This isn't by any means new feedback, but I feel it's certainly worth echoing. With the LoS checks on Dante's Tragedy, it no longer has the largest range of any damaging ability in the game and it comes down to the difference between actual range and effective range.
As we know, Tragedy deals its damage in 2 parts. The raw slash damage of the ability itself, and the cashing in of damaging status effects. Now while the raw damage isn't necessarily a low number, beyond base star chart it does very little in comparison to the status cashing as it scales off strength exclusively and not other factors like the damage of the weapons you're using. The maths in the end comes out to the raw damage scaling once over with strength, while the status cashing scales a whopping 4 times over with strength (once for Dark Verse damage, once for Pageflight status vulnerability, once for Pageflight status damage and once for the multiplier of Tragedy itself). This means that once you reach higher levels the raw damage becomes a negligible part of the overall damage, so I think we can safely ignore it for most of the discussion.
Now that we're focusing on only the status cashing, let's figure out where the statuses are coming from. The most likely source is from Dark Verse, as Dante is designed to cast 2 lots of Dark Verse to prime the enemies before hitting them with Tragedy to cash it all in. Since this gameplay loop is an intentional part of his design, we can probably safely assume that for most things this is the only (or at least, biggest) thing that is affecting Tragedy. Dark Verse in itself has a LoS check when you cast it, so we already have 1 line of sight restriction on our damage. Say we move to another part of the tile we're in to cast the second Dark Verse so we can have more coverage on Tragedy. Now in a lot of cases we've lost sight on the original enemies we primed with the first instance, which means casting Tragedy now would mean we no longer hit them and priming them didn't actually go anywhere. Despite the fact that they are within our abilities range and we used them as part of our main intentional gameplay loop, they are excluded because we can't see them. And this isn't an uncommon issue either, there are very very few tiles in the game where you actually have a large enough open space in order to utilize your entire range. Having LoS on Tragedy just means that hitting Dark Verse primed enemies becomes more inconsistent and finnicky, as well as limiting its range to the tile you can currently standing in (and not all of it, at that).
What this creates is an ability where the actual range and effective range differ wildly and where the effective range is constantly changing and never remains consistent. It also means that outside of a few very specific locations (e.g. Open Worlds or that massive open Void tile from ESO), the effective range never equals the actual range. As Rebb and Steve said in Devshorts 12, if they were to remove the LoS they would have to reduce the range of it. But I think what they might not have realized is that adding LoS reduces the range anyway because you can't reach out of the tile you're currently in, so removing LoS but reducing range would actually make the ability better than it currently is. But with all this said, what are some solutions?
1. Do what was mentioned in the Devshort. Remove LoS entirely from Tragedy and reduce the range to 25m to bring it in line with other abilities like Saryns Miasma (not that I think reducing the range is necessary, but if that's what they've said then that's what we go for).
2. Revert the changes entirely back to the original functionality. I highly doubt that they will do this but it is a solution that would fix every problem with the ability in its current state.
3. Add a marking functionality to Dark Verse so that as long as the status effects from it remain on an enemy, they will be hit by Tragedy regardless of whether we can see them or not. I actually think this is maybe the best solution for both us and DE, as it allows us to actually use our Dark Verse primes consistently but removes the map wide nuke that people were potentially complaining about in lower levels. Only problem with this is that the actual vs effective range dilemma is still there, just to a lesser extent.
Tragedy is a prime example of how LoS needs to be implemented very carefully in Warframe (if at all) as it can (and often will) lead to inconsistent effects and fiddly gameplay. I do hope that DE takes this into consideration for future changes.
This isn't by any means new feedback, but I feel it's certainly worth echoing. With the LoS checks on Dante's Tragedy, it no longer has the largest range of any damaging ability in the game and it comes down to the difference between actual range and effective range. As we know, Tragedy deals its damage in 2 parts. The raw slash damage of the ability itself, and the cashing in of damaging status effects. Now while the raw damage isn't necessarily a low number, beyond base star chart it does very little in comparison to the status cashing as it scales off strength exclusively and not other factors like the damage of the weapons you're using. The maths in the end comes out to the raw damage scaling once over with strength, while the status cashing scales a whopping 4 times over with strength (once for Dark Verse damage, once for Pageflight status vulnerability, once for Pageflight status damage and once for the multiplier of Tragedy itself). This means that once you reach higher levels the raw damage becomes a negligible part of the overall damage, so I think we can safely ignore it for most of the discussion. Now that we're focusing on only the status cashing, let's figure out where the statuses are coming from. The most likely source is from Dark Verse, as Dante is designed to cast 2 lots of Dark Verse to prime the enemies before hitting them with Tragedy to cash it all in. Since this gameplay loop is an intentional part of his design, we can probably safely assume that for most things this is the only (or at least, biggest) thing that is affecting Tragedy. Dark Verse in itself has a LoS check when you cast it, so we already have 1 line of sight restriction on our damage. Say we move to another part of the tile we're in to cast the second Dark Verse so we can have more coverage on Tragedy. Now in a lot of cases we've lost sight on the original enemies we primed with the first instance, which means casting Tragedy now would mean we no longer hit them and priming them didn't actually go anywhere. Despite the fact that they are within our abilities range and we used them as part of our main intentional gameplay loop, they are excluded because we can't see them. And this isn't an uncommon issue either, there are very very few tiles in the game where you actually have a large enough open space in order to utilize your entire range. Having LoS on Tragedy just means that hitting Dark Verse primed enemies becomes more inconsistent and finnicky, as well as limiting its range to the tile you can currently standing in (and not all of it, at that). What this creates is an ability where the actual range and effective range differ wildly and where the effective range is constantly changing and never remains consistent. It also means that outside of a few very specific locations (e.g. Open Worlds or that massive open Void tile from ESO), the effective range never equals the actual range. As Rebb and Steve said in Devshorts 12, if they were to remove the LoS they would have to reduce the range of it. But I think what they might not have realized is that adding LoS reduces the range anyway because you can't reach out of the tile you're currently in, so removing LoS but reducing range would actually make the ability better than it currently is. But with all this said, what are some solutions? 1. Do what was mentioned in the Devshort. Remove LoS entirely from Tragedy and reduce the range to 25m to bring it in line with other abilities like Saryns Miasma (not that I think reducing the range is necessary, but if that's what they've said then that's what we go for). 2. Revert the changes entirely back to the original functionality. I highly doubt that they will do this but it is a solution that would fix every problem with the ability in its current state. 3. Add a marking functionality to Dark Verse so that as long as the status effects from it remain on an enemy, they will be hit by Tragedy regardless of whether we can see them or not. I actually think this is maybe the best solution for both us and DE, as it allows us to actually use our Dark Verse primes consistently but removes the map wide nuke that people were potentially complaining about in lower levels. Only problem with this is that the actual vs effective range dilemma is still there, just to a lesser extent. Tragedy is a prime example of how LoS needs to be implemented very carefully in Warframe (if at all) as it can (and often will) lead to inconsistent effects and fiddly gameplay. I do hope that DE takes this into consideration for future changes.
