Modding 3.0?

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

Short and simple, Warframe's current mod systems does not encourage creativity or true customization. There are a lot of interesting mods that, unfortunately, are probably never used. Since Warframe's modding system is solely based on stacking damage upon damage.

My two-cents:

1. Remove base damage and multishot mods and boost weapon damage by said amount. Refund the Endo cost and, for Primed mods, maybe have them converted into Legendary Cores?

Edit: Seeing as to how multishot heavily influences things like the sniper combo multiplier and status effect application, multishot mods would be changed to fire additional projectiles. However, damage is split between the projectiles. Note, the damage boost from the old multishot mods would have been already incorporated to the base damage of all weapons. This new multishot mod will simply allow weapons that benefit from multiple-hit applications to keep doing so. 

2. The other damage mods will work similarly to how Conclave damage mods work (which I love tbh). As in, they don't add more damage. Rather, they take a percentage of the weapon's damage and converts it to the mod's damage type (Heated Charge converts X weapon's damage type to Heat). This way, you're not encouraged to simply stack damage mods. Rather, you tailor your damage to a specific situation. Leaving room for QoL mods.

Edit: Moreover, seeing as to how elemental mods won't simply add more damage. Combined elements should be revised in the form of specific mods. That is to say, you put on "Irradiating Round" to convert X% of your weapon's damage to Radiation. Moreover, this decoupling of primary elements combining will allow for a MUCH more versatile arsenal. For example, running both Gas and Blast on a melee weapon, 

3. If you use a crit chance mod, you will obviously use the critical damage one. Similar to the companion mod, Bite, critical mods will incorporate both critical chance and damage.

4. Lesser used mods need a rework. Things like Sure Shot can add base status chance, for example.

Edit: The addition of a true and effective pure status chance mod is long overdue. I dislike having to mod my Mara Detron for Corrosive and Blast to get to 100%, instead of Corrosive and Heat. Since enemies fall, making it a chore to line-up following shots.

5. Finally, enemy scaling. Health can scale as usual. Enemy armor, however, should cap at 75% damage reduction. Alleviating the possible damage losses from the changes in point 2.

Edit: Additionally, armor/shield interactions with the elements should be revised. Cold proccing an enemy should cause the armor to become brittle, increasing incoming damage. Moreover, Heat should be more effective the longer a Heat proc is kept going (armor heating up). Shields can be overloaded and explode when struck with an Electric proc, dealing some damage in addition to the stun, etc.

Edited September 27, 2018 by (PS4)LoisGordils

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

I think that throws the baby out with the bathwater a bit, and I'm not sure the gift of half a million endo and tens of millions of credit would really make up for all the current endgame weapons builds becoming useless.

There are quite a few paired stat mods like you describe, and there should be more, but all are reduced compared to the single stat equivalent - you can have 90% element or 60% element+60% status.

I do like some of your ideas though - there should be something like an Exilus slot for weapons that fits 'sidegrade' mods - they would always take away or convert, and not like corrupted mods where the DPS is still higher. They'd be a pure trade of one stat for another.

Mind you, that would just always be trading out Impact for Slash/anything else.

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

35 minutes ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

endgame weapons builds becoming useless.

How?🤔

[GrayArchon]

1 hour ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

I'm not sure the gift of half a million endo and tens of millions of credit would really make up for all the current endgame weapons builds becoming useless.

You'd have to re-mod all your weapons, sure, but you'd still have all the mods you needed. It would just be a case of opening up the mod interface, switching a few around, and going back to work. @(PS4)LoisGordils didn't talk about adding any new mods. Plus, you've now got lots of credits and endo, and probably more mod space, since the multishot and base damage mods tend to cost more than most mods (eg: you can now put on another 60/60 dual-stat mod, costing 7, in place of your Hornet Strike, which cost 14).

Your builds, after adjusting, should have similar effectiveness as before, since this mod rework would be accompanied by a rebalance in enemy health, as per OP.

[Teridax68]

My thoughts on this:

1 hour ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

1. Remove base damage and multishot mods and boost weapon damage by said amount. Refund the Endo cost and, for Primed mods, maybe have them converted into Legendary Cores?

I like this, multishot and base damage mods are essential to any build right now and are a major restrictor to diversity. Neither generate interesting choices, they just add raw damage, which is currently always the most desirable thing to have on a weapon. I'd increase status chance on those weapons as well, to make the transition complete, but otherwise increasing stats to match the ones lost by eliminating those mods would be a net buff, and would allow those weapons to then have their stats raised or reduced more finely as needed.

A larger, and much tricker issue, is going to be that of compensating players for the mods that would be removed. Legendary Cores definitely seem like they could be the best compensation, and in fact it may perhaps even be more desirable to also bunch together the Endo and credits refunded from non-Primed mods to also convert that into more LCs.

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2. The other damage mods will work similarly to how Conclave damage mods work (which I love tbh). As in, they don't add more damage. Rather, they take a percentage of the weapon's damage and converts it to the mod's damage type (Heated Charge converts X weapon's damage type to Heat). This way, you're not encouraged to simply stack damage mods. Rather, you tailor your damage to a specific situation. Leaving room for QoL mods.

I'm not a fan of status as currently implemented, but nonetheless, I think this is a brilliant idea. Converting damage to a certain type, instead of simply adding more damage, would make for much more interesting strategic choices, and would force players to consider the kind of damage and status they want to apply with their weapon, instead of just piling on everything they'd like. There would likely have to be some adjustments and additional considerations (you might have to cap the damage conversion to 50% for any one element, so that players would at most convert 100% of their damage to two composite elements, otherwise things might get weird past 100% conversion rates), but this could still be a huge step forward.

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3. If you use a crit chance mod, you will obviously use the critical damage one. Similar to the companion mod, Bite, critical mods will incorporate both critical chance and damage.

This I very much agree with as well, and I think the same can largely be said for status as well. To me, this just indicates how status and crit are both ultimately fairly shallow means of customizing weapons, but if the intent is to just do short-term work before considering a much larger overhaul, combining crit chance and damage into the same mods could work just fine.

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4. Lesser used mods need a rework. Things like Sure Shot can add base status chance, for example.

Pure status chance mods are obsolete for sure. I think there's a lot of chaff that could just be removed, though some lesser-used mods could probably do fine with just buffs.

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5. Finally, enemy scaling. Health can scale as usual. Enemy armor, however, should cap at 75% damage reduction. Alleviating the possible damage losses from the changes in point 2.

I'd personally go one step further and make armor static, i.e. never scale at all. 75% damage reduction can be reached at 900 armor, which is less than what Eidolons have, and the end result is still that Grineer would scale quadratically in their effective health, even if they'd return to linear scaling past a certain threshold. If armor remained constant, Grineer wouldn't become the high-level bullet sponges that they are now, and Corrosive Projection wouldn't be the optimal aura mod each time.

1 hour ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

I think that throws the baby out with the bathwater a bit, and I'm not sure the gift of half a million endo and tens of millions of credit would really make up for all the current endgame weapons builds becoming useless.

I too would be curious to know how the above proposed changes would make current endgame weapons useless. Most of the proposed changes here would affect all weapons, or practically all of them, and boil down to a general damage squish, rather than targeted nerfs to any particular build.

Edited September 26, 2018 by Teridax68

[GrayArchon]

2 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I think the same can largely be said for status as well.

"Status damage" isn't really a thing in the same way crit damage is. Proc damage is usually calculated off base damage or the total damage of the element in question, and isn't calculated separately from that damage in an alterable fashion such as crit damage. The only things that can affect the damage of status procs are Ash's passive (only for Slash procs) and the extremely underused aura Empowered Blades. Thus, there's nothing really to bundle status chance with, except maybe status duration?

[Teridax68]

Just now, GrayArchon said:

"Status damage" isn't really a thing in the same way crit damage is. Proc damage is usually calculated off base damage or the total damage of the element in question, and isn't calculated separately from that damage in an alterable fashion such as crit damage. The only things that can affect the damage of status procs are Ash's passive (only for Slash procs) and the extremely underused aura Empowered Blades. Thus, there's nothing really to bundle status chance with, except maybe status duration?

I didn't really mean status damage so much as status chance and elemental damage. With the exception of Slash damage, all current status builds pair up status chance with an element of some kind, usually Corrosive, Viral and/or Radiation. Thus, it would probably make sense to use the current model of status + elemental damage as the standard for elemental conversion mods, by pairing that damage conversion with status chance each time.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

1 hour ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

How

Because most need the fact that elemental damage is on top of other types, rather than replacing it.

2 hours ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

Remove base damage and multishot mods and boost weapon damage by said amount

Now what's the scaling on weapons? What's the advantage a player gains by obtaining stronger damage mods if the weapon just gets that boost automatically?

Yeah, it would be great if my new shotgun did Primed Point Blank damage out of the box, but the endo and cash to level that mod, and the ducats and cash to buy it in the first place represented a lot of play time.

46 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

A larger, and much tricker issue, is going to be that of compensating players for the mods that would be removed. Legendary Cores definitely seem like they could be the best compensation

Legendary cores would be significantly less useful when you've just removed ⅔ of all the primed mods.

 

[Teridax68]

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

Because most need the fact that elemental damage is on top of other types, rather than replacing it.

Sure, but this is something that is done for all weapons. If one were to cut the damage of all weapons in half, that would not magically make the upper crust of those weapons useless all of a sudden.

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

Now what's the scaling on weapons? What's the advantage a player gains by obtaining stronger damage mods if the weapon just gets that boost automatically?

Yeah, it would be great if my new shotgun did Primed Point Blank damage out of the box, but the endo and cash to level that mod, and the ducats and cash to buy it in the first place represented a lot of play time.

Why do weapons need to scale in damage? Why not just deal good baseline damage without having to rely on some mod to boost it? The advantage to removing base damage + multishot mods, and increasing the base stats of weapons in compensation, is that it frees up two slots that are currently being taken up by mandatory mods, thereby opening up a lot more build diversity. Players wouldn't simply be able to fill the gap with other damage mods, because again, the OP is proposing to remove raw damage increases in favor of damage conversion.

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

Legendary cores would be significantly less useful when you've just removed ⅔ of all the primed mods.

Sure, but they'd still be useful, if only as a collector's item to sell to others for plat if you've maxed out your mods. At the end of the day, if you haven't maxed out your mod collection, then refunding the Endo and credits spent on Primed mods, whether through an equivalent amount of mod resources or LCs, would let you take all of that to whichever mods remain at no major additional cost. If you did max out your collection already, you'd have already capped out on progression, so why ask for compensation?

[Eirshy]

I would like to note that, as mandatory as Multishot is, it has a very important purpose: rounding out the RNG curve. Builds oft rely on status and/or crit chance, and mulstishot is a way to increase the volume of fire without having to actually, you know, increase the volume of fire. Snipers are a major beneficiary of this, as only the Lanka can get guaranteed crits. Slotting SC+VA+PS on the new Rubico Prime gets you 2.5 bullets with a 95% chance on each bullet of critting. Without Multishot, you have a 5% chance of the game deciding your shot didn't count (just like my D&D game), but with both SC+VA, you're at a 0.25% chance of not getting at least one crit even if the VA was r0.

 

Given how central crit and status RNG is to current gameplay, we'd need some form of normalizing toggle at a minimum.

Also you're gonna need to completely redo enemy health/shield scaling as well. Even with an armor nerf. You try killing a pack of infested without Base Damage and Multishot at even just Sortie 1 levels. You'll see what I mean.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

42 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Sure, but this is something that is done for all weapons. If one were to cut the damage of all weapons in half, that would not magically make the upper crust of those weapons useless all of a sudden

The best weapons aren't too because they're better than the other guns, though they are. They're the top because they're the best at killing things. And we aren't cutting in half, it's more like a factor of 3-8 depending on the build.

45 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Sure, but they'd still be useful, if only as a collector's item to sell to others for plat if you've maxed out your mods

Oh, that would make it totally ok, getting a collector's item. I can add them to the noggles.

47 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

If you did max out your collection already, you'd have already capped out on progression, so why ask for compensation?

Not remotely, but what player doesn't max damage mods (and then crit mods) first? I can only think of about 3 prime variant weapon mods that aren't damage or crit.

And just about every weapon that has a maxed prime mod on it also has forma, so it's been levelled again and again for nothing.

 

The problem is damage is always going to be the thing people most want to mod, and the best thing to make them feel like they're progressing in the game. Damage is always going to be mandatory, take it away and you need something else to scale to keep the progression.

[Teridax68]

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

The best weapons aren't too because they're better than the other guns, though they are. They're the top because they're the best at killing things.

I fail to see the point here. Top-tier weapons are top-tier because they're the best at killing things, and... ? How does this relate to what is being argued?

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

And we aren't cutting in half, it's more like a factor of 3-8 depending on the build.

Sure, but as is being explained in the very point you are responding to, the reduction factor is irrelevant, because it's being applied across all weapons. Even if every weapon in the game had its damage reduced to literally one percent of its current value, the same weapons would still be dealing proportionately more damage than the rest.

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

Not remotely, but what player doesn't max damage mods (and then crit mods) first? I can only think of about 3 prime variant weapon mods that aren't damage or crit.

There are quite a few non-damaging Primed mods, more than 3 (many of them offer ammo mutation, for example), but again, if those mods are getting removed and compensated for, what would be the issue? You could just take the resources you sunk into them that have been given back to you, and use them on other mods.

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

And just about every weapon that has a maxed prime mod on it also has forma, so it's been levelled again and again for nothing.

Forma is an entirely separate issue, and DE's method in the past has been to simply hand out Forma whenever reworking a weapon or mod. I also do think Forma needs to be reworked so that it can stack polarities and doesn't offer any downsides, but that's another topic for another discussion.

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

The problem is damage is always going to be the thing people most want to mod, and the best thing to make them feel like they're progressing in the game. Damage is always going to be mandatory, take it away and you need something else to scale to keep the progression.

I disagree completely, I don't think damage comes even remotely close to the core of progression in Warframe. I've played this game for years now, and I remember maxing out Serration, Hornet Strike, and Pressure Point within my first few months of play. For the vast majority of my playthrough, my progression has been based on unlocking and mastering new frames and weapons, as well as collecting everything else that is to be collected. Iirc, in one of his videos, Brozime, a popular content creator, mentions that, past a certain mastery rank, players tend to look for tools, more than raw damage pumps, because at that point it becomes easy to obtain the BiS weapon, and generally mod anything to Sortie levels of effectiveness, and the interest switches to weapons being capable of achieving more specific functions. I'm much more interested in finding stuff that varies my playstyle instead of just increasing my damage, and at this point there are very few ways in which I could increase my damage even if I tried. Even if I did, it would make no difference, because my weapons and mods can carry me through practically any content the game can throw at me. Ultimately, collection and diversity is at the core of progression in Warframe, not damage, which is why there is strictly no need to have mandatory damage-increasing mods in the game.

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

3 hours ago, GrayArchon said:

You'd have to re-mod all your weapons, sure, but you'd still have all the mods you needed. It would just be a case of opening up the mod interface, switching a few around, and going back to work. @(PS4)LoisGordils didn't talk about adding any new mods. Plus, you've now got lots of credits and endo, and probably more mod space, since the multishot and base damage mods tend to cost more than most mods (eg: you can now put on another 60/60 dual-stat mod, costing 7, in place of your Hornet Strike, which cost 14).

Your builds, after adjusting, should have similar effectiveness as before, since this mod rework would be accompanied by a rebalance in enemy health, as per OP.

Thank you

[DreadWarlock]

OK. as someone who also dislikes excessive focus on damage multipliers some games enforces, here's my suggestion on how do deal with some of the problems some people have found with the OP's suggestion, and add some suggestions of my own.

1st- If the problem lies in progression, why not have forma solve this problem. Let's say we fuse crit damage and crit chance mods and substitute the remaining one for say, status damage? Anyway, by removing serration and adding it's damage bonus directly to weapons. We could have forma be the scaling factor, Forma would not only halve the cost of any mod of a certain polarity it would also increase the rank of the built in serration mod. Different weapons would need defferent amounts of forma to get full damage. At the end of the day it should result in the same amount of forma we usually spend to reach the maximum damage of a weapon. This would solve the problem of having access to a full powered weapon from the get go. And also encourage people to invest time in teh game to unlock a weapon's full potential.

2nd- However, just as cited by some people here, Multishot is far too important to be remove. It's not just a damage bonus, it's also important to deal with enemy bullS#&$ armor scaling, by allowing you to proc more than one status effect per shot, as well as increase your odds of getting a critical hit. which is why I decided on fusing the crit mods and and making a new status damage mod to take the place of the mod that's going to become obsolete.

3rd- This is also something the needs tp be considered. The neutral status chance mod should be buffed to become THE status mod. As it currently stands, we need far too many elements to properly increase status chance, because only dual stat mods give us status chace. I suggest a rework in the dual stat mods allowing it to give another kind of bonus, and have the sure shot-like mods to get the 120% status chance or 240% status chance(or whatever bonuses, they could also buff the base status chance on all weapons so large multipliers wouldn't be needed for 100% status chance builds, or something similar). As for the dual stat mods, it could allow for a secondary effect on elemental procs. I don't know, there are many possibilities here, like Cold dual stat mods could add the ability of cold procs to apply a damage multiplier on all impact damage for the duration of the slow effect perhaps? This would be a buff to both cold procs and impact damage and may allow for people to choose Impact over Slash. THe same thing could be done to Puncture, like, have Toxin procs allow for puncture damage to punchthrough(only through enemies) and they could even buff puncture procs to have that stacking mechanic they initially proposed. 

 

Edited September 27, 2018 by DreadWarlock

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

My thoughts on this:

I like this, multishot and base damage mods are essential to any build right now and are a major restrictor to diversity. Neither generate interesting choices, they just add raw damage, which is currently always the most desirable thing to have on a weapon. I'd increase status chance on those weapons as well, to make the transition complete, but otherwise increasing stats to match the ones lost by eliminating those mods would be a net buff, and would allow those weapons to then have their stats raised or reduced more finely as needed.

A larger, and much tricker issue, is going to be that of compensating players for the mods that would be removed. Legendary Cores definitely seem like they could be the best compensation, and in fact it may perhaps even be more desirable to also bunch together the Endo and credits refunded from non-Primed mods to also convert that into more LCs.

I'm not a fan of status as currently implemented, but nonetheless, I think this is a brilliant idea. Converting damage to a certain type, instead of simply adding more damage, would make for much more interesting strategic choices, and would force players to consider the kind of damage and status they want to apply with their weapon, instead of just piling on everything they'd like. There would likely have to be some adjustments and additional considerations (you might have to cap the damage conversion to 50% for any one element, so that players would at most convert 100% of their damage to two composite elements, otherwise things might get weird past 100% conversion rates), but this could still be a huge step forward.

This I very much agree with as well, and I think the same can largely be said for status as well. To me, this just indicates how status and crit are both ultimately fairly shallow means of customizing weapons, but if the intent is to just do short-term work before considering a much larger overhaul, combining crit chance and damage into the same mods could work just fine.

Pure status chance mods are obsolete for sure. I think there's a lot of chaff that could just be removed, though some lesser-used mods could probably do fine with just buffs.

I'd personally go one step further and make armor static, i.e. never scale at all. 75% damage reduction can be reached at 900 armor, which is less than what Eidolons have, and the end result is still that Grineer would scale quadratically in their effective health, even if they'd return to linear scaling past a certain threshold. If armor remained constant, Grineer wouldn't become the high-level bullet sponges that they are now, and Corrosive Projection wouldn't be the optimal aura mod each time.

I too would be curious to know how the above proposed changes would make current endgame weapons useless. Most of the proposed changes here would affect all weapons, or practically all of them, and boil down to a general damage squish, rather than targeted nerfs to any particular build.

Yes, we have similar philosophies, I see:]

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

1 minute ago, DreadWarlock said:

allowing you to proc more than one status effect per shot

That's why armor should get reworked, not to mention status over 100% 🙂

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

6 minutes ago, DreadWarlock said:

like Cold dual stat mods could add the ability of cold procs to apply a damage multiplier on all impact damage for the duration of the slow effect perhaps?

Yes! I love elemental synergy! 

[DreadWarlock]

1 minute ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

Yes! I love elemental synergy! 

I just thought on what could be done to the heat and electricity dual stat mods. 

The Electricity mod could allow for certain elemental proc damage(of any element that doesn't deliver DoT effects) to be scaled by the amount of enemies affected by a proc. Just like what happens to volt's Discharge. As for heat damage it could apply an effect in which enemies affected by panic would be more vulnerable to crit damage, or maybe have it increase the AoE on status procs(it would allow for single target procs to become AoE, although with a smaller range compared to naturally AoE procs).  

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Ultimately, collection and diversity is at the core of progression in Warframe, not damage

I'd agree with this, but what damage mods do is allow for some of that diversity within a single weapon - which is why you can get something like the Hek and keep it until Saturn. Without those mods you either:

- Get a gun at MR4 that annihilates everything.

- Get a gun at MR4 that only works until Mercury or Mars.

And if the latter you need another gun at around MR8 to bridge the gap to the Vaykor Hek and another around MR14 to make that work for levels 50+.

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Brozime, a popular content creator, mentions that, past a certain mastery rank, players tend to look for tools, more than raw damage pumps

Yeah, I'd agree with that, but raw damage is still something you need - it's the baseline. The Tigris Prime, Vaykor Hek, Arca Plasmor, etc are all very different, but they all have good base damage that separates them from, say, the Convectrix (which is garbage despite extremely high status).

7 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Sure, but as is being explained in the very point you are responding to, the reduction factor is irrelevant, because it's being applied across all weapons.

So you nerf all weapons - great, but now your Vaykor Hek that owned on T3 Sorties now struggles with the T1 mission. What do you take to that 3rd sortie mission now?

You also have to nerf all content past about level 40. Basically we're rebalancing the entire game, something that's tremendously hard.

11 hours ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

The other damage mods will work similarly to how Conclave damage mods work (which I love tbh). As in, they don't add more damage. Rather, they take a percentage of the weapon's damage and converts it to the mod's damage type

This is a problem, because PvP and PvE are very different beasts. Part of the reason Destiny kinda sucks is that every weapon needs to be fair in PvP, so nothing can be allowed to do too much DPS vs anything else. That's why all their weapons are so unvaried (despite having both loads of them and weapon levelling) and why the standout weapons become instantly meta. Conclave mods are part of DE's way of handling this - make elemental damage a trade off rather a boost.

So PvP - you want equal balance of damage and tankiness. You're carrying a gun that can kill you, but probably not in one shot (unless you want it to be a CoD twitch shooter). 30 kills and 5 deaths would often be a match winning score.

PvE - you want some enemies that can take a lot more damage than they can dish out, and general enemies you can kill in droves. You want to kill 100 of them and not get one-shotted.  30 kills vs 5 deaths would be game over, you want 200 kills and 0 deaths.

This PvE balance is part of the reason frames like Nyx don't really work - all the enemies are really bad at killing each other.

There are ways around this - the commonest being Destiny/The Division style bullet sponges (you think Noxes are bad?) or a very different game with far fewer, far more deadly enemies (Ivara mains might be happy though).

TL;DR: while I like some of these ideas I don't want DE to rebalance Warframe into a PvP style progression. I enjoy wiping out a corridor of mobs with one Arca Plasmor shot, or clearing a room of lvl 100 enemies with a Lenz, or whatever. I don't really want all the weapons equally balanced against bullet sponges, and I doubt DE will want to rebalance all the enemies in the game - their current solution is clearly "let power creep happen" so let's just go with that 🙂

Edited September 27, 2018 by (XB1)KayAitch

[ShortCat]

12 hours ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

1. Remove base damage and multishot mods and boost weapon damage by said amount. Refund the Endo cost and, for Primed mods, maybe have them converted into Legendary Cores?

Not a fan of this idea. Base damage mods are the first mods new players usually max, so this suggestion would erase 1 million credits and 20k Endo. A bold move, especially with the existence of Primed mods. Why not just redesign those mods to make them less mandatory. Like Multishot creates additional pellets instead of bullets? Mod is still there, funcionality is almost the same, but does not grant a boring double damage bonus.

12 hours ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

3. If you use a crit chance mod, you will obviously use the critical damage one. Similar to the companion mod, Bite, critical mods will incorporate both critical chance and damage.

Merging 2 staple mods into one is only half a solution. Same approach as above - redesign. Critical damage is easy - bonus weak spot damage. It would reward precise aiming even more and require skill. Critical chance is iffy - maybe something like highlight weakspots for easy targeting?

12 hours ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

2. The other damage mods will work similarly to how Conclave damage mods work (which I love tbh). As in, they don't add more damage. Rather, they take a percentage of the weapon's damage and converts it to the mod's damage type.

I support this. Same can be done with physical mods, as we have 2 sets of those. One can add damage, the other can convert it.

I also support a revisit of enemy scaling and the current damage system.

[Teridax68]

1 hour ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

I'd agree with this, but what damage mods do is allow for some of that diversity within a single weapon - which is why you can get something like the Hek and keep it until Saturn. Without those mods you either:

- Get a gun at MR4 that annihilates everything.

- Get a gun at MR4 that only works until Mercury or Mars.

And if the latter you need another gun at around MR8 to bridge the gap to the Vaykor Hek and another around MR14 to make that work for levels 50+.

Yeah, I'd agree with that, but raw damage is still something you need - it's the baseline. The Tigris Prime, Vaykor Hek, Arca Plasmor, etc are all very different, but they all have good base damage that separates them from, say, the Convectrix (which is garbage despite extremely high status).

So you nerf all weapons - great, but now your Vaykor Hek that owned on T3 Sorties now struggles with the T1 mission. What do you take to that 3rd sortie mission now?

You also have to nerf all content past about level 40. Basically we're rebalancing the entire game, something that's tremendously hard.

The OP is proposing a nerf to enemy scaling as well. They're not simply suggesting to nerf all weapons across the board and call it a day, they're proposing a stat squish, precisely so that we don't end up with the issue of certain weapons either obliterating everything in their general direction, or becoming useless in anything other than a base node in the Star Chart. In turn, this should prevent enemies from needing to turn into bullet sponges with excessive damage, leading to an overall better situation for players. It would definitely be a fairly significant update (though perhaps not a "tremendously hard" one, as it would require altering general mods and scalings, rather than fine-tuning every enemy and weapon)/, but nonetheless one that is feasible, as DE has done much larger balance passes in the past.

1 hour ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

This is a problem, because PvP and PvE are very different beasts. Part of the reason Destiny kinda sucks is that every weapon needs to be fair in PvP, so nothing can be allowed to do too much DPS vs anything else. That's why all their weapons are so unvaried (despite having both loads of them and weapon levelling) and why the standout weapons become instantly meta. Conclave mods are part of DE's way of handling this - make elemental damage a trade off rather a boost.

For sure, PvE doesn't need to be balanced like PvP, but really, that does not exclude the tactical value of mods that convert damage, instead of simply adding to it. Moreover, I feel much of the argument in this post misses the fact that there are two factors to PvE balance, namely players and enemies. Unlike PvP, where everything needs to be balanced against itself, PvE pits the players against NPCs, whose durability, damage and so on can be adjusted as needed. If PvE enemies are bullet sponges, the best way to address that would be to simply nerf their health. There is no need to "let power creep happen" when you can balance the baseline around the ideal situation you desire. In fact, establishing much stricter bounds on player damage would make this easier, because you'd then have a much clearer range for balancing enemy health values.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

8 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

If PvE enemies are bullet sponges, the best way to address that would be to simply nerf their health. There is no need to "let power creep happen" when you can balance the baseline around the ideal situation you desire

It's not quite that simple. It's really enemy damage vs enemy health vs a pile of other factors. 

Ok, now you need to scale that, creating harder challenges.

So if you scale everything nobody really notices. You're twice as tough/powerful, they are too - all the numbers double but the actual challenge stays the same. You can see this kind of mechanic in Borderlands, and does work there.

Warframe's solution to this is to have two completely different progression models: enemies scale by a fairly linear algorithm, but players don't - frames and weapons cap out at 30. To take your fight to any enemies higher than about lvl 20 you have to learn how to use mods - you're not grinding for the next level, you're grinding for the gear you can combine to kill the next tier of enemies. This gives players agency that simple scaling doesn't.

In addition Warframe scales enemy toughness much faster than damage, because a few bullet sponges (Nox, etc) in a mob can make for challenge, while just one shot enemies can just make it feel unfair and boring.

This is fairly well understood game design, you can see it in most online multiplayer games. It's the whole reason loot-em-up mechanics work - it's just fun to build your gun that can kill lvl 100 enemies, but under the hood it's still grind.

However, you don't see this mechanic (much anyway) in PvP games - grinding might give you minor upgrades, but you can't let ranked players have anything game changing. A skilled noob has to be in a fair fight with maxed out veterans or you kill any chance of new players getting into it after about a week.

This is why Conclave mods just swap stats rather than add them - that's the right, balanced, mechanic for PvP, but it's just all wrong for PvE (at least Warframe's version of it).

The suggest here is to take away the mods and scale the enemies down, which naïvely sounds fair, but really it would flatten the feeling of progress. We're left with either the scaling being done for you (i.e a lvl 15 is a match for lvl 15 enemies, a lvl 30 can take on lvl 30, and enemies above that, up to 50ish, would be for teams to take on) or maxing out (lvl 40 sorties, but no more damage/scale/multi mods).

That's not necessarily a bad game design, but it's not one that I'd still be playing hundreds of hours in. It's a game I'd have maxed out and got bored of ages ago.

Edited September 27, 2018 by (XB1)KayAitch

[Teridax68]

39 minutes ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

The suggest here is to take away the mods and scale the enemies down, which naïvely sounds fair, but really it would flatten the feeling of progress. We're left with either the scaling being done for you (i.e a lvl 15 is a match for lvl 15 enemies, a lvl 30 can take on lvl 30, and enemies above that, up to 50ish, would be for teams to take on) or maxing out (lvl 40 sorties, but no more damage/scale/multi mods).

But your entire previous explanation completely defeats this point. If players get double damage, but enemies get double health, you just end up on a treadmill where nothing changes. You're not approaching fights in a novel manner, or engaging in novel gameplay, you're just doing the exact same thing, which isn't progression. The only indicator of progression is that lower-level content becomes trivial, and that is a bad thing. If you want to generate progress, give players more gameplay, and incidentally that is exactly what happens when players receive more frames and more weapons. It's not like pulling back on enemy scaling is a terribly difficult thing, either -- if enemies past level X become too difficult to adequately deal with, you could just set that as the upper bound for Sortie content, particularly since the opposite was done in response to player power creep in the past.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

40 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

But your entire previous explanation completely defeats this point. If players get double damage, but enemies get double health, you just end up on a treadmill where nothing changes

Yes that's my point - I wasn't saying that was a good thing. That's why you can't just nerf weapons and then nerf enemies to match.

40 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

The only indicator of progression is that lower-level content becomes trivial, and that is a bad thing

That's exactly what happens in Borderlands, which uses this model. Borderlands was good, but only as far as it has new content, between 50-100 hours depending on how much you enjoy raid bosses. It also had it's own solution: RNG guns, kind of like every weapon is a generated Zaw with a Riven. While that bought some extra playtime for the game it really isn't something I want to see in Warframe.

 

Point is - I'm not arguing for that kind of scaling, I'm saying that's where the OP's changes take us, and you're right: it's a bad thing.

Edited September 27, 2018 by (XB1)KayAitch

[Teridax68]

2 minutes ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

Yes that's my point - I wasn't saying that was a good thing. That's why you can't just nerf weapons and then nerf enemies to match.

Why not? Again, this is what I was pointing out in your argument: at the end, the proposal here does not eliminate the feeling of progress, because damage never generated one to begin with.

2 minutes ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

Point is - I'm not arguing for that kind of scaling, I'm saying that's where the OP's changes take us, and you're right: it's a bad thing.

How? This feels completely backwards: what the OP is proposing is to equalize damage and prevent the treadmill that arises in games like Borderlands and the current game, not create it. How exactly would making damage and enemy health around the same at all levels trivialize content?