Packetdancer

All glory to the snot gun!

We already have one: Odonata Prime (If you really want to go for something unusual... imagine a Prime archmelee weapon. Or a Prime k-drive.)

Defection encourages not playing Defection in the first place. :P (I kid. Mostly.)

As a counterpoint, though, you should approach each design decision with some eye towards how it might get abused. If you don't, walking back a change to stop it being abused after rolling it out is often way less popular than not making the change in the first place would've been. (You'll never get it 100% right, of course... but there's a whole lot of ground between "absolutely perfect" and "why bother thinking about this.") That said, I don't think "this could be abused" necessarily means you shouldn't make the change... just that you should think about how to address the abuse, as well. After all, there's perfectly reasonable ways to make something like this work while also trying to minimize the abuse potential. One system design I toyed with in the past to allow folks to split up and tackle things in parallel was basically an invisible counter behind the scenes; every time you did something which progressed a mission objective, or healed a teammate, or took out an enemy, it added a certain amount to the counter. The counter value would then steadily decay; if you were still moving and doing stuff, it decayed slowly; if you stayed motionless doing nothing it would start to increase the rate of decay. As long as the counter stayed above a certain minimum level, you also received anything a teammate would pick up. If you weren't contributing despite trying—like in a mission where the person with heavily modded gear tears through and kills everything before you have a chance to—the loot would just drop for you to pick up yourself, meaning even in that case as you followed along behind them you'd still be getting the loot. I never ended up using the system in a final design, but it worked reasonably well in testing. I don't know if that specific system would be right for Warframe—quite possibly it wouldn't be the right choice—but I hope it illustrates what I mean. Even if something can be abused, you don't necessarily need to throw out the idea, you just need to figure out how to address the abuse case (or cases). If there's no viable way to address those abuse cases and still have the change be useful, that's when you go "well, this won't work" and discard the idea.

I do recall this, yes. But it still doesn't entirely make sense for Revenant Prime, Valkyr Prime, or Xaku Prime. But more to the point, that lore patch only provides additional reason to say "well, if it would make a good Prime, they can always hand-wave it away." Saying "X can't be a Prime because it isn't a Tenno design dating to the Orokin era" demonstrably has not stopped some things from being Primed. :)

In fact, I'm fairly sure a codex entry -- I want to say it's for the Helios variant, Sol, which appears in the Index -- says that Helios is a modern creation of Alad V's. Edit: Yep. Loaded game, checked codex.

I could see that potentially being a worthwhile addition; you could then have like... seven different shards on a frame, with five specific ones of those seven on Config A and a different combination of five on Config B. That gives flexibility without making the system wholly exploitable. (Though I would not be shocked if there's some limitation behind the scenes which makes that difficult, simply because games of any significant age become held together with bubblegum, duct tape, and hope after a certain point...)

I legit snorted coffee out my nose on reading this. So, thanks for that.

I realize you're half joking, but as someone whose playstyle is best described as "lunatic bow sniper" in most games and for whom headshot-powered mechanics are my jam... even I sometimes want to play with a thing where you go "push button, everything dies, maniacal laughter." Whether that be with a Tenet Arca Plasmor, or the Tenet Cycron (or the Torid Incarnon), or whatever else. Just for a little bit, for variety if nothing else. As someone who loves Nataruk, at least for me it's more the perfect shot mechanic that draws me to it. The charged AOE shots are nice and all, don't get me wrong, but being able to consistently pull off a chain of perfect shots is just so satisfying. (We need more bows in the game, dammit. If I can't have a Daikyu Prime, give me a Tenet Lenz already.)

Realistically, we've already left the realm of "this made sense lore-wise" when it comes to Primes. Valkyr Prime should not be Valkyr Prime, as Valkyr is the result of modern-day torture and experimentation in Corpus labs; we've seen with her deluxe that Valkyr's original pre-torture form was Gersemi. Revenant Prime should not exist, given that Revenant is the merger of a frame with a sentient eidolon's energy. Xaku Prime is on the horizon, and that's another one which shouldn't exist; by rights, the Prime variant would be three separate Primes (whatever the original three lost frames that make up Xaku are). There will eventually be a Caliban Prime, and there's another one which by rights should probably not have a Prime variant. I agree that it's unlikely we'll see Grineer or Corpus weapons Primed -- their 'upgraded' versions are Kuva or Tenet variants -- but let's not pretend we're still adhering strictly to the original lore interpretation of what Primed variants mean.

Not to mention the fact that on a more general level, in any game design, you almost certainly have resource faucets -- currency and resources are created out of thin air as-needed with no limits on how many can be in circulation -- so you eventually need drains on resources or else your in-game economy spins entirely out of control. (I mean, your in-game economy probably eventually spins out of control regardless, because gamers, but you don't have to help it get there faster.)

Sure. My point was more, there's a variety of squad buffs, and if they were to just give us a blanket "disable all squad buffs," you just know some players are going to complain that they can't shut off the elemental buffs while keeping red crit buffs. Or can't shut off red crit buffs while keeping Wisp health motes. Or whatever. I think at best you kind of have to tackle each thing one at a time, like having an exilus mod for weapons which makes them exempt from squad buffs -- elemental, red crit, whatever -- to allow folks to avoid people unintentionally breaking their builds. Even there it's not going to be perfect, because you're inevitably going to encounter someone out there who wants just exemption from elemental buffs but wants to still have red crit buffs. Or someone who wants to skip the red crit buffs but still have elemental damage. Or whatever. The complexity of Warframe's systems is great for those who want to experiment with build variety and being creative, and supports a ton of different playstyles. Which is great! The downside is that it's almost impossible to have that level of complexity and not have it be possible for someone to mess up someone else's build; I don't think there's a simple, easy "make everyone happy" solution to this problem.

More to the point, I think the bigger problem would be how to have any granularity to it. Just let you render yourself unaffected by all squad buffs? Someone's gonna complain that now in order to avoid elemental damage bonuses they're going to have to give up Overguard, Wisp health motes, and Harrow's red crit buffs. Moreover, someone's going to want it to be specific per loadout, etc. I can see it being done with exilus mods or something, though. Have an exilus mod for weapons which makes the weapon exempt from squad elemental bonuses, or whatever.

Isn't that kind of the preferable option, though? That the frame gets balanced before release rather than being adjusted after players have their hands on it? That said, to some extent, I sympathize with them; putting on my game-developer hat instead of my player one... there's a reason devs like to take the old "no plan survives contact with the enemy" and twist it to suit game-dev with "no balance survives contact with the players," after all. If they find 10 ways to mess with a frame or weapon's balance and play with them pre-release, we'll find 12 more, of which 2 will render the thing brokenly OP. That's hardly a thing unique to Warframe or DE. (I do think doing a rebalance one week after release is a little bit more of a snap judgment than I'd personally have gone for, admittedly, but I grant they may also have had numbers we're not privy to which rendered the situation more dire than I realize.) Don't you mean "just kaithe around," what with this being Dagath? :P

Fair; I suppose I should say, it's why Drifter is technically able to use all emotes (whether or not they make all emotes available during transference) while Operator is not, though there's enough similarity you could try to play them all to Operator (likely with a great deal of attendant jank and deforming in certain cases). Maybe a better example would be that, so far as I can tell, Operator lacks the attachment sockets for things like syandana, while Drifter has them. (Doesn't surprise me that Kahl's also just a Warframe under the hood, though, in terms of being able to do all the emotes.)