The game's outdated horde-shooting mechanics are showing (Challenge Discussion)

[MJ12]

2 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

I think this would be an oversimplification. Minor flavor bonuses like Infested being weak to fire are fine (e.g., the player's first response to Infested is "kill it with fire!!!"), but other than that effectiveness should be built around counter-mechanics.

Rather than "anti-Grineer," corrosive is obviously anti-armor. This would make it good against most Grineer, Corpus proxies, and Infested Ancients.

However... Instead of handling it through an arbitrary damage multiplier, I would implement it through specific effects. For example, armor would be a hard-to-penetrate health buffer instead of percentage damage reduction, and corrosive would eat away its durability over time while temporarily making it easier to penetrate. This would make corrosive useful to slash-based weapons unable to penetrate thick armor effectively, but puncture-based weapons could opt to take health-damaging elements due to penetrating armor more easily.

With adequate swap speed, players could even opt to specialize one weapon for armor destruction (puncture corrosive) and another for finishing off defenseless foes (slash viral, etc.) for a 1-2 punch combination.

In other words, tools should be adaptable for different purposes rather than used as simple color coding for otherwise-identical enemy factions.

I'd honestly remove most damage modifiers entirely from elemental effects and make elements largely just procs. My question about elemental-typed damage is what they add to the game-and I'm increasingly thinking they basically add nothing in their current state. Elemental resistance mods, save for Adaptation, are bad and nobody uses them-and Adaptation basically resists all elements anyways.

I do a bit of pen and paper RPG design/homebrew in my spare time and the most important lesson to learn from that, for all game design in general, is that players only have a certain amount of mental space and therefore it's important to always ask yourself 'is the amount of mental space it would take for someone to engage with this mechanic actually going to give benefits to the players and the gameplay that are worth the costs?' Oftentimes when you think about things this way, you quickly realize that you have a ton of features that exist not because they're well-designed, but because that's how it's always been done.

This is why Blizzard games are generally incredibly tight and fun to play-they are pretty willing to trash mechanics and complexity that doesn't work so players can play attention to things that do.

[Hyohakusha]

2 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

My question about elemental-typed damage is what they add to the game-and I'm increasingly thinking they basically add nothing in their current state.

I'm not trying to jump you MJ and I hope you don't take this that way; the topic of this thread in general is indicative of the real problem. People ask for depth while completely ignoring mechanics that already exist due to sheer laziness.

Elements are the highest source of damage in game. I swear to god, it's like no one even bothers to do any research before complaining about things.

Each type of "health", be it flesh, alloy/ ferrite armor, fossilized infested, etc., takes an increased amount of damage from the corresponding element that it's weak to, up to +75% total damage on combined elements. And that's total damage, at the end of the equation. In addition, unlike those worthless +slash or +puncture mods (save for Sweeping Serration), the +90% boost you get from an 11 cost elemental mod is calculated off of the weapons total base damage, instead of only applying to one of it's IPS totals.

Properly modding out weapons to deal with each faction adds quite a bit to the game. People complain about armor, and yet they don't bother to check what that type of armor is weak to. Radiation not only gets the +75% boost to damage against Alloy, it also ignores 75% of their armor rating. That's why people who only mod for Corrosive struggle against Bombards; Bombards have Alloy armor, and unless you hit them with enough Corrosive procs to outright remove it, it's not going to be doing much good. Same thing with Gas vs pure Toxin on enhanced shield sorties. Only the Gas proc goes through the shield, as it it's simply a weaker AoE version of a Toxin proc. However, plain Toxin damage bypasses shields from the jump, making a melee weapon with Primed Fever Strike extremely useful in such a situation.

It adds depth by allowing you to spread out various elemental damage types across your loadouts so you can be more than prepared to handle any enemy you come across, in any situation. That's the reward for taking 5 minutes to look at the elemental weakness chart on the wiki. The one legitimate criticism that DE shouldn't ignore is that the elemental/ ips/ proc system isn't explained in game beyond some symbols in the codex.

Maiming Strike is another good example of something people don't even bother to test before jumping on the bandwagon. Without Weeping Wounds, it's worthless beyond scrub levels (sub 120-140+) where anything is going to die instantly anyway. I encourage anyone reading this to take your Atterax into the simulacrum and spawn some lv140 Bombards. With Primed Pressure, Shatter, Maiming, Drifiting, the works, WITHOUT Weeping Wounds, you'll be hitting for a whopping 50 damage, even with a 2-3x combo meter. That's because slash sucks against armor. It's the slash PROC that does the damage. Swap out Maiming for Weeping, don't even bother to spin, just use your quick melee. The hits will continue to only deal about 50 damage, while Procs will tick off a thousand each. Maiming's only purpose is to boost the damage of those procs, and it doesn't even do that well. Thanks to Brozime's old video and the other Youtubers who copied it, DE's been reworking melee under entirely false pretenses, based on a false public perception instead of in game mechanics and damage calculations.

The simple fact is people don't want to bother trying things out for themselves. They want one answer for everything. That's not how this game works.

[AnnaCurser]

I dont need the game to be harder. DE thinks that Harder means more Armor, HP and some shield that makes mobs immune to everything.
I would like the combat to be more interesting.

When you play a tank like Inaros and youre a lazy #*!% like me, you can sometimes see how the AI of the enemies #*!% up their every bit. they run around like headless chicken, even ranged mobs come at you to give you a hug for no tactical reason whatsoever and their attack speed is poor. sometimes they hit you, sometimes they dont.

On the other end of the spectrum theres bursty Technician Engineers or giant space lasers that just put out insane damage within a second. And of course all of those Shields of Silence, Nihilators, Arbiter drones and such. Suddenly youre just #*!%ed becuase your spell your health or shield are all just gone and then you startin to become a onehit.

I like the concept of the fractions. Grineer have armor but dont do damage. Corpus have shields and kill you with lasers. and infested are all melee but nihilate your magic and leech your mana. it makes sense. the  execution is done poorly though.

[DiabolusUrsus]

2 hours ago, Mach25 said:

Yep, that's what I meant - I saw your idea and agreed with corrosive being good against all armor. I simply said grineer because they're an armor-based faction and I was thinking about Rook's discussion of enemies' characteristics at this point in time, the lack of info newer players don't have and how this game needs proper documentation so my summation was threefold: a distillation of enemies in simple to understand terms so players who don't know about these other resources can get a rough idea of what to expect with each faction, bringing reasonable changes to each faction in general and as well a simplistic argument to help maintain focus and discussion on the topic at hand.

Ah, okay. Agreed.

Quote

I'm still waiting for that game of yours, Diab. I. want. that. game.

Games are expensive and time-consuming to make, especially if you want to do a good job. Land me some winning lottery tickets and we'll talk. 😛

2 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

I was talking more appearance - i.e., the brightness of many projectiles seems to congeal them all into one, visually, even with a fair amount of spread - but yeah, that's true too.

Hum. I think DE could stand to review some of their FX brightness overall, especially with regards to on-screen saturation. I find that Warframe can become a right clusterbomb of blinding visuals which prevent me from really engaging with what's going on. Any defense-oriented mission with Napalms can be a good example of this, especially with a Nekros (i.e., me) in the mix.

2 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

Well that second one's just guts.

If that's the case then super-fast projectiles would work, but if they could fix that, I see no reason for the processing overhead regarding:

This, because many weapons and most combat scenarios in Warframe are going to make it that hitscan is pretty much equivalent. It's mostly about visual feel. That and people are likely to react badly just to the news that everything is a projectile, not even taking into consideration that the majority of things won't be that affected due to the high projectile speeds most stuff gets.

Keep in mind that part of why I would want this is making projectile speed a more universally applicable bonus/penalty. I would ultimately want every mod to be a measured trade-off, so having universally applicable stats would help a great deal in that respect. I also question how much processing power it would actually require; I don't think there's a noticeable difference in performance between Grineer and Corpus missions, nor does the game spontaneously hitch if you have a full team of people using projectile weapons.

The only issues that have cropped up in the past have been due to excessive multishot applied to ballistics-enabled projectiles (i.e., projectiles that drop due to gravity like on the Kohm) or intensive visual effects (like on the Simulor). Most weapons would be fine with simple tracers, and I'm not advocating for actual ballistics on a universal scale.

2 hours ago, MJ12 said:

I'd honestly remove most damage modifiers entirely from elemental effects and make elements largely just procs. My question about elemental-typed damage is what they add to the game-and I'm increasingly thinking they basically add nothing in their current state. Elemental resistance mods, save for Adaptation, are bad and nobody uses them-and Adaptation basically resists all elements anyways.

The answer is essentially nothing. Aside from the procs, radiation is the same as corrosive is the same as viral is the same as insert x element here from a gameplay perspective. Absolutely nothing changes aside from your arbitrary efficacy. That's fine for raw damage, but elements should certainly have more of an impact on playstyle.

2 hours ago, MJ12 said:

I do a bit of pen and paper RPG design/homebrew in my spare time and the most important lesson to learn from that, for all game design in general, is that players only have a certain amount of mental space and therefore it's important to always ask yourself 'is the amount of mental space it would take for someone to engage with this mechanic actually going to give benefits to the players and the gameplay that are worth the costs?' Oftentimes when you think about things this way, you quickly realize that you have a ton of features that exist not because they're well-designed, but because that's how it's always been done.

Agreed! Random crits and procs are two mechanics that spring handily to mind...

2 hours ago, MJ12 said:

This is why Blizzard games are generally incredibly tight and fun to play-they are pretty willing to trash mechanics and complexity that doesn't work so players can play attention to things that do.

I've never been a huge fan of any Blizzard games, though that's more down to aesthetic preferences than mechanical ones.

1 hour ago, Hyohakusha said:

I'm not trying to jump you MJ and I hope you don't take this that way; the topic of this thread in general is indicative of the real problem. People ask for depth while completely ignoring mechanics that already exist due to sheer laziness.

Elements are the highest source of damage in game. I swear to god, it's like no one even bothers to do any research before complaining about things.

You completely misunderstood what they said. Yes, elements have a function with regards to game mechanics. They're still just fancy raw damage, aside from a handful that have persistently useful procs.

1 hour ago, Hyohakusha said:

Each type of "health", be it flesh, alloy/ ferrite armor, fossilized infested, etc., takes an increased amount of damage from the corresponding element that it's weak to, up to +75% total damage on combined elements. And that's total damage, at the end of the equation. In addition, unlike those worthless +slash or +puncture mods (save for Sweeping Serration), the +90% boost you get from an 11 cost elemental mod is calculated off of the weapons total base damage, instead of only applying to one of it's IPS totals.

This is great and all, but it changes absolutely nothing in the greater scope of the game experience. If you strip off all the fancy labels you're left with "your weapon deals more damage." Great, that's exactly the same as Serration, and the only time this really comes up in game is if you happen to forget to switch between mod loadouts when facing a different faction.

1 hour ago, Hyohakusha said:

Properly modding out weapons to deal with each faction adds quite a bit to the game. People complain about armor, and yet they don't bother to check what that type of armor is weak to. Radiation not only gets the +75% boost to damage against Alloy, it also ignores 75% of their armor rating. That's why people who only mod for Corrosive struggle against Bombards; Bombards have Alloy armor, and unless you hit them with enough Corrosive procs to outright remove it, it's not going to be doing much good. Same thing with Gas vs pure Toxin on enhanced shield sorties. Only the Gas proc goes through the shield, as it it's simply a weaker AoE version of a Toxin proc. However, plain Toxin damage bypasses shields from the jump, making a melee weapon with Primed Fever Strike extremely useful in such a situation.

Again, how is this any different from just dealing more damage? Swapping out arbitrary mod cards before the mission starts does not equate to elemental damage adding meaningfully to the game. You still approach enemies the exact same way, and the only difference is "this one works and this one doesn't." Armor is even more ridiculous, because the actual most effective strategy is to ignore both radiation and corrosive entirely, stack CP, and take Viral. Why? Because it deals more damage against health.

Much unique, very interesting. Wow.

1 hour ago, Hyohakusha said:

It adds depth by allowing you to spread out various elemental damage types across your loadouts so you can be more than prepared to handle any enemy you come across, in any situation. That's the reward for taking 5 minutes to look at the elemental weakness chart on the wiki. The one legitimate criticism that DE shouldn't ignore is that the elemental/ ips/ proc system isn't explained in game beyond some symbols in the codex.

That. Is. Not. Depth. It's shallow complexity at best.

Ooh, great, let's memorize a table of what deals increased damage to what. Not only that, let's make it inconsistent as hell and completely opaque without a wiki, or until you've scanned possibly 20 of the same damn enemy before we share its weaknesses with you. Pokemon did a better job of this type of complexity because weaknesses and resistances were mostly common sense and easy to keep track of.

Depth would be something like players having options for making normally ineffective options more effective with the right knowledge. For example, freezing an armored enemy with Cold damage to increase its vulnerability to Impact. The rigid system we currently is basically just a game of color-by-the-numbers.

1 hour ago, Hyohakusha said:

Maiming Strike is another good example of something people don't even bother to test before jumping on the bandwagon. Without Weeping Wounds, it's worthless beyond scrub levels (sub 120-140+) where anything is going to die instantly anyway. I encourage anyone reading this to take your Atterax into the simulacrum and spawn some lv140 Bombards. With Primed Pressure, Shatter, Maiming, Drifiting, the works, WITHOUT Weeping Wounds, you'll be hitting for a whopping 50 damage, even with a 2-3x combo meter. That's because slash sucks against armor. It's the slash PROC that does the damage. Swap out Maiming for Weeping, don't even bother to spin, just use your quick melee. The hits will continue to only deal about 50 damage, while Procs will tick off a thousand each. Maiming's only purpose is to boost the damage of those procs, and it doesn't even do that well. Thanks to Brozime's old video and the other Youtubers who copied it, DE's been reworking melee under entirely false pretenses, based on a false public perception instead of in game mechanics and damage calculations.

There's a lot more to Melee 3.0 than Maiming Strike changes. If it were that big of a deal they could have just nerfed Maiming Strike's interaction with Blood Rush and been done with it.

1 hour ago, Hyohakusha said:

The simple fact is people don't want to bother trying things out for themselves. They want one answer for everything. That's not how this game works.

How did you read that ongoing discussion and come to the conclusion that any of us wants "one answer for everything?" Seriously, how?

[(PSN)Grnmchn1]

6 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Ah, okay. Agreed.

Games are expensive and time-consuming to make, especially if you want to do a good job. Land me some winning lottery tickets and we'll talk. 😛

Hum. I think DE could stand to review some of their FX brightness overall, especially with regards to on-screen saturation. I find that Warframe can become a right clusterbomb of blinding visuals which prevent me from really engaging with what's going on. Any defense-oriented mission with Napalms can be a good example of this, especially with a Nekros (i.e., me) in the mix.

Keep in mind that part of why I would want this is making projectile speed a more universally applicable bonus/penalty. I would ultimately want every mod to be a measured trade-off, so having universally applicable stats would help a great deal in that respect. I also question how much processing power it would actually require; I don't think there's a noticeable difference in performance between Grineer and Corpus missions, nor does the game spontaneously hitch if you have a full team of people using projectile weapons.

The only issues that have cropped up in the past have been due to excessive multishot applied to ballistics-enabled projectiles (i.e., projectiles that drop due to gravity like on the Kohm) or intensive visual effects (like on the Simulor). Most weapons would be fine with simple tracers, and I'm not advocating for actual ballistics on a universal scale.

The answer is essentially nothing. Aside from the procs, radiation is the same as corrosive is the same as viral is the same as insert x element here from a gameplay perspective. Absolutely nothing changes aside from your arbitrary efficacy. That's fine for raw damage, but elements should certainly have more of an impact on playstyle.

Agreed! Random crits and procs are two mechanics that spring handily to mind...

I've never been a huge fan of any Blizzard games, though that's more down to aesthetic preferences than mechanical ones.

You completely misunderstood what they said. Yes, elements have a function with regards to game mechanics. They're still just fancy raw damage, aside from a handful that have persistently useful procs.

This is great and all, but it changes absolutely nothing in the greater scope of the game experience. If you strip off all the fancy labels you're left with "your weapon deals more damage." Great, that's exactly the same as Serration, and the only time this really comes up in game is if you happen to forget to switch between mod loadouts when facing a different faction.

Again, how is this any different from just dealing more damage? Swapping out arbitrary mod cards before the mission starts does not equate to elemental damage adding meaningfully to the game. You still approach enemies the exact same way, and the only difference is "this one works and this one doesn't." Armor is even more ridiculous, because the actual most effective strategy is to ignore both radiation and corrosive entirely, stack CP, and take Viral. Why? Because it deals more damage against health.

Much unique, very interesting. Wow.

That. Is. Not. Depth. It's shallow complexity at best.

Ooh, great, let's memorize a table of what deals increased damage to what. Not only that, let's make it inconsistent as hell and completely opaque without a wiki, or until you've scanned possibly 20 of the same damn enemy before we share its weaknesses with you. Pokemon did a better job of this type of complexity because weaknesses and resistances were mostly common sense and easy to keep track of.

Depth would be something like players having options for making normally ineffective options more effective with the right knowledge. For example, freezing an armored enemy with Cold damage to increase its vulnerability to Impact. The rigid system we currently is basically just a game of color-by-the-numbers.

There's a lot more to Melee 3.0 than Maiming Strike changes. If it were that big of a deal they could have just nerfed Maiming Strike's interaction with Blood Rush and been done with it.

How did you read that ongoing discussion and come to the conclusion that any of us wants "one answer for everything?" Seriously, how?

Yea I condone this statement. I try multiple builds to make the game interesting out if boredom

[Tyreaus]

2 hours ago, Hyohakusha said:

Without Weeping Wounds, it's worthless beyond scrub levels (sub 120-140+) where anything is going to die instantly anyway.

I'm pretty sure DE's stated their intent to balance things around Sortie levels. If that's the case, well...

Along the same lines as Diabolus above, what-fits-where can be a bit unintuitive at times. It's one thing to have different armours between bosses and adds or heavy and light units, but Bombards and Heavy Gunners—both heavy units—have different armour types. And there likely are different EHP compositions that could make choosing elements more interesting but—again along the lines as above—we don't have clear visual feedback with armour. Shields are, arguably, just as bad since we just say "oh this has a lot of shields - toxin time".

I also wouldn't say it's necessarily laziness. Weapon swapping isn't as smooth as it could be (often due to latency in gear checks with the host, I think), and guns and melees have the entire range situation going on: it's not just what you're facing, but also where you and the target are that determines if you'd switch to melee or not. If you're mostly stuck to one weapon because of the others being situational or clunky to get to, you're having to build that as all-around as possible to deal with the variety of enemy health types.

It doesn't help a ton when most enemies, like you say, die pretty much instantly: why would I care about Radiation or Corrosive if this shiny Tigris will take out anything up to level 100? Sure, the depth is there, but I've no reason to jump into it.

Really, I think the elemental complexity like that can work, but it needs a ton of polish. We can't have toxin be some universal anti-shield-humanoid thing if humanoid units range from peons to bosses. The depth there gets ruined by the fact that you're dealing with units all over the power scale, so it isn't even as though Toxin is some wonderful anti-mob element. Yes, you make it easier to take out half of the Corpus faction, but on the power versus number scale, it's cut at some weird angle that doesn't really translate to a major change: you still have fodder MOAs, mid-range Ospreys, and heavy Bursas to deal with.

In a quasi-TL;DR:

Elemental depth, like weapon choices, probably should be a response by the player to an aspect of the game. They have trouble handling heavier Corpus units with tons of shields, they go magnetic with a high-powered semi-auto. They have trouble getting through the lower-shielded, high-health, more numerous fodder enemies, maybe they go toxin with a machine gun. Or maybe they decide a semi-auto with punch-through works best, so they can kite the fodder enemies down a hallway and mow them down. Fodder Grineer with low armour are countered with Radiation, heavy yoonits are countered with Corrosive. What you end up picking depends on where you falter or what you want to make easier.

_{Also probably a bunch of what Diabolus said above about intuitive mechanics and the like. I don't want to beat on a hammered nail, though.}

SPEAKING OF:

47 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Hum. I think DE could stand to review some of their FX brightness overall, especially with regards to on-screen saturation. I find that Warframe can become a right clusterbomb of blinding visuals which prevent me from really engaging with what's going on. Any defense-oriented mission with Napalms can be a good example of this, especially with a Nekros (i.e., me) in the mix.

It's really difficult to determine what does and doesn't work, because it's size as well as brightness. You can have a thin but bright projectile, yet it'll disappear into the backdrop after three feet. It doesn't help that flares on projectiles seem to be drawn at constant sizes: the main projectile shrinks, but it seems the lens flare stays the same, and it's the flare that does most of the multi-particle obscuring. So they'd also have to redraw or dim the flares over distance. And, chances are, put about 18 different sliders on projectile / flare intensity and intensity drop-off because it might blind people on some computers.

_{They don't really have to do that, but it's complicated to figure out the proverbial sweet-spot between "bright enough to be visually impactful and appealing" and "not so bright as to not obscure multiple projectiles". Funny thing is, the right answer is, in part, determined by how little spread can be achieved with two bullets: the closer they are, the less bright you want them to be, whereas the further apart they are, the brighter you want them to be for that visual "oomph". Variable target luminosity, and on a gameplay factor too. Fun times!}

47 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Keep in mind that part of why I would want this is making projectile speed a more universally applicable bonus/penalty. I would ultimately want every mod to be a measured trade-off, so having universally applicable stats would help a great deal in that respect. I also question how much processing power it would actually require; I don't think there's a noticeable difference in performance between Grineer and Corpus missions, nor does the game spontaneously hitch if you have a full team of people using projectile weapons.

The only issues that have cropped up in the past have been due to excessive multishot applied to ballistics-enabled projectiles (i.e., projectiles that drop due to gravity like on the Kohm) or intensive visual effects (like on the Simulor). Most weapons would be fine with simple tracers, and I'm not advocating for actual ballistics on a universal scale.

The mod thing is true, particularly for Rivens (even though they're the only one that seems to consider flight speed in the negative), I have to admit.

It's not that it'd require a lot of processing power (not for modern PCs at least), just that, conceptually (and barring the whole Riven downside thing), there's no point in taxing a CPU and GPU more to render a projectile if it travels so fast that, for 99.9999% of the game, it practically behaves as a hitscan. _{And, again, if they can fix the hitscan tracer issue so that isn't a difference.}

(Frankly I'm surprised I get lag issues from a high-RoF Dex Furis and have no problem with a bullet hell on a Corrupted tileset. If they have processing issues, you'd think the projectiles would act up long before the hitscan. Maybe my CPU is crap and my GPU is god-tier though, lol.)

Edited December 29, 2018 by Tyreaus

[Steel_Rook]

4 hours ago, Mach25 said:

Agreed. About that, what if, as a matter of progression, crit chance and crit damage was baked into the gold-tiered serration mod? The rarer the mod, the more bonuses you get? Copper = pure damage, silver = damage + multishot, gold = damage + multishot+ crit chance + crit damage? You get what I mean. Sure, you may have the other mods to keep you sated until you get the golden one, but once that mod is in play, the other mods cannot be slotted onto your weapon. Your other idea of sacrificing other mods to upgrade it, that's pretty cool. I'll leave that mechanic to further discussion.

On its face, that's not a bad idea. In fact, precedent for it already exists. The Primed Regeneration mod for Sentinels offers the same bonus as the basic Copper Regeneration, but with the addition of an extra effect - multiple regenerations. I can absolutely see Serration gain the addition of Multishot as you go from Silver to Gold. Say, the Copper Serration might cap out at Rank 5 for damage, the Silver Serration might cap out at Rank 10 for damage, and the Gold Serration might offer Multishot in addition to damage at ranks 6 through 10. Frankly, I feel a few more mods can do this, as well.

I wouldn't go as far as to bake Critical Hits into Serration, however. Not every weapon is a "crit" weapon, not every weapon should be slotted for that. I'm of the opinion that Crit should still be a choice that takes up space and capacity, just maybe not quite as much space or quite as much capacity. Merging mods of the same "type" is not a bad idea, but within reason. We want to reduce the bloat, not necessarily gut the complexity.

To be perfectly honest, though... I kind of don't think random-chance criticals have any place being in Warframe in the first place. These things are an old P&P RPG relic where a player's input was limited and actions were typically resolved by dice rolls. Modern shooters give players all of the tools necessary to actually hit an enemy's critical weaknesses ourselves. I'd like to see Critical Hits disappear entirely and be replaced with additional enemy weaknesses that players can hit for bonus damage. Not just the head, either. Look at something like The Division, where enemies can be shot in their Grenade Pouches or Incendiary Packs or Ammo Bags in addition to just being headshotted. Why is it impossible to hit a Grenier's weak spot from the back? Surely the majority of their armour would be on the side facing the enemy (i.e. "the front") with weaknesses pushed to the back. Surely a player who manages to sneak up on a Grenier shouldn't be punished by being denied headshot damage just because they all wear giant Terminator Armour packs.

But that's kind of going off-topic.

 

4 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

IMO spread should be a default maximum angle of deviation from the aim point and just randomly pick angles with each shot. Recoil is a bit trickier, but in PVE I don't think it should be made too complicated with all sorts of horizontal kicks mixed with vertical push and all that.

Recoil as I described it really isn't all that complex. The reason it's typically calculated as horizontal and vertical recoil separately is that makes it easier to give weapons their own uniqe recoil profile. If your weapon is supposed to "pull to the right," you set your horizontal bounds to, say, -0.5 degrees to 1.2 degrees. That gives you an average of 0.35 degrees to the right, meaning the weapon will tend to pull right. If it's always intended to pull up, give it something like 0.6 to 0.8 degrees vertical and it'll always pull quite hard up on every shot. This is preferable over radial recoil because it's easier to set and requires fewer vector calculations per shot, making for a slight performance boost. I don't know that that's how Warframe handles it, but it's how I've seen other games handle recoil.

Something I want to point out, as well: Warframe has what I've come to call "self-centring recoil." When you fire your gun and your view "jumps" from recoil, it always returns to where it was before you fired after a short pause. This generally doesn't affect automatic weapons but it gives a MASSIVE advantage to high-recoil semi-auto weapons. With self-centring recoil, you only need to line up your shot once, then wait for recoil to re-centre before taking another shot. Without it, you'd have to line up every single shot. I'm usually in favour of disabling self-centring recoil as that makes weapon recoil meaningful for slower-firing weapons like the Opticore, the Lenz, the Hek, etc.

The problem with accuracy and recoil is that the issues with them are typically highly technical and very heavily dependent on specific implementation. For one, developers tend to hide that fact, meaning players usually don't have any idea what their accuracy and recoil stats even mean. OK, my weapon has an accuracy of 13. What does that mean? And why does it get more accurate the longer I shoot? Oh, that's an undisclosed special feature of the Tenora, got it. But what does 13 accuracy mean, though? 13 what? Warframe is smart to limit players' availability to accuracy/recoil modifications severely, but it has the downside of giving players no real ability to judge what effect those are going to take, aside from reading the "notes" section in the Wiki and hoping to see if Heavy Caliber will effect the weapon.

[(XBOX)ZenithLord 42]

I’ve said it before and will continue to say it, the Warframe devs need to take a serious look into the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode. A few main points to consider are how weapons function, including mods, how characters worked, from powers to movement to even why they were fun in regards to progression. 

[Mach25]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

On its face, that's not a bad idea. In fact, precedent for it already exists. The Primed Regeneration mod for Sentinels offers the same bonus as the basic Copper Regeneration, but with the addition of an extra effect - multiple regenerations. I can absolutely see Serration gain the addition of Multishot as you go from Silver to Gold. Say, the Copper Serration might cap out at Rank 5 for damage, the Silver Serration might cap out at Rank 10 for damage, and the Gold Serration might offer Multishot in addition to damage at ranks 6 through 10. Frankly, I feel a few more mods can do this, as well.

I wouldn't go as far as to bake Critical Hits into Serration, however. Not every weapon is a "crit" weapon, not every weapon should be slotted for that. I'm of the opinion that Crit should still be a choice that takes up space and capacity, just maybe not quite as much space or quite as much capacity. Merging mods of the same "type" is not a bad idea, but within reason. We want to reduce the bloat, not necessarily gut the complexity.

To be perfectly honest, though... I kind of don't think random-chance criticals have any place being in Warframe in the first place. These things are an old P&P RPG relic where a player's input was limited and actions were typically resolved by dice rolls. Modern shooters give players all of the tools necessary to actually hit an enemy's critical weaknesses ourselves. I'd like to see Critical Hits disappear entirely and be replaced with additional enemy weaknesses that players can hit for bonus damage. Not just the head, either. Look at something like The Division, where enemies can be shot in their Grenade Pouches or Incendiary Packs or Ammo Bags in addition to just being headshotted. Why is it impossible to hit a Grenier's weak spot from the back? Surely the majority of their armour would be on the side facing the enemy (i.e. "the front") with weaknesses pushed to the back. Surely a player who manages to sneak up on a Grenier shouldn't be punished by being denied headshot damage just because they all wear giant Terminator Armour packs.

But that's kind of going off-topic.

True, true, I forgot about non-critical weapons and I hesitated to put crit chance and damage onto serration at first - should've listened to myself. Corrected my previous post as well. Still, the intention is rather clear. Since multishot and serration are universal damage mods, they can stand to be merged. I think criticals would be a bit trickier to deal with - should be an interesting avenue of discussion there. I can see critical hit chance and damage being removed from projectile weapons, but what do you (and anyone else) say about melee strikes if crits are removed, since those cannot be aimed for precision strikes (which would be pretty cool if we could do that)?

That aside, as a Division player, I fully understand what you mean and I agree.

26 minutes ago, (XB1)ZenithLord 42 said:

I’ve said it before and will continue to say it, the Warframe devs need to take a serious look into the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode. A few main points to consider are how weapons function, including mods, how characters worked, from powers to movement to even why they were fun in regards to progression. 

Mass Effect 3 for the win. I still play it to this day and have a pretty active team that plays it a lot.

[Darkuhn]

vor 13 Stunden schrieb DiabolusUrsus:

The game already has "more effective vs." and "less effective vs." what would be important to know (from a tutorial, not just a tooltip in this case) is what elements are and how to create corrosive damage

I guess you haven't informed yourself  about the Informations that are contained and easily accessible in the Game itself. Nearly all the things you mentioned (except multishot and what specific procs do as far as I can tell) are contained within the Codex, under the "Training" section, even damage types and how they are created. 

So I don't see what you try to accomplish here. New players even get informed that they can find additional information inside the Codex while playing Vor's Price. If they don't use what the game has to offer its not the games fault.

[DiabolusUrsus]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Recoil as I described it really isn't all that complex. The reason it's typically calculated as horizontal and vertical recoil separately is that makes it easier to give weapons their own uniqe recoil profile. If your weapon is supposed to "pull to the right," you set your horizontal bounds to, say, -0.5 degrees to 1.2 degrees. That gives you an average of 0.35 degrees to the right, meaning the weapon will tend to pull right. If it's always intended to pull up, give it something like 0.6 to 0.8 degrees vertical and it'll always pull quite hard up on every shot. This is preferable over radial recoil because it's easier to set and requires fewer vector calculations per shot, making for a slight performance boost. I don't know that that's how Warframe handles it, but it's how I've seen other games handle recoil.

Something I want to point out, as well: Warframe has what I've come to call "self-centring recoil." When you fire your gun and your view "jumps" from recoil, it always returns to where it was before you fired after a short pause. This generally doesn't affect automatic weapons but it gives a MASSIVE advantage to high-recoil semi-auto weapons. With self-centring recoil, you only need to line up your shot once, then wait for recoil to re-centre before taking another shot. Without it, you'd have to line up every single shot. I'm usually in favour of disabling self-centring recoil as that makes weapon recoil meaningful for slower-firing weapons like the Opticore, the Lenz, the Hek, etc.

The problem with accuracy and recoil is that the issues with them are typically highly technical and very heavily dependent on specific implementation. For one, developers tend to hide that fact, meaning players usually don't have any idea what their accuracy and recoil stats even mean. OK, my weapon has an accuracy of 13. What does that mean? And why does it get more accurate the longer I shoot? Oh, that's an undisclosed special feature of the Tenora, got it. But what does 13 accuracy mean, though? 13 what? Warframe is smart to limit players' availability to accuracy/recoil modifications severely, but it has the downside of giving players no real ability to judge what effect those are going to take, aside from reading the "notes" section in the Wiki and hoping to see if Heavy Caliber will effect the weapon.

What I meant is that implementing good recoil is a bit trickier; as it is recoil isn't really controllable beyond simply firing in shorter bursts (it's too "random" to an extent) and its jerky implementation causes motion sickness in some players. To my understanding, "recoil profiles" are really more relevant to PVP games (where learning patterns and getting used to controlling them is key to improving skill) and more precision-based PVE games. I don't think they really have much of a place in Warframe in its current (or similar) iterations.

The best accuracy/recoil implementation I've found in a game that doesn't calculate detailed ballistics has been in Blacklight: Retribution.

• Accuracy was expressed to the player as a minimum/maximum spread angle.
• Spread was directly affected by hip/fire, tight-aim fire, and movement, where stationary tight-aim has the smallest angle deviations and moving hipfire has the most.
• Recoil is expressed as an angle of kick per shot that the player's view would deviate from its original position (players could toggle auto-reset on/off), though precise values were less important than having a "feel" for what they meant.
• Precision semi-auto weapons had great initial accuracy, but were more affected by movement and their spread bloomed very quickly.

Obviously this isn't a direct match for Warframe, but the game had similarly flexible customization through weapon parts and I think semi-auto weapons could be balanced out with blooming spread rather than completely unpredictable recoil. I certainly agree that expressing values as cryptic numeric values with no attached units is pretty pointless.

1 hour ago, Darkuhn said:

I guess you haven't informed yourself  about the Informations that are contained and easily accessible in the Game itself. Nearly all the things you mentioned (except multishot and what specific procs do as far as I can tell) are contained within the Codex, under the "Training" section, even damage types and how they are created.

Nope, I had no idea that existed because I skipped Vor's prize and never read the training because I was already familiar with the basics. Good to know it's there, but...

1 hour ago, Darkuhn said:

So I don't see what you try to accomplish here. New players even get informed that they can find additional information inside the Codex while playing Vor's Price. If they don't use what the game has to offer its not the games fault.

In that case my point is really just one of smooth tutorial design and more accessible information. The reason I brought up tooltips is because it makes critical information available directly when it's relevant without adding too much clutter or burying it several clicks deep in an obscure menu.

For example, hovering over an electric mod or electric damage in the arsenal:

Calculates using total modded base damage excluding other elemental mods.

Procs damage and stun nearby enemies.

++ Machinery, Robotics

-- Alloy Armor

Combines With:
Heat (Radiation)
Cold (Magnetic)
Toxin (Corrosive)

More importantly, damage is something so basic that it really ought to be covered as part of the tutorial. Vor's Prize could introduce players to IPS and the damage readout (e.g., yellow crits + status icons) and players could be briefed on elementals when running "Once Awake" and they first get Molten Impact.

Examples of more detailed stuff that could be left to the Codex specifically would be the 3 second stun duration and 3m chain range, and the exact calculation (modded base damage *(elemental modifier/2)) or the fact that faction damage mods double-dip could be comfortably left on the Wiki.

[Darkuhn]

vor 4 Minuten schrieb DiabolusUrsus:

In that case my point is really just one of smooth tutorial design and more accessible information. The reason I brought up tooltips is because it makes critical information available directly when it's relevant without adding too much clutter or burying it several clicks deep in an obscure menu. 

For example, hovering over an electric mod or electric damage in the arsenal:

Calculates using total modded base damage excluding other elemental mods.

Procs damage and stun nearby enemies.

++ Machinery, Robotics

-- Alloy Armor

Combines With:
Heat (Radiation)
Cold (Magnetic)
Toxin (Corrosive)

Maybe they could use the "right click for more information" to add this to all the Mods when they are working on the UI rework for the modding screen(s).

vor 6 Minuten schrieb DiabolusUrsus:

Examples of more detailed stuff that could be left to the Codex specifically would be the 3 second stun duration and 3m chain range, and the exact calculation (modded base damage *(elemental modifier/2)) or the fact that faction damage mods double-dip could be comfortably left on the Wiki.

totally agree here, that isn't information the "average" player needs to play the game.

I find it sad, that new players don't get briefed on toxin damage and its (non)interaction with shields when they first encounter Corpus enemys. This could help new players quite a bit.

[DiabolusUrsus]

1 hour ago, Darkuhn said:

Maybe they could use the "right click for more information" to add this to all the Mods when they are working on the UI rework for the modding screen(s).

Would certainly be useful, though it could be as simple as hovering over a mod, considering right click is already used for fast-unequip on equipped mods. They could also allow players to click on specific stats on their loadout details section, or simply implement a "tooltip" icon (like a magnifying glass) for getting more info.

1 hour ago, Darkuhn said:

totally agree here, that isn't information the "average" player needs to play the game.

I find it sad, that new players don't get briefed on toxin damage and its (non)interaction with shields when they first encounter Corpus enemys. This could help new players quite a bit.

This is kind of exactly what I mean when it comes to building adequate tutorials. Just brief players on simple information like "toxin ignores shields" the first time it's relevant, index that information somewhere accessible within the game, and leave the super-detailed information that the average player doesn't need to care about to the wiki.

The average player just needs to know "toxin is good/bad against a/b/c, it has special effects x/y/z, and it combines into these elements." They can make do with the simple knowledge that stacking more toxin damage is going to improve the benefits they get from it, and they can do the research if they care enough to know exactly how the damage is calculated and how to maximize it beyond simply stacking more of it.

That said, I think it's terrible design for Toxin to bypass shields the same way it's terrible design for Slash procs to ignore armor, but that's another issue entirely.

[Steel_Rook]

7 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

What I meant is that implementing good recoil is a bit trickier; as it is recoil isn't really controllable beyond simply firing in shorter bursts (it's too "random" to an extent) and its jerky implementation causes motion sickness in some players. To my understanding, "recoil profiles" are really more relevant to PVP games (where learning patterns and getting used to controlling them is key to improving skill) and more precision-based PVE games. I don't think they really have much of a place in Warframe in its current (or similar) iterations.

The predictability of recoil isn't so much down to the system used to model it, but rather the values chosen for each gun. I've actually done some limited modding in Payday 2 experimenting with this exact issue. There, LMG recoil is both massive and uncontrollable, because it's set to -0.2 / 0.8, -1 / 1.4 degrees for horizontal and vertical, respectively. What that means is that while your weapon might pull slightly up and slightly to the right, it could actually kick left and even down on every shot, making recoil basically uncontrollable beyond ensuring the gun doesn't veer too far off to the side. As an experiment, I swapped out those numbers for more rifle-like 0.7 / 0.9, -1.2 / 1.2 degrees per shot. The result was a gun which while it still "danced" horizontally, would consistently pull up and was far easier to control because of it. By simply tweaking the stats, I managed to turn uncontrollable recoil into controllable recoil. There were a few other teething issues to fix, as well, such as a vertical recoil limit and a few others, but that's besides the point.

Essentially, what my changes produced was similar recoil to LMGs in The Division. There, LMGs kick up very hard but don't drift sideways very much. What this means is a skilled machinegunner will have to apply a constant downward correction to keep the LMG on target, as well as mind that their aim doesn't stray too far to the side since the thing WILL dance around horizontally. Because The Division's TTK is actually fairly high for damn near everything and LMGs have some of the lower DPS (which they trade away for volume of fire), it means that a skilled gunner will need to maintain accurate headshot fire for several seconds at a time, per enemy. Granted, that game also has regressive aim spread for LMGs (aim improves the longer you fire, like with the Tenora) so accuracy kind of really doesn't matter over the impact of recoil.

Both Payday 2 and The Division are PvE games, purely so in case of the former. All of that is to say that the "feel" of recoil is determined by the settings more so than the system and really isn't just a thing for PvP games. In fact, I'm of the opinion that gunplay without recoil feels flat and uninvolved, while the weapons themselves end up feeling weaker for it. Sure, something like the Dual Cestra or the Twin Kohmaks might rattle your teeth, methaphorically speaking, but they absolutely are controllable with a steady enough hand. I personally fancy myself a "machinegunner" and have sought out the biggest, dumbest, most recoil-heavy guns in practically every game I've played... So I might be biased towards recoil implementations. However, I still feel that some non-trivial amount of player input should be required to keep a weapon on-target, be it full auto or semi auto. Without it, the game feels a little too much like point-and-click.

It's part of why I prefer "critical hits" mechanics to be done via players manually hitting critical spots on the enemy vs. the game rolling RNG and determining if a shot hit an invisible critical spot in kayfabe.

 

9 hours ago, Mach25 said:

Since multishot and serration are universal damage mods, they can stand to be merged. I think criticals would be a bit trickier to deal with - should be an interesting avenue of discussion there. I can see critical hit chance and damage being removed from projectile weapons, but what do you (and anyone else) say about melee strikes if crits are removed, since those cannot be aimed for precision strikes (which would be pretty cool if we could do that)?

That's... A pretty good point, actually - melee weapons and critical hits. I've seen games attempt precision melee aiming (say, Metal Gear: Revengencenessenssness), but I suspect Warframe's combat is simply too fast-paced for that kind of precision. I know that melee attacks can land headshots even in the current system (they sometimes give me credit to the "10 headshot kills" side objective) but this seems to in large part depend upon an enemy randomly standing at the right height, such as being slightly below me on a set of stairs. Even if we allowed melee attacks to "aim" at the player's reticle, I doubt they could be animated well to do that.

The other option is to let players expose the enemy to critical hits somehow - staggers, stuns and such. Warframe already kind of has that in the form of Finishers and a few abilities which can make enemies vulnerable to those. Actually, we also have that "parry" mechanic which can open an enemy to a finisher just by blocking in certain ways though that's a little fiddly. Maybe we could have some kind of reliable melee attack which would stagger all enemies impacted and open them up to finishers that way? The ground slam already kind of does that, knocking enemies over and opening them up to ground finishers. Hmm...

But yeah - if I were to remove random-roll criticals from melee weapons, I'd probably replace them with a wider, more consistent access to melee finishers. We're due for a Melee 3.0 system, if I'm not mistaken, so that could come with more staggers, more knockdowns and more ways to chain combos directly into a finisher. Because realistically speaking, that's what a "melee critical hit" is - striking the enemy where they aren't defending. And no, that wouldn't work on broader area attacks, but I'm actually OK with this. For melee and for guns.

"AoE critguns" is something I've never agreed with in video games. More broadly speaking, I've never agreed that every weapon from every player should be designed to go for headshots and critical hits. Snipers and precision rifles and heavy pistols and such? Sure. Shotgun and machineguns? Hell no! Two games offer interesting approaches to this issue. Payday 2 offers the "Body Expertise" ability, which offers 90% (actually quite a bit less) of a headshot's damage on a bodyshot, at the expense of skill points, meaning automatic weapons could deal decent damage without having to behave like semi-auto precision weapons. Sanctum 2 has the Hip Fire perk which increases weapon damage substantially (by 30% in that case) but disables weakpoint hits entirely. In essence, you transform your weapon into a scattergun. It hits harder in general but can't benefit from precise aiming.

Given that Warframe offers substantial mobility, I feel it's not unreasonable for at least some players using at least some Warframes to forego aiming for headshots and weak points entirely, and instead trade that ability off for firing on the move. That's exactly what Payday 2's Body Expertise has done for me: no time wasted on target recognition or target acquisition, no time wasted on initial shot line-up as I begin to fire WHILE setting up the initial volley. As this is typically done on an ammo-heavy build, I usually have the magazine size and rounds to spare doing so. By contrast, I spend a lot more time standing stock-still and taking precise aim with automatic weapons in Warframe because headshots are so important to overall DPS.

The long and short of it is this: I feel that critical hits need to be shifted away from a random chance thing and more into sniping critical points on enemies, but only for some guns. Other guns should be designed without critical hit ability whatsoever and better-suited for firing on the move, suppressive fire and area saturation. Combine this with more weak spots on an enemy than just the head and you have a system which hands more control (and more choice) to the player. Even more so if some factions are comprised of a few slow-moving heavy units while other factions are comprised of many fast-moving light units, per encounter. Probably out of the scope of Warframe's development, though.

[DiabolusUrsus]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

The predictability of recoil isn't so much down to the system used to model it, but rather the values chosen for each gun. I've actually done some limited modding in Payday 2 experimenting with this exact issue. There, LMG recoil is both massive and uncontrollable, because it's set to -0.2 / 0.8, -1 / 1.4 degrees for horizontal and vertical, respectively. What that means is that while your weapon might pull slightly up and slightly to the right, it could actually kick left and even down on every shot, making recoil basically uncontrollable beyond ensuring the gun doesn't veer too far off to the side. As an experiment, I swapped out those numbers for more rifle-like 0.7 / 0.9, -1.2 / 1.2 degrees per shot. The result was a gun which while it still "danced" horizontally, would consistently pull up and was far easier to control because of it. By simply tweaking the stats, I managed to turn uncontrollable recoil into controllable recoil. There were a few other teething issues to fix, as well, such as a vertical recoil limit and a few others, but that's besides the point.

Interesting. I don't really care too much one way or the other how things are implemented under the hood; BL:R just had one of the best implementations of it from the user side of things.

That said, it did have issues with a few guns being given way too much horizontal recoil.

Quote

Essentially, what my changes produced was similar recoil to LMGs in The Division. There, LMGs kick up very hard but don't drift sideways very much. What this means is a skilled machinegunner will have to apply a constant downward correction to keep the LMG on target, as well as mind that their aim doesn't stray too far to the side since the thing WILL dance around horizontally. Because The Division's TTK is actually fairly high for damn near everything and LMGs have some of the lower DPS (which they trade away for volume of fire), it means that a skilled gunner will need to maintain accurate headshot fire for several seconds at a time, per enemy. Granted, that game also has regressive aim spread for LMGs (aim improves the longer you fire, like with the Tenora) so accuracy kind of really doesn't matter over the impact of recoil.

Both Payday 2 and The Division are PvE games, purely so in case of the former. All of that is to say that the "feel" of recoil is determined by the settings more so than the system and really isn't just a thing for PvP games. In fact, I'm of the opinion that gunplay without recoil feels flat and uninvolved, while the weapons themselves end up feeling weaker for it. Sure, something like the Dual Cestra or the Twin Kohmaks might rattle your teeth, methaphorically speaking, but they absolutely are controllable with a steady enough hand. I personally fancy myself a "machinegunner" and have sought out the biggest, dumbest, most recoil-heavy guns in practically every game I've played... So I might be biased towards recoil implementations. However, I still feel that some non-trivial amount of player input should be required to keep a weapon on-target, be it full auto or semi auto. Without it, the game feels a little too much like point-and-click.

I actually agree 100%, with regards to recoil being beneficial to the feel of a game and making the weapons feel like they have 'oomph.' What I meant with regards to recoil being less critically important was simply that Warframe could reasonably focus on somewhat consistent vertical recoil rather than horizontal recoil.

PVP shooters have to carefully sprinkle in the right amount of horizontal recoil to prevent players from simply "riding" vertical recoil into free headshots, but in a PVE setting that doesn't matter nearly as much.

Using BL:R as an example again, in its earlier iterations several of its guns were decisively OP simply because their recoil pulled straight up, meaning that by aiming center of mass they were practically guaranteed a headshot within 2-3 shots.

Sorry I wasn't expressing that clearly.

Quote

It's part of why I prefer "critical hits" mechanics to be done via players manually hitting critical spots on the enemy vs. the game rolling RNG and determining if a shot hit an invisible critical spot in kayfabe.

FRICKING YES.

Headshot = critical, please, and effects like Banshee's Sonar should simply create an additional "head."

Quote

But yeah - if I were to remove random-roll criticals from melee weapons, I'd probably replace them with a wider, more consistent access to melee finishers. We're due for a Melee 3.0 system, if I'm not mistaken, so that could come with more staggers, more knockdowns and more ways to chain combos directly into a finisher. Because realistically speaking, that's what a "melee critical hit" is - striking the enemy where they aren't defending. And no, that wouldn't work on broader area attacks, but I'm actually OK with this. For melee and for guns.

Yes, precisely!

In conjunction with this, change "finishers" from their current rigid sync-kill implementation to simple application of the bonus damage on the next attack. If the hit happens to kill, give out fancier death animations like decapitations, but don't lock the player into a several-seconds-long animation every time.

Quote

"AoE critguns" is something I've never agreed with in video games. More broadly speaking, I've never agreed that every weapon from every player should be designed to go for headshots and critical hits. Snipers and precision rifles and heavy pistols and such? Sure. Shotgun and machineguns? Hell no! Two games offer interesting approaches to this issue. Payday 2 offers the "Body Expertise" ability, which offers 90% (actually quite a bit less) of a headshot's damage on a bodyshot, at the expense of skill points, meaning automatic weapons could deal decent damage without having to behave like semi-auto precision weapons. Sanctum 2 has the Hip Fire perk which increases weapon damage substantially (by 30% in that case) but disables weakpoint hits entirely. In essence, you transform your weapon into a scattergun. It hits harder in general but can't benefit from precise aiming.

I think this could be handled simply by giving them lower crit multipliers relative to more precise weapons.

Quote

Given that Warframe offers substantial mobility, I feel it's not unreasonable for at least some players using at least some Warframes to forego aiming for headshots and weak points entirely, and instead trade that ability off for firing on the move. That's exactly what Payday 2's Body Expertise has done for me: no time wasted on target recognition or target acquisition, no time wasted on initial shot line-up as I begin to fire WHILE setting up the initial volley. As this is typically done on an ammo-heavy build, I usually have the magazine size and rounds to spare doing so. By contrast, I spend a lot more time standing stock-still and taking precise aim with automatic weapons in Warframe because headshots are so important to overall DPS.

The long and short of it is this: I feel that critical hits need to be shifted away from a random chance thing and more into sniping critical points on enemies, but only for some guns. Other guns should be designed without critical hit ability whatsoever and better-suited for firing on the move, suppressive fire and area saturation. Combine this with more weak spots on an enemy than just the head and you have a system which hands more control (and more choice) to the player. Even more so if some factions are comprised of a few slow-moving heavy units while other factions are comprised of many fast-moving light units, per encounter. Probably out of the scope of Warframe's development, though.

The key to this is just balance. Headshots would be less critically (heh) important if raw damage had a hope of competing with critical damage in terms of efficacy.

Non-crit weapons would probably be Warframe's Body Expertise counterpart if implemented correctly. Critical weapons should trade lower overall DPS for higher DPS with precise aiming, instead of straight-up universally higher DPS the way it does currently.

Assuming Warframe weapons are given noticeable recoil and we see the implementation of tiered enemies, there would be a place for both: raw damage weapons would be easier to use vs. the lesser hordes and elites, and critical weapons would have great value against champions and bosses when used effectively.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

The key to this is just balance. Headshots would be less critically (heh) important if raw damage had a hope of competing with critical damage in terms of efficacy. Non-crit weapons would probably be Warframe's Body Expertise counterpart if implemented correctly. Critical weapons should trade lower overall DPS for higher DPS with precise aiming, instead of straight-up universally higher DPS the way it does currently. Assuming Warframe weapons are given noticeable recoil and we see the implementation of tiered enemies, there would be a place for both: raw damage weapons would be easier to use vs. the lesser hordes and elites, and critical weapons would have great value against champions and bosses when used effectively.

I absolutely agree that there's no real "trick" to making weapons viable without needing headshots. The problem is that every time I've broached the subject, it's inevitably run into the "git gud" issue, where players will come out of the woodwork to tell me how I'm using my deliberately designed scattergun wrong, and that I should improve my aim so I can score headshots anyway. Whenever a developer pushes through a change like this, there's always the inevitable backlash of "you're dumbing down the game" and "this is for people who suck at aiming." If I come across as bitter on the subject, it's only because I've discussed it a lot over a number of games. I have a fundamental issue with shooters' obsession with headshots and marksmanship at the exclusion of everything else such as target priority, situational awareness and even something as simple as recoil control.

This, incidentally, is one of the reasons I tend to so vocal on the subject of recoil. I'm of the opinion that in a lot of cases, fire accuracy can be all but completely replaced with recoil control without losing much in the way of player skill. That, however, requires a robust enough recoil system which can challenge a player's ability to stay on target over long periods of time, potentially while on the move. I'm currently not entirely convinced Warframe has that, though mostly because TTK here is predominantly so short by necessity. Not a lot of reason to maintain fire if few enemies live long enough to merit it...

That said, I feel Warframe needs a few more high-magazine automatic guns. Right now, it really does come down predominantly to the Soma and the Supra, with maybe the Gorgon and the Tenora acting as a close second. I'd like to see a proper bullet hose with 400-500 rounds in the magazine and a 5-second reload, that sort of thing, just as a random thought. Though that's going somewhat off topic.

[Tyreaus]

1 hour ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Headshot = critical, please, and effects like Banshee's Sonar should simply create an additional "head."

 

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

But yeah - if I were to remove random-roll criticals from melee weapons, I'd probably replace them with a wider, more consistent access to melee finishers

Just a question related to this: What would you guys suggest should be done for critical chance stats if we were to make this transition?

(Also, regarding the "Body Expertise" ability - maybe that's the niche status can fill? We have statuses that can halve health or shields and lower armour, so it indirectly gives that damage buff to the weapon...)

[Mach25]

1 hour ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Interesting. I don't really care too much one way or the other how things are implemented under the hood; BL:R just had one of the best implementations of it from the user side of things.

That said, it did have issues with a few guns being given way too much horizontal recoil.

I actually agree 100%, with regards to recoil being beneficial to the feel of a game and making the weapons feel like they have 'oomph.' What I meant with regards to recoil being less critically important was simply that Warframe could reasonably focus on somewhat consistent vertical recoil rather than horizontal recoil.

PVP shooters have to carefully sprinkle in the right amount of horizontal recoil to prevent players from simply "riding" vertical recoil into free headshots, but in a PVE setting that doesn't matter nearly as much.

Using BL:R as an example again, in its earlier iterations several of its guns were decisively OP simply because their recoil pulled straight up, meaning that by aiming center of mass they were practically guaranteed a headshot within 2-3 shots.

Sorry I wasn't expressing that clearly.

FRICKING YES.

Headshot = critical, please, and effects like Banshee's Sonar should simply create an additional "head."

Yes, precisely!

In conjunction with this, change "finishers" from their current rigid sync-kill implementation to simple application of the bonus damage on the next attack. If the hit happens to kill, give out fancier death animations like decapitations, but don't lock the player into a several-seconds-long animation every time.

I think this could be handled simply by giving them lower crit multipliers relative to more precise weapons.

The key to this is just balance. Headshots would be less critically (heh) important if raw damage had a hope of competing with critical damage in terms of efficacy.

Non-crit weapons would probably be Warframe's Body Expertise counterpart if implemented correctly. Critical weapons should trade lower overall DPS for higher DPS with precise aiming, instead of straight-up universally higher DPS the way it does currently.

Assuming Warframe weapons are given noticeable recoil and we see the implementation of tiered enemies, there would be a place for both: raw damage weapons would be easier to use vs. the lesser hordes and elites, and critical weapons would have great value against champions and bosses when used effectively.

I'm going to see about those lottery tickets...

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, Tyreaus said:

Just a question related to this: What would you guys suggest should be done for critical chance stats if we were to make this transition?

Dump it entirely. The chance for a weapon to score a critical hit would be down to the weapon's handling and the player's ability to actually hit "critical" parts of the target. Of course, making that change would also require adding at least one more weak point per enemy - a battery pack, an ammo bag, a chink in the armour, etc.

 

1 hour ago, Tyreaus said:

Also, regarding the "Body Expertise" ability - maybe that's the niche status can fill? We have statuses that can halve health or shields and lower armour, so it indirectly gives that damage buff to the weapon...

Not a bad idea, actually. Similarly to above, however, I would dump the "status chance" mod entirely and replace it with a "status strength" mod. I'd personally like to see all weapons do all status types all of the time, but to very minor degrees. High-status weapons, then, would deal a far more substantial status effect per hit or per second, depending on how you want to scale it. Base the strength of a status effect on weapon damage and use status strength as a multiplier to that. That way, weapons like the Kohm Shotgun would be very good at slashing people or setting them on fire or triggering gas bursts than, say, a Vectis Prime, at the expense of a generally lower damage due to a very low (like, 1.25) critical damage multiplier.

On the other hand, though, this relies on damage-dealing Status procs, which not all of them are. Cold and Radiation, for instance, are control effects. If the idea is to allow non-crit weapons to have workable damage via Status porcs, then that kind of limits choice to just the few procs that contribute to damage. It also makes for some awkward choices when your damage type is often chosen based on enemy resistances rather than the proc it provides, such as Radiation damage against heavy Grenier units.

Personally, if I were setting the numbers, I'd give non-crit weapons overall far higher damage than crit weapons. The goal here is for, say, a Supra to hit FAR harder than a Vectis in nearly all situations, but for the Vectis to hit FAR harder than the Supra if the player is able to land consistent headshots. This means the Vectis player gains superior DPS in some situations while the Supra player gains consistent DPS in all situations. I say this, because I'd personally like to remove damage-dealing Status procs entirely and replace them with support procs of some kind, instead. That still leaves us with the likes of Magnetic, Corrosive and Viral damage, however. Even though none of those deal damage, they still contribute to DPS substantially and they ARE predominantly support procs.

Put it this way - I don't have a presentable solution quite yet, but I think we're on the right track 🙂

[DiabolusUrsus]

1 hour ago, Tyreaus said:

Just a question related to this: What would you guys suggest should be done for critical chance stats if we were to make this transition?

(Also, regarding the "Body Expertise" ability - maybe that's the niche status can fill? We have statuses that can halve health or shields and lower armour, so it indirectly gives that damage buff to the weapon...)

As @Steel_Rook said, scrap it. Though I'd just switch the mods themselves to give bonuses which might make getting critical hits easier, like additional flight speed, accuracy, or recoil reduction. Keep in mind that my ultimate goal is for every mod to have a trade-off, so different mods covering the same stats would potentially carry different combinations of penalties. For example, +accuracy -flightspeed or +accuracy -damage.

25 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Not a bad idea, actually. Similarly to above, however, I would dump the "status chance" mod entirely and replace it with a "status strength" mod. I'd personally like to see all weapons do all status types all of the time, but to very minor degrees. High-status weapons, then, would deal a far more substantial status effect per hit or per second, depending on how you want to scale it. Base the strength of a status effect on weapon damage and use status strength as a multiplier to that. That way, weapons like the Kohm Shotgun would be very good at slashing people or setting them on fire or triggering gas bursts than, say, a Vectis Prime, at the expense of a generally lower damage due to a very low (like, 1.25) critical damage multiplier.

On the other hand, though, this relies on damage-dealing Status procs, which not all of them are. Cold and Radiation, for instance, are control effects. If the idea is to allow non-crit weapons to have workable damage via Status porcs, then that kind of limits choice to just the few procs that contribute to damage. It also makes for some awkward choices when your damage type is often chosen based on enemy resistances rather than the proc it provides, such as Radiation damage against heavy Grenier units.

Personally, if I were setting the numbers, I'd give non-crit weapons overall far higher damage than crit weapons. The goal here is for, say, a Supra to hit FAR harder than a Vectis in nearly all situations, but for the Vectis to hit FAR harder than the Supra if the player is able to land consistent headshots. This means the Vectis player gains superior DPS in some situations while the Supra player gains consistent DPS in all situations. I say this, because I'd personally like to remove damage-dealing Status procs entirely and replace them with support procs of some kind, instead. That still leaves us with the likes of Magnetic, Corrosive and Viral damage, however. Even though none of those deal damage, they still contribute to DPS substantially and they ARE predominantly support procs.

Put it this way - I don't have a presentable solution quite yet, but I think we're on the right track 🙂

I really wanna see a combination non-random status system featuring minor guaranteed on-hit effects with periodic "accumulative" procs (a la Dark Souls). For example, Cold damage would instantly apply a minor slow that intensified with status buildup and culminated in a "frozen solid" state more vulnerable to Impact/Blast type damage.

I think it should be fine to keep some damage oriented status effects (like a stacking burn for Heat), but I definitely want to reduce the repeated DOT effects. For example, toxin could be replaced with an attack rate/accuracy debuff and ragdoll paralysis proc.

[(PSN)teacup775]

21 hours ago, DavidCurser said:

I would like the combat to be more interesting.

indeed. the game could enjoy more variety if combat on select enemies required timing and a bit of mechanic, maybe lobbing off a limb or bit of machinery instead of damage “challenge”.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

I really wanna see a combination non-random status system featuring minor guaranteed on-hit effects with periodic "accumulative" procs (a la Dark Souls). For example, Cold damage would instantly apply a minor slow that intensified with status buildup and culminated in a "frozen solid" state more vulnerable to Impact/Blast type damage.

Mechanically, that should be doable. City of Heroes used to have a pretty clever system (that it really didn't use in a clever way), by giving status effects their own "magnitude" and then granting specific enemies a certain level of "status protection." Most common status effects had a magnitude of 3, though some "weak" effects and most AoE status had a magnitude of 2. Minions had mag 2 status protection, Lietuenants mag 3 and Bosses mag 4. What that meant was that something like a Beanbag single-target stun could affect everything short of the fairly rare Boss class enemy, but a Mass Dominate AoE hold would only affect minions. Bosses couldn't be affected by most status effects on single application, but stacking two status effects with overlapping durations (and that game had durations in the 10+ seconds) would still affect them as that would boost magnitude to 6.

I feel Warframe can use something similar, though with a bit more granularity and a bit more plasticity. Let's take a Cold Status proc as applied by a Supra, which I hope we can agree is a "status gun." The current Cold proc reduces movement and attack speed by 50% for 7 seconds. Well, let's say the Supra would apply 4.2% slow for 5 seconds per shot, capping out at 50%. Every cold proc would add to the magnitude of the overall cold proc on the enemy, as well as refresh the duration. Once the enemy's slow caps out at shot 12 (so around a second's worth of sustained fire), you could keep shooting at the slowed enemy and building the duration even though the effect on the enemy is still capped. At a theoretical 100% slow (or ~24 shots), the slow effect transforms into a frozen effect for 2 seconds, with subsequent shots no longer adding slow but just instead refreshing the duration. That would allow the Supra to progressively slow and eventually straight-up freeze an enemy with sustained fire.

Let's compare this against the Tenora, a "crit gun" in this theoretical version of the game. Like the Supra, the Tenora would also apply 1 magnitude of Cold Status per shot, but only for say 1% per shot, capping at 50%. That would take 50 shots, or over 4 seconds' worth of sustained fire. In order to reach the Frozen status, the Tenora would have to strike an enemy 100 times, which is two thirds of its magazine size and likely long after the enemy in question is straight-up dead, but no sooner than 8-9 seconds of sustained, constant fire. This is to highlight that by giving different weapons different "status strength" and allowing them to scale with continued fire, "status guns" could offer substantially superior support.

Additionally, by giving a couple of separate stages to Status effects, things like the aforementioned "fire spreading" mechanic could be implemented. Initially, fire DOT could start out low and affect only the original target, capping at some maximum DPS. Build up enough "extra" on top of that and that DOT effect will spread to nearby enemies with a fixed duration, then reset on the original target. I haven't exactly thought this system through so I don't know what to do about Slash procs and the like, but the main system is what I was interested in. Allow weapons to trigger status on every shot, scale the strength of that status effect to the weapon's inherent status strength. Axe the concept of critical chance entirely, migrate "crit damage" to "weak point damage" and add a few more weak points to most enemies. Make sure no (or at most very few) weapons have high stats in both. This shift control more to the player as Crits require precision fire while Status requires sustained fire, and neither is triggered by RNG.

I'm sure there's something catastrophic I'm forgetting...

[Tyreaus]

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Dump it entirely. The chance for a weapon to score a critical hit would be down to the weapon's handling and the player's ability to actually hit "critical" parts of the target. Of course, making that change would also require adding at least one more weak point per enemy - a battery pack, an ammo bag, a chink in the armour, etc.

 

8 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

As @Steel_Rook said, scrap it. Though I'd just switch the mods themselves to give bonuses which might make getting critical hits easier, like additional flight speed, accuracy, or recoil reduction. Keep in mind that my ultimate goal is for every mod to have a trade-off, so different mods covering the same stats would potentially carry different combinations of penalties. For example, +accuracy -flightspeed or +accuracy -damage.

I guess I should have asked it more like: if you had to keep that particular number there, what might you apply it to?

Scrapping it outright entails a bit of work and it might be easier or smoother to transition if it were reused in some way. E.g., spitballing mind: having it be a chance for a 2x crit multiplier when crits are landed. Same mechanics as now, except it applies only to the precision shots and after the multiplier. Crit chance becomes the gambler's version of crit damage (if you could mod for one over the other).

Or, like @Steel_Rook suggests with status, making the % applicable to something else: you could take status chance and translate it to status strength easy enough: it's the same numbers and the same mods, just with a different underlying application.

On that note:

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

On the other hand, though, this relies on damage-dealing Status procs, which not all of them are. Cold and Radiation, for instance, are control effects. If the idea is to allow non-crit weapons to have workable damage via Status porcs, then that kind of limits choice to just the few procs that contribute to damage. It also makes for some awkward choices when your damage type is often chosen based on enemy resistances rather than the proc it provides, such as Radiation damage against heavy Grenier units.

I've probably come up with 18 different schema of how status procs can all scale in some manner (cold has increased slow, I think at one point I had Radiation decrease the enemy's targeting radius versus Tenno so they prioritize friendly targets from even further away).

One thought is to let players control status inclinations via mods. Dual stat mods may incline the formulae toward that particular element, rather than just increasing the damage. So one could throw in a 90% elemental to boost Radiation damage, but throw in a 60/60 Cold mod to lean the weapon toward Cold procs instead (despite Radiation overpowering Cold damage-wise).

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Personally, if I were setting the numbers, I'd give non-crit weapons overall far higher damage than crit weapons. The goal here is for, say, a Supra to hit FAR harder than a Vectis in nearly all situations, but for the Vectis to hit FAR harder than the Supra if the player is able to land consistent headshots.

I think the key is, generally: more crit = less base damage, but crit damage increases exponentially (e.g.) while the base damage decreases linearly. Thus, assuming consistent headshots, the more a weapon leans toward crit, the more damage it does on headshots / critical shots and the less damage it does on body shots.

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I say this, because I'd personally like to remove damage-dealing Status procs entirely and replace them with support procs of some kind, instead. That still leaves us with the likes of Magnetic, Corrosive and Viral damage, however. Even though none of those deal damage, they still contribute to DPS substantially and they ARE predominantly support procs.

My personal inclination is to try to create three general axes: status, crit, and base damage. Increases in one would entail decreases in the other two. So a high-status weapon, even with the current status effects, can theoretically output a lot of damage with magnetic and viral and the like—if it had the crit or damage to back it up.

I'm a bit weary about removing status chance compared to critical chance, though. I get wanting to make much more of the game skill-based, and the criticals idea definitely does that, but having every shot produce some kind of status effect feels...off. Consistent crits would be a result of player skill (and, chances are, you'd miss once in a while anyway, so it's not strictly consistent). Yet consistent status procs, even if they're highly diminished, would be...just there. All the time. And those procs likely still come with visual effects of some kind (or else how could I know an enemy is Corrosive-procced? Feedback to players is important), so even if the result is minor because of low status strength, it seems likely to have something for visual feedback—on every. Single. Shot.

Scaling status effects and creating a build-up system that stacks faster for certain weapons or loadouts (if I understand that correctly) feels like a workable idea, though. Don't get me wrong, I like that. Heck, you could make it so that you can trade power for consistency via status power versus status chance. But it feels strange just making the procs a constant.

I might be misunderstanding something, though.

[(PSN)negativ21]

On 2018-12-19 at 11:20 AM, peterc3 said:

Just totally change the game. Dump all the work done on it and start with a new genre of game. The idea that Melee 3.0 is somehow a step towards making Warframe less Diablo and more Dark Souls is ludicrous

Try reading the sentence immediately following your quote.

 

On 2018-12-19 at 1:31 PM, ragingIMP said:

Snip

I don't think having the power fantasy aspect and having sufficiently challenging enemies in the game are mutually exclusive. You can get the same satisfaction from when you beat a small group of really tough enemies, level up, and find out those same enemies are now really easy, partly bc ur stronger, and partly bc u learned the proper strategies. 

Also, adding more strategically challenging gameplay will solve alot of the games balance problems. As it is damage and DR frames rule the game. CC and Def come second. With this change frames like Vauban and others will become more valuable and players complaints about relative frame strengths/weaknesses will be reduced. 

Edited December 30, 2018 by (PS4)negativ21

[(PSN)Crixus044]

Warframe originally was a very tactical games. The damage we had was much lower than now, and the scaling formulas were a lot stronger. Then they updated the scaling formulas to be more balanced. After that, we just kept on getting stronger and stronger, but the enemy levels stayed the same. After a while, we outgrew the enemies we were fighting, until now where the enemies we fight are so weak that we don't even need stuff like healers and cc. Our fodder killer frames nuke maps, while our single target dps frames 1 shot bosses.

The game isn't showing its INTENDED horde shooter mechanics. This is just the result of years of power creep that where never matched with proper enemies.

Power boost+ increasing levels = progression

Power boost + static levels = power creep.

The solution is complex, but an increase in stats or levels is part of it, and by far the easiest to implement.