EyelessCoffee

Thanks for the info on the bug, I thought HM seemed oddly weak now. I hadn't thought about the pre-27.2 damage system for a long time before this post. I don't play multi-hour missions normally, but I found the old damage system more fun to mod for generally. With the current system most of my builds end up very similar in terms of damage distribution (viral, with maybe HM or heat) regardless of faction, and even in cases where something else is slightly better there is very little difference in feel, with e.g. magnetic being just viral for shields. In the old system there was a lot more variety in what procs did and how they were best used. Of the ones I remember using: - Viral would halve health, only allowed a single instance, and had no scaling with damage, so was an interesting element for high fire rate weapons with low status chance. Useful, but not nearly as prevalent as now. - Corrosive did less initial armor strip, but kept scaling. Good for weapons that could do a lot of procs, nearly essential vs high-level grineer hence overused. I don't think the problem was really with corrosive, but rather how strongly Grineer EHP scaled in a way only corrosive (and slash) could mitigate. - Blast was excellent CC, knocking down nearby enemies. - Gas was stronger, and triple-dipped on faction mods, so not really good for general builds but fun and different. - Electric, Slash, and Heat were fairly similar to now. These were all very unique effects. Lots of things had a niche in which they were usable, and a different style of building. It felt like a proper choice of what a build should do rather than just numbers on a spreadsheet for what does the most damage. Because so many things were good in their niche, any of them could be considered unbalanced if compared to other things that don't do that. Blast for instance had its radial knockdown which gave excellent CC and in a time when AOE was rare it was very useful if CC was wanted. But to get that you had to give up a different damage type that could have done something else. I didn't really notice at the time, but looking back it feels like it was a mistake to replace the weirdness of the old system with the fairly homogenous new system. With the old system, setting up a weapon for e.g. a gas build was different from building for a slash / viral build, which was different from building for a corrosive build. Nowadays if I want to switch to say magnetic, all I do is swap the toxin mod for the electric one, build done. TLDR: The "lack of balance" in the pre-27.2 damage system was fun to mod for, with greater build variety and ironically a less strict meta.

I was wondering how much XP it will be to get to rank 15 of helminth and how many subsumptions/infusions that was. According to the wiki the first rank costs 2250 XP and then each rank 1125 than the one before. So rank 10 currently is 73125 cumulative XP. So rank 20 looks likely to cost 18000 XP itself and 151875 XP cumulatively, slightly more than twice the current limit. Getting from rank 10 to rank 15 would require 78750 XP. Each warframe subsumption yields 1600 XP, and the resources to feed it approximately 210 * 6.66 = ~1400 XP (rough average of used resource points * XP per resource point), so together 3000 XP. So rank 14 would take about 44 frames and rank 15 50 frames. That seems fairly reasonable for someone who hasn't subsumed any at this point - by the time all 46 current frames are subsumed they will be rank 14 and a third of the way to rank 15 even without any infusing. For people who have subsumed all the frames it's less sensible though. An average ability appears to yield around 800 XP when infused, and the resources for feeding around 666 XP, so 1466 XP roughly per infusion. To go from rank 10 to rank 15 would take around 54 infusions, effectively one ability for every frame and eight with two abilities. The resource cost is pretty similar, but the main difficulty here at least for me is finding that many good ability combinations. I'd quite like a reason to experiment more with helminth, but the current system feels like it punishes experimentation with the cost of swapping (both in time and resources) and the general clunkiness. These extra ranks without XP feel like adding pressure with very little incentive, which is off-putting. I'd prefer maybe a system where once an ability is infused it is kept on that frame and can be swapped in and out easily from the arsenal like a mod - this would give me a reason to infuse lots of abilities, and would reduce the thought needed before infusing an ability as the ultimate goal would be to infuse all abilities on all frames, however unachievable that might be.