Drasiel

no, it's not outdated, it's always been super disruptive and frustrating for other players in every iteration. He's never meshed nicely with other players unless your playstyle is power spam. Playing him solo though? very cool mechanic, 10/10 experience, you feel like a real goddamn space wizard. Encountering him in public when you aren't playing him? He is the absolute worst, and I would like to gift wrap and deliver him to Vay Hek to be punted into the sun.

It's 42 loadouts I don't think most people would consider that a small amount lol. I have more individual builds but those are entire sets that tend to depend on each other for full functionality. Yeah, that's kind of the pain point of the entire system: Loadouts make switching items easy but they are harder to maintain (I have a bunch of loadouts I need to update and I've been putting it off for 2 years now). Configs are Easy to maintain but harder to swap out. Experimenting is always going to be easier with manual individual management. You start running into annoyance and frustration when you've got a set build and/or purpose for a single item and just want to swap it around depending on the situation. you're going 3 menus deep just to manage that unless you want to physically walk to the arsenal and then it's only 2 menus deep but burns time. You could read our earlier exchanges but I think you were trying to break down where the disconnect between what you think I want and what I actually want are. I think the underlying issues with enemy defences and damage bonuses that lead to viral and armour stripping being so prevalent as the go-to solution and path of least resistance are harming the game by making it unappealing and disadvantageous to use anything else. I also think that due to changing individual configs and keeping load-outs updated being cumbersome it further funnels players into the mindset of using one-size-fits-all builds. The best one-size-fits-all build just happens to be Viral and armour stripping, due to the underlying issues with the prevalence of armour and the specific damage type bonuses to health being abysmally inferior to Viral's general bonus. I don't want to make it easier to make one-size-fits-all builds, I would like to point out the issues that cause those status effects to be so "meta" so they can be addressed and the "best" builds aren't just the path of least resistance. It would be nice to return to arguing about the best builds for specific situations and not have every other option overshadowed by the massive mechanical advantages that viral and armour strip offer due to the pitfalls generated by the updates and evolutions (or the lack thereof) of these 3 interlocking systems.

So digging into that a little more, it's actually a bit more complicated than that and we're both incorrect but it's Warframe's fault. "Finisher damage" doesn't technically exist as a damage type at all, it's an attack type that modifies your damage, as I'm sure you are aware. Ground finishers have a damage multiplier depending on weapon class, stealth attacks apply a multiplier (which has different calculations for elemental damage for some reason) as well as converting the damage to "True Damage", and front/back finishers each have their own multipliers respectively and also convert the damage to "True Damage". In the code apparently, Bleed's damage is called Cinematic Damage. While there is a different name under the hood, it does appear that Cinematic Damage functions exactly the same as the "True Damage" from a finisher attack. Warframe powers that deal "True damage" for the most part do deal damage directly to health, but it's not consistent: Frost's Snowglobe push - ignores shields. Hydroid's Tentacle Swarm - ignores shields. Inaros': Passive - does not. Desiccation - ignores shields. Devour - does not. Mag's Polarize - does not (even on an enemy with both shields and armour). Revenant's Reave - ignores shields. Sevagoth's sow - Ignores shields. Trinity's Energy Vampire - ignores shields. The community has taken to calling the X-with-a-roof on its head "True Damage" and the variant with the same symbol that doesn't bypass shields "Finisher Damage" because it's confusing to have two damage types that have different behaviours called the same name. This type of damage was at one time called "Finishing Damage" which led to confusion with finisher attacks but I don't know if that is still the internal name for the damage type or not. This actually makes me wonder if finisher attacks are using the "Cinematic Damage" type. What's interesting about this is that the information on "True Damage" doesn't actually state that it should ignore shields, just that it only applies to health and overgaurd and bypasses armour's damage reduction. Oh and to add to the confusion, the Basmu's "True Damage" also ignores shields because of course the weapon-based sources aren't consistent either. Anyway, at the end of the day, the name doesn't really matter as long as we understand each other. We don't have an official name for X-with-a-roof on its head damage type and none of the supporting documentation has picked up the community nomenclature to validate it (unlike say damage attenuation or the other terms commonly used to refer to that mechanic) but, if it's easier going forward, we can call it "Finisher Damage" (although I'm rather partial to the name Thomas).

Mostly yes. Although some important cliff notes: Viral doesn't just multiply other status, it multiplies everything except damage done to shields. Slash is still good without Viral, it's just better with it. The majority of the essay is explaining why this is the case and the mechanics that led to it.

I am back home from tennocon and recovered enough to think properly again. Sorry, for the lag in responses. I would qualify that I like making more than just a few builds with goals but overall that is correct. I make... a lot. I also agree that every combination will not fit. I add to that, that while loadouts do work effectively as full loadout quick swaps, they fail to include archwing, necramechs, and vehicles (which causes problems in areas that can utilize those in addition to our normal loadouts) and individual item configs are very cumbersome to change between missions. I can't really argue with that, I am in fact a giant nerd. If I added another 26+ pages we'd have been looking at at least another 3 months of compiling it, and knowing warframe they'd have changed something fundamental by then that throws the entire essay out the window. They already snuck in changes to puncture and cold (twice) while I finished the editing after all. Yes by comparison there are a lot more of the other elemental and elemental combination damage-type weapons, but I don't think that the amount we have is too low (except for gas), I am always open to more of them though, either through more nemesis weapons or more unique new weaponry. I love it when a weapon has an inherent dual element because you can add any of the base elements to it and they won't combine. They are the only weapons where you can have something like both radiation and heat damage or cold and viral etc. I understand the mechanics offered by that combination but thank you for breaking it down. I wasn't actually trying to blip out my name, there's not much point when the username in-game is the same as on the forums, the black bar is to hide plat values since the community often has interesting opinions on your personal morality and critical thinking based on the amount of plat you have. I wish I hadn't needed to use viral there but because of the weapon I chose and keeping electricity, my only two options were viral and blast. Since blast is the only combination element that is objectively terrible at everything, especially in a situation with armoured enemies, I did not feel it would provide as good of an example. Ah, okay that makes sense about why you thought it was so top-down but funnily enough in this explanation you've hit on exactly the thing I wanted to highlight as an issue: That viral and armour strip are so prevalent that they become an assumed given in optimal builds. This was why I only dove into the actual status effects at the end of the essay and started with defences and damage types because the reason why they are so ubiquitous is what's going to be the foundational issue. I do feel the need to point out that armour strip from abilities has only become a viable strategy fairly recently. Newer armour strip powers have a tendency to cost less energy, strip more armour at once, and hit more targets, which is a necessity for the increasing hordes of enemies we face. A lot of the older armour strips are still based on older spawn rates and enemy density and are simply not cost-effective due to target limitations. Yes, it is 4.25 multiplier because the attack's initial damage is added to the 3.25 the community doesn't seem to agree on if we should write the total damage multiplier including the base damage for 4.25 or if it's expected that players already know to add the initial damage to the 3.25 multiplied value. I normally write 3.25 because honestly, it's still a big enough difference to get the point across. I think Viral could keep its bonus to health damage but it needs to follow the rule of "the specific should always be more powerful than the general". Right now specific health type bonuses max out at 1.75 and Viral's all-health bonus is 4.25 That's insanely unbalanced and makes it a complete joke to choose the specific bonuses over the general. Now you wouldn't necessarily need to nerf Viral's bonus into the ground, it would need a minor nerf at least but the damage-type bonuses need a big boost across the board. Enemy EHP has skyrocketed and damage-type bonuses have been stagnant the entire time. The game they were relevant in, for all intents and purposes, doesn't even exist anymore. I don't disagree that this is definitely a bed that DE made and now has to lie in, but I do feel sympathy for them in that it's easy to see the logic train that led us here one change and update at a time. Sadly a lot of it stems from making bad status effects better rather than looking at the root causes of what made those status effects into such bad choices to begin with. Which is what spurred me to write this essay, the community was also making the exact same kind of suggestions and the consequences of repeating those mistakes could be even more disastrous. Caliban is an interesting case, he's not a bad frame by any means, he's just an incredibly clunky frame. His 3 providing shield gating does have one terrible flaw though, if he's zeroed out on shields he loses the bonus regen until he regains some of his shields on his own. You can get around this with auger mods or other restores but that ability really should give some shields when it's recast like other shield-based frames with shield restoring abilities. There are some issues with his other abilities too but this isn't really the right thread to digress further into that at the moment, even if it would be fun. :D You are welcome, your gender expression will be what it is regardless of my knowledge of it. You do you, and I'll just cover all of my bases.

My mistake, you're right about that, even if you charge up Mend and then use Energy transfer to preserve the stored damage for Maim it doesn't affect the slash procs. I actually prefer night equinox for the heal and slow so my Day knowledge isn't as comprehensive. In the case of KPM Maim is alpha damage, it's everything up front in one strike, and no DoT effect should match the kill speed of that type of damage delivery. Yeah, you have to build Maim up with kills first but the damage is still delivered in an instant effect. Personally, the best argument for improving spores TTK is Gara's Splinterstorm. It's not an official fallacy, but the fallacy of common sense should be one. The problem with common sense is that it is incredibly subjective and limited by personal experience. You can simply never encounter what other people consider common sense. You'd think something like not bothering wild animals would be common sense and yet the amount of people that have never interacted with real nature is truly staggering. Everyone on here should know what viral does and why it does what it do, but to get by in the game you only need to know that viral status make number go up, and you'll be able to more than get by.

ah, okay. Well the problem of the community making silly demands about things they do to themselves is a tale as old as time, and like a phoenix shall continually rise until the universe itself is a cold dead speck. To quote one of my favourite authors: "Ahem," said Vetinari. "But I understand that the offending affair can only be seen in any detail with quite a large magnifying glass, and so the offence, if such it be, is largely self-inflicted." You can't save people from themselves and I believe the lack of such an option is the far greater harm.

not sure why you're throwing your need vs. want comments at me considering I only responded to your comment about semi-autos being semi-auto for balance reasons, but I guess I'll take the time to inform you about one of the single most frustrating things about being disabled, sick, or crippled: Having to prove you are worthy of accessibility options and assistance. If you try to withhold support because of bad actors or people "using the thing wrong!" all you do is create unnecessary suffering for the group it's a problem for. This kind of gatekeeping has existed for a long time outside of the world of video games and having to prove it's a "need" not a "want" has killed people. Now I'm not so overdramatic as to say the consequences are anywhere near the same level as real life in a video game but it is the exact same bull S#&$ with a bit less stink.

No, I understand it, that's why I said that I've come around to agree with you that the ramp-up needs to be faster and is due for review as it has both been a long time and the game has sped up a lot since the last time Saryn was touched up. That's not true. There was a period of time when the enemy scaling was different and alerts with level 80-90 enemies were the equivalent of 120-130 level enemies with much harsher armour scaling. Also, endurance runs have existed forever and if I remember right, barring specific mission-type modifiers it only takes an hour, hour and a half to get to that level of enemies. You can easily fit the archon shards, arcane, and one additional power mod on build. If you don't see being able to double your power strength fairly easily as an "improvement" we just aren't going to reach an agreement here. You are correct about Auger secrets, I misread the date. uh... Equinox's only damage ability Maim, deals slash damage with a 100% chance to slash proc. Do you have some other esoteric method by which you are killing enemies with Equinox? While she also benefits from storing incoming damage, that damage will continue to be dealt in armour ignoring slash procs if anything survives the initial damage. You're missing my point. It's not that Saryn should be barred from it, it's that you are making bad comparisons. Most of the frames you are comparing her to work nothing like her and rely on different mechanics to perform well at that level. Unless you are suggesting that she should use their mechanics instead of her own, they are bad comparisons to how she should be performing with her mechanics. Yes, I've played both and I found Splinter Storm to be much harder to maintain and required a lot more of my attention to keep active. You are correct that you can't directly control spores which can be a detriment in certain situations but for me, it was always a huge benefit. Yes, but you're probably not going to agree that my experience with her is the same as yours because as I mentioned previously, I like killing things with my weapons and not relying purely on powers. So my playstyle more heavily incorporates murdering things affected by spore but with weaponry. It kind of does in this case though, if it doesn't spread at least once its infinite duration is moot. So while everyone will need to spread some of it manually it also self-perpetuates which helps maintain it. If you didn't feel that was pertinent so be it, for me, it is something that is pertinent. Shield damage doesn't benefit from viral's debuff and neither does damage on overguard but I assume you mean outgoing damage on health and not damage applied to other defences. The problem with "open to interpretation" is that some people are going to be incredibly uncharitable about what they think your intentions are. Claiming you are falling into fallacies is fairly uncharitable and people like to make such claims for "easy wins". From the way you write, I choose not to consider it that way, but it can come off in that manner. This is subjective though, so we don't have to agree.

I'm sorry but having the muscle ability to rapidly click isn't a behaviour that affects balance. Holding a button doesn't change ROF, doesn't change recoil, doesn't increase damage per shot, doesn't make aiming easier (it actually makes it harder), and for most people results in more wasted ammo from poor trigger discipline. Not giving people RSI isn't going to affect the "balance" of semi-auto weapons. It would change the feel, which if you don't like that I can at least respect the opinion, but clutching pearls and going "Won't someone think of the children BALANCE!?" is the kind of idea that I would call the kind of name that would get me a forum time out.

I will comment as someone with clicking issues, being forced to only use full auto guns or build a macro sucks MASSIVELY. Duviri is also kind of a real mess for this since if you don't roll an auto weapon you have to load into Duviri and abort repeatedly until you get something you can use. Which also resets your frame options too of course. Having a semi-auto fire at its listed fire rate by holding fire doesn't stop anyone else from still single-clicking it if they want to, especially if it's an option toggle. It doesn't change the recoil and since all of the stupidly fast click semi-autos were turned down to human-capable RoF with boosted damage instead, there isn't a huge advantage in burst DPS by automating it, and without the addition of -recoil mods you won't hit anything with most semi-auto's at max fire rate and an auto-click. There are 198 semi-auto weapons in the Primary and Secondary category out of 586 total primary and secondary weapons. That means if you can't use semi-auto weapons you basically can't use 33% of the normal weapons. If you add Burst, charge, and duplex triggers which have the same RSI issues and require the same muscle behaviour as semi-auto weapons you get 398 weapons or 67% of the normal weapons that you can't use. You can't expect people to be thrilled that they are limited to just over a third of the guns in the game because of an accessibility issue.

Honestly, it's not even just disabilities that would benefit, any aging biological system benefits. This may shock people but we did not evolve to click a button 200 times within 5-minute spans and activities that require that kind of physical behaviour tend to damage even healthy bodies. It's why in the 90s carpal tunnel and RSIs became such a huge issue the widespread commercial usage of computers suddenly introduced this behaviour to the masses. Games have been bad for it for nearly as long, they used to call it "Nintendo thumb".

Well, Voltage is right actually. DE have come out multiple times saying that using a Macro may get your account banned because macros can be used nefariously and with enough effort can be used for damn near full automation. Now they normally follow this up by saying in most cases you will not get banned if you are using them as an accessibility option and you are not using them to play the game for you. As with all companies they use vague statements to avoid legal issues. DE 99% of the time will never ban someone for a turbo macro, but they can choose to do so with no legal repercussions at any point in time, which still leaves us macro users at risk of losing our accounts. This is why to this day all the support staff suggest you do not use macros at all.

woah now, let us be clear here, a turbo mode (a.k.a repeated clicks while holding a button) is far from auto-play. We've been on these forums a long time you and me so I think you might be aware of my health issues, but I've had to use macros for semi-autos and yes melee (even in the long long ago era of the charge attack meta) for a decade now or I wouldn't be able to use my hands. I highly doubt Pablo, the guy who has championed active play behaviours for years now is going to stuff a fully automatic set-it-and-forget-it melee mode. We're probably just looking at something a lot closer to turbo.

you can absolutely set up "auto melee" using a macro on consoles, you just need a controller that has a turbo function which have existed since the dawn of video games.

Nice! thanks!

At least in Canada, the price has increased but only by about 6 dollars, which might actually be fair, considering the older prime access didn't include boosters and without a plat coupon 90 days (3 x 30 day boosters @ 200 plat each) of one type of booster costs $41.96 (4 of the 170 plat packs costs the least while still meeting the 600 plat requirement) Here's the pricing for the current prime access highest tier and here's the pricing for the highest tier Rhino Prime access from March 2014. Also that price increase? Might actually have to do with the fact that in Canada on July 1st, 2021 started charging tax on digital goods which they were not previously doing.

That's not entirely accurate, Ancient disruptors have 2 methods of energy drain, their aura adding energy drain to melee attacks and the magnetic status effect from their long arm. The magnetic status effect is blocked by anything that blocks specifically magnetic status or status effects in general, but their energy drain on melee attack is a little bit more complicated than Frame's with DR are not affected. The short and confusing summary is that Warframe powers that provide protection from status effects will also protect from the melee energy drain but not all of them do this and that warframes power that provide DR will also protect from the melee energy drain but not all of them do this either. The complicated explanation is that that energy drain is really old and has weird quirks due to shifts in design. Originally a status effect couldn't be applied if you didn't take damage. This is why Rhino's original Ironskin and Trinity's link protected them from the energy drain. The damage never got to Rhino because Ironskin granted temporary invulnerability and it never got to trinity because it bypassed her and was sent to an enemy instead. As we move forward in time this was no longer a mechanical limitation but the spirit of the original design was still there. If the ability meant that you wouldn't take the damage to your health it tended to also grant you status protection and protection from disruptors auras. So Ironskin, link, parasitic link, Mesmer skin and other skills like that, all protect from the drain. But this is Warframe so we need to have outliers and unique exceptions to complicate the situation further. Exceptions like Nezha and Valkyr. Nezha still takes damage to health but is "grandfathered in" to status protection and protection from the drain due to warding halo originally being very similar to ironskin but with a stagger, fireskin if you will. Valkyr is more complicated I don't remember nearly as well I believe originally she did have immunity to the drain during hysteria (not 100% sure) but when it was changed to invincibility that could kill you when you turned it off due to storing damage taken when you aren't killing something suddenly she could lose all her energy to a disruptor and die from stored damage. Meanwhile, the temporary invulnerability from harrows covenant will protect from the drain. Edit: I should not be awake at 3am. I forgot to add that DR abilities that do not block the drain also don't reduce the amount of the drain. The drain amount is based on the damage of the attack not on the amount of damage you take.

Okay, I feel like either you're projecting onto me what you've already decided I'm like instead of entering into this discussion in good faith or there is a complete disconnect in our methods of communication. I like making builds for specific purposes, those purposes can range from: "I want to be able to revive my entire team at once if they go down in arbitrations. 15 revive tokens carried and need to stay alive" "I want a build that isn't reliant on energy and doesn't get knocked over while toroid farming" "I wonder if I can make a build using atmospheric archguns, the archgun wielded by necramechs, Voidrig's arquebex, and the 3 weapons a warframe carries to have one of every single element so I can shoot at every phase of profit taker? good for solo, groups, and the lols" "I want to prove that weapons the community considers 'low tier' are still steel path viable if you want to put in the effort and are willing to modify your play style a little bit" "Can I build the Tombfinger Primary into a viable weapon by using the forced impact proc on its physical grenade and not its charged explosion through the use of the internal bleeding mod?" (spoiler: it's a silly, but okay build with a little more versatility in single and multiple targets but ultimately equipping the battery arcane is more effective if you just want consistent damage) "is Gas really just that awful even against infested? What could I do to try to amplify its performance instead of falling back on slash, corrosive, and heat for Deimos enemies" "This gun is neat, what can I do to maximize its inherent qualities so I can slot it into my regular rotation of usage because I'm mostly playing steel path and steel path adjacent content nowadays" "This gun has some really cool mechanics but its overall effectiveness just isn't enough for me to comfortably use everywhere, what mid-tier activity could I gear its build towards in such a way as to make it shine" I make "alternative" builds all the time, I just like to have a specific goal to build towards. It's the difference between having macaroni and glitter thrown at you and being told to do art and instead having macaroni, glitter, and project outline thrown at you and told to make a specific kind of art. It's both art, I just like to have more structure to create a build around. The desire or ability to make different builds doesn't change the fact that changing builds between missions is a cumbersome procedure unless you are changing full loadouts (which have their own issues) I don't often want to change the entire loadout, mostly I just want to use a different a primary, or a different melee, or maybe just a different frame but that's going to be 1. esc> 2. equipment> 3. Arsenal> 4. warframe/weapon menu> 5. select warframe/weapon> 6. esc to exit arsenal> 7. esc> 8. navigation> 9. Play mission. It could be as easy as: 1. Navigation> 2. Arsenal> 3. Select warframe/weapon> 4. Escape to exit arsenal> 5. Play mission. But it's not because it was decided it was more important to have to walk around the ship in real time than fluid loadout management. Add to this the fact that loadouts don't actually include all our "weapons" that can be used on the "ground" and you have to micromanage your necramech, operator, and vehicle builds separately from the main arsenal. the system is clunky, and I pray every day that the arsenal rework they said they were working on 3 years or more ago now finally shows up so maybe it can be a nice easy experience to swap equipment. Okay, look, you're taking statements I'm making about the objective facts of how certain mechanics work and interact with others (you can argue "value" from a personal perspective but math is math) and very well-documented psychological behaviours people fall into especially pertaining to games and making the assumption those are my personal beliefs and the way I play the game when I keep refuting that. The way enemy defences, damage bonuses, and status are interacting right now are not healthy for the game, they pigeonhole less experimentally-minded players into effective but homogenous builds, they make damage bonuses and status effects that should be desirable in far more areas than extremely niche situations, into things considered useless by the community at large. If you've never come across any "how to fix status" threads they all, without fail, boil down to "just make everything like slash, corrosive, fire, or viral" or as the community often calls them: "the good statuses". 'The main point of Damage 2.0 was to un-homogenize the builds from a single build for all factions using as many damage mods as possible that all focused on overcoming armour and inflated EHP due to armour's DR. It's why the corpus only had shields, grineer only had armour, and the infested had so many health types at beginning of Damage 2.0. As time went on and powercreep kept creeping, and ramifications of the brand new "status" system resulted in clear outliers due to certain interactions, armour started cropping up in the corpus and infested factions again, heavy units almost all ended up with armour again, the focus shifted from different builds for all 3 factions into focusing on that armour since all 3 factions had it and chewing through the inflated EHP, with the defences other than armour becoming secondary considerations, again. So now instead of what we had at the end of Damage 1.0 we now have: Single builds for all factions using specific damage mods to weight towards certain statuses, all focused on overcoming armour and the inflated EHP due to armour's DR, and spicing it up by occasionally needing to remember to have some fast firing mid-range damage weapons to get around the Damage Attenuation on Bosses that invalidate the use of slow firing high alpha damage weaponry. Does every player build that way? No, of course not, even during damage 1.0 not everyone built the way described but when enough players ignore entire systems because there are outliers that are so much more effective than the next best option it will just keep picking up steam in the community until it snowballs into a self-fulfilling prophecy. We're already reaching the point in discourse about status effects that the solutions people offer are not even attempting to look at what makes those statuses so desirable but only how we could make everything more like the "good statuses". I don't even care if any of my suggestions happen, I didn't even want to include them but the community really gets on your case about how detailing an issue without providing a solution isn't real feedback, so I made some suggestions because I'm sick of hearing that complaint. What exactly do you mean by Top-down-limited-build-mentality, I'm not sure how I could dig further into the god-forsaken bedrock than by looking at the shifts in enemy defences, the effects that has on damage selection, how damage bonuses that would otherwise be valuable are invalidated by far superior options achieved via status effects, and that I think we need to consider all of these things when we talk about "fixing" status instead of just making everything slash and calling it a day. You don't seem to be hearing what I'm saying so I'm going to try shouting: I WANT TO BE ABLE TO EASILY CHANGE MY LOADOUTS BETWEEN MISSIONS. I OWN NEARLY EVERY ITEM IN THE GAME I DON'T JUST DO THAT FOR A SENSE OF PRIDE AND ACCOMPLISHMENT. I LIKE TO USE A LARGE VARIETY OF ITEMS AND MAKE MULTIPLE BUILDS FOR DIFFERENT ITEMS FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES EVEN IF THE PURPOSE IS JUST "THIS BUILD IS FOR TUESDAYS". THE CURRENT SYSTEM FOR CHANGING EQUIPMENT IS NEEDLESSLY CUMBERSOME AND HEAVILY IMPACTS MY DESIRE TO CHANGE BUILDS BECAUSE IT CONSUMES 1/4 OF A 2-HOUR PLAY SESSION FOR ME. THOSE ARE SEPARATE ISSUES FROM THE ONES I AM TRYING TO BRING TO PEOPLE'S ATTENTION ABOUT ENEMY DEFENSES, DAMAGE TYPES, DAMAGE BONUSES, AND THEIR STATUS EFFECTS. Just because the interface frustrates me and that's why changing builds isn't enjoyable doesn't change the fact other players will choose builds that are effective against all factions because it's the path of least resistance. It's not good for the game when the path of least resistance is also one of the most effective builds for the majority of the game. I don't want to simplify the game, I want to open its complexity back up for everyone. For christ's sake, I just wanted to talk about the mechanics that are the root triggers for the existence of the current Meta obsession with bypassing armour and dealing with massive EHP. I didn't write the essay as a masturbatory excuse to enforce my will on the entire community, I'm not channelling the spirit of Ballas through my forum posts. I wrote the essay because it's a complicated subject involving multiple overlapping systems and years worth of big and small changes layered on top of each other that have made a paved tower to hell one brick at a time if you'll excuse the aggressively mixed metaphor. A FOO strategy is a First Order Optimal Solution to a problem. It can be an item, class, specific mechanic, build, or behaviour that is easily acquired, easy to use, and results in success. FOO strategies on their own are not a bad thing they can be used to level the playing field between high-rank and low-rank players in pvp so that new players don't just give up or to help teach players the basic mechanics early on in games. However, when a FOO strategy is so effective players never need to invest effort into gaining knowledge or skill, a key aspect of player progression, in order to achieve success as they progress through the game, it's detrimental to the health of the game and ultimately the experience of the player. If you prefer a more thorough explanation in video format here's a video from extra credits before they went off the rails time-stamped at where they explain what a Foo strategy is and its positives and negatives. If the time stamp failed it starts around 3:01

If I get bored one day maybe I'll try timing it, Titania has always felt horrendously slow to me in the orbiter compared to everyone else, I can't remember if I felt the same for Zephyr.

I kind of just assumed bad English was at play and orbit meant while jumping. Orbiter actually makes more sense. I wonder if it is actually a walk speed issue because you still have 2 speeds in the orbiter, walk and slightly faster walk. I'd be curious if both are slower than other frames or only one of them. It would be funny if it was just a physics engine quirk and the game thinks she's ever so slightly in the air and applies the "low gravity" animation slow to her walk cycle.

There are several things that make a one-size-fits-all build appealing to players: ease of use, as you mentioned. ease of maintenance. dislike of the modding system but love of the gameplay. Simpler grind, as you mentioned. easier mods to farm. You just follow meta-build guides. If you have questions about what I look for when modding you can just ask. People's builds and their goals for them are going to be different but they aren't incomprehensible if you share your reasons. For warframes I like to focus on tanking damage and buffs for myself or other players, I like to use my powers sparingly and prefer to kill via my weapons. I have and do play casting-focused frames but try to avoid the glass cannons as my health conditions make playing them well a dubious proposition. On bad days tanky warframes let me play the game when I would otherwise be unable to play at all due to the negative impact on my processing speed and reaction time. For weapons, I prefer slow, heavy-hitting weapons that benefit from headshots or high accuracy, although I have to use a macro with them due to previously mentioned health issues. I don't shy away from using full-auto weapons for fun even though I tend to have poor trigger discipline between targets, and I've a big fan of beam weapons. Shotguns I can take or leave and I've never been a fan of the spooled weapons. My builds for weapons lean toward status, although that's more out of habit than anything as it's so easy to build crit chance now it's no longer less reliable than bonus damage from status. I like to take advantage of -recoil and reload while holstered mods for a smoother and more comfortable experience, and I think punchthrough mods are criminally underrated by other players. Rather than constantly adjusting and tweaking my builds on warframes and weapons I like to build them to specific purposes and make them as good at that one thing as possible. Unfortunately, this normally means that I can't fit another build in a separate config without building a new frame and in some cases a new weapon because Forma applies to all config slots. The only case where I've really built multiple copies of frames didn't even involve different builds at all it was the same build for 5 different saryns for focus farming (this predated the addition of more diverse focus-gaining options when we only had stealth experience bonus focus farming, eidolons, and elite sanctuary onslaught, RIP my need for 5 saryns). I did however build two different tenet Cycrons, one with magnetic damage for Sisters and the other with impact for general use and parazon shenanigans. The purpose can be just silly things too, I built a steel path viable excalibur prime, braton prime, lato vandal, and skana prime just to spite people saying that starter equipment and starter equipment variants/upgrades weren't capable of performing on the steel path. I named the build Flexcalibur Prime. I think the issue we're having is that we are talking about Viral from completely different starting points. I'm coming from the mechanical performance and player psychology end while you are speaking from a preference and necessity standpoint. Viral not being necessary, or undesired by someone doesn't change the objective information about how powerful it is mechanically. If you don't need the extra damage, or where you play the scaling doesn't require it, or you just deem QOL mods to be a better choice for you that affects how you build and what you are going to prioritize but it doesn't change the fact that Viral is the absolute best bonus to health damage in the entire game. Due to viral being the best bonus to health damage and not reliant on usage against a specific faction, it becomes a FOO strategy for the average players of video games. It works at all levels, it's got easy-to-attain mods, it gives back immediate positive feedback with lowered TTK; making you feel more powerful, you only need base 20% status to make it viable (15% if you are slapping on statusmental mods), and the majority of build guides, YouTubers, and even players in the ingame chats recommend it so you get to feel like you are part of the "in-group" which human brains enjoy to a detrimental level. This took a couple of months to write and you seem to have missed where I mentioned that there was a community workshop for the puncture status effect at the time. Sir, Ma'am, both or neither, I am only human and while I appreciate that you seem to hold me in very high esteem judging from the standard you are holding my essay to unless you wanted to read through another 26 pages of information at minimum there just isn't a way to cover absolutely everything that even slightly touches on Status's performance. Holistic in this case is used for systems with interdependence rather than comprehensively absolutely everything. The focus is also on general usage and not the more niche use cases. Niche use cases have niche solutions that do not reflect on what the general population is considering the Meta solutions nor what the general population considers the situation where that meta needs to be applied. Right now the general populous considers the current Meta options to be a solution to Steel path scaling and any modes that employ steel path scaling levels of difficulty. As for gas and electric with grouped enemies, that's really not quadratic. It's not squaring every instance of damage it's overlapping AOE's with less bullets needed to produce damgae. You're using grouping and two AOE effects to essentially create a localized multishot effect. You could achieve the same kind of damage stacking via a gather and punchthrough or any AOE weapon with only electricity and a far better-performing status type than gas. While the gather, gas, and shock combo have the potential for high damage due to the stacking, it is hampered by the very nature of electricity and gas as mentioned in the essay, their performance is gutted by armour and gas's unique damage maths makes its status effect grossly underperform in the damage department compared to everything, including the physical damage types. Viral isn't just important due to its 3.25 multiplier. It's important because it is without question the best bonus to all health damage in the game, the way it functions removes the need to mod for individual health types because the viral bonus is magnitudes better, It is equally effective against all of the common starchart factions, It is cheap and easy to build, and unlike other weapon bonuses, it applies to every source of damage that inflicts health damage: every physical, elemental, combination elemental, bane, and ability damage has that virus multiplier applied while something like slash's bonus to Grineer health only applies to your slash damage. Viral is an obscenely effective foo strategy and it isn't healthy for the game for it to be that much more effective than every other health damage bonus. Let me preface this by saying that I am not saying these enemies are not important or that their encounters are not legitimate considerations, but Disruption and its special units, Eidolons, liches/sisters, and acolytes are all special cases that react uniquely to viral or all status effects and are outliers for the consideration of the performance of status effects in general. Those units are also not found in the majority of the game aside from the Acolytes, which can spawn on the entire steel path. Eidolons don't take any status effects they are pointless for considerations on the status of status because you are only getting damage bonuses. All Demolishers/Demolysts are either immune to viral status or flat-out immune to viral damage. The Fact they have this immunity speaks volumes about the over effectiveness of Virus. it should be noted that the unique behaviour of demolishers where their goal is not to kill you but rush to the console changes how players need to engage with them, slowing them down because they script kill the objective is a more vital behaviour than just killing them faster so they don't kill you. The Demolishers/Demolysts don't need to engage with the player to win, they just need to move fast enough. This is similar to how in archwing pursuit you build for speed because it doesn't matter what you kill along the way, or how close you get to dying, because if you simply do not get to the last tile in time you lose. You wouldn't build your archwing that way for the rest of archwing content though ,so a build for archwing rush is not a good example of general use. Liches, sisters, and Accolytes are still affected by viral but only 4 stacks which still doubles all of your damage on their health and is a bigger bonus than all other bonus health damage. The only time it isn't a net benefit to mod for viral is when you happen to spawn one who is immune because even with a 50% resistance to viral the virus bonus is still greater than all the other health bonuses. I'm not seeing any unique behaviours with Index and Rathuum enemies aside from unique stats and Rathuum enemies having a weakness to melee attacks. They appear to take status and damage the same as normal enemies. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong there. Would you mind explaining why you think the essay is top-down? My overview starts with enemy defences, and everything further on in the essay is predicated on what modding choices those defences force us into to best overcome them, the limitations of how we are able to mod for damage and how the cost/benefit of certain elemental combinations make what would be appealing options less appealing because of the damage types that choice would invalidate, and then where and why status effects invalidate the damage bonuses of elements we could choose that could be effective but are less effective than the advantages the status effects offer. More diversity in innate damage types would create more weapons that didn't have to make the same cost/benefit analysis for damage and status types but it still won't solve the issues with enemy defences or status effects overshadowing damage bonuses to far too great of an extent. I would still absolutely love to have more diversity in damage types even if nothing else is addressed. I think that your evaluation of elemental and combination elemental damage weapon counts is skewed though. There are 3 weapons that deal gas damage: Zakti zakti prime cyanax's AOE. There are 8 weapons that deal corrosive damage: Catabolyst Caustacyst Kuva Seer AOE Scourge Scourge Prime stug synapse Tysis There are 38 weapons that deal Radiation damage: All tenet weapons All Kuva weapons Arca Plasmor Larkspur Prime Ocucor Phantasma Phantasma Prime Tatsu Prime There are 41 weapons that deal Magnetic damage: All tenet weapons All kuva weapons Battacor Gammacor Synoid Gammacor Simulor Synoid Simulor Velocitus (heavy weapon) Opticor AOE Opticor Vandal AOE There are 36 weapons that deal cold damage: All Tenet weapons All kuva Weapons Glaxion Glaxion Vandal Sibear There are 9 weapons that deal viral damage: Hema Komorex Compressa Pathocyst Phage Plague Keewar Plague Kripath Pupacyst Sporothix You are correct that Gas damage is exceedingly rare, but corrosive and viral weapons are very close to the same rarity. The Nemesis weapons skew Radiation, Magnetic, and Cold bearing weapons into very common territory. If you don't take Nemesis weapons into consideration Radiation and Magnetic are still around the same rarity as corrosive and viral (there are 33 nemesis weapons and two of them have inherent radiation before their progenitor bonus damage is added leaving 7 Radiation weapons) with cold being tied for rarity with gas.

A level 35 gunner isn't a level 35 gunner on the steel path. It's a level 135. A level 135 Gunner has ~1 million EHP while the steel path variant has ~6 million. A 600% increase. At 1,000,000 health with capped spore damage that would be 14 ticks, which isn't unreasonable considering you're going to be shooting enemies and acting while those ticks are happening. If you aren't reaching cap because everything else is dying before you reach it then you can turn nearly your full attention to the gunner. The 6 million health would take 86 ticks to kill a gunner, which I agree isn't great, but most damage powers fall off here without an armour strip, hidden scaling, true damage, or slash procs. 2 million of the steel path gunner's health is from their level and 150% health bonus the other 4 million is from their 150% bonus armour. Well let's take a look then at what has been added to increase our ability strength since Steel path was added: Crimson Archon shards 50% to 75% ability strength. Madurai Sling Strength 40% ability strength for 20s after chained sling. Zenurik Hardened Wellspring for 20% ability strength. Molt Vigor for 45% ability strength after using an operator ability. Molt Augment for 0.24% ability strength per enemy killed until you are killed, maxing at 60% with 250 kills. Auger Secrets 24% ability strength. Archon Intensify 30% ability strength +30% more ability strength after casting a healing ability (there are several helminth options available). Amar's Hatred for 15% ability strength. Garuda? Slash procs. Xaku? armour strip, damage that scales based on enemy level, and a 50% increase to enemy vulnerability to void damage. Equinox? Slash procs. Gara? Gara is actually a good example, or at least a much closer example to what Saryn does. Splinter storm's duration can be increased and with player intervention and care the damage could potentially be raised to the mechanical cap. It is a lot more work to keep it up and running though and doubles as Gara's main defensive measure. This naturally raises the question, should Gara have a cap as she has the same infinite scaling ability? Obviously, I know you are going to say no, but regardless of that, both abilities should be reviewed for what the intent is for modern power balance. It should be noted though that Gara's ability requires close range, higher attention to maintain, more effort to increase its damage, and more energy spent to keep it active and increasing in damage. It's not that 70k is a scary big number, it's the way that damage behaves that merited the cap in the first place. You have an ability with infinite duration, that requires bare minimum player interaction such as pointing an ignis in the vague direction of spored enemies, it spreads on its own (to a certain extent), and only requires enemies to be near each other to spread. While Gara can reach the engine's damage cap, you have to engage in a lot more work and get up into enemies' faces to deal that damage. Well you didn't ask me if I considered Steel Path a new mode, and I do actually, that's even how Dev's described it to us prior to launch a "Whole new mode for the entire starchart". In case it comes up I also consider fissure missions, Nightmare missions, Invasions, and Syndicate missions to be different modes. There's plenty of point in using them if you get even minimally creative, which you are capable of from your comment about sharkwing survival usage. They're a free couple of thousand health with access to heavy weapon archguns that recharge instead of deplete. While I'm not sure if Bone Widow's exalted Iron bride ignores Thrax armour like it did the orphix, voidrigs guardmode is the highest dps weapon in the game and shreds everything and can be used once every two rounds, or every round when split between groups of 2 or more. Nah, "properly" using archwing to benefit survival is just really really boring as far as I'm concerned because it's just non-afk out-of-bounds camping method that hasn't been patched out as an exploit like the other non-officially-endorsed holes in the level where the enemies can't hit you, due to needing to leave the sharkwing to pick up air canisters. You can get the same experience by finding holes in the level or sewer camping. Before you say it, no that's still not the same as necramechs in conjunction survival because conjunction survival still has other additions. I'm going to disagree with you about circular logic because you lack the information to encompass the prerequisites I deem necessary for a new mode and getting into that would end up really off-topic quite quickly. I do agree we're not going to come to an agreeable compromise on what is and isn't a new node. A refresher is good, but the way you laid out those pieces of information was hyperbolic and misleading (even if you didn't intend for that to be how they were received) and they really didn't need to be. There were such minimal additions necessary to say exactly what the case was: "Spores only spread automatically on their first kill" rather than "Spores don't spread on their own kills." "Miasma can only apply 1 stack of viral" rather than "Miasma doesn't get stronger with Viral's buff" <--- that one you gotta admit is pretty bad, because applying a status and benefitting from status are very different things. If you expect people to respond with a high level of knowledge on a subject then you need to also supply that same level of care and information to your communications. Reciprocity, Quid pro Quo, being the example for the standard you expect, or whatever else you wanna call it is just an ingrained human behaviour and sadly a lot of people, even when they do know a lot about a subject, will only respond with the same level of effort they perceive from the person they are responding to. well, I'm glad you feel that way because I'm not trying to come at with you animosity, we're just having a friendly discussion about our good buddy Saryn, and to be honest, while I don't think she is in as dire straights as you make her out to be, I have come around to the idea that it could be beneficial if her damage ramp up was increased a bit. Warframe never seems to stop getting faster and other "slow" abilities have had their windup increased over time but Saryn hasn't been looked at since Sanctuary Onslaught was shiny and new.

The trading doesn't seem to trigger as complete until the very last prompt is accepted by both players. Depending on exactly how long it takes to upload that data to the server, or if they pre-emptively upload that data as temporary files and wait on a confirmation signal from both parties, there may be a very tiny window where you could alt-f4 to cancel the trade as you press the button. If they coded it really poorly this could result in duplicated items or someone not receiving something but I don't think that they have coded it poorly. This community is full of people who like to poke, prod, and test code and a wide range of macro users who can create inputs that are faster than human reaction. I'm sure we would have encountered some rather upset players by now if force-quitting the game was causing inventory loss or successful trade scams.

I don't want the game balanced around not making alternate builds but the methods we have to equip and manage those are cumbersome and need to be improved to make it more fluid and enjoyable to do so. That's beyond the scope of this topic though even if it does get touched on briefly. The swapping of configs and maintenance of loadouts contributes to the appeal of a one-build-fits-all option and the current meta allows for it. If you have a frame you like that's 3 full loadouts right there: Corpus, Grineer, and Deimos Infested; 4 loadouts if you really like running fissures. If you want to use different primaries or other weapons with that frame? All a full loadout that needs to be made and kept updated. I like swapping items I have dozens of things I can choose between because I have everything in the game except the last few updates items, but I want to spend the time playing the game, not dig through multiple menus just to change a config slot. Before I got sick of it in a 2-hour play session I spent 30 minutes of it messing around equipping things and changing configs. Not making new builds, not adding forma or refining builds, just equipping, unequipping, or changing configs. I'm really not sure what you are building or what your goals are that such a large increase in damage against all health types and armour types is of questionable value. It multiplies everything, weapon damage, crit damage, status overload damage, bane damage, and even warframe ability damage. It's really not difficult to apply even while moving, you just attack them as normal and keep attacking them and they die, there is no increased difficulty to use, you can just play as you normally would. You don't even have to restrict yourself to super-specific weapons, most higher-mastery weapons have enough status to pump out at least a few stacks of viral. While 10 stacks exemplify the disparity even 5 stacks which can be achieved in less than seconds (naturally gun dependent but most can do it in seconds anyway) more than doubles your damage. So I gotta know, what are you using that you consider to be a better option? Esc Menu Equipment menu Arsenal Upgrade Change config. walking isn't any faster and takes just as many clicks. I've never understood why there isn't just an arsenal button on the navigation. We begged for it for years and all we got was the loadouts button that requires even more arsenal management to get set up and keep maintained.