of the window. For every argument that X frame is too weak, you can kinda counter it with Helminth systems. You can fix Mag’s low health with shards, remove Wukong’s useless fourth, add even more armour to Valkyr and turn Nidus into even more of a monster. There is a MASSIVE risk of damage creep here. No, I take that back. This IS power creep, as long as you have the patience and time to use Helminth’s buffs.

That being said, there is still balancing to be done. And since Rebecca took over as creative director, we’re slowly seeing buffs to various Warframes, despite the new features. So maybe it’s not as bad as I fear…