Playford

September 19, 2015

Received it, thank you very much :D

September 18, 2015

Alright, bit of interesting history trivia.

During WWII, Disney made some animations for the military.

Example:

https://youtu.be/CnhlD0HZAm4

September 16, 2015

Will the new J-3 Golem raid bring with it new Arcanes?

Has there been any interest in making new mods that aren't just stat upgrades?

Any word on being able to replay quests?

How has the discussion on multishot and related mods been going (you knew this was coming)?

September 15, 2015

Good GOD ! some of those ideas are amaizingly good for new mods! You should make a separate post bro

I actually made an entire topic where I attempted to discuss mandatory mods, pursuit of DPS and the like, shameless self-promoting link.

September 15, 2015

I've completed all arid eximus scans, they all spawned on Phobos defense, but only started spawning reliably past wave 20.

However, I did that a week before U17 launched, there have been some changes in spawn logic since then, so I don't know if that had any effect.

September 15, 2015

If base damage and multishot is taken away, people would just stack elemental mods. I think those need addressing as well.

Personally, I would prefer if completely new mods were introduced that provide utility and new features to weapons that have no effect on DPS, or if they do, then the DPS bonus is situational.

Here are a few examples:

(These are examples just for the sake examples, don't take them too seriously)

Melee weapons:

- Phantasm: attacks have a chance of creating autonomus holographic decoys that distract enemies (decoys move around and distract enemies on their own, but deal no damage and have no collision hitbox).

- Repeated Strikes: gain bonus damage when attacking the same enemy repeatedly, attacking a new enemy resets the bonus.

- Crippling Weakness: deal bonus damage the less % hp your enemy has.

- Crippling Fear: critical hits that kill causes nearby enemies to become terrified.

- Nothing Wasted: overkill damage is stored and used on the next attack. Kinda hard to put this one into words, but here's an example, enemy has 5 hp, you kill it with an attack that deals 20 damage, that extra 15 damage is stored and used on the next attack.

- Pickpocket: melee finishers generate extra loot (basically a single target Desecrate).

- Essence Theft: after killing an Eximus temporarily gain its aura.

- Great Riposte: when resisting a knockdown attack (either by blocking or by knockdown resistance mods) perform a melee strike that hits all enemies in range and does bonus damage.

Ranged weapons:

- Rigged Magazine: after reloading, drop the used magazine which acts as a stun grenade, dealing little damage but stunning in an area that increases in size the more rounds were in the magazine at the time of reload (unused ammo is lost).

- Shock and Awe: while shooting, enemies in a small radius around the shooter are staggered, enemies in a larger radius have their accuracy reduced (not compatible with noise reduction mods, not usable on weapons that are silent by default, such as bows, doesn't work with Hushed Invisibility).

- Focus Fire: if you fire a long enough burst, reload faster (only usable on fully automatic weapons).

- Headhunter: headshots give a (temporary) stacking buff to damage, bodyshots deal the extra damage but reset stacks to 0.

- Shrapnel: physical damage procs affects all enemies in a radius around the primary target.

Like I said, some of these add damage, but in their case that extra damage situational or has to be earned.

September 15, 2015

It could be a K, but definitely not a C. I said a 2 just because of the little pixel in the bottom right corner of that character looking lighter, like it was trying to represent a notch, but it probably is a K now that I think of it. Don't suppose anyone at DE knows what this could be *hint hint*

I agree, the character is definitely not a C, but the Grineer are a bit inconsistent with their C's and K's, so that was my thinking.

Example of the C-K confusion from the wiki:

SUPREMAKY IS DUTY

IF OUR ENEMIES DESERVED PEAKE, THEY WOULD HAVE DEFEATED US

Both of those are on the Grineer Galleon set.

And as I was typing this, decided to google: grineerhere.com

Found this Reddit thread from 2 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/1izy95/grineerherecom/

From what I gather from the discussion, it seems it was a website but was taken down in the meantime.

September 15, 2015

I don't think that's a 2, looks more like it could be a K, the texture is a bit too blurry. Grineer occasionally use K as a replacement for C, which is pretty weird considering they have a C in their alphabet.

That would make it: Wassup@grineerhere.com an email adress?

Well, time to send some emails.

EDIT:

Delivery failed, domain name not found.

Oh well, it was worth a shot.

September 13, 2015

£700 is about 1000$

While there is a US/EU price difference in PC components, go here: www.logicalincrements.com

Everything that is 600$ and up will give you a PC that is more powerful than PS4/XBO by a decent margin.

September 13, 2015

they should just make other mods better instead of nerfing current mods. what is the point of playing the game and farming for something if its just going to get nerfed at any time, make reload mods worth it, make mag size mods better, dont destroy 1 other mod that everyone has. it gives player incentive to leave the game.

"Buff everything" is not an answer.

Think about it, why should anyone bother with reload mods if they can just add more damage so they need fewer bullets to kill enemies? If a single magazine clears entire rooms, reloading is not an issue.

Then again, that same buff breaks the small handful of weapons that rely on low capacity and constant reloading as their balancing mechanic, such as Tonkor, Tigris and Vectis.

No. I don't mind the +damage mods being removed and worked in to something else, but they should NOT be tied to weapon rank. That school of thought is the very thing that lead to our current warframe ranking system. It means you have to push through dozens of levels of mediocre damage just to get to a usuable level. As it is now, I can rank my weapon to level 7 and slap a serration into a mod slot that has a matching polarity. Meaning I only have to deal with 7 levels of unbearably weak damage. This usually means one quick run on apollodorus. Using your suggestion at rank 7 I'd only be doing 40% more damage. This all becomes even worse when you start forma'ing your weapon.

_______________________________

To be honest, despite serration and similar mods being a staple in pretty much everyone's builds, I don't see that as a bad thing.

In all honesty, I would prefer if all level scaling was reworked but that's a discussion for another time.

The reason right now weapons start with unbearably low damage is precisely because of all the damage mods people put in their weapons, it's also the reason why a level 25 enemy has ten times the health of their level 1 counterpart, atleast that's what the enemy scaling page on the wiki claims.

If that was brought way down so the HP difference peaked at 5x at level 40, even that 40% extra damage at level 7 would be enough for the weapon to be usable on mid level content.

September 11, 2015

[snip]

I'll be honest, the equations you propose are difficult to understand at a glance and un-intuitive, quite often I see new players confused about the damage model even though it's relatively straightforward.

Complicating it even further would just make make newcomers even more confused.

September 11, 2015

When it comes to mandatory mods, I've already voiced my thoughts in one of the threads in the OP, removing them is not enough, the damage and mod system as a whole needs a rework.

September 11, 2015

Not quite true else, we'd all run fire rate mods.

There aren't many non-DPS mods on Primaries and Secondaries. There's the zoom ones, the silence ones, the recoil ones, reload speed and the ammo/mags ones. The mags ones are used. On Secondaries, there's also the range ones which are also used

Melee isn't much better but does have things like Life Strike and Reach.

But you identified one other way of increasing mod variety (buffing unused non-DPS mods) and there's a third: eximus slots. So my question was: Why this way?

We don't run regular firerate mods because elemental mods give more DPS, but even then Shred and Lethal Torrent are very popular, both giving firerate plus additional effects.

Mods that don't effect DPS are very rarely used because once you stack up base damage, multishot, elementals, nightmare mods and crit mods, there is no more room left for them.

And you have gotten to the root of the problem, modding for DPS is not just the most optimal way to play, it is the only way to play.

Exilus slots don't solve the issue, even if they were implemented on weapons, they are just one slot, the contents of the other 8 would remain identical meaning that build variety is just slightly less non-existent.

The point of my suggestion is to limit potential DPS and provide gameplay that doesn't consist of throwing numbers at the enemy until they run out of numbers.

[snip]

It seems that we have difference of opinion, you think that leveling Serration and Hornet Strike is crucial to the Warframe experience, I don't.

September 11, 2015

I agree that leveling up increasing stats is a bit of a crutch on game design, but the sad truth is that people like big numbers. In my previous attempts to discuss this topic I've had comments from people that they didn't like my suggestions because the numbers would be smaller, and I can understand that to a degree.

I would prefer stat growth being minimal and difficulty being based on enemy composition and tactics, rather than it being a math problem, but let's focus on one issue at a time.

September 11, 2015

You seem to be missing the point of my questions - and only looking at it thru the eyes of a veteran. Which is understandable but doesn't really take in the whole picture.

You say that weapons should stat-up innately - and Serration etc be ditched.

The reason for Serration being the way it is - is centred on the hooking of new players. I recall being quite excited way back whenever I got it up a notch - it was one of the few solid progression aspects in evidence once I realised how fast it was to fully level a frame or weapon. It's also one of the few *dependable* progression aspects - since collecting mods is pure RNG.

What you propose simply disposes of this factor and does nothing to replace the (admittedly lacklustre) progression lost.

So - if they're removed - that progression - in terms of time spent - has to be transferred somewhere. This is an online F2P - time sink is the name of the business. The only solutions I can see - is that 0-30 would have to be increased exponentially to accommodate this change. Hence my mentioning issues of Forma and Affinity - and pointing out what a nightmare this could be if ranking up a weapon were to require weeks instead of hours.

You cannot simply ignore that possibility just because what you propose is more interesting to you - from your veteran perspective.

The knock on I refer to is that shortening these already weak progression aspects would see newer players stay for shorter time and leave sooner. More so if your proposal means all advancement or tweaking is RNG - as opposed to most like we have now.

I should also point out the knock on which you refer to at the end - clearly isn't true. You're still here after all - despite the poor modding versatility.

Please note I don't see the current iteration as AOK - I'm not saying changes don't need to happen. However - the idea of innate increasing weapon damage in order to free up a slot - doesn't ever think some of these aspects through. Which I've subsequently tried to point out. You cannot scrub time spent out of the equation in a F2P game - it's bad for business.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say, getting Serration and the cores needed to rank it up is progression but not RNG?

Getting some other mod and ranking it up on the other hand is RNG and is not progression? I'm confused.

The progression doesn't have to be transferred elsewhere, we already have several other progression systems that can "take the load", such as the rest of the mod collection, building new weapons, building the dojo, researching clantech, filling out the codex and leveling syndicates.

As long as Forma exists rapidly releveling equipment will also exist, if there are to be any changes to the speed of leveling gear (which there shouldn't in my opinion) then DE needs to tackle Forma as a gameplay element but that is beyond the scope of this topic.

And yes, I'm still here in spite of the modding system, but it would be better if I was here because of it.

And I've stated in my OP that any progression lost can be compensated with Fusion Cores, it has happened multiple times in the past.

So you mean like Corrupted mods - and all the *different* builds they encourage ...

... Oh wait - that's not really how it turned out is it.

Their use varies from weapon to weapon because of inconsistent effect on accuracy. As suggested in the OP, the damage bonus should be less significant and their effect on accuracy changed so equipping it effects the ability to reliably deal that extra damage.

With the change to the ammo system and ammo economy of all weapons, missed shots would actually be enough to discourage people from running it on everything all the time.

September 11, 2015

Why? You negated to mention why this was a good idea, yet it was the basis of most of your post.

The only thing that matters is DPS. As long as there are effective and reliable ways of increasing DPS, that's the only thing people are going to mod for. That also means that weapon modding has almost no depth or variety.

If increasing DPS also comes with some sort of trade off, people might be encouraged to try different builds.

September 10, 2015

I don't buy boosters thanks.

Unless I'm mistaken, to celebrate the release of U17 on consoles everyone got a free booster.

September 10, 2015

So if weapon damage should scale with levelling the weapon - what happens to the little progression we have?

You progress by finding new mods that make your weapon do new things, you level them, combine them into different builds, experiment and find something that you find fun, enjoyable and goes with your playstyle.

Hornet Strike and Serration are sizable time and resource investments to a new player. The notion of it hurting build diversity only comes into the minds of veteran players who've been maxed out awhile and are growing bored.

I've been playing since closed beta, of course I'm bored with modding my weapons in the exact same way since Mods 2.0 came out.

Are you suggesting that ranking a weapon to 30 should be extended by orders of magnitude? Subsequently making mastery grind and Forma use an even more lengthy chore than it is now.

No? When did I suggest that?

Or are you implying that weeks/months of investment into the game simply be dumped altogether?

Weeks/months of investment have already been dumped. I have played for the past 2.5 years and 99% of the mods I collected during that time are never going to be used, they will just sit there in my inventory staring at me and praying for merciful death by transmutation.

The first is inherently bad for players - though it may well sell more boosters - so it's good for DE. It will certainly make the the current issues with Draco grinding even more apparent.

The second will be a huge knock on player retention over time - at least as things stand now. Aside from the starchart (which has very little incentive to clear) - the standard damage mods are the main progression for players starting out.

I have no idea where you are getting this releveling and Draco grinding stuff, never mentioned affinity gain.

As for the knock on effect. We already have it. It starts when you get Serration and Hornet Strike to max rank, and players figure out that weapon modding has almost no depth.

September 10, 2015

With the recent comments from the devs on how the damage/multishot mods are getting a second look I would like to give my opinion on the matter, this is something that I care deeply about and have made topics about it in the past, this being the 3rd. Beware, it's a wall of text and there is no TL;DR.

Let's get started.

There are three major issue with weapons and weapon modding:

- The pursuit of DPS and pointless mods

- Ammo economy is all over the place

- No build variety and a lack of interesting mods

Let me address these one by one, first focusing on DPS and how entire chunks of everyone's mod collection is worthless, because that is by far the biggest and most complicated issue.

The pursuit of DPS and pointless mods

Modding weapons right now boils down to one question: "Does adding this mod increase my DPS?" because that’s the only thing that matters. Damage 2.0 was conceived to stop people from using Rainbow Builds, but in my opinion it merely created Rainbow Builds 2.0.

There are some weapons that need slightly different builds focusing more on status chance, or need ammo mutation mods to make up for their ammo inefficiency, but in the end, you will still be predominantly adding damage mods to increase your DPS, either by adding elemental mods or crit mods (or both).

There is an entire section of the mod collection that is useless because they have no effect on DPS or they don’t add enough of it to be worthwhile making build variety is almost nonexistent. To be specific, I’m talking about IPS mods, regular status mods and some other utility mods.

For a time I thought the best solution to be simply buffing those mods into usefulness by increasing their numbers or changing their scaling. I slowly realized the flaw in this. Instead of adding more options for modding, it simply added more mods to increase DPS further.

How to fix this?

After some thought and suggestions from other people, the best solution I’ve come to is that mods that increase damage without drawbacks shouldn’t exist.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that elemental mods and IPS mods should be changed not to increase damage, but change a percentage of base damage into the corresponding damage type.

(I gave my best to format this, but the forum bbcode isn’t cooperating, if someone can inform me how to do tables, please do)

Example:

Burston has 30 base damage evenly spread out:

Impact: 10

Puncture: 10

Slash: 10

Adding max rank Rupture should change 30% of non-impact damage into impact, so the new stats for Burston are:

Impact: 16

Puncture: 7

Slash: 7

Of course elemental mods would need to be rescaled completely because their 90% stat is just too big, my suggestion is to change them to change 4% base damage per rank meaning that at max rank they would change 24% base damage (nightmare and other dual stat mods should also be modified, unless I’m mistaken they all go up to rank 3 so 5% per rank, maximum 20% seems fine), so that adding a maxed Hellfire to Burston would make the stats:

Impact: 7.6

Puncture: 7.6

Slash: 7.6

Heat: 7.2

When damage modifying mods are added, physical mods should be applied first, then elemental ones, so that adding both Rupture and Hellfire would make the new stats:

Impact: 12.1

Puncture: 5.3

Slash: 5.3

Heat: 7.2

Some will point out that this also makes elemental mods useless on weapons that use the same element, to use the fire example yet again, fire mods would be pointless on Ignis.

I honestly don’t consider that very important, let me remind you, currently all IPS mods are worthless on pure elemental damage weapons because of the way they scale.

If they are changed so they can actually add IPS damage to pure elemental weapons that would actually increase the number of mods they can use. And if people are going to complain about realism and immersion, let me remind you, our lasers can be modified to shoot viruses.

Realism and immersion has its place, for Warframe that place is out the airlock.

With this type of control over damage distribution weapons can be modded in multiple ways;

- Evenly spread out IPS damage for general purpose builds

- Focus on one damage type versus a specific health type

- Or add and combine elemental damage for further specialization versus a specific health type

One problem I can think of is that stacking various elemental mods would make the damage percentages go a bit wonky, I can think of multiple solutions (this isn’t a balancing measure, more of a programming one to prevent bugs, we have enough of those):

Solution #1

Allow only one elemental mod per damage type, meaning:

You can combine Hellfire and Cryo Rounds for blast damage, but can’t combine Hellfire and Wildfire for extra fire damage.

Solution #2

Limit elemental mods to maximum of four, meaning:

If you stack multiple mods of the same element, you get fewer other elements to put in.

Example:if you put in three fire mods (Hellfire, Wildfire, Thermite Rounds), you can add only one other elemental mod.

Personally, I prefer solution #2

For this example I used the rifle impact mod, it’s stats are just there for the sake of an example, while shotgun IPS mods have the same stats, pistol versions got up to 60% and for some reason melee go up to 90%. In this version of the damage system their stats should be revised, I think the rifle/shotgun version stats are a good baseline.

As for event IPS mods, I'm not sure what to do with them, maybe change them to function like the dual stat ones, changing damage and adding status chance, or maybe so that they convert 100% of base damage to their damage type while being incompatible with other IPS mods.

I know I’m going to encounter really strong resistance on my next point, and this is something that’s been brought up in the past.

I really think we should get rid of base damage boosting mods: Serration, Point Blank, Hornet Strike and Pressure Point (their corrupted counterparts and multishot mods I will be talking about later), they are mandatory on every single build and in effect we don’t have 8 slots to mod with, but 7.

Instead of using them, weapon base damage should increase as the weapon ranks up, much like warframes get stats as they rank up, my suggestion being 20% every 3 ranks for 200% bonus damage at max rank, obviously nearly all weapons would need to be rebalanced.

Of course, because we lose a lot of our damage output because the change to elemental damage mods, enemy scaling and stats should also be revised. I don’t know the formula, so I can’t make any good suggestions, people more knowledgeable than me can comment on that.

Some people might not like losing some very major mods from their collection, and that is perfectly understandable, I myself have multiple copies of Serration and Hornet Strike at various ranks, the thought of losing them after all that effort put into them makes me sad, but I also don’t like that while modding my weapons I have to cycle through tons worthless mods that I’m never going to use.

If DE ever decides to remove these mods, compensating people with appropriate amounts of Arcane/Ancinet Cores should be sufficient.

Primed Point Blank and other prime mods? No idea, Legendary Cores maybe?

One of the benefits of this is that it “normalizes” DPS for each weapon. The design team knows from day one how a weapon will scale and what the default damage output will be at all stages with all players, making balancing that weapon around other attributes, such as ammo capacity, fire rate, projectile speed, etc. easier.

One last mod group that needs talking about are the regular status mods.

They are worthless in any damage/mod system, and need to be buffed to the point they are useful and not a waste of UI space.

Rifle Aptitude, Sure Shot and Melee Prowess all add 15% (Shotgun Savvy is the only exception, giving 30%) bonus status chance at their max rank, which is the same amount as the dual stat mods at their base rank.

Not only that, but Sure Shot and Melee Prowess cost 7 points at their max rank, while Rifle Aptitude and Shotgun Savvy cost 9 point at their max rank. The dual stat mods make them completely and utterly obsolete.

My suggestion for for their new stats:

Rank Cost Status chance bonus

0 6 40%

1 7 80%

2 8 120%

3 9 160%

4 10 200%

5 11 240%

Atleast this way when you give us the D (har har) on weapons that slot has more than one viable mod for it.

Now, lets turn our attention to the very few mods left that can increase DPS, them being the corrupted, multishot, firerate and crit mods. Firerate I will talk about in the ammo economy part, crit mods are a bit more complicated and I will suggest solutions in the third part.

Corrupted base damage mods are fine if their drawbacks are significant enough.

I would suggest these changes:

- Vicious Spread and Spoiled Strike are changed to have 10 ranks like Heavy Caliber and Magnum Force

- They only get 5% damage bonus per rank, 55% at max rank

- Their effect on accuracy and recoil would need to be tweaked, I can't suggest numbers because for the life of me I have no idea how "accuracy" works (did hear some rather fascinating rumours though)

In interest of balance and to prevent beam weapons from dominating everything, their effect on accuracy should either be in absolute amounts or these mods should not be compatible with weapons that have no recoil and spread.

As for multishot, I like what was proposed in the devstream, extra bullets consuming extra ammo. The only change I would make is for both rifle and pistol versions using the same scaling as the shotgun version.

Ammo economy is all over the place

Now, lets focus on something that should be less controversial and far simpler to adress, ammo economy.

At the moment it's all over the place. Some weapons have practically infinite ammo with how efficient they are (Latron), but then there are others that even with tight trigger discipline and careful aim have ammo problems (almost every automatic secondary).

Some time ago (I think it was on a devstream) it was stated that the ammo system is limited because of engine limitations. Considering how DE owns the engine and has access to the source code, that's hardly a setback.

What the ammo system needs to improve in my opinion is the following:

Ammo pickups should be percentage based, going as far as different weapons having different percentage multipliers.

With this system it’s possible to individually modify each weapons ammo economy without affecting its damage per bullet.

Another thing that is important regarding ammo economy is spare ammo. 540 spare bullets on the Latron series is far too many, that same amount on some automatics is too little, Soma Prime with its expanded ammo pool is a step in the right direction, we need more varied spare ammo pools.

It would also be nice to see a greater variety in which weapon types use what ammo type.

Marelok is a stated in-game to be a cut down Grinlok, yet Grinlok uses rifle ammo while Marelok uses pistol ammo. Why? They should both use rifle ammo.

Grakata on the other hand doesn’t feel right using rifle ammo and in my opinion should be switched over to pistol ammo, which would make it consistent with the Twin Grakata.

This is what I mean by variety of ammo usage, weapons using different ammo types regardless of their status as primary or secondary.

To prevent the weirdness we have right now with some secondaries limiting primary ammo, primary and secondary weapons should have their own separate ammo pools, even though they are using the same ammo type.

Regarding firerate, as a damage boost it balances itself out, shooting more bullets also means wasting more bullets, both on misses and on already dead enemies. Other than tweaking a weapons ammo economy not much can be, or should be, done with people shooting faster.

No build variety and a lack of interesting mods

Third and final part. Sadly I have no definitive solution to prevent people just stacking crit mods. My only suggestion is to introduce brand new mods that provide alternatives to modding for damage, those alternative being situational damage boosts, utility and such.