[I think self-damage is a design mistake.]

20 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

Now that I'm back and have a bit more time to go through this...

The entire opening post are the reasons, and your "fallacies" actually aren't. Something being subjective isn't a fallacy. Allies diving in front of you isn't a fallacy. Glitches in the terrain aren't a fallacy. Burden of proof doesn't apply in the way you're asking it to here. It's a conversation about "Should this be here?" and not "Can we prove X or Y?" But if you'd like to talk about fallacies, how about starting with self-damage as somehow being a "balancing factor" actually being non-sequitur. You can't balance how much damage X weapon does with a binary Y/N for "Should it inflict self-damage?" There isn't a numerical value that can decide that, because it's entirely arbitrary. That's the whole point here. Self-damage is entirely arbitrary.

Given the extremely low usage of these kinds of weapons, it seems that you're the one trying to force your inclination on everyone else. It's clear that the majority of people dislike it.

With regard to your comments about the Tonkor nerfs, simply adjusting the stats would not have stopped people from using it. It was the addition of self-damage that destroyed that weapon. Let's be clear and honest on that point, at least. If we can't even agree on that, I don't know how I can recognize you in this conversation.

As for it being consistent, I don't know if you're intentionally being disingenuous about it, or if it was merely an oversight due to lack of thought, but there's nothing consistent about how self-damage is applied. [Concealed Explosives] and [Thunderbolt] both inflict self harm, but [Combustion Beam] and [Acid Shells] don't. Pox doesn't inflict self damage, but Castanas do. Launchers can cause it with Blast damage, but Blast elemental procs from other weapons don't. This is a laughable proposition.

 

There's plenty more I could go into here, but I think that's enough for you to chew on for now.

It's cute you think you're bringing new and amazing arguments to the table when you aren't. You're not willing to listen to the opposing side as evidenced by your many antagonistic responses in the thread. But let's give you your dues anyway.

Balancing factor - There isn't one number and I never claimed that, so nice strawman. What it is, however, is one archetypal option to balance the (intended) superior AOE output. Shotguns have spread (not every pellet hits every target) and falloff (not full damage unless close). The Ignis has its continuous nature (leaving you exposed as you roll through the DPS), also has falloff, and substandard ammo economy. An explosive you get the full damage to every target in its radius at whatever distance you shoot. The archetype of explosives has a natural balance factor to that in the personal risk.
Does it have to have that? No, but that means it must be reined back in somewhere else, see Cautious Shot sacrificing damage off the top. People like to cite TF2 especially relating to the Tonkor's old and redundant 'gimmick', but that still hurts those players unless they choose the weapon that deals no damage to others either.

The majority - Hello, bandwagon fallacy. Also, vocal / non-vocal rule applies here: the ones who dislike will always be louder than those that are happy or even ambivalent. You're not forced to use these weapons, so it doesn't matter if they're niche use, or only enjoyed by a sub-50% portion of the population. There is no reason to enforce complete mechanical change. Calling for rebalance is fine. I've agreed that's valid. Removing the entire mechanic for personal dislikes is not.

Consistency - If you care to read again, I specified conventional explosives being the baseline of consistency. A rubber chicken fart bomb is not a conventional explosive. A shock payload from Castanas is not a conventional explosive. Abstract Blast damage doesn't necessarily make it conventional explosive either; you failed to cite Quanta cubes, but that's some weird energy shenanigan and not a good old chemical reaction going boom despite the Blast output.

• Angstrum
• Kulstar
• Ogris
• Tonkor (eventually)
• Thunderbolt (explosive arrowheads)
• Concealed Explosives (self explanatory)
• Talons
• Penta

I'm probably missing something, but that's old crowd of basic consistency. The Tonkor was the first obvious conventional explosive to defy the trend, and it was eventually fixed.

Thematic consistency was an argument I had to field recently as well, why are so many of these explosives not 'smart'? Well, most of the weapons come from enemy factions. There's the Grineer, who hack-job everything and literally strap bombs to bad clones and throw them in. They don't care much for safety protocol. Then there's the Corpus, who are corporate money-grubbers, and can you really say you've never heard corporate greed cause a skimping on safety precautions? Infested would even make sense - they're a hive, good of the many, not the individual. The only factions that would likely eschew dumb-firing on a baseline level are the Tenno factions and the Sentients (since they currently 'cannot reproduce' locally).

Now let's bring it back around. There's a gameplay factor to consider since we're not Gritty Realism. Where does this fit in?

Control factor.

Can you kill yourself out of your control? This is why the Cyanex was absolved of self-damage. The homing self-damaging projectiles could be shot to a 'safe' distance and simply double back to kill the player unexpectedly. This was deemed as not reasonable and self-damage removed.
This is also one facet of why the Simulor was instead mechanically changed - the AOE radius of the 'explosion' exceeded the firing range. The player would invariably kill themselves if it was simply granted self-damage, so another solution was found to bring it down from its throne alongside the Tonkor.

Everything else is predictable, direct, or triggered - all things within your control. All things where you make the mistake.

 

Now, I'm sure you'll cite some of the current balance issues like @Aldain did, but that's just bad balance that needs fixing in its own right. The Arca Plasmor is the Tonkor of shotguns - it removes a core drawback and becomes overbearing as a result. Catchmoon is that in your pocket, but even other kitguns are crowding out essentially every other secondary the way Tonkor/SySim did in their heyday. DE is applying riven disposition nerfs to things that win without rivens, it's shortsighted.

I can't say I agree that the Ignis is any 'better' than an explosive, though - as I stated earlier, it does still have its own inherent drawbacks. Continuous fire is legitimately a limitation in some ways - ever tried to kill an Ancient Healer lost in a crowd of other infested? All those AOE damage ticks reflect healing on the Ancient way faster than you can damage it directly. An explosive's singular direct damage strike does the job.

[I think self-damage is a design mistake.]

6 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

None of those are reasons why self-damage should be a thing, and I'm about to leave so I don't have time to go through your post point by point right now. I'll address more of it later if you have a good argument to provide to that why. Just as a head start: Almost no other weapons can inflict self-self harm, so the fact that "explosives" do seems entirely arbitrary.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof You're making the claim self-damage should be removed, so onus is on you. Regardless:

It exists, it's consistent (among conventional explosive ordnance), it has basis in real-life analogues, and it's a common balancing factor to radial AOE weaponry. We also saw the negative, overbearing influence that happened when the drawback was absent in the Tonkor/Simulor meta.
Hard logic aside, some people just have a laugh running the risk of murdering themselves through misuse. The weapons don't have to be meta, they don't even have to be commonplace. There's just no real reason to not have the mechanic at all, for the variety and for those types of players.

I've provided actual problem factors - ally hitbox and linear scaling - along with solutions for them, while having to explain that no, the scenery didn't jump out in front of your rocket, you just took a questionable shot that went awry.
Of course, I do it too when I'm being incautious. I just accept that maybe, say, jumping around inside a Snowglobe isn't the best environment to be using risky explosives, so if I clip just outside the Globe enough that the rocket blows up in my face, that's actually my fault.

I'm not the type just saying 'lol git gud'. If you don't enjoy the risk, the effort invested to internalise their safest use, the occasional mishap putting you flat on your back.. You just don't have to put yourself through it. There are alternatives. Doesn't mean you should force that personal disinclination on everyone else.

[I think self-damage is a design mistake.]

Here I am again to dissect these same old logic-leaping conclusions.

1) This affects every weapon, doubly so for projectiles, doubly-again for (dumb-firing only) explosives. It's a valid issue to raise, but it doesn't mean remove self-damage, it means fix the bad ally collisions so everything is more comfortable. Bows might not be popular, but everyone who does or used to use them can attest that they've had their share of perfectly lined-up shots eaten by an unexpected ally on several occasions.

2) False assessment. It is almost always player error. You have all the information by the time you've mastered the weapon to make judgement calls on when and where you use it. If you try to use it with Infested nearby, and a Charger runs up into your line of fire, that's on you. If you use it in tight quarters or try to shoot narrowly around obstacles, and it clips them to put you in range, that's you that decided to take the shot with a narrow margin of error (on your part, or the hitboxes).
That's not to say the risk-reward ratio is completely perfect as it stands, but it doesn't mean you completely remove the risk, isn't that right, old Tonkor meta? Rebalancing is an acceptable solution, with some sort of diminishing returns to accommodate the fact we need to scale output far more than we scale our own defenses. The real issue is that the damage out is linearly related to self-damage at the moment. I even came up with an equation for an example of this, with variables that could be tweaked according to how the risk needed to scale up.

3) Subjective nonsense. The Tonkor wasn't 'fun', it was overpowered. It had no risks and the best reward. Every other explosive suffered because the Tonkor wasn't simply given self-damage from the start - they all used to auto-headshot, but the Tonkor made DE remove that, and therefore halved other explosive weapons' damage output without compensation.
The Tonkor was statistically nerfed at the same time as its self-damage was rightfully given. That's why it took such a complete nosedive. Just because you don't like self-damage, and many don't want to risk self-damage in their arsenal, doesn't mean the archetype should be removed outright. We have hundreds of weapons - you can just use something else and let those who are more willing to run the risk use the dangerous explosives.

4) Loaded language. You can use explosives without Cautious if you actually put the effort and attention into doing so. You have the option of Cautious if you want to limit the risk of instantaneous suicide when you make a mistake. Especially if the equation is altered to become non-linear - Cautious in its current percentage would be far more reduction than necessary, unless you're running around as an unmodded Loki.

[Change Concentrated Arrow as Exilus?]

9 hours ago, BlindStalker said:

So is Ivara the single wrench or is she the toolbox? I'm obviously bias, and I would say she's the toolbox... just that some times, there are really weird tools inside her toolbox that function in a different way that one would conventionally expect.

I don't want her to be associated as an AFK frame either, that will be even worst (it's people's actions which unfortunately give that impression of her).

--

Actually, I was referring to how others interpret Ivara when they first build for her. Like what ShortCat basically said earlier in this thread: " I said people usually discard high PS and Artemis in favor of cheaper invisibility. At least I hardly see an Ivara using her exsalted bow."  I'm not saying I think its the dump stat on Ivara, I'm saying that I think others thing strength is the dump stat on her. To be fair, I also have the build that dump stats strength, but that build has real purposes for Ivara, to me, since I have sitautions where I need it. (I actually usually don't like to dump stat on Ivara at all, but I have a few select builds that make sacrifices)

She's the AFK frame in the sense that standing AFK is the sole thing Prowl does better than other stealth frames. Any stealth frame can indefinite-stealth with an appropriate build from only Energy Siphon - including Ivara through cloak arrows but not prowl because channelling removes regen - but only Ivara's involves her being crippled or restricted to an area. So, she can stand in an area without upkeep for much longer while Prowling. Octavia even maintains the stealth with no recasting window while still having the energy regen to do it forever and being fully mobile.

--

I have three Ivara loadouts, but i'd consider the Strength dump my 'main' one:

1) Range (near-max) / Duration (high) / Efficiency (positive) / Strength (dump) - Making the most out of the control and utility of Quiver, while still being very Prowl-friendly when needed (although looting is a pain due to sub-neutral strength). Still has defensive mods so I can take glancing hits without having to fat-roll everywhere in prowl. Can't really bow worth a damn. Can still Navigate those highly effective Quiver arrows though the damage bonus is negligible.

2) Duration (near-max) / Range (high) / Efficiency (neutral) / Strength (neutral) + Primed Flow - Stealy build made of pure paper. Never not prowl, loots properly and as reliably as possible. Artemis Bow viable but not fantastic due to Duration over Efficiency and only baseline Strength. Probably the most 'afk' of the three, but dies to a stiff breeze. Also used when I want to Bow things but can't afford to be exposed ever. Navigator use is limited because duration kills the scaling, but Quiver's still fairly okay despite the weaker range than build 1.

3) Strength (near-max) / Efficiency (as much as possible after Blind Rage) / Range (coincidentally neutral) / Duration (absolute minimum) - This loadout exists to maximise Artemis Bow and/or Navigator. Playing the Duration antisynergy for the latter means it's a dangerous game since it's not viable to sit in either stealth without bleeding out energy. Used to hunt eidolons with A-Bow.

9 hours ago, BlindStalker said:

Ah sorry, I do recall as well you doing bounties as well with Ivara. Amesha is great too I agree for the excavator bounties on orb vallis. I know we can't cloak the drone, but at least we can cloak the coil drive, I feel like we were purposely limited to being able to cloak only one teammate object like that over all the bounties.

Actually, I think the Amesha in open-worlds is a perfect analogue to Ivara's current state of being.

Amesha at its core is a godly powerful archwing with basically infinite energy, the ability to perfect-defend any objective unless it dies in one melee strike (absorbing gunfire to generate constant health restoration), and can easily restore health to the players (which is carried back to the Frame when you jump out)...

But you don't see everyone using it in the open worlds all the time. Why? Because those neverending disarming rockets make it an inconvenient pain in the arse to do so.

Just like Ivara. You can use the Amesha to some amazingly functional outcomes, but you have to suffer the inconveniences of that rocket spam. Most people don't bother. They'd rather just use the Itzal to get around quicker and forget the rest of the wings and their kits entirely instead of getting frustrated by being knocked out of it every ten seconds.

7 hours ago, taiiat said:

frankly Elemental Sandstorm is the best Augment that Inaros has. not that it's great, but because the other two are just pointless. like, honestly what is Negation Swarm going to do that's ACTUALLY useful. bypass Magnetic? oh boy i can barely even keep my pants on.
Handspring already basically deletes Enemy CC from the game and it fits into Exilus while Negation Swarm doesn't. and there aren't any Status Effects that impact Inaros in any meaningful way. Negation Swarm was dead on arrival.

I think the general playerbase would disagree with you on that one. I don't use it myself because I'd rather Inaros be my set-and-forget tank frame, but I'm quite sure a large portion of Inaros players use Negation Swarm in their build - and very few use the others.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it protect against all status effects, not just knockdowns like your Handspring? I can imagine not being Slashed through the armour, annoyed with Cold slowdowns, Magnetised when you need to pocket-sand your health back, Irradiated and kill/be killed by your allies, all as well as not being knocked over, would actually be quite convenient so long as you keep an eye on the stack to recharge yourself.

[Change Concentrated Arrow as Exilus?]

50 minutes ago, DatDarkOne said:

Here's the interesting thing about Navigator and punchthru.  If the weapon has the punchthru mod or innate punchthru, Navigator pretty much makes that punchthru infinite without the augment.  Just try it with a Bow and you'll be surprised at just how many enemies you can kill with just one arrow without the augment.  

As for the shooting noisy weapons and decloaking, adding a Hush mod doesn't really hurt the overall damage of the weapon when you factor in the Prowl Bonus.  Then there is also Cloak Arrow which doesn't decloak with noisy weapons.  So, she can afford it if you actually need to use a noisy weapon.  It just requires applying just a tad bit of logic and Common Sense.

Ivara is a tactical frame.  Probably the most tactical frame in the game.  This means that she isn't quite as simple to use in some things.  This is an aspect of her that I like, while some may view that as punishing.  

One other benefit that Infiltrate gives just happens to be when in the Void maps with the orb lasers and other things.  Think of the times on Void defense mission when someone activates the turrets.  That issue isn't a problem with Infiltrate.  Hehe  😀 Don't get me wrong as I completely understand the augment is situational, but it just fits my playstyle way more than any of the other augments.  

 

My loadout used to be Ivara-Dread-Brakk-Sheev, I've spent more than my fair share of time navigating with bows. Depends plenty on the unit, your angle of attack and where you connect, etc. You can still run out of punch-through quickly enough (pre-augment change, at least). Suggesting indefinite punch-through is just a means to an end, and it's not like the Zenith doesn't exist. Even if it's 3m terrain but infinite enemy punch-through (see: Ignis mechanic) that'd work handy and avoid people Navigating off into places their camera probably shouldn't go.

It seems I wasn't clear enough on what I meant regarding the decloak from noisy weapons - I meant 'cannot afford' in the sense of being stealth-reliant for survival. She can't afford to be seen and shot as a result of that interaction - which no other stealth suffers as badly - especially when you account for the fact she still takes that extra energy drain from every damage tick while Prowl is active, even if she's temporarily visible. It adds up no matter how efficient your build, as I'm sure you've experienced from misadventures with Venom Eximi and Arc Traps occasionally.

I Hush my guns myself, but it shouldn't be necessary for Ivara alone over other stealth-centric frames. The headshot bonus inside Prowl is a nice-to-have, but we're discussing Concentrated Arrow because heads aren't 100% reliable to hit in every case, right?

[Change Concentrated Arrow as Exilus?]

11 hours ago, BlindStalker said:

Except Ivara can't steal loot from bosses (including mini-bosses), seriously, she lost that ability somewhere around 3 months after she was released.

Not to be a jerk or anything, but the only one who's actually slightly worst at farming for resources is Atlas, because he doesn't have a 100% guaranteed drop, but also because his looting augment doesn't work on bosses either. Sorry Atlas mains, I'm not trying to throw you under the bus.

Here's what Ivara can actually prowl for which might potentially be useful:

- War blueprint parts (and well those funny sentient mods) - from sentients spawned on Lua or elsewhere. I'm surprised that she can actually prowl from these dudes, these dudes are surprisingly not coded as bosses nor mini-bosses.

- Batteries for excavation drills for excavation mode - surprisingly, she can actually get two batteries off of one carrier (just like any other looting frame), whether that's considered useful or not is a different story as excavation drill health doesn't scale. ut who else besides me actually use Ivara for solo orb vallis bounties

- Condition overload farming - simply because this mod drops from a trash mob unit on Uranus, and since Ivara is the only frame who can officially stack with any other looting frame, in this really niche scenario, she can actually contribute to getting another roll off of this trash unit (actually it drops from the new nightwave stuff as well, but I honestly haven't touched that).

- Supposedly she can steal, from the enemies that drop the rare mods on Jupiter gas city's secret rooms (like Kavat's grace from the Amalgam Cinder Machinist), but I have never tested this out yet in-game, so I'm very tentative about saying it.

There's just sadly, very few niche scenarios where Ivara's prowl looting thief abilities actually work.

This is what I was thinking too. Prowl loot is only useful on individual priority targets as @taiiat said, but it's still incredibly inconvenient at best, if not outright non-working for most of them.

Sentients are the main genuine use-case still allowed in the game. I can also confirm that the Augmented-Amalgam units in the labs can also be stolen from. Everything else.. you're better off using either Hydroid for the guarantee (that still works right up to Hemocytes in Plague Star), Khora for better point control while looting, or Nekros for convenience.

I think you could still argue Atlas has a comparable edge over Ivara on the bottom rung of the ladder because Ore Gaze is instant (now, at least) and an AOE - not one target at a time after a delay.

(I use Ivara on the Vallis too! Bring the Amesha along for object-defending Extractors and those drones she can't cloak for some reason, and it's all gravy.)

11 hours ago, BlindStalker said:

It's kind of why I want Ivara to get a developer review... key emphasis, review, not rework. Just to re-examine Ivara's kit and give it some updating or polishing. Start off basic, just nudge her base stat numbers such as changing the cloak radius of quiver from 2.5m to maybe 3.5m or 4m. Not something insanely high, but just something more comfortable. Or sleep arrow radius from 6m to something like 8m or 9m, since everyone loves sleep arrow, probably one of her most favoured arrows out of quiver. Making the Noise Arrow actually have some real practical usage outside of gimmicky riven challenges (now that it's dead on Interception) since realistically noise arrow has no practical usage in multiplayer situations (because enemies become alerted by visible teammates), noise arrow actually can't work on game modes like survival or excavation because enemies are put into always 'alerted state'.

As I said earlier in the thread, all her abilities and augments both need a pass over to stop limiting her so much. No other frames have so many hindering factors tying their kit down. Why does Ivara's? Your assessment of Quiver is on point with mine, too. As Ivara 'mains' we're in agreement here.

10 hours ago, DatDarkOne said:

That said, Concentrated Arrow is only a slightly better augment than that trash Piercing Navigator.  An augment that is made pointless because of how Navigator really works.  

Empowering Quiver- This one can be used in a practical manner on Defense type missions.  As these are the only mission types wear you can camp on a dashwire long enough for the augment to be worthwhile.  It would be handy for eidolon hunts IF there was a decent point to mount a Dashwire.  Which in some ways put this augment in the same category as Infiltrate for me. 

I honestly feel the other two augments being not really worth the trouble except for enthusiasts or tryhards.  I label myself as a Tryhard Ivara Enthusiast as I did build a whole new frame just to fairly test an augment.  Hehe

I'd rather have the Power Of Three conclave augment for Quiver than Empowering Quiver, personally. I'm not sure what the actual arc of the triple-shot is, but I can imagine that being useful for Cloaking a bigger area instantly for more freedom of movement or Sleeping a more spread-out enemy group.

Piercing Navigator actually got a tiny bit of QoL in the recent pass, since they added some desperately needed bonus punch-through to it. It's still destroyed by the absolutely unseen anywhere else indefinite cost scaling of the base ability. Yes, we have Valkyr and Ember who reach double-cost but they cap there. Yes, we have drain-per second channels and drain-per-target/distance abilties on a few frames but they are linear. In those cases, too, those frames are actively moving and (often) killing while that drain goes on (sleepy Equinox notwithstanding) which means they are able to gather up Energy to keep going.
Compare Navigator, which makes your Warframe stand in place and halts energy generation, both of which work to hard cap the amount of time you can actually spend Navigating already. Why does the ability have to scale up cost?
As an improvement I'd like to see the Duration antisynergy and scaling cost addressed on the baseline of the ability, and because you're already limited by immobile channelling, infinite punch through on the projectile. Let Ivara go all Guardians of the Galaxy Yondu on our enemies. Wouldn't that be just a ton of fun?

Infiltrate I've already described as being an absolute waste of design space with irrelevant and insulting 'benefits'. If they're going to keep some limiting factors on Prowl, at least let the augment affect the ones that matter. For the cost of the mod slot, let her parkour. Don't expose her when shooting noisy weapons. She can't afford it. Loki doesn't even get revealed but he still gets to hush the damn things with his to avoid enemy blindfire.

And then we come to Concentrated Arrow, subject of the thread, which if nothing else just needs to concentrate the bloody arrows already. As hilarious as it would be to combine the Piercing Navigator suggestions with un-Punchthrough-restricted Concentrated Arrow including the headsplosions, maybe that would be a bit excessively powerful. But it would be amazing.

8 hours ago, taiiat said:

which then, Loki is boring. as. hell. the entire Warframe is summarized as you walk around Invisible, spam Disarm like it's going out of style, and maybe Teleport around for some big rooms to move a bit faster.
there's just no depth. and that's what happens when Warframes don't have features that give them a reason to deal with all of the Ability Stats. it's not the sole reason, but most certainly a contributing factor. newer Warframes commit sins like this too. the only removal of Ability Stat desires that i've seen be successful is Nidus with Efficiency. freeing up a Slot or two is pretty nice, but it comes with a very serious cost so it works.

honestly, i'd prefer if all Warframes were 'irrelevant' when talking strictly through the lens of whether uneducated Players cream their pants about how __ is "OP" and has to be used for __. i'd much rather Warframes be toolboxes with legs than a single wrench that's purpose made for people to AFK in one Gamemode.

Loki has his perks. I enjoy playing the drone carrier during Plague Star, skilful and efficient Switch Teleports (and Decoying to get ahead) are a blast for me.

It'd be even more handy in those big open-world areas if Decoy's cast range wasn't hard capped. I have over 220m teleport range but a sad 50 on Decoy..

 

Half the problem is, if you analogise Warframes to tools.. where other Warframes are hammers with nails, Ivara's a welding torch. The function of attaching A to B is there, situationally and arguably better, but it's a dangerous thing with added drawbacks; you're going to screw yourself over a lot worse if you aren't working around the issues it brings. You might just bruise yourself with a misused hammer, but you're very likely to blind and sear yourself using a welding torch without protective equipment.

[Change Concentrated Arrow as Exilus?]

3 hours ago, DatDarkOne said:

Hehe, interestingly enough my main Tenchu Assassin Ivara build is built around Infiltrate.  😀 It works because I found out a very long time ago that I can get away with only having 95% duration as long as my efficiency is max or very close to it.  It's a build I use for everything except the open world maps.  My second Ivara is just for those.  

Other than the largely irrelevant security laser thing, the only 'net positive' Infiltrate affords you is going faster on ziplines and her Dashwires when in prowl versus non-prowl.

With the current history it's not at all unlikely they address that as a 'bug' and make baseline Prowled movement glacial on there too.

2 hours ago, ShortCat said:

I didn't say you should not build for PS for Artemis Bow builds. I said people usually discard high PS and Artemis in favor of cheaper invisibility. At least I hardly see an Ivara using her exsalted bow.
My point was, that Frames can require broad stat destribution due to their kits. As such, you either specialize; or spread stats in favor of an extensive tool kit.

That's more to do with the needs of the rest of the kit than anything bad about Artemis itself:

Unless augmented, no Quiver arrows benefit from strength at all. They do, however, have a relatively mediocre radius in Cloak and Sleep. Overextended is valued, limiting Strength. Almost every Ivara player who dared to run without bonus range has probably been shot at because their Sentinel peeked up outside of a Cloak bubble hiding the frame.

Navigator has the inherent issue with Duration anti-synergy and the uniquely indefinite scaling of energy cost over time. Although it likes Strength (and Transient Fortitude happens to work with the antisynergy) it's relegated to niche/specialised use because it doesn't otherwise play nice with the kit.

Prowl likes everything but Strength as well - although for ~Ivara reasons~ you have to compensate that Overextended negative or you get dud-steals on already the worst loot-bonus ability in the game.

You can make an 'average' strength build with still fairly decent output, but the premiums are far too costly to have higher-end, less-efficient builds work out.

 

2 hours ago, DatDarkOne said:

This is only because people seem to think Prowl can go over the Efficiency limit.  It can't.  Once you have max efficiency, you have the lowest drain possible on Prowl.  this is with a Duration of just 100%.  So having max efficiency and then having high duration just for Prowl is just wasting stat points.  Drain will never go lower than .25.  Once you have a drain of .25, then more duration is only effecting Cloak, Sleep Arrows, and Prowl steal time.  The latter I never really depended on for long survivals anyway as keeping your kill rate up with increase energy Orb drops with the same energy per time ratio.  Having Vacuum to suck up orbs as a distance makes this even easier. 

Prowl is an opaque mess, though. Not only do you have the drain per second to worry about, you have to consider the extra costs and implications with stats, there's no wonder people get confused. Remember how long it was before the fail-steal chance was even shown in the game?

The listed energy cost is the cost for standing still.

Double that cost for the crime of not being AFK (moving around).

Add a flat cost of 2 energy (not affected by the channelling Duration/Efficiency codepend, only flat Efficiency) for every melee strike - including each strike in multi-hit finishers.

Add a flat cost of 10 energy (as above) for every tick of damage ever suffered while Prowling. Arc traps, DoT statuses (special mention for Venom Eximi and other stack-happy status afflicting foes), everything counts.

If you care about the steal, you need duration and range for it to accomplish anything without losing targets all the time, and obviously desire to meet the 100% strength threshold to avoid those random failures

 

So yeah - you can't just overlook any one stat on Ivara without falling afoul of the senseless limiters.

[Change Concentrated Arrow as Exilus?]

10 hours ago, DatDarkOne said:

This is something I said multiple times when the augment came out.  But every one was like it's an improvement, while completely not realizing that it's actually a huge nerf.  The augment makes it so that you can't use it on Bosses or any other enemy that requires a weak spot that isn't the head. Then it requires a massive amount of power range just to make it worth the energy being used.  

I built a second Ivara just so I could make a build just for Concentrated Arrow without messing up my main build. I did this just so I could have a fair assessment of this augment.  If you normally use multishot on Artemis, you would have 14 arrows.  CA augment only does 1/14th of normal artemis build should you not get a headshot.  Because of the headshot requirement, you will end up wasting energy if you're with a group because they will more than likely kill the target you're aiming at.  If you're solo, then the augment isn't really needed at all.  It's only real value IMO is just having weird fun.  

I still recommend that the augment be changed so that it really does concentrate the arrows.  Then multishot will mean something while the augment is equipped.  

4 hours ago, DatDarkOne said:

The really interesting or hard part came when modding for Artemis Bow to make better use of Concentrated Arrow.  This was due to all 3 of my Ivaras all sharing the same single Artemis Bow.  This one is still a work in progress.  

Spoiler

 

That screenshot - seeing an Eidolon hunter loadout for the bow - pleases me. When Plains dropped I took Ivara out for my first hunts, solo, with a beefed up Bow (albeit through primary mods at the time) to tackle the synovias. Worked pretty well. Kept the Prominence sigil on her in memory.

The trouble is that projectile multishot gets weird with certain crits and buffs, spreading out multipliers to a far lesser effect, and the bigger Eidolons are tougher to get up close land a full spread in the right spots.
^{(You might notice when using standard A-Bow that crits and non-crits actually hit the same per individual shot and apparently inconsistent between shots; the number of crit rolls is determined on firing and the net damage is then spread evenly to each projectile.)}

Concentrated Arrow, if it did what the name suggested, would not only solve that problem entirely by combining the full spread into a single projectile, but it would also positively synergise with Navigator's multiplier and make an impressively potent build for that purpose instead of being the same regardless of the augment - you only get to control and therefore multiply a single arrow, a fraction of the total output.

Full 7-18* Artemis spread condensed into one shot, multiplied by up to 15x-16x on Navigator? That's spicy. But we can't, because.. Ivara problems.

_{* Vigilante Armaments in addition to Split Chamber}

I'm aware we have the Navi-Castanas Eidolon hunter build, but that's just as oddball, honestly. It would be amusing to see what ludicrous damage would come from combining the crit damage buff there in this hypothetical as well.

57 minutes ago, taiiat said:

it's Loadouts that are centralizing around Infiltrate that get really strange and complicated, tbh. since you don't just want good Strength there, you want.... all of it. but still lots of Duration/Efficiency and Range is still useful.

Build around Infiltrate? That mod is a catastrophic waste of design space, much less something to actively build around.

Ivara shouldn't be painfully crippled in Prowl, no other stealth frames suffer that (plus all the other Prowl caveats), so the movement speed factor is irrelevant - should be baked back into the baseline.

Ignoring lasers is basically irrelevant to anyone who actually farmed Ivara naturally, especially if she could actually move normally while in Prowl. It wouldn't save enough time over just going around them same as the players were doing before they got her (unless Limbo).

Infiltrate should be scrapped for something that actually adds something productive, not just easing arbitrary limitations.

[Enemies react to invisible frame... possible Bug? [Fixed]]

Can't confirm. Just happened to be doing a bounty earlier and my silenced Rubico wasn't getting the enemies to shoot my hidden Ivara.

I do think that the AI needs an update in how it reacts to stealthed threats though. Even when the weapon isn't silenced (for non-Ivaras who stay unseen) the enemies shouldn't know with pinpoint precision where the sound came from, they should have some error margins when it comes to the exact distance and angle relative to themselves.

Wouldn't help much against the AOE units or grenades, but if all the more precise enemies have to go on is a 'bang', then you'd think they'd only have about a one in three chance of pointing in the right area, or would fire a spray of bullets in an uncertain arc hoping to hit the concealed target, right?

[Change Concentrated Arrow as Exilus?]

1 hour ago, SpringRocker said:

The biggest issue is that it's weird to try to fit in:
- The weapon change is a side-grade (yes, it's cool and AOE versus semi-wide angle. However it takes a non-exilus mod slot and requires headshots to use it).
- Takes a slot off a build that could be used for something else more useful.
- If you're putting on Concentrated Arrow you might as well build around it, because you're already committed (sounds kind of silly compared to normal builds, but it isn't really a mod for a "normal build").

The biggest issue is the augment itself. As generally happens with anything related to Ivara's kit, it's got an un-Warframe-like caveat that, in this case, makes it actively hamstring your capability if not making use of its (limited) function.

It's a 'sidegrade' if you build around it specifically and hit heads constantly. Any time you can't or don't hit heads, it's a 6/7ths damage nerf to your Artemis bow.

Because Concentrated Arrow doesn't.. concentrate the arrows into a single shot with the sum total of damage. It just gives you one of the natural 7 arrows, with that one arrow's worth of damage, then adds a headshot bomb effect onto that pitiful projectile.

 

Ivara needs overhauling to get rid of all these weird limitations she has that other Warframes don't have in any sort of equivalence. Base abilities and augments, the whole lot.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Are you sure you tried?.

Tried, yes. Succeeded? Eh, not much, but you've deliberately opened it up even more in response, to the point where I think you're trying to make an argument by verbosity. Granted, I can be accused of the same, but at least I identified it as an issue and made an attempt to group some things back in.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

What justifies your "salient point"? Clearly, your position doesn't apply to reality..

This is an ignorance response. 'Reality' by your assertion alone.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

But the resource costs aren't particularly meaningful, nor are Energy restores necessary to not suffer Energy constraints in the vast majority of content. For all intents and purposes, Energy may as well not exist as a constraint in the vast majority of cases, and this has nothing to do with whether or not players like running out of Energy. Whether or not we should remove Energy from our design completely is an entirely separate issue, and it feels like you've been confusing what is and what ought to be here.

Yet I who do not use Energy Restores except usually by accident (because I have them on the wheel just in case some exception comes along) seem to have millions of Nano Spores where other people run out.. and when asked how, usually cite restores. There's still an obligation there to address the issue, if it were removed then you'd not need Restores, your Zenurik focus would be unnecessary in favour of some other utility, and you'd get back Arcane slots for other utility. The undesirable outcome exists not removed.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Gladly:

• The game emphasises constant mobility via parkour, meaning the player will be frequently travelling through rapidly changing environments at high speed. Killing the player just because some bit of level geometry went up in front of them makes no sense.
• A tremendous portion of the game's levels still are made of small rooms and tight corridors. It therefore makes no sense in this context to punish the player for firing a weapon too closely.
• Every time self-damage has been used by players to their benefit, e.g. Trinity at the time of her 99% Blessing, or Chroma, DE treated that development as an exploit to be fixed, rather than an interesting player usage of mechanics. Self-damage is thus, by DE's own intentional design, a mechanic intended to have purely negative consequences upon our gameplay.
• In general, the philosophy of expressly punishing the player for playing "poorly", by whichever nebulous standard we are setting in this context, through mechanics built into their weapons, just doesn't work. Warframe is not a game that aims to punish the player to begin with, and if only some weapons are made to apply disproportionate punishment just for using them like any other weapon, players are simply going to drop those in favor of weapons that don't try to screw us over, as is the case now.

These are all "non-subjective" reasons why self-damage is unpopular, all of which you have deliberately avoided addressing. You have certainly dismissed these in bulk as "subjective", just as you have "posited" the rather questionable assumption that self-damage can be reasonably expected to be under the player's perfect control, an assumption that is itself disproven by the above points.

2 points of subjectivity, 1 point of inaccurate subjective judgement, and one complete statement of non-argumentative supposition. Failed. I addressed the first three and the fourth isn't even an argument in support, it's just speculating the claim itself.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... why not? It is certainly a solution, and if the fundamental implementation of self-damage does not work, and does not generate any tangible benefits, why preserve it? So much has been typed about whether or not it would be justified to remove self-damage, but really, the actual question here should be: why is the current implementation of self-damage worth preserving? What fun gameplay does it generate? How does it add to the game? Also, how can you still accuse me in good faith of using a bandwagon fallacy when I explained precisely to you why player consensus is relevant to the point? Simply throwing out fallacy names in pure ignorance of what's actually being said doesn't make it look like you know what you're talking about, especially when you also don't even read most of the post you're responding to.

There is no proof the fundamental implementation of self damage does not work by virtue of anything but your own opinion, but every argument against is flagrantly ignored/dismissed. It's entirely arguable that the fundamental idea of self-damage - instant risk to self upon failure, scaling with the potential reward - can work if rebalanced statistically.

It adds to the game because it's a distinctive different challenge and playstyle posed to the user. Some people enjoy the risk. Some laugh about blowing themselves up (whether or not they think it's their fault, but especially when they do acknowledge this). Why are those players forced to change to suit you when alternatives to that playstyle exist for your purposes?

Explanation flawed: fallacy remains. 

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Once again, you repeat yourself while deliberately failing to address the point: nobody is saying players should be forced to use these weapons, but the fact that people are not being allowed to have a good time while using these weapons means they will not use those weapons, thus lowering their range of weapons they will realistically use, and thus lowering fun overall. When there is a whole range of toys for the player to pick from, it is less fun for only some of them to be fun, rather than for all of them to be fun. It does not take a genius to realize that asking for a range of weapons in Warframe to be unfun for the near-totality of players is going to lower the overall amount of fun that can be had in the game.

Let me fix that quote: "Some people are not having a good time while using these weapons." Not all, and those people aren't being disallowed, it's just their opinion and interpretation of the results. As I've said, that's fine, just don't use them then? You're still demanding change to personally suit you where it's unnecessary.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

At this stage, it is also worth mentioning that, for all your vociferous defense of explosive self-damage... you don't actually seem to want to engage with the mechanic much at all either. Your most played explosive weapon is the Kulstar, at a whopping 3.4% play rate. Tell me: with you positioning yourself as an extremist defender of explosives, if removing self-damage from launchers were to affect you so badly that you'd stop using them... how much fun would that actually reduce for you? If people who genuinely liked self damage (and genuinely liked, not played devil's advocate for on the forums) were to stop having fun then, but everyone else would play these weapons far more often, would that not increase total fun overall?

Let me give you the inverse: Ivara's my primarily used frame and I spend a hell of a lot of argument on saying why she's currently a horrible experience in comparison to others. She simply functions in spite of that. I may not have the majority of usage time on explosives, but that doesn't mean I have no experience and doesn't mean I can't assess their use. Have you considered that the stats are padded out by all manner of things including time literally spent holding weapons without even using them? 9000 hours of 0-kill Spy missions would still be 9000 hours of playtime with whatever happened to be equipped at the time, despite 0 kills and affinity earned.

Frankly, if I can use the Kulstar and not blow myself up with even less predictable cluster payloads then what does that say about you who seem incapable of controlling a singular payload?

'Fun' is a finite resource. A player is only playing/enjoying so many things for so much time. 1 hour of gameplay spreads evenly across loadouts used in that time. If sufficient arsenal variety exists, no net 'fun time' is lost by a player opting to use any given weapon over another.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

.Why not? In both cases, there are unnecessary divides to the viability of weapons that restrict the player's available roster and thereby limit diversity. If removing the one mechanic making these weapons unplayably bad to most players were to make them at least slightly more popular, why not go for it?

• You have 2 viable choices. Gameplay investment is divided over a diversity of 2 items.
• You have 300 viable choices and 10 inviable choices. Gameplay investment is divided over a diversity of 300 items.

Point B is clearly more healthy than point A.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... why not? Simulor projectiles can't bounce back into the player's face, which can happen with the Penta or Tonkor. Clearly, there are more drawbacks available to launchers than just self-damage, with even the Tonkor being made a much slower weapon. Why then establish this arbitrary distinction? Where is the justification to any of your bolded statements here?

Simulor effect range was, if memory serves, ~12m radial blast.
Simulor firing range was, due to projectile behaviour, ~10m from point of fire (less due to gravitating of projectiles which could pull back for the initial combination)

You cannot simply put self-damage on that because the basic operation shoots with you in the threat zone.
The Tonkor bouncing back at you is a failure to execute. It shoots projectiles further than the 6m effect radius, you just shot a wall that caused it to reflect back.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

No no, I actually did explain, as noted in the bulletpoints you have deliberately avoided engaging thus far. For someone accusing me of "no u", you are illustrating it perfectly here, as you are responding to a comment of my own that pointed out that your own position has degenerated into pure arguing by repetition, and insistence (with bolded text to boot) upon claims you've made that you've simply expected everyone to take as fact, without a shred of justification. Again, one need not play Warframe for any particularly long amount of time to notice that a) the player can move really fast, and is encouraged to, b) Warframe's tilesets are full of tight spaces and unusual level geometry, c) that level geometry's hitboxes don't always reflect what the player visualizes, and d) explosions are typically not conveyed well enough for the player to clearly know their radius, which leads to e) the player getting a projectile caught on a random bit of rapidly approaching scenery while moving (a process made all the easier thanks to multishot), and blowing themselves up. Your counterpoint to all this is... what, exactly?

1. This aids in creating distance between player and intended target.
2. The player is not forced to use the weapon that does not work well in enclosed spaces (having a complete loadout except by selection) and most of these 'tight spaces' are still greater than the radius of payloads
3. The player does not need to 'thread the needle' and doing so implies a risk that the firing angle may be just off and hit the object. Also, simply place yourself >6m away from dubious-hitbox object.
4. A non-argument as mistake is made by the point of explosion, as explosives are generally fairly similar in size.
5. The parked car ran out and hit me, officer, I swear. You controlled your vector of motion and by extension, any vector of scenery 'approaching'.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Because I did not in fact assume you were better than anyone: you chose, entirely unprompted, to boast about your self-presumed superiority, in a post where you have repeatedly insulted the intelligence and skill of other players by framing the problem of explosive self-damage as a failure of character. It is not simply the fact that you choose to aggrandize yourself (falsely, might I add, as noted by your rather unimpressive usage of explosives), it is the fact that you also openly disdain players who dislike self-damage that makes your attitude on this thread elitist.

Me: I don't blow myself up on scenery by accident.
You: Well most players "can't" achieve that and do blow themselves up by accident.
2+2 = I am performing above average players and cannot be considered a representative sample.

That's not elitism. I don't actually think I am above other players, I think anyone who enjoys the weapons enough to do so could develop equal or greater finesse. You're the one claiming they can't as the basis of your argument.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I'm sorry, how does this improve your argument in any way? Even if one were to assume that there were this "subtext" to frame your point in this manner (which there isn't), what you're simply saying here is that players criticizing self-damage are biased and unwilling to understand how self-damage can be fun. It is still a contemptuous and contemptible view of the playerbase.

If nobody has to "git gud", why do you keep framing the issue of self-damage as one of pure personal responsibility and failure to play properly? Your attempt to rebrand yourself isn't quite working here, because you have been using your negative assumption of the playerbase's collective character as your central argument: if players aren't unskilled, and shouldn't have to bend over backwards just for a weapon to become less unpleasant... why still advocate for a near-universally unpopular mechanic that expects the latter? Why immediately jump to assumptions of player skill when someone mentions that self-damage can happen even to players who know how to use explosives, and so for reasons beyond their reasonable control?

Will you quit with this waffling ad-hominem? For the fifty thousandth time, players don't have to find self-damage fun for themselves, but that doesn't mean nobody finds it fun. Players don't have to go to the trouble of learning launcher finesse if they do not wish to, as other weapons are available.

Just use the other weapons if you hate self-damage so badly, you are not 'entitled' to have everything changed to suit you.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

And this is where the problem lies, because you are deliberately ignoring all the situations that make your position less secure, which have been mentioned several times already. Even as you continue to backpedal and undermine your point further by admitting that, actually, not all self-damage can be attributed to a player mistake (in which case, why still have it?), you still refuse to acknowledge the rather basic fact that explosives can get caught on scenery in ways the player cannot reliably predict, whether it be because the game's parkour causes the irregular scenery to change so rapidly relative to the player that one cannot reasonably expect perfect awareness of its exact topography, or simply because factors such as deceptive scenery hitboxes, multishot, and random weapon spread based on accuracy all cause explosives to travel and collide in places the player cannot reliably calculate. 

You say 'backpedaling', I say 'something I was already talking about before you were summoned to this thread'.

I do refuse to acknowledge the remaining "fact", because it's not a fact, it's an opinion from anecdotal experience.

Also can I get your parkour mods that physically warp level geometry? They sound rad af.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I haven't, actually, because I just jump out of the way, and if I were to hide behind scenery the enemy would throw one of those grenades to dislodge me (which, by the way, tend to deal a fair amount of damage to defense objective, so best not camp it unless you can reliably kill everyone coming your way before they can attack... which would defeat the point of cover). The game actively tries to prevent you from playing it like a typical cover shooter, and you trying to tell me that any game with levels that are anything except flat, empty planes is a cover shooter I find literally incredible.

You called it a cover shooter. I called it a shooter, with cover that can be used situationally. One of us is making a claim of predominance the other is not (hint: it's you).

You don't have to sit behind that pillar for an hour, you can literally take that cover for half a second to make the rocket discharge, or the Ballista to miss the shot, then move out to deal with them. That's still usage of cover. Since you seem to love NTS, I should probably turn it on you here except more accurately. Are you telling me no true Warframe player takes cover behind scenery?

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Except when people camp Survival, it's by specifically going into small rooms so as to funnel enemies as quickly as possible, not to hide behind cover. Not only are you trying to desperately apply "cover" to any piece of vertical scenery, the way you describe gameplay in Warframe, including Survival camping strategies here, differs so severely from the actual game that it feels like you came here to discuss an entirely different video game, and just so happened upon the Warframe forums by accident..

Funny story: If you're exposed (read: have no cover from line of sight) to a ranged enemy, that enemy is disinclined to move towards your location. You break line of sight, funnelling them through a chokepoint. Stop the presses, this squad utilised a form of cover against opposition(!)

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I don't get run over by parked cars often, because I don't spend my life as a magic cyborg parkouring over, around, and under them at blinding speeds, in a sci-fi environment full of random bits of machinery and architecture sticking out, that I'm expected to move through at that same speed, while also shooting at other moving targets. It is difficult to adequately describe just how stultifyingly dumb your analogy here is.

The analogy works because in both cases the object was static and you are the one moving. It's your responsibility. The 'parked car' equivalent just highlights how much you sound like a mind-addled drunkard by saying the scenery is rushing you.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... the Tonkor was used often, that does not mean it was incredibly well-liked, as noted by many complaints then. You are deliberately conflating popularity in terms of pick rate, and popularity in terms of enjoyment here, while also misunderstanding the difference between something that is and something that ought to be, itself typically known as an is-ought fallacy. Just because a weapon is picked often does not mean it ought to be so dominant. Meanwhile, if a mechanic is generally recognized as poor design, and does not in fact present real benefits, then it in fact ought to be removed. It's not a difficult concept to understand.

Oh but it was incredibly well liked. We had to go through >50 pages of this exact sort of point-for-point diatribe from the people defending their precious Tonka toy. Along with all those superficial "lol just don't use it" comments - which again, is completely inapplicable in the case of obligation to use few, versus a disinclination to use few.

Just because something is disliked, doesn't mean it ought to be changed to suit the ones who dislike it. See, I can do it too.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Which false dichotomy?

... why? With current balancing you'd still be killing yourself either way.

... or just remove the self-damage? I think I understand your fallacy name-dropping better, because from the looks of it you just announce the fallacy you are about to commit.

Oh look you're ignoring again. DE is disinclined to solely buff damage output because people are complaining about the input. If you gave the Ogris more damage, what would you get? "lol you still kill yourself with cautious even harder now". So unless you either stop complaining (accept fatal risk into your life) in which it doesn't matter how much damage they add, or accept rebalance so that we have a foundation that works better for you and scales better, DE won't be increasing the damage output.

Because removing self-damage means you also don't get 'bombastic' output, because nobody wants the Tonkor meta back.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... where did I dismiss them out of personal disbelief? I pointed out the issues with excessive abstraction and anecdotal evidence, and pointed out your "interpretations" continue to rely on the assumption that the player cannot possibly incur self-damage without it being the direct consequence of a mistake, an assumption you yourself have disproven by acknowledging the existence of alternative interpretations. Once again, explaining why you are wrong is not the same as dismissing you, and speaking of which, you are also dismissing my point here on the lack of consistent control players have over self-damage.

You say you can't do it, you refuse to believe it possible for players to do it, and that's all you have to counter my assertion - which is argued because you have superior mobility and a set of eyes with a brain. I know it to be possible, because I do it. But that's anecdotal, so instead I say it's generally possible because you have the necessary information fed into your eyeballs (minus the exceptions that prove the rule) to employ that control required.

I'm not dismissing your point. I'm refuting it.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

But then having to make "safe shots" with poor knowledge of one's explosive radius implies bending even further backwards to accommodate a class of weapons whose punishment mechanic is poorly-conveyed by your own admission. Right here, you directly admit that you too acknowledge the poor communication of explosion ranges as a problem, so why are you insisting upon the opposite?

The conveyance of the punishment mechanic is fine. You shoot the boom near you, you get hurt as well. That's all it needs to convey. When you pick up the weapon you don't kill yourself. Getting a couple ranks in it teaches you all the vanishingly small details of 'radius' (it's simply not that big, we aren't nuking tiles wholesale) and there you go. You know what you have and what is expected.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... where? I used "mistake" in quotation marks specifically to underline how self-damage can be incurred by accident, which you have so far purely framed as a player mistake. Are you so intent on parroting back my arguments at me as to deliberately misconstrue what I've written?

... I'm sorry, what? Why is the Lenz a "luxury"? Luxury by whose standards? Why would that validate self-damage through instant explosions? Literally no part of your claims here follow from each other or appear to have any grounding whatsoever; it's like you expect me to just take you on your word for everything you say here.

You shot a wall. The wall didn't jump out in front of you. You shot a wall. You made a mistake.

You made a mistake. You failed. You're given the grace to recover from failure. That's a luxury. Because you made the mistake.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Who's "we"? Not only is this a rather slimy ad hominem ("you're only complaining because you're lazy and don't want to be challenged"), it is rather precious that you would accuse me of entitlement when you are the one specifically asking to keep a poorly designed mechanic against player consensus: what makes you personally more entitled to this than a far larger number of players? Why are you so intent on denying fun to other players? Also, yet again, you ignore the point made and keep parroting the debunked notion that this is purely an issue of player skill, even though I pointed out that even if this were true, that would still not make you right: even if explosive self-damage was purely the result of player mistakes, which even you admitted not to truly believe in, the fact remains that it is reducing the fun of the majority of the playerbase with its existence. Thus, the correct move would be to remove it, because even if it were a skill-checking mechanic, it is one that has failed to generate any appeal.

Jesus christ, if you're going to accuse me of an ad-hominem, at least go a paragraph afterwards without using one yourself!

I mean, I've already refuted said accusations anyway, but you go right ahead and self-sabotage.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

But this is simply not true, and you are merely repeating yourself here while drawing up yet another strawman of my position. As I have already pointed out, the fiddliness of comboes is getting removed, even though the fiddliness was deliberately meant to be a skill test. You, by contrast, are desperately trying to frame explosive self-damage as a pure skill test, because you think this somehow absolves it of criticism and the threat of removal. The fact remains that DE have shown themselves willing to change their game's design, and cut out stuff that doesn't work, in order to improve the game, with comboes being one such piece of design getting reworked. By contrast, your suggestion to tone down the numbers on self-damage do not alter the fundamental implementation of it, and therefore do not change its design. If self-damage were to, say, all be turned into the Lenz's implementation, that would be a design change, but as it stands you have been categorically opposing design changes to self-damage, for whichever arbitrary reason you chose on this forum argument.

Going from, say, 'pause combo' to 'alternate button combo' is not removing the fundamental mechanic. You just access the variants slightly differently (attack speed messes up pauses but does not impact alt-presses the same way). You might still be hasty and mash buttons, messing the combo up when you should be pressing a particular sequence, you might still whiff the same 'payoff' steps of the chain.

Going from 'instant forfeit, scaling self-damage' to 'no damage' (or capped damage, smart-arming, et al) is fundamentally changing that. Capped damage will never kill you. Smart arming may never hurt you when a mistake is made.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Randomly accusing me of shifting the goalposts to this argument and of being intentionally misleading, without even a hint of justification, is an ad hominem, one that adds strictly nothing to discussion. Moreover, as has already pointed out, you don't really seem to understand "tu quoque", as it applies specifically when one tries to defend oneself purely by accusing one's opponent of making the same mistake: by contrast, I have defended my position and pointed out the absurdity of your own accusations, all while pointing out what you did wrong, which for whichever reason tends to mirror almost exactly the accusations you levy at me at that same moment. Perhaps you believe that projecting your rhetorical flaws upon me, and thus anticipating the resulting criticism, will somehow magically protect you from it.

Actually, at best it'd be 'fallacy fallacy'. Which is kind of the point - you don't actually appear to understand them. If you're going to cite them, please get them right.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

And this is you merely denying yet another point that you are incapable of answering. You have elucidated nothing, and so far no single part of your post has said anything that hasn't been debunked already.

Please cease wilful ignorance.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I see the No True Scotsman fallacy has reared its ugly head here yet again. Tell me: why establish the false dichotomy of "natural" versus "unnatural" stealth here? How is it relevant to the argument? How does Assimilate Nyx disprove anything I've said so far about self-damage? You are visibly grasping at straws, while inexplicably hoping for me to fill in the gaps in your argumentation.

You don't understand fallacies. Stop.

Natural stealth or in other words, aided versus unaided. Inaros has huge natural tank, unaided health pool, where Trinity has aided tank through a couple stacking damage resistance buffs.

Assimilate Nyx removes all self-damage from the equation. Your entire problem is therefore 'solved' if you're going to allow specific builds as arguments.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

No amount of pretentious expressions here (what does "absolute equivalence" even mean in this context?) disproves the fact that you have been proven wrong on the matter, and that your attempts at saving your argument only defeat it further: yet again, you are comparing picking a self-damaging weapon with deliberately sabotaging oneself in a playstyle that is clearly not encouraged. Effectively, you are trying to tell me that self-damage should stay, because apparently it's worth accommodating this mechanic specifically so that an incredibly small amount of players can have fun intentionally gimping their play. You are effectively one slip of the tongue away from accidentally admitting to me that not even you believe self-damage adds anything positive to gameplay.

Let me break it down real simple like:

1+1+1+1... and 2+2+2+2... are correlating sequences. They are not absolutely equivalent, but they follow the same general trend (n*X).

Self-damage explosives and Hildryn without shields are both correlating - they result in a greater-than-average risk of death. They are not equivalent, because Shieldless Hildy is a lot more of a burden than Explosives are.

In both cases players can operate skilfully enough to subvert the risks and enjoy fun and satisfaction of doing so.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Repeating yourself here yet again will, yet again, not make you any less wrong on the matter. Tell me: how exactly do you reasonably expect a human being to not only establish a detailed set of relations between themselves (or their in-game avatar) and a complex, rapidly-shifting alien scenery many times a second, but also perfectly anticipate the random spread and trajectory of their explosive weapons, their poorly-conveyed range, and the disguised hitboxes of said scenery? In fact, how do you even expect a superintelligent being to predict all of this perfectly, when some factors are clearly random or otherwise out of the player's control? It doesn't matter how magnanimous you want to come across by listing a subset of cases, you are still deliberately ignoring the ones you visibly don't have a solution for... or at least, not one that wouldn't involve removing self-damage, or changing its implementation on most explosive weapons.

I am this-close to just memeposting for how dumb this sounds.

Let's call in that old 'git gudness' of Dark Souls, right?

Vanishingly few people become skilled enough (enjoy getting there) to read every tell and execute flawlessly, defeating bosses without taking a single lick of damage consistently, right?

They make mistakes. But those mistakes ARE STILL MISTAKES!

It isn't that "I never blow myself up". I never blow myself up unless I made a mistake.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I guess I could've just said "stealth develops upon the game's core mechanics whereas explosive self-damage goes against them", which still says something, but then I realized you were referring to your own post:

Here's one of those direct "NO U" quotes you wanted so much.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

In other words: you apparently think being expected to perform literally any action when playing a video game is equivalent to directly running against a game's core design, and incurring all of the resulting gameplay problems, for no tangible payoff. Impressive.

Fishing is against Warframe's core design. We have it. Some people like it, most likely don't care for it. Get rid, yeah? Oh wait no because it doesn't actually harm you.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

If that is what you believe to be my argumentation, then you have fundamentally failed to understand my arguments (which wouldn't surprise me, considering you apparently don't even read them). If we were to reduce my position down to the simplest propositional logic:

1. Self-damage on explosive weapons in Warframe exists to punish the player for making mistakes, and so is a punishment mechanic.
2. Punishment mechanics are valid only if all punishments they issue stem from genuine player mistakes.
3. Some instances of self-damage on explosive weapons in Warframe are incurred by factors outside of the player's control (e.g. random projectile travel/spread, scenery collisions the player could not have predicted, etc.).
4. Therefore, self-damage on explosive weapons is not a valid punishment mechanic.

Your disagreement stems from you denying point 3, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, which simply makes you wrong and unwilling to acknowledge reality. But also, along with that:

1. A game should have a mechanic only if some sufficiently large portion of its playerbase considers that mechanic fun, if the mechanic is necessary to support another that is similarly considered fun, or if that mechanic contributes towards the game's artistic intent.
2. Explosive self-damage in Warframe as currently implemented is largely considered unfun, does not support any other fun mechanic, and does not contribute towards the game's artistic intent.
3. Therefore, Warframe should not have explosive self-damage as currently implemented.

Simple stuff, really, though so far you have yet to produce any answer to this, besides "well I say it's fun (even though I barely use explosives at all) and my opinion on the matter is more important than everyone else's put together".

Again you employ this "OBVIOUSLY I'M RIGHT" perspective while accusing me of the same. You have still yet to disprove my rebuttals to 1.3 with anything beyond vague waffle and personal opinion.

For the second list entirely, your conclusion is flawed. If the mechanic exists already and if the mechanic does not ACTIVELY work to the detriment of those who do not find it fun, then there is no obligation to change it. You say it 'denies fun' but as previously observed, this is not a founded claim as there is no obligation to engage with the unwanted mechanic. You're not being denied anything in the Primary slot of your loadout for not liking launchers, you just fill it with something else.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

But this is simply a lie, though? I pointed out that your argument was fallacious and purely based on conjecture, then pointed out that you accusing me of Tu Quoque didn't work, because I had not in fact accused you of hypocrisy in this particular point, let alone used it as "defence". As pointed out already in the very post you are replying to, you are the one who cited fallacy as your only defense, and didn't even do it right. It's like you're engaging in this bizarre tactic where you keep making fallacious arguments, accuse me of the fallacies, then cry out "tu quoque" when called out on it.

... says who? You're just making stuff up at this point.

You seem to misunderstand how the No True Scotsman fallacy works: "top athletes" is a quantifiable, objective measure insofar as one agrees upon the performance metrics and number of athletes being counted (which is the case when talking about the Olympics). However, when talking about how "no true Scotsman would do such a thing", or in your case, "true launcher enthusiasts", the fallacy comes from setting arbitrary standards in an attempt to create a false separation between two groups. In your case, it is obvious you are trying to contrast "true enthusiasts" to the rest of us in an attempt to frame those who dislike explosive self-damage as unqualified to speak on the matter. This is not, by the way, the only time you have committed this fallacy, as mentioned above.

... but we're apparently not allowed to have our feedback be accepted as valid, because "true enthusiasts" don't want that. Your rhetoric here is transparent.

1) You attempted to undermine me calling your arguments fallacious by saying I was pulling a fallacy. You also even misattributed the fallacy you chose.

2) Says basic understanding of logic because you can't be appealing to purity when you're observing data. It's hilarious this is the cornerstone of your rebuttal because it's one of the closest times I've been to leaning to your side of an argument, and you're so caught up you're trying to push me back over.

3) See 2). I'm not saying you can't or won't, I'm saying you don't. Claims and observations. Technically my example was limited because, I suppose, you could argue that non-top athletes could enter the Olympics, they'd just fail to meet competition. I should have said "are competing" as that is more clearly observant than claimant.

4) Your feedback is that you don't like self-damage and find it difficult (or in your words 'impossible') to avoid. That is valid. Your subsequent demand is to have it changed to suit you. That is not valid feedback.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

So, in other words, you are arguing on pure conjecture, all while trying to arbitrarily divide opponents of explosive self-damage in order to make the resulting subgroups appear somehow less overwhelmingly majoritary than they are. I myself have been one of the most vocal opponents of explosive self-damage in this thread, and even I'd fit into the "change it" camp if you decided to frame my posts under a certain light; that does not stop me and many other players from acknowledging that the current implementation of explosive self-damage is fundamentally poor.

You're the one originally claiming majority - I merely state that it is in fact likely due to the subdivisions that you are not in the majority for your specific solution. There's been a few problems over the course of failing to understand boolean logic on non-binary data. "Not positive" includes neutral as well as negative, "Not negative" also includes neutral. "Not neutral" only disincludes neutral and allows the full spectrum either side.

As we have no real statistical data on something as fickle and fleeting as opinions, we can only draw supposition from the groupings in play.

23 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

1. Where? Point to where, I want to see an actual cogent argument for once.
2. Which question does this answer? Because the following question was a simple yes/no, and you seem to be saying "yes", even though you really don't want to admit it.
3. Despite your protests, it sounds an awful lot like you admitting my arguments are not, in fact, as subjective as you tried to claim when you initially dismissed them.
4. False: at the time of 99% Bless Trinity, the damage reduction was based off of the health of the most wounded teammate, which is what enabled self-damage Trinity. Blessing was then changed to have its damage reduction based on an average of the whole team, then capped at 75%, then changed to a fixed amount per cast. Self-damage was the key reason behind the initial change. Still, though, it's an interesting narrative you've got there; shame it's completely made up.
5. False again, DE specifically changed Trinity to address self-damage. You are in blatant denial.

1. Go back to your original summoning portal to the thread. By which I mean where you were quoted. I immediately rebuked.
2. It's not a simple yes/no, and trying to make it one is false dichotomy. There are some tight spaces. There are never exclusively tight spaces that preclude that ~6m radius.
3. No, you're still fundamentally wrong for the working assumption in general, you just had a couple actual exception cases which I knew about and addressed before you even showed up, stop trying to call this a personal victory.
4. It was impossible to access the required extents of Blessing (primarily the DR) when it became relevant due to the flawed design. Self-damage emerged as a way to safely force that without risking one-too-many bullets causing outright death before Trin could finish casting. Self-damage was a treatment to the symptom, the design flaw was the cause which was subsequently treated to obviate the need for self-damage.
5. Let me ask you something: Would Castanas Trin have worked if Castanas couldn't be pure radiation? Would it have worked if resistance to radiation couldn't be additively stacked to >100% for complete immunity? How many Trinities accidentallied themselves to death because they mistimed the manoeuvre?
   • Just because removing self-damage was the selected response does not mean it was the correct response. Self damage, again, was merely a catalyst to the outcome, not the core cause of why it was present. Rectifying additive resistance stacking would have also removed the overwhelming Trinity Link gameplay while also solving issues with situationally-invulnerable enemies, whom unfortunately remain a problem.
   • You can also still charge up damage into Nyx's Absorb with triggering explosives, which is fundamentally the same process - self-damage in and ignored, more damage out to enemies. QED.

 

Aaand the reply box ganked almost the entire rest of the response when I tried to change something.

I guess I have a ton of rewriting to do. Posting this bit to be edited.. god damnit, what a waste of time.

This is why this over-verbose stuff detracts from legitimate conversation. Sorry, I'm going to half-ass this and chunk it in unattributed quotes for celerity's sake. RIP quality.

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Cool story bro. As it stands, though, I have criticized you on both the substance and the style of your arguments, both of which demonstrably have severe issues, issues that have visibly shown to be intentional. Are you writing this because you fear you might get another "black mark" out of this, and pre-emptively want to defend yourself?

Accused me of outright abuse. Just saying that I've not been infringed for it yet, so that's fairly baseless.

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Pffffft. If "life called first"... why did you write such a large volume of text in response? It would've taken you comparatively less time to read my post in full without responding (and you could've always done that at a later date) than to do what you did instead. Honestly, it would be less embarrassing for you if you just came clean, and admitted that you simply felt compelled to answer my post, but didn't want to make the effort of reading through it before responding.

Well look what just happened. Sucks to lose an hour's detailed rebuttal, and honestly, I had important things to do that limited how much time I could proceed right then. It takes sweet time to actually address things like this.

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Speaking of glossing over the substance in favor of the style, this is a good example of it. It doesn't matter how angry you feel in this argument, that does not change the veracity of what I'm saying, or the verifiability of my claims. There is objective common ground to be had, and if even that is too much for you to admit, then why are you even arguing in the first place? Nobody is compelling you to respond, either, so if you don't like getting called out on your rhetorical tactics... then don't engage in those rhetorical tactics, and perhaps try to actually listen to what someone else has to say instead, for a change.

Your 'verifiability' has mostly been through sheer repetition, unfortunately, calling things 'objective' when they're argued subjective, and 'ignored' when the address has either been overlooked or dismissed arbitrarily.

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Immediately after attempting to clean up your image here, you shoot yourself in the foot: even when trying not to appear disdainful of the playerbase, you continue to disparage them by implying players who dislike explosives are biased and entitled. You are continuing to insinuate players are lazy, even as you deny the fact. One of your central arguments so far has been that essentially all instances of explosive self-damage are the result of playing poorly, too, so repeating your spiel here does not make it any more convincing.

A player being imprecise or imperfect down not make them 'a lazy scrub', and all I'm saying is that they haven't elected to take the time to advance beyond said imprecision.

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But, apparently, not the first whole part, which you responded to in detail, and so ignoring the fact that you ignored far more than just the end conclusion. I'd recommend not making so many excuses for yourself here, it just makes you look worse.

 

I think I made some 'witty' comment here but it's gone now. Guess you'll just have to settle for please address my argument and not cast aspersions on my character.

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See, I completely agree! Which is why I left plenty of room for debate on possible ways to address self-damage, and have repeatedly asked you to ground your claims in evidence, as I do mine. You should be directing this question towards yourself, as you are visibly more preoccupied with winning this argument, by whichever standard you have set for yourself, rather than saying anything constructive or with any actual relevance to Warframe. A view can certainly be wrong, but facts and evidence are objective, and I have been basing my opinions on those (which does not make my opinions objective, even if the facts are, just so you know). If you chose not to base your own views on anything factual, that's entirely on you; I don't have to pretend that everything is relative and up for debate just so that you don't feel offended when I point out you make claims that are provably false.

Your "facts and evidence" have almost always been speculative and subjective, and this continued enshrinement of yourself as unassailably objective is kind of the point.

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It looks like you may not actually understand my position, then, because there isn't a contradiction to what I'm saying: I pointed out that self-damage, as implemented on most weapons in Warframe, has an unworkably poor design, and so the current implementation needs to be removed. Whether one is to do a pure removal, or replace that mode of self-damage with one that has genuinely good design, like on the Lenz, is secondary, as both approaches I think are fine. Your idea of "needs to be changed", by contrast, seems to resume itself to just toning down the self-damage numbers, an approach that, as I pointed out already, would not fully address the design issues being discussed.

You "pointed out" (actually argued that) it is an unworkable design when I disagree.

The Lenz delay is still a luxury in giving you grace after making a mistake that does not need to be retrofitted to extant weapons.

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But this argument is in itself not valid, because the problem comes from the player believing their shot is correct, only for it to literally blow up in their face. Lecturing to that player with 20/20 hindsight that they should've used another weapon instead is pointless, and fails entirely to address the issue. As it stands, you are also missing the point to what I said regarding scenery and unpredictable collisions, a recurring issue with your post. By pure coincidence, this is apparently the only problem with self damage you apparently have no solution for, which suggests your opposition to what I'm saying lies more with you defending that one thread you made for fear it might be made irrelevant.

 

You have described an error in judgement which is still an error made by the player.

Repeating this 'scenery' and 'unpredictable collision' idea of yours does not make it objective. But it turns out my solution even solves for that because in my rebalance you still have some iteration of Cautious Shot to fall back on if you are not comfortable - it's just less extreme of a reduction and/or more of a detriment to the total damage, in accordance with the risk/reward balance resulting from the formula in play.

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... which ignores how mobility interacts with terrain and cannot consistently enable "safe shots" owing to Warframe's frequently cramped tiles. You are, yet again, dodging the point, particularly since the situations I was referring to were not exclusive to the player constantly backpedalling in-game (which rarely happens in the first place anyway, so you isolating mobility to just that scenario also isolates your argument to just that scenario).

 

The only tiles exhibiting zero 6m+ clearance spaces for entirely safe shots to be made are certain connecting corridors and dead-end 'locker rooms'. In cases where you are currently too cramped you have other weapons in your loadout unless specifically selected not to.

You have the option to backpedal if the situation calls for it. Electing not to do so, and to instead fire explosives in close quarters, is your own responsibility.

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This is false, as I also acknowledged the fact that many launchers also have weak damage, a statement you yourself responded to in the same reply. You are also misconstruing my argument as one of pure pick rates, when I am also arguing that players explicitly voice their dislike of launchers, citing self-damage as the reason. The writing is on the proverbial wall.

 

I have already observed the inherent limitation on output changes to be related to the current criticisms of self-damage.

You have no real way of knowing which of these people, including even the ones currently demanding no damage, would in fact ultimately become satisfied with a solely statistical (non-mechanical) rebalance. You might even be surprised yourself if it were offered.

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If the issue were one of pure risk, and that risk were entirely within the player's control, which as pointed above, is not the case. Substitute "risk" for "poor design", and you have the actual point at hand (and, incidentally, that should explain why one of the solutions is better than the others).

Argued above not to be the case, not objective. I argue it broadly is (barring the very specific exception cases).

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Buffing the Ogris to be not crap is not going to "strong-arm" anyone. If it were overbuffed, sure, but then that is a risk that can come from any buff.

As a matter of overall balance, yes, that is a risk with changes in general. But with how vehement you are against self-damage in its current form, the buff that would be needed for you to pick it up regardless is, implicatively, the strong-arming we wish to avoid

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Why does the existence of alternatives make the removal of a poorly-designed mechanic unnecessary? One doesn't simply let a troubled part of the game rot just because some other bit of content exists.

It's not that poorly designed. And it doesn't hurt you. Now, if friendly-fire were always on them as well, you might have an argument. But it only affects you if you use it. So, you can leave that impact to players who don't mind it nearly as much.

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... which, as explained already, did not arise as a result of the weapon's lack of self-damage, but simply because of its statistical strength and general lack of weaknesses at the time (notice how you conveniently forger a larger variety of possible factors when it suits you).

The history went a little like this:

1. TONKOR - PREDOMINANTLY USED - No risks, Incredible Reward
   1. Base launch level. Irrelevant self-damage, crit weapon, automatic headshots
2. TONKOR - PREDOMINANTLY USED - No risks, High Reward
   1. Auto-headshots removed, slashing effectiveness by 75% in most content. Still dominating.
3. TONKOR - Little-used - High Risk, Medium Reward
   1. Added self-damage to Tonkor
   2. Further reduced base stats of Tonkor

So, hitting the reward alone didn't work. Applying the risk and further slashing reward together is why it dropped into outright disuse since.

If it had been left at Stage 2 Reward with Stage 3 (actual) Risks it might have found a niche of players (other than Salty Susans who missed it being outright broken) actually using and enjoying it even with its self-damage in play, but without dominating everything else.

Conjecture yes, but far from impossible.

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Possibly, but then a large number of players agree with me. Conversely, you may be wrong here in telling me that it's not so bad after all.

I've agreed it could stand to be rebalanced. Mechanically it's fine. I'm not the only one who thinks that way, I'm just the one most prepared to engage to this extent.

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There is a difference between a niche weapon not being used because it's just not someone's style, and it not being used because, even though the person is interested, the weapon is poorly designed. As noted by the large number of people expressing a desire to use launchers, but an unwillingness to use them currently due to their self-damage, the latter is more likely to be happening than the former.

Again working from an assumption that these players agree with you based on mechanics (above and beyond the identified actual problem cases) and would not be placated with statistical balance improvements. We can't know for certain unless we tried it.

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By admission where? Being in the area where the arrow lands could also be the result of an accident, as noted above.

 

Argued*

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Again with the talk of "luxury". Also, even assuming the player did make a mistake here, why does this mean this isn't a model for other launchers to follow? Your argument is circular here: as you yourself plainly listed, you are presupposing that the player has made a mistake by finding themselves in an explosive weapon's blast radius, and then drawing from that the conclusion that the the player has made a mistake by finding themselves in an explosive weapon's blast radius (and then, for whichever reason, making the leap that this somehow means we shouldn't change self-damage). For someone asking the other to acknowledge the possibility of being wrong, you are explicitly giving me a line of argumentation that relies entirely on you being right as the premise.

If you made a mistake, you made a mistake. That is 1=1 logic. Whether or not you are allowed the grace to recover from that mistake is a separate question - you are not necessarily entitled to recover from it, because you have to admit, you messed up.

Perhaps there's opening for the niche of risky-but-more-gracious explosives as their own archetype expanding with future gear, but that doesn't need to detract from the highest-risk instant-forfeiture archetype (assuming said archetype is conferred appropriate benefits to compensate).

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... none of which have the self-damage model of the Kulstar, Angstrum, Penta, Ogris, etc. What you are saying here is ultimately a pure rehash of what I've been saying in my very first post, so if nothing else, I'm at least glad you're finally coming round.

I've never said all future launchers have to use the current model in precision, I just argue against precluding the current model for current or future weapons. Even down to thematic 'realism' as with that other guy.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

I'm going to exercise restraint this time and try to make my responses as succinct as possible in the hopes we can cut down this web of quotes. 

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... but who ever said anything about "moving at maximum optimal traversal speeds"? That is yet another straw man, the point I simply made is that the game expects you move and use parkour, as opposed to standing stock still on the ground or just walking at a leisurely pace. Using parkour does not mean you have to literally always be moving as absolutely fast as possible, and framing this in spite of the fact that aim-gliding and wall-latching are still parkour moves feels like a deliberate attempt to avoid addressing the point. At best, it fundamentally misunderstands how parkour works in Warframe, which does not establish the sufficient common framework needed to be having this discussion.

Salient point: I have posited that parkour at anything other than maximum pace is entirely within reason for safe explosive usage. It's slow(er) but it's very possible and fun to take mastery of personal-risk weaponry to that level.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I literally went into an extended description of how one could do just that with the Lenz, and contrasted this specifically with other explosive weapons, whose payloads can end up connecting far sooner than expected if they hit a random bit of scenery. Your claim here reflects poorly upon not only your own impartiality, but also your willingness to read and internalize contrary points.

The comment on the Lenz was in the very end of the post when I'd already worn thin. I believe you bring it up again later in the responses, I'll answer it down there.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... which, for all intents and purposes, abolishes Energy as a gating mechanism at higher levels. What is your point again?

It provides options to mitigate the risk, it does not unilaterally remove the mechanic. Energy Restores may be the most egregious option, but even they have implicit restrictions - as a consumable, each costs resources. To get the most out of each you sit with it. Players not liking an outcome does not implicitly indicate that abject removal of that outcome being possible.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

But I'm not arguing just from my own opinion, and when the subject of discussion is the design of a video game, which is itself purely subjective, consensus matters. As it stands, the consensus visibly is that explosive self-damage is unpopular, and there have been non-subjective reasons for this cited here as well, which you are yet again deliberately ignoring here. Because self-damage is unpleasant enough to so many people that it turns them off of using launchers completely in Warframe, asking to preserve this mechanic for your own sake is in fact excluding others from the fun. In other words: just because you say something is good design, doesn't mean is objectively is.

--

That's all very nice, except you are deliberately ignoring the context of this exchange, in which this is a design debate where your position is to preserve explosive self-damage, a mechanic that is known for making people refuse to use launchers, thereby lowering the amount of overall fun to be had from playing with Warframe's arsenal. You are effectively asking to make the game less fun for the majority of players, and thereby exclude them from fun, just because you've personally chosen explosive self-damage as your hill to die on in an internet forum.

Please indicate "non-subjective" reasons that I have ignored, as I am pretty sure from your quoted content prior to entry onwards I have systemically addressed each assertion. Also, bandwagon fallacy aside, consensus being that 'current self damage is unpopular' does not automatically conclude 'remove self-damage risks'.

Fun is not being excluded because you are not obliged to use these weapons. It is not removing the fun that is to be had from playing with varied arsenals to retain one of these varieties. Where I say "a player doesn't like this, so they should use something they do like instead" you say, "a player doesn't like this, so it should be made into the type they do like".

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

But your example perfectly demonstrates what I'm telling you: limiting the player's arsenal along harsh divides of meta and unviable weapons is bad, because it reduces the player's options. Reducing the meta to two weapons is bad, but so is excluding a whole class of weapons from viability. It is good that we started using more weapons than the Tonkor and Simulor (and notice how the Simulor fell out of favor without needing self-damage), just as it would be good if launchers as a weapon class started seeing more use, or any real use for that matter.

Limiting viable approaches to a vanishingly small subset of weapons is not comparable with the idea of a small (if not as small) subset of the many available options simply not being popular and widely-applicable choices.
I actually showed that the Simulor could not be given self-damage as it was actually unreasonable to avoid that outcome with its stats (mainly the extra effect radius and limited projectile travel). That doesn't mean it wasn't broken for the same reasons of no drawback, high damage in wide AOE. It just required a different mechanical change. The Tonkor did not require a different mechanical change. Launchers do not require a total mechanical change.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

.. but they work poorly together, as explained already several times. Arguing by assertion does not make you any less wrong on this matter, nor does it demonstrate good faith in this exchange.

As 'explained' => as asserted several times. All you're doing is insisting that they don't work together, the reasons for which I am rebuking with arguments of my own.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

You have made several disparaging and passive-aggressive comments about the playerbase regarding their unwillingness to use explosive weapons, framing it as a flaw in character or skill (e.g. "It's really not hard"), while using yourself in examples of how to use explosives "properly" or outright bragging, such as with this particular gem of arrogance:

One of the reasons this is worth mentioning is because not only is this kind of self-aggrandizement at the playerbase's expense a consistent attitude I've seen among people defending explosive self-damage in Warframe, it often tends to be one of the defense's central arguments, including here: much of your argumentation here has focused on the fact that explosive self-damage isn't so bad if one plays "properly" by whichever arbitrary standard you've set for yourself, even if this is a standard only few people follow (or at least claim to follow on the forums; I have yet to see people apply that in practice despite having been playing the game for quite some time). When challenged on this, the implicit response has been that everyone else is too lazy, stupid, or unskilled to play the game your way. You're not the only one here with this attitude, by the way, as demonstrated by the following:

Or this:

Or this:

So yeah, I sense a running theme here. In many ways, this isn't dissimilar to the equally tiny, loud and elitist crowd of Conclave players, who are in a similar state of denial at just how unpopular and isolated the mode is relative to the rest of the game. For whichever reason, whenever an ultra-minoritary group grows around a maligned mechanic in a videogame, that's almost always accompanied by a superiority complex within.

You argued that my personal experience is incomparable to the capability that should be expected of the general playerbase. In response, I say "Okay let's assume I'm 'better', what does that leave?" and you call that elitism. That is hilarious.

I say "It's not hard to operate around it" with the subtext of if you find it engaging to try. That's not saying they're lazy or stupid for not wanting to engage in that learning process. They just don't want to - they don't find the process and results fun - so they can use other equipment which presents different requirements.

That is fine. They don't have to 'git gud' with explosives, any more than I have to, say, 'git gud' at drawing art. If I don't feel the motivation to learn and I don't find it engaging to seek out the result in spite of the failure along the way, I just don't try because nothing's forcing me to.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Case in point. As explained already in detail, including in a post I quoted in the response above, explosive self-damage can occur accidentally, and not exclusively from "misuse". Once again, your argument has degenerated into sneering repetition, suggesting the fundamental interaction problem between explosives and Warframe's environments is an argument you simply have no answer for.

The only self-damage without reasonable personal agency involved in the result are:

• Unpredictable ally crosses the firing line.
• (Arguably) A triggered explosive you no longer realised was out happens to be nearby when you set off further ones.

Those I have already accepted and resolved - ally collision disabled unless absolutely required, and UI markers on payloads to let the player track them. Everything else is 'accidental' by virtue of a failure to execute.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Ah yes, the Simulacrum, the best example of levels in Warframe the player will actually fight in. Also... what cover? The pillars in there are for parkour, not for the player to take cover behind.

Ah yes, the famous cover abilities: do you mean Atlas's Tectonics, an ability near-universally recognized as useless, precisely because its only real function is to provide cover? Or do you mean abilities like Frost's Snow Globe, Limbo's Cataclysm, or Gara's Mass Vitrify, which are commonly used to cover static objectives while our warframes move about freely? Perhaps you mean Volt's Electric Shield, whom players get behind exclusively for the bonus electric damage to their shots? Or perhaps Garuda's Dread Mirror and Zephyr's Turbulence, perhaps the only effective pieces of cover in the game owing to the fact that they move with the player? Gee, I didn't realize Warframe was such an in-depth cover-based shooter...

Warframe has no cover system by design, and the fact you are trying to frame literally any bit of vertical level geometry as "cover" demonstrates galaxy-brained levels of bullsh*tting and straw-grasping. It doesn't in fact seem like we're playing the same game, because from what you're telling me you're playing a cover-based shooter where players are encouraged to hide behind the scenery and shoot from behind it. Meanwhile, I'm playing Warframe.

Have you ever moved behind a wall to cause a Bombard rocket to explode, or break a Ballista's wind-up? That all counts as cover. You don't need to go into a special animation rubbing your cheeks up against level geometry for it to be 'cover' that you can freely use.

Survivals where people camp? Cover from fire and line-of-sight., causing enemies to filter into the chokepoints.

And yes, Snow Globe, Mass Vitrify and Cataclysm do all count as cover. Snow Globe even disinclines you not staying inside it because it blocks your line of fire from outside as well (arguably it shouldn't given Mass Vitrify doesn't, but that's beside the point). You're generally safer inside that space than outside, that's what cover is. 

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... which happens when you're parkouring, due to a busy level design that frequently features a lot of level geometry going about in unusual directions and shapes, and often demonstrating undue amounts of solidity or thickness. But I don't suppose you'd know, as you're apparently too busy shooting from behind cover.

Do you get run over by parked cars often? Because saying the scenery 'goes about' in directions and shapes is tantamount to that. It is not moving, you are moving, and you control where you move. Onus back on the player.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

It is a fallacy when the discussion is on a matter of objective truth: it does not matter if the majority of people think 2+2=5, that will still remain objectively wrong. However, in this particular case, the subject of discussion is whether the playerbase considers explosive self-damage a good mechanic in Warframe, which not only makes "bandwagon" not a fallacy, but in fact makes it the objectively correct way of answering the question. The majority of players does not consider explosive self-damage a good mechanic in Warframe, therefore the mechanic is objectively unpopular. It's cute to throw out fallacy names, but kind of silly to throw them around without understanding what they mean and actually apply to.

The Tonkor was incredibly popular. By all accounts of the bandwagon fallacy, the Tonkor would not be nerfed. The Tonkor was in fact nerfed because we, the side against, sufficiently proved that the negative subjectives were greater in effect than the positive subjectives. Bandwagon may count for considering a view, it does not prove any view beyond question.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... yes, there are complaints, because the bombast of explosives comes from the explosions they create, and it feels weird for those weapons' damage output to be so piddly as to be in almost direct opposition to one's expectations. I really fail to see this obsessive need to overintellectualize the appeal of big explosions.

Generalising to a false dichotomy. Note that I have observed how complaining about self-damage is actually disincentive for damage output to be increased. So if you want 'bombastic explosions', either put up with self-damage as it is right now, or accept a rebalance of the relationship so that both halves of the equation are satisfied. Appropriate risks for better rewards.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Because neither are valid arguments, as you are either abstracting too much or using made-up individual events with no general application. It does not take a genius, nor any big, pretentious words to be able to make verifiable statements with general application, e.g. "Warframe's tilesets tend to have bits of scenery and level geometry that rapidly approach the player as they parkour around".

The entire dichotomy you're setting here is false, as the much simpler problem is simply that you are continuing to rely on the assumption that the risk of incurring explosive self-damage is entirely within the player's control, whereas I have pointed out from my very first post on here that there is always a measure of risk that the player cannot be reasonably expected to control, and so that punishment based off of that risk is unacceptable.

You have not proved either interpretation false, only dismissed them as invalid out of personal disbelief.

Again you need to explain how exactly the scenery you can see jumps out at you from your own controlled movement, and how exactly it is impossible to intuit all required information besides the two minutia I previously addressed in order to make a safe shot with an explosive - in ways that have not already been refuted.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

So two things:

• The explosions themselves do not accurately convey their range, and if you have to see which enemies got their health bar chipped away and which didn't to determine the range of an explosion, that in itself is an implicit admission that the visuals of the explosion itself failed to properly deliver that information. Contrast this to the Lenz, for example, whose area of effect is extremely well-conveyed thanks to a highly visible and telegraphed image of its main explosion's range.
• What you are describing is precisely why the current implementation of self-damage doesn't work: even if explosives did have better visuals to convey their explosion radius, that still likely wouldn't improve things by much, because by the time the player gets punished, they would already have made the "mistake". Contrast this again to the Lenz, where even if the player messes up or accidentally gets the arrow caught on random scenery, they are still given a fair chance to escape or protect themselves.

You do not need to know the precise range of an explosion to make 'safe shots', only 'questionable shots' where you are implicitly inviting the risk of being wrong. Also, I already suggested payload distance markers. Explosions are generally 4-6m in base range from what I recall of testing them. It's not that wildly variant.

By your own admission, the player is punished when they already made a mistake. The Lenz then is a luxury in allowing you to escape one mistake unless you make that second one and take damage. Ergo, self-damage through instant explosions is valid and a visual indication is strictly superfluous because it's only relevant after failure.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Yet again, you are framing this issue as one of player character, rather than one of game design. Even if this was indeed a problem purely based on the faults of the entire playerbase, guess what: you're not going to change human nature, but you can change your game's design so that it can be played adequately by humans.

It can be played by humans. You just don't want to. As previously stated... that's fine, but we're not making you, so you are not entitled to have the game remove that weapon class' inherent challenge.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... except combos have been criticized for the very reason that they are overly fiddly and often not nearly as effective as simple quick-melee (back when it still existed), or spin-attacking. This is, in fact, why these comboes are being reworked, so that they can be made more functional and accessible. In other words, instead of telling the collective playerbase to git gud, DE has changed their design to accommodate the faculties and expectations of us mere mortals. Your example effectively proves my point.

Combos are being reworked, not removed. Your "point" instead is that players should all just automatically beyblade all the time because most people do that instead of the less-attractive combos. Instead we're keeping them, you still have to get in there, move and position, but the risk - of mucking up the combo and not getting towards the payoff strikes - is being eased. This directly correlates to my suggestion to make the risk of self damage less fatal earlier therefore lowering the barrier to entry while keeping the core concept in place.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

So far, you have been the one trying to shift conversation away from the design of explosives and onto the faults of playerbase, which you have at times directly contrasted to yourself. Meanwhile, I have remained consistent in my criticism of explosive self-damage, so really, not only is my "ad hominem" pertinent to the discussion, your own ad hominem here is hypocritical.

I said your arguments are misleading and fallacious at best. I'm still addressing the argument, there. ^{Also, another tu quoque.}

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Except you are the one drawing the inane strawmen and making some of the stupidest claims I have seen on the forums, such as the one that Warframe is designed for players to shoot from cover. You don't quite seem to grasp what even constitutes analogy here, as you are the one who outright told me that using diversions and stealth-like movement is how one should be using explosive weapons optimally. I can in fact quote you on all of this, because that is a surefire way of verifying the truth of a statement such as this, a quality you do not seem to value.

This is just "no u" in more words. I've already elucidated the points as far as you could be genuinely misconstruing them.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

But the guy who obliterated everything incautiously does get shot at, unless they're playing a AoE nuke frame in such a low-level mission that the enemy dies before they can fight back. Just because you get a bunch of Affinity fast from all-out gunning does not mean that amount is equal to the one you get from stealth multipliers -- this is in fact the reason why a Focus farming strategy that endures even today is to go through Exterminate missions with a stealth or sleep frame, e.g. Equinox, and kill enemies to rack up stealth-multiplied Affinity. I can fully agree with you that stealth isn't balanced in such a way that it's as attractive as just running and gunning in most missions, but the fact remains that stealth is a playstyle that Warframe has and rewards. By contrast, the optimal way to use launchers, by your own implicit admission, clashes directly with the way the game is designed to be played.

I was talking about natural stealth, where enemies can't simply be put to sleep en masse and cleaved down in droves. If you want to bring specific frame influences into the equation then you lost any argument against self-damage because Assimilate Nyx exists. Of course, your point is you shouldn't have to use that - and my point is you don't. Stealth is possible without sleep effects, explosive use is possible without immunity to self-damage.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... it's not, though? It's certainly needlessly difficult and intentionally self-sabotaging, but that is not "objectively" unfun, and stating it as such does not demonstrate the best grasp of the difference between an objective and subjective statement. Unless you are arguing that people are picking launchers in the same vein of intentional self-sabotage, that's not exactly the best example to bring up.

It's an extreme example. Correlation counts without being absolute equivalence. If someone can have 'fun' with something as "objectively unfun" (read: mechanically obstructive) as losing all of Hildy's shields and abilities, then the risk of self-damage (which is by far less obstructive) can also be fun.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... and here you let slip that the game does in fact have random instances of self-damage, which validates my point and, by extension, disproves yours. To be clear, I never said that every instance of self-damage is random, and to imply as much is itself a straw man. I merely acknowledged the fact that self-damage often happens outside of the player's realistic control, and that this makes the mechanic poor design even if the majority of instances of self-damage came from misplays.

To be clear myself, those 'random' instances are the two I bulletpointed and advised on solving previously in this reply. Not any case where you hit obstructions or fire too close to yourself, which is actually what happens in the overwhelming majority and is in your control.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Indeed, it is meaningless, because you are applying the word of the argument with complete disregard for its substance, and the context in which it was made. In this instance, I pointed out that, whereas gameplay such as stealth develops upon the game's core systems, including common or universal mechanics (e.g. enemies getting alerted), launcher gameplay does not, as by your own admission it expects the player to go out of their way to accommodate an extremely minoritary mechanic that goes against much of the game's core systems. Using silenced weapons does not ask the player to go against the game's core mechanics, because it specifically relies on them for its unique gameplay to emerge, and the same goes for body-vanishing effects.

That's a lot of words to say nothing. A player goes 'out of their way' to do anything compared to anything else, because variety involves doing something different. Going from a stealth bow to a rifle to a carefully-used launcher is fundamentally no different than going from Loki to Rhino to Garuda. Each asks you to play the game differently for best results. Loki doesn't stealth or disarm? He's dying sooner than some less-paper frame who isn't expected to use those mechanics. Garuda bloodlets and doesn't build any altars? Whoops, slash proc, dead.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Indeed, a mechanic that exists is, by definition, an existing mechanic, well done. That does not make it any more congruent to the rest of the game's design, however. Once again, you try to shift the goalposts to this discussion by trying to reframe it around the perceived failings of players, and falsely assuming perfect predictability of self-damage in spite of prior points made, and implicit admissions on your part. No matter how many times you repeat yourself on this matter, it's not going to be any more convincing than before.

Non-statements. You're accusing me of repetitive assertions when that is your own sole foundation of circular logic.
"Self damage doesn't fit with Warframe because X"
"X is inaccurate because Y"
"Y is invalid because Self-damage doesn't fit with Warframe"

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

"Tu quoque (/tjuːˈkwoʊkwi, tuːˈkwoʊkweɪ/;^[1] Latin for "you also"), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s)."

So... where am I accusing you of hypocrisy in this particular point? It feels like you just looked up fallacy names and decided to throw one out at random in response to my pointing out an actual fallacy in your argument. More specifically:

Is a No True Scotsman: you are stating that those who don't frequently use launchers aren't "the true enthusiasts", as if being a "true enthusiast" somehow conferred special status in this discussion. Even if that was not your intention, your very choice of framing itself indicates an unhealthy us-versus-them mentality that has visibly colored the rest of your argumentation.

Paraphrased, "you're doing a fallacy too so you can't call me out on mine". Your citation of fallacy was your defence and you didn't use it right.

No True Scotsman requires me to be making an active claim, not a passive observation. "Only top athletes are competing in the Olympics" is not a No True Scotsman fallacy, it's an observation because the Olympics is a top-level challenge with limited participants. There's no point in average or weak athletes being in the Olympics. There's no current reason why a non-enthusiast would be heavily using launchers because they have a risk-to-reward ratio currently overshadowed by alternatives.

Conversely, if I was saying only true enthusiasts are ever allowed to use launchers - appeal to purity. But you're allowed to use them, and you're allowed to like or not like them, and you're allowed to stop using them for not liking them. We cycle back to the idea of "it's possible, but if you don't want to, nothing's making you".

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Just to labor the point a tad, this is you implicitly admitting that launchers are only truly used by a minority of people. Thus, it is pointless to faff about how one cannot be sure what the numbers are, whether there's a silent majority of satisfied players, and so on.

Ah, but I'm not saying there's a majority that are satisfied. I'm saying that there is likely not a majority that would be unsatisfied with anything but removal. The shouty boys are already heavily split among "change it" and "remove it", so it's reasonable to believe change it would satisfy those who are happy with it, those who don't care, and those who simply wanted it changed but not removed, leaving the remainder as a probable minority.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Argues as "almost wholly subjective"... where? By whom? Does the game not feature a large amount of tight corridors and small rooms? Do our projectiles not collide with our teammates? Has DE not made changes specifically to avoid players exploiting self-damage? There is a difference between making an argument that something is subjective, and simply dismissing something as subjective, which is what you are doing now. The former makes a point that can be addressed or conceded, the latter just indicates you aren't willing to engage in proper discussion, and instead prefer to deny the existence of arguments that discomfit your position.

Questions answered in order:

1. Earlier in the thread
2. By myself
3. Depending on tileset and map generation (but in no case too tight to ever utilise explosives in a mission)
4. Yes, but I have advised solving this already as one of the few genuine issues
5. No, DE has made changes to avoid some undesirable interactions in which self-damage was involved but not necessarily responsible, for example:
   1. 99% Bless Trinity was a design problem which made self-damage the only viable way to access the buff reliably,
   2. Castanas/Link Trinity was a problem with stacking additive resistances to 100% immunity, removing the self-damage interaction was not the correct response as this interaction still exists (including on enemies!)

Ironic that you should draw the line between argument and dismissal, when you've been treading all over that for some time now.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Name one example. As it stands, I have answered you in scrupulous detail, as itself noted by the sheer size of my post and the fact that it comprehensively includes your own, so simply making these kinds of wild, unsubstantiated claims doesn't really work.

Which would you like? It says a lot that out of that whole last part I can intuit scant few of the origins for those responses without double-checking back.

Spoiler

"It's not but it is" is a lovely 'no u', the contradictory points of mobility and tight spaces depending on what suits that particular moment, goalpost-moving fallacies where you say something doesn't count for some additional unrelated criteria to say nothing of the abject strawmen, and you still flagrantly ignore my arguments that it's viable to mix parkour and explosives without shooting yourself in the foot with assertations that your viewpoints are 'objective' and unassailable.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

This whole statement applies more to yourself than it does to me, as not only have I specifically pushed for a more nuanced discussion and tried to establish common ground with you, you have repeatedly been negatively received on this very thread for starting arguments with other posters, ignoring their arguments wholesale, and continually pushing the same, borderline fanatical agenda. I do not see how you can reasonably accuse me of "glossing over" your arguments when not only have I answered your literal every point, but you have written that paragraph immediately after openly announcing that you wouldn't even bother addressing a huge part of my post.

Ad hominem. You know, I've got black marks on my record for 'arguments', but none here yet. Some of the modding staff have trouble dissociating heated debate from attacks, and inevitably I might get one, but that doesn't make my points less valid. The ones I got, almost exhaustively, were in using the other person's own words to highlight exactly how unreasonable they were being. Oops. "Abusive behaviour".

I said why I wasn't touching the rest of that post. Since I'm trying to formulate new analogies and explanations it takes sweet time to get this out, and when you blatantly disregard it that time is wasted. Life called first.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

But this is a lie: you are deliberately failing to understand the opposing view, and so by consistently turning it into a straw man and constantly insulting your opponents by claiming they and anyone who dislike launchers are just too unskilled or lazy to play properly. Meanwhile, I have taken great pains to understand your position, and even agree with you that self-damage as an effect is not inherently bad, even if I believe its implementation on most launchers is unworkably poor.

I'm not doing either of those things. If you truly are trying to engage me then this whole assertion of 'objectivity' and vilifying me has to stop. They're not lazy, they just don't find it fun. They're not unskilled plebs who can't hack it, they just don't enjoy developing the skill. Both of those are fine, because I'm not telling them to pick it up and git gud, I'm saying that they can leave it alone without insisting that it gets changed to suit them.

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Actually, tell you what, I've already said this in my previous post, in a nice little paragraph that sums up our entire discussion. Of course, you chose to gloss over it, and I suspect you did not even bother to read it:

Spoiler

I have in fact been questioning the mechanic and its implementation, not simply opposing it categorically. It is only when you started digging your argumentative trenches that you decided to fall into this "us versus them" mentality, and pictured me as wanting to remove self-damage from the game entirely, when I specifically tried to meet you halfway by pointing out that explosive damage has in fact been implemented successfully... but only because its implementation was completely different from the standard. At no point have I said that all self-damage, regardless of implementation, was fundamentally bad, I simply pointed out that attaching this self-damage to instant, poorly indicated explosions, in a game with tight spaces and an emphasis on mobility in highly variable level geometry, is a bad idea. I even attempted compromise from my very first post by suggesting three different other ways of punishing the player for using weapons at the "wrong" ranges, including suggesting to remove the scaling with self-damage mods in an effort to make self-damage more tolerable (but still not fun). As such, you are the only extremist on this thread, as you are not only aggressively defending a mechanic that has proven not to work, but have constructed such a limited mental model of your debating opponents that the discussion has lost all nuance for it. To restate my position: I think explosive self-damage as it is implemented on the majority of current launchers is bad by design, and should be removed or changed. I think implementations of self-damage resembling the Lenz are genuinely fun, and could potentially be developed, but I also believe some weapons could have their self-damage removed entirely and only benefit from it. To reject all of this in favor of the extremely simplistic position that everything would be just fine if the numbers were toned down, and people learned to git gud, is not only needlessly reductive, but dismissive and antagonistic to the point of insult.

So yeah, take it or leave it. To be honest, this paragraph alone answers your entire latest reply, as for all the volume you've posted, you've failed to move discussion forward an inch. I'm here to genuinely discuss self-damage and, as noted above, have been openly welcoming constructive exchange from the start: in many respects I in fact agree with you, in the sense that I believe toning down self-damage would go a long way towards making it feel less bad. However, discussion with you has been entirely unsatisfying, because you yourself are not willing to discuss or engage with other users: so far, you have done nothing but start arguments, and defend an indefensible position against all facts, all reasoning, and all evidence. Until you realize that the playerbase dislikes launchers in Warframe for a reason, that reason not being that they're all unskilled and lazy, and until you stop trying to shift the topic of conversation onto your perceived failings of the playerbase, nothing new or useful will come from your position.

See, again, your concluding at the bottom is this same holier-than-thou concept that made me abandon the remainder of your last post in the first place. What point is there for debate if you're not prepared to even say my views could be wrong?

Now, for the actual meat i've spoilerquoted back in there for reference:

Your arguments have at best been flowing back and forth between a standpoint of "It has no place" and "It needs to be changed". Since I've accepted the possibility of 'needs to be changed' by bringing my own suggestions to the table, the remaining assertions of it being fundamentally unworkable are what I'm contesting.

So your argument boils down to this 'bad by design' idea, and okay. Let's go back onto that.

• Launchers have an instant forfeiture for failure. Why is that bad, as you've made the mistake? 
  • You say, because that failure is not always the player's fault, citing causes mainly involving allies and scenery, with a dubious sub-point about 'telegraphing'
    • I have acknowledged that allies are a bad interaction for more than just explosives and should be treated separately
    • I have allowed for a solution to the 'telegraphing' in the case where it may reasonably matter (lingering, indirect explosives) with UI markers and a general understanding of the 4-6m range typical of payloads.
    • The remaining citation of scenery is argued not valid because it is entirely possible for a player to discretely select the right alternative weapon for situations where they truly cannot find a safe shot (e.g. surrounded in a tiny corridor), or find the safe shot in every other instance (since you only require average >=6m of clearance to the impact point).
• You assert that launchers do not play well with mobility.
  • I counter that they in fact work just fine with mobility, as mobility aids in finding the safe shots and quickly making distance with the prospective impact point.
• An argument is made that launchers are infrequently used in their current state.
  • This is not wrong, but you are asserting the cause of this to be purely isolated on the risk when it is a multifaceted cause involving the risk and relative reward.
    • It is equally valid to posit several potential changes from this:
      • Adding significant reward without reducing risk at all
      • Statistically rebalancing the values of risk and reward
      • Mechanically removing risk
    • At this stage we have not defined any of these as objective 'correct' solutions.
    • Arguments between the options can be introduced citing additional reasoning and sources:
      • Solely adding reward may introduce an indirect obligation to use the weapon significantly better in spite of the risk and in spite of personal preferences on risk-based gameplay. We don't want people who don't enjoy the paradigm to be strong-armed into it.
      • Mechanical removal of risk is A) unnecessary due to equivalent alternatives already existing for that playstyle and B) introduces the possible return of a historic problem case i.e. Tonkor Meta.
  • You identify this (objective fact of current usage levels) as a problem to be solved when it may not necessarily be a problem or may not be as much of a problem as you believe it to be.
    • As per previous analogy, allowing some specialised weapons that are infrequently used is not a problem if alternatives exist and overall balance is achieved between simplicity/difficulty of use, potential reward and potential drawbacks.
• You identify the Lenz as the 'one true launcher' for its two-step detonation.
  • By admission, should you be in the area where that arrow lands, a mistake has been made.
  • The Lenz allows you to recover from this mistake.
  • Recovery does not mean a mistake was not made, and therefore does not mean that every other 'risk-based' weapon absolutely must allow this luxury of escaping the consequences of mistakes.

Future weapons can be put anywhere across these nuanced concepts. Maybe there's more delayed Lenz-types. Maybe there's more softer-damage AOE radials like the Sonicor/Staticor. Maybe more like the Corinth alt-fire with its smart-arming.

Okay? That doesn't mean we have to drastically change these ones when a simple rebalance could reinforce their niche and playability while keeping the basic framework unaltered: Risk of failure that scales with the reward, but if used well, brings worthwhile reward.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

I swear, in a display of comedic irony, getting out posts of point-per-point quote debate is more annoyingly inconvenient than the very subject we're discussing. But on we go.

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... they are both parkour maneuvers, and aim-gliding specifically has you conserve momentum while moving while still giving you time to aim... while moving. Wall-latching, by contrast, has you directly attach yourself to the level geometry. Both are specifically part of a combat system where rapid movement and gunplay are part of the same whole, and the fact that you'd latch onto some superficial aspect to ignore this feels like you're trying to find excuses to avoid addressing the substance of the argument here.

Therefore you're not moving at maximum optimal traversal speeds at all times when combat is in play. Since that selfsame steadiness and control applies precisely to the usage of launchers right now, just as it does to properly handling anything else with only a difference in the sequence of execution and vectors of travel, calling it superficial is laughable.

I mean, even if you've never personally seen someone carpet-bomb from on high while aim gliding, only to land safely and continue their travels when the payloads have already connected, it's easy enough to envisage that saying such mastered executions are strictly impossible is a poor reflection on your impartiality.

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Literally none of this changes the fact that most people do not like self-damage, and unlike rifles, this is enough to make them not use launchers at all. One of the key flaws to the equivalence you are trying to establish is that most weapons, while perhaps not to everyone's preferences, only rarely have features that are actively disliked, meaning that anyone, even a fan of current launchers, can try them without being violently turned off. The same cannot be said for launchers, who have proven to be unpopular specifically due to self-damage. Thus, while I can certainly emphasize with wanting a weapon more suited for a more niche demographic of people, my ongoing criticism is that this should not mean excluding everyone else from the fun, which is why explosive self-damage is not really a "niche" worth implementing on an entire class of weapons, even if it might be fine on one or two like the Lenz (whose self-damage is implemented in a completely different manner).

Most people probably don't like running out of energy. But we don't just abolish energy and efficiency and let people run amok. We provide options to play around that, from lazy consumables to efficiency builds and energy generation sources.

Just because you say that's a flaw, doesn't mean it objectively is. Once again this is subjectivity being treated as the objective. Language like 'excluding everyone else from the fun' is just loaded rhetoric. There is a difference between excluding fun and just not being fun for everyone equally. Because there's no obligation.

Compare this to removed features like Limbo's Stasis. That was fun-exclusive because you had little to no personal control over exactly when and where you would be obligated not to use your guns. If you wanted to be where the fight was, you would be in range of that player's negative influence. You would have to abort the mission to remove the problem.
Personally selecting a launcher weapon is your own choice. There are not even Sortie modifiers forcing you to equip a self-risking launcher as your primary or sole option. If that gameplay variance is not fun for you, you have not been excluded from fun, you just found something that you don't like and can now happily pick something else in all future cases.

This is also related to how problematic the Tonkor and Simulor meta were. You were excluded from the fun because you couldn't pick anything but those to relatively compete with the easy obliteration. You were excluded from fun because if you brought other things, everyone just removed 90% of your potential opposition without a thought or care, and that wasn't your agency. You don't pick what they use.

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... but making one's movements more precise or orienting oneself mid-traversal are both central to the game's parkour, not opposed to it. The game isn't trying to slow you down with these traps forever, because with enough skill at parkour, those traps cease to pose a problem. Unlike explosives, parkour is a skill being constantly reinforced through play, which makes it reasonable to expect the player to have a measure of expertise in parkour after enough time playing.

Another statement as if to suggest explosives cannot be made safer to use through certain parkour approaches. Launchers don't strip you of aim glide like a deployed Archgun. You're free to weave full parkour with and around proper use of explosives. Mobility and explosives are not exclusive. 

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... except as I mentioned in one of my first posts here, self-damage isn't entirely based on personal failures, as the game, its levels, and even its explosive weapons do not have the predictability required to consistently avoid it. There appears to be an undue obsession with personal skill in this discussion, and an underlying fear of losing one's stated bragging rights with the removal of an otherwise demonstrably unhealthy mechanic.

^{[citation needed]}

It's 'unhealthy' because you can die from misusing it? Well that's probably because - stick with me here - that's a punishment for misuse. Which is entirely avoidable, to say nothing of how I have also suggested ways to further aid that judgement and mitigate risks in a way that doesn't sacrifice the fundamental mechanic because it doesn't need to.

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... which cover? Are you sure we're playing the same game? Because even defensive missions in Warframe still encourage the player to move around to fight waves of enemies coming from all sides. A lot of the stuff said here is so patently ridiculous in the face of even five minutes of actual in-game play that it feels like this conversation is being made for some completely imaginary game, and sustained entirely by the fact that it is being made on an internet forum, far from the reality of direct play experience.

I'd cite a fallacy here but I'm not even sure what to diagnose that mess as.

Even the Simulacrum has a significant amount of cover in it, and then there's all the Warframes that supply their own deployed cover to operate within and around. Are we playing the same game, indeed? Yours seems to be a flat open plane where there's nothing around you that can get between yourself and the enemies.
Except, that is, when you pull the trigger of a launcher in which case scenery arrives out of the aether to interfere.

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Precisely: the player element muddies those boundaries, and means that discussion on paper turns out differently in practice. In this specific case, for instance, one can pontificate endlessly about how, theoretically, one could be able to stop oneself at just the right times, or engage in stealth gameplay in every mission, or have absolute awareness of the environment while moving at high speeds, without taking into account any of the many other random factors that trigger self-damage, all just to make launchers usable, but the reality is simply that players as a whole dislike self-damage so much that they'd rather not touch one of the most bombastic weapons classes in the game, sooner than go through hours of pain for very little payoff.

Bandwagon is also a fallacy. Also, for the 'most bombastic weapons' there sure are a lot of complaints about the output being outmatched, almost like the whole (case of majority not using the weapons) is greater than the sum of its parts (output, risk, burden of mastery, etc).

I can describe it esoterically as a general approach to deconstructing the risks involved in the environment, or I can describe it more granular as in specific example cases and personal experience. But you'd only dismiss both. it's 'overly vague pontificating' or 'anecdotal personal experience'.

The trouble is, we're arguing two distinct concepts here: How the player can mitigate the risk, and whether the risk should exist in the first place. We will never agree on the ability for people to operate around self-damage risks while our stances on the risk existing as a mechanic are so diametrically opposed. From my side, "can be possible" is a perfectly adequate resolution to operating around risks, because the risk is there and you either get used to it or use something else. From your own, presupposing the risk's outright removal, "can be impossible" serves as your foundation. We're technically agreeing on the facts of the matter - both of us are saying that it's player-dependant on whether they comfortably operate around risks - we just disagree on what that means for the second point of contention.

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Is it, though? Because the majority of explosions aren't actually well-conveyed, and as said above, the level geometry means that shots can collide much sooner than anticipated, even with seemingly clear visual information at hand. Warframe's levels aren't the perfectly regular, square-like environments of Synthetik, for example, they're tilesets with bits of scenery sticking out from all sides, including some fairly irregular bits as well, often in spaces so tight it's difficult to fire a launcher at all. You could say that the player deserves to die for using launchers in those environments, but then the problem is that many players agree with you, and so choose to not use those weapons at all. Idealistic player moralism in this case doesn't actually help the situation, even if it must feel good to establish a point of comparison to other players in which one feels superior.

What explosions aren't well conveyed? You point it at a few guys and you see that those ones died, and those ones a bit further away didn't. What difference would it make to have a more flashy visual, exactly, when you already made the mistake you had every necessary piece of information to avoid?

It's still not difficult to just not shoot when up against scenery. It's also still not a problem if people agree with that fact and choose not to seek out the clearer shots, in favour of something with more generalised application. That's kind of the point, in fact. It's easy to spin-to-win melee than to execute combos for the desirable outcomes of damage and mobility between targets. Spin attacks are generalised to the point where most players will even use them on single targets where a combo might easily perform better through inherent multipliers or forced procs. That doesn't mean combos are conceptually being removed outright. A drawback is slated to be eased (making individual combo variants a bit more predictable to access) much as I suggested the rebalance to launcher risk/reward eases their drawback. The more generalised option is implicitly still going to be preferable to many or most who don't want to engage and learn how to properly use the other.

Also, nice ad hominem. Reading that I'm now wondering if I can stand to push through the rest of this goalpost-moving doublespeak.

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... I'm sorry, were you not the one outright telling me players should be using the same method of parkouring around enemies and slowing one's pace in the same manner as stealth just to land an explosive shot? Because I can quote you on that. Feigning plausible deniability here by telling me that you were just speaking in analogies doesn't work here, as the substance is still the same: you still seem to be asking for players to go out of their way to slow themselves down just to manage explosives, which begs the question: why should anyone do that? What is the payoff here for this unusually large effort?

... okay, but alerting someone because you shot them near their friend is a universal mechanic, whereas self-damage is not. Stealth weapons develop upon an existing framework and existing mechanics to operate, whereas launchers fabricate this entirely new mechanic that goes directly against how the rest of the game works. Properly engaging in stealth means the enemy stays unalerted and you get more Affinity; "properly" engaging in launcher gameplay means either turning into a sitting duck, or constantly running the risk of blowing up at random because of poorly predictable self-damage when in motion.

You can go ahead and quote, but you're the one who makes such absurdist conclusions as "Launchers are stealth weapons?" and "You have to play exactly the way stealth players do just to use explosives?" Either you fail to grasp analogy or you're wilfully making these inane statements to construct strawmen you can poke fun at.

What's the payoff for stealth? They might get shot at less - but the guy who obliterated everything incautiously doesn't get shot either. They might get affinity multipliers - but the guys who killed 5 times as many enemies in the same time, and moved on to the next spawns, also got a bunch of affinity.

There's no real reason required. Players do all sorts of things for fun. Hildryn in No-Shield Nightmare is objectively unfun but someone's out there running it for personal amusement regardless.

Once again, self-damage is not random in almost every case, and this vague 'rest of the game' concept can be applied to basically anything with the right coercion. Naturally silent weapons shouldn't exist because the rest of the game alerts enemies when triggers are pulled? Dissolving a body with certain effects shouldn't exist because in the rest of the game, they stick around to potentially alert enemies? It's meaningless.
Self-damage is part of the game in its own right, historically and consistently among a thematic weapon group. It is, by definition, an existing mechanic, it operates predictably in that you get hurt if you stand in the blast radius and it's your responsibility to put the blast radius elsewhere.

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

This is a curious blend of conjectural optimism and the No True Scotsman fallacy, one that ignores a fact that has been pointed out multiple times already that self-damage isn't a problem purely because it's balanced wrong, but because its design fundamentally does not work in Warframe:

These are a few choice bulletpoints I made in my very first post on this thread. Balancing self-damage by reducing it would not address the above issues.

If you're going to Tu Quoque me, you should probably get your act in order. That's not a No True Scotsman, it's a simple observation. Currently, for various reasons, they're not used except by people who do really like them enough to overlook shortfalls or work around challenges they pose.

Your choice bulletpoints were already argued as almost wholly subjective, so 'fundamentally' you're taking the high road of "this is fundamentally and objectively true" off a sheer cliff of "because I say so". If anyone, it's actually you pulling the appeal to purity, because "no true Warframe player accepts self-damage and the steps required to mitigate its risks".

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Spoiler

 

And how exactly do you know that this is more likely? Because that's how you personally feel? Because you too are advocating to "neuter" the archetype by reducing self-damage, so really, all of this fearmongering leads to nowhere, because it is purely hypothetical and based on some arbitrary baseline neither of us seem to have decided upon. Even if by some freak chance a handful of people were so attached to self-damaged that they'd leave the game for it, yet that were to gain the game more players, players actually aligned with Warframe's gameplay... well, I guess that's just too bad.

Indeed, it wouldn't be... except it is. It's been pointed out by many more users, and is demonstrated by actual player behavior in-game, where the few players who do pick up self-damaging weapons often end up killing themselves at random. Again, launchers are patently unpopular, so pretending that it's all the player's fault here is as pointless as it is false.

I'm not sure you understand the concept of semantics. To be clear, I called you out on semantics because you were inventing the notion that there was some sort of Platonic ideal of explosives, and that one of the essential characteristics of this archetype was self-damage, a line of reasoning that makes strictly no sense from beginning to end. By contrast "me likey explosives because big boom boom explosion" isn't a semantic argument. I had already answered you on this matter rather clearly: explosives tend to be popular because they produce discrete, yet powerful explosions that tend to feel impactful. It really isn't that hard to understand why people like explosions, as Michael Bay moviegoers can attest to. Trying to establish some vague association between the AoE of explosions and that of the Ignis therefore makes absolutely no sense, and would only make sense in an imaginary world where one were to abstract all weapons to such a high-level degree that the resulting design talk would be fruitless. 

... case in point. You are completely ignoring prior arguments made here in favor of repeating the same, debunked talking points: self-damage is not an essential characteristic of "conventional ordnance", nor would it need to be if it were the case, and "radial AoE" is an intentionally vague term that completely misses the fact that using a flamethrower or a shotgun with punch-through does not have the same feel as firing a grenade or exploding rocket. Why is it an oxymoron to ask for launchers without self-damage? Would the Tonkor or Ogris cease to exist if their self-damage were reduced to 0?

... speaking of sabotage, you have diluted your point to the extent where it ceases to make sense here, while utterly missing the point of what I'm saying: attempting to gerrymander the playerbase along arbitrary degrees of intensity on the subject does strictly nothing in the face of the very obvious fact that self-damage is very unpopular. Players express a general dislike of self-damage, and only a tiny handful of people scattered across internet discussion spaces ever defend the mechanic. It is possible that more people would tolerate self-damage if it were reduced, but that is not the same as enjoying a mechanic, the latter of which is obviously better (and, speaking of, not even you have really expressed any actual enjoyment of self-damage, so much as the assurance that it'd feel less bad if it were reduced). Pretending that there's this silent majority of players who are satisfied with self-damage is equally laughable when launchers are themselves a notoriously unpopular class of weapons: more generally, the moment you count on a "silent majority" of players that just so happens to never have expressed themselves on the subject as being on your side, that is an implicit admission that your position is unpopular, and indefensible on its own terms.

So, first off, just because I've said words and you've said words does not mean our words are equal in meaning and value. I've actually done the work of explaining why most self-damage in Warframe is bad by design, and so have several others on here and on many other spaces, and these are points you have yet to address. Meanwhile, your two central arguments so far, namely that self-damage can be balanced better (which I agree with), and that the unpopularity of launchers comes from Warframe's playerbase being collectively inferior to you, have been responded to in several different ways.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, I have in fact been questioning the mechanic and its implementation, not simply opposing it categorically. It is only when you started digging your argumentative trenches that you decided to fall into this "us versus them" mentality, and pictured me as wanting to remove self-damage from the game entirely, when I specifically tried to meet you halfway by pointing out that explosive damage has in fact been implemented successfully... but only because its implementation was completely different from the standard. At no point have I said that all self-damage, regardless of implementation, was fundamentally bad, I simply pointed out that attaching this self-damage to instant, poorly indicated explosions, in a game with tight spaces and an emphasis on mobility in highly variable level geometry, is a bad idea. I even attempted compromise from my very first post by suggesting three different other ways of punishing the player for using weapons at the "wrong" ranges, including suggesting to remove the scaling with self-damage mods in an effort to make self-damage more tolerable (but still not fun). As such, you are the only extremist on this thread, as you are not only aggressively defending a mechanic that has proven not to work, but have constructed such a limited mental model of your debating opponents that the discussion has lost all nuance for it. To restate my position: I think explosive self-damage as it is implemented on the majority of current launchers is bad by design, and should be removed or changed. I think implementations of self-damage resembling the Lenz are genuinely fun, and could potentially be developed, but I also believe some weapons could have their self-damage removed entirely and only benefit from it. To reject all of this in favor of the extremely simplistic position that everything would be just fine if the numbers were toned down, and people learned to git gud, is not only needlessly reductive, but dismissive and antagonistic to the point of insult.

What does this even mean?! I cited individual examples of launchers to specifically point out that they, and by extension the archetype as a whole, would lose strictly none of their identity if self-damage were removed. When I tell you that a rocket launcher is a rocket launcher regardless of whether or not the wielder is hurt by its explosions, and you tell me I'm being "semantically vague", that does not convey to me that you truly understand semantics, so much as it does that you're trying to find excuses to dismiss a cogent argument that makes your position more difficult to defend.

Okay, but this is being intentionally vague and too focused on semantics. I'm not trying to have a discussion with you on what constitutes the Platonic ideal of a shotgun, a pistol, or a launcher, unless you are so unwilling to establish any common ground that you are prepared to tell me that the only essential characteristic of an explosive weapon is its capacity for self-damage. 

Syndicate procs don't fire explosive payloads, and the Staticor is visibly designed to fire rapid-fire projectiles rather than those same slow, explosive payloads. You are undermining your point on several sides here, as citing the Tonkor immediately harkens back to when it had no real risk to self... and was still a "conventional explosive launcher", and citing "risk-to-self" as an exclusive characteristic of the launcher archetype means the Komorex, all glaive weapons, and even the Hema are "conventional explosive launchers" by your definition. In effect, by bringing this discussion down to pure semantics, you are showing that your concept of launchers is so alien that we may in fact be talking about two entirely separate classes of weapons.

... except the Simulors are also no longer meta, and they didn't receive self damage. Why's that, pray tell? Oh, that's right, better weapons arrived... and the Tonkor was also reworked into a much slower weapon, even after its nerf that not only reduced its self-damage, but reduced its damage and the reliability of its explosions. It is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that we'd all just go back to using the Tonkor now if its self-damage were removed, because self-damage does not even begin to describe why the Tonkor is outmatched by better weapons.

... all of which got nerfed in addition to the increase in self-damage. It is indeed good that you have decided to update your spreadsheet, because you are using outdated information to come to entirely wrong conclusions (because, just so we're clear on this, the Tonkor is a completely different weapon now, and better weapons have arrived since).

No, I can't actually, because you are expecting me to assume that removing self-damage on the Tonkor would also somehow undo all of the other statistical changes it's gone through since, while also somehow purging weapons like the Tigris Prime from the game. The fact that you bring up Mirage and the Simulor also clearly illustrates the fact that the meta shifts even on weapons without self-damage, further undermining your point. Yes, if the Tonkor went back to having the best damage out of all weapons, negligible downtime, and ultra-reliable explosions, on top of having no self-damage, then it would likely be a problem, but in its current state, the weapon fires one shot at a time and has a lengthy reload period in-between, which I'd say are sufficient enough tradeoffs on their own, without having to add self-damage on top.

Or, even more simply: "That's a bomb, I want to shoot it so that it blows up"... which just so happens to not work when doing so blows the player up during regular play. Warframes are superhumanly strong and resilient, on top of having magic powers, so there really is no reason to enforce some kind of realism in this respect. Once again, insulting the playerbase's collective intelligent isn't going to make anyone want to play launchers more, it just makes you look elitist and fundamentally out of touch with the game.

Yet it is apparently too hard for a majority of players to want to use launchers. Again, I'm not criminalizing thought, and would in fact like to see more opportunities for tactical thinking in-game, I'm just pointing out that your mental model of explosive self-damage is not only demonstrably wrong, it is outright insulting, as it presumes that people only incur self-damage because they're stupid or otherwise unskilled. Are you trying to discuss design for a video game here, or do you just want to tell me you think you're better than everyone else?

Yes, it is, because Eidolon hunts are an extremely specific format in a very specific and unusually open level... and even then, many Eidolon moves explicitly try to force the player to move, e.g. the delayed lightning, sky lasers, shockwaves, acid ground, and so on. This is not the same as asking the player to bend over backwards in regular play just to avoid self-damaging themselves in ways that are often not really in the player's control.

But I'm not opposing altering one's playstyle here, I just don't think it's an adequate solution to the problem at hand: with the Lenz, for example, I've found myself altering my playstyle in a manner I actually really like, because the weapon naturally pushes me to bullet-jump into the air, aim-glide, and fire a shot at a crowd of enemies to blow them all up in almost cinematic fashion. All of this works, because if I accidentally hit a bit of level geometry instead, I can just move out of the way or use Transference to avoid incurring self-damage. I cannot do this with the Tonkor, the Ogris, or the Penta, because if I attempt to jump away from my enemies while firing at them, I may very well just blow myself up instead because the explosive hit some random bit of scenery, or because one enemy in the omnidirectional horde I'm fighting decided that that would be the exact moment they'd use their jump move to position themselves right in front of me. This is why the way those weapons implement self-damage fundamentally does not work.

How long have you been on the forums? Because people had in fact been complaining about self-damage pretty regularly even before Cautious Shot, it's just that Cautious Shot annoyed a lot of players by attempting to band-aid (ineffectively, might I add) what was generally considered a fundamental balance and design problem. It is no different in this respect from how The Vacuum Within only exacerbated discussion surrounding Universal Vacuum, a topic that continues to be discussed and was long popular before the event.

 

 

Christ, look how much of that is left.

Just skimming that vaguely I can see a whole cavalcade of 'no u', minor hypocrisies, fallacy citations waiting to be made, and not inconsiderable counts of you just ignoring arguments that don't suit you.

I do love a good debate, but this is getting to be much more quantity than quality and if you truly have no interest in understanding an opposing view whatsoever (deifying subjective viewa as "fundamentally correct" suggests this) then it's not worth my earnest time spent coming up with new analogies and explanations for you to inevitably gloss over.

Now, before I get another tu quoque, no I do not fail to understand the opposing view. I can see why people might not want to engage in self-damage at the current balance state (hence my proposition) and I can understand people who might not want to elect to engage in self damage at all - they just don't find that particular variation and nuance of gameplay fun enough - but they have their alternatives; so for the topic of the thread overall this becomes a conclusion of "self-harm is not unnecessary in this game". It has a place, we don't need it removing any more than we need it adding onto everything like that other game you two were citing.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

20 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

Here's the thing. You're right that you can avoid self-damage via some situational awareness. Okay, and?

Look, the Ogris is literally my most used weapon. I am very aware of how Warframe launchers handle. I can avoid their AoEs just fine. The entire process is still incredibly pointless frustrating busywork for weapons that literally aren't, and shouldn't be, any better than alternatives.

The fact that you probably won't be regularly killing yourself doesn't change that using them is annoying because of the absurd self-damage, the absurd punishment for the use of self-damage weapons disinclines players to actually experiment with them and 'get used to it,' the deaths that you suffer from bad luck are extremely frustrating, and the level of punishment launchers in Warframe have for missed shots is far out of line of literally every other weapon type in the game. Even the Opticor, which is relatively punishing due to its charge mechanics and slow fire rate, means that if you miss a shot you... have to wait one or two more seconds to fire another one (and it also has two AoEs: The beam itself with a .5m radius, and the impact AoE to boot). If the punishment for a whiffed self-damaging launcher shot was a dud round or some visual disruption or a knockdown, that would be one thing. But it isn't.

Why shouldn't they be better (if better is defined as better damage output, specifically) than alternatives?
If 'better' means the overall risks/rewards as a proportion, how does addressing that from both sides not also work to solve the inferiority of explosives in an incremental fashion until acceptable balance is reached?

I interject to ask this because once again you have not actually identified any impersonal reason why self-damage is inexcusable.

Consider weapon balance abstracted as a rectangular plot on a graph with positive X (Better Rewards), negative X (Bigger Risks) and positive Y (which we'll call General Applicability for want of a more succinct name).

Most weapons are a relatively tall plot, which does not extend very far on either side of X. Low impact risks, average output. More specialised weapons squash the height of this plot to extend the width. In their worst, they can bring about much more lost opportunity than the basic, average plot. In their best, they bring greater rewards. The reduction in applicability means that they're just more specialised, more care needs to be taken in their usage to achieve positive X outcomes rather than negative X outcomes.

Launchers with self-damage then are the shallow form of this plot. They should bring greater rewards in optimal use cases, they have the great deficit of self-damage and possible self-fatality when inappropriately used. As a shallow plot, that means they're among the most specialised, they require the most diligence, care, finesse, skill - whatever you want to call it - to ensure outcomes land on Positive X.

Now, if all these abstract plots have a reasonably similar total area and are centred for X, we can consider them balanced. They may not see equal usage, but each is valid for people who wish to use them. More people will tend to the taller plots, fewer to the shallower plots, as is natural outside of specific scenarios that play into the positives or play out of the potential negatives.

You do not have to make the plot less shallow to right an imbalance. You can squash or stretch the width as appropriate also. While this does not prove your desire abjectly wrong, if the less-shallow plot already exists in similar functionality (which it does, through the various AOE alternatives), there is no obligating reason whatsoever to make that Risky Explosive plot taller.

20 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

You're exaggerating "carefully aim" into "calculate the world" now as if I was implying that avoiding self-damage required calculating windage and elevation. And you're also conflating "simple and straightforward in concept" with "work in simple and straightforward fashions" despite the fact that they don't actually mean the same thing. Requiring players to understand their weapon's poorly-telegraphed, unlisted blast radius, then get used to working around it so much that they can successfully use said weapon in close quarters, is a hell of a lot less simple and straightforward than putting your reticle on target and firing. Especially since almost all launchers in Warframe fire slow, arcing projectiles that have noticeable drop even over short distances, so they're already somewhat unwieldy even ignoring their slow fire and reload speeds and self-damage and everything else. Yet again, you're acting like most of Warframe's combat doesn't take place in cramped, indoors areas with average engagement ranges of maybe a dozen meters.

The investment that self-damage weapons want from the player in a game where the mechanics incentivize dabbling in a lot of weapons and very few weapons require that level of investment is unreasonably high.

Actually, I was extrapolating 'calculate the world' from your description of the minutia of this other game of yours.

How is a simple and straightforward concept not inherently something that works in a simple fashion? You shoot an explosive badly, you died. You shoot it well, you kill the other guys (theoretically) and not yourself. Still simple. "This end towards enemy" and "operate at safe distance". That's all the weapons generally care for, the rest is your gameplay around that. It's not the weapon's fault if you don't distance yourself, hell, it's not even the weapon's fault if you clip a hitbox that's imperfect. The latter might not be directly yours, but you judged the value of that 'near miss' playing out as expected to be worth the fact that it is still, invariably, a non-zero risk compared to a clear field of view.

Do go on about engagement ranges of 12m when the best base radius of a typical single payload is maybe half of that. I killed myself thrice last night playing around with my ol' Kulstar, not going to lie. But then I was dumbfiring at Infested within my cosy-ranged Snowglobe at the time, so when I made my distance I clipped the edge of the dome. Shockingly, trying to lay clusters down in a 6m radius led to a backing up slightly too far. If deaths mattered I wouldn't be doing that, of course, because I knew it was daft and needlessly risky. 

20 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

Eidolon hunts have been criticized for basically rendering irrelevant most of the things which make Warframe unique (like mobility and agility) and devolving into Destiny 2 raid metas where you stand around stacking damage buffs and unload your highest DPS guns into the raid boss's weakspot, so I'm not sure appealing to something that's already debatable (the fact that you basically might as well stand still in an Eidolon fight unless you're targeted by a telegraphed attack) to defend the existence of self-damage is wise. Furthermore, it's funny that you strawman Warframe being a hyper-fast looter shooter into "it's criminal to employ a moment of cognisant thought" when what I want is emphasizing thinking about movement and people firing while moving.

But even assuming, arguendo, that eidolon hunts are a good example of why it shouldn't be "criminal to employ a moment of cognisant thought" (hey that's another exaggeration, I never said it should be), that doesn't actually support your case. Eidolons are a break from the normal content in Warframe, much like most Warframe bosses are. They can only be fought at limited times, they're only limited to a single area and are primarily a self-contained ecosystem for Operator and extremely late-game items (Arcanes), and like the other bosses they attempt to change the gameplay up a little because they're allowed to be somewhat abnormal for the rest of the game because you're not expected to fight them that much and new mechanics are something of a draw for bosses. Hell, one of the bosses is literally a music puzzle with jumping puzzle elements.

But launchers aren't an environmental weapon or something else that shows up in a handful of special missions where the launcher rules exist . Launchers are intended to be used in regular gameplay, which is supposed to be a fast-paced horde shooter. They should be not annoying to use if you want to play the game as a fast paced horde shooter, which means they should be reasonably forgiving in their handling, like the other guns in Warframe are.

Again, if somehow AoE weapons are all incredibly unbalanced if they can be used at short range, give them a minimum arm distance, so short-range attacks plink off the enemy like Corinth alt-fires.

Okay then, let's put away Eidolon fights and sink back to other bosses.

Are you going to parkour at full speed around the arena when aiming for the weak spots of Grineer bosses such as Lech Kril, Vay Hek, Sargas Ruk? Even Kela when she's in her own parkour mode? Or are you going to find the gap between attacks where you can slow down a second to take that shot?

When you've downed an Ambulas, are you better off circling the arena or holding cover while you point-defend against the Remechs and hacking Crewmen - except when the artillery expressly makes you change up that strategy for a short period?

Yes, Warframe promotes mobility, but it equally promotes ebb and flow between higher- and lower-mobility moments.

Now those are bosses that exhibit that measure of approach in general, but it follows naturally in regular play based on what you bring: Some weapons play particularly well at high speeds, some need you to occasionally measure your shots to get the output you desire. Many are generally ambivalent where you just might not get as much out as accurately if you're being laissez-faire.
But you can even get more out of a totally standard boring rifle with a little punch-through and lining your opposition up from your point of view.

Yes, the risk of launchers is a big deal (although further mitigated by squads, bonus Arcane revives, Sacrifice sentinels..) but so what, fundamentally? Why can't we - as per the example under the first quote - let that shallow and wide group of balance plots just exist as the specialised gear they are?

If brought to a more appropriate representative total 'plot area' by tweaks to the risk/reward relationship, they're balanced.
Alternative AOE equipment with similar implementations exist as a thinner/taller plot already, so we're not filling a missing niche by squashing in the explosive class. We're just removing that separate level.

 

Although you say your Ogris is your most used weapon, I hate to break it to you, but if you're getting that frustrated with killing yourself (and the process involved in not killing yourself), the appeal is definitely not the whole package - you're not attached to the sum of its parts, just some of its parts. The problem is, you're trying to cherry pick those parts for everyone.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

9 hours ago, MJ12 said:

The punishment for a door trap is falling flat on your face and losing some of your shields (unless you're knockdown immune in which case you literally bull through them), or taking a magnetic proc (unless you're proc immune in which case you ignore it). This is significantly less punishing than 'a missed launcher shot' and moreover they're easier to avoid in the first place as well. Moreover, door traps are far rarer than launcher shots. You're only likely to encounter a handful of door traps in a mission, whereas you're probably firing a launcher hundreds of times in the same mission. 

More importantly, "door traps" exist as part of the level design to slow down the first person to encounter them. They're a pacing tool that exist for a legitimate purpose, which is to keep players from getting too spread out in a mission, just like friendship doors. They exist specifically to manipulate mobility to avoid making it so that players who know how to use Warframe maneuverability (or simply load up with mobility enhancements) end up a mile in front of the players who don't. Making launchers force a player to slow down doesn't actually do this, in fact it does the very opposite by making it so that launcher users are more likely to end up even further behind non-launcher users.

And last but not least, the devs have said on stream that they're very unhappy with door traps as they exist specifically because parkour punishments are undesirable given the current state of Warframe, which is much faster and more mobile than when door traps were implemented. There's been a trend of removing 'parkour punishments' like Stamina, jutting level geometry, 'cannot cast in air' effects, and the like.

The punishment for a standard Corpus laser trap is knockdown. It's been argued this is an equivalent to the fatality of self-damage, so there's clearly a disconnect here to now say the same reaction is significantly less punishing.
Magnetic procs sap energy. Taking aside the breed of player that spams energy restores like an absolute chump, that player's now been robbed of their abilities, you know, the core uniqueness of Warframe being the Warframes. That's a pretty hefty penalty to mistake, forcing you to wait out energy regen or orbs to get back access to the 'fun part'
Jupiter traps often mean a gas cloud of toxin that can easily wipe out a softer frame just the same as self-damage would. Arguably better, because shields would offset the launcher damage.

Door traps also don't slow down the first person to encounter them. They slow down the first person to deal with them. The punishments can hit everyone in the squad multiple times if nobody bothers to deal with it. They are prone to getting blown up in collateral, depending on the weapons in use, though.

I'm gonna go ahead and slap the ol' ^{[citation needed]} on that last comment too. I haven't ever heard them say anything about door traps that way, and considering they added new door traps in Jupiter I think you're frankly talking nonsense. Removal of stamina and vent geometry is more about the parkour flow when parkour is appropriate, which is only partially related considering we're talking about cases where parkour is not appropriate. Because it's not always. Basic design for Experience Contrast; you need the variety of moments without an experience to validate the time with the experience. Why would we have wall latch at all if we're always meant to be moving at speed?

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

"Parallel with combat" implies that the game somehow intends for mobility and combat to be mutually exclusive, or at the very least separate, a notion that is patently false. We have wall-latching and aim-gliding for a reason, just as the game's enemy accuracy algorithm is designed specifically so that players avoid more shots when they're on the move. Making yourself a sitting duck while shooting is exactly what the game discourages.

Interesting that you identify wall latching and aim gliding, both features which slow or halt your parkour vectors so you can control yourself and aim better. I don't think I could have made my point better than you already did with that.

Okay, though. Maybe my mind works differently. Maybe I process situations quickly and my experience is not a representative median of judgement and reaction. But for something that should be such an absolute solution to That Group Right There, it's part and parcel of the experience to make that call.
Where the guy mowing enemies down with the rifle at high speed has to aim at each individual target, compensating as they go, the guy with the explosives performs their assessment and adjustments up front, finds their clear distance and takes The Shot, and everything goes away with them surviving.
Perhaps they both spent as long getting their aim on, it just varies in distribution? After all, given the standardised Fast Move includes a roll, Rifle Dave can't keep their aiming and shooting while at maximum movement either.

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... what reorientation is there to rolling and sliding? For sure, those traps mean that players can't just ignorantly walk through those doors without incurring consequences, but both of those trap types can be bypassed completely through the use of parkour, and so without even losing momentum. It's just a matter of observing those traps and/or shooting them, which can itself be done while in motion. If it's too difficult to adjust course on the fly, then yeah, you can pause to shoot those traps, but with a bit of experience that quickly becomes unnecessary, and one can just parkour through.

Reorienting was specific to the Corpus traps mostly, since you have to have a semblance of control to have your roll ready and placed correctly even to pass a standard laser barricade. At full whack it's easy to still be aim-gliding after you rolled and end up being clipped unless you drop yourself short to get the roll back.
Jupiter now doubles-down on that by having partial coverage. You might have to slide, you might have to orient yourself to a particular side. Occasionally there's even a low one you're meant to go over.

Yes, they can all be shot, but pulling that off at full speed is a matter of experience and expertise.. just like learning how to wield an explosive safely yet without being glacially slow.

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

It's not a crime... but then, as mentioned above, the game doesn't really want you to just stand around and act like a stationary turret. The game's entire design encourages you to be constantly on the move, including during combat, so it makes zero sense to have a mechanic whose haphazard method of punishment interacts especially poorly with said movement. At this point, it's also worth mentioning that the mechanic isn't even good when stationary, as random bits of scenery, breakable objects, poor indication of the explosives' range, and sudden appearance of allies can all "punish" the player for the wrong reasons.

The entire design, you say? In my version of the game there are defending-based objectives which are fairly well suited to stationary, cover-based approaches. They're not the only one that works, but they are excellent tools for the job at hand.

Likewise, the explosive wielder may not be Volt doing the running-man to his destination (invariably kissing the nearest wall until he compensates momentum) but they can still move competently enough between and during their uses of those risky payloads to still be on their toes in a Warframe environment.
I can't stand Volts, by the way, because by muscle memory and experience I'm overall slower with that arbitrary momentum buff than I am without it. Does that mean I fall completely behind every squad containing a Volt? Nah. I've even become fairly competent at spinning around to integrate the back-dodge into my parkour flow when I need to get rid of the buff.
On paper they should be faster, just like on paper operating around the risk of explosives should make you slower, but the player element muddies those boundaries right over each other.

 

If you're stationary and you die from shooting anything other than a rogue ally whose own parkour 'crosses the pipe' then that is absolutely a reason to punish the player. They took grossly inadequate care of entirely visible clues when judging their trigger pull. But that is why I suggested a resolution for ally issues (and possibly the 'distance to payload' issue) to handle those questionable cases. 

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... because stealth is in fact something at least some part of the game genuinely tries to encourage, via silenced weapons, our parkour, enemy awareness, and Spy vaults. The game certainly doesn't do stealth well, because stealth isn't truly functional at this stage, and players aren't really incentivized to be stealthy, but at least stealth doesn't actively clash with the rest of Warframe's intended gameplay. Asking the player to engage in precise stealth gameplay to make proper use of what should normally be the absolute noisiest, heaviest class of weapon makes little sense in and of itself, to say nothing of how even stealth-oriented weapons don't demand that kind of setup.

I'm not sure you understand the concept of analogy. You don't have to be a stealth player to use explosives, but if stealth can still be a played style, so can risky explosives, as they both require deviation from the norm, indirect pathing and more consideration in engagements than the average run 'n gun. The deviations are similar in concept but differ in execution. Stealth Joe cares where enemies are looking when deciding where he moves. Explosive Dave cares where they are standing and where he can move to clear his line of fire. Stealth Joe waits for patrols to turn their backs; Explosive Dave waits briefly for a detonation in an enclosed space or takes a somewhat slower route around the impending danger zone.

Stealth weapons do require setups that behoove them. You get found if you shot a guy in front of his buddy, now. Arrows can carry corpses into view and alert guards as well. Explosives fare poorly in tight space unless you can back up a respectable distance, but have a better freedom of effective firing path in less-obstructed areas.

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I mean, something's clearly not quite clicking with your reasoning, because players are not in fact making frequent use of these weapons, with self-damage being cited as one of the main reasons why most players don't touch launchers. If, by your logic, this means the quasi-totality of Warframe's playerbase is made of idiots with no depth perception... well, too bad, that's just the demographic you have to work with.

With current risk-reward ratio and overpowering alternatives, few but the true enthusiasts make frequent use of most launchers.
This says nothing about whether a more adequate balance within and without of their archetype would see people more willing to accept that risk.

What is far more likely is that people who are enthusiasts already in spite of the risk and alternatives will probably feel at best like they just got their weapon replaced by a baby toy should the archetype be neutered in the way you suggest.

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

This is pure finagling on semantics: explosive weapons are not universally designed with self-damage in video games, and even if they were, that would not stop their implementation from making launchers fundamentally undesirable in Warframe. The fact remains that players want to be able to fire explosives at enemies in Warframe, but don't want to kill themselves at random in the process, and currently have no option that accommodates them. It is ridiculous to pretend that I am the only one with this opinion, and that I am single-handedly trying to bend Warframe to my whims, when explosive self-damage in Warframe is a notoriously unpopular mechanic.

Other than the previously addressed issues, it's not 'at random' if the player can reasonably operate around the risk.

You bring up semantics and then make a semantic call that the 'explosives' are desired as some unique property of their own above and beyond their archetype in relation to other AOE weaponry. What is it then? Is it art assets? Should I riot because my Ignis can produce noxious fumes instead of a stream of visually pleasing fire?

If it's conventional ordnance that you want, they always came with self-damage, barring the obvious mistake, and saying you want one without the other is an oxymoron.
If it's a radial AOE that you want, then there are other options currently, potential additional options later, and don't require the changing of one subset to become more identical to another.

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

This is a non-argument. Just because a number of people have one opinion and another number of people have another opinion does not mean those two groups have the exact same number of people making them up: as it stands, the majority of opinions expressed on explosive self-damage on all Warframe-related discussion spaces, and by content creators, has not only been negative, but severely negative. As in, people questioning why the mechanic exists in the first place. It's all very nice to go into conjecture on what people could be thinking, but the reality of what most people are expressing is that they don't like self-damage as a mechanic.

I'm not sure if you were sabotaging yourself or not in vagueness considering the meat of what this replied to, being that it is not one group with A opinion and one group with B opinion, but one group with one opinion being declared the inarguable majority over several groups of several opinions. You have absolutely zero proof that the singular opinion of "zero self-damage" is the majority, especially not by their vocal nature. Look at the 'yes' posters here. How many of them are engaging to this extent? They all still obviously exist even if they've come and gone in a heartbeat. It's also a factor that those who are in a negative perspective are inherently more disposed to be vocal than those with a neutral or positive perspective. Outliers like myself notwithstanding, they have no need to go on tirades because they don't feel like they particularly require action.

Sure, you can have people who question the mechanic! And I'll point them right to that old chestnut that proved the need. Then, I'll question the why not which is an equally valid question as why so, and one which you have done a respectable effort of debating but proved no more inarguably than I the opposite.

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

All of this is pointlessly and excessively vague, when it's not particularly difficult to identify key features of launchers that would not be removed, namely the fact that they all involve launching some explosive payload in discrete amounts. The Tonkor was never equivalent to the Ignis or to a punch-through Tigris even when its self-damage was still irrelevant. With or without self-damage, the Ogris will remain a rocket launcher, the Zarr a flak cannon, and the Lenz an explosive bow. I'm not really convinced here by the pretense that removing self-damage from launchers will somehow cause them to become unrecognizable from other weapon types, particularly since, as mentioned already, launchers also already have the distinct drawback of being slow to fire, while frequently having unwieldy travel times and arcs to their projectiles.

This is no less semantically vague than my own can be argued. I'd posit more so in fact, because you're mixing the distinction between weapon individuals and weapon-archetypes.

Is the Arca Plasmor a shotgun? In some ways - not least its designated ammo type - yes. In others, no. In no case is it going to be comparable to a Dread, but equally in some cases it's not comparable to any other shotgun, making it distinctly not one for lacking those pellet-based and partial-miss drawback qualities. Conversely, the Brakk is a 'pistol' that is a pocket shotgun, featuring all the distinguishing design and drawbacks of the shotgun caste.

Is a Tonkor a grenade launcher and the Ogris a rocket launcher within themselves? Aye. But as conventional explosive launchers, they share that common and distinguishing feature of risk-to-self when compared to other archetypes involving radial blasts. Is a Syndicate Proc attaching an explosive launcher effect? Is the Staticor an explosive launcher? Currently no, but what tangible difference is there once 'explosive launchers' are reduced in nuance to 'weapon producing radial AOE'?

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Easy: not only remove the self-damage, but just massively buff the damage per shot, and even the blast radius of whichever launcher you're discussing. Thus, the Staticor would be a rapid-fire mini-AoE alternative to the slow-firing launcher capable of clearing crowds of enemies with a single, well-placed shot. Both weapons would offer significantly different paths to mastery, and the launcher would retain its key distinguishing features, while lowering the barrier to entry of becoming an enthusiast by dint of removing a horrendously unattractive anti-mechanic.

You have successfully invented the Tonkor at launch and obliterated the barrier to entry while also removing the ceiling of non-entry, that is to say, supplied zero effective reason to use anything else except (at the time) the Simulors in 90+% of standard play.

On the plus side, I realised my analysis spreadsheet is so old I still have calculations on there from original Tonkor Judgement Day. They may be changed now, but did you know despite the horrendous mag and reload, the single target DPS of a Tonkor at its baseline level already strongly competed or even exceeded those of meta rifles/LMGs even through those constant reloads? Now take that, multiply it for every extra target you hit with that burst on average, and bear in mind that it's a crit based weapon so it was taking the optimal per-slot advantage scaling up from there. And all that was in ignorance of autoheadshot.

That may simply be a dated example but you can still see how easily these changes can muscle out broad swathes of completely different weapons that should be more suited for a job when you add the step of removing a limitation like that. Attach specific Warframes and the problem extends further. Turbulence removes flight-speed issues. Hall of Mirrors removed the setup of the Simulors allowing every shot to pop significant damage to the full area.

1 hour ago, MJ12 said:

So I'd like to expand on the idea that mobility and combat mechanics influence whether your weapons have self-harm. One of the games I've actually played a lot and done reasonably well with (I have a bunch of 200+% difficulty clears in multiple classes, so I think I can say I am/was reasonably decent at it) is Synthetik. In Synthetik, every weapon in the game has self-harm. Bullets ricochet, often unpredictably, launchers explode, and every single weapon can overheat, dealing significant damage to you and debilitating you by reducing your fire rate. Every enemy does damage to other enemies.

Synthetik is a game where the complexity of weapons handling forces very deliberate gunplay and engagement selection. Self-damage fits into that game. And it couldn't be more different than Warframe, which is a game where weapons work in a simple, straightforward fashion. So I'm not against self-damage in anything. I'm against self-damage in Warframe because when you make a hyper-fast parkour shooter, you probably don't want to suddenly tell people that actually what you're supposed to do is stand still and carefully aim every shot you make. (The punchline to the joke is that explosive self-damage is still less dangerous in Synthetik than it is in Warframe despite the game being built around weapons handling being very punishing).

So, we're a game where weapons work in simple straightforward fashions, right? I think "That's a bomb, don't be there when it blows up" is pretty damn simple and straightforward in concept. You don't need to calculate the world, you just a) don't jump directly into the place you just sent the murder ball and b) shoot them clearly away from yourself.

I think you're begging the question, with this image of 'hyper fast looter shooter' as if it's criminal to employ a moment of cognisant thought. It's really not hard. You don't see your Chroma in Eidolon hunts bouncing off trees and having to land his Synovia shot in the middle of all that. They position for the shot and line it up so they get it right. Is that so different from slightly altering your playstyle based on the risks of an explosive? Maybe you tend to back-dodge, shoot, then parkour forwards through a cloud of vaporised opposition. Maybe you tend to take the most airborne approach you can when in anything but the narrowest toob of a corridor, raining down explosives from above instead of gut-shooting fools at point blank range.

There's nothing objectively wrong with that. Only subjectively if you don't like it; if it doesn't work well with how you play.

 

The funny thing is, I bet 90% of the vocal group complaining for absolute self-damage removal are only even paying any attention to it at all because of Cautious Shot's introduction. If DE hadn't communicated that they've got some interest in tweaking the self-damage curve, most of this group might just be quietly ignoring the weapons they don't like instead of clamouring for them to be thematically butchered into something they do like.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

12 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

But I'm not saying players should Never Stop Moving Ever, that's a total strawman, I'm just saying parkour is central to how players move in Warframe, and imposing a punishment mechanic that interacts very badly with that system is simply not good design. It's great to make players stop and think, but unless you are trying to tell me that the near-totality of the Warframe playerbase has some sort of attention disorder, that's not what's making players not want to use launchers.

Parkour is central to mobility, mobility is parallel with combat. Sometimes intertwined, but not exclusively.

You want to talk about parkour punishments? Door traps have existed for a long time. Their sole purpose is to make the player deviate from the parkour norm. Do they not trigger that camera, do they aim and pop that sensor bar, and now especially in Jupiter, do they take a moment to reorient their movement to deal with the hazard.

It's not a crime to temporarily halt or redirect mobility, be that through level hazards or necessitating proper cautious usage of a weapon with risks attached.

13 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I'm sorry, explosives are a stealth weapon now? Doorways now apparently open for the player even when they're distant enough to not get hit by explosive self-damage? Do you really believe players are going to take a detour every time they want to take a shot without killing themselves? None of this makes sense with the way Warframe actually plays, which is precisely why players don't engage in the strategies you are theorycrafting here. I can agree that we should be encouraging stealthier and slower-paced gameplay as a legitimate option, but framing this as a means of using explosive weapons is itself fundamentally in opposition to what explosives are meant to do.

I know this isn't what you meant, but while we're being obtuse, explosives used to be the best damn stealth weapons in the game. Silent trigger, silent explosion. You must know the stealth comment was an analogy strictly based on the idea of game pace. General stealth (without frames' aid) slows the game down more than launchers ever would, and yet there are players who do go for that. It's not the majority populace, but they're out there.

And yes. I believe players will back up from body checking enemies with a rocket. I believe they have a semblance of common sense to maybe look for a clear opening or switch to equipment better suited for the environment at that moment in time if there is inadequate space. I also believe that's not every player's desire, but those players have plenty of other options to explore.

13 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... because that weapon's just going to pick up dust, instead of delivering on gameplay many more people could enjoy? The issue here is that self-damage has been applied as a standard, such that there are no real options for players who want to use launchers without having to deal with self-damage. If there were launchers that did not self-damage, then you'd have a more convincing argument here, but as it stands launchers are disappointing to players precisely because all of them come saddled with a near-universally loathed mechanic, one that is only ever defended by a tiny, vocal minority of people arguing on internet forums, far from the reality of a game that is capable of demonstrating immediately why the mechanic just doesn't work.

Setting aside quasi-launcher equipment like the Staticor... There's no launcher options without self-damage because launchers have self-damage as part of their archetype. The real issue seems to just be this projection of perspective. Your view of the game disagrees with launchers as they stand, and you're asking that they be brought in line with your view of the game.

You're entitled to your opinion, but it's not as objective as you think. People have differing perspectives. Some use launchers, considering them fine with the risk they already have (albeit desiring the power grade to be less overshadowed). Some would use them more if it was just less immediately fatal long before a full build. There's people who think some percentage-based design would marry the risk up better, although I'd personally disagree for other reasons.

A whole spectrum. Calling everyone defending the risk archetype a 'vocal minority' is fairly dubious when 'remove self-damage outright' is just an extreme end of that spectrum.

13 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... but why are you suggesting to turn them into snipers, then? Why not capitalize on the aspects that make them from distinct from snipers, like their improved effectiveness at medium range? What does this have to do with a discussion on launchers? If you are implying I'm asking to turn launchers into some other class of weapon, which weapon class would that be, and why?

The point is, and I've tried so much to avoid using this word, but.. Homogenisation.

All the AOE variants we have. Some conical. Some radial. Risk of self, risk of exposure in the continuous. Falloff and not. Even object punch-through and target punch-through are distinct in some cases now.

You take away too much from an archetype's primary identifying features, yes, even if it's identified more by a unique drawback... and you're taking away what makes them.

 

Instead of "Can I remove something from this launcher to make it more like [the Staticor]" you should ask "Can I make this launcher distinct from and worthwhile compared to [the Staticor]".
Hence tweaking the curve; making it more worthwhile without changing the distinguishing features any more than necessary. Preservation of what the current enthusiasts like, while lowering the perceived barrier to entry of becoming an enthusiast.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

16 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

... okay, but by your own admission, this is anecdotal evidence. It is a known fact that Warframe is a game where the primary mode of movement is parkour, yet where most spaces are also quite small, and where there are plenty of bits of geometry that stick through the scenery, including bits of scenery with deceptive collision areas. There are plenty more records of players experiencing this contradiction, where the mode of punishment inflicted by explosive weapons clashes directly with moving at high speed through varied scenery in often tight spaces.

Okay, but then what you're saying is that players shouldn't be using explosives in most tilesets, where the tiles will more often than not force the player into close quarters. Add to this the fact that most launchers are also not that great at long distances or wide areas (which rules out open levels like the Plains and Vallis), and what you have is a class of weapons that is very harshly balanced around a range of distances that isn't all that present in Warframe. Meanwhile, snipers are obviously more functional at longer ranges, yet they don't punish the player in such a binary manner for using them in mid- or short-ranged combat. "Flying around recklessly" -- or as most Warframe players say: parkouring -- is how the game fundamentally expects players to move, by placing emphasis on agility and constant motion. Asking the player to slow themselves down just to not damage themselves with a weapon is also itself too much to ask, particularly when most other weapons don't hassle the player like this in order to function. In general, I just don't think it's a good idea to try to force a design that goes directly against the game's intended and encouraged gameplay, in this case by punishing the player for parkouring across scenery and shooting in tandem.

Sure, you don't have to parkour full speed, and you could slow a little... but why? Slowing down to line up a headshot makes sense, because you are specifically trying to land a precise shot. Slowing down to fire an explosive weapon from the hip, on the other hand, does not, as the very point of explosives is that they do not require precision to do their job. In the end, if you're designing a game, you're going to have to work with your players, rather than expect them to bend over backwards just to satisfy your own little designer fantasy: it's all well and good to implicitly lay the blame on players for not having the skill or openness of mind to accommodate a class of unwieldy and poorly balanced weapons, but that's not going to make anyone change and start using launchers, not when there are weapons that do a better job without the threat of random suicide. On the flipside, making these weapons legitimately functional, and removing an arbitrary punishment mechanic that demonstrably does not work in a game like Warframe, is far more likely to make these weapons more popular, and more interesting to play for more players.

It seems like you're operating strictly from this standpoint of Never Stop Moving Ever when that's simply not the case. It's a common playstyle, sure, but limiting players from being able to do exactly that - to simply GO and never THINK - is the only shred of argument that supported removing the efficacy of World on Fire over other wide-clearing alternatives.

I'm not saying you have to go slow permanently to use an explosive, even if there are players who do enjoy that pace even in Warframe. Stealth boys are still out there (somewhere).
You can parkour your way around enemies to find that opening, then steady yourself to get your safe shot. You can switch to your on-the-move pistol as you blow past stragglers, then see a cluster of enemies in your destination hall/doorway, switch to a launcher and boom, clear them out to resume parkouring. It's disingenuous to present this binary idea when there's a natural ebb and flow, only accentuated by those choices made.

Maybe you, maybe most people might not want to risk themselves, might not want to take that moment to check their surroundings and let off an explosive. That's fine. But you admit there are alternatives for that playstyle already, so what does it really harm to leave a risk-thrill weapon archetype in the game especially if that risk/reward relationship is changed to something better-proportioned?

I mean, look at bows. You can say they're underperforming, sure - their drawbacks and benefits might not be too well-balanced currently either. But you can only cut the drawbacks - improving the draw speed and projectile speed/arc - so much before you've just made them snipers with a different animation set, you know?

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

3 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I actually completely agree with the observation that most other weapons have drawbacks, but it is the distinction you raised with self-damage that I think is crucial: some of the best weapons in the game have clear downsides, and in fact I believe that good weapon design should dictate that a weapon should give a convincing reason to use something else in certain other situations, which implies some sort of drawback at some point in its usage.

Meanwhile, explosion self-damage in a game full of corridors and janky level geometry means the mechanic will often punish the player by accident, or simply just for playing the game correctly.

This isn't to say that we should never include self-damage in a weapon, because honestly I think it can be genuinely fun to avoid self-damage when firing the Lenz (that is, of course, when the shot works properly, and doesn't instead collide with a breakable object to explode instantly). However, the Lenz I think works because it doesn't play by the same rules as standard self-damage: the AoE is clearly telegraphed, so if the player messes up, they can move out of the way or use whichever ability to protect themselves. In other words, there is gameplay to the Lenz's self-damage, whereas self-damage on most explosive weapons boils down to a binary yes/no check on whether the player was in range of what is often a poorly visible explosion. If we are to keep self-damage on weapons, it should demand gameplay from the player that is reasonable: in this respect, asking the player to memorize the exact range of a weapon's area of effect while moving rapidly through complex terrain isn't reasonable, even if the punishment for it were lessened.

Forgive the anecdotes, but I have rarely gotten tripped up by the enclosed space or geometry. It's possible, by all means, but it is by no means an absolute. Far, far more often I make a mistake of simply not paying attention to what weapon is out and do something stupid like point-blank a Lancer with my Kulstar after picking up a datamass. I die then, and yeah, I deserved it.

I have agreed that there are improvements that could be made in terms of visibility and false-negatives where the player didn't actually make a mistake, e.g. allies parkouring into the way at inopportune moments. Applying the Elytron UI marker tech would remove a lot of the by-eye requirement of the explosion. If you have a distance marker on your payload, and you know its radius, then you've all the information required, right?

But mostly I think it comes down to what you said (my emphasis) up there at the start. It's using something else in those situations where an explosive is inadvisable that really matters. If you want to be flying around recklessly - tend towards non-instant explosives. If you're in tight quarters - maybe not point blanking a cluster bomb. The price for taking that risk may currently be too steep, as we've all acknowledged, but that is a risk that has been taken.

Does that mean self-risk explosives have a narrower field of use than most weapons? Sure, maybe it does, not unlike their archetype in reality. On the other hand, you don't have to parkour full speed while shooting, you can slow a little to line yourself up just as much as the sniper-user alongside you can choose to take careful headshots instead of accepting a bunch of haphazard bodyshots if they want. There's faster and slower mission types. Mobile and stationary. It's down to the individual to find those use cases and enjoy them all the more for having done so without killing themselves, I feel.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

11 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

As we all know, however, AoE is common as dirt in Warframe, with a whole slew of weapons like the Ignis, Tigris, etc. being capable of decimating crowds of enemies at a time, including through walls, without any self-damage. Even single-target weapons like assault rifles tend to still be good, because no individual enemy takes long to kill anyway. Meanwhile, most launchers are crap, because on top of their self-damage they tend to be extremely slow, ammo-inefficient, and outright sub-par in their damage output against enemies, and as we also know, the game simply isn't designed for launchers to be used any differently from any other weapon: it does not take any real amount of risk or skill to fire a Zarr explosive shot into an incoming crowd of enemies, and the only time most players will find themselves suffering self-damage is by accident. As we also all know, and as even @TheLexiConArtist is willing to admit, self-damage isn't balanced appropriately relative to our own health, making the risk disproportionately large relative to an often meager reward, in addition to often being out of the player's control. Framing self-damage here as "high-risk, high-reward" therefore relies on some imaginary version of Warframe that doesn't, and likely will never exist in order to even start making sense, which is why I'd say we should just stop trying to protect the feature that clearly doesn't work and find other ways to balance launchers (which exist already, e.g. their slow firing rates).

Most of those other weapons have their drawbacks too, it's just less visible than the instant anti-gratification of fatal self-damage.
To get a good area clear on standard shotguns you're absolutely burdening them with mods for that purpose - which is fine - and particularly for the Tigris you spend time reloading. It's also a different ideal case than the radial AOEs, either your enemies are doing the Conga or you're not hitting the full load on all of them (even when they are lined up, punch through is limited and falloff applies).
The Ignis I've mentioned before, has some ammo economy problems of its own in upper content, has its own shaped AOE, and does also still have falloff, plus the less-statistical drawback of a continuous fire often requiring prolonged exposure to enemies, where direct-damage AOE even with comparable on-paper DPS implicitly involves less risk of opposition firing back before they keel over. This effect can be linked back to shotguns thanks to the middle-ground of the Phage - it's extremely underused since the other shotguns just remove opposition instead of spending time tickling them to death.

But then we come back to launcher under-performance. Setting aside the historics of losing an effective 50% of their output, I still maintain that DE is directly being disinclined to buff the output by complaints about self-damage currently in place. Cautious Shot in itself is a statement - "Self-damage is deemed worth keeping, but we'll try to provide an optional way around it killing you outright". The recent buff to it reinforces this idea. It's throwing numbers at the wall until something sticks so they have a foundation for future balancing of self-damage effects.

This is why I suggest the compromise of grabbing the current boundaries of risk and reward and stretching the whole thing out, as it were. Providing a formulaic reduction allows an easy tweak for future power creep if necessary, and makes the mechanic work on a more believable and steady curve - rather than currently, where it's a sharp rise to a flat ceiling of 'YOU DIED'.

9 hours ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

Are you sure? I can't think of a single shotgun in the game that like... Fires plasma or something, and can fill an entire corridor with death with a single trigger pull... Are you suggesting that there is some... Shotgun.. In this game that like... Fires plasma bolts six meters wide and can instantly wipe an entire battalion of enemies? And surely such a shotgun would never be made by the the corpus right?....

Really is all I'm saying. There are tons of weapons that are oppressively meta in that they can literally overwhelm any level of enemy. Entire crowds of them in fact.... And yet people want to obsess over the need for some of the overall weakest weapons in the game to inflict damage to the player... So I'll say for atleast the fifth time... If they eliminated the suicide physics from these weapons? People would still not use them. All the suicide physics cause is people who might want to just play around with these weapons to deliberately never touch them. 

We aren't saying those weapons don't exist, but then again, so did the old Tonkor.

DE makes mistakes sometimes on weapon balance. Sometimes, big ones. Kitguns make almost all other secondaries obsolete. Spin to win melee exists. Old Tonkor, Arca Plasmor. But then people get them and would absolutely riot if their shiny new cheap trick got balanced. You should have seen how hard it was to fight the Tonkor/Simulor metas back then for the same reason.

Back then we didn't have Rivens, though. Nowadays it seems like DE try to play both sides at once - users and non-users - by just hitting Riven disposition instead of actually changing the weapons themselves in most cases. That way, they have three direct reactions (not counting people who don't know or don't care):

1. Riven-elite on the arguably imbalanced weapon, a smaller population than the overall weapon users, who still get peeved that their mods are slightly less egregious.
2. Everyone else who still uses the weapon, who either didn't get harmed at all (no Riven) or didn't have anything amazing enough to salt over. These people just keep on using the same old questionably-balanced weapon as it is, and are content.
3. Everyone who doesn't use that weapon, and are sick of it. Since they see everyone in groups 1 and 2 as a problem, they're not happy either because the fundamental problem as they see it has been flagrantly ignored.

I'll concede that there was one direct change in the Plasmor's case (no headshot bonus) but it's still questionable whether that was enough of a hit to the reward to mitigate insufficient drawbacks.

In other cases, though, sweeping changes are made that inhibited the problem weapon but also everything like it. Tonkor caused autoheadshot removal, damaging the reward curve of every other launcher as well - while not good enough to counter the non-drawbacks of the weapon as it was. Spin to win melee caused non-penetrating Melee strikes to become the norm, and that is maddening for all of us who never abused Meme Strike and excessive-range together in the first place. Once again, that hasn't stopped spin to win gameplay.

Because they weren't directly addressing the fundamental problem. Tonkor hadn't got drawbacks to make it not the best tool for every job, with base stats that were still strong enough even without autoheadshot. Spin to win melee still hyperscales Meme Strike with Blood Rush with only the inconvenience of performing the manoeuvre (if you don't have a macro) compared to regular melee strikes, and the Plasmor is still a "shotgun" in name only that effectively shoots out giant walls instead of a spread of pellets meaning it doesn't take any finesse to acheve the maximum - and still significantly strong - output.

Trouble is, you know that quote people love to paraphrase as a 'rebuttal' when the idea of nerfs for balance comes up? "If everyone's super, no one is"? Yeah, that's not a real thing, because there's the whole ecosystem around those entities that hasn't also been upscaled accordingly. Turns out in a situation of everyone being OP enough to delete the entire map at the press of a button, everyone is still OP. We have a Warframe 'razor' for that quote: "Everything is OP... on Mercury". A reminder that you can't just look at one localised portion of the game, you have to look at the entire picture of all the interrelated parts. ^{And why Ember should never have been murdered in cold blood, but that's another topic entirely.}

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

13 hours ago, MJ12 said:

{{The literal definition of a strawman argument, repeated.}}

It's clear from that response you have no interest in the actual debate. Not even worth continuing.

44 minutes ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

So basically what you're saying is that you're one of those people who believe that balance can only be achieved by making everything weaker and weaker, basically you are in the "no buff, only nerf" camp... 
You know "power crunch" is as big a problem in long term game environments as power creep.

Any weapon that is, by nature, weak and under used, but also has special detrimental physics that make people even less likely to use it, needs to either be buffed in it's effectiveness to be worth the risk, or have the risk removed so that the item's overall lack of usefulness won't be further diminished by additional negative effects. Long story short. Explosive weapons need to either be buffed massively to make up for the risk, or have the risk removed to make up for their overall lack of effectiveness. 

If /you/ really want balance... The only way we are going to achieve that is if the entire system, from enemy levels, player levels, mods, weapon mechanics, everything, is all thrown in the trash, and they start /everything/ over to create a truly new paradigm addressing all of the balancing issues. And thank heaven they are never going to do that.

Because.
Fun is more important than balance, and that is why the staticor exists. 

Both nerfs and buffs are equally viable, and need not be mutually exclusive to approach balance ideals. Being ideals, approach is all we can hope for, because of the other mitigating factors that aren't simply statistical and logical like per-player preferences and skills.

You present a false dichotomy in addressing explosives: Overpowering reward for overpowering risks, OR removing risk entirely. 
In this case, as evidenced by my alternate solution thread, I'm recommending a partial application of both tweaks. Better output of explosives, and rebalanced self-damage that makes them usable in more than a strict binary fashion. Risk doesn't have to be removed entirely when it can be reduced to a more accurate proportion, and we don't have to incite a broken Suicide Squad wielding invariably self-destructive explosives becoming the only endgame option because they vastly outstrip any competition. They can just be.. a bit better, and especially against a clustered group, like they always were.

Fun is not unilaterally more important than balance. No, not even in PvE. The arguable 'fun' of Tonkor meta was shallow for its users, and detrimental to non-users for its imbalance much the same way as trying to compete with Mesa and Saryn can be now; it might be 'fun' for you, but it comes at the expense of those around you getting a chance to operate and seek their own fun.

I don't play enough public to know relatively how much the Staticor actually sees use, but I do know that we have the same shallowness issue with Kitguns in general. They're so much better than almost every other option, and nothing really acts as counterbalance - especially with the added perks of their Arcanes. But.. well, people do riot more about their shinies getting rebalanced down than they would about other things being brought up. We see that even when it's riven dispositions.
The Staticor's disposition is atrocious for a reason. Dispos that low are tantamount admissions that even DE knows something is pretty OP, they just haven't dared hit the base stats.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

2 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

That's not answering my question. I didn't ask you why you think players deserve rewards for "their enjoyed danger/power dynamic."

Why do you think Warframe should encourage players to commit suicide?

That's what risk/reward balancing is all about. It's about encouraging players to do things that would otherwise be stupid. It's about encouraging players of XCOM to rush into unexplored parts of the map and possibly activate six aliens rather than creep forward one square at a time. It's about encouraging players of Devil May Cry to constantly be in the enemy's face and attacking rather than spending five minutes wearing each one down with guns and dodging whenever there might be a threat. It's about encouraging a player in a MMO to advance to higher level zones rather than sit in the newbie zone farming boars for several months straight. It's about encouraging a player of a platformer to actually explore the level rather than beeline to the exit. Fundamentally, risk/reward balancing exists because the developers want to force players to encounter that risk.

So when you say explosive power is "risk/reward" and your "reward" for saying that you're okay with "blowing yourself up sometimes" is more power, what you're saying is that the game should encourage you to blow yourself up. So again, why is it that players should be encouraged to blow themselves up?

I didn't answer your question because it's not the one that should be asked.

Players aren't made to suffer the risk 100% of the time in risk/reward dynamics. They're encouraged by the reward to invite the possibility of that negative outcome and operate around it thus making the exchange worthwhile.

Your own analogies show this. It's not "players are forced to rush blindly and invariably die" in XCOM, it's "players advance quickly but strategically" so as not to run afoul of the risk of ambush. Royal Guard in DMC likewise. Being open to more attacks, the damage is the failure state, not an obligation. The player's skill operating around it gains the reward of parry-damage and full blocks if done right.

So, your question is flawed at its foundation. Players aren't being encouraged to blow themselves up, they're encouraged to play around the possibility of blowing themselves up in order to enjoy the reward of big group damage. If they shoot risky explosives right, then they will, generally speaking, not be blown up by their own fire.

[Self-Damage: How to Keep it Scaling, Effective, and Relevant but NOT Overwhelming]

18 hours ago, Keylan118 said:

This is true. Certain frames can synergize with certain weapons better. However, why add more to the mix? Each frame synergizes with a specific weapon/certain types of weapons, but now you're making classifications of frames synergize with classifications of weapons. All self-damage weapons synergize more with all tanks. Volt synergizes with crit guns, but a crit self-damage? That seems harder to balance, and might enforce even more of a nuke (due to lack of AOE weapons)/tank (due to access to AOE weapons) meta.
Also, no, hitting the outlier on a power curve isn't always the best option and there may be other factors at play. A frame can be above the power curve if it's difficult to execute correctily (risk/reward).
Sure, self-damage can scale to modding. But what reason is there? The reasons in your original post have been refuted. Why should the risk increase as the reward increases? The risk doesn't increase for any other weapon. A sniper still does the same damage, an smg still shoots just as fast, and a shotgun still fires the same number of pellets with the same chance of losing X pellets (disregarding adding multishot). Sure, you can lose more damage, but that's not quite the same as having damage done to you. Shotguns still have the same chance of hitting or missing no matter what, the only thing that changes is the amount of damage in each pellet. The main risk/reward for a shotgun is the chance of missing. The main risk/reward for an explosive is self-damage. The shotgun's chance doesn't increase/decrease (outside mods geared towards that) just as the explosive's shouldn't.

It's not adding more to the mix. We're not ideating on a new system, we're tweaking an existing one. Tanks already survive better than non-tanks (in theory, the curve just grows too high in the end for both). Instead you're arguing to remove or invert that implicit synergy.

My points have yet to be refuted by anything with a greater foundation than "I disagree". Does a sniper miss still deal (modded damage - base damage) to the intended target, or zero? Does a shotgun missing half its pellets still do the entirety of modded damage on the remaining ones, or does it deal half the total damage? The risks have scaled up with the reward. Their proportion has not changed (100% loss on a miss, 50% loss for half pellets, etc) but as I have already stated, this linearity is permissible when the risk is based on the same scale as the reward - they're both enemy health. In a spectacular display of defeating your own point, you're arguing that the value of the risk should not change whatsoever, which means the proportional risk is completely dissociated from the reward - the equivalent of changing the chance directly. Damage mods do not tighten a shotgun's spread or add homing to snipers, so they shouldn't be decoupled from the risk for launchers either.

18 hours ago, Keylan118 said:

Actually, this ID system is how you can disable/enable friendly-fire. It's not hard at all to do, most games already ID each and every bullet, this just adds a few specific tags/extensions to that ID. And, again, it's just an option about fun and not logic. If games were logical, everything would be a gritty CoD or something of the sort.

It's a simple theory, but practice can bring up caveats to the approach. Yes, fun versus logic, but 'fun' at the expense of logic can also lead to weird abuse cases. What's fun for one might be "why does that work, that's dumb" to the next person.
Plus, you know, Warframe and its spaghetti. Trying to ID self-damage projectiles would blow something else up, or stop projectile weapons from dealing damage, or something misadventurous like that.

18 hours ago, Keylan118 said:

Should they have a difference? Is there a reason?
Well, actually, no. If you make squishies unfairly powerful, sure. However, one can balance for self-damage weapons with frames in mind just as one can balance without. It makes no difference, the benefit for tanks of surviving longer still exists and you can balance against that.

See previous observation about changing existing dynamics.

Players who like tanks feel like they should be able to shrug off their own explosives, after all. Making it irrelevant to the paper Loki next to him (who doesn't stand to gain enjoyment from it themselves, they just remain outright ambivalent to the self-damaging process at best) just detracts from their enjoyment.

18 hours ago, Keylan118 said:

Or they could just release the formula for self-damage and have it somewhere in-game. That's far better than hitboxes, which you would have to datamine or watch thousands of videos to know beforehand. Problem solved easily. Also, does this matter? I could ask the same questions for your method, or any method. Whatever your answer is I could apply to the other methods, or say no and do the opposite. Whether any method does or does not armor-pierce or react to keys isn't the point. The point is your method remains no better than others. I see no reason to pick it. I'm not offering a solution, I'm asking why I should accept the one offered above the others I can see.

Well, the armour-piercing, key manipulation and all that matters for the 'percentage based' solutions because that completely alters the efficacy of that pre-ordained damage where my resolution doesn't care about your stats to determine what it deals. Only the damage it's equipped for alters what risk it poses. The simple question of "can I survive this" is different to "how do my Warframe stats manipulate the self-damage equation", and is far less prone to potential exploit cases. Recent related: Hildryn shield-gate grace period being exploited by reducing the shield capacity with Dragon Key.

18 hours ago, Keylan118 said:

There are certainly many hitboxes you can hit that aren't 'questionable shots', visually speaking. Any infested tileset is a nightmare. Hitscan weapons are perfectly fine in player hands, I don't know what you mean by jarring unless you're talking about in the hands of enemies, which is valid.
The problem you bring up seems... irrelevant to the previous one? That's a visual problem, sure, but ultimately the gameplay is provided for over visual experience. (The way it works in Warframe is that invisible damage projectiles come from your camera, while visible fake projectiles emerge from your gun. The game then attempts to detect whether there was actually LOS from your frame, I believe.) You inevitably shoot towards the reticle and not where your character is pointing (and they can point really weirdly). Anyway, whether or not this is a problem with your system is another matter, one important to discuss, but one that is not relevant to the previous problem.

By 'questionable shot', I mean any situation where you aren't given a wide and clear berth from even potential obstructions. Whether you appear to be pointing so you don't run afoul of them is another question - you're in a risky spot there. Consider getting physically nudged by some outside force just before a trigger pull. Your shots made near an obstacle? Probably harm you. Clear and open shots? Still probably safe, if perhaps less effectively placed for their eventual impact.

The projectiles travelling from your weapon are not fakes, by the way. Anyone who's played with a bow will tell you about horizontal-firing arrows when shooting too close to enemies, and they certainly are the source of damage (or not damage, since it buggered off elsewhere). That means your projectile is not guaranteed to reach the reticle when the reticle is in clear space / on an enemy, depending on the character position. Maybe this is partly responsible for some of your many 'inaccurate' hitboxes?

18 hours ago, Keylan118 said:

So you want to exclude self-damage weapons from any and all sortie parts with those modifiers? That's a lot of non-usage for an entire category of possible weapons.

Not exclude them. But if you go in with one, you've gone in knowing you might get put into a bad spot. It's perhaps not the most prudent thing, much the same as taking Hildryn to those no-shield Nightmares. It can be successful, but it's just not the best idea to cover all your bases with minimal weaknesses. Each tool with its own purpose, right?

18 hours ago, Keylan118 said:

Well, not always. Infested tilesets are, as I said, a nightmare with many tight corners yet wide spaces all spaced out like a madman decided level design was not needed (but then, I guess that's the point of the infested). Furthermore, the game doesn't always switch weapons properly (pressing the switch button too fast while doing other things sometimes ignores the button, sometimes acknowledges it).

Hitbox gore of Infested tilesets falls under the 'not shooting near obstructions' part, I wouldn't be taking explosives into Infested missions (or would simply choose to only use them in the more open areas with a quick back-dodge to add resistance/distance).

Bad or forgetful weapon switching is exactly what I was talking about for my own self-inflicted fatalities, though. Not checking I had the right weapon out, or switched - the name's right there in the screen even if you can't spot the model - or, heck, even sometimes having a hilarious brainfart and picking up a datamass only to walk two feet and obliterate myself because oh yes, that means it switched to your Kulstar, you idiot. I call that a lack of due diligence on my part.

18 hours ago, Keylan118 said:

Actually I like that idea of knockdown, since it's proportional to the actual risk/reward. If you're mowing down enemies and could potentially do so with anything because they're level 1's, I don't like the idea that my self-damage weapon is the biggest threat there. The only problem I see with this solution is it isn't proportional to distance from the explosion, unless you make the knockdown take time based on how close you were.

That'd just be a benefit to said frames. As you say, tanks and squishies can synergize/not synergize with said weapons, why can't these specific frames? See, this is just another alternative that your method is no better than.

"I don't like" is probably the crux of the issue we have here. I feel you've made your conclusion long before now; if you're asking me to deconstruct every subjective view you have with the Sheer Force of Logic, then it isn't going to happen and I think we both know that. People are illogical, the more I try to convince you, the less effective I'd be even if everything was outright objective. Which it isn't, by the way. I just provide heavy background explanations for why I see it as a thing.

As for the 'synergy of those frames', not quite. That's not the same sort of synergy. It's a complete absence of drawback instead of synergistic mitigation of the drawback.
For an analogy, look back at 99%-Blessing Trinity: It wasn't changed because a self-damage synergy existed to facilitate it, it was changed because it was the only reliable way to reach that - avoiding the drawback of standard play where the damage reduction buff couldn't be guaranteed at any value.
QT alone mitigated the risk of dying from damage received before getting a good damage reduction, where corner-hiding self-damaging QT completely avoided the mechanic. Different concepts. Trinity players who didn't abuse self-damaging QT could not function on the same level at all.

Additionally, and forgive the heavy emphasis here but it needs to be clear:

The goal is to maintain as many properties of the current mechanical implementation as possible while solving for the core issue of disproportioned risk/reward.

Why? Because people like what they have already. Because alternatives for people who don't like it already exist. Arguing "I would like to use this weapon" means you cannot desire to fundamentally change the weapon when those alternatives already provide the same AOE experience you 'like' without the risks you find problematic.
Allow people their risky explosive fantasy because they like it already. It's not objectively detrimental like the overpowered and riskless Tonkor was, players can cite 'fun' for something here; without those external factors to refute 'fun' because it's at the expense of others, you should respect that.
Therefore, if you must have some changes to pander to vocal complainants - Cautious Shot means DE is prepared to offer something - you should preserve as much of the current playstyle as possible.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

2 hours ago, MJ12 said:

I've looked at your address in the other thread and it's got the flaw that it's stuck in a flawed risk-reward paradigm.

So let me ask you this core question. Why do you want players to blow themselves up?

Well, inviting powerful explosives, like I said, regaining their appropriate power when the risk is in play. Currently they're matched or exceeded by the safe alternatives, but that can't be resolved until people are less inclined to complain they're killing themselves at the extant level of power. Hence, rework the curve to something better befitting the game's expectations.

The reward then becomes "covering an area, dealing above-average damage to everything in it" at the risk of.. well, personal risk.

But other than that, look at the people defending it. The people here who use them already quite happily. Why, exactly, do you feel it's your right to deny those players their enjoyed danger/power dynamic when alternatives already exist to avoid it?

I blow myself up sometimes and it's generally my fault for not paying attention. That's on me. I'd be fine with leaving it just as fatal.
But if the vocal minority are still going to complain then let's address that so you're at least outright killing yourself at full build, rather than merely halfway into the modding power scale.

That leaves people who like to feel the danger of their weapon (and feel skillful for not murdering themselves) able to slam in the full build and play their playstyle, while absolutely risk-averse players have the option of entirely different weapons not featuring self-damage, and people who fall somewhere in between can use Cautious Shot for some mitigated-risk but lessened-reward on the explosive weapons.

Not everyone has to like every weapon, you know. We who like the risky explosives currently certainly don't like them for the fallacious reasons of "meta-Tonkor [was] 'fun' (being so overpowered)", since they are far from it right now, so how do you justify an argument that we are not allowed that playstyle you don't enjoy?
If it's, "I'd like to use the weapon", then you can't argue to remove the core dynamic of the weapon. Implicitly then you wouldn't actually like to use the weapon, you want to use something in the safe-alternative AOE category.
If it's, "I'd like to use the weapon as it is but the risk/reward is inadequately balanced", then you should support the change that maintains the mechanic's functionality and design as much as possible while bringing it into line, as my proposition does. This is why I argue things like "percentile health self-damage is inadequate" because it's taking away an extra facet that it doesn't need to.

Edit: I should probably point out that there's a separate additional path for future, new weapons to potentially feature smart-arming payloads. But that doesn't mean you have to retrofit that onto everything currently in usage. Not for 'realism'/thematic reasons or any gameplay reason when alternatives already exist in the interim.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

16 hours ago, MJ12 said:

And the obsession with going "but I use explosives and I pay attention, clearly these other peasants are just bad at the game" is funny because people like @Teridax68 have pointed out objective, useful reasons for why self-damage is bad in Warframe even if you're actually used to it.

(Emphasis mine)
Hardly objective. That is a lot of arguably-objective observations about the game, but judging them as 'why self damage is bad' is purely subjective for most of that. The only parts we can all agree on is that the actual relation of self-risk to enemy-risk is no longer appropriately proportioned at the current level of power (and expectation of power, more importantly), and that ally-collision is a dumb thing (which also applies to non-explosive projectiles for that matter - people love to eat arrows too) but that's why I have my own solutions for those already given that do maintain the mechanic's fundamental design.

It also cites the Cyanex being a 'proof' that shows it should go away from more weapons, which is blatantly opinionated. As I see it, the Cyanex shouldn't have self-damage because the player could take a perfect shot and then have it come back to punish them through no fault and with little agency of their own due to the automatic homing properties. Every other weapon they have predictable control enough over that the onus is back on them. Including the Komorex.

 

Since your last post there also highlights 'extremely high' self-damage, I'm also wondering if you've looked at my address of that over in the other thread at all? With Cautious Shot still available (to some extent as it'd be too strong in its current band-aid form) afterwards, applying a formulaic reduction to how 'extreme' the self-damage can become provides a range of risk-to-power that need only become fatal if you're making it fatal without trying to safeguard yourself by your chosen frame's resilience or slotting Cautious to drop the risk down at the cost of power.

We could have balance where explosives have greater output than the current 'safe' AOE analogues naturally due to the (better-proportional) added risk, but they can be reined in to a nearer-'safe' AOE that is roughly equivalent in power to the non-explosives which have a similar general safety. Would that not satisfy both camps? You get a safe soft boom, players willing to risk themselves get some reward satisfaction out of it.

[Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?]

4 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

Here's the thing. You seem to think that explosives with 'safety features' are less dangerous than explosives without. This isn't true. The benefit of directionally fused explosives is that they actually deal damage more effectively to targets because they waste less energy on things that aren't the target.

Your entire post is based on the belief that weapons more effective against enemies must also be more dangerous to the users. --

And no, according to my argument Bombards and Napalms should work just fine. Napalms don't actually use explosive blast (they're incendiaries) for one, which aren't completely ineffective against hardened targets. Nothing in the game or out of game suggests that Bombards don't use some sort of selectively aimable warhead which would channel the blast towards enemies rather than having an ineffective omnidirectional blast-and in fact the Ogris blast radius when used by enemies (i.e. against Tenno) is much smaller than the Ogris blast radius against other targets. This suggests that against Tenno, you need to use more focused warheads, or that Tenno use HE-FRAG instead of HEAP rounds because many of their foes aren't heavily armored, and therefore the Tenno Ogris shouldn't do significant self-damage.

Hold on, don't mis-represent. I never likened the safety features to lessened effectiveness. That segment of my post was for the argument that "Warframe too stronk for tiny baby explosive", that's all. Arguably not when in relation to enemies (too little information to make such an absolute statement) and objectively not when those weapons came from the enemies.

I'll set aside Napalms as that was mildly a stretch more so because we mod the Ogris for the same so it starts on the same basis.

But Bombards? No, if anything this refutes your own argument that Tenno are harder targets. If we could 'choose to use different rounds' then we'd have it as a fire mode or a weapon variant and suddenly, Grineer aren't magically more difficult to pierce. But we're stuck with mods acting as surrogate and while I see 'reduced radius' on the Napalm patch, I don't see any "+armour piercing -blast radius" mod. Smaller blast radius though they may have, that doesn't make it any less omnidirectional.

This feels like you're trying to draw the target around the shots you've already taken as far as the argument goes.

4 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

The enemies of the Tenno are not some primitive bunch who can't build modern technology, so this doesn't countermand the idea of future tech smart fuses. The idea that they can harm Tenno also supports the idea of future-tech smart fuses, because dumb explosives are inefficient and ineffective ways to harm fast-moving armored targets, while smart fuses make these weapons more effective.

Some could build modern technology, but the point is that they generally wouldn't in the cases where the option is there.

Omnidirectional explosives are good for fast moving targets, because you don't have "this end towards enemy" find an enemy no longer that way. 100% waste from a directed jet of force not pointed in the right direction is not better than 50% waste from a dumb explosive that spreads the payload. As for armour, well, we disagree on this idea. Isn't the whole point that we're too self-fatal because enemies are beefier than us, in gameplay?

4 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

The Grineer use extremely hastily grown and deformed clones as line troops, who cannot be trusted to use unsafe explosive weapons effectively. Meanwhile, they are led by fairly intelligent, tactically adept commanders. Grineer explosive weapons should all have safety measures because the Grineer don't want an idiot clone blowing up their entire squad and disrupting their battle plans. Furthermore we know that Grineer are actually surprisingly technologically adept, this is literally stated in the Fragments. They make extensive use of smart weapons like the Bombard Ogris and the Buzlok. The Bombard who, by the way, is more than willing to fire his Ogris at point-blank range, almost as if he wasn't concerned about self-damage. Ghouls are flash grown creatures that are used as initial vanguards and exist mostly to absorb fire, and the Ghoul Expired is in fact a literal Ghoul corpse that is incapable of doing much more than being a fast zombie. Importantly, Ghoul expired explosives aren't nearly as self-destructive as Tenno ones either, because if you set off one of their bombs it just blows off their arm. This suggests directional explosives with greatly reduced backblast.

The Corpus sell their weapons to others. The buyers of said weapons would probably want basic features like "won't be more dangerous to us than to the enemy" included in their weapons and "will actually be able to direct their force effectively against hardened targets" as well, since that's kind of the point of a weapon. Furthermore the Corpus probably wouldn't want a single incorrectly brainwashed Crewman with a launcher to sabotage their entire operation by firing their launcher inside of their dropship or something. This means safety systems to stop mutinies from leading to mission failure.

The infested would probably want their munitions to not, you know, blow up their relatively advanced assets, because unlike Volatile Runners, the Infested units which actually wield what we think of as 'weaponry' are significantly rarer and more elite.

And fairly obviously the Tenno would want safe weapons because they're an elite force which doesn't want to lose their assets to accidents.

So there's sufficient justification for all major factions to use non-self-damaging weapons, especially when you consider that things like directional explosives and selectively aimed warheads exist not primarily as safety mechanisms but because by aiming the blast and shrapnel at things you don't like, rather than having it hit both things you do and don't like, you do more damage to the things you don't like. In fact, you have to jump through hoops, and deliberately make the game less realistic, to maintain an insistence on the frankly comical self-damage that exists in Warframe.

Most of this is covered by a big old ^{[citation needed]}

We know Grineer are haphazard stick-stuff-together types. We know they give their mad lads cleavers for the risk of gun misuse instead of giving those guns 'future-safe targeting'. The Bombards don't always do self-damage largely for metagame reasons; simplified Horde AI would just have it going off on themselves constantly and be a joke. Notice that when they have friendly-fire enabled from Radiation they don't murder each other instantly from direct hits with these 'heavy piercing' rounds you theorise? Could a regular human take a focused AP blast to the face and survive?
And doesn't the Ghoul explosive taking off their arm at all work against the idea that it's directed payloads? You're just setting it off, not pulling a 'stop hitting yourself' on them. Logically it'd just go outwards. Also, they use the sheer concussive force of bombing behind themselves to propel forwards, which could be argued in favour of  "generic shockwave" where the directed would be too unhelpfully precise.

Corpus.. well, what's your argument here? That greedy profiteers have never once knowingly sold unsafe products to their customers? Oh, it 'doesn't make sense' to put big capital at theoretical risk like that, you say.. but short-sighted CEOs literally do that by unsafe practices all the time. A lawsuit. A malfunction causing more damage than cutting the corner saved. Recalls. It happens, and Corpus are the pinnacle of that exact sort of abject disdain in favour of pocket change going up.

Infested was largely theoretical, since we don't have examples of Infested self-damage weaponry that is in active use by current units.  But it's the infestation. A growing mass that reclaims and corrupts anything. Volatile Runners may be shrugged off by us, but that's just how it be. The individuals don't matter. Sacrifice a bunch of drones to neutralise a threat if need be. It's also intelligent enough to make that call - 'if need be' - and favour the nuclear option.to cut off the external risk at that cost to themselves when the risk is high enough rather than gradually working up. Even non-hiveminds can exhibit this practice - lizards that drop their tail for instance. Why struggle when threatened at the cost of worse, when you can just give a chunk up to solve the problem outright?

Tenno, as I agreed, would care. However, much of their tech comes from the Orokin, who while not precluding safety measures, sure as hell wouldn't care about consequences. Just look at the.. everything they did that came back to haunt them.

 

None of this means these factions couldn't use safety features - Corpus directors, ranking Grineer over grunts, etc, where they can afford and care to be a little more wary - but it absolutely means that it's very unlikely that rank-and-file equipment would have them.