The Brokenness of Redeemer Prime and the Current Melee in General

[ant99999]

So, Redeemer Prime, the infamous melee weapon claimed to be 'The New Tigris Prime', 'The Ultimate One and Only Weapon', 'The Insta-Deleter' or whatever else. But something is obviously wrong with it. This something is of course its damage numbers. So here I will try to explain why it is so and why the current melee system is terribly broken.

First of all what do we know from Redeemer P's Wiki page? That it's charge attack has 0% crit chance. So, that seems pretty bad, let's try to test it in simulacrum to find out if it's really is so. Spawning one lvl155 Battalyst.

No crits indeed, you can make sure yourself.

But what about insta-deletion - you ask. Let's try and spawn a more traditional enemy, like a lvl155 Bombard

Out of a sudden some insane crits appear. What was that?

So without further ado I'll say: they aren't crits, they are shots enhanced with stealth multiplier. Where does the multiplier comes from if Bombard was shooting at me? It's because of Blast status proc which technically makes enemy unaware of your existence until it is back on its feet. As for the Battalyst, it is as you know immune to statuses. The question here is: why the hell the effect of unawareness from Blast status makes the same shot deal 8x damage (it even sounds hillarious as I write it)? The thing is with current damage system a shot of a shotgun seems to be counted as a burst fire with no time between the shots. Some of the pellets are 'first' to hit the target, and if they cause a Blast proc, 'further' ones will be counted as stealth hits. Sounds broken, yeah?

Wait, we are not finished yet. Continue our testing and spawn a Nightwatch Bailiff

And the stealth hits are gone! What's happening here now - I have no idea. The Blast procs are here, but no stealth hits.

With other enemies results can vary. For example - Raptor RX from the Index:

Here stealth hits apear (the numbers are large),

But here they don't although Blast status is applied.

Apparently, this part of Redeemer P's mechanics is too broken for me to comprehend.

The idea of creating this thread came to me while I was doing High risk Index solo with terribly modded Revenant equipped with Gas-Magnet Tigris P and this abomination of a gunblade modded for Viral-Radiation. I managed to reach my first ever John Prodman with zero deaths using just the brokenness of Redeemer P. Reconsidering the events of that Index I can add the following:

1) Revenant is hands down the best points carrier. Rhino can go cry somewhere else.

2) The hardest ever enemy to kill with Redeemer is this piece of armored Corpus electronics from above - Raptor RX. It seems to be even more broken than Redeemer P itself, as whenever it falls on the ground it completely refuses to receive any stealth damage.

3) Condition Overload plays a massive part in defining whether this weapon will one-shot or not. I used Gas-Mgnetic Tigris to strip off the shields and apply additional statuses before obliterating an enemy with the Redeemer. It helped greatly when enemy levels went past 200

4) Stealth hits appearing has something to do with whether or not the enemy is going to be one-shotted (not sure about this one though). I constantly was having an impression that if the ammount of eHP of an enemy is even slightly more than Redeemer will take out, it will deal a lot less damage and you will waste a lot of time killing that enemy.

So to summarise - melee is horribly broken with different mechanics and mods effecs applying completely counter-intuitive and against any common sence, which in the end makes this gun terribly unbalanced and even more terribly unpredictable. I hope the coming melee rework will at least partly solve the situation described above.

Best wishes, have a good day farming.

P.S.

If for some reason after reading this you have an impression that I want Redeemer P nerfed, YOU ARE WRONG, I don't. The only thing I wanted to show here is that melee in it's current state doesn't work properly and shpuld be fixed.

Edited January 2, 2019 by ant99999
FFS stop this madness already

[GPrime96]

I was wondering why my Redeemer Prime was 2 - 3 Shotting lvl 130 Corrupted Heavy Gunners and Bombards when i was at the Simulacrum. I guess it one shots when the Stealth Multiplier has affected the Weapon's shot like any other Melee Weapon which is not surprising.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

About 9 paragraphs and a bunch of other sentences just to say you want a weapon nerfed.

[ant99999]

3 часа назад, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 сказал:

About 9 paragraphs and a bunch of other sentences just to say you want a weapon nerfed.

It is called feedback you know. I tried to provide everything I found testing this weapon in simulacrum and the Index. You can always skip and don't read if you want.

[NeopetsMaster4432]

These are indeed interesting findings, thanks for doing testing~

I wonder if DE will hotfix a nerf in to fix the Redeemer Prime, or if they'll just leave it in it's brokenly overpowered state until Melee 3.0 arrives. 
It will arrive soon, right? :')

Edited January 2, 2019 by NeopetsMaster4432

[ToolboxMotley]

Isn't Redeemer Prime's shotgun blast the same as the original Redeemer's? The only difference is a slightly higher attack speed. This has effectively been in the game for years now. X)

[ant99999]

3 часа назад, ToolboxMotley сказал:

Isn't Redeemer Prime's shotgun blast the same as the original Redeemer's? The only difference is a slightly higher attack speed. This has effectively been in the game for years now. X)

No, the main difference is status chance which can be boosted to 100% on Prime (which by itself is a whole another topic to discuss). While on usual Redeemer you basicly got one Blast proc per shot if you are lucky and it didn't make any real difference, this gun applies them on the regular basis, which makes it pretty good in atomizing every enemy vulnerable to status proc.

4 часа назад, NeopetsMaster4432 сказал:

I wonder if DE will hotfix a nerf in to fix the Redeemer Prime, or if they'll just leave it in it's brokenly overpowered state until Melee 3.0 arrives. 
It will arrive soon, right? :')

The problem is not the gun, its stats are fine. It is the terribly flawed current melee system and the fact that luckily for this gun all the unfinished and broken mechanics current melee has apply to it collectively magnifying its power straight to infinity.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

7 hours ago, ant99999 said:

It is called feedback you know. I tried to provide everything I found testing this weapon in simulacrum and the Index. You can always skip and don't read if you want.

If it was something more deserving then I wouldn’t have an issue, but you are literally just asking for a nerf of a single weapon.

[Fallen_Echo]

3 hours ago, ant99999 said:

No, the main difference is status chance which can be boosted to 100% on Prime (which by itself is a whole another topic to discuss). While on usual Redeemer you basicly got one Blast proc per shot if you are lucky and it didn't make any real difference, this gun applies them on the regular basis, which makes it pretty good in atomizing every enemy vulnerable to status proc.

Have it crossed your mind that instead of asking for a nerf on a single weapon you ask for a fix on the terrible shotgun status chance calculation?

Before reaching 100% all status is evenly distributed among all pellets so if you have any shotgun blaster with 99.9% status and 10 pelets that means you have 9.99% status chance per pellet which is awfully low BUT as soon as you hit 100% suddenly all your pellets have 100% status chance so on 10 pellets thats 10 simultenous status hits what is enought for the system to create some bizarre effects.

Technically if you are quick enough you can do the same stealth nonsense with any 100% status shotgun and a melee weapon, hell im sure theres somewhere a limbo video posted about this borked nonsense.

[ant99999]

28 минут назад, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 сказал:

If it was something more deserving then I wouldn’t have an issue, but you are literally just asking for a nerf of a single weapon.

 

11 минут назад, Fallen_Echo сказал:

Have it crossed your mind that instead of asking for a nerf on a single weapon you ask for a fix on the terrible shotgun status chance calculation?

Sometimes I wonder if it is really true that every person playing this game is actually able to read.

Sorry for being so straight forward or even a bit rude, but where the heck in my entire post I wrote about my desire to nerf Redeemer P? Point me at this place please, would you be so kind.

The answer is NOWHERE. Because I don't want to nerf it, dammit.

And even more, I literally wrote about my main point in my answer to another person. Here it is:

3 часа назад, ant99999 сказал:

The problem is not the gun, its stats are fine. It is the terribly flawed current melee system and the fact that luckily for this gun all the unfinished and broken mechanics current melee has apply to it collectively magnifying its power straight to infinity.

What about status calculation, again I said nothing about it in the post deliberately. Why? Because this:

12 часов назад, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 сказал:

About 9 paragraphs and a bunch of other sentences just to say you want a weapon nerfed.

And this:

3 часа назад, ant99999 сказал:

No, the main difference is status chance which can be boosted to 100% on Prime (which by itself is a whole another topic to discuss).

And after reading it (or at least I assume so) you write this.

I honestly don't have suitable words to describe the situation over here.

[Crousere]

Sarpa is broken in the same way. Gunblade stances have been bugged ever since they have been introduced (as far as I know). Perhaps they will look into this when melee 3.0 hits

[Fallen_Echo]

13 minutes ago, ant99999 said:

Snip

Okay well first, its the impression you give out. Reading throught your entire original post left me with the thought "Is this a nerf request? It looks like one of the more cultured ones."

As for the status you might have noticed that i replied to one of your comments talking about status and i tried to explain in best just where could these strange stealth damage numbers come.

[Viges]

It's radiation works like that. Sometimes when enemies proced by rad they become unaware. Maybe blast procs help too.

[ant99999]

Well, I'm not entirely sure right now.

I ran some testing in Simulacrum, but weirdly enough I was only able to get constant stealth crits on Redeemer P. Neither Blast nor raduation or virus on any other melee were getting this result. The only moment I got it on other melee was when I tried to disable AI and also when attacking from Loki invisibility.

I always remembered Blast proc making enemies unaware. So there I have two options: either effects of Blast got fixed or Simulacrum doesn't work properly however the question remains why Redeemer P is the only weapon applying instant stealth hits there. Maybe it's Blast plus Radiation combined. I guess I will do more testing later.

[(XBOX)XGN DrFeelGood]

D E,

Thank you for making this making more content to experience the game in more ways with options. Some of us do not agree on the purpose of new content sometimes; but we are sure that we approve of the way this piece of content was made for us.

[ant99999]

21 минуту назад, (XB1)XGN DrFeelGood сказал:

D E,

Thank you for making this making more content to experience the game in more ways with options. Some of us do not agree on the purpose of new content sometimes; but we are sure that we approve of the way this piece of content was made for us.

I am... not entirely sure what does this have to do with the topic.

Anyway, I've done some more testing, this time it was the first zone of ESO with Grineer in it.

So I still can't say for sure but it seems to me that Blast alone indeed doesn't make an enemy get stealth hits, Radiation alone - a bit unclear, but seems also not to work on its own. However Radiation plus Blast combined were giving me damage spikes more often than any of those alone. So my theory now is that they have to be combined to reach this result.

Which makes sence after all as there are only three or four melee weapons that can achieve this elemental combination and firearms aren't commonly used to proc status effects for melee.

[(XBOX)XGN DrFeelGood]

1 hour ago, ant99999 said:

I am... not entirely sure what does this have to do with the topic.

Anyway, I've done some more testing, this time it was the first zone of ESO with Grineer in it.

So I still can't say for sure but it seems to me that Blast alone indeed doesn't make an enemy get stealth hits, Radiation alone - a bit unclear, but seems also not to work on its own. However Radiation plus Blast combined were giving me damage spikes more often than any of those alone. So my theory now is that they have to be combined to reach this result.

Which makes sence after all as there are only three or four melee weapons that can achieve this elemental combination and firearms aren't commonly used to proc status effects for melee.

That is for those who do decide to use certain mechanics to the game and their play style deserves credit as much as the maiming strike players who made several melees do better than to just spin to win with whips and tonfas.

[ant99999]

So, if I understand you correctly, you are basically saying that playing with this weapon has its unique aspects that should be kept in the game.

If that I'm 100% agree with you as well as for example I'm for keeping Maiming Strike gameplay core as is.

Uniqueness and diversity are always good and are what this game is built on. However both Redeemer P and Maiming Strike have certain aspects making them unnecessarily overpowered in certain situations.

In case of MS it is the formula used to count damage that is incorrect. MS bonus basically changing weapon's base crit chance when doing spin attack. For me fixing this formula so that it does not result in insane damage numbers on whips and polearms is enough and shouldn't be more.

The similar thing goes for Redeemer. The main reason for me calling it unbalanced is totally unnecessary application of 8x damage multiplier when the only thing you do is shoot in the enemy's face. This results in this gun one-shotting the vast majority of enemies from lvl 0 to basically around lvl250-300, which trivialises most of the endgame too much. On top of that this gun is higly unpredictable as you can see from my experiment with Raptor RX and Nightwatch Bailiff, while the core of any enjoyable gameplay is stability and knowing what to do.

So no, I'm not asking for deletion of this weapon's unique aspects nor I want a nerf for it's stats. What I do ask for however is fixing the gameplay with this weapon for it to function properly and reliably.

[OvisCaedo]

What's particularly funny about the bizarre application of stealth multipliers to the shotgun blast is that normally the game hates stealth so much that it will count enemies as being alerted in between simultaneous damage calculations of shotgun pellets and drop your stealth combo.

Stealth damage and the stealth affinity bonus obviously aren't the same system at all, but it does make it seem even funnier how much of a broken disconnect there is between the two.

i think condition overload will be nerfed along with the rest of melee when 3.0 actually comes out, but the bizarre stealth damage interactions that make no sense are a bit weirder. Still, DE has probably noticed all the threads on it by now, so I guess we'll see if they bother saying anything. Maybe they'll "fix" it by entirely removing the stealth damage bonus from melee in 3.0

Edited January 3, 2019 by OvisCaedo

[Peter]

Just tell me when you can clear entire waves with that, oh wait, you cant!

[ant99999]

12 минут назад, Peter сказал:

Just tell me when you can clear entire waves with that, oh wait, you cant!

Of course you can't. Imagine how OP it would be. We have Saryn for this purpose.

Although you can send usual Mesa/Banshee/Nova team for Index straight to the Void and do it solo using this gun.

[Xzorn]

Quite a few melee quirks have shown up as Melee 3.0 gets closer to it's release in 2020.

The removal of momentum from Heavy Blades is probably the most known about. There was also the removal of stealth Bleed ticks on enemies after you line of sight them. Though this could be considered a fix the numbers will still show up Yellow but increase. This is actually a similar interaction to unaware status caused from knockdowns ie Blast procs and quite a few other effects. Curiously last I checked LoS still worked long as the enemy was deafened which doesn't make sense. There was also Banshee's Silence augment which caused enemies to be in a constant state of unaware status allowing constant stealth multipliers now this is only applied during the stun animation.

Melee has always been a mess, esp related to stealth and even more so after the stealth farming nerfs.

My favorite right now is probably the oversight of Redeemer's front Stealth attack execute firing the gun and alerting all nearby enemies. Very Ninja.

[(PSN)teacup775]

23 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

If it was something more deserving then I wouldn’t have an issue, but you are literally just asking for a nerf of a single weapon.

He has twice said melee itself and buggy implementation is his discovery.

[ant99999]

16 минут назад, Xzorn сказал:

My favorite right now is probably the oversight of Redeemer's front Stealth attack execute firing the gun and alerting all nearby enemies. Very Ninja.

I think the developers made it so back when Redeemer was always silent. And then they just left it as it was.

Btw how in the world a point-blank shot can be considered a stealth attack? I mean, what could be stealthier than a two meters high Rhino P emtying a sawed-off bladed shotgun straight into your face with a sound of a battleship's main caliber firing? You'll never know what happened.

[Sharkgoblin]

condition overload is what many weapons rely on to not be worthless