[End Game 2Ndary]

Go with Akbolto.  It's a great weapon, and it has the most overpowered firing sound in the game. 

[Why Is Dps Important?]

As several people have pointed out, DPS is the best most generally applicable single-number metric for a gun.  It's not a perfect measurement, but it's the best we've got without trying to account for tons of variables. 

 

Damage-per-shot is useful to know, but it does not account for fire rate or reload speed of a weapon, so it doesn't tell you much about a gun's true performance except for "can I one-shot this guy or not?"  IE, a gun could do 5,000 damage per shot, but have a clip size of 1 and 30-second reload.  Obviously this gun would be pretty bad, but it's damage-per-shot is fantastic - if that's the only thing you're looking it, this would look like a very nice gun.

 

Damage per-second isn't a perfect metric, but it does account for damage per-shot, fire rate, clip size, and reload speed, so it's a better point of comparison than just damage-per shot.  DPS plus a weapons classificiation (IE "shotgun", "automatic rifle", "sniper-rifle") give you a pretty good overall idea of how a weapon will play.

[It's Not Forma'd, Learn To Say It Right!]

Forma'd is really kind of ok... but if you insist, here are some alternatives that are better grammatically and still less ambiguous than "polarized":

 

1. Use Forma as an adjective rather than a verb, IE "I have a five-forma Akbolto"

2. Each Forma used on a weapon adds a star in the upgrade UI.  How about we just say "stars"?  IE "I have a 5-star Akbolto".  As a bonus, this can be abbreviated as "5*", which is even quicker to type than "forma'd". 

[Your Doing It Wrong: Vauban's Alerts]

I think what they really need to do is add an option into the Warframe Nexus mobile app (and maybe also somewhere in the website) to "respond" to an alert remotely.  "Responding" on the mobile app or the website would give your account a few extra hours (5-10 maybe?) to complete that alert.  That way people who are watching alerts closely would be able to sort of "save" them and complete them later if they aren't available right away.  The ability to "respond" remotely could be limited to a few times per week (1-3?), or maybe start at zero and raise slowly with mastery rank (IE, you get one per week at Rank 3, two per-week at Rank 6, ect).

 

I think this is a pretty fair solution, and would also incentive people to use the Warframe mobile app and its notifications (which are pretty useless right now, because nine times out of ten, they amount to "hey, you just missed getting X!").    

[100% Knock Down From Enermy?]

1) Blocking should prevent knockdowns and stuns.  This simple change would make blocking useful and give us a good skill-based mechanism to avoid some irritating and dangerous enemy mechanics. 

2) As someone above said, there should be a quick recovery QTE to reduce the knockdown time when you are hit.

 

Seriously, I'm a freaking SPACE NINJA.  I shouldn't need to equip a mod to not be a clumsy idiot. 

[New Player Experience Is Bananas.]

I had played the game for around 120 hours before I got my first Serration.  I had most of the solar map unlocked, was almost mastery rank 7, and was doing primarily void missions by that point.  Most people consider that "endgame" - which meant that for the entire "regular" game, I couldn't use rifle weapons because they didn't do enough damage.  I was lucky I'd picked up the Strun Wraith, because otherwise I would not have had a viable primary weapon at all. 

 

New user experience needs a *major* looking at, and drop rates of core/crucial mods is a big part of that. 

[How To Make Saryn's Molt/contagion Useful [Serious]]

I like the suggestions for Contagion, but I think what contagion really needs is *knockdown protection*.  Three out of Four of Saryn's abilities work best if she's in the middle of a group of enemies (Molt, which now explodes, is obviously best placed in a tightly packed group, Contagion is obviously a melee buff, and Miasma is a radial AoE), and Saryn is a "tanky" frame, but right now it's dangerous to run in to a group due to lack of cc protection like Rhino/Trinity/Valkyr get.

 

If Contagion was a melee buff with a knockdown protection component, it would give Saryn a way to go into melee safely to use those other abilities.   If you also give Contagion the ability to pop Venom bubbles, it would then have great synergy with all of her other abilities. 

[New Alarm System Thoughts]

I think what it boils down to is that enemies need several alert states, not just "aware" and "oblivious". 

 

IE

1. Unaware - enemies are only in this state when no alarms have been sounded.  Once an alarm has gone off, enemies can *never* be returned to this state.

2. Alerted - the state enemies should go to if an alarm has been sounded then cancelled.  Enemies are wondering if something is happening and might patrol more and look around a lot more.

3. Alarmed - Maybe they do this after several alarms.  They know you're there, they just don't know where you are.  They actively check hiding spots, arm traps, check the walls, ect.  If enough time passes, maybe they downgrade back to "alerted". 

4. Aggressive - Alarm is sounding - Entire enemy force knows where you are and actively seeks out and attacks you. Cancel the alarm and they downgrade to "alerted" or "alarmed" based on  how many times the alarm has gone off.

 

Right now the entire level seems to share the same state as well.  The above should ideally apply at the room level.  IE, if one guy sees you and yells, the room could go to "aggressive", but unless one of them reaches an alarm panel, the next room would still be unaware.  If you disarm the alarm, but enemies are still alive who saw you, maybe they would stay at at least "alarmed", ect. 

[Lights Flicker, But No One Comes ?]

That happens when space cthulhu is about to spawn. 

[Starter Weapons Seriously Need Buffs]

A few posters  earlier on got this right - the problem is the availability (or lack thereof) of mods early in the game.  Base damage mods are simply too critical for builds to be as rare as they currently are. New players aren't going to have these by the time they need them unless they somehow to know to farm Apollodorus or trade for them (and either way, it contributes to a poor new user experience).

 

IMHO - new players should be given a set of new base damage mods as stand-ins for Serration, Hornet Strike, and Pressure Point.  These new mods could be given as part of a modding/fusion tutorial in Mercury.  They would have 5 ranks (50-60% damage boost at max) and would be Common/cheap to level, and would cost 11 at max rank.  This would effectively make them useless for high level players (this is intentional - we don't want people stacking them with the real base damage mods - 11 points for 50% is too low value for most players to consider it), BUT it would give the newbie weapons the damage they need to carry players through Venus/Earth while simultaneously teaching them the value of base weapon damage.

 

As an aside, all three of the starter weapons should be changed to have an even distribution of Slash/Impact/Puncture damage.  They are too Slash heavy right now, Venus is like hitting a brick wall if you're still using the MK-1. 

[I Really Hope Md Is Not The Next Mission Type To Go.]

The "infinite" mission types are the ones players seem to like though - everyone does Survival and Endless Defense because they are better for farming... I wouldn't be surprised if DE is looking at ways to make the other mission types more open-ended. 

[No...grineer. Please Don't Take The Pluto.]

Project Thethra Spoilers:  The Corpus open a Detron store to anyone who helps them fight back against the Grineer.  The Grineer are wiped out almost instantly.  "Wait.. really?  You've been slaughtering thousands of our people just to get one of these guns?  The guns we mass produce and give to our throwaway solider dudes?  You could have just SAID something (grumble: stupid eyeless voiceless Tenno)!"

[So, Who Thinks We Should Remove Serration, And Weapons Have More Damage With Level Ups?]

While in general I'm in favor of getting rid of Serration/Hornet Strike/ect, I don't think it's as simple as just removing them and adding base damage scaling by rank to the weapon.

 

The problem with that approach is that acquiring and leveling mods are the only form of cross-weapon progression the game currently has.  We're encouraged to switch weapons frequently to improve our mastery, to the point where man weapons are just used as throwaways. Acquiring and leveling the mods required for good endgame builds is a big piece of the game's overall progression system (and the damage mods, being so hard/expensive to level, are a big piece of that). 

 

On the flip side, is it good for the game if every weapon reaches near maximum potential just by ranking to 30 once?  You can run a handful of survival missions and get something to rank 40... does that level or effort warrant a 220% damage increase?  I think players should have to put in a little more effort for such a large boost.

 

Where I do agree with you is that the necessity and high mod cost of these damage mods really restricts player freedom and build variety.  They are absolutely required in every single build, and if fully ranked, take up almost half of the capacity of an un-patatoed weapon. 

 

I have two thoughts on things that might work better:

 

1. Have an aura type slots for weapons that accepts *only* the base-damage mod for that weapon type (Serration, Hornet Strike, ect).  Putting a damage mod in that slot does not cost nor grant any points.  This keeps the mods mechanically intact, but removes them from the build and point equation. 

2. Remove them from the game, and introduce a "weapon mastery" system similar to the current mastery rank system. For instance, you'd have a "pistol mastery" rank that you increase by leveling pistols.  As your pistol mastery rank increases, you get a tiered damage boost that applies to any pistol you use (regardless of its rank), eventually becoming equivalent to having a maxed Serration, ect.    

[How Do You Soma ?]

An ideal build for a Soma with that setup is Molecular Prime, Pull, Miasma, Iron Skin, Rip Line, Overload, and Switch Teleport.  You can do whatever you want with the final slot, but I'd suggest Coolant Leak. 

[Ak Krakken Some Day?]

Only if they actually call it akkrakken.  Release the akkrakken!

[Given Mastery Rank 9 Even Though I Failed The Test]

I saw an interesting bug today while trying to cheese the Mastery 8 -> 9 (stealth) test with a Loki.  When I got to the third branch of the test, I tried to hit Stealth, but hit the Decoy button accidentally, placing a Decoy in the room directly in front of one of the patrolling Grineer.  This caused two issues, at least one of which seems like a bug:

 

1. The decoy caused me to be "detected" and fail the test, forcing me to restart at the beginning of the third branch.  However, after restarting, the decoy was still there, causing me to fail again.  The decoy lasted long enough to cause me to fail all my retries at once, failing the entire test due to one mistake.  This may not be an actual bug, but is an area for improvement:  all active powers should be terminated/dispelled between retries during mastery tests. 

 

2. After failing all of my retries, while the level was ending, my Tenno looped in the stand up/ kneel down animations, almost as though I was still failing and restarting the test.  When I finally landed back on the map screen, I got a "mission complete" popup and was progressed to Mastery Rank 9 (as though I had passed).  Since I obviously had failed the test, this should not have happened. 

[Melee Charge Damage And Damage 2.0]

I really hope this is something they fix in melee 2.0... it's fine to give weapons different attack types, but they should not require different mods to affect damage on the different attacks.  Modding charge speed is fine, but damage, crit, and status should all be linked to the weapon's base types and function off of a single set of mods. 

[Something I'm Sure We Could All Get On Board With Regarding Self Damage]

I think the self-damage you should stay as-is. Weapons like the Penta and Ogris get tons of free extra damage by virtue of the fact that they are naturally AoE.  They need a severe drawback to balance that out.  Yes, it sucks if you blow yourself up because a door closed, or someone ran in front of you, but you can almost always avoid these situations with better planning or situational awareness.  If they happen sometimes by chance... that's the price you pay and the risk you take for using an explosive weapon. 

[Looking For Everyones Ideas, How Do We Make Abilities Scale Properly?]

A few thoughts:

 

1. Turn Focus into something more like Serration - IE a ten-rank mod that goes to MUCH higher values, but is very expensive to rank up.

 

2. Take a page from the City of Heroes playbook - give powers mod slots and introduce power-specific mods.  Power, duration, cost reduction, ect would become power mods rather than Warframe mods (or maybe keep both, with the Warframe versions applying to all powers but having much lower values). 

 

3. Take a page from the World of Warcraft playbook - create an "ability power" stat (called antimatter or void essence or tenno juice or something) and add this to weapons.  Make powers scale off of ability power and introduce weapon mods to increase ability power further.  Players would have to spec their weapons for either weapon damage or ability damage (or try to balance the two).  This could actually lead to some interesting mechanics, like "caster" weapons with high natural ability power, or the idea of switching weapons (to a higher ability power secondary for instance) to use powers.  

 

4. Redesign all offensive powers to have some useful synergy with weapons, or give them all useful utility side-effects to keep them useful late game - Nova's Molecular Prime is a decent example (the damage from the explosions drops off at higher levels, but 200% extra weapon damage will always scale as well as weapons do, and the slow is useful utility). 

[What Do You Guys Think Of Login Awards?]

Credit and Experience should be replaced with consumable percentile Affinity/Credit boost items you equip in your gear slot which are consumed/applied on the next mission you complete successfully.  This way:

  1. Experience boosts will apply to all equipped items

  2. Players have a chance to equip the items they actually want to level, AND when they want to use the boost

  3. The bonus would naturally scale to the player level because they'd depend on which missions you have unlocked

  4. The items should be sellable for credits, so the bonus is not completely useless even for players who have most of the weapons maxed

[What Is Armor 2.0 And Why Should I Care?]

I know a lot of the specific details aren't really known yet, but it really seems to me like this will just make things much more complicated and much harder to balance.

 

Are enemies going to have different vulnerabilities to the different combined damage types, or will the combined damage types act as a superset of the two combined elements?  IE, if I have Blast damage, does it count as dealing both Fire and Cold damage, or is "Blast" truly a unique element and enemies will have a separate "Blast" resistance?  If it's the later, that's a lot of damage types and resistances for players to keep track of... 

 

Are elemental mods going to stop adding damage and just convert your existing damage to that elemental type?  If not, how do you deal with the fact that different elements add different amounts of additional damage for each weapon type (IE, Rifle Fire mods being better than Rifle Cold mods)?  If these mods *are* doing damage conversion, will it be 100%?  IE, my gun stops doing "Impact" and does exclusively "Blast" instead?

 

If I want a slow on my weapon, I have to equip *only* a cold mod, and no other elemental types, sacrificing damage? (unless extra damage is removed from elemental mods)?

 

Are all elemental effects becoming procs only?  Is elemental damage proc-only also?  If so, will a procs-per-minute system or some time of damage/effect scaling going to be used to balance weapons with different fire rates?   

 

If damage is being left on elemental mods, won't people just pick the highest damage combo?  Especially if elemental effects will only be procs? 

 

Some of the elemental procs are AoE and some sound like they will be single target.  How will this be balanced?  IE, are we going to end up with "Gas damage is the best for defense and survival"?

 

Some of the elemental procs do additional damage (DoTs or AoE effects).  How will these be balanced against the effects that do not do extra damage? (IE knockback/confusion)?  Damage is king, and players will min/max to do the highest possible damage.  Why would a player pick every pick "confusion" over "poison AoE"?

 

Are we going to be limited to a maximum of two elemental type mods per weapon?  If not, can we have an alternate way to determine how our elements combine?  As I understand it, if I just throw all four elemental types on the same gun, I'd end up with Blast and Corrosive due to the static combination order. 

 

Is there going to be a major mod/weapon UI update as part of this?  The new system will introduce a lot of confusing new mechanics.  Without reading the forums, how are players going to understand how elements combine, what order they combine in, or what enemy types/vulnerabilities are?  We don't exactly have that today either, but at least today we only have three to memorize.  There will be four times the number of elemental damage types in the new system...

[Change The Hobbled Dragon]

Or play Frost and use globe.

Or play Trinity and use Blessing.

Or use Ash/Loki and ivis when things go sour

Or play Nyx and make everything pay attention to something else.

Or play Vauban and CC everything.

Or play Banshee and push everything away from you.

Or play Nekros and summon an army to fight for you...

Rhino isn't the only answer.

 

No :) I was mostly being sarcastic.  It's easy to compensate for the drawbacks on any frame really, and Derelict is not exactly scary high-level content.  I just find it amusing that the Rhino seems to excel in so many odd situations.  Every time a new mechanic/situation comes up, there's a Rhino for that...  For the record, Saryn is my favorite and buff Contagion. 

[Change The Hobbled Dragon]

My biggest problem with these is that it seems like the best solution all of them is to play Rhino...

 

Bleeding Dragon: Play Rhino and use Iron Skin to compenate

Decaying Dragon: Play Rhino and use Iron Skin to compensate

Hobbled Dragon: Play Rhino and use Charge to move around, Iron Skin to not get shot to death while crawing/rolling to extraction

Extinguished Dragon: Play Rhino to Rhino Rhino Rhino.  Rhino!

[Heavy Grineer Knockdowns Shouldn't Be Unavoidable]

Knockdowns and staggers (*all* of them) should be preventable by blocking the attacks that cause them.  This would go a long, long way towards both improving the state of melee and block. 

[Mastery Rank 8 Test Too Hard For Controller Users]

There actually *already is* an option in-game that makes it so that you don't have to hold jump to wallrun.  I believe it's in the general settings... can't check the name right now.  If you switch this, you only need to hold sprint while wallrunning (you hit jump once as you touch the wall to start wall running, then you can release it.  Hitting jump again will jump off the wall).

 

I played with it for awhile and found it to be a bit buggy (wall detection seemed worse with it set, it was harder to successfully start a wall run, but that may just be because I never quite mastered the timing), but it is an alternative that might make this easier for some.