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I don't feel that elements of Warframe's design match the inent of 'every playstyle is viable'


Loza03
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Ok, that title's pretty hefty, so what do I mean by that? Well, simply, the tendency for the 'best' playstyles to be the DPS nuke that kills everything or, when enemy scaling renders that impossible, turtling behind cover, while invisible or whilst focusing a choke point whilst you slowly chip away at the one-shot hellscape outside the little safe zone. This is, in effect, the 'meta' and whenever content that reaches a certain point in levels is introduced, these are what become the only viable playstyles, meaning that any attempt to add challenging content rapidly leads to frustration. The high-speed, run-and-gun gameplay that the devs seem to want to encourage is so much less effective under most circumstances. This feedback is intended to suggest some ideas to at least narrow that gap enough so that these other gameplay styles can become more used.

To be specific about what the intentions of this thread are: 1) Bring single-target and AoE weapons closer together in terms of power and usefulness, 2) Reduce the power of AoE nuke abilities in a logical way that doesn't render them entirely useless and 3) rebalance enemies to be more fun to fight with run-and-gun gameplay. I'll go over all of these in turn, and give my specific intent behind each set of changes as well. Oh, and fair warning: A lot of words inbound. Alrighty, first things first.

 

Weapons:

Right now, AoE weapons like the Ignis, the Amprex and the Phantasma are more useful than the vast majority of other weapons by a wide margin. They can deal large amounts of damage and do it to an area, so they are basically a better option than any single-target weapon. This is a problem, because it renders weapons that only hit one or two targets at a time much less useful, and thus, discourages playstyles that use them, particularly against Grineer with their huge EHP, where as many health pools need to be drained as possible. Now, whilst individual weapons in the AoE category might need looking at specifically, I have an idea that could help more generally - a new stat for weapons, that could also use armour scaling, which many recognise as an issue for Warframe, as a strength.

Armour piercing. In effect, weapons with this stat possess the ability to ignore a percentage of the damage resistance from an enemies' armour. How I see this working is: let's say a gun has 50% armour pierce, and is used against a level 50-ish Bombard, which has about 90% damage resistance. When calculating damage, the damage reduction from armour is halved, becoming 45%.

All single-target guns (basically, anything that only deals damage to one enemy with each bullet, excluding punch-through) would possess this stat, custom tweaked depending on their current effectiveness and capacity to attack multiple targets. Assault rifles, for example, would have lower Armour pierce than burst or semi-auto weapons. Perhaps some weapons have higher based on lore - like Corpus could generally get more armour pierce, given how often they fight Grineer. Another property of this stat is how it works with attacks that start as single-target, than become AoE. By default, the AoE does not possess armour pierce, but on a direct hit, the AoE will 'inherit' the armour pierce when dealing damage to the enemy hit, and no others. For example, firing the Astilla will cause the enemy hit by a glass shard to take damage calculated with armour pierce from the slug and explosion, but enemies only hit by the explosion will take damage reduced fully by armour. Most enemies' weapons lack armour-pierce, although a few high-threat enemies might deserve it. I'll talk more about enemies later.

As Corpus lack armour, I've thought of an alternate solution for them, utilising shields. Shields now possess innate damage reduction to damage sources with no armour-pierce. In practice, this means innate damage reduction to AoE weapons, as long as their shields are still up. Since gas procs inherit the damage dealt when bypassing shields, this means that they aren't a work-around for AoE weapons either, although it is still for Single-target. The Infested continue to have no protection against AoE however - they are a horde after all, burning them up with a flamethrower and such is a big part of the fun of fighting them. If anything, having every faction be best handled like that was taking away from the Infested.

There are two classes of weapons that can damage multiple enemies and also have armour pierce however: Amps, and Melee. A lot of Amps deal damage in AoE, and are tied to slow, squishy Operators, with limited applications in combat. Giving them a good way to both deal with armour, and a niche as AoE armour-piercers would make Operators a lot more useful and fun outside of Eidolons and the like. For Melee, it inherently has shorter range than guns significantly, and a large part of the point of Melee is putting yourself in the line of fire in exchange for a lot more damage. Melees that especially only hit one target would still have a lot more armour pierce though.

The intent of this is to bring weapons that struggle to scale effectively up in power so that they can kill fast, especially at higher levels, having similar effectiveness to AoE weapons, by virtue of them having a dramatically faster time to kill, so that in the same period of time, they can kill as many enemies as an AoE weapon would be able to. In doing so, using them becomes more fun as you pop the heads of your foes at great speeds, making using them whilst you run and gun viable.

 

AoE DPS Nuke abilities: (Edit: outdated. Refer to further in the thread.)

These are a little out of hand right now, rendering whole missions moot. I get why they exist of course - they're ways to deal huge damage for DPS frames to make them feel powerful. So, the nerf (and yes, this is a nerf), should not prevent these abilities from feeling powerful. It should, however, prevent this powerful ability from being able to eliminate everything on the map. To this end, a simple suggestion. Falloff for AoE abilities.

Inverse square law, right? Energy has a reduced effect the further from the source. Gravity goes on forever, but you can't feel the gravity of the countless stars in the universe because they're so far away. The same principle applies here. Full damage for abilities is only dealt within a percentage of it's modded range - perhaps 25% - before falling off and dealing less damage. This doesn't neuter the abilities entirely, though. For example, Volt can still fire a discharge and wipe away things directly threatening him, and tight clusters of enemies will still be fried, but it no longer renders entire missions non-existent, because enemies further away from either Volt or other enemies won't feel the same effects. I also feel that maybe CC affects associated should be limited to a percentage of the range, but then again, that's something that should probably be done with greater specificity.

Speaking of, two examples which deserve special address. Saryn's spores and Mesa's Peacemaker, as they aren't your traditional nukes. Peacemaker already has 'falloff', since at greater ranges the smaller reticle will target fewer enemies. To that end, Peacemaker should be less severely affected. For Saryn, since it has such a large range and so many individual 'casts', I think it'd be better off having falloff based on how far away the Saryn is from a victim, perhaps with a wider falloff radius to compensate. Just to make it more predictable for the player.

The intent behind this is, pretty much, to not make the former change completely pointless. There's no point in increasing the variety of weapons good at higher levels if a Warframe makes it so you never even see one.

 

Enemies:

Right now enemies are in an odd state of being both insultingly easy and frustratingly powerful. When using nuke tactics with either gun, melee or ability, they're functionally non-existent. When trying to play run-and-gun at high (or even medium in some cases) levels, they can erase you in milliseconds. I've addressed the former, so the latter must be addressed as well.

My changes are intended to make running and gunning a more viable damage-dealing option, but they're not very useful if a common enemy blinks you out of existence. 'Weak' enemies that can deal consistent damage to you have really high damage scaling. The classic example is Corrrupted Crewmen, but to some extent, it applies to all mooks. Of course, a flat nerf to damage scaling would render several existing enemies that are be higher-priority targets for their damage potential to become pointless. So, instead, my idea is to make damage scaling variable, unlike other scaling calculations. As a rule of thumb, the more consistently an enemy, or attack, is able to inflict damage to a player, the less that damage should scale. This seems fair to me, since stronger enemies can still have higher base damage to scale from. Another boon to this is a previously-suggested change to Shields, that should carry over to players and companions too - AoE damage sources should deal less damage to shields, thereby making them a bit more useful. Of course, this also means that some enemy classes can actually have their damage upped, if some attack they have rarely damages players and also doesn't deal too much. And, of course, some could wind up getting armour pierce as well.

Speaking of these classes, I'd like to suggest some changes to the design of a few specific enemies, whose design detracts from run-and gun enjoyment regardless of the prior suggestions. First off, Snipers - the trait of the Laser sight should be applied to Corpus snipers too, and their accuracy should be changed so that it'll always land on whatever the laser sight's looking at, but also making said sight lag behind fast-moving players, especially if they're changing direction a lot. That way, shots from them are more predictable to dodge. On the subject of sniper rifles, take them off Nullifiers. Seriously. Nullifiers's capacity to render abilities useless already makes them a huge threat, they don't need high damage as well, especially since other heavy units that can serve that purpose will often be found near them.

Another enemy with overkill design that makes them no fun to run-and-gun is Bombards. They've got high damage, extremely high accuracy thanks to homing and splash damage and also take more damage than almost every other enemy. They're a bit absurd by any definition, especially for a standard enemy. A simple change is just to remove the homing from the rockets. If they're less likely to hit you when you're moving, it makes their big damage more justifiable - it could even be increased to compensate. in fact, this exact change is already in the game with one of the Bombard variants, the regular Tusk Bombards, and they're way more fun to fight as getting killed by them feels more fair. "I messed up, I didn't dodge that" as opposed to "I dodged this rocket and then moved off to another part of the room and it still hit me" which occasionally happens with current Bombards, particularly in more open areas. Getting killed when you dodged is no fun, it's cheap enemy design.

The intent behind these changes is simple. With weaker, more common enemies doing less damage and less able to kill you in a matter of seconds, leaving defensive positions for front-line fighting is much less of a death sentence, but since other enemies are still capable of killing you very quickly outside of this, there is still a very tangible threat at higher levels. However, since they're less capable of hitting you, as long as you're up to snuff on your dodging and movement, you should be fine.

 

All right, that's everything. I'd like to hear other people's opinions on this.

Tl;Dr: single-target guns get a stat that ignores a percent of armour but AoE guns don't, shields for players and enemies take reduced damage from AoE guns, AoE abilities get falloff, enemies that hit you a lot scale slower, enemies that hit you rarely scale faster.

 

Edit: After some of the posts, I'd like to clear something up about my goal I forgot to mention. My goal isn't to overturn the meta, but more for players who want to use a certain weapon, like for example the Dex Sybaris, in the daily sortie, but get discouraged because they'd be a lot further behind a player using, say, the Ignis, or not get any kills or gameplay at all because someone was using nuke strategies, or get killed repeatedly by enemies which do a lot more damage than they should be for how universal they are across the map. In short, I'm trying to make it so that running these weapons aren't a burden on you or your teammates, as opposed to a grand shift in the power of the game.

Edited by Loza03
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Okay first of all, look at your suggestions and think about the horde shooter gameplay. No matter how much armor ignore a sniper gets it will stay inferior compared to everything else.

Lets take a look of another horde shooter, Earth defense force 4.1 . This game has loads of different weapons but to be effective most players need to have atleast one aoe weapon in their loadout because the only reason to get the single target guns out is when it would be too dangerous to shot tactical nukes infront of you.

What warframe needs is unique quirks and mechanics what technically make all weapon class equal. Let me show some examples:

Snipers: All snipers should either have impact rounds or infinite punchthrought. The impact rounds is a feature what makes the round create a wave of kinetic force on the last target hit. This wave is atleast 4 meter wide and deals 25% less damage every 1 meter away from the impact. Punchtrought doesnt need explanation.

Auto weapons: Base punchtrought of 1 meter with the armor ignore or shrapnel rounds. Shrapnel round release 5-10 sharpnels in a 2 meter long cone on the opposite side of the hit. Each shrapnel deals 1-20% damage with 0.5 meter punchthrought.

Burst weapons: Sharpnel rounds, Impact rounds or heavy rounds. Heavy rounds increase the damage by 25% and the punchthrought by 1 meter, this effect stacks on the next bullet released in the burst . 

Semi weapons: Kinetic rounds or Impact rounds. Kinetic rounds create a wave of kinetic energy as they travel around the bullet, max range 0.5 meter. This wave has infinite punchtrought, deals damage equal to the shots damage and stops at the point where the original bullet stops.

Beams: Either ramp up while shooting with atleast 0.5 meter punchthrought or Plasma trail battery. Plasma trail battery leaves back a trail of flaming plasma on anything the beam touches, stays active for 3 seconds dealing 50% damage every 0.5 sec.

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I don't agree with all of the suggestions, but I agree wholeheartedly with the criticism: Warframe is a vast game with plenty of options, and I do think there are more viable playstyles than it gets credit for, but there is nonetheless a distinct subset of playstyles that happen to be both extremely powerful, and extremely low on interactivity. I agree that a healthy Warframe is a game that requires players to engage properly with one's opponents, and being able to kill enemies from another room without even being aware of their existence is not particularly fun or engaging gameplay, particularly when those kinds of builds also tend to prevent other players from engaging with the game as well.

Regarding weapons, I personally feel most weapons are fine; the problem has more to do with enemy density favoring AoE weapons over all others, as well as certain tileset layouts. The vast majority of the game takes place in small rooms or narrow corridors, where enemies swarm towards the player, so it would make sense for weapons with high damage and AoE capabilities to be the strongest (I'd argue a Tigris Prime with punch-through still remains the strongest weapon in the game to this day). Adding innate armor piercing to single-target weapons could be a good short-term fix to this, but I think the eventual, more complete solution should be to update some older tilesets, as well as rework factions to have much more variation in unit strengths and densities. We don't need everything to be an open world, but it would be much harder to clear a room in a single shot if enemies could come from multiple different angles, perhaps even different vertical levels, in an open enough space, which happens often in tilesets like Lua, the Void, and to a large extent Corpus Outposts, but not so much on Corpus ships, Eris, Europa, and so on. Moreover, if we had factions that had really low enemy density, but proportionately higher enemy power and rewards (the Corpus could be particularly well-suited for this imo), there would be a much better distinction to be made between single-target weapons, which would be more appropriate against those factions, and current room blenders, which would be fine for more horde mode-style gameplay.

As for falloff on radial damage, while I agree that radial damage is the problem, I'm not sure simply weakening it would be the ideal solution, as it would risk just having us all revert back to a state where damage frames feel anemic relative to weapons. Ember's rework also tried to force close-quarters combat by progressively reducing in range and increasing in drain, though with an increase in damage, and she's still heavily complained about to this day. Personally, I think the overarching issue with these problematic nuke abilities is that they combine three factors: A) they're fire-and-forget (you can just press a button and let the ability do its thing), B) they can kill enemies single-handedly (the nuke does the entire job on its own), and C) they can be used on-demand (you can have that radial damage up whenever you like). As long as a radial nuke has exactly these three characteristics, that ability will be lacking in interactivity, as to use the ability you'd just press a button whenever and let the Affinity come to you. Technically, the ability also needs to do sufficient damage to work, but if it doesn't, then the ability is weak, if still broken. 

With this in mind, I think there are three different methods that could be used to fix radial nuke abilities, which could be applied differently to different effects:

  • Version A - Can kill enemies single-handedly and on-demand, but requires player participation: The best examples of abilities that currently follow this model I think are Mesa's Peacemaker and Ash's Bladestorm: both abilities are potent nukes, but require at least some minimum amount of player participation, even if it boils down to pressing 4 and spinning around quickly. Revenant's 4 also fits this model imo, as it requires the player to move around and position themselves properly while spinning to win.
  • Version B - Can be fired and forgotten on-demand, but sets enemies up for kills instead of killing them outright: There isn't really a current example of this, besides maybe Nova's Molecular Prime, but this I think should be the model to follow for Saryn's spores: her whole shtick is supposed to be weakening enemies, not simply mass murdering them from across the map, so if her spores applied a variable viral proc, one that would ramp up over time to reduce increasingly large amounts of the enemy's maximum health, instead of dealing damage, she'd be able to bring enemies on the verge of death, but would need to use something else to finish them off, even if it'd be just to take off 1 HP. Similarly, if Ember's World on Fire dealt current health damage and melted armor, instead of dealing flat damage, she'd be able to generate an aura that would soften up enemies around her, but still require some other ability to actually get kills. Not only would this make these playstyles more engaging for these frames, it would also flip their gameplay for allies, turning them from kill-stealers to kill-enablers across the whole map.
  • Version C - Can be fired and forgotten and kill enemies single-handedly, but cannot be used all the time: As with the above, there isn't a perfect example of this in-game, though the closest thing that exists is Equinox's Mend and Maim, specifically the instant damage/heal version. The actual persistent heal/damage aura isn't all that interesting, and treads on the toes of other frames, but imo the idea of an extreme, radial burst of power that one has to charge up is a great idea, as it pushes for high moments and meaningful downtimes in a manner that doesn't come across as a forced cooldown or the like. Removing the passive aura components to those abilities on Equinox, and instead having Mend and Main charge up much more strongly from damage dealt to enemies, could make the ability and frame both more distinct and more engaging overall (though Mend could probably be changed to some other bonus, perhaps invincibility or the like, since it's otherwise just a weaker version of Trinity's Blessing). This is also a model that could be used to aid with certain other radial nukes that are struggling: Excalibur's Radial Javelin scales notoriously poorly, for example, but if it dealt bonus damage based on melee damage dealt recently, and expended that bonus damage in the process, it could become a powerful room clear even at higher levels, without that power becoming abusive when spamming 3 repeatedly.

The general idea here being that radial nukes should always involve player participation and engagement with their opponents, whether it be before, during or after the ability's usage. So long as an ability innately forces players to do something other than just press one ability button and wait for kills to happen, or just press the same button repeatedly, its gameplay should be healthy, hopefully without needing to have its power or scaling rendered intentionally weaker otherwise.

Edited by Teridax68
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We just need a new damage system.

Damage 1.0 was a very different game. it had flaws of it's own but Damage 2.0 does as well. With the change to Damage 2.0, scaling, enemy weak points, enemy numbers and many other things changed with it. I think a lot of people just think status effects or damage types when they hear Damage 3.0.

Armor piecing existed in 1.0. There was a mod for it and enemies also had no armor on their weak points. Now in damage 2.0 they scale head and all. From my experience Damage 1.0 was superior to Damage 2.0 in one major way. It rewarded good aim. I recall using MK-1 Braton through the entire game all the way to maxing out all my mods because it had 40 accuracy. Outside of secondaries like Sicarus Prime single target DPS has always been underwhelming in Damage 2.0. Reverting the beam weapon nerf was one of the better things DE has done to improve against AoE supremacy but now there's more in play. Many many more enemies ( Compare old videos to what you face now ) which alone helps feed the ability based AoE you speak of by supplying more energy orbs. With Damage 2.0 we gained more enemies that are less meaningful.

More enemies deters from making smarter enemies as a human can only deal with so many mechanics going on at once. I'm sure most players have experienced the Corpus swarms. Each enemy alone has a reasonable mechanic but mixed together they create unfair situations for the player to deal with. So we're stuck with fairly brain dead enemies that can only punish the player by one-shotting them when they make a mistake and spinning AoE in circles because, well, we can.

Damage 3.0, Less more meaningful enemies, less eHP gap between frames and stop acting like lvl 100 is hard.

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il y a 41 minutes, Xzorn a dit :

Damage 3.0, Less more meaningful enemies, less eHP gap between frames and stop acting like lvl 100 is hard.

I agree on everything save for this. I mean, i agree on this but with a different spin. 

I personally think this game is at its best in fun factor when there is a proper horde of stuff in your face and everywhere around you, proper musou style. 

What i would love to see would be a LOT more enemies on screen with lower threat level but interpersed within the horde enemies with much higher threat level, at a lower frequency. 

Currently we have a model that doesn't really have priority targets, even heavy units are non-issues until you go way past the levels this game gives you ready access to. I'd really love that to change. Have the current heavy units act like sort of elites, and/or add minibosses, and mingle them in the horde in fewer number, but make them smarter/harder to cheese. 

That would, imo, work wonders for this game's gameplay.

 

Oh, and also the last sentence cannot be stressed enough. People lately seem convinced that lv 100+ enemies are impossible to face unless you cheese them, when it is very much not the case. Heck, enemies thrice that level don't need to be necessarily cheesed even when they have T4 damage modifiers... 

Edited by Autongnosis
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3 hours ago, Fallen_Echo said:

Okay first of all, look at your suggestions and think about the horde shooter gameplay. No matter how much armor ignore a sniper gets it will stay inferior compared to everything else.

Lets take a look of another horde shooter, Earth defense force 4.1 . This game has loads of different weapons but to be effective most players need to have atleast one aoe weapon in their loadout because the only reason to get the single target guns out is when it would be too dangerous to shot tactical nukes infront of you.

What warframe needs is unique quirks and mechanics what technically make all weapon class equal. Let me show some examples:

-snip-

On the one hand, your right, in terms of being meta, AoE will still win overall. I'm at peace with that. I'm not trying to completely overturn the meta, I'm trying to make it so that the Meta isn't so immensely above everything else that not playing it will screw you over. I'm thinking less of the 'I want to kill everything as fast as possible' group, more of the 'I want to use my Lex Prime/Vaykor Marelok/Veldt for the sortie today, but it'll take ages to kill the enemies' group.

7 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

So you basically just want to nerf beam weapons.

You do realise half the beams in the game fall under 'Single target damage', right?

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

I don't agree with all of the suggestions, but I agree wholeheartedly with the criticism: Warframe is a vast game with plenty of options, and I do think there are more viable playstyles than it gets credit for, but there is nonetheless a distinct subset of playstyles that happen to be both extremely powerful, and extremely low on interactivity. I agree that a healthy Warframe is a game that requires players to engage properly with one's opponents, and being able to kill enemies from another room without even being aware of their existence is not particularly fun or engaging gameplay, particularly when those kinds of builds also tend to prevent other players from engaging with the game as well.

Regarding weapons, I personally feel most weapons are fine; the problem has more to do with enemy density favoring AoE weapons over all others, as well as certain tileset layouts. The vast majority of the game takes place in small rooms or narrow corridors, where enemies swarm towards the player, so it would make sense for weapons with high damage and AoE capabilities to be the strongest (I'd argue a Tigris Prime with punch-through still remains the strongest weapon in the game to this day). Adding innate armor piercing to single-target weapons could be a good short-term fix to this, but I think the eventual, more complete solution should be to update some older tilesets, as well as rework factions to have much more variation in unit strengths and densities. We don't need everything to be an open world, but it would be much harder to clear a room in a single shot if enemies could come from multiple different angles, perhaps even different vertical levels, in an open enough space, which happens often in tilesets like Lua, the Void, and to a large extent Corpus Outposts, but not so much on Corpus ships, Eris, Europa, and so on. Moreover, if we had factions that had really low enemy density, but proportionately higher enemy power and rewards (the Corpus could be particularly well-suited for this imo), there would be a much better distinction to be made between single-target weapons, which would be more appropriate against those factions, and current room blenders, which would be fine for more horde mode-style gameplay.

I've come to this same conclusion myself, actually! The suggestions here are very much only a first step. I've made a thread talking about changes to enemy and area design in the past, and likely will again in the future, but there was the very significant point of 'enemies will get vaporised immediately, so no-one will notice if they have good AI', and more thought on my end and attempts to play run-and-gun made me realise that enemies can erase players really fast too which is just as off-putting, so putting changes like these in now could cause significant upheaval. I think it's better to get things set up so that the weapon types are a lot closer to an equal footing and more active gameplay is less of a death sentence before the changes to enemy and area design can realistically be discussed. But, yes, I agree that these suggestions are far from the end-all be-all. I'm trying to avoid eating an elephant for lunch.

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

As for falloff on radial damage, while I agree that radial damage is the problem, I'm not sure simply weakening it would be the ideal solution, as it would risk just having us all revert back to a state where damage frames feel anemic relative to weapons. Ember's rework also tried to force close-quarters combat by progressively reducing in range and increasing in drain, though with an increase in damage, and she's still heavily complained about to this day. Personally, I think the overarching issue with these problematic nuke abilities is that they combine three factors: A) they're fire-and-forget (you can just press a button and let the ability do its thing), B) they can kill enemies single-handedly (the nuke does the entire job on its own), and C) they can be used on-demand (you can have that radial damage up whenever you like). As long as a radial nuke has exactly these three characteristics, that ability will be lacking in interactivity, as to use the ability you'd just press a button whenever and let the Affinity come to you. Technically, the ability also needs to do sufficient damage to work, but if it doesn't, then the ability is weak, if still broken. 

With this in mind, I think there are three different methods that could be used to fix radial nuke abilities, which could be applied differently to different effects:

  • Version A - Can kill enemies single-handedly and on-demand, but requires player participation: The best examples of abilities that currently follow this model I think are Mesa's Peacemaker and Ash's Bladestorm: both abilities are potent nukes, but require at least some minimum amount of player participation, even if it boils down to pressing 4 and spinning around quickly. Revenant's 4 also fits this model imo, as it requires the player to move around and position themselves properly while spinning to win.
  • Version B - Can be fired and forgotten on-demand, but sets enemies up for kills instead of killing them outright: There isn't really a current example of this, besides maybe Nova's Molecular Prime, but this I think should be the model to follow for Saryn's spores: her whole shtick is supposed to be weakening enemies, not simply mass murdering them from across the map, so if her spores applied a variable viral proc, one that would ramp up over time to reduce increasingly large amounts of the enemy's maximum health, instead of dealing damage, she'd be able to bring enemies on the verge of death, but would need to use something else to finish them off, even if it'd be just to take off 1 HP. Similarly, if Ember's World on Fire dealt current health damage and melted armor, instead of dealing flat damage, she'd be able to generate an aura that would soften up enemies around her, but still require some other ability to actually get kills. Not only would this make these playstyles more engaging for these frames, it would also flip their gameplay for allies, turning them from kill-stealers to kill-enablers across the whole map.
  • Version C - Can be fired and forgotten and kill enemies single-handedly, but cannot be used all the time: As with the above, there isn't a perfect example of this in-game, though the closest thing that exists is Equinox's Mend and Maim, specifically the instant damage/heal version. The actual persistent heal/damage aura isn't all that interesting, and treads on the toes of other frames, but imo the idea of an extreme, radial burst of power that one has to charge up is a great idea, as it pushes for high moments and meaningful downtimes in a manner that doesn't come across as a forced cooldown or the like. Removing the passive aura components to those abilities on Equinox, and instead having Mend and Main charge up much more strongly from damage dealt to enemies, could make the ability and frame both more distinct and more engaging overall (though Mend could probably be changed to some other bonus, perhaps invincibility or the like, since it's otherwise just a weaker version of Trinity's Blessing). This is also a model that could be used to aid with certain other radial nukes that are struggling: Excalibur's Radial Javelin scales notoriously poorly, for example, but if it dealt bonus damage based on melee damage dealt recently, and expended that bonus damage in the process, it could become a powerful room clear even at higher levels, without that power becoming abusive when spamming 3 repeatedly.

The general idea here being that radial nukes should always involve player participation and engagement with their opponents, whether it be before, during or after the ability's usage. So long as an ability innately forces players to do something other than just press one ability button and wait for kills to happen, or just press the same button repeatedly, its gameplay should be healthy, hopefully without needing to have its power or scaling rendered intentionally weaker otherwise.

This is much better than my suggestion. What I really don't like about nukes right now is the complete lack of player interaction with them, both by the user and for everyone else. Version C especially appeals to me (I'm fond of built-up 'ultimate' attacks like that), but given the nature of this thread, having multiple models for this for multiple playstyles is the ideal for this.

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7 hours ago, Autongnosis said:

I agree on everything save for this. I mean, i agree on this but with a different spin. 

I personally think this game is at its best in fun factor when there is a proper horde of stuff in your face and everywhere around you, proper musou style. 

What i would love to see would be a LOT more enemies on screen with lower threat level but interpersed within the horde enemies with much higher threat level, at a lower frequency. 

Currently we have a model that doesn't really have priority targets, even heavy units are non-issues until you go way past the levels this game gives you ready access to. I'd really love that to change. Have the current heavy units act like sort of elites, and/or add minibosses, and mingle them in the horde in fewer number, but make them smarter/harder to cheese. 

That would, imo, work wonders for this game's gameplay.

 

Oh, and also the last sentence cannot be stressed enough. People lately seem convinced that lv 100+ enemies are impossible to face unless you cheese them, when it is very much not the case. Heck, enemies thrice that level don't need to be necessarily cheesed even when they have T4 damage modifiers... 

I agree with a lot of this. Yeah, level 100 enemies are far from impossible - there are a wide number of options to deal with them - they're just not as fun as they probably should be. Hence why I wanted to lower the damage on common troops, but raise it on certain, rarer troops and attacks. They're usually what spoils the fun - in a horde game, you don't want to be afraid of the common enemies. But even Dynasty Warriors has enemies that pose a threat show up, quite often in fact. With the proposed changes, these would be enemies like reworked bombards. As I've said before, it's better to lay the foundations first and get it balanced and then ask for more changes. 

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On 2018-09-25 at 3:56 AM, Loza03 said:

Ok, that title's pretty hefty, so what do I mean by that? Well, simply, the tendency for the 'best' playstyles to be the DPS nuke that kills everything or, when enemy scaling renders that impossible, turtling behind cover, while invisible or whilst focusing a choke point whilst you slowly chip away at the one-shot hellscape outside the little safe zone. This is, in effect, the 'meta' and whenever content that reaches a certain point in levels is introduced, these are what become the only viable playstyles, meaning that any attempt to add challenging content rapidly leads to frustration. The high-speed, run-and-gun gameplay that the devs seem to want to encourage is so much less effective under most circumstances. This feedback is intended to suggest some ideas to at least narrow that gap enough so that these other gameplay styles can become more used.

To be specific about what the intentions of this thread are: 1) Bring single-target and AoE weapons closer together in terms of power and usefulness, 2) Reduce the power of AoE nuke abilities in a logical way that doesn't render them entirely useless and 3) rebalance enemies to be more fun to fight with run-and-gun gameplay. I'll go over all of these in turn, and give my specific intent behind each set of changes as well. Oh, and fair warning: A lot of words inbound. Alrighty, first things first.

 

Weapons:

Right now, AoE weapons like the Ignis, the Amprex and the Phantasma are more useful than the vast majority of other weapons by a wide margin. They can deal large amounts of damage and do it to an area, so they are basically a better option than any single-target weapon. This is a problem, because it renders weapons that only hit one or two targets at a time much less useful, and thus, discourages playstyles that use them, particularly against Grineer with their huge EHP, where as many health pools need to be drained as possible. Now, whilst individual weapons in the AoE category might need looking at specifically, I have an idea that could help more generally - a new stat for weapons, that could also use armour scaling, which many recognise as an issue for Warframe, as a strength.

Armour piercing. In effect, weapons with this stat possess the ability to ignore a percentage of the damage resistance from an enemies' armour. How I see this working is: let's say a gun has 50% armour pierce, and is used against a level 50-ish Bombard, which has about 90% damage resistance. When calculating damage, the damage reduction from armour is halved, becoming 45%.

All single-target guns (basically, anything that only deals damage to one enemy with each bullet, excluding punch-through) would possess this stat, custom tweaked depending on their current effectiveness and capacity to attack multiple targets. Assault rifles, for example, would have lower Armour pierce than burst or semi-auto weapons. Perhaps some weapons have higher based on lore - like Corpus could generally get more armour pierce, given how often they fight Grineer. Another property of this stat is how it works with attacks that start as single-target, than become AoE. By default, the AoE does not possess armour pierce, but on a direct hit, the AoE will 'inherit' the armour pierce when dealing damage to the enemy hit, and no others. For example, firing the Astilla will cause the enemy hit by a glass shard to take damage calculated with armour pierce from the slug and explosion, but enemies only hit by the explosion will take damage reduced fully by armour. Most enemies' weapons lack armour-pierce, although a few high-threat enemies might deserve it. I'll talk more about enemies later.

As Corpus lack armour, I've thought of an alternate solution for them, utilising shields. Shields now possess innate damage reduction to damage sources with no armour-pierce. In practice, this means innate damage reduction to AoE weapons, as long as their shields are still up. Since gas procs inherit the damage dealt when bypassing shields, this means that they aren't a work-around for AoE weapons either, although it is still for Single-target. The Infested continue to have no protection against AoE however - they are a horde after all, burning them up with a flamethrower and such is a big part of the fun of fighting them. If anything, having every faction be best handled like that was taking away from the Infested.

There are two classes of weapons that can damage multiple enemies and also have armour pierce however: Amps, and Melee. A lot of Amps deal damage in AoE, and are tied to slow, squishy Operators, with limited applications in combat. Giving them a good way to both deal with armour, and a niche as AoE armour-piercers would make Operators a lot more useful and fun outside of Eidolons and the like. For Melee, it inherently has shorter range than guns significantly, and a large part of the point of Melee is putting yourself in the line of fire in exchange for a lot more damage. Melees that especially only hit one target would still have a lot more armour pierce though.

The intent of this is to bring weapons that struggle to scale effectively up in power so that they can kill fast, especially at higher levels, having similar effectiveness to AoE weapons, by virtue of them having a dramatically faster time to kill, so that in the same period of time, they can kill as many enemies as an AoE weapon would be able to. In doing so, using them becomes more fun as you pop the heads of your foes at great speeds, making using them whilst you run and gun viable.

 

AoE DPS Nuke abilities: (Edit: outdated. Refer to further in the thread.)

These are a little out of hand right now, rendering whole missions moot. I get why they exist of course - they're ways to deal huge damage for DPS frames to make them feel powerful. So, the nerf (and yes, this is a nerf), should not prevent these abilities from feeling powerful. It should, however, prevent this powerful ability from being able to eliminate everything on the map. To this end, a simple suggestion. Falloff for AoE abilities.

Inverse square law, right? Energy has a reduced effect the further from the source. Gravity goes on forever, but you can't feel the gravity of the countless stars in the universe because they're so far away. The same principle applies here. Full damage for abilities is only dealt within a percentage of it's modded range - perhaps 25% - before falling off and dealing less damage. This doesn't neuter the abilities entirely, though. For example, Volt can still fire a discharge and wipe away things directly threatening him, and tight clusters of enemies will still be fried, but it no longer renders entire missions non-existent, because enemies further away from either Volt or other enemies won't feel the same effects. I also feel that maybe CC affects associated should be limited to a percentage of the range, but then again, that's something that should probably be done with greater specificity.

Speaking of, two examples which deserve special address. Saryn's spores and Mesa's Peacemaker, as they aren't your traditional nukes. Peacemaker already has 'falloff', since at greater ranges the smaller reticle will target fewer enemies. To that end, Peacemaker should be less severely affected. For Saryn, since it has such a large range and so many individual 'casts', I think it'd be better off having falloff based on how far away the Saryn is from a victim, perhaps with a wider falloff radius to compensate. Just to make it more predictable for the player.

The intent behind this is, pretty much, to not make the former change completely pointless. There's no point in increasing the variety of weapons good at higher levels if a Warframe makes it so you never even see one.

 

Enemies:

Right now enemies are in an odd state of being both insultingly easy and frustratingly powerful. When using nuke tactics with either gun, melee or ability, they're functionally non-existent. When trying to play run-and-gun at high (or even medium in some cases) levels, they can erase you in milliseconds. I've addressed the former, so the latter must be addressed as well.

My changes are intended to make running and gunning a more viable damage-dealing option, but they're not very useful if a common enemy blinks you out of existence. 'Weak' enemies that can deal consistent damage to you have really high damage scaling. The classic example is Corrrupted Crewmen, but to some extent, it applies to all mooks. Of course, a flat nerf to damage scaling would render several existing enemies that are be higher-priority targets for their damage potential to become pointless. So, instead, my idea is to make damage scaling variable, unlike other scaling calculations. As a rule of thumb, the more consistently an enemy, or attack, is able to inflict damage to a player, the less that damage should scale. This seems fair to me, since stronger enemies can still have higher base damage to scale from. Another boon to this is a previously-suggested change to Shields, that should carry over to players and companions too - AoE damage sources should deal less damage to shields, thereby making them a bit more useful. Of course, this also means that some enemy classes can actually have their damage upped, if some attack they have rarely damages players and also doesn't deal too much. And, of course, some could wind up getting armour pierce as well.

Speaking of these classes, I'd like to suggest some changes to the design of a few specific enemies, whose design detracts from run-and gun enjoyment regardless of the prior suggestions. First off, Snipers - the trait of the Laser sight should be applied to Corpus snipers too, and their accuracy should be changed so that it'll always land on whatever the laser sight's looking at, but also making said sight lag behind fast-moving players, especially if they're changing direction a lot. That way, shots from them are more predictable to dodge. On the subject of sniper rifles, take them off Nullifiers. Seriously. Nullifiers's capacity to render abilities useless already makes them a huge threat, they don't need high damage as well, especially since other heavy units that can serve that purpose will often be found near them.

Another enemy with overkill design that makes them no fun to run-and-gun is Bombards. They've got high damage, extremely high accuracy thanks to homing and splash damage and also take more damage than almost every other enemy. They're a bit absurd by any definition, especially for a standard enemy. A simple change is just to remove the homing from the rockets. If they're less likely to hit you when you're moving, it makes their big damage more justifiable - it could even be increased to compensate. in fact, this exact change is already in the game with one of the Bombard variants, the regular Tusk Bombards, and they're way more fun to fight as getting killed by them feels more fair. "I messed up, I didn't dodge that" as opposed to "I dodged this rocket and then moved off to another part of the room and it still hit me" which occasionally happens with current Bombards, particularly in more open areas. Getting killed when you dodged is no fun, it's cheap enemy design.

The intent behind these changes is simple. With weaker, more common enemies doing less damage and less able to kill you in a matter of seconds, leaving defensive positions for front-line fighting is much less of a death sentence, but since other enemies are still capable of killing you very quickly outside of this, there is still a very tangible threat at higher levels. However, since they're less capable of hitting you, as long as you're up to snuff on your dodging and movement, you should be fine.

 

All right, that's everything. I'd like to hear other people's opinions on this.

Tl;Dr: single-target guns get a stat that ignores a percent of armour but AoE guns don't, shields for players and enemies take reduced damage from AoE guns, AoE abilities get falloff, enemies that hit you a lot scale slower, enemies that hit you rarely scale faster.

 

Edit: After some of the posts, I'd like to clear something up about my goal I forgot to mention. My goal isn't to overturn the meta, but more for players who want to use a certain weapon, like for example the Dex Sybaris, in the daily sortie, but get discouraged because they'd be a lot further behind a player using, say, the Ignis, or not get any kills or gameplay at all because someone was using nuke strategies, or get killed repeatedly by enemies which do a lot more damage than they should be for how universal they are across the map. In short, I'm trying to make it so that running these weapons aren't a burden on you or your teammates, as opposed to a grand shift in the power of the game.

This. I like this.

If you don't mind, I'd like to implement these ideas into my fan-made units and weapons over at the fan concept forums (obviously I would link to here). I enjoy tinkering with stats and I always wanted some sort of "damage" stat made for enemies, to better qualify them as threats or mooks.

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1 hour ago, HugintheCrow said:

This. I like this.

If you don't mind, I'd like to implement these ideas into my fan-made units and weapons over at the fan concept forums (obviously I would link to here). I enjoy tinkering with stats and I always wanted some sort of "damage" stat made for enemies, to better qualify them as threats or mooks.

I've seen the  "Strength to the Grineer" thread, and overall it seems pretty neat. I don't mind ideas from here making it over there. After all, the more awareness of the issues in Warframe's core design the better. People (including myself, in the past) too often blame the symptoms of a deeper problem.

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4 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

I've seen the  "Strength to the Grineer" thread, and overall it seems pretty neat. I don't mind ideas from here making it over there. After all, the more awareness of the issues in Warframe's core design the better. People (including myself, in the past) too often blame the symptoms of a deeper problem.

Alrighty then, thanks!

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