Steel_Rook Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 I'm going to have to pick-and-choose what to respond to here as I simply don't have the opportunity to respond to everything... 12 hours ago, Teridax68 said: I don't really see what that situation really has to do with status procs, so much as an error in map and AI design that led to an exploit in a totally separate game. To be clear, I don't think every status proc needs to deal damage, and in fact I think we could do with fewer damaging status effects (Electricity status procs deal damage, for some reason, despite being more known for the stun). However, I honestly don't think it matters whether a weapon's damage comes from, say, its base damage or its fire DoT, so long as the sum total of any weapon's damage remains balanced, which should itself entail changes to status effects and how their damage is calculated: currently, the best DoT weapon in the game is the best burst weapon in the game, i.e. the Tigris Prime, and so because the Slash DoT formula is based on its damage per shot. The problem is how the damage of these Status procs is calculated. The Heat proc we're talking about here is base_damage*(heat/2), meaning the harder the weapon hits and the more aggressively you've modded it for Heat damage (which in the current system of stacked mod effects can be A LOT), the more Heat damage it does. Why shouldn't I, then, bring the heaviest single-target sniper weapon I have available to me into an Infested mission, snipe an Ancient in the chest and then run away waiting for the Heat proc to kill them? The Opticor, for instance, deals 1000 damage base and can easily be slotted with Serration, Heavy Caliber, Split Chamber and at least 150% Heat damage. If that damage then spreads to nearby enemies like Inaros' Scarab Swarm, then that's a MASSIVE amount of DPS from a weapon which by its own design should be terrible against the Infested - which it is, currently. Now, granted, the above might not be exactly a GREAT example, but my problem with damage-dealing Status procs is how their damage is calculated, chiefly because it's calculated off the damage of the weapon. Sure, the Slash proc is problematic because for some odd reason it deals True damage rather than... You know, SLASH. But it's not the only problematic one. A friend of mine swears by putting Gas on his sniper rifle, for instance, because it allows him to turn it into an AoE cannon with the damage of a sniper rifle, if the status chance is high enough. Which it is on the Vectis Prime, more so with its even split of damage types making it easier for Elemental Damage to proc. I'm not necessarily opposed to a weapon's damage being derived predominantly from DoT, but I don't want that DoT to come from a one-size-fits-all Status proc applicable to every weapon. Something like the Miter dealing heavy bleeding or the Ignis setting people on fire - that makes sense for those weapons' design. Their direct damage is weak, but their DoT somewhat makes up for that. When you transplant that same mechanic to weapons which are already very powerful is where issues start cropping up. Why take a weak weapon with a lot of DoT when you can take a powerful weapon with a lot of DoT? I'd argue Slash would be popular even if it didn't bypass armour, though obviously not to the same extent, because it's free damage and easy to achieve due to physical damage being weighted four times as much as elemental damage Status procs. I'm told that Warframe didn't always have the current damage system, and that these kinds of Elemental damage were only available to a few select weapons which had them natively. To be perfectly honest... I kind of like that system better. I understand that rare, weapon-specific damage types make it harder to balance enemy resistances since that bottlenecks people into just a few specific weapons, but it also has the side effect of restricting those powerful Status procs to just a few specific weapons. I know the ship has sailed on this one, but I'm still not convinced that shifting even more of our damage away from our weapons and onto our Status procs is a positive change. There are plenty of other ways to balance different weapons against different factions. If you want a weapon that's good against the Infested, then anything with a lot of AoE or a fast rate of fire or punch-through is typically going to be pretty good, even without creating a Status proc specifically designed to fight Infested. 12 hours ago, Teridax68 said: Sure, and it's great to ask oneself those questions, but neither frame's armor-modifying mechanic presents any real choice on the matter: Atlas's rubble mechanic heals when he's not at full health, gives him armor otherwise, and can be collected either by fighting or upon the death of his Rumblers. The latter are also far too slow for him to consider pre-emptively spawning Rumblers, then waiting for them to die just so that he can give himself 100 armor that'll immediately start decaying. Inaros's armor modifier comes at a health cost, so it can't be used as an instant heal, and on top of that the entire mechanic blends with his kit so that it is always better to pre-emptively charge his Scarab Armor to 100%, especially with the augment equipped. It's not even a good choice to use the swarm active, most of the time, because the active's damage is weak, the heal is weak due to being based on damage received, and both scale with Power Strength, a stat Inaros really doesn't need to use when he could just max out on health, armor and damage resistance instead. This isn't the only instance here, and in general armor modifiers don't actually provide good gameplay or interesting choices in Warframe. As mentioned above, I think that if there's a distinct way of increasing effective health without modifying current health, it would be overshields, though the state of shields and the relative rarity of the effect make the mechanic difficult to appreciate. I didn't bring up Atlas and Inaros on accident. I picked them specifically because I've played both of those Frames extensively, and I honestly don't agree with what you're saying here. For both of these characters, their Armour mechanic matters significantly, even more so with the new-ish Adaptation mod but that's besides the point. My Atlas has 740 health and 945 around, for a total of 2145 armour at max capacity. This gives him an effective health value of 6031 which is weak, yes. However, due to his low health, a single point of healing in those conditions gives Atlas 8.15 points of effective healing. A single 75 health Rubble produced by Landslide, then, effectively heals him for 611 health, and Atlas is able to produce a LOT of those. My Inaros, by contrast, has 5280 health and 420 armour, which gives him 12 672 effective health, with Scarab Armour producing an extra 3520 effective health. That's not a small number, especially considering Inaros' armour is not just an on/off switch. It's a resource. And I STRONGLY disagree with your views on building and using Inaros. I've built mine for Power Strength, because Scarab Swarm is absolutely invaluable. Yes, I have other means of healing, but Scarab Swarm is the only one which allows me to heal WHILE fighting AND the only one which heals my Sentinel AND is also probably the best source of control I have, which also happens to be independent of ability range. But to go back to healing: While Atlas heals 8.15 points of effective healing per single point of healing, Inaros only heals 3.13 points. Granted, Inaros generally has a lot more healing to lean back on (a LOT more), but that's a difference in Warframe design and a fundamental problem with Atlas' stats balance more so that armour not mattering. What you're also ignoring is the fact that enemies can do to us what we can do to them, meaning they can strip our armour and mitigate our armour. I've been playing with the Adaptation mod recently, and have only now started to realise just HOW many enemies in this game shoot Puncture damage. That's most of the Grenier and most of the Corpus. Now consider that the "armour" stat listed in your Arsenal is Ferrite armour, meaning most Corpus and Grenier guns will reduce the armour's damage resistance by 50% and also deal 50% bonus damage after that. Near as I can tell, both Scarab Swarm and Rubble both just increase the Warframe's innate Ferrite armour. That reduces Atlas' effective health to ~1 693 and Inaros' to 5 368 health. By contrast. Now compare this against my Rhino Prime, who has 701 armour. This gives him 3838 Iron Skin without factoring in Ironclad Charge or absorbed damage. Because Alloy armour has only a 15% damage vulnerability to Puncture, that's 2 773 effective health. My point here is that armour offers an added layer of complexity. It affects effective health, yes, but it also affects healing received and especially damage received in a non-equal fashion. High-armour Warframes are going to do disproportionately well against enemies who deal Slash and Blast damage, but will suffer against Puncture and Corrosive especially, and that's not even accounting for their health type. In fact, I want to segue into my next point right here: 13 hours ago, Teridax68 said: I think visual feedback could be interesting, but what personally interests me far more is the gameplay behind this: what is the actual net impact of these resistances and associated audiovisual responses? How are they meant to affect the player and the choices they make? If the net gameplay impact is simply that the player has to swap one damage mod out for another damage mod just to be able to deal +X% damage to the faction they're fighting, I'm not sure that's really a compelling choice. Different damage types dealing better or worse against different types of health, armour and shields adds complexity to the game's mechanics and more levers to pull for developers trying to enact some sort of balance. Yes, currently it really DOES come down to just swapping a single damage mod for another, but this is one thing I'd personally like to change. For one, elemental damage is currently all-powerful. Not only does it add a LOT of damage (cumulatively more so than pretty much any other type of damage) but it ALSO gives you near complete control over the damage your weapon does. Something as simple as slapping two 90% elemental damage mods on your gun gives you a combo elemental damage mod worth 180% of all three of your physical damage mods combined. It turns bullet guns into toxic supersoakers, as a random example. I'm still of the opinion that elemental damage mods should convert a portion of the weapon's damage into that element, rather than straight-up doubling its damage on top of criticals and headshots and whatnot. Fundamentally, I like damage/resistance systems in theory because they offer both a bit of depth in learning what's good against which enemy without having to rely on gimmicks and a bit of depth in loadout selection. In practice, however, Warframe has a pretty convoluted and confusing one that's impractical to try and learn (and simpler to just have the Wiki open to cross-reference) and also inconsistent. I'm of the opinion that simplifying and standardising the resistance spread within enemy groups would take a lot of the clunk out of the system while still allowing enough variety for weapon selection to matter. The Corups (the regular ones, not the Terra version) are a good example of doing this right. Everyone has shields so it pays to have an anti-shield weapon, but Crewmen have a very different health type than Proxies. The question, then, is what do you want dead more - the Proxies or the Humans? Well, humans are generally tougher... But every so often the game will throw a tanky Bursa at you, so what do you choose? Grenier are maybe a bit less straightforward since their "Machine" units are pretty much just Rollers - and that's kind of dumb. Maybe mix in the civvies with the staves into more tilesets and give them high health but no armour? While I'm not a huge fan of it, Warframe's general design pushes players into building up a large inventory of diverse tools. It makes sense for the game to actually have use for at least SOME of those tools beyond just whatever weapon I can mod for enough damage that it works against all the enemy types. I'm fine with my Opticor being oppressive on the Plains of Eidolon where sight lines are long and enemies are tanky, but utterly suck against the Infested in close quarters. I have a bunch of shotguns for that. I'm equally fine with my shotguns not being good enough against heavy armour even at point blank range because I need something with better penetration. Once again, I feel that Warframe's modding system offers perhaps a bit TOO much freedom to players, which results in most guns being built the same way and used against all of the enemies. The primary danger here, of course, is going too far with the anti-faction specialisation to the point where we might as well just throw our hands up and do a bunch more +damage to Grenier mods. Incidentally, I ABSOLUTELY HATE THESE. Take them out of the game, burn them in a tyre fire, never put crap like that in your game. If you want me to build a weapon that's better against the Grenier, let me exploit the game's innate mechanics to optimise it, don't just flip a switch and tell me that this weapon is magically better against an enemy because of their race or species. The challenge should be on ME to figure out what "good against Grenier" actually means after having fought and scanned them, not just to punch a button that says "optimise against Grenier." 13 hours ago, Teridax68 said: There are many factors to this, but ultimately I think the game needs to tone down its AoE, find a way to scale difficulty that doesn't involve jacking up enemy stats and numbers, progressively rework several of its tilesets to make them more open and parkour-friendly, and overhaul its new player experience (again) so that players have a clear notion from the get-go that they're meant to move and fight at the same time, not just one after the other. On the topic of mods specifically, I think this system should reflect itself through many, many more mods that would reward the player for blending parkour into combat, for example by providing some benefit for shooting while aim-gliding or wall-latching. Honestly, I'm not a fan of this at all. While I like the Parkour system, I don't like being forced to use it in combat. Aiming on the move - especially with slow-firing weapons with slow, arcing projectiles - is a recipe for frustration. Moreover, Warframe is a horde shooter at the end of the day. A lot of missions are designed around not just throwing a lot of enemies at the player but forcing the player to kill as quickly as possible. Survival, Sanctuary Assault, most Void Fissures, etc. - all of these are reminiscent of Nephilem Rifts which test not the player's ability to survive or win, but on whether they brought enough DPS. Forcing players to stay on the move means forcing players to dedicate more of their time moving and less of their time killing, which is going to run head-first into the DPS checks of a lot of game modes. Moreover, I LIKE the tight, claustrophobic feel of a lot of tilesets and would hate for older tiles to be phased out in favour of wider open arenas, like what it seems like you're suggesting. While Warframe is not a cover shooter, it still pays to have cover of SOME kind if for no reason other than to prevent every enemy on the map from shooting at you at the same time. I know you're trying to argue for diversity, but the way you're phrasing it comes across as trying to argue for invalidating the tank-n-spank playstyle that - yes, absolutely does exist in Warframe. There's little aggor control in the game, but there is some and enemies will generally focus on whomever they saw first. It makes sense, then, for my Inaros to move ahead of the pack and eat the brunt of the damage while my team-mates hang a little back and engage only after I've absorbed the initial salvo. One of the things I really hate about Warframe is when a fight devolves into every player bullet-jumping in a different direction, scatters to the four winds and turns proceedings into a disorganised dogfight. I hate it, because when players inevitably die, I have to go dig their derelict ass out from three rooms away and hope I can locate them before they time out. A substantial amount of coordination and synergy is lost when an over-reliance on mobility causes players to scatter. And that's not even considering that some Warframes - quite a few, actually - have "bunkering" abilities. From Frost's Snow Globe to Nidus' Ravenous to Garaa's cylindrical barrier thing that I don't remember the name of to a whole bunch more, plenty of Warframes are able to lay down hard fortifications and hold their ground. And when my team-mates super-speed away from my Parasitic Link and dash out of the constant healing of my Ravenous and die, I then have to go die and trade my Mutation stacks reviving them. Or swap to Operator and ensure my Sentinel dies, I guess. Point being, "it's a valid strategy." The last thing I want to see Warframe do is punish people for not bunnyhopping like it's 1999. I've played those games, I've paid my dues, I pick my Warframes based on being able to hold ground rather than having to be constantly on the move. Having that as an option? Sure, that's fine. Would even make sense for SOME Warframes and SOME builds. But to make the game inaccessible to everyone who can't play Tumble Dryer Simulator and shoot at the same time seems more than excessive. The Parkour system has a substantial cost of its own. I'm fine with offering conditional buffs if a player is willing to pay that cost, but I'm strictly opposed to trying to redefine how players are "meant" to play Warframe, especially in this fashion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sharkgoblin Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 On 2018-12-13 at 6:35 AM, Hmm...interesting. said: I posted this on the Warframe subreddit about a week ago, but I have now decided to post it here to see what you guys think. Having a modding system is fantastic, but it is not executed well in Warframe. If it were done well, many of the problems that DE is having with community feedback would either not exist or be much less significant. Among those problems are the lack of endgame content, the broken riven system, and underwhelming operators. Now let me just clarify that the modding of Warframes is quite adequate and does not need much changing (though some tweaks could be done to make it a bit better). What I'm most concerned with is weapon modding. There will be some extra modding stuff at the end of the post Weapon modding is currently diseased with mandatory mods and useless mods. Most weapon builds can be boiled down to Damage, dual multishot, an elemental combo, status chance if it's a status build or critical chance/damage if it's a critical build, and one slot to do what you want with. Almost every other mod is useless. The way to fix this is to remove mandatory mods. I don't mean simply eliminate every mod that we need in this game, but either integrate those mods in another way, change the way the stats of those mods work, or improve the mods that aren't being used. Flat damage mods: Almost every single person playing this game will include a damage mod (Serration, Hornet Strike, [Primed] Point Blank, [Primed] Pressure Point) on their weapon no matter what. This means that you essentially lose a modifiable mod slot (ironic isn't it?). The way to solve this is to make the damage of the weapon scale with the level of the weapon. These are just placeholder numbers, but at rank 0, weapons could have a 0% damage multiplier, and at rank 30, there could be a 200% damage multiplier. That solves the flat damage issue. Elemental and IPS damage: Rather than add a damage type based on the base damage of the weapon, elemental damage should convert the base damage into another damage. With this, the weapon doesn't do more damage, but it does more of one damage type, and less of another. The tool tip of the mod card would say for example, "Converts 50% of the damage into toxin" or something along those lines. That fixes the issue of damage types. Critical and Status Stats: These don't need much changing (maybe just a bit of number tweaking), although it would be nice to get some other mods that could also modify those stats. The "beginner" status mods (Rifle Aptitude, Shotgun Savvy, Sure Shot, Melee Prowess) should absolutely be buffed. They should be made additive instead of multiplicative, either adding status chance before or after the multiplicative status chance buff calculations (from mods like the 60/60 mods). Status values of these "beginner" mods would need to be modified accordingly. Multishot: This is the most difficult one to change. I'm not entirely sure about how to best change this statistic, but my current idea is to have it double or triple the damage (with added pellets of course) at the expense of halving (or maybe just lowering) the critical chance and status chance. Feel free to post more ideas in the comments. That covers all of the mandatory weapon mods/stats, and my ideas on them. Let's talk about a few of the problems that this could solve. Lack of endgame content: These proposed changes would make weapons less game-breaking, and would make star chart enemies more worthy foes. That being said, some numbers concerning enemy health, armor, shields, etc. would have to be tweaked, but that's not what this post is for. This won't necessarily solve the lack of replayable or interesting content in Warframe, but it will expand the scope of viable end game missions. The broken riven system: At the moment, rivens are a broken system. While much of Warframe takes a very predictable and reliable approach to player investment yield (take for example the microtransactions that Warframe uses), the riven system goes in the complete opposite direction. It requires an enormous amount of time invested with a very luck-based outcome that either yields either extreme satisfaction or extreme disappointment. This polarized outcome wrecks the trading system and the economic balance of the game. The proposed changes to modding put a dent in both the economic imbalance of rivens, and the invariability of riven rolling (no more Damage+Multishot god rolls). While there would still need to be many changes in order to make the system work, this would be a step in the right direction. I may make another post concerning how to best change this. Underwhelming operators: Since weapons would be nerfed so to speak, the significance of operator damage would increase incredibly since they would do so much more damage than they did before. This would begin to pave the road for the Warframe & operator combat relationship. We don't use operators for anything other than Eidolon hunting and kuva farming, which is truly unfortunate since there is a lot of potential for using operators in combat. Now for some extra stuff concerning mods: Make stances and auras all have the same polarities. Limiting the stances and auras on weapons is just counter-intuitive. Why should my playstyle be limited by a polarity? I wanna enjoy different stances without having to forma or severely nerf my build because of it. Why in the world do so many weapon mods have V/Madurai polarities? An imbalance that doesn't need to be there. Many mods for both weapons and warframes find no use due to their obsolete stats or stat values. That should be fixed. just no. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(XBOX)Erudite Prime Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 On 2018-12-12 at 9:35 PM, Hmm...interesting. said: "Converts 50% of the damage into toxin" or something along those lines. That fixes the issue of damage types. I don't see how this fixes anything. It looks to me like you'll just do less damage. On 2018-12-12 at 9:35 PM, Hmm...interesting. said: it double or triple the damage (with added pellets of course) at the expense of halving (or maybe just lowering) the critical chance and status chance Please leave it alone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zuldar Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 On 2018-12-12 at 9:35 PM, Hmm...interesting. said: Multishot: This is the most difficult one to change. I'm not entirely sure about how to best change this statistic, but my current idea is to have it double or triple the damage (with added pellets of course) at the expense of halving (or maybe just lowering) the critical chance and status chance. Feel free to post more ideas in the comments. Multishot could work the same as it does now, but consume extra ammo out of the clip. Getting the most out of multishot would then benefit from the use of increased magazine size or reload speed, whereas not using multishot frees up two or three slots for other effects. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teridax68 Posted December 29, 2018 Share Posted December 29, 2018 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: The problem is how the damage of these Status procs is calculated. The Heat proc we're talking about here is base_damage*(heat/2), meaning the harder the weapon hits and the more aggressively you've modded it for Heat damage (which in the current system of stacked mod effects can be A LOT), the more Heat damage it does. I completely agree with this, which is why I brought up the example of the Tigris Prime in the paragraph you quoted. If a weapon is more oriented towards burst, it needs to have less damage over time, and vice-versa; a system that bases DoT power on sheer damage per hit is a system that rewards damage with more damage. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I'm not necessarily opposed to a weapon's damage being derived predominantly from DoT, but I don't want that DoT to come from a one-size-fits-all Status proc applicable to every weapon. Something like the Miter dealing heavy bleeding or the Ignis setting people on fire - that makes sense for those weapons' design. Their direct damage is weak, but their DoT somewhat makes up for that. When you transplant that same mechanic to weapons which are already very powerful is where issues start cropping up. Why take a weak weapon with a lot of DoT when you can take a powerful weapon with a lot of DoT? I'd argue Slash would be popular even if it didn't bypass armour, though obviously not to the same extent, because it's free damage and easy to achieve due to physical damage being weighted four times as much as elemental damage Status procs. I'm told that Warframe didn't always have the current damage system, and that these kinds of Elemental damage were only available to a few select weapons which had them natively. To be perfectly honest... I kind of like that system better. I understand that rare, weapon-specific damage types make it harder to balance enemy resistances since that bottlenecks people into just a few specific weapons, but it also has the side effect of restricting those powerful Status procs to just a few specific weapons. I know the ship has sailed on this one, but I'm still not convinced that shifting even more of our damage away from our weapons and onto our Status procs is a positive change. I also largely agree with this, and personally I would also want to move towards a system where elements can only be found on weapons who possess them innately, rather than bolted onto any weapon with mods. A system that could give damage through status without overloading already highly damaging weapons could be great, but overall I also agree that when some elemental effect can be given to essentially any weapon with no real drawbacks (elemental mods currently also give bonus damage, and sometimes even extra status chance to boot), the choice of that element is no longer meaningful (I mentioned this as well in my previous post). An environment where only some weapons could apply a Viral, Corrosive or Magnetic effect is an environment where those weapons could be made deliberately more supportive due to their status effects, and therefore likely less damaging than a much more straightforward weapon, for example (assuming Magnetic were a useful element for the Tenno at any point in time). 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: There are plenty of other ways to balance different weapons against different factions. If you want a weapon that's good against the Infested, then anything with a lot of AoE or a fast rate of fire or punch-through is typically going to be pretty good, even without creating a Status proc specifically designed to fight Infested. This is precisely the kind of design I'd rather go for. When faced with large, packed groups of weak enemies, AoE damage is a completely intuitive answer, as would high-damage, single-target weapons against individual high-health opponents. It makes for these "just right" scenarios where some of the best weapons against zombie-like hordes will naturally be flamethrowers, shotguns that can shoot through multiple enemies at a time, rocket launchers, and all the other zombie movie tropes, without even having to give those enemies a special weakness to fire or whatever, and the same could be said for other factions if their distributions were rebalanced. Assuming different factions played completely differently from each other, and each naturally invited counters from weapons due to actual gameplay mechanics, there would be no need for resistances as a means of forcing certain weapons to be more effective against one faction over another, where no significant difference would exist otherwise. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I didn't bring up Atlas and Inaros on accident. I picked them specifically because I've played both of those Frames extensively, and I honestly don't agree with what you're saying here. For both of these characters, their Armour mechanic matters significantly, even more so with the new-ish Adaptation mod but that's besides the point. My Atlas has 740 health and 945 around, for a total of 2145 armour at max capacity. This gives him an effective health value of 6031 which is weak, yes. However, due to his low health, a single point of healing in those conditions gives Atlas 8.15 points of effective healing. A single 75 health Rubble produced by Landslide, then, effectively heals him for 611 health, and Atlas is able to produce a LOT of those. Sure, but where are you going to find this healing in abundance outside of Rubble itself? If Atlas's self-sustain is itself self-contained, there is no real difference between Atlas giving himself additional armor or healing himself, and Atlas just giving himself self-healing and bonus health. Atlas's low health does not matter in the calculations for his healing, because the healing is purely amplified by armor, which in turn means armor's specific contribution isn't that significant when "natural" healing is both scarce and too weak to usually matter. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: My Inaros, by contrast, has 5280 health and 420 armour, which gives him 12 672 effective health, with Scarab Armour producing an extra 3520 effective health. That's not a small number, especially considering Inaros' armour is not just an on/off switch. It's a resource. ... sure, yet all of that can simply be expressed as health. You may as well hold 4 to give yourself 3.5k bonus health, and the gameplay would be virtually identical. For sure, there's a channel, and with the augment the thing turns into a depleting resource, but that is not something specific to armor (in fact, it's not even an inherent property of armor, since it's unique to Inaros's 4). 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: And I STRONGLY disagree with your views on building and using Inaros. I've built mine for Power Strength, because Scarab Swarm is absolutely invaluable. Yes, I have other means of healing, but Scarab Swarm is the only one which allows me to heal WHILE fighting AND the only one which heals my Sentinel AND is also probably the best source of control I have, which also happens to be independent of ability range. This may be going on a bit of a tangent, but why are you building purely around Scarab Swarm for healing when Arcane Grace gives significantly better regeneration? The only time I've had trouble with my Sentinel surviving is when going into high-level endless missions for extended periods of time, at which point there's no real utility it could give Inaros that would significantly benefit him. Stack health, armor and Adaptation, and you end up with the closest thing to a truly immortal frame in the game. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: But to go back to healing: While Atlas heals 8.15 points of effective healing per single point of healing, Inaros only heals 3.13 points. Granted, Inaros generally has a lot more healing to lean back on (a LOT more), but that's a difference in Warframe design and a fundamental problem with Atlas' stats balance more so that armour not mattering. Okay, but why is that meaningful? Which situations does Atlas have a strategic advantage over Inaros because of this? Which healing is going to make that difference? 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: What you're also ignoring is the fact that enemies can do to us what we can do to them, meaning they can strip our armour and mitigate our armour. I've been playing with the Adaptation mod recently, and have only now started to realise just HOW many enemies in this game shoot Puncture damage. Puncture damage does not strip armor, and Corrosive damage on enemies is exceedingly rare. Puncture damage technically ignores half of the player's Ferrite armor, but considering how enemy and player damage are balanced in complete isolation from each other (with notorious side-effects when it comes to redirecting enemy damage towards other enemies), this has no impact on how we play the game, as ultimately enemy damage is purely based around player health (to begin with, anyway), and vice versa. In practice, if you're bringing a high-armor, low-health frame like Atlas into a Corpus mission, you're not going to suffer because of the Puncture or Radiation damage, you're going to suffer because of Nullifiers stripping your armor, i.e. actual in-game mechanics, rather than behind-the-scenes damage spreadsheets. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: That's most of the Grenier and most of the Corpus. Grineer deal mostly Impact and Slash damage, just FYI. The Corpus and Grineer are both designed to predominantly have damage types that counter the opposing faction. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Now consider that the "armour" stat listed in your Arsenal is Ferrite armour, meaning most Corpus and Grenier guns will reduce the armour's damage resistance by 50% and also deal 50% bonus damage after that. Near as I can tell, both Scarab Swarm and Rubble both just increase the Warframe's innate Ferrite armour. That reduces Atlas' effective health to ~1 693 and Inaros' to 5 368 health. By contrast. Now compare this against my Rhino Prime, who has 701 armour. This gives him 3838 Iron Skin without factoring in Ironclad Charge or absorbed damage. Because Alloy armour has only a 15% damage vulnerability to Puncture, that's 2 773 effective health. Okay... but then how does this impact gameplay? Which decision does this inform? 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: My point here is that armour offers an added layer of complexity. Sure, but my point is: does armor add depth? Complexity can make a system sound smarter than it is, but what actually matters is depth, i.e. the number of meaningful choices presented to the player. If all armor does is add some extra numbers to theorycrafting, yet have no tangible impact on how a player decides to approach a fight or build for a mission, then it's just dead weight. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Different damage types dealing better or worse against different types of health, armour and shields adds complexity to the game's mechanics and more levers to pull for developers trying to enact some sort of balance. But do they, though? When has DE ever used armor, shields or health independently of each other as a balancing measure? What impact has this had on the metagame, when players have been running Corrosive Projection by default for years? Again, it's all very nice to dress up a game with additional complexity, but if that complexity does not generate meaningful choices, or make the game feel genuinely deeper, then it's simply complexity for complexity's sake, and that's absolutely not something Warframe needs when it already does such a poor job of conveying its gameplay mechanics and systems. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I'm still of the opinion that elemental damage mods should convert a portion of the weapon's damage into that element, rather than straight-up doubling its damage on top of criticals and headshots and whatnot. This I can get behind with, for sure. Having mods convert one damage type to another, rather than simply add damage, makes for a more strategically engaging option, and could help force a tradeoff between damage and some sort of utility. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: The question, then, is what do you want dead more - the Proxies or the Humans? When is this decision being made? If it's before starting a mission, and while setting up your build -- how are you able to anticipate whether one is more important than the other? If the answer is simply that one is always going to be a higher priority than the other, then you don't really have a meaningful strategic choice on your hand, since the puzzle is easily solved by just picking some optimal build each time. If the point of decision is happening within the mission, i.e. some proxy is messing your team up, then it's far too late to be deciding which damage types to slot into your weapons. In practice, this kind of choice doesn't get made either, because ultimately players want everyone to die quickly, and can mod to do so. This is why I genuinely believe it may be better to base weaknesses around "gimmicks", i.e. Infested being grouped up, Grineer having armor plating covering parts of their hitbox, or machines having hacking panels usable while stunned or unalerted, because that sort of system tends to be much richer and more intuitive. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: While I'm not a huge fan of it, Warframe's general design pushes players into building up a large inventory of diverse tools. It makes sense for the game to actually have use for at least SOME of those tools beyond just whatever weapon I can mod for enough damage that it works against all the enemy types. I'm fine with my Opticor being oppressive on the Plains of Eidolon where sight lines are long and enemies are tanky, but utterly suck against the Infested in close quarters. I have a bunch of shotguns for that. I'm equally fine with my shotguns not being good enough against heavy armour even at point blank range because I need something with better penetration. Once again, I feel that Warframe's modding system offers perhaps a bit TOO much freedom to players, which results in most guns being built the same way and used against all of the enemies. I completely agree with this, and ultimately I'd like an environment where every weapon, frame, etc. has its niche, and so is distinctly stronger in some situations, and weaker in others. This is precisely why I think it's so important to convey this explicitly through intuitive mechanics, because if the only reason a weapon has a niche is because it multiplies off of some table of variables, it's not going to feel like it has a niche, and the system overall is going to feel shallow and forced, as is sometimes the case now. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: The primary danger here, of course, is going too far with the anti-faction specialisation to the point where we might as well just throw our hands up and do a bunch more +damage to Grenier mods. Incidentally, I ABSOLUTELY HATE THESE. Take them out of the game, burn them in a tyre fire, never put crap like that in your game. If you want me to build a weapon that's better against the Grenier, let me exploit the game's innate mechanics to optimise it, don't just flip a switch and tell me that this weapon is magically better against an enemy because of their race or species. The challenge should be on ME to figure out what "good against Grenier" actually means after having fought and scanned them, not just to punch a button that says "optimise against Grenier." Agree completely, which is precisely why I think resistances as damage multipliers need to be removed. A fundamental point of conflict you're going to end up with is that, the more you streamline resistances per faction, the simpler the choices will be to deal optimal damage to each faction, whereas asking for different components to a faction to have different weaknesses complexifies the system, or at least makes it less simple to understand intuitively. Taking out these faction-based multipliers, and instead allowing elements to exploit mechanics in the environment and enemies to the player's benefit, would make for a deeper system, one that would also be easier to grok. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Honestly, I'm not a fan of this at all. While I like the Parkour system, I don't like being forced to use it in combat. Who's talking about forcing parkour into combat? The proposition here is to enable it as a viable alternative to straight-up direct combat power, not limit the options of players who like more typical shooter fare. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Aiming on the move - especially with slow-firing weapons with slow, arcing projectiles - is a recipe for frustration. Or, when mastered, tremendous satisfaction. The Tribes games are a shining example of this, and even in Warframe there are a ton of great moments I've had from landing crack shots in the middle of an aim glide or jump. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Moreover, Warframe is a horde shooter at the end of the day. Says who? It's definitely accumulated a lot of horde-killing modes recently, but that's a problem, not a feature. The game is not designed at its core to be a horde shooter, and while it definitely deserves to have horde shooter content, it absolutely does not need to only be a horde shooter. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: A lot of missions are designed around not just throwing a lot of enemies at the player but forcing the player to kill as quickly as possible. Survival, Sanctuary Assault, most Void Fissures, etc. - all of these are reminiscent of Nephilem Rifts which test not the player's ability to survive or win, but on whether they brought enough DPS. And this is valuable... why? Why is it important to gear check the player? Where is the skill test or choice inherent in asking the player to bring more DPS? What is the alternative? 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Forcing players to stay on the move means forcing players to dedicate more of their time moving and less of their time killing, which is going to run head-first into the DPS checks of a lot of game modes. And this is bad... why? DE struggles to implement difficulty in missions where players can simply kill everything on the map. Furthermore, because these missions end up almost exclusively revolving around spamming a select few nuke abilities to do so, these missions frequently become dull and repetitive. In this respect, enabling more parkour, and balancing around that, would diversify missions overall. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Moreover, I LIKE the tight, claustrophobic feel of a lot of tilesets and would hate for older tiles to be phased out in favour of wider open arenas, like what it seems like you're suggesting. While Warframe is not a cover shooter, it still pays to have cover of SOME kind if for no reason other than to prevent every enemy on the map from shooting at you at the same time. ... why? Why ask for cover in a game that deliberately has no cover system? I can agree that it's nice to have some claustrophobic tiles, but I do not think it is at all okay for entire tilesets to clash with the game's parkour system. Also, who here is asking for wide, barren rooms? Rooms that are interesting for parkour are rooms with plenty of verticality, layers and obstacles, so if you're afraid of being shot at from all sides, the solution would be to simply parkour to a better position, as is meant to be a core part of Warframe's combat loop. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I know you're trying to argue for diversity, but the way you're phrasing it comes across as trying to argue for invalidating the tank-n-spank playstyle that - yes, absolutely does exist in Warframe. Okay, but then just to clarify, that is the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting: I'm not saying tanks should not exist, I'm saying players shouldn't have to be expected to be tanks just to survive when the baseline mode of survival in Warframe is meant to be parkour. If a frame isn't naturally durable, they should naturally be able to maneuver around easily through parkour, and if a frame is meant to take a lot of hits, there should be a valid reason behind it as well (e.g. the frame needs to stay in place for certain periods of time, or is more defensive in nature). If we're just going to slap tankiness onto any passing frame just because it's a nice thing to have, the end result is an environment where nearly all frames have inbuilt survivability, and where it therefore becomes even more difficult to put frames in any real danger of death. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: There's little aggor control in the game, but there is some and enemies will generally focus on whomever they saw first. It makes sense, then, for my Inaros to move ahead of the pack and eat the brunt of the damage while my team-mates hang a little back and engage only after I've absorbed the initial salvo. One of the things I really hate about Warframe is when a fight devolves into every player bullet-jumping in a different direction, scatters to the four winds and turns proceedings into a disorganised dogfight. I hate it, because when players inevitably die, I have to go dig their derelict ass out from three rooms away and hope I can locate them before they time out. A substantial amount of coordination and synergy is lost when an over-reliance on mobility causes players to scatter. Except that is simply the way Warframe naturally plays. Never in my thousands of hours of play have I witnessed a tank deliberately leading the charge, and other players intentionally hanging back, just to defer aggro to the tanky frame. A core aspect to aggro management in classical MMORPGs is taunts: aside from Guardian Derision, Nyx's Absorb, and a handful of other effects, there are no ways of taunting enemies towards oneself, which means that the only way to defer aggro is to bullet jump around until your attackers pick on another teammate. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: The last thing I want to see Warframe do is punish people for not bunnyhopping like it's 1999. Why? I can agree that past some point parkour may be excessive if overly enforced, but considering how the game was built from the start to have players use movement to dodge shots and destabilize enemy accuracy, why shouldn't the game punish a player for not using that skill? Should we have guns shoot enemies regardless of where the player's pointing at, simply because some player doesn't want the game punishing inaccurate aiming? 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I've played those games, I've paid my dues, I pick my Warframes based on being able to hold ground rather than having to be constantly on the move. Which games out there have a fully developed parkour system and third-person shooting besides Warframe? I'd be interested in trying those out too. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Having that as an option? Sure, that's fine. Would even make sense for SOME Warframes and SOME builds. But to make the game inaccessible to everyone who can't play Tumble Dryer Simulator and shoot at the same time seems more than excessive. Sure, and I agree that there should be room for multiple playstyles. However, each advantage should come with a tradeoff, and a valid reason behind it. In practice, this means tanky frames should still exist, they'd just need a valid reason for their tankiness (several of which you've mentioned), besides it simply being a nice thing to have. 9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: The Parkour system has a substantial cost of its own. I'm fine with offering conditional buffs if a player is willing to pay that cost, but I'm strictly opposed to trying to redefine how players are "meant" to play Warframe, especially in this fashion. But Parkour is at the core definition of Warframe, so enabling more options around it isn't going to be redefining the game. I'm with you that players should be able to opt out of parkour in combat for certain frames if they want to, but I would hardly consider merely emphasizing parkour elsewhere a redefinition of the game, much less unwarrantedly forcing some behavior. Whether you like it or not, every game is going to have some intended way of playing it, even if that intended way is broad and full of caveats. Parkour is a core system within Warframe, and one of the many ways in which the game can test its players' skill. Enacting that more is, therefore, not a deviation from what the game had already been intending. Moreover, your entire line of argumentation here is itself based on the presumption that the natural and intended way of playing Warframe is to stay put and shoot hordes of enemies like any other third-person shooter, as you yourself noted in calling Warframe a horde mode shooter: not only is this assumption eminently questionable, it raises the same concerns as you're having for parkour. If I dislike the gunplay, or simply don't want to play horde mode, why should I be forced to participate in either of these things? If I just want to jump around, why should I not be empowered to do so? What makes one side right and the other wrong here? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted December 29, 2018 Share Posted December 29, 2018 (edited) A few rapid-fire responses incoming. Be forewarned that this is the last time I'm doing this. If you want to hold a conversation that's not going to cost me a full hour to make a response to, please try to offer a continuous argument rather than single-sentence snippets that often address the same point over and over again. You don't need to act as my editor. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: A fundamental point of conflict you're going to end up with is that, the more you streamline resistances per faction, the simpler the choices will be to deal optimal damage to each faction, whereas asking for different components to a faction to have different weaknesses complexifies the system, or at least makes it less simple to understand intuitively. I disagree. Complex resistances isn't the issue as long as the logic which governs them is itself either obvious or intuitive. If certain things are known to work well against armour or shields or carapace or flesh, then the player has a reasonable shot at figuring out what resistances an enemy has with only minor memorisation required. And yes, I'm aware that simplified resistances also simplify elemental damage choices, which can itself be used to differentiate the factions. The Grenier are stupid and single-minded, so choosing the right weapon against them should be equally as simple. The Corpus have their dual nature of "man and machine" so the player would need to choose. The Infested are a confusing mess of effects against whom there should be no real optimal choices as that's their "thing." Resistances are a simpler way to emulate complex mechanics without having to create a gimmick for every weapon. Furthermore, it avoids having to give players access to potentially very powerful status effects on every weapon. Both systems can coexist. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: Sure, but where are you going to find this healing in abundance outside of Rubble itself? Health orbs, Team Health Restores, Medi-Ray, Rejuvenation and healing from team-mates, just off the top of my head. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: This may be going on a bit of a tangent, but why are you building purely around Scarab Swarm for healing when Arcane Grace gives significantly better regeneration? Because I don't have Arcane Grace and no realistic way to get it solo short of straight-up buying it, whereas Scarab Swarm I is substantially cheaper. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: Okay, but why is that meaningful? Which situations does Atlas have a strategic advantage over Inaros because of this? When using Rejuvenation. The slow health trickle of healing is substantially more meaningful for Altas' lower health pool than it is for Inaros' massive health pool for which pretty much no amount of healing bar his own makes a difference. Well, that and Arcane Grace and Medi-Ray, which scale off of total hit points. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: if you're bringing a high-armor, low-health frame like Atlas into a Corpus mission, you're not going to suffer because of the Puncture or Radiation damage, you're going to suffer because of Nullifiers stripping your armor, i.e. actual in-game mechanics, rather than behind-the-scenes damage spreadsheets. Nullifers don't strip Atlas' armour to any substantial degree. They double his rate of decay while in the Nullifier bubble, which is irrelevant as there's no compelling need to spend any significant amount of time inside a Nullifier's bubble that I'm aware of. By contrast, Puncture damage creates a substantial difference in Effective Health which "simply health" can't emulate. Puncture reduces the health of high-armour Warframes disproportionately to that of low-armour Warframes. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: Grineer deal mostly Impact and Slash damage, just FYI. My Adaptation mod disagrees with this assessment. Heavy Gunners are the only unit which ever gives me a substantial amount of Slash resistance from that mod. The vast majority of the time when fighting Grenier, Corpus and Orokin, my Puncture resistance never drops below 90% while the other resistances either don't show up at all or fluctuate substantially. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: Okay... but then how does this impact gameplay? Which decision does this inform? Warframe selection, Sentinel selection, build selection. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: But do they, though? When has DE ever used armor, shields or health independently of each other as a balancing measure? How the developers use the tools at their disposal is irrelevant to how useful the tools themselves are. Just because DE haven't done a great job balancing damage and resistance doesn't mean they're not worth having. The whole point of posting suggestions is to use the tools we already have available in new and different ways as a means of improving the game on the cheap. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: When is this decision being made? If it's before starting a mission, and while setting up your build -- how are you able to anticipate whether one is more important than the other? Experience with the faction and other considerations - Warframe, weapons, level, objective, etc. After quite a while experimenting against the Terra Corpus with various weapons dealing damage types traditionally good against the Corpus, I discovered that an Opticore with Radiation damage is the optimal solution. I judged the greatest threat to me to be the Hyena and Raptor enemies, as well as the occasional appearance of the Jackal and Arachnid enemies. I judged both Crewmen and Proxies to be a low-priority target for damage selection because they typically have low enough health to be brute-forced through, where the "minibosses" tend to need special tools in order to ensure smooth operations. You're not expected to divine the correct solution, but rather arrive at it through either experimentation or number-crunching, and the result is going to vary based on what else you're bringing with you. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: I completely agree with this, and ultimately I'd like an environment where every weapon, frame, etc. has its niche, and so is distinctly stronger in some situations, and weaker in others That's an impossible proposition, however, within the context of Warframe. Creating unique niches and mechanics for every single item only works with a small library of items, I'd say 20-30 items or thereabout. Once you start counting weapons by the hundreds, it becomes functionally impossible to make all of them unique, and it's typically smarter to divide them into categories. Attempting to make the 200th weapon unique will either make it completely overpowered if you landed on a valuable mechanic or pointless if you didn't, because people will stick with what works. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: ... why? Why ask for cover in a game that deliberately has no cover system? The presence or lack of a cover system is irrelevant. Payday 2 is a cover-based game with no cover system. Space Marine Exterminatus is a cover-based game with no cover system. The ability to break sight and reduce the number of enemies shoot at you is what stands between games like Warframe and the aforementioned two and the likes of Lineage 2, World of Warcraft and the old World MMOs. Without it, all enemies are able to shoot at all players at all times, which reduces combat to a pure numbers game of "damage in vs. damage out." And no, adding Parkour as an "option" to reduce incoming damage doesn't help. Efficient DPS is always going to matter, and forcing players into a state that's both awkward and hard to aim from will simply have the effect of pushing them towards more min/maxed builds. 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: the baseline mode of survival in Warframe is meant to be parkour Removed a bit of unnecessarily confrontational responses here, so I'll try to condense. I fundamentally disagree with this statement, and I disagree very strongly. I see no compelling reason for why this should be the case in a game which was originally designed without the current Parkour system and is currently designed predominantly around stats min/maxing. I'm not opposed to individual Warframes having abilities designed around exploiting the Parkour system, but I'm not willing to accept this as an across-the-board rule of thumb for all Warframes. I see the Parkour system as tool for terrain navigation and mobility, not a tool a fundamental damage mitigation ability. I've played enough of Tribes, Unreal Tournament and Quake, I'm not interested in Warframe being any of these games, nor am I interested in revisiting them. I'm not in favour of any changes whatsoever which put further emphasis on using the parkour system in combat, and I don't see that opinion changing. Edited December 29, 2018 by Steel_Rook Removed some needlessly confrontational stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teridax68 Posted December 29, 2018 Share Posted December 29, 2018 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: A few rapid-fire responses incoming. Be forewarned that this is the last time I'm doing this. If you want to hold a conversation that's not going to cost me a full hour to make a response to, please try to offer a continuous argument rather than single-sentence snippets that often address the same point over and over again. You don't need to act as my editor. No-one is compelling you to respond to every single point being made, or faulting you for not doing so. Furthermore, I am addressing your points individually and concisely, as opposed to dumping everything into a wall of text, because that is how one addresses arguments. My overall argument is simple: currently, damage types and resistances don't add a lot of depth to the game, but muddy clarity of gameplay and prevent interesting developments from arising out of these systems, which is why I believe the impending rework to damage is warranted, and needs to change the system so that it presents compelling choices out of missions, and maximally responsive and fluid gameplay within them. Additionally, I believe the game right now is too focused on horde-mode style combat, and frames with large amounts of survivability and AoE: while horde mode combat deserves to exist in Warframe, and many frames deserve to have survivability, AoE, or both, the game should not revolve exclusively around all this, and should make an effort to bring its other existing forms of gameplay to the forefront alongside the current pseudo-endgame content we have now. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I disagree. Complex resistances isn't the issue as long as the logic which governs them is itself either obvious or intuitive. So... why condense resistances in the first place? If all machines having some sort of armor is the intuitive thing to have, why make Corpus machinery differ in resistances from Grineer machinery or armored units? Why make each faction rely on a smaller number of resistances when it could be perfectly plausible and "intuitive" for different factions to have similar resistances? I think there's a fundamental contradiction here between complexity and intuitiveness, because the more complexity you load onto the player, especially in the middle of fast-paced combat, the less intuitive any information they'll have to process will be, because there would simply be too much to memorize past a certain point. The current set of resistances we have aimed for intuitiveness, and failed. What alternative exactly would solve this if you're keeping the same key aspects, and the same level of complexity? 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: If certain things are known to work well against armour or shields or carapace or flesh, then the player has a reasonable shot at figuring out what resistances an enemy has with only minor memorisation required. Is this the case now, though? Because again, that is what the current set of resistances aimed to do, without success. I also disagree with this, because different people may have different opinions on what may qualify as an intuitive counter: I could very well argue that any sort of exoskeletal carapace, particularly one made out of the armor of a fallen Grineer, should be vulnerable to corrosive damage, but Infested Chargers have no such vulnerability, and instead it's units like Boilers and Ancients that take increased damage, because their older flesh is, for whichever reason, weak to that element. Similarly, one could argue that magnetic damage should be incredibly destructive against any sort of machinery, yet neither the Corpus robotic health class, nor the Grineer machine health class take any increased Magnetic damage. You could argue that one could simply change these resistances, but in the end, someone clearly had a different opinion of what counted as an intuitive set of resistances when designing them in the first place. Considering how hidden damage percentage multipliers are, by nature, not the most intuitive or obvious way of providing feedback on one's moment-to-moment damage usage, I don't think aiming for universally intuitive, yet also complex resistances can ever truly succeed. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: And yes, I'm aware that simplified resistances also simplify elemental damage choices, which can itself be used to differentiate the factions. The Grenier are stupid and single-minded, so choosing the right weapon against them should be equally as simple. The Corpus have their dual nature of "man and machine" so the player would need to choose. The Infested are a confusing mess of effects against whom there should be no real optimal choices as that's their "thing." So, what you're saying is that the only meaningful choice that should come out of all of three main factions in Warframe is choosing whether to deal more damage to Corpus humans or proxies? Why? Why go for such a shallow model when there are tons of opportunities for more nuanced choices to be had? The Grineer for sure are individually stupid, but they are known for using squad tactics and vicious weaponry, so there are opportunities to build around that (for example, burst-fire weapons that would allow for easy repositioning in between shots). The Corpus have been designed with an increasing amount of complexity per unit, and making each individual Corpus unit stronger and tougher, but also more rewarding on XP, could open opportunities for significantly more tactical combat, as well as more uses for single-target weaponry and utility effects irrespective of the human vs. machinery dichotomy. The Infested are a horde of reconstituted biomass and machinery, but nonetheless are mainly distinguished by their great numbers, and largely weak individual units, which lends itself most closely to the horde mode combat we see now. These are all distinct approaches to combat that could all offer distinct means of playing the game, and distinct choices to the player when it comes to choosing their warframe, weapons, mods, etc., so I really don't see why one should just give up on building meaningful choices out of such a rich set of systems. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Resistances are a simpler way to emulate complex mechanics without having to create a gimmick for every weapon. Furthermore, it avoids having to give players access to potentially very powerful status effects on every weapon. Both systems can coexist. Where has anyone talked about forcing gimmicks onto weapons? This is one of the points you've been repeating in spite of contrary arguments, and I'm confused as to where it's coming from. As an aside, I do believe every weapon should have some distinct traits that sets it apart from the rest, but I'm not quite sure what it is I mentioned about status effects, or crafting meaningful mechanics out of them, that you're interpreting as a "gimmick". I also agreed with you already that it would be better to move away from an environment where every weapon can be fitted with every sort of elemental status effect on demand, so I'm not sure where debate is to be had here. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Health orbs, Team Health Restores, Medi-Ray, Rejuvenation and healing from team-mates, just off the top of my head. As has already been said several times already, health orbs are both exceedingly rare in their natural state, as well as severely weak relative to the amount of health fully-geared frames have. This is but one of the many instances where you have been repeating yourself on a point that has already been addressed (I already brought to your attention in my immediate previous response that I had already given the example of the Tigris Prime for the issues with calculating status damage based on weapon damage, for instance), without adding anything new to the argument or acknowledging a prior point I made that directly addressed the topic. Nevertheless, for some reason you have nonetheless chosen to accuse me of this same behavior, citing no examples. As for the rest, the examples you have chosen are grasping at straws. Team health restores and Rejuvenation are both exceedingly slow in their healing, which is why they are rarely used, and Medi-Ray's healing is based entirely on maximum health, which means there is strictly no difference whether its healing on Atlas comes from high health or high armor. There is strictly no form of general healing in the game that sits in this happy middle ground where it will not either be too small or slow to make an impact in heated combat, or too high for armor multiplication to be meaningful. This is why Trinity's 100% health and shields healing remains supreme, whereas other healers are known more for their ability to prevent death entirely (e.g. Oberon's Phoenix Renewal, Harrow's Covenant), than their own smaller instances. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Because I don't have Arcane Grace and no realistic way to get it solo short of straight-up buying it, whereas Scarab Swarm I is substantially cheaper. What about Eidolons? That's how everyone else gets their arcanes these days. If you're building suboptimally just because you don't want to use a certain component of the game, that's fine, but then you don't really get to argue that your Power Strength Scarab Swarm Inaros build is somehow going to perform better than a full health + armor + Adaptation Inaros with Arcane Grace, particularly since the latter build, not the former, is widely known as the optimal build for the frame. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: When using Rejuvenation. The slow health trickle of healing is substantially more meaningful for Altas' lower health pool than it is for Inaros' massive health pool for which pretty much no amount of healing bar his own makes a difference. Well, that and Arcane Grace and Medi-Ray, which scale off of total hit points. But where is this slow trickle of health going to matter? If you have enough time for 3 points of health a second to make a difference (which is worse than Gara's Mending Splinters augment as a baseline, and that mod's already known for being one of the worst augments around), then you're not fighting in a high-level environment full of heavy incoming damage, at which point there is strictly no reason to be optimizing around increasing one's healing with armor. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Nullifers don't strip Atlas' armour to any substantial degree. They double his rate of decay while in the Nullifier bubble, which is irrelevant as there's no compelling need to spend any significant amount of time inside a Nullifier's bubble that I'm aware of. Except Nullifiers negate ability usage and block projectiles, which are the main reason why they tend to cause problems. If you're not having trouble against Nullifiers, once again, you're not going to be having trouble with the Corpus in general. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: By contrast, Puncture damage creates a substantial difference in Effective Health which "simply health" can't emulate. Puncture reduces the health of high-armour Warframes disproportionately to that of low-armour Warframes. How substantial, exactly? Please, elaborate on the time or hit difference Puncture damage will make when you go up against the Corpus versus the Grineer in a mission. What exactly is this difference changing in the way you play? 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: My Adaptation mod disagrees with this assessment. Heavy Gunners are the only unit which ever gives me a substantial amount of Slash resistance from that mod. The vast majority of the time when fighting Grenier, Corpus and Orokin, my Puncture resistance never drops below 90% while the other resistances either don't show up at all or fluctuate substantially. Then please, by all means, explain where this Puncture damage is coming from when playing against the Grineer, because the faction is notorious for having mostly Impact-based weapons and an abnormally large amount of Slash procs. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Warframe selection, Sentinel selection, build selection. Could you perhaps give any specifics to this? Please list even one example of a meaningful choice the existence of Puncture damage on enemies has you make. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: How the developers use the tools at their disposal is irrelevant to how useful the tools themselves are. Just because DE haven't done a great job balancing damage and resistance doesn't mean they're not worth having. The whole point of posting suggestions is to use the tools we already have available in new and different ways as a means of improving the game on the cheap. But that's not what suggestions are exclusively about, and I find it particularly disingenuous to pretend that this entire discussion needs to only focus on "improving the game on the cheap" when the central topic of this thread is reworking the entire mod system, a change I remind you that you advocated fully, to the point of suggesting some pretty extreme changes to the structure and implementation of mods. Moreover, this in no way addresses the point: you argued that the separation of armor, health and shields was a useful tool for balancing the game, yet by your own implicit admission the game has never used those levers to balance itself. If the only real justification for keeping all of these near-identical mechanics is because they're "balance levers", then that is no justification at all. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Experience with the faction and other considerations - Warframe, weapons, level, objective, etc. After quite a while experimenting against the Terra Corpus with various weapons dealing damage types traditionally good against the Corpus, I discovered that an Opticore with Radiation damage is the optimal solution. I judged the greatest threat to me to be the Hyena and Raptor enemies, as well as the occasional appearance of the Jackal and Arachnid enemies. I judged both Crewmen and Proxies to be a low-priority target for damage selection because they typically have low enough health to be brute-forced through, where the "minibosses" tend to need special tools in order to ensure smooth operations. You're not expected to divine the correct solution, but rather arrive at it through either experimentation or number-crunching, and the result is going to vary based on what else you're bringing with you. Literally none of this in any way addresses the question. Where are you making the decision to prioritize one enemy over the other in your next mission? If your answer is simply that you eventually figured out which damage type would be optimal against which enemy, and which unit type would consistently merit prioritization over the other, then what you are saying is that you simply solved the puzzle of Warframe's resistances, and therefore no longer have any meaningful choice to make when one is clearly optimal. Ergo, the system has failed to continually generate meaningful choice, and only served to mystify the game's number-crunching for a few hours. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: That's an impossible proposition, however, within the context of Warframe. Creating unique niches and mechanics for every single item only works with a small library of items, I'd say 20-30 items or thereabout. Once you start counting weapons by the hundreds, it becomes functionally impossible to make all of them unique, and it's typically smarter to divide them into categories. Attempting to make the 200th weapon unique will either make it completely overpowered if you landed on a valuable mechanic or pointless if you didn't, because people will stick with what works. ... why? What is the basis for this kind of claim? I can agree that it becomes increasingly difficult to make new content stand out from a larger pool of previous content, but as seen with the new warframes and weapons DE has released, it is perfectly possible to do so. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: The presence or lack of a cover system is irrelevant. Payday 2 is a cover-based game with no cover system. Space Marine Exterminatus is a cover-based game with no cover system. The ability to break sight and reduce the number of enemies shoot at you is what stands between games like Warframe and the aforementioned two and the likes of Lineage 2, World of Warcraft and the old World MMOs. Without it, all enemies are able to shoot at all players at all times, which reduces combat to a pure numbers game of "damage in vs. damage out." This kind of claim only makes sense if the entirety of Warframe's tilesets were made up of completely empty rooms, which makes strictly no sense. Payday 2 and Exterminatus don't have freeform parkour, no do games like Call of Duty or the like, which is why they have cover systems in place (and no, a game doesn't explicitly need to give you a button near a piece of cover to have a cover system). By contrast, Warframe is a game built to have the player evade damage through parkour, not by hiding behind cover. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: And no, adding Parkour as an "option" to reduce incoming damage doesn't help. Efficient DPS is always going to matter, and forcing players into a state that's both awkward and hard to aim from will simply have the effect of pushing them towards more min/maxed builds. But that is precisely the issue: you are treating parkour as an "option" when it is an essential, fundamental part of the game. It is how players move and reposition, even while in the middle of combat, so even if you aren't aim-gliding or wall-latching all the time, you are still using rapid parkour maneuvers in order to play efficiently. This too is why the whole notion that the only way of dealing optimal DPS is to stay in place is utter bunk. Even if that were the case, that would only be a reason to rework the way players would deal damage, because mobility is at the core of Warframe's gameplay, and players notoriously dislike having to stay in the same place for extended periods of time. In the end, what I am simply proposing is to allow players to do cool and viable things while doing those crazier parkour maneuvers, and move away from bending the game out of shape into an inferior, stereotypical horde mode shooter when it is simply not designed to be one, and when many other games do that formula far better. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: Removed a bit of unnecessarily confrontational responses here, so I'll try to condense. I fundamentally disagree with this statement, and I disagree very strongly. I see no compelling reason for why this should be the case in a game which was originally designed without the current Parkour system and is currently designed predominantly around stats min/maxing. The first statement is a distortion of the truth, and the second statement is flat-out wrong. Warframe may not have been designed with Parkour 2.0, but it was designed with parkour right from the start nonetheless. The entire premise of this game is that player incarnate warriors who are not only gifted with techno-magical abilities, but are also both stealthy and incredibly agile ("Ninjas play free"). As such, there is strictly no reason to dispute the fact that parkour is one of the foundational elements of Warframe and its gameplay. Moreover, min-maxing only came about with the advent of Corrupted Mods, which were themselves designed precisely because players didn't min-max beforehand: until then, the standard build was simply to equip mods like Stretch, Intensify, Streamline, etc. for more stats across the board, with only few frames avoiding certain stats entirely. Customization may certainly be at the heart of Warframe, but min-maxing certainly isn't, and I find it utterly bizarre that you would argue in favor of this when one of your original and biggest points in this thread has been to go against min-maxing, by preventing players from increasing the same stat more than once using mods. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I'm not opposed to individual Warframes having abilities designed around exploiting the Parkour system, but I'm not willing to accept this as an across-the-board rule of thumb for all Warframes. I see the Parkour system as tool for terrain navigation and mobility, not a tool a fundamental damage mitigation ability. You may not see it that way, but that is the way the system is designed, seeing how enemy accuracy specifically has a delay so that players on the move take fewer hits. I'm also not proposing to introduce more movement abilities on warframes, so I'm not quite sure where that argument is coming from. 12 hours ago, Steel_Rook said: I've played enough of Tribes, Unreal Tournament and Quake, I'm not interested in Warframe being any of these games, nor am I interested in revisiting them. I'm not in favour of any changes whatsoever which put further emphasis on using the parkour system in combat, and I don't see that opinion changing. That's fine, and you are entitled to your opinion. As it stands, though, Warframe is a game explicitly designed with parkour as one of its central systems, one that also integrates into combat, and this is an aspect of the game most players enjoy, and many players want to see more of. Moreover, what is not fine is to oppose more options for everyone, not just yourself, that would allow players to integrate parkour more into combat, including options that would have strictly no effect on you even if they existed in-game. If the game had more mods that let players use parkour more, but opting out of those mods and using slow, tanky frames were still just as fun to use and viable, why would you oppose such additions? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted December 29, 2018 Share Posted December 29, 2018 17 minutes ago, Teridax68 said: No-one is compelling you to respond to every single point being made, or faulting you for not doing so. Furthermore, I am addressing your points individually and concisely, as opposed to dumping everything into a wall of text, because that is how one addresses arguments. No, that is how one nit-picks arguments. Nit-picking my word choice and focusing on individual sentences fails to address the broad-strokes point of what I'm trying to get across and breaks the conversation down into 15 different conversations about frankly trivial details a lot of the time. You chose to disregard my request, so I guess this is where the conversation ends. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teridax68 Posted December 29, 2018 Share Posted December 29, 2018 (edited) 1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said: No, that is how one nit-picks arguments. Nit-picking my word choice and focusing on individual sentences fails to address the broad-strokes point of what I'm trying to get across and breaks the conversation down into 15 different conversations about frankly trivial details a lot of the time. You chose to disregard my request, so I guess this is where the conversation ends. Alright, so which words have I nit-picked or misinterpreted? It is difficult to follow you on these points when you make accusations with strictly no supporting evidence. I have explained to you that I have addressed your points as needed, and to the best of my knowledge I addressed the heart of the matter each time. I even stated my general argument clearly at your request. That you would apparently ignore all of this, accuse me of doing things I did not do, then leave the exchange in a huff, to me suggests more that you started taking our conversation as an argument, and got frustrated along the way that I didn't take everything you said as a given truth, than me somehow acting out of turn. Edited December 29, 2018 by Teridax68 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted December 29, 2018 Share Posted December 29, 2018 (edited) 1 hour ago, Teridax68 said: Alright, so which words have I nit-picked or misinterpreted? It is difficult to follow you on these points when you make accusations with strictly no supporting evidence. I have explained to you that I have addressed your points as needed, and to the best of my knowledge I addressed the heart of the matter each time. I even stated my general argument clearly at your request. That you would apparently ignore all of this, accuse me of doing things I did not do, then leave the exchange in a huff, to me suggests more that you started taking our conversation as an argument, and got frustrated along the way that I didn't take everything you said as a given truth, than me somehow acting out of turn. Feel free to take it however you want. I asked you to please stop splitting my post by the sentence and delivering 20 separate responses, multiple of which retread the same ground where I might have repeated myself, asking the same questions over and over again and truing to discuss probably 11 separate subjects in the same post. It's hard to follow, it's time-consuming to respond to, it's fiddly to quote and turns the discussion into an exercise of proof-reading my writing. I asked you to try and address my points rather than my wording in the hopes that this would produce slightly more condensed with a continuous narrative throughout that doesn't take me half an hour to read through and another hour to respond. Either try to meet me half way and make this easier on both of us, or don't. Up to you. I'm not looking to pick a fight. I simply find responding to your posts to be far too draining, so I figured it was best to be up-front about it. I can't have a conversation the way this one's been going and I can no longer support current one at this pace. Edited December 29, 2018 by Steel_Rook Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teridax68 Posted December 29, 2018 Share Posted December 29, 2018 4 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said: Feel free to take it however you want. I asked you to please stop splitting my post by the sentence and delivering 20 separate responses, multiple of which retread the same ground where I might have repeated myself, asking the same questions over and over again and truing to discuss probably 11 separate subjects in the same post. It's hard to follow, it's time-consuming to respond to, it's fiddly to quote and turns the discussion into an exercise of proof-reading my writing. I asked you to try and address my points rather than my wording in the hopes that this would produce slightly more condensed with a continuous narrative throughout that doesn't take me half an hour to read through and another hour to respond. Either try to meet me half way and make this easier on both of us, or don't. Up to you. Okay, so first off, you continue to list exactly zero specifics or examples, which leads me to believe you are simply making up excuses. Second, if you personally do not enjoy answering individual points, that's fine, but don't blame me for addressing what you've said. Third, pointing out that you've been repeating yourself, and that you have been accusing me of the same (again, with zero evidence) isn't "proof-reading" your writing, it is pointing out serious problems in the way you are arguing, and what appears to be a degree of projection, and therefore bad faith, behind it, which is also apparent in your posts here. Fourth, I have answered your general points, and brought the discussion into generalities several times now, irrespective of wording, yet you continue to repeat your accusations, again with strictly no supporting evidence. It is not my job to accommodate you when expressing my opinions in a manner that is perfectly acceptable and constructive to general discussion, nor is it my fault if you personally dislike debating in this format. If this discussion no longer interests you, you are obviously free to leave at any time, but to do so by blaming me for things I haven't done, and for personal hang-ups that are simply not my problem, is to act in demonstrably bad faith. I went into this discussion expecting to have a productive exchange with people who themselves wanted to share and discuss their ideas, and until the last couple of posts that is what I thought I was doing with you. I still do not understand where your antagonism is coming from, nor do I care: if you don't want to participate in this discussion, nobody is holding you back, but you are never going to successfully convince anyone that your complete derailment of the conversation you yourself started is somehow the pure product of me splitting my responses into paragraphs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steel_Rook Posted December 29, 2018 Share Posted December 29, 2018 (edited) I considered it only polite to express my difficulties rather than disappearing without a word. It has become apparent that that was a mistake, which I genuinely do regret. My apologies. Edited December 29, 2018 by Steel_Rook Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Klokwerkaos Posted December 30, 2018 Share Posted December 30, 2018 On 2018-12-24 at 6:40 PM, Vahlokjul said: Is being OP the problem? I thought the problem was we don't really have room for much in the way of quality of life mods to customize the guns? That and general build diversity but that takes actual effort to fix. I thought they had cancelled Damage 3.0? If not I am glad, I had been looking forward to that. I wonder what they are going to do, maybe make each damage type strong against a different thing? Puncture procs could ignore armor, Impact ignore shields? Well whatever they do hopefully they put more thought into it than I, and I hope it works well. I do like your idea, we have so many elemental types but I don't think I have ever used magnetic for anything. What's the point of quality of life mods when the quality of life is tap one button and the whole room dies? I don't see the need to consider these things at all. The window for all QoL mods is very narrow, like mr 3 to 5. After that they are pointless and it's not because of damage mods, it's because of the horde shooter with stupid ai and bullet sponges with redonkulous scaling issues. Adjusting damage for weapons to be tied to weapon level rather than endo is simply a nerf stick for vets. I just don't understand why I need a hush mod when nothing can hurt me and I cam set off every alarm and murder every enemy with the touch of a button, as can anyone starting at Mr 2 when they get their atterax and run a couple of vaults to buy maiming strike. This whole complaint i can only see serves to help one group of people which is people who can't farm endo. It also does nothing to address that all mods including shield mods and armor mods and utility mods can all be addressed in value by two factors, first how rare they are and second how much they affect your ttk. Removing base damage mods only serves to replace them with more multi shot, or more fire rate or more whatever the next best thing is to enhance your tri and that will be the new meta. None of the arguments in this thread address that and simply this proposed solution only does three things : hits vets with a nerf bat, increases power creep, makes an already super easy game even easier and cater more to new players that already have de kissing their butts full time with every content release, even releases that supposedly aren't for them. It doesn't address the core gamely issues and build diversity still comes back to ttk and if you say it doesn't them why is everyone using the ttk build when they don't have to? No one forces that behavior. The only way to discourage that is to create more tactical situations like the orb fights and such. Until that happens when it comes to horde shoot and loot ttk will always be the go to, and every mod has some contribution to tri that is measurable, even hush increases survivability for invis frames and thereby allows them to kill more, increasing their dps output, so until that ttk stops being the only relevant thing in the game, then ttk builds will always dominate and if you pull are damage then you replace with multishot, then crit or status, and then fire rate, magazine size and so on... all of it affects ttk. Until the core gameplay issue is addressed literally no mod adjustment will matter because the same meta qualities will emerge and the same mods will still be unpopular, not to mention you never need to use any specific build. I could randomize my load outs and mods and clear anything on the star chart with little or no difficulty, and so can anyone else of they bother to learn the game. You never need to min max so complaining that you habe to min max to play is literally an argument from ignorance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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