Death is the Best Crowd Control

I’m having a bit of a problem with Warframe lately. There’s no reason to crowd control things. Like, ever. Well, maybe sometimes. But 90% of the time, it’s easier to just murder everything in sight, whether you’re doing a spy mission or an inteception or a survival mission.

In fact, in a mission type like Defense, you do way, way more killing than actual defending. You really have to because each wave won’t end until everything is dead. Crowd control is only good from stopping the defense target (either a dumb operative or a stationary object) from being damaged, but if everything dies fast, then the defense target never takes damage anyway. If you’ve ever visited Helene or Hydron, two very popular defense missions, then it’s likely enemies might not even reach the defense target.

To be fair, in most missions, you need to murder everything quickly. Especially in Exterminate missions, but murdering everything makes things easier in pretty much every mission. Why would you even use any crowd control when you can make everything die? After all, crowd control isn’t infinite in duration, but death is. Sure, other enemies will spawn but they will die, when a crowd control user will have to stop crowd controlling and kill eventually.

The missions where you don’t want to murder everything though? The crowd control is very specific. The most common mission where you’re not instantly murdering is while farming for resources. For example, if you want Polymer Bundles, you’ll do a survival on Uranus, and you want some crowd control. That crowd control though will be a Hydroid in a vague attempt to get extra loot. You’ll still have a Nova to drive enemies to their deaths and and a wall of Zenistars or an Octavia or something to murder everything and turn them into pieces for a Nekros to desecrate.

Why is this though? Why is murder just so much easier? Because there are just so many ways to murder, which are all so much faster than crowd control.

It’s not just Warframes that nuke everything. A Saryn or Volt nuke really well in an enclosed space (like a defense mission) but there’s plenty of very basic weapons that kill everything. Take the Ignis Wraith for example. It’s easily accessible to anyone over MR9 and, with some forma, will easily murder anything. There’s loads of very strong weapons around, from the MR4 Hek to the Supra Vandal to the Amprex.

Death being the best form of crowd control though is an impossible thing to fix. Because the only ways to fix it are to make things harder to kill, and that affects crowd control users too. And frankly, you don’t really want to make things harder to kill or anything, because that’s just going to upset people. On the flip side, you could bring powerful frames down a little, giving other frames a chance to fight as well, but you’re still annoying people.

Is there anything that can be done? I guess. Giving each frame a high damage ability would go a long way, but not everyone has room in their kit for a high damage ability, or it might take away from the frame itself. And if everyone has a nuke, then no one has a nuke.

In the mean time, enemies just get stronger and stronger, with their infinitely scaling armour.