Koekr

I have an incarnon sancti magistar that causes the game to freeze briefly when I melee attack with it, but only on the first melee attack in the mission, or if some time has passed since pulling out the weapon in the current mission. If I pull it out and keep swinging, it only freezes on the initial attack.

That's true to a great extent, ability damage probably needs to bypass armour to some degree. Although, I think it would be weird to entirely ignore armour, and there's the issue of how abilities should treat shields if they're going to treat armour differently.

Maybe there should be an augment that replaces the cooldowns with conventional energy. Or Lavos gets conventional energy, and requires an augment for cooldowns, and maybe some other warframes get cooldown augments too. Most people don't seem to enjoy the cooldown system, myself included, but it feels rude to those who play Lavos for the cooldown system to remove it entirely.

It's important to understand the details of these attempts at ability damage scaling, as these are instructive on any future iterations. If the level scaling damage closely matched the EHP curve, then the trivialization problem would occur without a doubt, and it has already occurred as you described. This is generally the pitfall with ability damage directly scaling with enemy health too. If the level scaling damage only slightly scaled with level in a way that barely matched the EHP curve, then we have a very slightly lessened version of the same problem we do now. You are correct in that trying to balance this is difficult. Inventing and implementing an alternate better solution will also be difficult. But I think some warframes do achieve a good-feeling form of scaling, so I think it's possible to achieve on a broader scale.

I personally want to see an attempt at ability damage sort of scaling with the level of whatever it's hitting, with the intention that it approaches the EHP curve without completely matching it. You should still have to build your warframe properly if you expect competitive effectiveness against higher level enemies, after all. Some earlier warframes' damage numbers were tuned for what is now lower level content and barely scratch higher level enemies, while newer warframes' damage numbers tend to be tuned for higher level content, and thus utterly obliterate lower level content. The compromise between these two is allowing damage numbers to re-tune based on enemy level. I want to see this tested with Banshee, as she's not particularly popular right now and her abilities are definitely undertuned for current content.

Yes, that's why this thread exists, abilities are generally much weaker than guns. My point is that making abilities deal damage directly proportional to the max health of the target causes wonky scaling problems if you just apply it to everything. Your examples of one-shot abilities are worth dissecting, as they're examples of when and when not to use direct max health scaling. Trinity's Energy Vampire, according to its ability description, has some very notable balancing decisions. While it can deal a lot of damage very fast, this is with a high-strength low-duration build, an interesting tradeoff. It is also single-target, and its damage is based on a portion of current health, with a minimum of just 5 damage. I wouldn't call this a particularly well-designed ability either though. Revenant's Reave requires some setup and a high-strength build to achieve its one-shot condition, with the extra caveat that the enemy must be enthrallable, which excludes some strong enemies. Garuda's Blood Orb also requires setup to one-shot, but it's a more gratifying process than if it just dealt 25-65% of max health to any enemy it struck. I balk against your suggestion because the 'percentage of maximum health' idea is an obvious solution with unobvious problems. The devs had already thought of it, and we know they did because they've already implemented a couple of abilities with that feature. How many times have we seen that feature on abilities since then?

That explains the circuit run I did as Nyx, where I thought I was simply mis-positioning and not attracting enough fire because her 4 did a suspiciously low amount of damage. Scaling with enemy health directly like this can cause even more problems if applied to all abilities baseline. If the percentage doesn't scale with ability strength, then it doesn't matter how low your ability strength is if it at least deals 25% of max health. If the percentage does scale with ability strength, then there better be something to prevent abilities from dealing 100% of max health as damage while still letting these abilities one-shot relatively weak enemies. If an enemy has low health and high shields, does it use shields for scaling or not? What happens if the shields get stripped? If the damage ignores armour AND viral procs, then the damage is just bypassing a mechanic AND not benefitting from a mechanic that benefit guns. If you look at pre-existing abilities that use enemy health as damage to some degree, you'll notice that they tend to use an accumulation mechanic, and the resultant damage never scales with the enemy getting hit with it. Garuda's 1st ability eats up a percentage of max health, but the projectile doesn't care about the max health of whatever it's hitting. However, some abilities would definitely work well with direct health scaling. It's just not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Oh I definitely don't think that simply increasing ability damage is a viable solution. In fact, it just postpones the level at which the ability damage becomes useless. It's not necessarily good for most abilities to one-shot enemies except at very low levels, I think.

A lot of warframe abilities are categorically worse by virtue of being intended for damage, with notable exceptions. For the majority, they'll be clearing rooms at lower levels, then progressively one-shot fewer and fewer enemies as the level number climbs, ending in high level missions where the 100-energy room-clearer is barely scratching the enemy, while the 25-energy utility that makes your pew pew slightly more effective gets a sumptuous buffet. The notable exceptions are abilities that a) scale their damage off of enemy stats, and/or b) scale up as high as you want with enough attention. Honourable mention goes to exalted weapon abilities, and the less honourable mention goes to abilities that scale off of equipped normal weapon stats. Often, the less useful damage abilities are given utility as a fix, such as armour strip or damage vulnerability, but isn't that kind of monotonous? Do we want a game where all the 'nuke abilities' tickle the enemy but apply a 300% damage vulnerability effect?

Why do we instantly lose all accumulated damage on Splinter Storm when we fall off the map or enter a nullifier bubble? It can take ages to build up this damage, it shouldn't be entirely erased with a single mistake. In some cases, it's not even a mistake on the player's part, with host migrations and wonky map geometry capable of stripping the effect entirely. Granted, without this downside, there's nothing to deter Splinter Storm from accumulating damage infinitely. Saryn's 'Spores' ability already avoids this problem by degenerating rather than disappearing while inside a nullifier bubble or after the effect expires.

Currently the damage/healing accimulation number is tucked between all the other buffs. It's hardly a buff itself, it has no effect until the 4th ability is deactivated. Give it a unique HUD element, like how Saryn has a unique HUD element that displays accumulated spore damage.

It's not that she needs to be buffed, it's that she needs polishing, but since she is held back by her lack of polish, it would buff her by proxy. I also recently tested what happens if you unleash Mend & Maim during Metamorphosis's transition period, and it seems to simply waste all accumulated damage and do nothing. Seems like a missed opportunity for some special interactions between her other abilities and her 1 during the shift.

Is Metamorphosis supposed to be the crux of her kit, or is it merely to enable the rest of it? I run a build that uses the augment mods Energy Transfer and Duality, the former putting in the majority of the work. I maintain Mend & Maim while switching forms constantly, accumulating damage for when I need a room-nuke. And I never use her 2 and 3 abilities. I don't feel like I'm playing her correctly, and I don't think I want to. I don't want to recast her 3 and 4 whenever I switch forms, simple as. So I have an augment for her 4, and I never use her 3, because they don't persist through forms for some reason. It's not like I can't recast this ability every time I shift form, I only don't because it's annoying. As for her 4, I find myself using Maim 99% of the time, only using Mend if I have an extremely low amount accumulated and I'm not getting health from anywhere else. If you're not using the augment, this just makes Mend more spammable at higher levels, but with the augment, Maim is the only option past a certain amount of accumulated damage. Metamorphosis itself also doesn't let you cast abilities while shifting, which is a tiny bit annoying. On the other hand, if this were all 'fixed', it would probably make Equinox significantly easier to play. She's otherwise really quite a simple warframe with simple patterns, it's her jank that makes her interesting. Maybe. I don't know. Also please change how the HUD displays the accumulated damage. It shouldn't be hiding among the buffs, and it shouldn't disappear briefly while switching forms.