Modding 3.0 would be great for Warframe

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, MJ12 said:

Moreover, people should be aware that making AI that is believable and beatable by humans is actually immensely hard, and thus suggesting AI changes is not a minor change, but something that is ludicrously expensive and time-consuming.

Excessively complex and realistic AI can also be entirely superfluous, if people don't notice the complexity. Game Maker's Toolkit has a really good video on enemy AI in video games that's worth a watch if you have the time. The long and short of it, what makes AI "feel" intelligent isn't really their actual intelligence, but rather the way that intelligence is presented. Overly-complex AI's decision-making might be factually more intelligent, but those subtleties are often lost on players who simply regard it as either dumb or random. That's a side bar, though, so I don't want to go into it. I'm not opposed to AI changes, but I don't believe they'd address the issue of build diversity to any significant degree.

 

1 hour ago, Mach25 said:

So far, you've hit the nail on the head with all of your posts. I appreciate hearing from someone else whose experience is very broad and is able to speak on issues with clarity. Agreed with your posts - I never did like the modding system as it is right now for precisely the reasons you've stated. Hopefully these things will be altered in the future to make mods in this game actual modifications, not justifications.

In the interest of full disclosure, I can't pretend to be an expert on the matter. I've played through a few games with points-buy systems (which is what Warframe modding is, at its core) in them and noticed the common points - and problems - they tend to share. The difference between the absolute number of all possible choices and the actual number of practical choices is a common issue with those systems, and it's my belief that "choice granularity" is a major contributing factor. What I mean by that is how many knobs the player can turn and how many stops are on each knob, metaphorically speaking. Intuitively, you'd think that giving players more fine-grained control over their own stats would produce more build variety, but in my experience the exact opposite is the case. The problem is that points-buy systems - video games, really - are highly reductive. Regardless of the complexity of the presentation, most can be reduced to simple optimisation problems with even moderate knowledge of the mechanics and simple statistics. Even when a game doesn't track the player's DPS or Effective Health, these numbers still keep coming up in conversation because they're core to most combat mechanics. I'll take a rough guess and assert that they've been used in this forum before, despite Warframe not tracking these statistics.

If I may take a brief aside, the MMO City of Heroes is a pretty good example of everything wrong in points-buy systems. Back in 2001, it started out with a points-buy system not unlike something like D&D or Vampire: The Masquerade. As a consequence, the game became completely impossible to balance. The performance gap between concept players who grabbed multiple travel powers to mimic their childhood super heroes and hardcore players who min/maxed their builds was so severe that no amount of stats tweaking was enough. By release, the game switched to a class-based system. You pick an Archetype which can then pick from two Powersets (literally sets of 9 powers/abilities) and several Power Pools of additional utility powers. Far more restrictive, but far more balanced because players were essentially forced into at least a broadly viable build. The player could then assign up to 6 slots per power, from a pool of 91 total by level 50 (I think), and place stat Enhancements in each slot. Because the player could stack multiple of the same enhancement, everyone built everything with 1x Accuracy, 1x Cost Reduction, 4xDamage... So this had to be tweaked further via "Enhancement Diversification." Harsh diminishing returns made it pointless to slot more than three of the same kind and not very useful to slot more than two of the same kind. The list of changes goes on, but it gets complicated so I'll leave it at that.

Suffice it to say, though, that I've seen what happens in a system which allows stacking the same "mod" multiple times. People over-slot for DPS and "mods" like control duration, run speed, jump height, to-hit debuff and so on never get used. It doesn't matter that my Dark Blast debuffs enemy hit accuracy, I'm not going to slot it for debuff because I could slap on more damage and cost reduction, instead. The simple fact of the matter is that people by and large will build for whatever seems the most viable. Them more fine-grained control over their own stats doesn't lead players to introduce broader variety in their builds. On the contrary, it leads players optimise variety out of their builds. If you give them the choice between killing things faster or flying, they'll typically pick the former. If you give them a choice between not dying or controlling aggro, they'll typically pick the former. Back in the day of EQ and SW:G you had more leeway for non-combat "support" players, but that's been waning in popularity HARD ever since.

To bring all of this back to Warframe, this big and complex modding system that we have isn't giving people more variety. For veterans, it gives more options to optimise variety out of their builds and for newbies more rope to hang themselves with. I could maybe see the argument that that's part of the game's "challenge" - identifying and creating viable builds, winning the fight before it's even stated. That was certainly what I got told a lot in City of Heroes. The problem is that in this day and age of mass communication, that's not a challenge. You open Google or YouTube or r/Reddit and the challenge has already been solved for you. It's a bit like ye-olde point-and-click adventure games' relationship with Dirty Little Helper (anyone remember that?). And you can only blame players for being "sheep" and copying other people's builds for so long before you catch yourself doing the same thing. Because at the end of the day, points-buy systems are reductive and their optimisation solutions are going to be very similar regardless of how you come to the answer. People don't flock to the same builds because they're being uncreative or lazy. They do it because those builds work.

 

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

A common expression that gets thrown around is "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game": even though players may personally prefer one playstyle over another, or simply consider a playstyle less fun to play, they will still find themselves naturally driven to go for the less fun playstyle if it happens to be optimal by whichever important metric (usually because it makes them beat the game faster or more easily). If one playstyle is clearly optimal over the others, this means that one playstyle tends to dominate and leave the others underused, and this is amplified further if the game is multiplayer, where each playstyle is likely to have been tested massively, and where there's an even greater pressure to maximize performance.

Unfortunately, you're never going to reach a point where all possible builds are equally viable. The very nature of a points-buy system makes that highly unlikely. Fortunately, you don't really need to. Problems with build diversity will always exist, but they become egregious enough to try and fix only when one or several builds are substantially more effective than all the other options. Essentially, when the gap between the best and the worst builds is very large. In those cases, a combination of strategic nuking of the most powerful builds and buffing of the weakest builds can narrow the band of player performance and lessen the draw of optimal builds. While I fully agree that players will optimise all the fun out of a game, I also believe that they still generally want cool stuff. If you make the choice between "cool stuff" and "effective builds" less prominent, more might be convinced to take the performance hit and play their own way. The less severe the choice between what you want and what you need is, the more people are typically willing to disregard their own self-interest and just have fun.

And one final word on my use of the term "need:" I'm not referring to the game literally forcing players into a build or else they can't play the game. Rather, I'm referring to the game's balance and systems heavily encouraging players into that build, potentially at the exclusion of other builds that that player might have preferred for abstract esoteric reasons of personal preference. I WANT a big shotgun but I NEED a powerful shotgun. Ideally, I would hope the game would be so-designed that options exist which I both NEED and WANT. For weapon choice, that absolutely is the case simply due to the staggeringly huge weapon selection. For builds... Well, I'll stick to what works for the most part.

[Vahlokjul]

I agree with much of this. But if they don't want to mess with anything as is, I feel like they could take all the less effective mods like Eagle Eye, Stabilizer, Hush, Overview (Have I always had that?) etc. and make them Exilus mods, and give guns 2-4 Exilus slots to guns to sort of customize how each gun feels.

Edited December 22, 2018 by Vahlokjul

[MysticDragonMage]

On 2018-12-13 at 12:35 AM, Hmm...interesting. said:

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.

or, simply create a skill tree concept that affects every weapon and warframe within your arsenal, create a branch for each base damage mod (such as Pressure Point and Serration), and allow players to upgrade each branch with Endo.

anyone who owns any primed mod will unlock a specific upgrade segment for their mod station. in the case of pressure point, it would simply be called the "Pressure Point upgrade segment", which will make the Pressure point branch up-gradable with endo up to 165% damage.

On 2018-12-13 at 12:35 AM, 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.

 

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.

or with a skill tree system suggested before, apply a multishot branch.

multishot enhances critical chance and status chance along with base damage. if it only multiplied the base damage, that would be an extreme nerf across the board.

[Klokwerkaos]

11 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... why? Please list examples of complex or niche builds that would be lost by addressing mandatory mods.

This fundamentally misunderstands how games and metagames work. When an optimal strategy arises, there is reason for it to dominate (it gives quicker or better results than the alternatives), and no practical reason for it not to, therefore that strategy tends to dominate. In games that are in ongoing development, such as Warframe, that tends to cause the game to balance itself around these optimal strategies, and in this case, mandatory mods. You posted at an exceptionally poor time, considering how DE presented in today's dev stream just how present these mods are in players' builds, so there is really no valid reason to pretend that mandatory mods don't exist in Warframe.

By all means, please demonstrate. Show us the way, because so far I have not seen even a single player even attempt this. Show us how easy it is to do so, how reasonable it is to expect this especially from someone new to the game, and how effective it is compared to the way people normally play.

They are by no means the only one. Again, you can pretend all you like that people don't go for mandatory mods, or certain optimal builds, but in the end it is you who are the special snowflake here, not everyone else pointing out the obvious problem of mandatory mods. Again, today's dev stream is evidence of this.

Sure, one can make a ton of different builds, but how will those builds actually work? How good will my Nidus truly be if I just build shield and shield regen mods on him? What about a gun with only zoom and silencer mods? Perhaps these builds may even have some advantage in some situation, but how realistic is it to use them, compared to proper builds?

... um, what? How exactly does enemy AI relate in any way to the topic of player modding?

I believe you are missing the point entirely.

The point behind modding the way it is done is to increase grind efficiency.  Warframe is centered around grind based on its pay to skip model.

If you deprive the ability to reduce grind people stop playing because the grind is too intense to reach the top tiers.  If you decrease the grind to feel genuinely rewarding de closes it's doors unless they start adding subscription fees.

The mid comoromise that allows de to keep it's doors open is to allow progression against grind, which the current system does.

The only valid argument against this is that some items have bloat, Octavia being a good example, where there are more mods that you would want to put on that you can possibly put on, but these are thankfully rare situations and in the cases it actually does what all of you seem to be complaining about, being, making those choices more meaningful to cater to a specific playstyle.

Additionally, as more mods come out meta builds are less and less relevant, we see this more with warframes themselves since they have added augment pools where only a small handful of weapons habe such augments.

Ultimately I don't know what the concern is regardless since this whole thread seems to be a solution in search of a problem.

No one stops anyone from putting any build they want on.  Additionally multiple viable builds exist, but sadly, only one can be the most efficient... but that doesn't limit the way that you mod, if you think it does, you're not far enough in the game.

For example, I have two god build saws, one for mot, one for star chart clearing, as you might suspect, the mot one is damage focussed while the star chart one is range focussed.

Why is that?  Because the range is more valuable than the damage at that level because everything does in one shot regardless.

This is a perfect example of why the premise is wrong.  Different tools are used for different purposes and that includes your mod load out, and of you feel deprived of options there are two possible reasons I can think that contribute to that: 1) you dont have everything so your build freedom is limited and 2) you dont think outside the box to make alternate builds.

If you have both of those things in check there is no reason not to find different uses for different tools.  A great example, drakgoon, why use it?  Unless you're mag... discovering those synergies is a lot of fun for a lot of people.

Another example, I never used the Lanka besides leveling till eidolons, and now with the addition of profit taker, I kept my Lanka for eidolons but got a beastly vectis riven to cover all ips and one elemental combo.  2 different snipers, for 2 different jobs.  The mods are the same situation.

The problem you're encountering is that you're failing to recognize the chief reason to build a certain way, which is to be more efficient, and even if you remove those mods, a new meta will appear to be most efficient, and those will be the new mandatory mods.  Plus let's not forget that mods like fire rate and punch through are invisible dps mods... should we strip those too?  Why domt we just balance eberything until everything is identical amd its pointless to play?  Absolute balance, is not a good thing.  Ask karate from nintendo.  Its a crap game... but its balanced!

The failure here, is to take personal responsibility for the way one chooses to mod.  The code of the game never said you needed to add serration, or whatever, you chose to do that, and why?  Because you wanted to be more efficient and changing what mods are available won't change that because then a new set of "mandatory mods" will emerge and a new group of folks will gripe about those too.

In short, I see no compelling evidence that firstly, there is a problem outside of what people have chosen to create for themselves, and second, that adding any of the proposed changes will actually fix anything that is being complained about.

To back that up I will use adaptation as evidence.  Adaptation is a relatively new mod.  It was not in prior build videos.  Now it is in build videos for any frame that can take decent advantage of it (ie not wet paper bag frames).

It's not a damage mod.  It's a utility mod.  Nobody needs to use it, the content didn't change and was completely doable before that... but now something more busted is available and so people use that and it becomes the new meta.  The reverse is also true.  What happens if you remove maiming strike?  Tomorrow every spin build video has relentless combination, because that's how gamers play, that's not de's fault, that's our fault and we have the power to play however we like, its juat that most ofnus recognize that effociency is how you win faster and more often in wf.

Removing damage as a variable simply limits your options and that seems to be what you guys are complaining about... not having enough options... well the option is there, you're just choosing not to take it and that's not a problem with the system as much as people seem to want to say it is.  The option is there, you can choose it or not.  If you always choose it that's more about you than the system. 

All de can do is provide options, which they have done.

It seems a lot to me like this thread is more about trying to smash the current meta to ruin people's investments than it is about providing options because the options are there, they just aren't chosen as much because, by and large, gamers want to win, and in warframe you win more by being efficient, which means use of a particular type of build.

As with all things, a buff elsewhere is almost always better than a nerf anywhere.  Removing these choices is a straight nerf to build freedom.  And for what?  So I can equip magazine size mods that I have no use for because everything dies in one shot or if I'm going endless, one clip?  What's the point?

Plus how does one reconcile a build with pressure point vs primed pressure point vs sacrificial steel if all damage is equal by weapon level?  How does that make sense now? (Not even starting on set bonuses and rivens)

I feel strongly a lot of this is rooted more in salt from not having earned all the tools in the game, than it is about "options" because removing the mods actually removes options.  If that's the case for anyone, thankfully there is already a great solution... you can go farm the stuff, same as we did!  Actually not even, it's easier now because acquisition of items gets cheaper and easier to farm over time as the game grows... i remeber not so long ago there wasnt a single frame that could be bought under 100p, now even vaulted frames go for just a little more than that unless they are highly desirable ones, and available frames powered down to something like 30 or 40 depending on the time of day...

Can anyone explain why this removal of options is an objectively good idea rather than just saying it is or speaking from emotion?  Because I'm really not convinced at all by what I've seen.

Now in the spirit of buffs vs nerfs, I can see a viable solution to the complaints here, but I still don't think it's a good idea, being, create a damage slot for weapons like exilus for frames, only a primary damage mod for that weapon type can go there, and that adds a free slot for utility...

The reason. I don't like that is because I guarantee you people won't put magazine size in that slot, they will stack in more ways to kill faster, whether it's range on melee, or more status or crit or whatever... which makes no sense since we can already one shot clear a room of sortie 3.

And let's say we do the opposite, let's create a slot just for utility mods... well, why?  We can already one shot clear sortie 3 rooms, what purpose does this serve?  Why do I need more magazine size if I can aoe clear a room?  Heck, why even use weapons when my frame powers can clear for me at a faster rate in many/most cases?

It serves no purpose because the premise of this argument isn't rooted in objective truth.  Instead, I believe the premise is more rooted in personal bias, and that bias being, forcing others to play the way some would like, rather than allowing for the options for players to choose how they play, which is already there, and is a superior option because it allows more freedom in playstyle.

Don't like the way someone plays?  Either put your own group together or play solo.  In warframe you can currently play however you like by adjusting parameters across the board.

Removing damage from the equation simply reduces freedom and solves nothing except to frustrate everyone that invested 1000s of plat in a riven with damage on it, which, by this proposed logic, would have to go away too.  As would range, punch through, fire rate... and you know, come to think about it, magazine size and zoom are also hidden dps mods so let's toss them out too... and pretty soon we have no mods left... even Shield health and armor mods are hidden DPS mods

But even then, this gun is better than that gun, so let's nerf that too until all guns are the same... etc, etc until all we have left is a perfectly balanced shooter... oh wait that game already exists, it's called pong.

Ultimately the chief complaint seems to be that magazine size is not as effective of a mod as a damage mod and no matter what you do that's not going to change because magazine size is not as effective as raw killing power even if you were to buff magazine size by 300% and cut damage in half only in a handful of cases would this be a viable mod situation with high fire rate endless weapons like the Supra vandal.

Even if you buffed Zoom by 600% it still wouldn't equate to one rank of serration.  This is because of the game play loop, not the modding.  That's why addressing that would be a viable solution.  Having smarter enemies or at least different styles of encounter objectives would greatly effect what kinds of builds are needed, take profit taker for example.  You "could" use your old eidolon builds there bit it would be inefficient.  Fixing the core objectives, enemy scaling and ai is the only relevant solution, changing the mods available is futile and all that does is hit all vets with a giant nerf bat as if we didn't have enough to be salty about already as the entire rest of the game is all built for newbies now we have to give up the stuff we earned and builds we invested in too.  No thank you.

Edited December 22, 2018 by Klokwerkaos

[Klokwerkaos]

On 2018-12-21 at 6:59 PM, Vahlokjul said:

I agree with much of this. But if they don't want to mess with anything as is, I feel like they could take all the less effective mods like Eagle Eye, Stabilizer, Hush, Overview (Have I always had that?) etc. and make them Exilus mods, and give guns 2-4 Exilus slots to guns to sort of customize how each gun feels.

I'm not sure that does anything to better the game, actually the opposite.

If you can one shot everything on the star chart with what you have, then what does adding a hush mod do except make you even more OP?

 

[Teridax68]

On 2018-12-22 at 8:31 AM, Klokwerkaos said:

I believe you are missing the point entirely.

The point behind modding the way it is done is to increase grind efficiency.  Warframe is centered around grind based on its pay to skip model.

I'm sorry, I thought it was about build diversity? Which one is it now? Also, how exactly does current modding cater to the game's "pay to skip" model when buying mod packs is notoriously terrible, and mods traded from other players are ultimately obtained from grinding?

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If you deprive the ability to reduce grind people stop playing because the grind is too intense to reach the top tiers.  If you decrease the grind to feel genuinely rewarding de closes it's doors unless they start adding subscription fees.

... why? Is anyone suggesting to change the grind here? Why would reducing the grind put DE out of business in their current state? Again, not only is this a complete non-sequitur from your previous arguments, no part of this argument appears to be supported by any sort of evidence.

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The mid comoromise that allows de to keep it's doors open is to allow progression against grind, which the current system does.

I think the necessity of the grind in the current Warframe can itself be debated, but even assuming that that is the case, how does that relate to the topic of modding? There is definitely a lot of intentionally grindy progression, namely with how frames and weapons are obtained, and some mods are certainly rarer than others, but unlike frames and weapons, individual mods cannot be purchased directly from DE, only traded. Why then is it important to keep the modding scheme, even when factoring in grinding?

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The only valid argument against this is that some items have bloat, Octavia being a good example, where there are more mods that you would want to put on that you can possibly put on, but these are thankfully rare situations and in the cases it actually does what all of you seem to be complaining about, being, making those choices more meaningful to cater to a specific playstyle.

Again, how is this relevant to mods themselves? Right now you're talking about mod slot limits on warframes, which don't even relate to grinding.

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Additionally, as more mods come out meta builds are less and less relevant, we see this more with warframes themselves since they have added augment pools where only a small handful of weapons habe such augments.

Um, what? How does any of this make sense? Mandatory mods like Serration and Split Chamber have been meta ever since they were released, and augments don't change this. Some rare augments may introduce new builds on warframes, but they rarely alter builds on weapons, nor do they eliminate meta builds unless the weapon was so weak that even the most meta build was inefficient (augments also almost never change the other mods that go on warframes alongside them).

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Ultimately I don't know what the concern is regardless since this whole thread seems to be a solution in search of a problem.

This is rather strange, considering the volume of text you've responded to, much of which clearly laid out reasons why people would prefer a new modding system. The OP itself starts by elaborating on the problems with the current modding system, namely the lack of current build diversity, especially around weapons, and a focus on piling more damage onto the latter over anything else.

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No one stops anyone from putting any build they want on.  Additionally multiple viable builds exist, but sadly, only one can be the most efficient... but that doesn't limit the way that you mod, if you think it does, you're not far enough in the game.

The question of metagaming and optimal builds was already addressed several times, though, so why try to repeat this point again?

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For example, I have two god build saws, one for mot, one for star chart clearing, as you might suspect, the mot one is damage focussed while the star chart one is range focussed.

Why is that?  Because the range is more valuable than the damage at that level because everything does in one shot regardless.

What exactly does this contradict?

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This is a perfect example of why the premise is wrong.  Different tools are used for different purposes and that includes your mod load out, and of you feel deprived of options there are two possible reasons I can think that contribute to that: 1) you dont have everything so your build freedom is limited and 2) you dont think outside the box to make alternate builds.

Different tools are used for different purposes, yet you just so happened to have countered your own point: instead of having two useful builds for the same weapon for different situations, you felt the need to use two different weapons to achieve only slightly different purposes. Why is that? What is stopping you from using a different mod scheme on the same weapon to maximize range instead of damage? Is this because you lacking in necessary mods here, or because you're not thinking enough outside the box?

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If you have both of those things in check there is no reason not to find different uses for different tools.  A great example, drakgoon, why use it?  Unless you're mag... discovering those synergies is a lot of fun for a lot of people.

This is, yet again, completely beside the point. For sure, certain weapons synergize with certain frames, and different weapons have different niches, but none of these platitudes apply to the subject of modding itself. How many common builds are there out there for the Drakgoon? What percentage of possible mod combinations does that number represent?

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Another example, I never used the Lanka besides leveling till eidolons, and now with the addition of profit taker, I kept my Lanka for eidolons but got a beastly vectis riven to cover all ips and one elemental combo.  2 different snipers, for 2 different jobs.  The mods are the same situation.

Are they really? In that case, why did you talk only about weapons, and did not list even a single example of mod diversity akin to the niche uses and synergies of weapons?

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The problem you're encountering is that you're failing to recognize the chief reason to build a certain way, which is to be more efficient, and even if you remove those mods, a new meta will appear to be most efficient, and those will be the new mandatory mods.  Plus let's not forget that mods like fire rate and punch through are invisible dps mods... should we strip those too?  Why domt we just balance eberything until everything is identical amd its pointless to play?  Absolute balance, is not a good thing.  Ask karate from nintendo.  Its a crap game... but its balanced!

This is nice, but was already been addressed by Steel_Rook in a prior post. Again, why repeat yourself without adding to what's been said already? Nobody's aiming for absolute balance here, and peeling back layers of mandatory mods would indeed lead to some level of differentiation farther down the line, especially since both fire rate and punch-through have their own tradeoffs that raw increased damage does not.

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The failure here, is to take personal responsibility for the way one chooses to mod.  The code of the game never said you needed to add serration, or whatever, you chose to do that, and why?  Because you wanted to be more efficient and changing what mods are available won't change that because then a new set of "mandatory mods" will emerge and a new group of folks will gripe about those too.

So it's the players' fault if the game is built in such a way that it incentivizes against mod diversity? Interesting. What's even more interesting is that, as I mentioned to you directly in my prior post, this sort of presumption has been directly countered by DE's own dev stream, in which the developers clearly acknowledged the existence of mandatory mods, with supporting data to boot. You can try to blame the players as much as you like, for whichever reason, the fact of the matter is still that players overwhelmingly go for the most efficient builds around. Why shouldn't they?

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In short, I see no compelling evidence that firstly, there is a problem outside of what people have chosen to create for themselves, and second, that adding any of the proposed changes will actually fix anything that is being complained about.

This is a rather disingenuous statement to make when it's already been pointed out to you that the latest dev stream did, in fact, provide plenty of compelling evidence that there is indeed a problem with mod diversity, as did prior dev streams where the developers eventually slid towards making Vacuum more and more universal. In effect, the problem here isn't that there is a lack of evidence, but that you personally refuse to acknowledge valid evidence, and somehow believe this invalidates everyone else's argument. At the end of the day, you can refuse to change your mind on the matter as much as you like, the world simply moves on with or without you, as does this discussion.

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To back that up I will use adaptation as evidence.  Adaptation is a relatively new mod.  It was not in prior build videos.  Now it is in build videos for any frame that can take decent advantage of it (ie not wet paper bag frames).

So... because people didn't build Adaptation when the mod did not exist on Live, it getting added to tank builds somehow is evidence of mod diversity? How does any of this make sense, exactly?

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It's not a damage mod.  It's a utility mod.  Nobody needs to use it, the content didn't change and was completely doable before that... but now something more busted is available and so people use that and it becomes the new meta.  The reverse is also true.  What happens if you remove maiming strike?  Tomorrow every spin build video has relentless combination, because that's how gamers play, that's not de's fault, that's our fault and we have the power to play however we like, its juat that most ofnus recognize that effociency is how you win faster and more often in wf.

So the game's design is the players' fault, now? Because as it stands, you gave a perfectly good example of why developers should be careful about the kind of content they release, because if it's as severely unbalanced as Maiming Strike or Adaptation, it's going to dominate in relevant builds (and there is, again, no reason for it not to), and thereby diminish mod diversity.

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Removing damage as a variable simply limits your options and that seems to be what you guys are complaining about... not having enough options... well the option is there, you're just choosing not to take it and that's not a problem with the system as much as people seem to want to say it is.  The option is there, you can choose it or not.  If you always choose it that's more about you than the system. 

... why would that limit options again? It's not like mods like Serration are the only source of damage, either. There are quite a few conditional damage mods that could likely see more play if there weren't a more reliable alternative that were also strictly better (e.g. Argon Scope and its counterparts).

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All de can do is provide options, which they have done.

... why? What's stopping them from altering or removing existing mods, as they've done in the past?

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It seems a lot to me like this thread is more about trying to smash the current meta to ruin people's investments than it is about providing options because the options are there, they just aren't chosen as much because, by and large, gamers want to win, and in warframe you win more by being efficient, which means use of a particular type of build.

So, to you, everyone here criticizing the current mod system and suggesting alternatives is doing so out of malice? Interesting. Again, putting aside how people have demonstrably no problem having their "investments" ruined overnight when it comes to mods, as noted by the recent changes to Riven dispositions, you are yet again admitting that players by and large don't have diverse mod setups. Why should they, when that's not what the game encourages?

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As with all things, a buff elsewhere is almost always better than a nerf anywhere.  Removing these choices is a straight nerf to build freedom. 

... why?

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And for what?  So I can equip magazine size mods that I have no use for because everything dies in one shot or if I'm going endless, one clip?  What's the point?

Ah, but see, what if enemies don't die in one shot? What if there were situations where you'd benefit from having an extra-large magazine? Sounds like you don't want to think outside the box!

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Plus how does one reconcile a build with pressure point vs primed pressure point vs sacrificial steel if all damage is equal by weapon level?  How does that make sense now? (Not even starting on set bonuses and rivens)

Reconcile what with what now? Are you asking what threshold weapons would be balanced around without current base damage mods?

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I feel strongly a lot of this is rooted more in salt from not having earned all the tools in the game, than it is about "options" because removing the mods actually removes options.  If that's the case for anyone, thankfully there is already a great solution... you can go farm the stuff, same as we did!  Actually not even, it's easier now because acquisition of items gets cheaper and easier to farm over time as the game grows... i remeber not so long ago there wasnt a single frame that could be bought under 100p, now even vaulted frames go for just a little more than that unless they are highly desirable ones, and available frames powered down to something like 30 or 40 depending on the time of day...

This is all nice and elitist, except many of the people making suggestions here are at a pretty high MR. I myself am at MR 26. It doesn't take a particularly high MR either to discuss mods like Serration, which are easily obtained from the start of the game, and quickly maxed out thereafter. It sounds more like you're making an attempt to falsely portray critics of the current mod system as malicious and unskilled, rather than trying to genuinely make any sort of argument, particularly as there is exactly zero evidence you appear to have to support your rather bizarre opinion. Considering how this sort of hostile rhetoric follows from a long list of personal attacks you've made upon several posters here, it is much more likely that it is your own intentions in this discussion that have been less than honorable.

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Can anyone explain why this removal of options is an objectively good idea rather than just saying it is or speaking from emotion?  Because I'm really not convinced at all by what I've seen.

First off, when has anyone spoken from emotion? As for why removing mandatory mods would be a good idea, you need only look at the plethora of answers that have already been given on this thread, such as:

On 2018-12-20 at 7:37 PM, Steel_Rook said:

The common argument when these things come up goes along the lines of: "You make Serration inherent, then everyone uses Multishot. You make that inherent, everyone uses more elemental damage. Etc., etc." While there's some truth to that, the universality of how people build tends to have a pretty rapid diminishing return. Yes, the first few options absolutely EVERYONE is going to use, but you get towards the third? Fourth? You start getting disagreements. Is reload speed better than a larger magazine? Do I want the health mod and the shield mod, or do I want the half-health/half-shield mod and an extra slot? I'm speaking broadly, of course, but my point is that "personal preference" has a not insignificant weight of its own. Most people will pick performance when the performance difference is significant, but more will be inclined to pick up "cool stuff" when the cost isn't as high.

Or:

On 2018-12-13 at 6:35 AM, Hmm...interesting. said:

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.

Which incidentally happens to be the opening to the OP.

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Now in the spirit of buffs vs nerfs, I can see a viable solution to the complaints here, but I still don't think it's a good idea, being, create a damage slot for weapons like exilus for frames, only a primary damage mod for that weapon type can go there, and that adds a free slot for utility...

The reason. I don't like that is because I guarantee you people won't put magazine size in that slot, they will stack in more ways to kill faster, whether it's range on melee, or more status or crit or whatever... which makes no sense since we can already one shot clear a room of sortie 3.

And let's say we do the opposite, let's create a slot just for utility mods... well, why?  We can already one shot clear sortie 3 rooms, what purpose does this serve?  Why do I need more magazine size if I can aoe clear a room?  Heck, why even use weapons when my frame powers can clear for me at a faster rate in many/most cases?

I agree, neither proposed solution would answer the key issues at hand, which you appear to recognize here in spite of your previous denial of them, which is why neither of the ideas you suggested would work for the purposes of this topic.

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It serves no purpose because the premise of this argument isn't rooted in objective truth.  Instead, I believe the premise is more rooted in personal bias, and that bias being, forcing others to play the way some would like, rather than allowing for the options for players to choose how they play, which is already there, and is a superior option because it allows more freedom in playstyle.

That's nice, except this is, by your own admission, itself an opinion, one that is rather evidently rooted in your own biases. What's more, this is an opinion contradicted by existing evidence, namely (again) the latest dev stream, which put forth data showing just how frequently certain mods were picked. It is, therefore, an objective truth that players currently pick certain mods far more than others, and that mod diversity is therefore far less than it could be.

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Don't like the way someone plays?  Either put your own group together or play solo.  In warframe you can currently play however you like by adjusting parameters across the board.

Interesting that you would try to trot out this argument, when it is not only trite, but also utterly irrelevant to the subject of discussion. Nobody here is complaining that they dislike playing alongside players with mandatory mods, and playing solo or in premade groups would do strictly nothing to solve the issue of mandatory mods and reduced build diversity. At this point, it feels like more like you're throwing arguments you've seen before on these forums and seeing what sticks, rather than genuinely trying to advance discussion, let alone respond to anyone who's answered you before. On that matter, you have yet to emit any sort of response regarding the topic of running the entire game from start to finish without mandatory mods: if your solution to the topic of modding is to play the game solo without any mods one wouldn't want, where is your evidence that this is feasible and realistic?

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Removing damage from the equation simply reduces freedom and solves nothing except to frustrate everyone that invested 1000s of plat in a riven with damage on it, which, by this proposed logic, would have to go away too.

So again, why would removing mandatory damage mods reduce freedom? Why would this frustrate anyone, when a month ago DE utterly destroyed players' investments into Riven mods by overhauling dispositions, and generated no notable backlash? Where is your evidence to support all of this fearmongering?

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As would range, punch through, fire rate... and you know, come to think about it, magazine size and zoom are also hidden dps mods so let's toss them out too... and pretty soon we have no mods left... even Shield health and armor mods are hidden DPS mods

... how is zoom a DPS mod, hidden or not, again? By all means, please enlighten us on the methods of abstraction and association you are using here to pretend that every mod is simply another version of Serration. What makes this all the sadder is that, if your reasoning were true, and literally every mod could be boiled down to DPS, then that would itself be categorical proof that the game's current modding system would be broken and in need of an overhaul, because there would be no real choice between any mod, as all would be ordered relative to each other based on some objective metric.

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But even then, this gun is better than that gun, so let's nerf that too until all guns are the same... etc, etc until all we have left is a perfectly balanced shooter... oh wait that game already exists, it's called pong.

Nerf what, exactly? No matter which stat you change on the Vectis, it's never going to play the same way as the Ignis, and the Soma is never going to play the same as the Opticor. Why then pretend that all guns are only differentiated from each other by stats when many of them clearly have different mechanics? For sure, some guns are a lot stronger than others, and I personally believe DE could do some balancing work on them, but that does not equate to homogenizing them. Fortunately, DE seems to agree with me, considering how they just recently rebalanced both the Tonkor and the Simulor, among others, to bring them closer to the current top tier of weapons.

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Ultimately the chief complaint seems to be that magazine size is not as effective of a mod as a damage mod and no matter what you do that's not going to change because magazine size is not as effective as raw killing power even if you were to buff magazine size by 300% and cut damage in half only in a handful of cases would this be a viable mod situation with high fire rate endless weapons like the Supra vandal.

Very few other people here have been talking about magazine size in particular. Nonetheless, the even simpler issue here is that, if a player can put literally nothing but pure damage-increasing mods on a weapon, they have no reason not to do so, because unless a weapon is particularly deficient in some aspect, and unless damage on its own isn't enough to deal with enemies, raw damage will always be more desirable than utility on a weapon. Because damage is so high, because most (but not all weapons) aren't in need of utility mods, and because it's easy to fill a weapon mod table with damage mods, it is therefore difficult to slot in utility mods. In this respect, targeting and either nerfing or removing mandatory damage/multishot mods would lower overall damage, so while there would still be plenty of damage mods out there, there'd be much more space and opportunity for non-damage mods in an environment less saturated with damage.

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Even if you buffed Zoom by 600% it still wouldn't equate to one rank of serration.  This is because of the game play loop, not the modding. 

This is quite possible, which is precisely why mods like Serration aren't made for Warframe: if the "game play loop" means damage automatically beats everything else, this means any damage mod will automatically take priority over non-damage mods, so adding damage mods will reduce mod diversity by default. Therefore, by that same reasoning, peeling back these damage mods would leave room for other mods, and therefore generate choice.

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That's why addressing that would be a viable solution.  Having smarter enemies or at least different styles of encounter objectives would greatly effect what kinds of builds are needed, take profit taker for example.  You "could" use your old eidolon builds there bit it would be inefficient.

Um, what? Eidolon builds aren't inefficient against Profit-Taker because of differences in AI, they're inefficient because the two boss types have completely different mechanics that each affect the way they can be damaged. Even if they had the exact same AI and behavior, the same builds would not be equally viable against the two. What changes to AI do you believe would introduce changes to mod incentives, exactly?

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Fixing the core objectives, enemy scaling and ai is the only relevant solution, changing the mods available is futile and all that does is hit all vets with a giant nerf bat as if we didn't have enough to be salty about already as the entire rest of the game is all built for newbies now we have to give up the stuff we earned and builds we invested in too.  No thank you.

From the sound of it, it sounds more like you're salty that the game isn't catering exclusively to you, as opposed to catering to all players equally, and don't want anything you have to change, more like you're genuinely interested in discussing the topic of mods. This, incidentally, might explain why you're asking for everything else in the game to change except mods: tell me, why should this happen? Why do you think it is more efficient or effective to overhaul multiple game systems at a time and deliberately avoid one that the developers acknowledge has problems?

Edited December 28, 2018 by Teridax68

[Mach25]

On 2018-12-21 at 5:43 PM, Steel_Rook said:

In the interest of full disclosure, I can't pretend to be an expert on the matter. I've played through a few games with points-buy systems (which is what Warframe modding is, at its core) in them and noticed the common points - and problems - they tend to share. The difference between the absolute number of all possible choices and the actual number of practical choices is a common issue with those systems, and it's my belief that "choice granularity" is a major contributing factor. What I mean by that is how many knobs the player can turn and how many stops are on each knob, metaphorically speaking. Intuitively, you'd think that giving players more fine-grained control over their own stats would produce more build variety, but in my experience the exact opposite is the case. The problem is that points-buy systems - video games, really - are highly reductive. Regardless of the complexity of the presentation, most can be reduced to simple optimisation problems with even moderate knowledge of the mechanics and simple statistics. Even when a game doesn't track the player's DPS or Effective Health, these numbers still keep coming up in conversation because they're core to most combat mechanics. I'll take a rough guess and assert that they've been used in this forum before, despite Warframe not tracking these statistics.

If I may take a brief aside, the MMO City of Heroes is a pretty good example of everything wrong in points-buy systems. Back in 2001, it started out with a points-buy system not unlike something like D&D or Vampire: The Masquerade. As a consequence, the game became completely impossible to balance. The performance gap between concept players who grabbed multiple travel powers to mimic their childhood super heroes and hardcore players who min/maxed their builds was so severe that no amount of stats tweaking was enough. By release, the game switched to a class-based system. You pick an Archetype which can then pick from two Powersets (literally sets of 9 powers/abilities) and several Power Pools of additional utility powers. Far more restrictive, but far more balanced because players were essentially forced into at least a broadly viable build. The player could then assign up to 6 slots per power, from a pool of 91 total by level 50 (I think), and place stat Enhancements in each slot. Because the player could stack multiple of the same enhancement, everyone built everything with 1x Accuracy, 1x Cost Reduction, 4xDamage... So this had to be tweaked further via "Enhancement Diversification." Harsh diminishing returns made it pointless to slot more than three of the same kind and not very useful to slot more than two of the same kind. The list of changes goes on, but it gets complicated so I'll leave it at that.

Suffice it to say, though, that I've seen what happens in a system which allows stacking the same "mod" multiple times. People over-slot for DPS and "mods" like control duration, run speed, jump height, to-hit debuff and so on never get used. It doesn't matter that my Dark Blast debuffs enemy hit accuracy, I'm not going to slot it for debuff because I could slap on more damage and cost reduction, instead. The simple fact of the matter is that people by and large will build for whatever seems the most viable. Them more fine-grained control over their own stats doesn't lead players to introduce broader variety in their builds. On the contrary, it leads players optimise variety out of their builds. If you give them the choice between killing things faster or flying, they'll typically pick the former. If you give them a choice between not dying or controlling aggro, they'll typically pick the former. Back in the day of EQ and SW:G you had more leeway for non-combat "support" players, but that's been waning in popularity HARD ever since.

To bring all of this back to Warframe, this big and complex modding system that we have isn't giving people more variety. For veterans, it gives more options to optimise variety out of their builds and for newbies more rope to hang themselves with. I could maybe see the argument that that's part of the game's "challenge" - identifying and creating viable builds, winning the fight before it's even stated. That was certainly what I got told a lot in City of Heroes. The problem is that in this day and age of mass communication, that's not a challenge. You open Google or YouTube or r/Reddit and the challenge has already been solved for you. It's a bit like ye-olde point-and-click adventure games' relationship with Dirty Little Helper (anyone remember that?). And you can only blame players for being "sheep" and copying other people's builds for so long before you catch yourself doing the same thing. Because at the end of the day, points-buy systems are reductive and their optimisation solutions are going to be very similar regardless of how you come to the answer. People don't flock to the same builds because they're being uncreative or lazy. They do it because those builds work.

This is what I meant when I referred to experience - not simply in amount of games played, but one whose life experiences are sufficiently broad enough to where they can create meaningful posts that aid discussions touching upon deep subjects.

Well-written post here. I will see what else you have to say on the matter in future.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2018-12-22 at 9:31 AM, Klokwerkaos said:

The failure here, is to take personal responsibility for the way one chooses to mod.  The code of the game never said you needed to add serration, or whatever, you chose to do that, and why?  Because you wanted to be more efficient and changing what mods are available won't change that because then a new set of "mandatory mods" will emerge and a new group of folks will gripe about those too.

This statement is false on its face. Game systems don't exist in a vacuum or without an intended use. Even when developers fail to properly execute their intended player experience, the system itself has rules inherent in how the numbers work out. If a combat system can be reduced down to a simple calculation of "damage in vs. damage out" (which Warframe can be, in a lot of cases), then the system's inherent rules funnel people down only a few optimal paths - increase damage out, decrease damage in, do some combination of both. Most players don't need to be told what they're expected to do. Even basic trial-and-error experimentation with the system will inform people on how it's "meant" to be played, whether that's what the developers were actually shooting for it or not.

As I said in a previous post, points-buy systems can almost always be reduced to an optimisation problem, which almost always has a small handful of optimal solutions from the massive pool of possible options. Suppose for a moment that you've never seen a hammer in your life. I walked up to you, handed you a claw hammer and told you to go hammer that there nail into a piece of wood. There are a dozen ways you can go about it, from trying to press the nail with the handle to trying to hit the nail with the claw, etc. I doubt it's going to take you long, however, to figure out which side you're supposed to hold the thing by and which side you're supposed to hit with. That's not you being stupid and unimaginative for not trying to hammer a nail by sitting on it, it's you being able to deduce how a tool is meant to be used from its basic design.

Video game systems are not a medium for artistic expression. They're a mathematical problem with a discrete set of solutions. Eventually, players will find those solutions either by crunching the numbers or by brute-force repetition, at which point your system is effectively jammed. New things you add will either be ignored if they're not part of the optimal solution or they'll replace the old optimal solution and those old things will proceed to be ignored. There are a lot of ways developers have historically tried to get around this from hiding mechanics to over-complicating the math to a whole bunch of other approaches. The simplest and most reliable approach, however, is to simply invalidate the most obvious solutions. Figure out the first few best ways to build, then simply don't let players do that. Force players into finding less obviously optimal solutions. After a certain point, these solutions offer so little difference in their level of optimisation that a player's innate personal preferences begin to hold comparable weight.

Again as I said before - same-buff stacking has been by far the largest contributing factor in my experience, which is why I'm in favour of disallowing it whenever possible. In terms of Warframe, I'd argue that forcing players to build for 8 separate buffs rather than x4 the same buff and another x4 the same buff would both produce greater build variety and leave more room for personal preference. Sure, another "meta" will develop, likely around rate of fire... But that's substantially less straight-forward of a weapon buff than just upping the damage. A higher rate of fire means worse accuracy and recoil and greater ammo consumption, where a lower rate of fire might mean slower burst damage but better sustained damage. And that's just a random example off the top of my head.

The broader point here is that players aren't choosing the most optimal builds because they're sheep. Players do this because basic problem-solving leads to those most optimal builds. Yes, players are free to choose sub-optimal builds deliberately, but that's a no-win situation. Either the player has to pick a strong build that they might not like, or the player has to pick a build they like that might not work very well. By removing the most optimal builds from the game as an option altogether, that distinction becomes narrower, perhaps narrow enough to not matter. That's my goal here.

 

On 2018-12-22 at 9:31 AM, Klokwerkaos said:

Removing damage as a variable simply limits your options and that seems to be what you guys are complaining about... not having enough options... well the option is there, you're just choosing not to take it and that's not a problem with the system as much as people seem to want to say it is.  The option is there, you can choose it or not.  If you always choose it that's more about you than the system. 

That's not how choices work. "Cake or death" is technically a choice, but really isn't in practice. Nobody ever picks death. The same holds true on general. A system with two equivalent choices still has more choice than a system with one optimal choice and ten sub-optimal ones. While the latter has a broader opportunity space (10 vs. 2), it has fewer actual options to choose from (1 vs. 2). Build diversity in video games is not a function of how many options there are, but rather a function of how many options are worth taking. Blaming low build variety on people's refusal to pick sub-optimal choices is like trying to hold the tide back with your hands. Either you design around it, or people break your design and do what they were going to do anyway.

I encourage you to look into the concept of "desire paths." There's a neat little YouTube video them     as simple primer. The gist of it is that people's behaviour is typically governed by a common, disorganised goal of optimisation. You, as an environment designer, can only blame people for walking on the grass or cutting between paths for so long before you have to pave over the footpath that people have created by circumventing your design. Either build a wall to physically prevent them from going that way (such as fencing to keep people off of train tracks) or base your design on their desired paths. Game design works in pretty much the same way. A well-designed system is informed by how players use it, whether that's choosing what to allow or what to entirely block off. A developer who takes a wrong guess as to how players will use the system is typically asking for trouble and expensive, unpopular reworks down the line.

 

On 2018-12-22 at 9:31 AM, Klokwerkaos said:

I feel strongly a lot of this is rooted more in salt from not having earned all the tools in the game, than it is about "options" because removing the mods actually removes options.

Then you're wrong. I speak from the perspective of either having all of the mods I want or at least having enough disposable Platinum to buy what I don't have. My issue is with the core system itself, not with my ability to use it efficiently. The way the modding system is designed, optimal performance is often gated behind some REALLY dull builds, predicated on either stacking a lot of the same small handful of buffs or really awkward and unintuitive playstyles. Again, the concept of "desire paths" is relevant here. Your entire argument hinges on shifting the issue away from the design and onto the user, suggesting that it's the user's fault for playing the game wrong and disliking it for that reason. If only the user would play right, then the problems would go away. This once again ignores the whole point of design in the first place - to create an environment that's going to feel natural to the people intended to use it, where the things they're expected to want to do will be doable in ways that they'll find intuitive and natural.

The reason metrics exist - in video games and in design - is to compare a developer's intended user interaction against the way users actually interact with their creation. If players overwhelmingly favour certain builds over others, there's only so far you can blame them before you look inwards and ask yourself a simple question: What is it about my system that's causing players to behave this way, and is there anything I can do to fix it? And it's not like DE don't want to fix this. They fully recognise that some weapons, mods and builds are used FAR more than others. The entire concept of Riven Disposition is based on this very concept. Yes, players cane be "wrong" and sometimes may need to be better educated on the game. But if a majority of people keep being "wrong" in similar ways over a long enough period of time, then I'd argue it's the game which needs to change, rather than the people who play it.

Blaming players doesn't fix problems.

[DatDarkOne]

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Again, the concept of "desire paths" is relevant here. Your entire argument hinges on shifting the issue away from the design and onto the user, suggesting that it's the user's fault for playing the game wrong and disliking it for that reason. If only the user would play right, then the problems would go away. This once again ignores the whole point of design in the first place - to create an environment that's going to feel natural to the people intended to use it, where the things they're expected to want to do will be doable in ways that they'll find intuitive and natural.

Thank you for saying this. 

It's the only reason I got into and continue to play Warframe.  It allows me to play how I want and in a style that I want.  I like to mostly play solo and stealth, hunt, and stalk everything I can.  My choice of frame, weapons, and loadout all reflect this. 

In the 3 years I've been playing this game there has been one consistent thing that hasn't changed (other than me maining Ivara) is that regardless of weapon I use it will always have a Serration, Hornet Strike, or Pressure Point in the build.  Now lets remove the need to have those specific mods in every build.  You just opened up a free mod slot on each weapon for something else to be used.  Do the same for multishot, and you open up a total of two slots for every non-melee weapon.  Hmmmm, looks like my build diversity just got increased. 😄  The only reason I bother with rivens is because they have the potential to use one mod slot in place of two or three other mods to achieve the same effect.  Hence why I value unrolled rivens way more than rolled ones.  

[Mach25]

20 minutes ago, DatDarkOne said:

...The only reason I bother with rivens is because they have the potential to use one mod slot in place of two or three other mods to achieve the same effect...

 

[DatDarkOne]

Did I say something wrong?

[Pryzmatiq]

Damage 3.0, which DE is working on, is going to change much of this. They don't like "mandatory mods" and want modding to be about build diversity. But this is a huge undertaking, and will be literally impossible to please everyone. One thing I do know is that any mods that are removed will refund the credits and endo from those mods, so no worries there. I also agree with what you said about Rivens. They were literally created to bring balance, but instead have simply created an additional power creep. Not that I exactly mind doing a ton of damage, but the system never worked as intended. Too many people want bigger damage numbers instead of better gameplay, it's been this way for ages, and I don't just mean Warframe.

Overall, there is literally a plethora of interesting mods they could create that would increase build diversity to replace those that objectively squander it.

Edited December 24, 2018 by Pryzmatiq

[Mach25]

1 hour ago, DatDarkOne said:

Did I say something wrong?

You said something right. You were simply quoted because our goals are the same with rivens. 👊 (fist bump)

I have a buddy that regularly sells off his rivens because he doesn't like the system - I'm saving up some plat so I can buy them off him when he gets them. If interested, any weapons that you want a riven for, let me know either here on the forums or in-game and I'll keep an eye out.

Edited December 24, 2018 by Mach25

[DatDarkOne]

26 minutes ago, Mach25 said:

You said something right. You were simply quoted because our goals are the same with rivens. 👊 (fist bump)

I have a buddy that regularly sells off his rivens because he doesn't like the system - I'm saving up some plat so I can buy them off him when he gets them. If interested, any weapons that you want a riven for, let me know either here on the forums or in-game and I'll keep an eye out.

Thanks for the offer.  Only weapon I might have a riven use for is the AkBolto.  I have rivens for my other most used weapons.  

Would you believe that I actually enjoy unlocking them more than what the riven is for?  Kinda one of those "the journey is more rewarding than the goal" things.  

[Steel_Rook]

9 hours ago, Pryzmatiq said:

Damage 3.0, which DE is working on, is going to change much of this. They don't like "mandatory mods" and want modding to be about build diversity. But this is a huge undertaking, and will be literally impossible to please everyone. One thing I do know is that any mods that are removed will refund the credits and endo from those mods, so no worries there. I also agree with what you said about Rivens. They were literally created to bring balance, but instead have simply created an additional power creep. Not that I exactly mind doing a ton of damage, but the system never worked as intended. Too many people want bigger damage numbers instead of better gameplay, it's been this way for ages, and I don't just mean Warframe.

I'd be interested to see a new damage system. To be honest, the current resistance distribution among enemy factions is absolutely weird to me, and creates a lot of problems. Every faction has two sets of armour distributed in ways which are difficult to track and each weak to different damage types. Grenier armour is probably what annoys me the most, with Ferrite weak to Corrosive but Alloy weak to Radiation. That right there is two separate damage types that a single faction is weak against, not counting their actual health type. The Corpus are a little less weird, as all of their shields are weak to Magnetic, but some resist Corrosive while others don't. It creates a chaotic system with too many high-priority damage types to the point where players just give up and go for Corrosive anyway. I mean, why bother trying to be clever with your damage types of 3/4 of the enemies you face aren't going to be weak to your chosen damage type even if you specifically built against that faction? Just go Corrosive, pick a high-damage weapon and everyone's eventually going to be weak to that.

I'm of the opinion that enemy resistances need to vary less within the same faction and that status procs need to not deal damage or debuff resistance. That way, you don't have Corrosive and Slash reigning supreme over all the other procs. This goes to my other argument, as well - that elemental damage mods shouldn't be ADDING damage, but rather converting partial damage to that element both in order to exploit enemy resistances and to force a specific proc. This game has WAY too much player damage bloat in stacking multipliers as it is. That's what necessitates crippling amounts of enemy armour damage resistance and forces this ridiculous arms race. A damage / status system which is less stringently tied into stacking the greatest number of damage multipliers and ignoring armour would itself lead to more diversity, I think.

[Vahlokjul]

How do I delete a post?

Edited December 25, 2018 by Vahlokjul

[Vahlokjul]

On 2018-12-22 at 6:50 PM, Klokwerkaos said:

I'm not sure that does anything to better the game, actually the opposite.

If you can one shot everything on the star chart with what you have, then what does adding a hush mod do except make you even more OP?

 

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.

Edited December 25, 2018 by Vahlokjul

[DatDarkOne]

10 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

A damage / status system which is less stringently tied into stacking the greatest number of damage multipliers and ignoring armour would itself lead to more diversity, I think.

I'm only part of your post to keep it short.  Almost everything you mentioned is why I just use Gas as my main elemental.  Because of both my frame and playstyle, gas just gives me the most benefit while having convenience of not switching combos for different factions.  

It gives bonus utility because of the AoE and DoT to power up mods like Condition Overload, Healing Return, and Growing Power all at the same time.  In a way, one could say that I build for overall synergy.  

The funny thing is that it could be considered meta without being "Meta".  😁 

[Mr.Mist]

So.. i have this kind of idea

What of you can combine 3 forma + 1 mod, than that mod will be permanently embedded to the qeapon base stat (yes the mod will not be usable to other weapon) (And yes, they need to make forma less frustating)

This will be only limited to weapon, the mod must be full endo and not riven, and you cannot equip that same mod to the weapon

The other idea is for melee (which i already make a post) to keep channeling stays. Make channeling activate an extra mod slot (1 stance slot, 8 mod slot, 3 channel slot)

 

[Teridax68]

11 hours ago, Mr.Mist said:

What of you can combine 3 forma + 1 mod, than that mod will be permanently embedded to the qeapon base stat (yes the mod will not be usable to other weapon) (And yes, they need to make forma less frustating)

This feature could potentially allow players to slot new mods, but carries the very serious tradeoff of powercreeping weapons. Effectively, this feature would allow players to put more overall mods on their weapon, which means that they could have stuff like Serration, but also whichever damage mods they previously didn't have space for (and there are a couple for any class of weapon). Considering how weapon damage is already out of control, I think it would likely be preferable to look for ways of increasing mod diversity that wouldn't risk inducing power creep.

On 2018-12-24 at 3:46 PM, Steel_Rook said:

I'd be interested to see a new damage system. To be honest, the current resistance distribution among enemy factions is absolutely weird to me, and creates a lot of problems.

I completely agree with the entire post, and I feel more generally that, if we are to have different damage types, those damage types need to have some intrinsically useful function, rather than just play off of a hidden numbers spreadsheet. Ultimately, it isn't all that interesting if Damage Type A deals 25% more damage to an enemy than Damage Type B, and the fact that stuff like health and armor are common to all factions has caused damage types like Corrosive and Slash to be picked by default (and the difference in damage modifiers doesn't really matter because we deal tons of damage, not that the modifiers are visible to begin with). By contrast, if Damage Type A can chill enemies and slow them down, whereas Damage Type B causes them to attract nearby bullets, suddenly there's a much more interesting choice to be made, because these different types have different gameplay effects.

Warframe is a hybrid between a shooter and a RPG, and I feel going forward it would benefit from a clear separation between the two when it comes to customization: when tweaking their builds, players should be dealing with a deep and nuanced customization system that should get them to really think about how they can optimize their play or tailor their weapons and frames to their personal playstyle. Within a mission, though, what should matter above all is the visceral feel of combat, where weapons and frames should be satisfying to use because they give good and direct feedback, not because of numbers popping into the air. A few players have mentioned that the gunplay isn't quite as responsive or polished as in a AAA game, and while I personally think the gunplay in the game is rather good, I can agree that it could be refined, which I think should mean taking away all of the damage modifier spreadsheets to enemies, and instead designing enemies and damage around gameplay that is intuitive and easy to immediately recognize.

On 2018-12-24 at 5:18 AM, DatDarkOne said:

It's the only reason I got into and continue to play Warframe.  It allows me to play how I want and in a style that I want.  I like to mostly play solo and stealth, hunt, and stalk everything I can.  My choice of frame, weapons, and loadout all reflect this.

This I think gets a bit closer to what I was trying to say about off-meta builds: to a layperson, equipping nothing but a silencer on a gun sounds amazing, and for some that alone could be a hook to get them to play Warframe, in the hopes that they could live out their fantasy as a futuristic ninja. To anyone who's had experience with the game, though, that build would be utterly terrible, because putting aside how the current metagame makes loud, all-out combat faster, easier and more rewarding than stealth in almost all cases, the current modding system pushes players to pile damage on top of damage at the expense of everything else, especially standalone utility. More generally, there are currently a ton of builds out there in the game that are niche, quirky, and often immensely fun, but that aren't considered viable, simply because these builds aren't designed to pump out as much damage as possible while making the player near-immune to all incoming damage.

Effectively, the game currently caters almost exclusively to one type of player, i.e. players who enjoy loud, open combat in the same vein as most shooters, while failing to acknowledge almost everyone else, e.g. players who'd like to be stealthy, or players who really want to engage with the game's parkour system, including in combat. This creates further problems when the game ostensibly advertizes its parkour and stealth as historical selling points, and has tried to distance itself from traditional shooters ("ninjas play free"). As good as it is to satisfy one group of players (who deserve content that caters to them), it's not fair to not really give that same opportunity to others, and it's this overcommitment to a single direction that I think has been limiting much of Warframe's gameplay, especially among veterans. We keep getting "endgame" content predicated upon horde mode-style fights with increasingly higher-level enemies, but none of it really puts the player's stealth or parkour skills to the test. Consequently, we've sunk deeper and deeper into a meta that favors raw damage, durability and AoE over any sort of utility or precision. Beyond altering modding to allow weapons to be built in a variety of ways, instead of requiring the same damage mods each time, it would help if DE took a dive into some of the game's mission, enemy and combat systems to bring more diversity there, and remove all the unnecessary restrictors to a game that already has quite a fair amount of diversity, but could have even more by encouraging more styles of play.

[Steel_Rook]

22 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I completely agree with the entire post, and I feel more generally that, if we are to have different damage types, those damage types need to have some intrinsically useful function, rather than just play off of a hidden numbers spreadsheet. Ultimately, it isn't all that interesting if Damage Type A deals 25% more damage to an enemy than Damage Type B, and the fact that stuff like health and armor are common to all factions has caused damage types like Corrosive and Slash to be picked by default (and the difference in damage modifiers doesn't really matter because we deal tons of damage, not that the modifiers are visible to begin with). By contrast, if Damage Type A can chill enemies and slow them down, whereas Damage Type B causes them to attract nearby bullets, suddenly there's a much more interesting choice to be made, because these different types have different gameplay effects.

Damage types and resistances thereof are an old RPG mechanic. This keeps cropping up in games because it's an easy and cheap way to create at least the sense of variety and choice. Stats like damage, resistance, health, armour and so on might come come across like just boring stats in a spreadsheet, but they way they come together is what creates the "feel" of a game. While a concept-minded player might not necessarily care about whether their weapon deals 100 or 10 000 damage per shot, they're still going to care about how powerful that weapon "feels." A slow-firing, powerful-sounding weapon which kills in one or two hits is going to also feel powerful to use, whereas the same weapon which takes four headshots to down a single enemy starts feeling weak. Similarly, a machinegun capable of mowing down large groups of enemies "feels" more intuitive to use than one which requires you to dump an entire magazine into an individual enemy. I know this from experience - it's why I stopped using the standard Gorgon.

This is where picking the right damage type for the right enemy comes in. By employing knowledge about the game, a player could in theory choose their loadout wisely and make even otherwise weak items feel powerful if they're used in the right circumstances. The problem is that this still has to be accompanied by intuitive, easy-to-remember visual and thematic cues in order for the system to be engaging to players. These are still really boring, often really complex behind-the-scenes stats that most people aren't going to remember off-hand, and you REALLY don't want players Alt-Tabbing to the Wiki every few minutes. Damage types need to make sense for the weapon that's causing them and resistances have to make sense for the enemy who has them... And Warframe utterly fails on both counts.

For one, what weapon does what damage seems utterly arbitrary. I'd expect all bullet-firing guns to deal pure Puncture damage. Not only do all of them deal some combination of all three physical damage types instead, but some deal predominantly Impact or even Slash. How the hell does a bullet deal slash damage? I mean, sure - space ninja magic, but how am I supposed to remember which weapon does what damage type? You can't possibly expect me to have encyclopaedic knowledge of every stat, and I have no other means. The same goes for resistances. It makes sense that Grenier metal armour would be resistant to cutting and blunt damage and weak to armour-piercing damage. I can also wrap my head around it being weak to Corrosive damage... But why Radiation? Scratch that, why both, depending on the enemy? Other than trying to memorise the Codex, how the hell am I supposed to know which enemy has Ferrite and which enemy has Alloy armour? And if I want anti-armour capability, what do I build for? Corrosive or Radiation? I know there are answers to these questions, but they're all meta-gamey and non-intuitive from the perspective of someone trying to learn the game by playing it.

Why do we have three types of physical damage? Why does every single enemy faction have different units with different sets of resistances? How am I supposed to either keep all of that straight in my head or actually use that knowledge? And - to follow up on that - is it any wonder most people don't bother and just build for Corrosive damage? When the damage/resistance system in the game is hard to keep track of all the factions have all the resistance types anyway, what's a player's motivation to care one way or another? Why not just grab whatever is the simplest and most widely-usable damage type and just pile on as much damage as possible, instead? In my opinion, whoever picked the damage types and damage resistances in Warframe VASTLY overthought and overcomplicated the system to the point where most players would rather just avoid it entirely.

It doesn't help that, yes, just stacking base damage upon elemental damage upon critical damage upon more damage is usually the best most effective way to build, far more so than trying to be fancy and tailoring your gear to your task. And that's not counting the Orokin/Corrupted faction which has enemies and resistances from all the enemy factions anyway. If the developers are going to throw up their hands and invalidate their own damage/resistance system, why shouldn't I?

I'm of the opinion that a single faction shouldn't have more than two sets of resistances - one for health, one for whatever else they have over that health - armour, shields, sinew, etc. You can have multiple types of each, but vary only the levels of weakness or resistance, not the damage type they're weak or resistant to. Maybe see about ascribing to weapons damage types that players would intuitively expect those weapons to have, as well. I realise that's a LOT more complex and difficult than I'm making it out to be and I suspect DE might already be working on something like that. Whatever the case, though, I find the current damage/resistance system to have far more complexity than is ever actually in play. Almost like DE decided to create a bunch of new combo damage types and needed something to put them on at some point in the past...

[Teridax68]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'm of the opinion that a single faction shouldn't have more than two sets of resistances - one for health, one for whatever else they have over that health - armour, shields, sinew, etc. You can have multiple types of each, but vary only the levels of weakness or resistance, not the damage type they're weak or resistant to. Maybe see about ascribing to weapons damage types that players would intuitively expect those weapons to have, as well. I realise that's a LOT more complex and difficult than I'm making it out to be and I suspect DE might already be working on something like that. Whatever the case, though, I find the current damage/resistance system to have far more complexity than is ever actually in play. Almost like DE decided to create a bunch of new combo damage types and needed something to put them on at some point in the past...

Personally, I think you could actually cut out the middle man and remove resistances altogether -- if an enemy's meant to be weaker to a certain damage type, it would be better to show it, rather than tell it: for example, if fire could spread to nearby enemies, the Infested would be naturally weak to fire, even without any damage modifiers, because if they were to clump up and one of them caught fire, the fire would then spread and damage everyone in the tightly packed horde. If all machinery had a hacking panel that could only be accessed while stunned, and electricity damage stunned enemies, that would create a natural interaction where electricity would be a natural counter to machines. This would show which enemies would be vulnerable to which effect, via ingrained interactions between the relevant enemies and effects, as opposed to having to tell the player via a plethora of different resistances with their own damage modifiers. I very much agree with you that appreciation of a weapon comes down to its feel, which is why I feel natural interactions between weapon quirks and enemies, whether it be sniper rifles naturally working well against single, high-health targets or fire working well against tightly-packed crowds, should take precedence over hidden multipliers (if the latter were to be needed at all in an environment where every weapon were to feel intuitive and integrated into the larger game environment).

On that note, if we're talking about altering resistances, I'd say we could also go one step further and either remove or rework armor and shields as they currently exist: armor as a mechanic exists purely as a multiplier to health, so it is in effect simply more health, whereas shields on enemies are either just worse health, when enemies die quickly, or potentially progression-stopping, if the player somehow cannot kill an enemy before their shields regenerate. This applies even to players, especially in higher levels when shields go down far too quickly, and the sheer amount of damage, including near-unavoidable damage from Slash procs, means there's very little reason for health to not regenerate in the same manner as shields. Put another way, if players had just a health bar that regenerated after not taking damage, and enemies simply had non-regenerating health, there would be no loss in depth of gameplay, and in fact stripping the system of needless complexity could potentially solve the issue of armor scaling, shields falling off in effectiveness at high levels, and certain damage types being significantly over- or undervalued relative to others purely based on how well they can deal with armor.

[Herbeh]

This may have already been suggested (but honestly this short topic is a small novel at this point and I can't read all that) but I think guns should have an ammo slot at the top that gives capacity like melee stances. You could use the less used reload/max capacity mods we have now, but you could include stuff like concealed explosives or the beam variant. 

DE could make more interesting mods for the slot that we would never use currently. Something like "shots explode after punching through their first target, dealing damage in a cone aoe" or "firing for the first 3 seconds after reloading from an empty mag doesn't consume ammo"

[Steel_Rook]

13 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Personally, I think you could actually cut out the middle man and remove resistances altogether -- if an enemy's meant to be weaker to a certain damage type, it would be better to show it, rather than tell it: for example, if fire could spread to nearby enemies, the Infested would be naturally weak to fire, even without any damage modifiers, because if they were to clump up and one of them caught fire, the fire would then spread and damage everyone in the tightly packed horde. If all machinery had a hacking panel that could only be accessed while stunned, and electricity damage stunned enemies, that would create a natural interaction where electricity would be a natural counter to machines. This would show which enemies would be vulnerable to which effect, via ingrained interactions between the relevant enemies and effects, as opposed to having to tell the player via a plethora of different resistances with their own damage modifiers.

I'd be careful with that sort of thing. Turning a status effect proc into free damage is why Slash is so popular, and particularly why you almost always see Gas pop up whenever people aren't using Slash or Corrosive against armour. The whole problem with build diversity especially of weapons is that piling on as much damage as possible is almost always the optimal approach, and enemies can easily be brought together via some Warframe abilities (like Nudus' Larva). A Fire proc which spreads damage - especially if it can spread across a large group, starts being problematic. Back in the days of City of Heroes, we had the infamous "Wolf Farm" - a map full of War Wolf enemies with no ranged attacks, whose AI could be manipulated by a single Tank into stacking on top of each other inside a dumpster, where a Blaster would nuke all of them in a single blast. Wash, rinse, repeat. That's part of why I suggested NOT putting damage onto status procs - so people would have a reason to use the ones that don't deal damage or don't reduce resistances thus facilitating the dealing of more damage.

To your broader point, though, I agree with a more visual representation of resistances. The old WH40K: Space Marine game had a good approach to this. When firing at an Ork's armour plating (such as when shooting at 'Ard Boyz), you'd see sparks and hear a meallic ting. When hitting their flesh where shots deal more damage, you'd see blood spurts and hear a meaty thud. When firing against Chaos Heretics, you'd see their body flash yellow until their shields went down. I feel the same could be done here in Warframe, though our weapons having 15 damage types each sort of undermines this a little. But for instance, dealing predominantly Impact or Slash damage against the Grenier could produce weak-looking superficial sparking while hitting them with predominantly Impact damage could produce blood spurts or powerful-looking explosions. Similarly, hitting the Corpus with physical damage could cause their entire body to flash blue while their shields are up, while hitting them with Magnetic damage could cause their shields to flash red instead, or emit shochwaves off of their body on every shot. I'm obviously making this up as I go along and I'm neither an artist nor a game designer, so I'm sure DE could come up with their own better visual indicators. My point is that I shouldn't need a cheat sheet to tell which enemy is weak to what damage.

And like I said, reduce the resistances per enemy type significantly. For Grenier, have only Cloned Flesh, Armour and Machinery. For Corpus, have only Suit, Shield and Robotic. For Infested, have only Infested Flesh, Ancient Flesh and Infested Machinery. You can have different levels of the same resistance type, like how we have Alloy and Ferrite armour, as long as they resist and are weak to the same damage types. Alloy Armour can be stronger than Ferrite armour still by just having lesser weaknesses and greater resistances, as long as they are to the SAME damage types. That way, the player doesn't have to memorise resistances on a per-unit basis, but can go with general rules. All Grenier have armour and probably this kind of health. All Corpus have shields. Infested machines have Infested Machinery health. Not only is this easier to keep straight in my head, it's also easier to build for. You can have Corpus machinery be weak to completely different damage types to the Crewman Suits and that's fine, as long as it's consistent.

And whatever you do, NEVER give an enemy health AND armour AND shields. Maybe for a boss since those get to cheat, but NEVER for a regular, common enemy. Not even for a miniboss like the Ambulas and definitely not for the hordes upon hordes of Hyenas in Orb Vallis. Armour is a Grenier thing. While Corpus Proxies might be "armoured" in the narrative sense, they shouldn't have Grenier armour damage resistance. Make the rules simple enough that people can remember and exploit them, and I'd argue more people will bother to remember and exploit them. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with relying on damage resistance multipliers as a means of giving "character" to your enemy critters, as long as it's done in a way that players could eventually intuit without having to dig through the Wiki or constantly rely on Scanners. After a certain point, I really should be able to take a rough guess as to what an enemy I haven't seen before might be weak and resistant to, and be right more often than not.

 

13 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

On that note, if we're talking about altering resistances, I'd say we could also go one step further and either remove or rework armor and shields as they currently exist: armor as a mechanic exists purely as a multiplier to health, so it is in effect simply more health, whereas shields on enemies are either just worse health, when enemies die quickly, or potentially progression-stopping, if the player somehow cannot kill an enemy before their shields regenerate. This applies even to players, especially in higher levels when shields go down far too quickly, and the sheer amount of damage, including near-unavoidable damage from Slash procs, means there's very little reason for health to not regenerate in the same manner as shields. Put another way, if players had just a health bar that regenerated after not taking damage, and enemies simply had non-regenerating health, there would be no loss in depth of gameplay, and in fact stripping the system of needless complexity could potentially solve the issue of armor scaling, shields falling off in effectiveness at high levels, and certain damage types being significantly over- or undervalued relative to others purely based on how well they can deal with armor.

I disagree. While Armour predominantly contributes to effective health, its contribution is not absolute. Based purely on armour, your effective health is essentially this:

effective_health = health + health*(armour/300)

The effective health you gain from armour depends on both your actual health and your armour. That way, you can "tank" with both low-health frames with high armour (like Atlas) and high-health frames with low or medium armour (like Inaros). In addition to this, a few other things scale off of health, as well, such as healing. Atlas doesn't heal nearly as much as Inaros, but he also has a far smaller health pool meaning even small heals contribute A LOT to his effective healing, whereas Inaros needs thousands upon thousands of health points per second to top up. The former can heal a lot from Health Orbs while the latter might as well not bother picking them up. Additionally, Armour can be gained or lost in battle without worrying about updating the player's health. The reason I picked Atlas and Inaros is because both of them can alter their armour value through abilities. Inaros has his Scarab Armour which takes a substantial amount of health to build up, offers substantial effective health and can be traded for both control/healing and status resistance. Atlas, on the other hand, can stack up to 1500 armour via his Rubble passive and easily reach 2100 armour total, but that armour value decays and needs to be maintained via constant action.

Doing what Atlas and Inaros do via manipulating the player's health pool isn't nearly as straightforward. You always have to worry about what happens when to the player's current health when their health pool expands and contracts. Do you boost the player's health and so offer what amounts to healing? Do you remove portions of the player's health when the pool contracts? Do you scale a player's health so they have the same percentage before and after the health pool change? I ask, because I used to have this exact problem with the City of Heroes power "Dull Pain." That would boost the player's health and heal about 1.5 times that. As a result, constant debates arose as to whether it's better to use that pre-emptively for the larger health pool at the start of the fight, or whether it was better to use it as a heal late in the fight and basically ignore the bonus health pool. Modifying armour, by contrast, is an easy way to modify effective health without having to worry about current health.

---

I do agree on shields, though - they don't scale up at all. I suspect this issue dates back to the game's roots as Dark Sector, which comes across like it was meant to be a much slower, more methodical stealth-based cover shooter MMO where players would routinely disengage to recover and hide. Indeed, that's how the game plays to a new player who hasn't gotten all the game-breaking gear yet. In such a design, a regenerating shield is VERY valuable because health is so hard to recover. The problem is the game has long since abandoned that design, with Orb Vallis being the clearest example yet. Wide open fields with no cover, hyper-mobile enemies who can't be easily evaded and fragile defence objectives which require the player to stand in the open soaking up damage or else fail. The game has long since moved from a tactical shooter into a more traditional tank-n-spank MMO of the likes of WoW or City of Heroes or Lineage 2. In that design, shields aren't powerful enough to tank much damage and their regeneration mechanics don't let them recover to any significant degree.

I'd personally propose removing the recovery delay from shields altogether and boosting their recovery rate significantly. Boost base shield recovery, then either scale shield recovery to shield capacity (10 seconds fro, 0 to max shields) or boost the strength of Fast Deflection up to Vitality/Redirection levels of 440% (up from 90% currently). I've seen suggestions about adding Shield Damage Resistance of some kind and I'm not exactly opposed to it, but I don't want shields to be just another health pool for players with a different colour. I'd like to avoid shields from breaking down into the same "effective health" metric that health does, and would rather they were weaker but faster to regenerate. Potentially fast enough that a shield build could disengage and be back to full strength within seconds, rather than having to be out of the fight for half a minute. I'd say you could also give shields ramping resistance the faster they take damage... But that's already there in Adaptation, isn't it?

Point being, I feel all three of Health, Armour and Shields are worth keeping in the game, but shields can stand to have a major redesign in order to stop being pointless. In fact, I'd be perfectly happy to see more shield-less Warframes with health recovery abilities if that meant the high-shield, low-health frames could scale a bit better.

[Teridax68]

10 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'd be careful with that sort of thing. Turning a status effect proc into free damage is why Slash is so popular, and particularly why you almost always see Gas pop up whenever people aren't using Slash or Corrosive against armour. The whole problem with build diversity especially of weapons is that piling on as much damage as possible is almost always the optimal approach, and enemies can easily be brought together via some Warframe abilities (like Nudus' Larva). A Fire proc which spreads damage - especially if it can spread across a large group, starts being problematic.

I think that assessment is very much based on the current state of balance: Slash, for example, is popular because it goes through all defenses, whereas damage types like Fire and Toxin, which are also DoTs, aren't nearly as popular. As such, the problem isn't that DoTs in general are overpowered by design (especially not in a game state where players can deal so much burst damage), but that certain DoT effects are overpowered, and others are underwhelming. Moreover, even an effect as broad as damage can have a niche if implemented right: to go back to the example of spreading fire damage, for sure it would be strong against crowds, but against spread-out enemies, that part of the effect wouldn't work, which would then open up opportunities for other kinds of effects (e.g. sniper rifles or other potent single-target weapons). For sure, that doesn't sound feasible in a current state of the game where every faction is always attacking the player in hordes, but then there are many reasons why different factions should provide different distributions of enemies, since it makes no sense for the Corpus to attack in hordes, even if it does very much make sense for the Infested to do so.

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Back in the days of City of Heroes, we had the infamous "Wolf Farm" - a map full of War Wolf enemies with no ranged attacks, whose AI could be manipulated by a single Tank into stacking on top of each other inside a dumpster, where a Blaster would nuke all of them in a single blast. Wash, rinse, repeat. That's part of why I suggested NOT putting damage onto status procs - so people would have a reason to use the ones that don't deal damage or don't reduce resistances thus facilitating the dealing of more damage.

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.  

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To your broader point, though, I agree with a more visual representation of resistances. The old WH40K: Space Marine game had a good approach to this. When firing at an Ork's armour plating (such as when shooting at 'Ard Boyz), you'd see sparks and hear a meallic ting. When hitting their flesh where shots deal more damage, you'd see blood spurts and hear a meaty thud. When firing against Chaos Heretics, you'd see their body flash yellow until their shields went down. I feel the same could be done here in Warframe, though our weapons having 15 damage types each sort of undermines this a little. But for instance, dealing predominantly Impact or Slash damage against the Grenier could produce weak-looking superficial sparking while hitting them with predominantly Impact damage could produce blood spurts or powerful-looking explosions. Similarly, hitting the Corpus with physical damage could cause their entire body to flash blue while their shields are up, while hitting them with Magnetic damage could cause their shields to flash red instead, or emit shochwaves off of their body on every shot. I'm obviously making this up as I go along and I'm neither an artist nor a game designer, so I'm sure DE could come up with their own better visual indicators. My point is that I shouldn't need a cheat sheet to tell which enemy is weak to what damage.

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. If, by contrast, armored enemies had armor only on certain parts of their hitboxes, and certain effects could either allow for penetration through this armor (e.g. Puncture), or could melt it off entirely (e.g. Corrosive), then there would be a much more interesting gameplay system at hand, where players would be faced with genuine choice: do you stick to a weapon that's not made to deal with armor, and try to shoot more accurately to hit armored enemies in their weak spots? Do you pick an armor-piercing weapon that'll be good against armored targets, but will struggle outside of that context? Or do you go for the more supportive weapon and melt off enemy armor for another damage source to hit them more easily? This I think is the kind of gameplay that would embody different enemies having different resistances, rather than just some hidden damage modifier spreadsheet, and it's gameplay that Warframe could implement. If not, and if damage types only vary per faction in the hidden damage modifiers each of them possesses, then the entirety of that system ends up being the digital equivalent of asking the player to put wooden pegs into matching holes.

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And like I said, reduce the resistances per enemy type significantly. For Grenier, have only Cloned Flesh, Armour and Machinery. For Corpus, have only Suit, Shield and Robotic. For Infested, have only Infested Flesh, Ancient Flesh and Infested Machinery. You can have different levels of the same resistance type, like how we have Alloy and Ferrite armour, as long as they resist and are weak to the same damage types. Alloy Armour can be stronger than Ferrite armour still by just having lesser weaknesses and greater resistances, as long as they are to the SAME damage types. That way, the player doesn't have to memorise resistances on a per-unit basis, but can go with general rules. All Grenier have armour and probably this kind of health. All Corpus have shields. Infested machines have Infested Machinery health. Not only is this easier to keep straight in my head, it's also easier to build for. You can have Corpus machinery be weak to completely different damage types to the Crewman Suits and that's fine, as long as it's consistent.

And whatever you do, NEVER give an enemy health AND armour AND shields. Maybe for a boss since those get to cheat, but NEVER for a regular, common enemy. Not even for a miniboss like the Ambulas and definitely not for the hordes upon hordes of Hyenas in Orb Vallis. Armour is a Grenier thing. While Corpus Proxies might be "armoured" in the narrative sense, they shouldn't have Grenier armour damage resistance. Make the rules simple enough that people can remember and exploit them, and I'd argue more people will bother to remember and exploit them. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with relying on damage resistance multipliers as a means of giving "character" to your enemy critters, as long as it's done in a way that players could eventually intuit without having to dig through the Wiki or constantly rely on Scanners. After a certain point, I really should be able to take a rough guess as to what an enemy I haven't seen before might be weak and resistant to, and be right more often than not.

I can agree with this: even if we're not ripping apart the current system, it would at least help to go back to its roots and cleanly separate which factions are weak/strong to which elements. As you mentioned, shields and armor are common to almost all factions now, and on top of that there are different types of armor and flesh. This I think is all the more reason to remove resistances altogether, becomes when it comes to it, what the player sees are red, yellow or blue bars: while some factions may have weaknesses that may be more intuitive to the player (e.g. "the zombie horde faction is weak to fire"), others do not (Grineer Cloned Flesh takes 50% less Void damage, but Corpus Flesh does not, for example). As long as these damage modifier tables exist, players are going to have to consult some sort of database to understand what's making their damage spike against some enemies and slow down against others, hence why I think we should move away from spreadsheet-style resistances and into actual gameplay implementations of those strengths and weaknesses, e.g. the above examples of hitbox-based armor, and crowds of enemies versus spread-out units.

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I disagree. While Armour predominantly contributes to effective health, its contribution is not absolute. Based purely on armour, your effective health is essentially this:

effective_health = health + health*(armour/300)

Okay, but that is also my point: health and armor both just multiply off of each other to give a unit their "real" health. Because armor has strictly no gameplay impact besides its own resistances, its contribution to gameplay is fundamentally not that significant: all else held equal, a character with 1000 health and 300 armor is going to die as quickly as a character with 2000 health, and die in very much the same way. If armor carried some actual gameplay impact, e.g. the armor plating mentioned above, resistance to crowd control, etc., it could perhaps be said to have a function, but as it stands it exists only to multiply health.

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The effective health you gain from armour depends on both your actual health and your armour. That way, you can "tank" with both low-health frames with high armour (like Atlas) and high-health frames with low or medium armour (like Inaros). In addition to this, a few other things scale off of health, as well, such as healing. Atlas doesn't heal nearly as much as Inaros, but he also has a far smaller health pool meaning even small heals contribute A LOT to his effective healing, whereas Inaros needs thousands upon thousands of health points per second to top up. The former can heal a lot from Health Orbs while the latter might as well not bother picking them up. Additionally, Armour can be gained or lost in battle without worrying about updating the player's health. The reason I picked Atlas and Inaros is because both of them can alter their armour value through abilities. Inaros has his Scarab Armour which takes a substantial amount of health to build up, offers substantial effective health and can be traded for both control/healing and status resistance. Atlas, on the other hand, can stack up to 1500 armour via his Rubble passive and easily reach 2100 armour total, but that armour value decays and needs to be maintained via constant action.

I don't really agree with any of this. For one, if a frame has low health, even with high armor they'll die quickly to Slash procs, and will have only a low base for their health to multiply off of, which is one of the reasons why Atlas still isn't considered as survivable as the likes of Inaros (who happens to have the highest health in the game, in addition to high armor). If both of these characters could simply modify their health pool (and both have self-healing), the net gameplay impact would be no different, particularly since Inaros's effective health modification is fairly confusing and deceptive (you're lowering your health, which lowers your current effective health... but also increasing your armor, which increases your effective health). Moreover, outside of the specific abilities on certain frames and weapons, healing is far too rare and minute to really cause armor to have an impact: health orbs only rarely spawn in regular play, and even when they drop, they have no real impact on the health pool of a kitted-out player, certainly not in the middle of a heated fight. In practice, armor simply does not make enough of a gameplay difference to merit standing out from health. In fact, I'd go as far as saying the only health type with a unique gameplay effect is overshields, which amount to giving oneself non-regenerating bonus health.  

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Doing what Atlas and Inaros do via manipulating the player's health pool isn't nearly as straightforward. You always have to worry about what happens when to the player's current health when their health pool expands and contracts. Do you boost the player's health and so offer what amounts to healing? Do you remove portions of the player's health when the pool contracts? Do you scale a player's health so they have the same percentage before and after the health pool change? I ask, because I used to have this exact problem with the City of Heroes power "Dull Pain." That would boost the player's health and heal about 1.5 times that. As a result, constant debates arose as to whether it's better to use that pre-emptively for the larger health pool at the start of the fight, or whether it was better to use it as a heal late in the fight and basically ignore the bonus health pool. Modifying armour, by contrast, is an easy way to modify effective health without having to worry about current health.

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.

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I do agree on shields, though - they don't scale up at all. I suspect this issue dates back to the game's roots as Dark Sector, which comes across like it was meant to be a much slower, more methodical stealth-based cover shooter MMO where players would routinely disengage to recover and hide. Indeed, that's how the game plays to a new player who hasn't gotten all the game-breaking gear yet. In such a design, a regenerating shield is VERY valuable because health is so hard to recover. The problem is the game has long since abandoned that design, with Orb Vallis being the clearest example yet. Wide open fields with no cover, hyper-mobile enemies who can't be easily evaded and fragile defence objectives which require the player to stand in the open soaking up damage or else fail. The game has long since moved from a tactical shooter into a more traditional tank-n-spank MMO of the likes of WoW or City of Heroes or Lineage 2. In that design, shields aren't powerful enough to tank much damage and their regeneration mechanics don't let them recover to any significant degree.

I largely agree with this, though ultimately I don't think Warframe really falls into tank-and-spank territory now, simply because there is no such thing as tanking in the classical MMO sense in this game, as there is no real form of aggro management. At higher levels, the problem is simply that there are way too many enemies with too much AoE and/or crowd control, way too much emphasis on staying in the same place for many objectives, and way too little emphasis on parkour for players to really benefit from moving swiftly around to avoid incoming damage. Even if they do, enemies can still hit them, and the damage they deal can easily go right to their health, or even outright kill them, which is why highly survivable frames are in demand.

Meanwhile, at low levels, where combat is less heated, players genuinely could play the game the way it was originally intended, and dodge enemy fire with parkour before their shields take damage, but the game's many claustrophobic tilesets, poor conveying of its full moveset and the importance of movement in combat (new and veteran players move in distinctly different ways, with stark differences in speed), and accidental health attrition through a plethora of damage effects that directly affect the player's health bar (e.g. Slash procs, Toxin damage from Infested) and a lack of adequate healing, all cause Warframe to fall short of its intended combat.

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. This to me is all the more reason to either scrap or nerf mods like Serration, because any sort of situational bonus mod would need to offer some seriously broken amounts of damage to compete with them (and even then, if the mod were strong enough, it'd likely get slotted alongside Serration or its equivalent, unless the developers force mutual exclusion between the two). 

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I'd personally propose removing the recovery delay from shields altogether and boosting their recovery rate significantly. Boost base shield recovery, then either scale shield recovery to shield capacity (10 seconds fro, 0 to max shields) or boost the strength of Fast Deflection up to Vitality/Redirection levels of 440% (up from 90% currently). I've seen suggestions about adding Shield Damage Resistance of some kind and I'm not exactly opposed to it, but I don't want shields to be just another health pool for players with a different colour. I'd like to avoid shields from breaking down into the same "effective health" metric that health does, and would rather they were weaker but faster to regenerate. Potentially fast enough that a shield build could disengage and be back to full strength within seconds, rather than having to be out of the fight for half a minute. I'd say you could also give shields ramping resistance the faster they take damage... But that's already there in Adaptation, isn't it?

Point being, I feel all three of Health, Armour and Shields are worth keeping in the game, but shields can stand to have a major redesign in order to stop being pointless. In fact, I'd be perfectly happy to see more shield-less Warframes with health recovery abilities if that meant the high-shield, low-health frames could scale a bit better.

This is fair, though I feel there's a slippery slope here with respect to health recovery abilities: right now, healing of some sort is considered vital in higher-end play because a) players take too much damage relative to their health pool, and b) most frames have no real self-sustain to speak of, so if they take damage that breaches their shields (and most damage does at that point), their health will invariably decrease until they die or get downed. The fact that health as a baseline does not regenerate, and that healing is mostly dependent on specific frames, weapons, mods, etc., since healing from the environment is exceedingly rare, unreliable and weak, also means that the way most frames manage their health is inherently dysfunctional. As such, if the goal is to give certain frames health recovery because that is genuinely meant to be a part of their theme, that's fine, but if the goal is to give frames self-sustain abilities simply because that's the only way they'll perform adequately at higher levels, that's a design trend that is going to age poorly. We're already seeing something similar with the current trend of giving frames utterly unnecessary amounts of damage mitigation, to the point where even some players have started to ask for glass cannon warframes like Ember to also receive a damage reduction steroid. In this respect, I think it may be ultimately better if health itself regenerated over time.

Edited December 28, 2018 by Teridax68