[Scarlet Spear drops deleted]

I got a Shedu handle and chassis on my last ground mission, but all my pickups were deleted because the extraction timer ended before I got there, causing a host migration prior to mission reward screen. 😕 All I received from the mission was event tokens.

I checked my inventory back in the Orbiter, and the drops did not offload. I only had my Shedu barrel from a previous run.

[New war early disappointment?]

Squad Link is being introduced in Scarlet Spear, where it can be bug tested, before being expanded to more parts of the game. They said they were going to do this at the initial TennoCon reveal.

As for the New War, they have said that it is not a quest, more like a "season" that includes quests, events, etc.

If you go further back a couple years, Scott claimed to have a working version of the new Dark Sector system on a devstream. Quote: "Right now it's basically an RTS, and we need it to be RTS Lite." The teaser shot of Erra's army invading the Plains suggests to me the invasion will begin there, and eventually escalate to space battles involving the Railjack. But I don't think these will happen in the same event.

[So many frames are wasted on current content.]

1 minute ago, Ikyr0 said:

Thanks! Mag is great man, her Polarize and Fracturing Crush got mad buffed when mobs' armor got nerfed...so it's really easy for her to strip it. I'm not sure how I want to build Mag right now. I'm playing a couple of other frames atm that clear content way faster, so I'm fairly uncertain.

Yeah, I mainly just used Mag because I enjoyed her so much. She's got a fun kit. Lot of latent potential.

There's another route you can go with her, but some say it's a little cheesy. Grab a radiation weapon, and a corrosive weapon, both projectile vs hitscan. Hit a group with 4>2, then throw rounds from both weapons in, and let the unarmored enemies murder themselves. The higher the levels, the better. New enemy armor/health can't keep up with enemy damage.

My tests a few years ago yielded Magnetize explosions worth 1.6mil with a group of 4 lv145 corrupted bombards. The weapons I used were corrosive Pox and radiation Mutalist Cernos. But that was before the balance pass, you have many more good options now.

[Gara Grind Was... Not Hard?]

1 hour ago, Tulipunahapero said:

You've had good luck. Anybody doing over 25 runs has awful luck.

 

I remember how I did over 60 Void T4 Survival runs, most of them to 40 minutes because I wanted Loki Prime Neuroptics (C-rotation, every 20min) but finally a friend of mine traded his because he couldn't watch me struggle.

Oh god, I still have nightmares about Saryn Prime helm... Part of why I have such a deep-seated dislike toward mobile defense. Rot C drops in T4 survival were bad, yeah, but at least you were doing something semi-engaging. Eight straight hours of T1 mobile defense made me want to blow my brains out.

[So many frames are wasted on current content.]

Not entirely on-topic @Ikyr0 but last I crunched the numbers, Mag's 4>3 combo at 185 str could full strip heavies up to around lv130. After that, a second 3 or preceding corrosive proc is needed for full strip. This was a couple years back. She should be able to two-cast full strip well into the hundreds now. The trouble is keeping her self-sufficient (unless you have nothing against pizzas). Once she needs 3 casts to strip, it becomes more difficult to manage her energy. Eventually, once armor is high enough, you need 4>4>3 to full strip, and the only things that keep that sustainable are Trinity and the old Energize. I haven't run the numbers, but just based on a cursory glance at the graph, I don't think this will happen until over lv500, possibly much much higher.

[The Problem With Empyrean Resources is NOT About Volume/Grind]

It is the fact that content scales up about 20x faster than your equipment is able to keep up. The drop increases help a bit, but you're still running the same handful of nodes over and over.

I have a few suggestions.

1. Double the Empyrean star chart: Star chart progression equals natural resource accumulation. It helps on two fronts: less time going out of your way for resources, and twice as long for content to scale up. Much better flow. This would be an odd change now; would have been a good idea out of the gate.
2. Group resource costs by type: Every upgrade tier shares the same set of non-special resources. This is bad because you can only choose one upgrade at a time, without knowing how it will perform, and are locked into that choice for the next 8-10 hrs of resource gathering. Splitting resources into an offense upgrade group and defense/performance upgrade group (maybe a third as well for performance) will allow the player to install two upgrades per interval, without any change in the amount of time it takes to fund any one upgrade currently.
3. Remove repair timer: Scrapping old equipment to fund new equipment leaves you using even older equipment until the repair finishes. If you want a timer, add a cost-free 12hr "Polish" action, after which the equipment can be funded to make it instantly usable. Coupled with suggestion 2, this completely eliminates the urge to hold out for Mk III.
4. Remove electrical hazard, shields block all hazard accumulation: Self-explanatory. Shields are not very useful for defense, partly because they are almost always down, and partly because they don't help much when they're up because electrical hazards hurt shields way harder than fires hurt hull. Electrical hazards aren't even worth repairing. This suggestion draws player attention to shields at the same time that suggestion 2 enables you to upgrade them without sacrificing firepower. (Shields still need some help. I recommend adding a way to manually kickoff shield regen, that is available without avionic/intrinsic.)

Hope you find this helpful, DE. I have other suggestions to help with the resource slog, but they're things you already intend to implement (dynamic objectives, etc.). I happen to like Empyrean a lot despite its flaws and incompleteness. I understand that you felt compelled to honor your release schedule. Keep up the good work. You'll get there eventually.

[So, they're gonna make impact procs open enemies up to parazon finishers.]

1 hour ago, Redfeather75 said:

No, I linked the video. You need to lower an enemy to 5% health. Already certified and heading to console too.

Oh wow. Watched your link.

Okay so random chance for Parazon finisher at 5% health... that sounds pretty bad. But, do we get the standing finisher window back? Because if so, then I'm perfectly fine with it.

[So, they're gonna make impact procs open enemies up to parazon finishers.]

I don't get it. Why would someone not like this?

We get the old impact status back, except the stagger gets longer on reproc. And it opens for Parazon finishers instead of standing finishers.

If you preferred standing finishers over Parazon, okay, that's fair. But it sounds like most people just misinterpreted the proposed change.

[Upcoming changes -- what do people think of them?]

I'm impressed that DE is actually crunching power on the player's side. I used to say that if WF is ever going to have satisfying, well-paced combat, then they're going to have to nerf the S#&$ out of players. Never thought they'd do it.

I am cautiously optimistic about the changes in general. Although I don't like the full removal of self-damage. Hoping it can be opted into with a mod that reduces explosive radius by 20% and also confers some kind of benefit.

[100% Status Shotguns: buff or nerf?]

19 hours ago, RX-3DR said:

My Strun Wraith without 100% SC is taking 4 ~ 9  shots to kill most enemies in the Veil. Testing on an Exo Elite Lancer, the TTK for a Primsa Gorgon and a Strun Wraith without 100% SC are both at about 3 ~ 4 seconds with a Critical + Corrosive build. The Strun Wraith isn't so much a Crit weapon, meaning it's expected to perform weaker as a hybrid Crit/Status build. Meanwhile, the Prisma Gorgon is 1MR higher so it is technically classed on the same level, or higher in base stats. I can also drop Chilling Reload on my Strun to get a cut down the TTK by about a second.

In this situation, a 3x base Status Chance would result in a significant increase in Status Effects, which would cut down the TTK for the Strun Wraith by a sizable amount over the Prisma Gorgon, ironically, likely giving you your intended end-result of the Strun Wraith taking less than 6 shots to kill troops in Veil Proxima. The specific meta of 100% Status Chance or bust is cut down but the overall performance will see enough of an increase to raise shotguns on the radar without having to force yourself into a singular build.

It does highlight how underwhelming many shotguns are and perhaps we might see some improvements to them, be it base stats or Disposition. The Tigris Prime is a prime example of this with 1 Disposition purely because of 100% Status Chance builds as opposed to it being a good or reliable weapon.

See, none of this actually matters because you can't full strip with corrosive status now anyway. It's additive reduction capping at 80%. So... I guess problem solved? The case for 100% sc is moot now.

That workshop pt.2 was pretty shocking, I did not expect some of those changes. I'm interested to see how all this will affect builds and weapon comparisons. And the general pace of combat.

Here's hoping DE pushes out cross-progression sooner than later, along with a way to copy inventory to the PC version. My new GPU is hungry for things to bite into.

[100% Status Shotguns: buff or nerf?]

9 hours ago, RX-3DR said:

Have you used a conventional rifle recently? As far as weapon performance goes, even without 100% Status Chance, shotguns are very competitive against their single pellet counterparts. If your comparison with the "normal" is comparing with the outliers way too far ahead, then 90% of weapons are not balanced to begin with. It's an overall buff if you ask me, opening them for significantly more versatility over their already good performance over rifles. If you've built your shotguns to be an all-rounded weapon with things like Reload Speed and Magazine Size, you're getting a straight status chance buff. If you're annoyed having to obsess over 100% status chance, you no longer need to shoehorn your build to revolve around hitting that ridiculous breakpoint. The only thing getting hit, is trying to force Shotguns to keep up with the absolute meta weapons, which doesn't really matter because you can just move on back to those meta weapons.

It's essentially the melee changes, except on a much smaller scale. General performance sees a lot of good increase in base functionality and versatility. Only the extreme meta chasing takes a hit.

By conventional rifle, I assume you mean something like Prisma Gorgon? Not recently, but I recognize that even 10% sc on an automatic rifle is perfectly serviceable for a hybrid build, given sufficient fire rate.

But you're mad if you take Strun Wraith to Veil Proxima without 100sc. It handles Veil, but only just. 4-6 trigger pulls to kill a boarder feels about right to me, 10 does not. I'm not chasing meta. I like the way my mid-tier gear performs when modded to handle the content I'm doing, and I don't want to see it fall to the point that it can't handle that content anymore. Considering RJ is like... 80% of what I do now.

Can Strun Wraith handle Veil with 60 pellet sc instead of 100? Maybe. My intuition says no. I don't really care about meta or how other people are modding their stuff. I understand that you're pleased that your shotty builds perform better with the changes. That's great and all. But it sounds like you see it as a bonus that the maximum effectiveness of some mid-tier equipment is reduced if it also produces a Tigris nerf. I'll try not to take it personally.

Apologies if I seem curt. It's late and I've had a very difficult week.

[Oh boy. I cant wait for the arcane changes.]

Am I the only one who heard DE say arcanes will be available through a token system in Scarlet Spear?

Yes? Just me? Okay then.

[100% Status Shotguns: buff or nerf?]

3 minutes ago, nslay said:

If that's true, then nerfing status shotguns is necessary to maintain balance. Can't be getting, say, 22 guaranteed status procs in one shot if they can amp each other up.

Well, that's the thing. For the purpose of DOTs, proc amping doesn't change the amount of damage you're doing, at least the amped effects they've described. Reducing the procs dealt per shot is a reduction in DOT damage over what you're currently dealing. In the case of stacking viral, I can understand it. But from what they've described, that's the only case where 100% sc with 40 pellets might be overpowered. In all other known cases, it's a reduction in effectiveness.

That's why I want clarification. From what they've told us, the natural interpretation is that shotguns will be less effective than currently, not "balanced" with the new normal. If status-based automatic weapons proc more status/sec, and handle better, then what's the value of a shotgun? Just raw damage?

Maybe I'm wrong and shotguns will retain their station in the new norm. Hell, maybe a shotgun nerf isn't really that big of a deal. Guess we'll find out soon enough. Worst-case scenario, DE can x6 shotgun status instead of x3.

[Volt Got a Big Boi Buff]

2 hours ago, (PS4)Shaun-T-Wilson said:

You mean chroma players that exploited self damage to get an ability buff.

See, five years you ago you'd have a point. But a known and widely used mechanic that is left in-game for half a decade can't be considered an "exploit".

[100% Status Shotguns: buff or nerf?]

After the changes, multishot will function the same on every weapon where status is concerned. If you want to know the likelihood of at least one pellet inflicting a status effect, that's something you'll have to math out yourself, because it's not displayed in the UI anymore. The sc displayed is the real sc of each individual pellet, not an average like it is now. Breaking 100sc gives each pellet a corresponding chance to proc additional times, with every additional 100.

Now the one thing that's not entirely clear is whether:

1. the current sc values are being used for the real chance per pellet, and those are being tripled or
2. the current per-pellet sc values are being exposed in the arsenal, and those are being tripled.

Let's use an extreme example. Strun Wraith has 40% sc, or ~4.98% per pellet (according to the wiki). In scenario 1, it will have 112% when tripled. That's a crapload of status for an unmodded weapon and a huge buff to all shotties. But in scenario 2, it will have ~15%. You're going to need 4 dual status and an absolutely bonkers riven to get 100% sc out of a base 15%. Only a few multishot shotguns can achieve that. Strun Wraith, Exergis, Phantasma's alt-fire... Maybe Sobek? Its status isn't great, but its pellet count is low, so the chance per pellet is actually higher than Strun Wraith's.

Steve claims that the changes will ultimately be a buff for shotguns because of the other mechanics being added, particularly overproc (my pet name for additional procs over 100% sc). But if scenario 2 is true, then no shotgun under 15% per-pellet sc and 5/5 dispo can achieve 100%, so they will not benefit from these mechanics. This seems to suggest that they are implementing scenario 1. But that is so incredibly powerful that it's hard to fathom that's their real intention.

Now it's important to note that they discussed another new mechanic in the devstream. Consecutive procs will improve the effects of existing procs. Viral will stack multiplicatively (most of you probably don't remember it working this way four years ago, it was pretty insane with slash), DOTs will increase and refresh, proc effects like impact will ramp up, etc. I believe this is what Steve meant when he said that ultimately shotguns will be more effective. They will be able to amp a lot of status effects at once. Without more details on this mechanic, it's hard to know if that's an accurate prediction.

tl;dr: We need clarification from DE. Some details are fuzzy.

[DO NOT remove self damage. It is a legitimate drawback and a niche some players welcome.]

This thread is filled with people pretending not to understand the intention of the language of the person they're responding to, so they can argue the merits of an opinion in a vacuum instead of deconstructing or improving on the ideas presented for the benefit of both parties.

But this is the internet, so I guess that's saying "this water is too wet". Everyone's a politician. This is why we can't have nice things.

[DO NOT remove self damage. It is a legitimate drawback and a niche some players welcome.]

@TheLexiConArtist I will miss it as well. It was the one thing that kept typical WF missions from being braindead. Misfiring is nowhere near as frustrating as being hosed down in animation lock, even if the latter will happen less often. Unfortunately, this is one of those situations where only one side of the argument is able or willing to understand both sides.

I agree with your feelings about self-damage only being lethal when the damage is meaningful. But honestly, explosives aren't even that dangerous anymore. You can't kill yourself with Tonkor unless you're trucking toward the grenade. Lenz gives you plenty of time to roll out. Nobody uses Penta without Tether/Napalm Grenades, so it's not dangerous at all. Zarr is the only self-damage weapon you can easily kill yourself with, but that's what the alt-fire is for. Everything else has such minor self-damage that it's not really a factor. I heard some complain about Zhuge Prime. I can't imagine how you could possibly suicide with that. Even Banshee can take several hits from it.

On 2020-02-28 at 9:26 PM, Tiltskillet said:

Think of it as an opportunity to push for Self Damage an opt-in mechanic. For instance, 

Reckless Shot: Weapons with Stagger gain +150% damage, +20% explosion radius.  Stagger now causes Self Damage.

Dude....... you're a hero. Quick, everyone upvote this man.

[Element stack effects?]

They actually discussed this in late 2017. It was described as "Damage 3.0" for some reason. Here's the status changes they suggested.

Electric: Chains to other enemies and stuns longer, like Volt's 4.
Cold: Cumulative slow until frozen solid, similar to Glaxion.
Heat: Cumulative refreshing heat proc.
Slash: Same effect, but conversion% dependent on damage spread instead of fixed 35%. (All DOT status would receive this treatment.)
Puncture: Same as Bleed.
Impact: Multi-stage stagger with reproc, culminating in knockdown. (Many people hated this because it makes headshots harder. It would also remove impact's current effect, which is opening enemies to melee finishers.)
Blast: Ragdoll with scaling force.

Those are the only ones they described, to my recollection. Maybe I'm missing a couple.

By the sound of it, the only thing they're changing is status effects on reproc and double-procs over 100%. The changes proposed in 2017 were more extensive than status effects, though. They wanted to change how proc rolling worked. Basically, your chance to inflict a specific effect would still be based on your damage spread, but now the intensity of the effect would also be influenced. For instance, if 70% of your damage spread is puncture, then a puncture proc would reduce enemy damage by 70%. If you dealt a slash proc, then the ticks would be 70% of the weapon's base damage per second. It would have radically altered the meta, and changed how we mod almost every weapon.

I actually still like the idea. Right now, you add damage mods to change your primary damage types, not to increase your raw damage. Under the proposed changes, the two would be synonymous. Might have incentivized using those archaic 30% damage mods for careful damage balancing. Also created a strong case for damage conversion mods (example: -50% Puncture, +60% Slash) like the ones in Conclave.

[Is Arcane Energize getting nerfed?]

2 hours ago, (XB1)Cram Duahcim said:

If a slight nerf something that's essentially niche [...]

I wouldn't call it slight. If my understanding is correct, Energize's function is completely changing, and the thing that makes it so powerful (bypassing channeling restrictions) is going away.

[Is Arcane Energize getting nerfed?]

From what I understand, many arcanes have a cooldown equal to their duration now. Judging by the language in the description, Energize is going to work like Zenurik's Energy Pulse, and can't re-trigger until the regen ends. This probably means it will no longer bypass ability channeling. That's a pretty massive nerf. Energize will become an alternative to Zenurik's Energizing Dash, rather than the ultimate energy maintenance option.

[Are status mods going to get a buff?]

8 minutes ago, Hixlysss said:

I still wish it was more. I hope they decrease the cost of the mods, if nothing else. Dual status mods giving 60/60...vs 90%...I really feel like the status chance mods should be like 120%. But that's without knowing what benefits the Double Procs bring.

I agree. Even at 90%, the only benefit of those mods is being able to specialize in non-combo elements. Which is valuable, don't get me wrong. There are a few shotguns that can't achieve 100sc with 4 dual status, but can with 3 dual status and a 90% status. But shotgun status is getting tripled, so........ yeah. It's really just the first thing.

[Shield gate on corpus. Are they a bigger threat now?]

3 hours ago, Loza03 said:

A bigger threat? Yes. On par with the Grineer? Remains to be seen, but I'm erring on the side of no.

If Corpus were the only thing being changed, I would say definitely no. But the only thing keeping Grineer dangerous was armor scaling and bleed procs, both of which are changing. Corpus pump out way more damage. Granted, that's partly because of our vulnerability to puncture, but that's gone now too.

The comparisons are hard to math out right now. Like you, I'm waiting for a live fire scenario. Really interested to see how all this shakes out.

[Is magnetic status still a mediocre status effect?]

2 hours ago, GrazeZeroLow said:

The only thing that shield gating "added", is the ability to one-shot corpus through headshots and weakspots

It doesn't one-shot, it just deals normal damage instead of tiny bleedover. Bodyshots are where the change occurs.

Or were you just being passive-aggressive?

imo, magnetic will be deprecated even more by the changes. 25% shield depletion is nice... but the difference between dealing full damage directly, and dealing AOE gas damage immediately, is minimal at best. There is a threshold where Corpus health becomes so dramatic that gas isn't as good as raw damage. But that's way, way deep into level scaling

I can think of a few ways to deal with the problem.

1. Magnetic procs disable shield gating. This means the shot that deals a magnetic proc gains full bleedover. Additionally, enemies gain a second shield gate on overshields.
2. Give magnetic procs an additional effect. For example: Enemies suffering magnetic procs will get yoinked together for a few seconds, setting them up for AOEs and enabling some interesting Mag shenanigans.
3. Magnetic procs cause enemy overshields to rupture, dealing direct health damage. This works well with the overshield suggestion in 1.

Any combination of one or more of these ideas would make magnetic procs more valuable. Not saying they should be implemented, just highlighting that there are plenty of ways to approach the problem.

[Shield gate on corpus. Are they a bigger threat now?]

Provided you don't shoot the head, Corpus take two shots to kill above a certain level. I wonder if shotguns bypass the gate? They shouldn't, but we don't know exactly how it works yet.

This effectively doubles Corpus TTK. They have some pretty extreme firepower already. But that is being reduced, since Tenno armor (I assume?) is no longer vulnerable to puncture. To what extent that will affect engagement, hard to say.

The longer an enemy takes to kill, the longer other enemies are able to harass you. So they're more of a threat. Are they a deadly threat? Live fire scenario is the only way to know for sure. I'm extremely interested in all the changes described in the devstream. Never thought they'd go so deep, let alone all at once.

["You'll have to stop at some point" says DE]

The door frame thing does bug me. There's no visible geometry. It's a holdover nuisance from pre-TSD. Not as annoying now as it was then, considering the linearity of old parkour frontflip. You can avoid it... but sometimes my frame displaces mid-jump to land on it. What is this, Smash Ultimate?