Drasiel

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.

Yeah unfortunately since it's on the forums the only way to have a constructive conversation is to make sure everyone is on the same page. While many players are going to be aware of why things work the way they do and how we got here so many just don't either because they don't personally dig deep into mechanics, they only have passing knowledge on one of the necessary topics, or they are just newer players and don't have the same context available because they haven't been here for 10 years. People also won't respond if they don't think there is something to argue about most of the time. I could have completely skipped the suggestions since my focus is actually raising awareness on the interlocking issues that create "good" and "bad" status but when I've done that before I get told my posts aren't feedback because I'm not trying to solve the problem, and thus, every section gets a suggestions sub-section so I can meet the not-actually-required-standard for "feedback" and not deal with "this isn't feedback tho" comments In order to just change the active config on a weapon you have to go through 4 menus. I've tried doing that for faction-specific builds and it sucks, teammates don't want to wait for you, and it's tedious and annoying to manage when you just want to go play a Corpus mission after dealing with Grineer. Your only faster option is making full load-outs to swap to but unless you are hyper-vigilant about keeping every loadout up to date you're gonna end up in the mission with the wrong equipment. Viral damage isn't what makes Viral good, Viral damage on its own is nearly as terrible as Gas and Blast. The status effect: Virus, is what makes viral good. Every single weapon benefits from hitting something under the effect of Virus. Okay, let's throw some math at this. You have a gun say it does: 10 impact 10 puncture 10 slash, 10 viral, and 10 radiation for 50 total damage. For the purposes of keeping the math simple, We are going to say that it is a health type that only has a 75% weakness to slash damage (ergo slash gets a 75% bonus against it). So we take our 10 slash damage and apply that bonus 10 slash damage + (10 slash damage * 0.75 damage bonus) = 17.5 slash damage Now we add the other damage to that total 10 impact damage + 10 puncture damage + 17.5 slash damage + 10 radiation = 57.5 This is what happens when that same gun is used on an enemy under the effects of 10 stacks of Virus: All damage, including any already present bonus damage, is multiplied so you get (10 impact damage + 10 puncture damage + 17.5 slash damage + 10 radiation) * (2 + (0.25 * (10-1))) This is the formula for calculating the viral bonus = 244.8 Viral's benefit isn't that Viral damage is strong, it's that it makes literally everything stronger across the board than the bonuses that specifically apply to certain health types or only certain damage types. This is compounded when you add in armour as armoured health is still health and now all your damage types with bonuses against armour are amplified too because the damage is striking the unit's health.

To touch specifically on the points you mention, The amount of bonus damage gained from viral status combined with the nature of how that bonus is applied is what makes it a very alluring choice in the first place. Virus (the name of the status effect) is a bonus to damage on Health so you can directly compare it to every damage type that gives bonus damage on health. All other damage-based health bonuses only reach up to 75% additional damage while Viral's bonus can reach 325%. The other damage-based bonuses to health only apply their bonus damage to specifically the damage type with that bonus (ie., Slash's bonus against clone health only increases Slash's damage) while viral is bonus damage on every damage type that hits an enemy under the effects virus. So instead of picking and choosing between 8 different options for health bonuses that are much weaker and require you to change builds between factions, you spend 2 slots to get viral, get bonus damage to all health, get a much larger bonus than any other health bonus, and never have to change your loadout (except on deimos). To get around the low-firing, low-status weapons, people have started using "status painters" Fast-firing weapons with high status they can shoot at enemies to get their status effects "painted" across the group and then easily take them out with their bigger slower weapon. The Panzer Vulpaphyla is also often used here as the companion is immortal and its ability is a set of viral quills that works as a viral status painter. Steel Path exacerbates and highlights the focus of the meta, but the build focus towards viral and slash predates its addition. With, the addition of the Zarimon and Duviri to the starchart this only encourages more meta-consideration at the Startchart level. Duviri's circuit especially, because you face the corrupted which means damage bonuses to health outside Bane of Corrupted are less efficient and just won't work as well, so viral is the better choice there to guarantee consistent health bonuses.

It's not really about balancing around the meta, all of the discussion around the best and worst status options only look at status and what can be changed about status to fix it. However, the reason why people decide which status is best is based on how enemy defences and our damage bonuses work, you can't "fix" status without considering those aspects. So this entire thing is a breakdown of the design and gradual updates and changes to enemy defences, damage types, and status that have caused the current meta to become dominant and led to the homogenization of builds. Or to put it more succinctly this is more a Diagnosis of the problems rather than a treatment plan. We can't crowdsource better solutions if we solve a symptom and not the actual source of the problem.

TL;DR This is going to be long. It is a post with both girth and heft. If you’ve come here expecting a short read, abort now. If you wish to only know my results and not the process to get to them, skip ahead to “Suggestions” at the end of each section. You can argue the merit of my suggestions as much as you like, but I will not be defending them. The suggestions are simply things I thought might correct the issues I see, but the goal of this essay wasn’t to “solve” the issues with Status but to bring the information that Status cannot be fixed if we only adjust the statuses themselves into the discussion. You may also view this post as a Google Document for easier reading: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PaBtP4bCwyeAwXTSm-SUVXlKv1r1emrkF3Jv4sSs2X0/edit?usp=sharing Introduction For many years, I’ve watched various threads pop up with suggestions to try to fix the “bad” status effects we have. The more I read through them, the more I started to consider that the status effects weren’t just bad because of inferior behaviours, but were also reliant on the performance of the base damage type. When you start looking at damage types, that leads you directly to enemy defences. So, in this essay, we’ll start at the root and head for the canopy of what makes a status “bad”. Exclusions You may notice that the Orokin, Sentient, and Narmer factions are not included in this essay. This is intentional as they are combinations of the other factions, or in the case of Sentients, use the same types of defences seen in the other factions. While they have their own niches for effective modding strategies and suffer from the same issues presented further on, I do not think they need to be addressed independently because their mix-and-match factions and Defences exist to create more difficult encounters and scenarios. Damage, Defence, Status Overview I am using the same +/- formatting as the in-game codex to display weaknesses and resistances. Each + or - represents 25% (i.e., one + is a 25% damage bonus 3 +’s are 75%). Negatives follow the same behaviour but represent damage resistance, which will reduce the incoming damage by that value. Damage, Defence, Status Overview Table Defence Overview All of our modding choices are chosen to best overcome our enemy's defences, this is the root that all of the other systems grow from. Below is an Overview of all non-repeated enemy defences in Warframe. Defence Overview Table Defence Overview Points of Interest (POI) I will be using the following terms to classify the defences: Primary Defence Type: Marked by a (P) next to the faction. This is the type of defence used by nearly all units in a faction (e.g., Shields for Corpus units). Secondary Defence Type: Marked by an (S) next to the faction. These are Defence types that are not shared by nearly all units in a faction. (e.g., Armour for Infested Units). Just from organizing the defences into this kind of view, we can learn several things right off the bat that I will expand on in the “Consequences” section: 1. Each faction has a Primary Defence type that is used by nearly all of its units. 2. Some of the weaknesses and resistances do not have values that fit into the codex’s formatting style, thus the codex lies to us. You can see this in the image below, where Cold and Puncture both show one + despite Puncture only dealing 15% additional damage and not 25% like Cold. 3. It appears that every faction is intended to have at least 2 nearly opposing Health types to encourage damage-type diversity. 4. It appears that every faction is intended to have at least 2 nearly opposing Primary Defence types to encourage damage-type diversity. 5. For some reason, the Infested have 3 Health types. 6. Every faction uses Armour again. Giving the 3 factions unique defences was one of the primary changes of Damage 2.0, in Damage 1.0 every faction used armour and armour became the only Defence type worth modding for. Consequences 1. Every faction has one of three primary defences: the Grineer have Armour, the Corpus have Shields, and the Infested have Health. In theory, this means we should have very different mod setups for each faction. In practice, this is very rarely the case, so what causes this break between intent and result? a. One major factor contributing to this outcome appears to be that we can bypass or surpass at least two of the factions’ Primary Defences. Shields can be bypassed by Toxin except for the secret special ones that cannot, and Viral is so incredibly effective against every Health type that isn’t outright immune to its status effect that there is essentially no reason to mod Damage types against individual Health types. 10 stacks of viral grant +325% damage against health, which is vastly superior to every other option. E.g., If you take a weapon that does 100 Gas damage and damage a target with the Infested Health type which has a -75% weakness to that damage type you will deal 175 damage: 100 Gas damage +(1 initial damage count * 0.75 weakness bonus) = 175 If you use a weapon that deals 100 Viral damage and damage a target with 10 stacks of Virus and the Infested Health type which has a -50% resistance to that damage type, you will deal 212 damage: 100 Viral damage * 0.5 negative resistance = 50 50 + (1 initial damage count * 3.25 Virus Health damage bonus) = 212.5 i. Magnetic Status has the same damage boost against Shields that Viral has against Health, so why don’t I list Magnetic as a problem? 2 reasons: 1. Unless something is immune to Toxin Status, there is no reason to use Magnetic 2. Magnetic status only applies to a single Primary Defence type, not every single Primary Defence type across the board, the way Viral does with Health Types. b. This brings us to the “secret” immunity to toxin status effects and viral damage and/or its status effect by specific units. Players hate this immunity, but without it, the boss and mini-boss units would be no more challenging than every other unit of their faction; they would be fodder, and thus, within the confines of the current system, this immunity has to exist. We can make this mechanic better and much clearer to players, which I will discuss in the “Suggestions” section below. c. If bypassing a defence type leads to players not modding for that defence type, why does this not occur with Armour? The truth is that it does, but to a much lesser extent. Fire reducing armour is a relatively new change and not everyone has caught on to that and its other benefits; corrosive is both effective against armour and reduces it, even if it does not fully bypass it; and slash is the dominant modding choice for steel path because its Status is true damage, which bypasses/ignores armour. Cold, Radiation, and Puncture do not bypass armour but are all effective against certain Armour types. How often have you seen people mod for those Damage types though? 2. The game’s codex only shows weaknesses and resistances in increments of 25%. This is not accurate to the actual values and misleads players to think a damage type is more (or less) effective than it is. For example, in-game, Alloy Armour has a weakness to Puncture and Cold, displayed by a single “+”. That plus means that you will receive 25% bonus damage with those damage types, which is wrong. Puncture only receives a 15% bonus against Alloy Armour while Cold receives 25%, making Puncture less effective than Cold. Players who know this will not choose Puncture over Cold damage when given the option due to Puncture being the weaker choice. Players who do not know this will be modding their weapons less effectively because the game has lied to them about how effective their Damage Types are. 3. Why have 2 types of Health per faction? This seems to have been put in place as a method to encourage modding diversity. There are 2 Health types, and we have 3 weapons which enable us to mod for both Health types between our weapons. While this works for the Corpus and Infested factions it, unfortunately, does not work for the Grineer faction. Grineer units with the Machinery Health type are rare, mission-specific, or acceptable to ignore. Grineer with the Health type Machinery. The 19 units with that health type are as follows: Normal Mission (6) Carabus Orbital Strike Drone Latcher Propaganda Drone Roller (Sensor) Regulator Railjack (6) Cutter (Elite) Flak (Elite) Gokstad Crewship Outrider (Elite) Skold Crewship Taktis (Elite) Sharkwing (1) Sikula Open world (6) Eidolon Lure Tusk Bolkor Tusk Firbolg Tusk Thumper Tusk Thumper Bull Tusk Thumper Doma Nearly one-third of the enemies that have the machinery health type are Railjack exclusive and as they are ships, they do not interact with our standard loadout. Another third of them are only found on the Plains of Eidolon and can be ignored when not playing there. One unit is unique to underwater Grineer combat, which is only found on Uranus. Of the 6 remaining normal enemies, latchers and sensor regulators (the non-buffing ones) can be ignored, orbital strike and propaganda drones only spawn during one boss fight, and Carabus only show up when the Grustrag 3 spawn, or you play Rathuum. That leaves only 2 units with Machinery Health out of 25 total Grineer unit types you will regularly come into contact with in normal play. There are not enough units to make modding for Machinery useful. 4. The same kind of Primary defence types have different weaknesses and resistances for the same reason as Health does: encouraging modding diversity. This at face value does exactly as was intended, however, it rapidly falls apart due to the previously mentioned option to mod damage that bypasses/surpasses defences. Units with Secondary Defences require additional damage types, and this creates excessive variables beyond the 4 variables we already are supposed to be modding for. 5. Why do the infested have 3 different kinds of health? An additional health type was likely added to the infested because they were intended to be the health tank faction, thus instead of needing to consider a Primary Defence’s modding requirements in addition to Health we instead have an additional Health type to encourage more diverse modding. However, this creates problems with the infested because they had armour added back into the faction as a Secondary Defence. Viral Status also prevents the need to mod for different Health types, making the 3 different kinds of health essentially a moot point. 6. Every faction has Armour at least as a Secondary Defence. Again. During Damage 1.0 all 3 factions used armour on their heavy units, this resulted in modding for armour being the only effective end-game strategy because on endurance runs heavies were the majority of enemies that spawned. This relegated any weapon that didn’t use one of the Armour-ignoring Damage Types into nothing more than mastery fodder because their damage was neutered so severely by Armour. One of the primary changes implemented by Damage 2.0 was to remove Armour from the Corpus and Infested Factions to fix that issue and to diversify Damage modding for each faction. It has taken us a while, but we seem to have fallen back into the same problem: You mod for armour because every faction, specifically their heavier units or mini-bosses, all have armour. Armour appears to be treated as the go-to solution to improve enemy survivability, regardless of how it negatively affects modding diversity. a. It should be mentioned that while there are many Warframe powers that strip armour that could replace the need to mod for armour on your weapons, this isn’t normally a viable option. Many armour strips are instantaneous, low range, or have small areas of effect. Warframe’s enemy density and spawn speed, especially on the steel path, make any instantaneous or small armour strip abilities prohibitively expensive as you need to recast them almost constantly to maintain the same effectiveness you can get by using weapon mods. Suggestions 1. Fix Corpus and Infested faction Primary Defence types by making one Shield type, and at least one Infested faction Health type, immune to Toxin and Viral status respectively. Include this in the Codex information for enemies; this will make it much easier for players to understand and recognize the mechanic without needing to stumble upon it in the Warframe Wiki, or through time-heavy independent testing. Armour does not have as simple a fix due to there being 1 method to bypass/ignore; and 2 methods to reduce it. I do not have a suggestion for “fixing” Armour defences, but as with the Primary Defences for the other factions, one of the Armour types should probably be made immune to Slash Status. I would recommend Alloy. 2. Increase every weakness and resistance value up (or down for negatives) to 25% at minimum. 3. Use Machinery Health in more Grineer units and other Grineer objects. For example, ramparts, blunts, sensors, and other destroyable objects could all become Machinery. This would be an improvement as they are things we can destroy already, but no one will mod weapons to destroy them efficiently at high levels (i.e., non-kuva ramparts) because it would be insane to mod to kill objects. Other Health types are functioning as intended. 4. Correcting the Defence type bypasses/surpasses and removing Secondary Defences will correct the majority of current issues, with the intended purpose of having 2 Primary Defence Types per faction. 5. If the Infested faction is going to retain Armour it should become a Primary Defence, and the Infested Health & Infested Primary Defence Health types should be combined, or have one of them removed from the game. If the Infested faction is not going to retain Armour, they should have Infested Sinew changed into a 4th Health type to bring them into parity with the other Primary Defences. They would potentially need 2 Health types with immunity from Viral due to Health being their Primary Defence type, and thus completely at the mercy of Viral Damage. This would prevent Viral Damage from being the best option for 3 of the Infested Health types, regardless of weaknesses and resistances. 6. Remove the Armour Secondary Defence from the Corpus and, potentially, Infested factions. It might be reasonable to leave their bosses with Armour, however, I believe a better choice would be to give bosses the bypass/surpass immune Shield and Health types suggested in point 1 of this section, and just crank up the values until their time-to-kill reaches parity with the Armoured bosses in the game. Damage Overview We choose our damage types as the best methods to overcome the defences we face. The bonuses and negatives spread across the various damage types paint a very different picture than what is dominant in the game. While status effects play a heavy role here, there are more factors than just status that affect the appeal of certain damage types. Damage Overview Table Damage Overview POI We’re going to start with general observations from the “Damage Effectiveness” section of the chart before getting into the nitty-gritty of the actual effectiveness of the Damage Types. It is important to note that we will be discussing both the in-action effectiveness of these damage types as well as their performance assumed from the values alone. This allows us to highlight where the game misleads players and highlight the disconnects between the Damage Types’ stats and their actual in-game performance. In the section of the chart labelled “Totals,” I have included the total amount of bonuses and negatives each Damage type has. I have used green text for any values above the average amount of bonuses and below the average amount of negatives for all Damage Types. I have used red text for any values below the average amount of bonuses and above the average amount of negatives for all Damage Types. Throughout this section, there are 3 factors that I touch on with more specificity in individual areas, but it is important to keep in mind these 3 factors when considering anything about the Damage system: Physical Damage types cannot be added where there are none and do not scale off of non-Physical and non-Base damage, making them less desirable from a damage standpoint. You can only have one Elemental Damage Type on a given weapon. Combination Elements costing 2 slots makes them less efficient for mod space and thus less desirable than a comparable single Element. Damage Effectiveness: 1. At face value, the Physical Damage Types should be just as effective, if not more so, than the Elemental and Combination Elemental Damage Types. In practice, this is not actually the case due to the unique maths used by Physical Damage Mods which massively decreases their damage potential compared to Elemental and Combination Elemental Damage Types. They are also hampered by the inability to add any of the Physical Damage types to a weapon via mods that do not natively have it. This means if a weapon doesn’t have one of the 3 Physical Damage Types it has to use an Element or Combination Element to provide a similar bonus. 2. At face value, the Elemental damage types appear to be only slightly less effective than Combination Elements but their usage in-game is far less common than their on-paper effectiveness suggests should be the case. This is due to a hidden opportunity cost for using Elemental Damage that prevents the use of certain Combination Elements and lower total damage modding potential. 3. The Infested have a lot of damage types that are effective against them, but in-game you almost only see Heat, Slash, and Viral used. The reason for this is partially caused by status effects invalidating or surpassing their defences, Gas being an extremely niche damage type with a very weak status, and Radiation being bad vs Infested Health Types and only good against one of their Armour Types. 4. At face value, many of the damage types' effectiveness does not line up with their effectiveness in-game. a. Physical i. Impact is very good against Shield Types and should be the second-best choice for dealing with Shields, but that title actually falls to Magnetic Damage, with Toxin Damage’s status effect (which bypasses Shields) being the best element for “dealing” with Shields (“dealing” being a euphemism, as toxic status simply bypasses shields). ii. Puncture should be a strong contender for dealing with Armour but instead, that title is held by Slash, Corrosive, and Heat Damage. Puncture is less effective against Alloy Armour than every other Damage type that has a bonus to Alloy Armour (Puncture’s bonus is 15% instead of the normal minimum of 25%), does not have a status effect that reduces or ignores Armour like Slash, Corrosive, and Heat Damage, and due to the maths with modding Physical Damage has much lower damage potential than Corrosive and Heat Damage. iii. Slash should be hyper-effective against Health Types and Ineffective against Armour, however, due to its status effect’s true damage, it’s one of the best options for both Health and Armour. While Slash also suffers from the maths used for modding physical damage types, its bonuses against most Health Types and its Status’ ability to bypass Armour more than makeup for the lowered potential damage. b. Elemental i. Cold should be an adequate choice for Armour and Shields, but due to Toxin status bypassing Shields, Heat and Corrosive Bypassing Armour, and modding Cold Damage preventing you from using Viral Damage, it becomes a very poor choice for many builds. ii. Electricity looks like it should be an okay choice, but it’s most effective against Machinery Health, which too few units use to make that valuable, and Robotic Health, which like every other Health Type grants much bigger bonuses if you use Viral status. Outside of Electricity’s Chaining Status, which can help spread your damage, you aren’t going to mod for Electricity when only considering its type effectiveness. iii. Heat is far more effective than it appears on paper due to being effective against the most common Health types of 2 Factions and its status effect both reducing armour and supplying a powerful damage over time effect. iv. Toxin on paper looks like it shouldn’t be highly effective against the entire corpus faction, however, its status effect bypassing most Shields makes it one of the go-to choices when modding against corpus. You massively decrease the time-to-kill against corpus when you don’t have to deplete their shields first. c. Combination Elemental i. Blast looks like it should at least be a consideration for modding, but it isn’t. Blast is the worst damage type in the game, it’s weak against Armour, and very strong against the rarest Health type in the game. Blast’s only saving grace is that it has a minor bonus against Fossilized Health, but Corrosive damage being effective against both Fossilized Health and Armour as well as decreasing total Armour puts it miles ahead of Blast. As Fossilized is a Health type, that also means that Viral’s status effect makes it far superior to any bonus Blast could offer, and as modding for Blast prevents you from modding for Viral it is the worst damage type you could choose. ii. Corrosive is better than it appears on paper due to its status effect reducing all Armour. While ferrite armour becomes less prevalent at higher levels, the ability to reduce the Armour values makes it on par or superior to Radiation even versus Alloy Armour. Its only negative is that you cannot mod for both Corrosive Damage and Viral, which makes Fire more appealing as an Armour solution. iii. Gas should be a good choice against Infested as it’s effective against 2 of their Health Types, but due to Viral’s status effect, Viral will always be the superior option. If you mod for Gas you cannot mod for Viral, making Gas a much less effective and far less appealing option. Gas is only saved from being the worst Damage Type by both of its bonuses being to the very common Infested Health types. iv. Magnetic on paper is only good against shields and this lines up well with how effective it is in-game, although Magnetic’s status effect does make it perform even better than its on-paper stats attest. Magnetic’s status effect is nearly the same as Viral except it affects Shields instead of Health, it also has one additional bonus: it prevents shield regen for the duration of the status effect. This makes Magnetic the best Damage Type to use against enemies with non-bypassable Shields and the second-best Damage Type against all Shields. Unfortunately, bypassing Shields with Toxin Damage’s status effect will always lower your time-to-kill far more than using Magnetic Damage. v. Radiation should also be a strong contender for dealing with Armour but once more, that title is held by Slash, Corrosive, and Heat Damage. Using Radiation prevents you from using Corrosive or Heat. Radiation is very effective against Alloy Armour and Infested sinew but is only neutral against Ferrite Armour, Corrosive Damage is very good against Ferrite Armour, and it decreases the values of all Armour Defence Types. Heat is often chosen over both of those options because Heat also reduces armour while still allowing you to mod for Viral Damage, something prevented if you use Corrosive, and because you cannot mod both Heat and Radiation at the same time, the Damage type that reduces all armour is more effective than the one that only provides a bonus. vi. Viral looks like it should only be slightly better than Gas and Blast, the two worst Damage Types. Viral’s status is what, for the most part, drags it from the bottom tier up to the best option, in nearly every single situation. Viral’s status effect grants the biggest bonus to every Health Type, even if it’s a Health type that is strong against Viral such as the Infested Health type. Viral’s damage bonus against Grineer and Corpus health types helps it become even more ridiculously effective, especially in the Grineer’s case which due to nearly every unit being bolstered by armour causes Viral paired with Slash’s status effect to be disgustingly effective as you are only targeting their health. Bonus and Negative Totals 1. When looking at the total bonuses of a Damage vs their total negatives, the Physical Damage types appear to be the superior choice in most cases, while the division of bonuses and negatives among Elemental and Combination Elemental Damage types appears generally equal with fewer bonuses overall. Unfortunately, bonuses and negatives don’t tell the whole story if you take status effects into account the effective bonuses and negatives can change drastically. This is one of the most confusing issues when learning the Warframe Damage system: status effects and methods of overcoming Defenses effectively change or nullify the underlying effectiveness of Damage types, regardless of their actual bonuses and negatives. a. Physicals i. Impact has the fewest bonuses and the second-lowest amount of negatives of the Physical Damage types. Unfortunately, One of its bonuses is against machinery, a Health type which is so rare its bonus may as well be non-existent for the majority of the game. Leaving it with 2 bonuses against Shield Defence types. As mentioned previously there are already 2 superior options for dealing with shields and this leaves Impact as one of the worst damage types outside two niches: triggering parazon finishers, and as an extra element for Condition overload or other +Damage per Status effect mods. ii. Puncture comes in strong with 4 bonuses, 3 of which are good against Armour, the most prevalent defence type. Unfortunately, it has the lowest bonus against Alloy armour which is more common to encounter at higher level play. It also suffers from the problem that a Damage bonus is inferior in effectiveness to Armour stripping/removal. iii. Slash even on paper is head and shoulders above the other Physicals. It has more bonuses than any other Damage type before you take into account status. If you take its status into effect, it gains 3 more bonuses against Armour types and loses 2 of its negatives, leaving it with 8 bonuses and 1 negative, making it arguably the best damage type in the game. b. Elementals A general issue with the Elemental Damage types is that they interfere with each other to create the Combination Elementals. This means that you can only use 1 at a time and places all the Elementals in immediate competition for which one provides the most benefit over the rest as you can only use 1 single Elemental Damage Type in a build at any time. The best single Elements are Heat followed by Toxin. Other Elements are rarely seen outside of an Element inherent to the weapon, or the single Element Damage Type is being chosen to combine with an inherent Element on the weapon to make a more desired Combination Element. i. Cold looks like one of the stronger Elementals with bonuses against Armour and Shields, but in both cases bypassing or removing those defences are the superior option to just a damage bonus. While Cold can be used in tandem with Corrosive, Corrosive’s armour removal provides enough of a benefit to slot an alternative mod for greater benefit versus a different Defence type or boosting a different stat. In the case of shields, if you use Cold you lose access to Viral and Magnetic which are both vastly superior in overcoming Health and Shields respectively. There is no situation where Cold damage’s bonus is greater than the alternatives. ii. Electricity at face value is a fairly neutral damage type with only 2 bonuses and 1 negative, all at the 50% mark. However, one of its bonuses is for Machinery Health and as such, is ineffective for the majority of the game. Its bonus against Robotic health is restricted to the Corpus faction and, like all Damage bonuses to Health, is inferior to Viral status. That leaves us with its weakness to Alloy Armour, which applies to every faction. Effectively, Electricity is a mostly neutral damage type that is bad against Armour when all factions have Armour. iii. Heat already looks like a strong contender on paper, with 3 bonuses and only 1 negative. Heat is effective against Grineer and both infested Health types. Heat is secretly good against all armour due to its status effect that reduces Armour. This combination makes Heat one of the best options for both the Grineer and Infested factions. Due to Corpus having armour, Heat is still a solid choice against the Corpus faction, despite being weak against Proto Shields. iv. Toxin appears to be one of the worst-performing elements, with only 2 bonuses and 3 negatives. However, its bonuses and negatives don’t matter. You do not pick Toxin for its damage type, you pick Toxin for its Status effect that bypasses the majority of Shields, you don’t need to care about bonuses when you can invalidate almost an entire Defence type. The Damage Bonus versus Flesh does make Toxin even more effective against the human Corpus enemies. c. Combination Elementals i. Blast looks like a completely average Combination Element, but it’s the hands-down worst Damage type in the game. It’s most effective against Machinery Health, which as detailed previously is too rare of a bonus to be useful, and its negatives are both for Armour types. There is no reason to ever use this element unless it already exists on a weapon. ii. Corrosive at face value appears to be only effective against the Armour found at lower enemy levels. This is false, as Corrosive’s Status effect makes it the 3rd most effective option against Armour types. While Corrosive is often replaced against Grineer with Slash or Heat, it is still the single most effective damage type against specifically the Deimos Infested due to the prevalence of Fossilized Health, Ferrite Armour, and Infested Sinew Armour on the majority of Deimos Infested. While Corrosive doesn’t offer a bonus against Sinew Armour, its Armour stripping Status effect makes Corrosive incredibly desirable as a one-stop solution to the Deimos infested. iii. Gas at 2 bonuses and 2 negatives looks to be as effective as Blast and unfortunately, it is, both on paper and in practice. Its bonuses to the Infested and Infested Flesh health types are rendered less valuable due to both Heat and Slash providing the same bonus versus Infested Flesh on top of their other benefits. Also of note is that only 3 of the enemies with Infested Health have enough Health (Juggernaut, Leaping Thrasher, and Deimos Therid) to warrant considering a Health bonus modifier. Those specific enemies also happen to be immune to Viral making this the rare case where Viral can’t be the better option. Unfortunately, if you build for Gas you can’t use Heat. Heat also has bonuses against Infested and Infested Flesh Health types and even though the bonuses are lower, using heat is more cost-effective in terms of modding space and utility as Heat’s status reduces Armour, which is a large factor on Deimos where those 3 enemy types are most common. iv. Magnetic is completely accurate. It’s good against shields and that’s it, even the 75% bonus damage against both Shield types exemplifies its total focus on obliterating shields. Its only real downsides are that you cannot build for Viral or Corrosive if you build for Magnetic. Viral is the larger loss, as you can still build for Heat with Magnetic, and depending on the weapon Slash is also a possibility. v. Radiation at face value looks like a very good option for dealing with Armour, especially at higher levels where Alloy Armour becomes more common. Unfortunately, stripping armour is just the far more effective strategy. Why would you choose a single damage type that is better at damaging Armour when you could pick a damage type that makes everything better at killing the Armoured enemy? Radiation also prevents building for Corrosive damage and using Heat, which are the superior options for dealing with Armour. vi. Viral looks like it should be as effective as Gas and Blast but it ends up being one of the very best damage types in the game due to its status effect. When you have a damage type that makes an enemy take 325% more damage from every source rather than only viral, as other Damage type’s bonuses versus Health function. There is no other Damage bonus against Health that can match it, let alone surpass it. Its extremely high bonus against the Cloned Health type makes it incredibly effective against the Grineer Faction, and with the ability to pair it with both Slash and Heat to deal with Grineer Armour, you end up with one build that is superior to nearly every other option possible against that faction. Due to Virals Status’ effect, its negatives are barely noticeable, as even with those reductions Viral is still better than all other Health type damage bonuses. The only enemies where Viral isn’t one of, if not the best supporting Damage type, are the Viral immune enemies found on Deimos. Damage Performance As an addendum to the Damage Overview, I have included a chart that shows each Damage type’s performance versus each faction and damage type. There are 5 key sections explained below. Damage Performance Table 1. Faction Performance Assumed from values alone - which show which faction the damage type should be best and worst against according to their bonuses and weaknesses. 2. Faction Performance in Practice - which is based on the effectiveness of those damage types in-game against the enemy factions. 3. Defence Performance Assumed from values alone - which show which defence type the damage type should be best and worst against according to their bonuses and weaknesses. 4. Defence Performance in Practice - which is based on the effectiveness of those damage types in-game against each defence type. 5. Total Best/Worst Performance - which gives the total number of damage types that are best and worst for each faction and defence type, in each of the previously listed sections. A green number signifies an above-average number for Best values and a below-average number for Worst values. A red number signifies a below-average value for Best values and an above-average number for Worst values. Damage Performance POI Looking at the Faction Performance sections, it is very easy to see that the most dominant damage types either are very effective against all three factions or very effective against 2 with no downside for the 3rd. The only outlier here is Magnetic, which while only effective against one faction, is so effective in its role it is still viable in non-bypassable shield situations. Looking at the Defence Performance sections, it should be noted that health having double the amount of effective options compared to the other defences is not an outlier due to there simply being far more health options in the game. Looking at the Defence Performance sections, it should be noted that in practice there has been a big increase in the damages that are effective versus armour. This is a natural consequence of the faction-wide usage of armour and the need for more methods to counterplay that armour. Suggestions These suggestions are made without consideration of the previous suggestions from the Defence section, as I am writing this about the function of the system as it currently is. While many changes could work in tandem with the previous suggestions, others here would need to be adjusted to function effectively with the previous suggestions. 1. Damage Bonuses against very rare enemy types or enemies without the ability to survive when even a damage type they are resistant to is used against them make several damage bonuses effectively non-existent in terms of usability and desirability. That information should be factored into the Damage type bonuses and not considered against the total bonuses ascribed to that Damage type. 2. If one wants to achieve parity between Armour-focused damage types, then they all need to play by the same rules or have equivalent effectiveness. The option here would be to grant all Armour bonuses the ability to reduce it or If only some options remove or bypass Armour, then the Damage types with only a bonus against the Armour should have a bonus close to equivalent with the effective performance of the Armour reducing options. 3. Toxin damage will always be the best option for Shields where applicable because ignoring a defence type is always superior to having to contend with it. I don’t have a good solution here aside from changing toxins status effect or relying on changes suggested to shields in the previous “Suggestions” section. Potentially you could lower the percentage of damage transferred directly to health from the status effect, but that may be incredibly difficult to fine-tune to both an acceptable level of usefulness while still not completely overshadowing the other damage types with bonuses against shields. Toxin’s underperformance outside of its status effect should also be considered, if the status effect is changed or weakened it might benefit from an additional effect 4. No Damage type that provides a bonus against Health types can achieve the same effectiveness and ease of use of viral. Instead of picking and choosing between 8 different Damage types for each kind of Health, you can just use viral and be more effective than any one, or more, of the other options. a. One adjustment would be changing Viral from a damage bonus to any damage to a damage bonus for only viral damage. This keeps the bonus high but brings it at least nominally back in line with how other bonuses against Defences function. b. The second adjustment would be to increase the Health damage bonuses for all Health-type-specific Damage bonuses to grant them closer parity, or even superiority to Viral’s Status effect. The specific case, as it is more niche should be a stronger option. 5. As Magnetic functions the same way Viral does but for Shields, it would not be unreasonable for the same adjustments stated above to be made to both Magnetic and the Damage types with bonuses against Shields. It should, however, be taken into consideration that there are only 3 Damage types with Shield bonuses, which is far less than ones with Health and Armour bonuses, and with one of the three being a Physical damage type that cannot be modded onto a weapon that does not already have it, there is very little mod diversity when targeting Shield Defences. a. Blast would be a good candidate for another Damage type with a bonus against Shields. It could be described in the lore as being a strong enough concussive force to overload the Shield matrix. Status Overview So finally, we come to it, the original topic that launched this threadnaught: the Damage type Status effects. Throughout this analysis, I have come to believe that there are very few “Bad” status effects; the issues plaguing status seem to come down to the Meta options being overwhelmingly the best options with our current Defence and Damage systems’ behaviours. We are going to break the conventional formatting here and start by organizing the Status effects into the following categories: Meta - The best choices in the game as it stands today. Things considered Meta or top tier for status choices Conditional - A status effect that can be extremely useful but only in specific situations Okay - A status effect that is useful but not particularly desirable compared to the Meta category Ineffective - A status effect that provides very little benefit and is actively avoided when modding I do not expect every single person to agree with my categorizations, but I believe it to be accurate for the average player and will explain the reasoning behind placing the Status effects in each category. This section will only be looking at the status effects themselves, the section “Putting everything together” will cover how enemy Defences and the Damage types contribute to a status being considered good or bad. Meta 1. Slash - Bleed a. Bleed dealing damage-over time as True damage allows Slash to ignore armour. Making it one of the best elements for dealing with armoured enemies, where the end-game enemies are all armoured. b. Damage-over-time effects are also very effective for depleting shields. 2. Heat - Ignite a. Ignite has nearly the same advantages as Slash. Instead of ignoring armour, it reduces armour but can be continually refreshed to maintain the reduction. b. It has a very high 50% of its damage as a damage-over-time effect, which helps deplete shields. c. It also has a mild CC effect on humanoid enemies while they are burning, causing them to stand still and wave their arms around. 3. Toxin - Poison a. Poison bypasses most shields in the game, invalidating that defence b. Poison has a very high damage over time effect at 50% of its damage. 3. Corrosive - Corrosion a. Corrosive can reduce all armour, granting a more comprehensive benefit against multiple factions than any other damage type that only grants a bonus against a specific type of armour. 4. Viral - Virus a. The long and the short of it is that Virus makes everything else more effective. It amplifies all health damage on targets afflicted with Virus, which also increases the performance of damage types with bonuses against armour because Health with Armour is still Health at the end of the day. Situational 1. Impact - Stagger a. If Stagger’s effect was only its original one which causes the enemy unit to stagger, it would be regarded as completely ineffective. Staggering an enemy is disruptive to gameplay with how the unit ends up jerking around, making precision shots much more difficult, which is a very sad state of affairs when many of the high-precision weapons have a heavy bias to impact. b. The secondary effect of Stagger is what elevates the status to situational use. While many users malign using parazon finishers due to the horde nature of the combat, they are exceptionally useful against Eximus, which have a much lower spawn cap and more substantial defences. Even against some of the heavier units it can be useful, as an execution kill at 75% health can be very useful. 2. Cold - Freeze a. Freeze is a slow that works on nearly all enemies, even some that are immune to other slowing effects (albeit at lower effectiveness than cold procs on other enemies). Freeze ends up situational because its target count is dependent on the target count of the weapon. Spraying down enemies with a cold primer is deemed as wasted time that could be spent just killing the enemy instead. b. Compounding the previous negative, Cold is one of the component elements for viral and in nearly every situation Viral is the more dependable and beneficial option, leaving cold situational at best. 3. Magnetic - Disruption a. Disruption is the equivalent of Virus for shields. Due to there being enemies with shields that cannot be bypassed by Poison, Magnetic still finds a niche. Magnetic is a combination of Electric and Cold, which means unless your weapon has Magnetic damage as one of its base damage types, you have to give up both Viral and Corrosive as elemental options. In the majority of cases, those two will be the better option. Okay 1. Electricity - Tesla Chain a. Tesla chain has a high 50% of damage dealt as damage over time effect. b. A much more valuable component of Tesla Chain is its ability to chain to other enemies, effectively creating an AOE weapon. With the bias towards AOE present in the game today one might expect this effect to raise Electricity’s position to at least situational, but its 3-meter range makes it a very small AOE and, as it cannot be increased, less appealing overall. 2. Radiation - Confusion a. Confusion can be a very useful effect but is seen as disruptive by some players and a waste of time by others. Confusion causes enemies to attack each other, and it can disrupt the flow of enemies from spawn locations to the players' location, as they will instead target each other and cease movement toward the players. On missions where killing enemies is required, this can be quite frustrating. b. Much like Freeze, Confusion provides crowd control, however, just like Freeze crowd control is considered inferior to killing the units faster. Ineffective 3. Puncture - Weakened a. Reducing damage from an enemy by 75% no longer matters by the time a reduction in incoming damage would truly be helpful. At high levels, enemies can do hundreds of thousands of damage and even with a 75% reduction, there is still more than enough damage being produced to one-shot the player several times over. 4. Blast - Inaccuracy a. Similarly to Weakened, Inaccuracy decreases enemy accuracy by up to 75% percent. At the levels where more missed shots should theoretically equate to more survival, reality simply doesn’t meet expectations. When the Incoming damage gets high enough, even the remaining 25% of the shots are more than enough to kill you. This status effect does not affect melee units 5. Gas - Gas Cloud a. Gas cloud creates a 3-meter at base, 6-meter at max area-of-effect Gas-Damage-field. b. While it has the same high 50% damage over time as other elements, it’s ultimately hamstrung by its damage type and specifically how its damage is calculated. c. Unlike the other Elemental Damage over time effects, Gas does not take any elemental mods into account when calculating its damage. While Ignite, Poison, and Tesla Coil include Heat, Toxin, and Electrical damage respectively in their calculations, Gas Cloud instead uses the same equation as a physical damage type. Using that equation creates a problem when applied to an Elemental or Combination Elemental Damage type. Base damage is only made up of the 3 Physical Damage types, which means that your gas damage doesn’t contribute to the damage-over-time effects damage, nor does Toxin or Heat damage. Observations: General Over time, there has been a shift from the dominance of crowd control to time to kill as a gameplay focus. This can be observed not just in Warframe selection but in the prioritization of Damage types and the Meta Status effects. All 5 of the status effects in the Meta category are very effective at increasing kill speed: ignoring or stripping armour lowers time to kill, massive damage bonuses versus health lowers time to kill, skipping shields; preventing their regeneration; or massive damage bonuses versus shields lowers time to kill. The Situational and Okay categories are dominated by what used to be the Meta options when crowd control was king. While crowd control is still useful against the average enemy, VIPs being almost immune to it in many cases and with how placing crowd control in direct competition with dead enemies, always results in dead enemies being the better option, it’s not hard to see why those effects have suffered such a fall from grace. Unless there is an advantage to keeping enemies alive, it is currently faster and easier to just kill enemies outright. I can only think of 2 situations where keeping enemies locked down but alive was the best option for players. The first was in the Law of Retribution raid. In that specific case, it was better to lock down the infinite spawns with CC than have to keep devoting resources to kill them, as they spawned almost as quickly as they were annihilated. The Law of Retribution is no longer available as a mission. The second is hijack missions, where if you can hit the spawn cap and keep the majority of units locked down, the missions become much easier. The status effects found in the Ineffective category neither provide crowd control nor assist effectively in time to kill. Blast and Puncture could be considered Defensive Status effects, however, they are equally ineffective at providing reliable protection. The Cost/Benefit Analysis This was touched on in the Damage section, but status effects are where we see the full effect of the hidden costs of using certain elements. While Slash is completely unaffected by this due to being a Physical Damage type and either just existing or not, all Elemental and Combination Elemental Status effects have to be taken into account with what you give up to get them. We will do a quick breakdown of the Hidden costs of the Meta status effects as these are the most obvious options and when inverted show why other options end up with lower priority or viability among players. Slash Not applicable Heat You cannot mod any other single Element You cannot mod Blast You cannot mod Gas You cannot mod Radiation Toxin You cannot mod any other single Element You cannot mod Corrosive You cannot mod Gas You cannot mod Viral Corrosive You cannot mod Toxin You cannot mod Electricity You cannot mod Gas You cannot mod Magnetic You cannot mod Radiation You cannot mod Viral Viral You cannot mod Toxin You cannot mod Cold You cannot mod Blast You cannot mod Corrosive You cannot mod Gas You cannot mod Magnetic In the list above you can see that several of the Meta Status effects conflict with each other, however, unlike the options in the other categories they supply something that is deemed equivalent or close enough to the effect they would replace to be a viable choice. For every status effect not found in the Meta category, it has to be worth losing the effect of the Meta Option to consider modding for it at all. While you can circumnavigate this issue somewhat with weapons that have certain inherent Damage types, status effects outside of the Physical damage types are in constant competition with each other and this substantially affects how the Meta shakes out. Suggestions: In all honesty, there aren’t a lot of suggestions that will “fix” bad status by only adjusting the status effects themselves. Still, there are some obvious sore spots where improvements could be made. Blast’s Inaccuracy simply isn’t effective as a defensive measure, as a damage or status effect that kills the unit means they deal zero damage rather than a miss chance that can still kill us a quarter of the time. Inaccuracy offers no improvements in time to kill or crowd control, thus when brought into competition with status effects that provide either of those elements it will always lose. An alternative status effect could be a weapon jam. While it wouldn’t lower the time to kill, it would provide a quite strong bit of CC where affected enemies would be unable to deal damage to you at all. Melee units could be staggered (or stunned, see Impact’s Stagger suggestion below) or knocked down without a ragdoll effect to avoid the issues of the original blast. Puncture’s Weakened suffers from the same issues as Blast. It fails defensively as the percentage of damage it allows through will still kill you while also not offering anything to decrease time to kill or grant crowd control. I do not have a suggestion for this but in the Dev workshop that was released on July 24th, 2023 the proposed changes to Weakened in the next update is an additive critical chance bonus applied after mods with a maximum of a 25% bonus. Gas’ Gas Cloud should just be changed to apply heat, toxin, or gas Damage types to its area of effect Damage. The damage calculation limitation imposed on it from when it changed from an Area of Effect Poison, which had it completely overshadowing Toxin, to its current Gas Cloud mechanic was an unnecessary nerf after it lost the ability to be applied directly to health. All crowd control options are overshadowed by effects that decrease the time to kill. A large component of this is that it takes the exact same time and effort to apply the status effects as it would to mod for Meta options and just kill them. Honestly, I think the only way to counterbalance the advantages of a dead enemy would be to allow a greater proliferation of the status effects that provide crowd control, Electricity’s Tesla Coil is a good example of this where it at the very least retains some usefulness due to its area of effect affecting more than one unit at a time. When a unit is affected by Freeze or Confusion, they would act as a locus to trigger the same effect in enemies that are within a certain range of them. If an enemy steps too closely to a frozen unit, they slowly accrue freeze up to the maximum currently on the frozen unit, with the stacks depleting as normal in accordance with their own onset timer. Radiation would work similarly to Freeze with nearby units accruing Confusion when near enemies afflicted by that status effect. Irradiated people, places, and things do sicken those that encounter them, after all. Radiation’s Confusion’s disruption to enemy flow is one of its bigger negatives, if the enemy could continue to move towards the player while attacking others on the way it should resolve that, you could have the behaviour switch back towards focusing greater aggression on previously friendly units once within a certain distance of the player. This would not be a perfect solution and likely would lead to its own pathing oddities, but would hopefully mitigate enemies needing to be hunted down by players because they were too focused on killing their own. Essentially, this behaviour could be repurposed from the behaviour of enemies at the end of exterminate missions, where the units will run away from the player but still shoot at them while running. In our case, they would shoot at things as they instead move toward the players' position. Impact’s Stagger detrimental stagger effect is a far greater handicap than its niche but strong early Parazon trigger effect. Rather than causing stagger, I would suggest replacing it with a stun animation that could reuse the sleeping animations. This would cause the stagger effect to no longer be a detriment, but an actual boon for high-accuracy weapons, opening enemies up to easier shots at their weak points. If you wanted to grant this improved crowd control effect proliferation, you could have enemies that run by the unit within a certain distance of them stop and check the afflicted unit before moving on. Putting Everything Together Thus far we have outlined the problems of each component of the Defence, Damage, and Status systems and proposed solutions that apply to each individual category. If you’ve made it this far or skimmed and found yourself here, then I have to admit that I lied. This is the “Secret Bonus Too Long Didn’t Read” section, where I simply outline the combination of factors that have spurred me onto writing this monstrous breakdown. While many people will be able to extrapolate the current situation from the data here, I felt it was important to actually go through the breakdown of each component in these interlocking systems so those less familiar with them can also understand the reasoning behind my essay. Defences All factions have armour again, which was one of the key factors for the change from damage 1.0 to damage 2.0 that we experience today. Most importantly, with all factions, and especially their tougher units using armour, armour has to be one of the main considerations for modding even against the “non-armoured” Factions. While Warframe powers can be considered here, there are few and far between that provide as cost-effective or sustainable armour removal as status effects do. Energy is simply not as plentiful, nor as easily acquired as bullets. With the majority of shields being bypassed by Toxin, Shields can never be as effective a Defence as Armour and will always be considered as an afterthought when modding except with the rare enemies that are immune to Poison bypassing their shields. Damages With the proliferation of Armour among all factions, damage focus shifts to dealing with that armour and increasing damage to armoured Health as much as possible if outright removal isn’t an option. In order to maximize performance with that goal in mind, Damage types that do not provide an advantage against armour quickly fall by the wayside Due to any Armour that remains on a unit still providing that Damage type’s bonus damage against armour to its remaining Health, enemies with armoured Health that the player cannot fully strip the armour from often get a greater effective bonus from the Damage bonus against Armour than the one from the Damage bonuses against Health types. Due to this, it further encourages modding towards overcoming Armour. Status The Meta options almost all contain a method of reducing or ignoring Armour. The one case where they do not is Toxin’s Poison, which bypasses the majority of shields. Viral’s Virus grants a larger bonus than every other bonus against Health types in the game. At the same time, Armour modifying Health means Virus also grants increased damage against health from the Damage types with a bonus against Armour. As it takes the same effort to apply crowd control effects to enemies as to kill them, status modding has shifted towards effects that decrease time to kill over effects that grant crowd control All Together Now This ultimately means that the entire mix of Defences, Damages, and Status all funnel down into very narrow build goals: Deal with armour. Biggest bonuses to kill faster. If it doesn’t decrease the time to kill, it’s useless. And this is where we hit on every reason the current Status effects that are Meta are leading the pack They deal with armour They drastically decrease the time to kill. They offer the biggest bonuses at the least cost. This explanation is not easily summed up, but between the limitations of mod slots and the cumbersome nature of swapping weapon configs a single build that is effective against every faction is much more valuable than bespoke ones that are 3 menus deep and require changing between factions. Heat, Viral, and Slash is effective against all enemies, except for the Deimos infested at which point you swap out Viral for Corrosive, one of the other Meta options. This combination also tends to utilize slash-focused weaponry so that no additional slash mods are needed to bias the Status types produced towards slash and only requires 3 elemental mods leaving more room for other damage-modifying options like critical and galvanized mods. As a consequence of these build goals, there is a marked decrease in modding diversity once you leave the early levels of play. For veteran players, it also leads to the homogenization of builds and turns mechanics that can and should have depth into something very shallow. So if you made it all the way down here, thanks for taking the time to read this. If you skipped down here instead, hi, if these summations don’t make sense, might I recommend visiting the prior sections?

worth a try even if just for the lols. I do feel the need to mention that at the time of that interaction's existence, you basically NEEDED it, Radial javelin couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if you cast from inside the barn wall.

they did this once with Mag's bullet attractor (or was it polarize?) and Radial javelin. It created basically a guaranteed hit for radial javelin. It was also one of the key builds in the whole Viver-gate thing.

She isn't slower in orbit or at least that's not the mechanic at play, she falls slower because the game gravity has less effect on her. This is a passive feature like Nezha having less friction.

The math cap for all damage is a very different thing than setting a cap specifically for an ability, one is a limitation of the engine and the other is an intentional design decision. You can't just say that SP is a large factor without also considering all the extra power potential added to the game in response to SP and continuing well after its inclusion in the game. Our ability power hasn't stagnated at pre-SP levels, the wiki has even retired the maximization calculators for abilities because of the continual growth and no build needing to maximize purely into one stat anymore to get biggaton number boosts. People can't argue against the case you are intending to make if the information in your argument is inaccurate. There are over 50 warframes and 10 years' worth of changing mechanics, adjustments, and deviations in game design. No one can hold all of that information in their head at one time unless they have an eidetic memory. They can look it up and cross reference and test things but they are going to use the information you are stating as the basis for the discussion and tailor their "research" to arguing those points. I don't think you are not doing this in bad faith and maybe not even intentionally, because otherwise I would have dipped out of this conversation already, but from the other side of the argument it feels very much like you are moving goalposts when evidence contrary to your statements is provided. Deimos survival and Venus survival are the exact same survival missions. Conjunction survival Has a roaming Power bonus granting unit, the addition of the Corrupted faction in the only place that isn't the void or fissures, a unique reward set and not just a single addition, Thrax Centurians which aren't just the normal centurian spawn but a variant that rapidly drains life support, and the only non-open-world non-railjack mission where you can summon your necramech. So yes I do consider it a new mode. I can't believe I get to use this but, *Ahem* DO NOT CITE THE OLD MAGIC TO ME, WITCH, I WAS THERE WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN. I was here when "Mot" was added as a new mode when it was a Void key and it was the equivalent of an "SP" type challenge at the time. Yes, the unique modifiers on the Tier 4 Void Keys which featured 3x enemy damage and their own mini-boss were considered new missions at that time because it required a different playstyle and team composition than the tiers below it. Kuva survival was also considered a new mission type when it was added because of the unique gameplay offered in addition to the normal survival mechanics. The difference between Ophelia having access to archwing and those other examples is the archwing doesn't affect the gameplay at all while the other additions did. You never go underwater to tap life support nor do you need to use archwing except to navigate between tiles, and it's rare that you actually have to do that because pure water tiles mess up the spawn pathing and so you only get the hybrid dry land and water tiles.

a cap 70k passive damage every second still isn't anything to deride in 2023. That does appear to be correct, but just like with miasma your initial statement that I replied to left out half the information. "Spores don't spread on their own kills" and "Spores don't spread a second time when the propagation was triggered by a second-generation spore kills" are substantially different behaviours. Regardless of what you think defines a new mode those missions have unique features and their own unique rewards. You cannot just run any survival or defence to get what they contain or encounter the same mechanics. They are new modes with new rewards.

Alt-f4 works, but it's not a stable method of exiting games in all cases and just because it does work in warframe doesn't mean that the best method of exiting the game should be to force quit at the operating system level of the computer. Alt-f4 is effectively a shortcut key for force-closing a program without opening the task manager. It is not the method that should be employed to quit games even if it "works". People think Alt-f4 isn't a big deal just because you need to go through multiple operating system sub-menus and actually press a button that says force close and pops up a warning dialogue but it is the same thing. When you start a paragraph by saying that unlike you, other people don't respect the devs it sets the topic of the paragraph to be about being disrespectful to the devs. If the rest of the paragraph is unrelated to that, it should be a separate paragraph. Of course "I think the moon is round. I dont think Draisiel lives in space." doesn't convey an accusation because the topic the paragraph is introduced with is what you think of the moon, not a judgment on how other people treat the moon. I separated the areas by purpose because that affects what activities you are doing and where it would be feasible to quit from. Mission - you aren't going to want to quit from here because you lose stuff if you don't finish the missions. Orbiter - You can quit from here Dojo - with trading, Railjack management and missions, and navigation options you quite often want to end a play session here without needing to leave the dojo first. Maroo's Bazaar - Trading and Prime resurgence it's common to want to quit the game after completing trades. Yes, there are people that only play the game to run a trading empire. Relays - Navigation, Simaris targets, Mastery Tests, Railjack, it's easy to complete a play session while on relays and thus want to quit. Cetus - You need to load back into open-world hubs to properly save open-world progress without using one of the world triggers and to preserve bounty completion bonuses. All open worlds also have unique purchasable items and daily standing to trade. it's not uncommon to want to quit from Cetus. The other open worlds have been included separately because the items, purchases, and benefits available are unique to each open world. Fortuna - see Cetus Deimos - see Cetus Zariman - see Cetus Dormizone - with access to the Duviri store without needing to run a Duviri mission and access to spend drifter intrinsics it's not unreasonable to want to be able to quit here. Teshin's cave - With the "extractor" equivalent of the plants and access to drifter intrinsics sometimes you only enter here to pick stuff up or level things up at the end of a non-Duviri play session. It would be nice to quit here. My problem with Leqessais's comment was that I made the suggestion with the reason: "It's annoying to have to go through multiple loading screens to be able to quit the game properly". They disregarded that reasoning to instead reply to my comment to another poster about how we shouldn't have to force quit to exit the game to avoid that annoyance. They didn't engage with the supplied reason, they just scolded me for having the opinion that we shouldn't have to force close a game just to avoid superfluous loading screens. They decided my reasoning was "we shouldn't have to" and not "multiple loading screens in order to quit the game is bad" and then scolded me for not having a good enough reason to request a change. They didn't even provide any counter opinions like you did or reasons it wouldn't work, they only maligned the validity of the request itself because of their incorrect decision about the validity of my reasons. They added nothing to the conversation and dipped out as soon as they were challenged.

It uh, might not actually be the opticor shot that is killing you. Malice can cast Bullet attractor on you. Most deaths from malice are from killing yourself with a single shot from your own weapon when you didn't notice the bullet attractor or it landed on you right as you shoot. It's all projectiles too, not just guns, so you can murder yourself with thrown melees if you want a real laugh.

Yes, that's exactly what a DoT means, that they will kill slower but require less active engagement. Garuda's damage is more frontloaded because to maximize its range you have to manually charge it up, it only has a 95-degree targeting zone, its range is 60m at maximum charge, it only lasts for 10 seconds, it only affects the enemies initially targeted by the attack, and it inflicts the bleed status effect which deals true damage. Spore doesn't have a finite duration, does have a spread range between units but no cap to how far it can spread through the affected enemies, it spreads on its own, and can affect new enemies that get close to infected ones. If it had the same upfront damage as Garuda it just be a delete enemies button rather than a warframe ability. It's being brought up because at steel path levels with steel path spawn rate, maintaining high damage is easier. It's also being pointed out because Spore's scaling was considered strong enough to need a Cap. Spores still spread on spore kills. It just spreads faster with other interactions. There was no Steel Path but there also wasn't helminth, or many of the arcanes that further improve abilities, or prime mods, or umbral mods, or many of the other ability-power-increasing options there are today. Actually, there was a very strong counter-meta to complete strips: 1%-ing because the bonuses provided from elements that were good against armour were normally more than the bonuses you could effectively mod for health. Viral was also still devastatingly useful even on 1%-ing builds because it increases all damage to health including armoured health. So you would strip as close as possible to 1% remaining armour on your build to get the bigger bonuses, boost those bonuses further with virus stacks, and not have to worry about changing builds or modding for specific health types. In most cases, this option ended up producing higher damage potential than a complete strip. This was also the preferred method for many veterans as only recently has full armour removal become the truly dominant meta due to more armour stripping abilities that have wide enough areas of effect and stronger stripping on single casts. Complete armour stripping only really became viable when we didn't have to burn through all our energy to only strip the armour from enemies 2 or 3 at a time. Let's be realistic, there are 2 types of armour and a very rare specialty option. Ferrite and Alloy are encountered regularly but Infested sinew is only on the Hemocyte and Deimos open-world missions, specifically the Heavy units: Carnis (rex), Genetrix (the drop ship equivalent), Jugulus, and Saxxum (Rex). Infested sinew isn't something that's considered for 99% of the game. In the future maybe that changes but this is the reality today. Yes the patch notes say that, but I responded based on what you said: If you meant to say that miasma can't apply multiple stacks of viral your wording choice was poor because that reads as if it doesn't benefit from the virus status effect's damage buff. I'm trying to think if there is another ability similar to miasma where it can apply a status effect but also has its own DoT effect unrelated to the status effect. That would give us a better understanding of what the current balancing intentions are around such abilities. If there are other abilities like miasma that can apply multiple stacks of a status effect on a single cast then you've got a very good argument for updating miasma to follow suit. That's really weird about the shields' behaviour because I went through the notes starting in 2020 and continuing up to the current year and that specific change isn't mentioned anywhere. While it's possible it was a missed note, it's even odder that the wiki doesn't list it as an unlisted change. The wiki always used to be really good about that stuff. It could just be a bug no one bothered to report, that's happened a few times, but it could also be working as intended. I get impatient with every DoT so tend to favour slow-hitting high Alpha damage options (which sucks with the damage attenuation let me tell you) so it's not something I'd encounter in my everyday play. The accusation I don't play the game was uncalled for. Obviously, the Circuit and stuff like Traditional Defense or Interception are going to have lulls with no enemies, they're designed to have breaks between waves, but Conjunction Survival, Mirror defence, void cascade, void flood, and disruption all have near-constant high spawn rates. Even if you want to keep "new modes" to the past year, that's still 4 missions with near-constant spawns (conjunction survival, mirror defence, void cascade, void flood) and only 2 with predetermined breaks between waves (Circuit and Void Armageddon).

While there would be some cost, the art assets can be reused and so can the coding from the existing exit game button. Due to reusing existing items bug testing would likely be minimal as well. Of course, this is speculation but such speculation is about the same validity as one where its cost is quite high, neither of us truly has the data to support either hypothesis. There might be a limitation with the account syncing with the server, but considering that people have been using alt-f4 for more than half a decade to quit while in social hubs and no one has been complaining about lost items (nor have I lost any items while doing this) I think it's highly unlikely it's a restriction due to server communication. Account changes seem to be saved at purchase time from the vendors. It wouldn't actually be that much easier to accidentally close the game, because there's already an "are you sure" prompt for that: You way you've written the last paragraphs comes across like you don't think I regard the developers with respect, which is pretty insulting. If that wasn't your intent you might want to separate your topics a bit better in the future. You are forgetting a core facet of this specific game: Most of what is in the game is there simply because it was there before and it worked well enough. Warframe devs are really good at keeping up a steady flow of content and not so adept at touchups and consistency passes. This isn't surprising, considering the nature of live services and especially free-to-plays where your bottom line tends to get punished when you step back from new content. Anyway, While we've had some UI touchups the majority of the diegetic user interface is still the same as when it was introduced in update 14. In update 14 the only place you could ever possibly want to exit the game was in your Liset (we weren't even calling it the orbiter yet) because the only two important locations were in mission or on your ship. Dojos did exist at this point but the only things in there were imbalanced dueling and Dojo Research. 99% of the time you went to the dojo for research and most people don't immediately quit the game after they buy research, preferring to return to their ship to build what they just picked up, so quitting from the dojo wasn't even a consideration during that time. Update 14 was on July 18th, 2014, the first global player hubs added were the relays in update 15.6 on December 11th, 2014 with the void trader, darvo, and syndicates. Like the dojo, the exiting the game option was absent but there wasn't that much to do there and you could always just alt-f4 right? Well, more and more social spaces kept getting added and more and more interactions kept getting added to those locations. We went from: Mission Ship Dojo where 99% of your interactions were just with your ship to: Mission Orbiter Dojo Maroo's Bazaar Relays Cetus Fortuna Deimos Zariman Dormizone Teshin's cave where the majority of your interactions for a play session depend on which social hub contains your objectives. To put this another way when the menu system we are still currently using was added we could quit from one-third or 30% of the locations in the game. Today we can quit from one-eleventh or only ~9% of the locations in-game. The game has marched on and social hubs are more important to warframe gameplay now, have far more reasons to visit them, and there are far far more of them than when quitting from the escape menu of your liset was first added. Like many other similar situations, it likely hasn't changed more due to inertia than any actual limitations. I'm bringing it up now because while it's always been a minor annoyance it's become a lot bigger in recent years as the social spaces and their uses expand. I know, I don't think we should be required to do that just to avoid loading screens in order to quit "properly". I can actually answer the thing about "network issues" Due to social hubs having account-affecting interactions such as buying something for plat from darvo, turning in syndicate medallions for standing, or exchanging syndicate standing for items one does have to consider when that data is saved to the servers in order to exit the game without losing items or possibly corrupting data. That said, we've been alt-f4ing in those situations for years and there have been no lost items nor consequences from data corruption seen by the playerbase so this likely isn't an issue that needs consideration in warframe. For all intents and purposes, it looks like the game saves to the server directly after purchase which makes sense as the hubs are all on DE servers and not hosted peer-to-peer. This might mean that Dormizones and Dojos would need an extra check performed, but the orbiter clearly has this coded into it already so theoretically they may be able to repurpose the solution from there.

"Shouldn't have to" is my opinion, which I'm here on the forums to share, I'm not demanding it and I shouldn't have to always supply what others consider a "valid argument" just to share that opinion. This is such a minor request it just isn't worth the effort to write an essay providing references and arguments for why it would be beneficial. At face value, the request is completely obvious and easy to understand why it would be an improvement. If they disagree with my opinion I'll keep alt-f4ing but it won't change the fact that I think we still shouldn't have to. Besides, sometimes "shouldn't have to" or "because I would like it" is a completely valid argument especially when something is an inconvenience and not some earth-shattering issue. If you had to run around the footprint of your building 3 times before you could leave via the front door I'd imagine you'd also feel you shouldn't have to do that.

yeah, I already do that but we shouldn't have to, social areas don't have a good reason not to let us quit the "correct" way.

The only menu in warframe that has the Quit game option is the one on our orbiter or camp but it gets pretty annoying to have to return there to quit when you are in a relay, open world hub, dojo, Teshin's Cave, or the Dormizone. Could we please get a quit option in those esc menus instead of having to force close the game to avoid wasting our time?

ah it brings back memories, vampire lotus lol. It's a shame the infested are using a ghost overlay if you could see the actual models you'd see that the ancient's arms are replaced with rotating blades. You can hear them during the first mission. the Jack-o-naught doesn't have the break the pumpkins to be damaged by them though, he just has to be in the range of the fire ring and you can break them by dragon kicking them or using a bullet jump. you can also kill the other infested using dragon kicks and bullet jumps. I'm really glad this isn't the endurance version which had a time limit to complete it.

it wasn't explained any better when it was the first around either. I do love to see the Jackonaut again though I always wanted a plushy of him.

Saryn is a caster but she isn't a nuker, she's the DOT Queen. The enemy growth cap slows how quickly she can get her damage up, but considering spores is one of the few abilities that also has a damage cap and it's 70k per second it's not like the damage growth hamstrings her into uselessness. It maintains the over-time aspect of the ability which in earlier iterations was almost nonexistent. A single casting of spores would kill everything in under a few seconds. There was no point in playing when you matchmade a Saryn. If people think players bailing on Sanctuary Onslaught nowadays is a problem imagine encountering that on every mission where you never got to see any enemies and just damage numbers that vanished before you even got to the room. The Nerf to corrosive removed its permanent duration and reduced its effectiveness to 80% armour removal. While this affected other damage types paired with corrosive this wasn't the catastrophic build-ending debacle for corrosive itself. It's still the most effective armour removal option and with the oft-ignored or forgotten property of damage types that have a bonus vs armour, it still excels. Corrosive damage itself ignores a percentage of armour equivalent to its damage bonus against that armour type and then applies the bonus damage to the remaining armour, without the corrosion status being present or applied. I have no idea what you are talking about with miasma not gaining boosted damage from viral status. This is really easy to test and see in practice. You can see miasma's damage double from the initial hit which applies one stack of viral to its first dot, and you can apply 10 stacks of viral with a weapon and also see miasma's damage increase accordingly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA4xjpbaOxM The shields thing is strange, I don't remember reading about that change in the patch notes and the historic notes in the shield page of the wiki doesn't list the change either. What's even stranger is that the shields don't regen at all on the corpus units once they are all removed (even after waiting 2 minutes) unless there is an osprey. I'm actually wondering if something is bugged there. However, calling spores DOT small or infrequent is damn near a bald-faced lie, it's easy to build up thousands of damage and ticks every second. The only time I've experienced a "break" in enemy spawns in the newer missions is when playing with a console host which lowers the spawns, or we've killed everything faster than it can spawn, so mission-accomplished abilities performing as expected. What is etc? Your previous claims leave the existence of other tenable negatives that are affecting spores' effectiveness suspect.

there's no point in buying multiple config slots if the forma you've used locks you into one build for the frame because the forma is shared between all configs. the only "solution" to that so far is just building another version of the frame.

the problem with tying the rate of fire to the ability to use auto is that all semi-auto weapons are eventually power crept to the point that a one-shot-one-kill gun, like the lex was with headshots at launch, always becomes a 5+ shots-to-kill gun eventually. When you've got 100+ enemies to kill in a mission even at just 5 shots each that's over 500 clicks at minimum. It pushes the issue into the future and just means that anyone who needs that auto option now is forced to mod for firerate even with it's detrimental or unwanted. Don't forget that +rof also makes the nausea-inducing recoil warframe has taken to using really bad and often requires the use of stabilization mods to even use the guns without throwing up.

crossplay is live, as in all platforms can matchmake with each other for missions. No cross-platform trading or clans. Crosssave is still being worked on. Contracts are done according to DE Steve prior to Crowning Rebecca as Creative Director and abdicating warframe to run Soulframe. We haven't heard much on the nitty-gritty except they are focusing on making it as bugless as possible people could be looking at losing decades worth of investment and effort into their accounts if something goes wrong.

Because Fortnite is made by Epic which is a massive company in the gaming sphere, for a long time crossplay only existed for companies that could throw a lot of money and influence at the problem of platforms who refuse to grant it. If you are Sony or Microsoft and a company that not only has one of the biggest and most popular multiplayer games worldwide and owns the engine a substantially large amount of games use to run, saying give us crosssave or we won't launch on your platform will cause them to capitulate. It's why only the really big games backed by very lucrative and powerful companies had crossplay for so long while the option wasn't on the table for any smaller companies. Warframe has grown a lot but it's a sardine compared to those whales. To put the size disparity into perspective: right now DE has about ~100 fewer employees than Blizzard did when WoW launched in 2004. Today DE has ~311 while Blizzard has ~13 000. I'm using Blizzard because I had these stats at hand for something else but it would still be reflective of the disparity between DE and something like Epic or EA who also already have crossave for some of their games.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's a server ping. In your situation, your internet connection would have entirely disconnected, which could mean the game is just checking for an internet connection. It would be the kind of thing that is hard to check without packet sniffing to see what's been sent, if anything, for that check. I'm given to believe warframe is very hostile to such packet sniffing and would be reticent to test it out for fear of a ban. There is one server check I know that you can manually trigger though, and when you are logged into Warframe and in a solo mission that check is not made until you finish the mission. If you have the mobile Warframe companion app logging into it counts as being logged into the game with your account and Warframe only allows you to have one login instance active at once. If you have Warframe on your computer (never tested this on a console) and load into a solo mission then open the mobile app it will tell you it needs to log you out to open the app. When you click yes it logs you out of the game and into the app. In your solo mission on your computer, nothing will have changed you can play the mission as normal, you will not get any pop-ups for disconnecting from the network nor will you get booted from the game, it doesn't matter how long you spend in the mission (barring the solo afk timer) which means the solo mission is not checking in with the server to check account state during the mission. Once you complete the mission everything goes to hell, you are logged out so it can't save to your account and has no idea how to deal with a user account that is somehow playing the game and logged out at the same time. You get permanently stuck in an attempting-to-save-to-account loop that won't even force log you out since you are already logged out as far as it is concerned. This says to me that solo missions are not communicating with the server for the duration of solo missions, since in order to do so you would need to have the correct credentials to give which you do not in that scenario. All of the other server communications seem to require the correct credentials to activate as well. The one exception to this is of course, open-world solo missions where the game communicates to the server after specific activities to save progress.