The Scaling Renaissance

Teridax68 · February 4, 2019

15 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Of course I am still adamant about keeping the linear scale. The exponential scale is currently what largely contributes to the damage inconsistencies that make many Warframes and weapons obsolete at later levels. With a linear scale, abilities, weapons, and health can remain coparable between both Warframes and enemies.

Armored units will continue to scale quadratically at the very least if both their armor and their health scale, though. So long as you increase both health and the associated health multiplier, your unit will not scale linearly. The more you scale armor as well, and the more Corrosive and Slash become important. Because of this, while it might be interesting to represent different armor classes, you may still be better off representing that through different levels of static armor per unit, and scale only health, rather than do both.

Steel_Rook · February 4, 2019

20 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

The Grineer are frail, relying on mechanical augments to keep their rotting bodies combat ready. Odds are they can't handle very much weight, even with augments. Seeing as how their armor is almost definitely metal-based, that puts their overall protective capabilities into question. Overall it makes sense that lesser units have little armor, while heavily augmented units like Bombards and Gunners get higher armor ratings.

Realism aside (the Grenier seem to be using Power Armour), you can still give different levels of armour to different units. It just wouldn't scale with their level. Butchers, Scorpions and basic Lancers might have 100 armour, Elite Lancers and Beast Masters might have 200, Heavy Gunners and Bombards might have 300 and your average Nox might have 600 armour everywhere and 100 on his head with crap-tons of health. All of these numbers represent meaningful levels of resistance - 25%, 40%, 50% and 75%, respectively. Granted, Warframe weapons deal such massive amounts of damage that they can blast through any sane amount of armour, but that's not an issue of enemy design. It's the same way in the reverse direction. My Inaros didn't start actually tanking damage comfortably until I layered 90% damage resistance on top of 90% damage resistance because enemy damage scales up just as aggressively.

Moreover, the game already offers two kinds of armour - Ferrite vs. Alloy, both of which offer a bunch of added resistances. In fact, the game tends to use those to differentiate "lighter" from "heavier" units. Bombards and Heavy Gunners have the much tougher Alloy armour while Lancers have the much weaker Ferrite armour. In fact, a major inflection point in my own experience with the game was running into Elite Lancers for the first time. Due to their Alloy armour and my inappropriate damage type (Magnetic, since that's all I had the mods for), they were remarkably hard to kill. Unlike Heavy Gunners, these guys were a common unit and spawned in large numbers. Despite their lower effective health, I was still having a terrible time fighting them due to to the resistances on their Alloy Armour.

Obviously, my first encounter with Elite Lancers was aberrant, as it was the experience of a new player just learning the ropes and I've since rendered them trivial. However, my point is that you have plenty of tools with which to vary the effective health of enemies without scaling their armour with level.

On 2019-02-03 at 3:38 AM, Xzorn said:

In spite of the complexities of the Damage system and perhaps the happy accident that it managed to be so robust I did come to one rather simple improvement to the current system that wouldn't cause much trouble and improve the performance of a lot weapons.. Static Weak-point armor values.

While I'm definitely in favour of adding weak points with a lower armour value to the Grenier (more than just the head, at least one on their back), I don't think that's enough. Retaining the current level of armour scaling with fixed-armour weak points heavily stacks the game towards sniping weapons. The "Headshot or GTFO" issue best exemplified by Payday 2. With the 2016 difficulty rebalance, that game increased enemy health substantially, but also boosted headshot multipliers substantially, as well. On some difficulties, certain enemies could have a headshot multiplier of *7.5, *18.5, *22.5, etc. The net result was that there was basically no point in wasting ammo on bodyS#&$s, as you'd need 15-30 shots to kill an enemy in a game with very tight ammo margins and 100 enemies on the map. That's vs. 1 or 2 headlshots to kill. Hence, "Headshot or GTFO."

Now, those changes were preceded by the addition of the top-tier Body Expertise skill which passively added partial headshot bonus to every bodyshot, and the ammo pick-up for automatic weapons was drastically increased. That did solve the issue... For automatic weapons, but anything that wasn't a Light Rifle or an LMG still had the same issue, and the skill only worked with Rifles, SMGs and LMGs. Light spammy pistols were (and still are) #*!%ed, if you'll pardon my English.

All of that is to say that armour scaling is the core issue. Getting around it with weak points is no different from getting around it with specific damage types. In both cases, it funnels players into a small subset of builds which completely negate the entire system. That creates a binary system with very little room for experimentation and very little room for "making the wrong tools work." I'm by far not suggesting that everyone should be able to bring any odd weapon and ROFLstomp the Grenier, but I am suggesting that any decent weapon should have a fighting chance. Accidentally swapping the places of my mods and bringing Magnetic + Toxic instead of Corrosive + Cold shouldn't turn a mission from a cake-walk into a nigh-on impossibility where I end up Dessicating and Executing everyone because my guns can barely tickle them.

More weak points than just the head and weak points with lower armour values are absolutely a good idea. I just feel they need to accompany a general shift away from cascading armour values until the entire system ceases to function properly.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 4, 2019

5 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Armored units will continue to scale quadratically at the very least if both their armor and their health scale, though. So long as you increase both health and the associated health multiplier, your unit will not scale linearly. The more you scale armor as well, and the more Corrosive and Slash become important. Because of this, while it might be interesting to represent different armor classes, you may still be better off representing that through different levels of static armor per unit, and scale only health, rather than do both.

39 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Realism aside (the Grenier seem to be using Power Armour), you can still give different levels of armour to different units. It just wouldn't scale with their level. Butchers, Scorpions and basic Lancers might have 100 armour, Elite Lancers and Beast Masters might have 200, Heavy Gunners and Bombards might have 300 and your average Nox might have 600 armour everywhere and 100 on his head with crap-tons of health. All of these numbers represent meaningful levels of resistance - 25%, 40%, 50% and 75%, respectively. Granted, Warframe weapons deal such massive amounts of damage that they can blast through any sane amount of armour, but that's not an issue of enemy design. It's the same way in the reverse direction. My Inaros didn't start actually tanking damage comfortably until I layered 90% damage resistance on top of 90% damage resistance because enemy damage scales up just as aggressively.

Yeah... You guys are probably right. Actually I just remembered that there are already "upgraded" units for common infantry. After a certain point the common Lancer gets replaced outright by the Elite Lancer. These guys possess Alloy Armor and more of it. To think there was already an inherent difficulty spike within Warframe even before looking at the actual numbers... I mean the current system basically begs to have a simple number adjustment.

Okay so my argument has changed slightly: All enemies should have linear scaling health, but armor should remain largely static to the unit class. To compensate, abilities and weapons should have their damage numbers revised to better fit this smaller scale in enemy defenses.

Side note: I believe its important to acknowledge just how tough Warframes (lore-wise) are. Their skin is like "sword steel", meaning even the squishiest Warframes should be able to take a few direct hits. Their Infested biology makes delicate anatomy almost nonexistent (rendering smaller wounds trivial). And their overall equipment is taken directly from Orokin engineering, whom are repeatedly said to be far technologically superior to any current faction (even the Corpus don't quite understand their tech). So overall Warframes shouldn't be taken down after a couple hits, even at fairly high levels.

H0B0Z · February 4, 2019

I have nothing to add, but I am really enjoying reading all this.

Everyone is being so civil. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 6, 2019

Just in case anyone missed it: I updated the initial post. It now shows scaling formulas with armor values being static.

There is also a new sub-topic regarding how enemy health should scale. Be sure to take a look.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 6, 2019

On 2019-02-01 at 5:27 AM, Teridax68 said:

The math and intent are good, but I feel the analysis also goes about the problem backwards: enemies scale exponentially in effective health because our damage scales to ludicrous levels. Our weapons can be fully kitted out with mods whose damage increase scale multiplicatively off of each other: base damage mods multiply base damage, elemental damage mods multiply the resulting total damage, which is also multiplied by multishot, then multiplied by crit chance, then multiplied by crit damage, to say nothing of the damage increases brought about by status effects like Corrosive or Viral. If we want to equalize enemy effective health numbers with our own, and prevent them from scaling exponentially, we first need to deflate the exponential scaling on our own weapons. Example:

Remove base damage and multishot mods, both of which are mandatory and add no gameplay, only more power.

Rework elemental damage mods to convert existing damage to a certain element, rather than add damage.

Rework crit away from a random damage chance, and instead as a cover-all damage multiplier on headshots, finishers, and more generally damage against enemies that are unalerted or stunned in some form. Crit would become more situational, rather than a general damage increase.

Rework status chance in some form to operate less on permanent damage multipliers, and not add raw damage based purely off of the weapon's own damage. Would probably take some time, and could operate alongside an equalization of enemy health.

(Sorry for not replying sooner. I had to mull this over.)

You have several great points, but they may be a bit too harsh of a revision. May I refine these suggestions a bit?

I don't believe the outright removal of base damage mods is viable. They are essential in the early-to-mid game's progression system, as well as being vital to teaching about the game's Endo and Credit economy. It would be nice though if they had a single dedicated slot, rather than taking up a standard mod slot.
- As for Multishot, another guy suggested splitting the damage between the bullets. This would keep base damage the same, but retroactively increase status chance.
The elemental system is a beast in itself (as it uses an odd priority formula). Perhaps a compromise would be ideal here: The base mod could convert a small percentage of damage, but leveling the mod would add a little bit more damage. Meanwhile, physical damage mods (Jagged Edge, Buzz Kill, etc) would add damage outright, so to give them a little bit more value.
I actually figured out a potentially great solution to the crit issue. There would be two types of Critical hits: Body Crit and Vital Crit. A Body Crit would use the weapon's listed critical chance, but only proc a fraction of the listed Critical Damage. Vital Crits would be used when hitting a weakpoint and multiply the listed Critical Chance and use the true Critical Damage. That way crit weapons would still be viable, but ultimately require precision to directly compete with raw-damage/status weapons.
Indeed status chance needs some review. Personally I think bleed and toxin should procs should strip a specific percentage of an enemy's health, in order to give consistency across all weapons. After all, enemies should have a generally fixed amount of blood.
- Side note: It would be nice if Radiation got a slightly better proc. Confusion is nice, but isn't very useful unless applied over a wide area. My thought is to add on a new proc called "Decay". Basically it'd be a weaker mix of viral, toxin, and confusion. It would only strip about an 8th of their health, do 1/3 the DoT of toxin, and keep confusion. Thoughts?

Teridax68 · February 6, 2019

53 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

(Sorry for not replying sooner. I had to mull this over.)

You have several great points, but they may be a bit too harsh of a revision. May I refine these suggestions a bit?

No worries at all! I agree that my suggestions are harsh, though I also feel they are justified. My thoughts on the responses:

53 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

I don't believe the outright removal of base damage mods is viable. They are essential in the early-to-mid game's progression system, as well as being vital to teaching about the game's Endo and Credit economy. It would be nice though if they had a single dedicated slot, rather than taking up a standard mod slot.

I don't really agree with any of this. "Progression" in the early-to-mid game is already defined by collecting mods of various kinds, all of which are a perfect opportunity to teach the player about Endo or credits. Base damage mods are neither essential nor even central to either function.

53 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

As for Multishot, another guy suggested splitting the damage between the bullets. This would keep base damage the same, but retroactively increase status chance.

If the intent is to alter status chance, why not just have status chance mods? Why do we need to go through all of this trouble just to get what is basically another version of a status chance mod? Part of the problem I see in this sort of solution is that it very obviously starts from the current situation, and attempts to justify keeping existing items, even cosmetically: while this is generally good to do (you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater), in this case the proposal is itself fundamentally flawed and redundant. I do not see the sense in justifying mechanics that are inherently unjustifiable: there does not appear to be any inherent unique gameplay in multishot, and if there is, I don't think turning multishot into some more complicated status chance mod really showcases it.

53 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

The elemental system is a beast in itself (as it uses an odd priority formula). Perhaps a compromise would be ideal here: The base mod could convert a small percentage of damage, but leveling the mod would add a little bit more damage. Meanwhile, physical damage mods (Jagged Edge, Buzz Kill, etc) would add damage outright, so to give them a little bit more value.

My question here is: why increase damage? Why is there a need to increase damage when the goal of these mods would, or at least should be purely to adjust one's damage types? What happens if we don't have these mods increase damage?

53 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

I actually figured out a potentially great solution to the crit issue. There would be two types of Critical hits: Body Crit and Vital Crit. A Body Crit would use the weapon's listed critical chance, but only proc a fraction of the listed Critical Damage. Vital Crits would be used when hitting a weakpoint and multiply the listed Critical Chance and use the true Critical Damage. That way crit weapons would still be viable, but ultimately require precision to directly compete with raw-damage/status weapons.

I feel this adds a significant layer of complication when you could achieve your stated goal much more cleanly just by having Vital Crits, and nothing else (and even then, by using only critical damage and not critical chance). Again, this feels like an attempt to preserve existing mechanics at all costs, and if the goal is for critical weapons to encourage precision, then their gameplay should emphasize this: Warframe is a game where enemies have weak spots, and where headshots, stealth attacks and finishers deal bonus damage. There is therefore no reason to simulate crits with a virtual dice roll when the player could enact those critical strikes by actually striking critical body parts.

53 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Indeed status chance needs some review. Personally I think bleed and toxin should procs should strip a specific percentage of an enemy's health, in order to give consistency across all weapons. After all, enemies should have a generally fixed amount of blood.

That's true, though I would also be wary of making status operate on health percentages, as that defeats the purpose of scaling enemies. If our mode of scaling difficulty changes, and enemies remain at static health values, that could be fine, but otherwise we should avoid having our own power nullify difficulty scaling, as that makes balancing more difficult in the long run.

53 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Side note: It would be nice if Radiation got a slightly better proc. Confusion is nice, but isn't very useful unless applied over a wide area. My thought is to add on a new proc called "Decay". Basically it'd be a weaker mix of viral, toxin, and confusion. It would only strip about an 8th of their health, do 1/3 the DoT of toxin, and keep confusion. Thoughts?

Putting aside how Radiation damage is one of the best around against many different armor and health types, I feel Confusion itself is actually secretly overpowered: even if a Rad-procced enemy doesn't deal much damage, so long as they fight another enemy, the status effect is essentially a prolonged stun, which is stronger than most status effects other than Corrosive or Viral. Loki's Irradiating Disarm and Nyx's Chaos are both radial rad procs, one way or another, and are among the most powerful crowd control effects in the game.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 6, 2019

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

No worries at all! I agree that my suggestions are harsh, though I also feel they are justified. My thoughts on the responses:

I don't really agree with any of this. "Progression" in the early-to-mid game is already defined by collecting mods of various kinds, all of which are a perfect opportunity to teach the player about Endo or credits. Base damage mods are neither essential nor even central to either function.

If the intent is to alter status chance, why not just have status chance mods? Why do we need to go through all of this trouble just to get what is basically another version of a status chance mod? Part of the problem I see in this sort of solution is that it very obviously starts from the current situation, and attempts to justify keeping existing items, even cosmetically: while this is generally good to do (you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater), in this case the proposal is itself fundamentally flawed and redundant. I do not see the sense in justifying mechanics that are inherently unjustifiable: there does not appear to be any inherent unique gameplay in multishot, and if there is, I don't think turning multishot into some more complicated status chance mod really showcases it.

My question here is: why increase damage? Why is there a need to increase damage when the goal of these mods would, or at least should be purely to adjust one's damage types? What happens if we don't have these mods increase damage?

I feel this adds a significant layer of complication when you could achieve your stated goal much more cleanly just by having Vital Crits, and nothing else (and even then, by using only critical damage and not critical chance). Again, this feels like an attempt to preserve existing mechanics at all costs, and if the goal is for critical weapons to encourage precision, then their gameplay should emphasize this: Warframe is a game where enemies have weak spots, and where headshots, stealth attacks and finishers deal bonus damage. There is therefore no reason to simulate crits with a virtual dice roll when the player could enact those critical strikes by actually striking critical body parts.

That's true, though I would also be wary of making status operate on health percentages, as that defeats the purpose of scaling enemies. If our mode of scaling difficulty changes, and enemies remain at static health values, that could be fine, but otherwise we should avoid having our own power nullify difficulty scaling, as that makes balancing more difficult in the long run.

Putting aside how Radiation damage is one of the best around against many different armor and health types, I feel Confusion itself is actually secretly overpowered: even if a Rad-procced enemy doesn't deal much damage, so long as they fight another enemy, the status effect is essentially a prolonged stun, which is stronger than most status effects other than Corrosive or Viral. Loki's Irradiating Disarm and Nyx's Chaos are both radial rad procs, one way or another, and are among the most powerful crowd control effects in the game.

You make really good points. However, I feel as though we may be slightly off when it comes to "vision".

Here is my general logic: A bullet is a bullet. Take a 9mm round: Its compact, accurate to a fair distance, and causes decent trauma. Now take a 7.62mm NATO round: Its large, punches through light armor, and goes a long distance. You can tweak a 9mm to perform slightly differently, such as changing its material type, the gunpowder formula, and altering the shape slightly, but it will never perform the exact same as a 7.62mm. But ultimately neither of them are going to punch through a tank's hull.

Warframe ideally would operate on similar principles: you can make a bullet/gun all-round better, but not to an exceptional degree. Tenno, having access to superior modding technology, would be able to create weaponry superior to the NPCs, but are ultimately doomed to plateau in power. This is why mods must persist. Straight up damage mods essentially "refine" the weapon to do more damage (albeit to much lesser degree than now) while elemental mods pack in advanced tech to perform supplementary effects. Its a delicate give-take system. There needs to be a basis of realism, but not too much as to dull the unique gameplay experience.

Teridax68 · February 6, 2019

4 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Here is my general logic: A bullet is a bullet. Take a 9mm round: Its compact, accurate to a fair distance, and causes decent trauma. Now take a 7.62mm NATO round: Its large, punches through light armor, and goes a long distance. You can tweak a 9mm to perform slightly differently, such as changing its material type, the gunpowder formula, and altering the shape slightly, but it will never perform the exact same as a 7.62mm. But ultimately neither of them are going to punch through a tank's hull.

A few things:

Warframe does not aim for realism, nor has it ever tried. As such, I don't think bringing in real-life weapon comparisons really works when discussing gameplay mechanics, particularly when our weapons in-game do plenty of kooky stuff.
Warframe is a game set in a fictional future. Who knows what kinds of technologies may have been invented by then, and what kind of power future weapons hold. Already, we have some form of universal ammo that applies just as well to ancient shotguns as to contemporary energy weaponry. As such, current rules of ballistics, particularly those closely based upon modern projectile weaponry, fly out the window.

4 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Warframe ideally would operate on similar principles: you can make a bullet/gun all-round better, but not to an exceptional degree. Tenno, having access to superior modding technology, would be able to create weaponry superior to the NPCs, but are ultimately doomed to plateau in power. This is why mods must persist. Straight up damage mods essentially "refine" the weapon to do more damage (albeit to much lesser degree than now) while elemental mods pack in advanced tech to perform supplementary effects. Its a delicate give-take system. There needs to be a basis of realism, but not too much as to dull the unique gameplay experience.

I still don't really see why this should imply our mods should provide multiple increases in damage. Even if we accept that elemental mods hold advanced tech that other mods inexplicably don't, and that there needs to be realism in Warframe for realism's sake (which I strongly disagree with), I feel that could very well be used to justify elemental mods providing no damage increases, but instead converting our damage to a certain element.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 6, 2019

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

A few things:

Warframe does not aim for realism, nor has it ever tried. As such, I don't think bringing in real-life weapon comparisons really works when discussing gameplay mechanics, particularly when our weapons in-game do plenty of kooky stuff.

Warframe is a game set in a fictional future. Who knows what kinds of technologies may have been invented by then, and what kind of power future weapons hold. Already, we have some form of universal ammo that applies just as well to ancient shotguns as to contemporary energy weaponry. As such, current rules of ballistics, particularly those closely based upon modern projectile weaponry, fly out the window.

I still don't really see why this should imply our mods should provide multiple increases in damage. Even if we accept that elemental mods hold advanced tech that other mods inexplicably don't, and that there needs to be realism in Warframe for realism's sake (which I strongly disagree with), I feel that could very well be used to justify elemental mods providing no damage increases, but instead converting our damage to a certain element.

As I said: There needs to be a balance. There by no means should be realism on a tangible scale, but there should be realism on a mathematical scale. Enemies shouldn't miraculously get god-bullets and super armor just by being at a higher level. Likewise Tenno should have a means to be arbitrarily tougher than a typical enemy unit. I will agree that by all means modding should be used to improve various aspect of a weapon, rather than simply adding on more damage. However Tenno still need a means to feel powerful.

Perhaps this can be best explained with a parable: (Assume the new scaling is in place) A Nyx is fighting a horde of Grineer units. They are all wielding Grakatas, but she too has a Grakata. If she casts Chaos, the enemies will immediately fire upon each other. It takes about 2 seconds of one Lancer firing upon another to kill them. However, one Lancer was out of her range and is still targeting her. It takes her only half a second of gunfire from her modded Grakata to kill this Lancer.

Now of course this never happens in the current game. It takes quite a while for Chaos to clear a room, with many of its victims often being relatively fine by the time its over. Meanwhile a few stray bullets can readily down a Nyx at higher levels. What I'm getting at is there needs to be a means to make a Tenno's weapon better; to give them an edge of the swarms of enemies they constantly fight. It doesn't have to a massive edge, but enough to where the player can feel that they wield a power superior to what the Solar system once knew.

EDIT: Also there is a fair argument as to why elemental damage should be largely additive instead of a conversion: weapon identity. If we can convert a weapon's damage into something totally different just by adding the right mods, then the specific damage distribution of the default weapon loses its uniqueness. Take a Braton for example: Its a simple all-rounder with a slight lean towards slash. Add a buzz kill mod and now its overwhelmingly slash-based. Or how about a Synapse? Its base element is corrosive. Add a bunch of heat damage and now its an organic crit-based flamethrower. Put simply, the damage conversion model would end up making weapons behave rather generically, with the only fixes being to add several complicated exemptions. Really it makes more sense to just lower the damage bonuses current mods give and slightly rebalance the proc weight to match.

Edited February 7, 2019 by (XB1)alchemPyro

Teridax68 · February 7, 2019

9 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

As I said: There needs to be a balance. There by no means should be realism on a tangible scale, but there should be realism on a mathematical scale. Enemies shouldn't miraculously get god-bullets and super armor just by being at a higher level. Likewise Tenno should have a means to be arbitrarily tougher than a typical enemy unit. I will agree that by all means modding should be used to improve various aspect of a weapon, rather than simply adding on more damage. However Tenno still need a means to feel powerful.

Perhaps this can be best explained with a parable: (Assume the new scaling is in place) A Nyx is fighting a horde of Grineer units. They are all wielding Grakatas, but she too has a Grakata. If she casts Chaos, the enemies will immediately fire upon each other. It takes about 2 seconds of one Lancer firing upon another to kill them. However, one Lancer was out of her range and is still targeting her. It takes her only half a second of gunfire from her modded Grakata to kill this Lancer.

Now of course this never happens in the current game. It takes quite a while for Chaos to clear a room, with many of its victims often being relatively fine by the time its over. Meanwhile a few stray bullets can readily down a Nyx at higher levels. What I'm getting at is there needs to be a means to make a Tenno's weapon better; to give them an edge of the swarms of enemies they constantly fight. It doesn't have to a massive edge, but enough to where the player can feel that they wield a power superior to what the Solar system once knew.

This is precisely why I don't think difficulty should scale via enemy stats. Canonically and thematically speaking, warframes are much more powerful than most enemies, which means that the damage needed to kill a single warframe should mow down a weaker entity, such as a Grineer Lancer, much more quickly. However, this I think can simply be achieved via differences in enemy health: if a warframe has, say, 1000 health, a Lancer has 100 health, and a Grakata deals 200 damage per second, the former will take much longer to die from direct hits by the same weapon as the latter, regardless of mods. Assuming these damage and health values don't change, this will remain true at all times, leading to consistent combat. This would stop Warframe's difficulty from scaling the way it currently does, but that I think is all the more reason for the game to scale its difficulty through some other means, e.g. tighter mission conditions.

9 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

EDIT: Also there is a fair argument as to why elemental damage should be largely additive instead of a conversion: weapon identity. If we can convert a weapon's damage into something totally different just by adding the right mods, then the specific damage distribution of the default weapon loses its uniqueness. Take a Braton for example: Its a simple all-rounder with a slight lean towards slash. Add a buzz kill mod and now its overwhelmingly slash-based. Or how about a Synapse? Its base element is corrosive. Add a bunch of heat damage and now its an organic crit-based flamethrower. Put simply, the damage conversion model would end up making weapons behave rather generically, with the only fixes being to add several complicated exemptions. Really it makes more sense to just lower the damage bonuses current mods give and slightly rebalance the proc weight to match.

I agree with the criticism, but the above conclusion perplexes me: if the problem with damage conversion mods is that they erase weapon identity, how exactly would adding damage bonuses to these weapons solve the problem? Wouldn't it make the issue even worse, by making those mods popular as damage boosts, rather than pure utility effects? This is why I'm in favor of removing elemental mods altogether in the long run: it is difficult to make weapons unique through damage types when any weapon can be made to deal damage of any element, and when some of these elements or status effects are stronger than others, this also forces all weapons to be balanced around similar damage levels if they are to be picked, further homogenizing them. In this respect, having our current elemental and physical damage mods switch to pure damage conversion I think would be the best compromise in the short term to ease this transition, as it would make those mods far more situational, and no longer part of our current lineup of multiplicative damage increases.

Steel_Rook · February 7, 2019

On 2019-02-04 at 4:14 PM, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Yeah... You guys are probably right. Actually I just remembered that there are already "upgraded" units for common infantry. After a certain point the common Lancer gets replaced outright by the Elite Lancer. These guys possess Alloy Armor and more of it. To think there was already an inherent difficulty spike within Warframe even before looking at the actual numbers... I mean the current system basically begs to have a simple number adjustment.

Yup, this is what I was getting at. You can scale the health of existing units to make them tougher with level. When that starts not being enough, you can replace the unit with an Elite version of it that has more armour or a different class of armour, and maybe throw in an extra ability or quirk in there at the same time. That's actually exactly what DE did when the mess that is the Terra Corpus first hit Live. They were absolutely murdering newbies, so DE nerfed their damage across the board. Then high-level players complained about the game being "too easy," so Elite Terra Corpus units were introduced, spawning I think level 40+. Whether that actually made the game "harder" or just slightly shifted the gear check is debatable, but it's a neat approach to scaling enemies without letting their stats spiral out of hand to the point of game mechanics themselves breaking down.

On 2019-02-04 at 4:14 PM, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Okay so my argument has changed slightly: All enemies should have linear scaling health, but armor should remain largely static to the unit class. To compensate, abilities and weapons should have their damage numbers revised to better fit this smaller scale in enemy defenses.

I very much agree with this. Most Warframe damaging abilities scale terribly. Either they have such low damage that they're basically useless for killing high-level enemies (Inaros' Sand Storm) or they have such high damage that they can effortlessly nuke entire rooms of anything up to massively high-level enemies (Nova Antimatter Drop). With criticals, headshots, damage mods, elemental damage and ally buffs, weapon damage can increase by a factor of 20 easily, while ability damage can only realistically increase by a factor of maybe 2. The result is that damage-dealing abilities are incredibly binary, as I pointed out above, depending on whether they're set for high-level enemies or low-level enemies.

I don't know of any really good way to handle this, to be honest. Maybe we could separate Ability Strength from Ability Damage? Strength can be left at the default 30% for the basic mod, while damage can scale up to 200-400%? That way, strength can be used for control abilities, buffs and debuffs where the values aren't expected to vary by much, while damage can be allowed to vary far more significantly. Of course, that makes decent modding even harder and walks us into an entirely separate issue (I personally feel abilities should be slottable individually, rather than together with the Warframe), but it's the first thing that popped into my head.

21 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I don't really agree with any of this. "Progression" in the early-to-mid game is already defined by collecting mods of various kinds, all of which are a perfect opportunity to teach the player about Endo or credits. Base damage mods are neither essential nor even central to either function.

Trying to sidestep the broader discussion: I feel base damage mods are important for one simple reason - scaling TTK. For any RPG, it's beneficial to start the player out disproportionately strong, so that they're able to overmatch low-level enemies both without any decent gear and without real knowledge of the game. You want the player to have a smooth and pleasant initial experience so as not to alienate them. Gradually over time, you want to shift that balance down, making enemies harder to kill and more dangerous. However, JUST making enemies tougher feels cheap because the player ends up feeling like they're regressing. As such, you want to let the player upgrade in order to break even on difficulty and perhaps even exceed their initial power over time. While you could accomplish this by giving the player extra exotic tools, simply letting them earn higher stats over time is a reliable and dependable way of accomplishing that.

Simply put, base damage mods are an easy way to scale the player's damage vs. the enemy's toughness while still keeping the player feeling engaged and in control of the situation. Now, that's not to say that having "best-in-slot" or "must-have" damage mods is a good idea. In fact, this is typically the main drawback to most if not all points-buy systems. In the past, I've suggested implementing "dedicated" slots for weapons and Warframes, rather than relying on a pool of generic-only slots. Personally, I'd give each weapon a single Base Damage slots which could take the likes of Serration, Heavy Calibre and so on, and bar those mods from being slotted anywhere else. The "inherent Serration" idea, if you will, though my version is quite a bit more extensive and beyond the scope of this thread.

In general, I like linear upgrades, aka "just bigger stats." You can't build an RPG on just those alone, but it doesn't hurt to have them in addition to the rest of the game's build customisation.

22 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

There does not appear to be any inherent unique gameplay in multishot, and if there is, I don't think turning multishot into some more complicated status chance mod really showcases it.

Agreed. I've never seen the point of multishot from a game design perspective. As a player, sure - it's a damage/crit/status buff, so OF COURSE I'm going to want to stick as much of it as I can on every gun I own. Trying to think as a developer, though, I see no reason to ever implement something like this. Even if it had downsides like a higher ammo cost or faster reticle bloom or what have you, it's still a highly technical means of adding a DPS buff that most players are probably not really going to see. About the only way I can see multishot being useful is in tweaking the number of pellets per shotgun shell, and even that's of dubious value. Off-hand, I don't know if more pellets or fewer is better, provided damage is split evenly between them.

Basically, Multishot is a thing that sounds cool on paper, but in practice just takes up a slot to add more DPS that's difficult to convey to the player. Or multiple slots, in fact. If I were allowed to make any kind of large-scale change to the modding system, Multishot is one of the things I'd straight-up remove from the game entirely.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 7, 2019

6 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I agree with the criticism, but the above conclusion perplexes me: if the problem with damage conversion mods is that they erase weapon identity, how exactly would adding damage bonuses to these weapons solve the problem? Wouldn't it make the issue even worse, by making those mods popular as damage boosts, rather than pure utility effects? This is why I'm in favor of removing elemental mods altogether in the long run: it is difficult to make weapons unique through damage types when any weapon can be made to deal damage of any element, and when some of these elements or status effects are stronger than others, this also forces all weapons to be balanced around similar damage levels if they are to be picked, further homogenizing them. In this respect, having our current elemental and physical damage mods switch to pure damage conversion I think would be the best compromise in the short term to ease this transition, as it would make those mods far more situational, and no longer part of our current lineup of multiplicative damage increases.

Well its simple: Just limit how much bonus damage mods give. Adding a little bit of damage isn't bad, so long as it doesn't trivialize encounters. Really though, the main point of elemental match ups is to deal as much damage as possible to a particular enemy type; an art sadly lost to the current meta. If you build a puncture weapon with Radiation+Viral, you would decimate Grineer units, however it would be nearly useless against Infested. Likewise if you built a slash weapon with corrosive and fire, it should decimate Infested but be largely ineffective against Corpus.

The core mechanic of Warframe is still the same: increasing TTK to better deal with the endless hoards of enemies. The goal here is to simply shift that away from being a raw number's game and more towards incorporating strategy. The new mechanics I'm suggesting is that enemies have very little scaling in offense, but still have decent scaling in defense (while keeping armor values static). By doing this Tenno have less to worry about in regards to their own defense, but must now carefully choose how to best approach each encounter so not to get overwhelmed. As there are several ways to increase an enemy's difficulty without directly raising their base numbers (switching them out with rarer/tougher units, increasing their AI, giving them different guns, etc) it comes down to the players to have insight on how to keep TTK up knowing that their raw damage numbers will plateau relatively early.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 7, 2019

24 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

I very much agree with this. Most Warframe damaging abilities scale terribly. Either they have such low damage that they're basically useless for killing high-level enemies (Inaros' Sand Storm) or they have such high damage that they can effortlessly nuke entire rooms of anything up to massively high-level enemies (Nova Antimatter Drop). With criticals, headshots, damage mods, elemental damage and ally buffs, weapon damage can increase by a factor of 20 easily, while ability damage can only realistically increase by a factor of maybe 2. The result is that damage-dealing abilities are incredibly binary, as I pointed out above, depending on whether they're set for high-level enemies or low-level enemies.

I don't know of any really good way to handle this, to be honest. Maybe we could separate Ability Strength from Ability Damage? Strength can be left at the default 30% for the basic mod, while damage can scale up to 200-400%? That way, strength can be used for control abilities, buffs and debuffs where the values aren't expected to vary by much, while damage can be allowed to vary far more significantly. Of course, that makes decent modding even harder and walks us into an entirely separate issue (I personally feel abilities should be slottable individually, rather than together with the Warframe), but it's the first thing that popped into my head.

(This is something for a later discussion, but) I think a good fix, if ever needed, would be soft-caps. With a linear scaling system the difference between a level 1 enemy and a level 50 would be the same as the difference between a level 50 and a level 100, making the math for balancing abilities while still giving some challenge overall much cleaner. That said, Warframe is infamous for "buff-stacking" with the right builds and team compositions trivializing even the toughest enemies (and further preventing any sort of meaningful endgame). By curbing Warframe damage and/or defenses after a certain point, endgame enemies will still be a viable threat even with buff stacking. Buff stacking would still work, but it not to the ungodly degree it does now.

Teridax68 · February 7, 2019

8 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Trying to sidestep the broader discussion: I feel base damage mods are important for one simple reason - scaling TTK. For any RPG, it's beneficial to start the player out disproportionately strong, so that they're able to overmatch low-level enemies both without any decent gear and without real knowledge of the game. You want the player to have a smooth and pleasant initial experience so as not to alienate them. Gradually over time, you want to shift that balance down, making enemies harder to kill and more dangerous. However, JUST making enemies tougher feels cheap because the player ends up feeling like they're regressing. As such, you want to let the player upgrade in order to break even on difficulty and perhaps even exceed their initial power over time. While you could accomplish this by giving the player extra exotic tools, simply letting them earn higher stats over time is a reliable and dependable way of accomplishing that.

Simply put, base damage mods are an easy way to scale the player's damage vs. the enemy's toughness while still keeping the player feeling engaged and in control of the situation. Now, that's not to say that having "best-in-slot" or "must-have" damage mods is a good idea. In fact, this is typically the main drawback to most if not all points-buy systems. In the past, I've suggested implementing "dedicated" slots for weapons and Warframes, rather than relying on a pool of generic-only slots. Personally, I'd give each weapon a single Base Damage slots which could take the likes of Serration, Heavy Calibre and so on, and bar those mods from being slotted anywhere else. The "inherent Serration" idea, if you will, though my version is quite a bit more extensive and beyond the scope of this thread.

I don't really feel this is how progression works in practice. In linear, singleplayer games, for example, there is a difficulty curve, but the player doesn't feel like they're regressing in power even when they do lack pure stat increases, because difficulty there is done by adding tougher classes of enemies. For example, in Half-Life 2, the game introduces you with cops, who are pretty weak, and towards the end you start fighting elite soldiers, who have better durability and weaponry, as well as giant alien tripods: content is more difficult, but the player doesn't feel like they're regressing, because they can still kill the same units in equal or less time. Doom 2016 technically had upgrades, but also had a solid difficulty curve by throwing new demons at the player (while also making the player feel like a god through speed and fluidity of action). If the game wants a smooth difficulty curve for newer players, it should therefore present them with a small initial selection of simple enemies, before graduating out into more complex opponents that test the player harder on their skills at the game.

Meanwhile, though, the issue with trying to have mods scale to counter enemy scaling is that currently enemies scale infinitely, whereas mods don't: no matter how powerful your mods are, you will still reach a point where you will feel like you have regressed, because the same enemies will have scaled to become stronger than you. Moreover, enemies scale in real-time in missions, whereas mods typically do not: mods therefore only increase your baseline level of power, and the end result is still a feeling of constant regression, as enemies become progressively tougher and more damaging. Thus, I do not believe mods can adequately cover the function of keeping the player engaged, as they offer an unchanging modifier per mission, which does nothing to prevent enemies from scaling against the player, bar auto-scaling status effects like Corrosive, Slash or Viral. The problem of enemies making the player feel like they're regressing therefore also still applies even with mods, and will continue to so long as the game scales its difficulty by increasing stats on the same enemies.

Quote

In general, I like linear upgrades, aka "just bigger stats." You can't build an RPG on just those alone, but it doesn't hurt to have them in addition to the rest of the game's build customisation.

I feel bigger stats can indeed be harmless in some contexts, namely linear, singleplayer games that scale themselves precisely to the player's power, but, as I feel I've said in a prior discussion, such a system can be harmful in games that cannot properly adjust to changes in the player's stats. Because Warframe is a multiplayer game where people of disparate power levels can play together in any part of the game, from starter zones to high-end levels, the game has trouble adjusting its difficulty via enemies all of those players fight, as the same enemy can be too strong for one player, yet trivially weak for another. Linear upgrades/"Just bigger stats" are the direct cause of this problem difficulty, and as long as Warframe retains both these stat increases and its current mode of difficulty scaling, this fundamental issue will persist.

8 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Well its simple: Just limit how much bonus damage mods give. Adding a little bit of damage isn't bad, so long as it doesn't trivialize encounters. Really though, the main point of elemental match ups is to deal as much damage as possible to a particular enemy type; an art sadly lost to the current meta. If you build a puncture weapon with Radiation+Viral, you would decimate Grineer units, however it would be nearly useless against Infested. Likewise if you built a slash weapon with corrosive and fire, it should decimate Infested but be largely ineffective against Corpus.

If the damage bonus isn't meant to be significant, why have in the first place? Ultimately, this still doesn't answer the question of why these mods would need to deal bonus damage. Moreover, if the intent is to maximize damage against a certain enemy type, then pure conversion would be the better solution, precisely because it would be about fine-tuning one's damage based on element, rather than giving oneself blanket damage increases. No matter which way you slice it, a mod scheme that alters your damage to Corrosive and Heat, but still adds damage, is going to be more effective against Corpus than if those elemental mods added no damage at all.

Quote

The core mechanic of Warframe is still the same: increasing TTK to better deal with the endless hoards of enemies. The goal here is to simply shift that away from being a raw number's game and more towards incorporating strategy. The new mechanics I'm suggesting is that enemies have very little scaling in offense, but still have decent scaling in defense (while keeping armor values static). By doing this Tenno have less to worry about in regards to their own defense, but must now carefully choose how to best approach each encounter so not to get overwhelmed. As there are several ways to increase an enemy's difficulty without directly raising their base numbers (switching them out with rarer/tougher units, increasing their AI, giving them different guns, etc) it comes down to the players to have insight on how to keep TTK up knowing that their raw damage numbers will plateau relatively early.

I completely agree to shifting away from a raw numbers game, which is precisely why I'd support moving away from adding or keeping raw numbers to the mix. If the strategic component to elemental mods is to alter one's effectiveness against enemies of certain types, then adding raw numbers via bonus damage would only muddy the waters.

Edited February 7, 2019 by Teridax68

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 8, 2019

52 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I completely agree to shifting away from a raw numbers game, which is precisely why I'd support moving away from adding or keeping raw numbers to the mix. If the strategic component to elemental mods is to alter one's effectiveness against enemies of certain types, then adding raw numbers via bonus damage would only muddy the waters.

Ah, I think I see the issue now. You're seeking a scaling system where enemies grow very little as a whole. That's wishful thinking, but really hurts the argument in its entirety. While we do want to limit numbers, we still need a clearly defined growth. Between levels 1 to 30, a properly modded Tenno should be able to dominate. From 30 to 50, a properly modded Tenno should be able to hold its own with a touch of caution. It is only after that fact that average damage numbers start falling short. That is how we get a comfortable player-friendly scaling system.

I was actually doing a bit of "testing" to get a better understanding of just exactly how important scaling is. I'm running low-level missions with unmodded weapons. When the DPS falls below a comfortable level, I add on an elemental mod. As enemies between level 1 and level 20 grow at a near-linear rate, they make a good control group to see just how important damage scaling would be should they become linear. Try it yourself. Get your toughest weapons, strip them of mods, and see how far they can go without outright damage buffs.

Teridax68 · February 8, 2019

6 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Ah, I think I see the issue now. You're seeking a scaling system where enemies grow very little as a whole. That's wishful thinking, but really hurts the argument in its entirety. While we do want to limit numbers, we still need a clearly defined growth. Between levels 1 to 30, a properly modded Tenno should be able to dominate. From 30 to 50, a properly modded Tenno should be able to hold its own with a touch of caution. It is only after that fact that average damage numbers start falling short. That is how we get a comfortable player-friendly scaling system.

But it's not a player-friendly scaling system at all, again because the very fact that enemies scale up in power, and Tenno do not mid-mission (or at least hit some sort of cap) means that eventually the fantasy breaks, precisely because the game's current means of making itself more difficult is by making enemies eventually more powerful than the player. Making enemies scale only a little simply makes for a difficulty system that has trouble being difficult in due time for the player, as is already the case with enemies taking hours in endless missions to become challenging for some frames, while still not resolving the core issue. There is a fundamental logical contradiction with what you are advocating.

I really don't see why advocating a system where enemies don't scale, but where some other condition scales in difficulty, e.g. mission objectives, is "wishful thinking" or "hurts the argument", and I feel both of these claims are dismissive, particularly as your only backing for either so far has been your personal idea of how levels should work, which I disagree with. My very simple request is for the game to adjust itself so that enemies feel satisfying to fight, without being too weak, too spongey, too pea-shooty or too one-shotty, and keeping itself at that same level of stats in combat so that players can participate in fine-tuned combat. With this established, the game could find other ways of implementing difficulty that do not involve breaking its own balance or core fantasy.

Quote

I was actually doing a bit of "testing" to get a better understanding of just exactly how important scaling is. I'm running low-level missions with unmodded weapons. When the DPS falls below a comfortable level, I add on an elemental mod. As enemies between level 1 and level 20 grow at a near-linear rate, they make a good control group to see just how important damage scaling would be should they become linear. Try it yourself. Get your toughest weapons, strip them of mods, and see how far they can go without outright damage buffs.

This is missing the forest for the trees: it does not matter where your damage comes from, you could lose all of your damage from your mods, that would make no difference if enemies had fewer stats, or your weapon itself had more base damage. It is silly to argue for damage buffs on mods just to be able to scale, because scaling enemies are themselves a component of the game that can change. Moreover, the entire point of scaling on enemies right now is to make the game more difficult, so in this respect mods go against that. If you are complaining that enemies are too tough to deal with when you take out your mods... good. You are finally experiencing some sort of difficulty in Warframe, and so without having to spend hours in an endless mission to achieve it.

Edited February 8, 2019 by Teridax68

Steel_Rook · February 8, 2019

13 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Meanwhile, though, the issue with trying to have mods scale to counter enemy scaling is that currently enemies scale infinitely, whereas mods don't: no matter how powerful your mods are, you will still reach a point where you will feel like you have regressed, because the same enemies will have scaled to become stronger than you. Moreover, enemies scale in real-time in missions, whereas mods typically do not: mods therefore only increase your baseline level of power, and the end result is still a feeling of constant regression, as enemies become progressively tougher and more damaging. Thus, I do not believe mods can adequately cover the function of keeping the player engaged, as they offer an unchanging modifier per mission, which does nothing to prevent enemies from scaling against the player, bar auto-scaling status effects like Corrosive, Slash or Viral. The problem of enemies making the player feel like they're regressing therefore also still applies even with mods, and will continue to so long as the game scales its difficulty by increasing stats on the same enemies.

For all the talk we've done about balancing weapons and armour and such, the issues you're highlighting only really pop up on enemies over level 60, which is intentionally a very small amount of content and all of it optional. I have over 1000 hours in this game, and I can count the number of times I've fought level 100 enemies on the fingers of one hand. There's really only this one time I went farming for Toroids and forgot to check enemy levels so they scaled up to 100 before I realised it. Even Sorties don't really spawn level 100 enemies consistently, and that's one mission per day if I even cared to do that much.

The reason I bring this up is level 100+ enemies seem to deliberately NOT be balanced well against players and be given stupid-high stats. It's the same issue as the One Down / Death Sentence difficulty had in Payday 2 - it's not meant to be fun or well-balanced, it's there as a buffer so players don't complain that "the game is too easy." Unlike Payday 2, though, Warframe at least doesn't gate achievements, content or rewards behind fighting level 200 enemies. They exist if you want to fight them (and arguably should be easier to get to), but they offer no materially superior rewards for facing them. I'm of the opinion that enemy balance "matters" mostly up to about level 60. That's where Plains of Eidolon and Orb Vallis bounties cap out, that's around where you hit your first Rotation C reward in 40+ endless missions (if that, I'm speaking off memory), etc. Up to that point, base stat mods scale up against enemies decently well. That's actually the reason why the game keeps being popular despite the HORRIFICALLY bad armour scaling in this game - a lot of players just aren't affected by it.

Now, that's not to say we throw our hands in the air and give up trying to balance the game because "who cares." However, it does bring up an important question: Where do you stop? Everything I've said up to this point has been from my own perspective - that of an average player who prefers a power fantasy where difficulty is fair and I can feel comfortable bringing gear and builds I like, regardless of whether they're "meta." But is that where difficulty stops - where I'm comfortable? What about people who want a tougher challenge, who want to use the worst, most broken weapons and builds and still ride a razor's edge where they can die over a single mistake? After four years of Payday 2 players *@##$ing about how that game is "too easy" even on the highest difficulty setting, I know that's an aspect of the population worth considering, so what do we do about them?

Long story short, I feel that base stat mods do their job in bridging the gap between a new player without gear fighting wimpy enemies to feel powerful and a veteran player with strong gear fighting tough enemies well enough. That stops in the 40-60 range somewhere, but I'd argue that's far enough. Anyone going past that point can be assumed to be looking for challenge specifically, and becoming progressively weaker relative to enemies is part of that proposition. I'm not saying level 100 enemies shouldn't be balanced better, but rather that their dynamic relative to the player is different from the dynamic up to the game's "soft cap" of normal content.

22 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

I think a good fix, if ever needed, would be soft-caps. With a linear scaling system the difference between a level 1 enemy and a level 50 would be the same as the difference between a level 50 and a level 100, making the math for balancing abilities while still giving some challenge overall much cleaner. That said, Warframe is infamous for "buff-stacking" with the right builds and team compositions trivializing even the toughest enemies (and further preventing any sort of meaningful endgame). By curbing Warframe damage and/or defenses after a certain point, endgame enemies will still be a viable threat even with buff stacking. Buff stacking would still work, but it not to the ungodly degree it does now.

While that's true, the solution is typically highly technical in nature and comes down to specific mathematical models. The very armour system we're discussing, for instance, is a pretty good example of someone going out of their way to model effective health as a linear function of armour by putting two rational functions against each other to flatten the curve. Granted, your base health still determines how aggressively your effective health scales, but that scaling is always linear, at a rate of 1/300th of your health per 1 unit of armour. The problem is that whoever set the armour value of enemies deliberately overrode that and set armour value to scale quadratically (I think) anyway, thus entirely undoing THE WHOLE SODDING POINT of having a rational armour-to-resistance conversion in the first place.

Another one I like to bring up is Status Chance for shotguns, because that one's a radical function with a heavy bias towards 100%. Someone tried to abstract out pellet count by modelling Status Chance as an "at least one proc" mechanic, but the resultant mathematical model is entirely binary - 100% or GTFO. It also abstracts nothing, because "at least one" is a terrible metric when even low percentages still have a high probability of proccing multiple times and are entirely incomparable with single-pellet weapons. And then you throw bonus Multishot from mods to completely muddy the UI display so nobody knows anything. Again, a commendable effort to create a universal status chance model regardless of pellet count which ended up creating a skewed and improperly-scaling system.

This is sort of why I (admittedly tersely) asked you for specific implementations earlier in the thread. When it comes to scaling, the devil is in the details - or rather, in the mathematical functions. Granted, my own background in applied mathematics makes me naturally biased towards this, but I really do feel solutions will come down to what formulas we can come up with over and above broad game design ideas. What you're proposing here - linear scaling of effective enemy health per level - is entirely possible. In fact, keeping armour fixed per enemy type and scaling health as a multiple of level would absolutely do this, albeit enemies with higher health and more armour would scale more aggressively. Ultimately, the secret to success is keeping your numbers within reasonable bounds where scaling can't run away from you too much. Because realistically speaking, ANY mathematical model is going to break eventually, if you push numbers too far in either direction.

Teridax68 · February 8, 2019

8 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

For all the talk we've done about balancing weapons and armour and such, the issues you're highlighting only really pop up on enemies over level 60, which is intentionally a very small amount of content and all of it optional. I have over 1000 hours in this game, and I can count the number of times I've fought level 100 enemies on the fingers of one hand. There's really only this one time I went farming for Toroids and forgot to check enemy levels so they scaled up to 100 before I realised it. Even Sorties don't really spawn level 100 enemies consistently, and that's one mission per day if I even cared to do that much.

Sure, it's a small amount of content, but it's what currently counts as endgame content, and is therefore content that is accessed far more frequently than the rest by most experienced players. The fact that the only viable form of content for many long-established players also happens to be poorly balanced and not all that fun I think is a major reason why so many veterans eventually burn out from the game. The issue I'm discussing I think also appears way before that: sure, enemies only start to get weird at around level 60, but the very fact that enemies scale at all is a problem, as with players. Any content below level 60, for example, is trivial for those same veterans, or just players who have the right core mods, so the end result either way is a game that is simply not well-balanced for the players going through it.

8 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

The reason I bring this up is level 100+ enemies seem to deliberately NOT be balanced well against players and be given stupid-high stats. It's the same issue as the One Down / Death Sentence difficulty had in Payday 2 - it's not meant to be fun or well-balanced, it's there as a buffer so players don't complain that "the game is too easy." Unlike Payday 2, though, Warframe at least doesn't gate achievements, content or rewards behind fighting level 200 enemies. They exist if you want to fight them (and arguably should be easier to get to), but they offer no materially superior rewards for facing them. I'm of the opinion that enemy balance "matters" mostly up to about level 60. That's where Plains of Eidolon and Orb Vallis bounties cap out, that's around where you hit your first Rotation C reward in 40+ endless missions (if that, I'm speaking off memory), etc. Up to that point, base stat mods scale up against enemies decently well. That's actually the reason why the game keeps being popular despite the HORRIFICALLY bad armour scaling in this game - a lot of players just aren't affected by it.

Now, that's not to say we throw our hands in the air and give up trying to balance the game because "who cares." However, it does bring up an important question: Where do you stop? Everything I've said up to this point has been from my own perspective - that of an average player who prefers a power fantasy where difficulty is fair and I can feel comfortable bringing gear and builds I like, regardless of whether they're "meta." But is that where difficulty stops - where I'm comfortable? What about people who want a tougher challenge, who want to use the worst, most broken weapons and builds and still ride a razor's edge where they can die over a single mistake? After four years of Payday 2 players *@##$ing about how that game is "too easy" even on the highest difficulty setting, I know that's an aspect of the population worth considering, so what do we do about them?

Where does one stop what? I also take issue with establishing a dichotomy between power fantasies and challenge, even if Reaper Hunter mentioned it in one of his videos, because that dichotomy simply does not make sense: Warframe is not the only game in the world, nor is Payday 2 (though that game doesn't really promise a power fantasy either, so if it can't deliver challenge it's doing something wrong), and plenty of games manage to deliver a power fantasy and a challenge without compromising on fun (e.g. Doom, as mentioned above). The only reason the two conflict is when a game bases its difficulty around scaling both the player and the same enemies up in stats, because at that point the game can only be difficult by making the player feel comparatively weaker. By contrast, if difficulty scaled through mission conditions, even a godlike player character would eventually run the risk of failure, without feeling like they were weaker than their opponents. It is perfectly possible for a game to be fun and challenging at the same time, and when a game can't have that, then there is an issue with its balance or design that needs to be resolved.

8 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Long story short, I feel that base stat mods do their job in bridging the gap between a new player without gear fighting wimpy enemies to feel powerful and a veteran player with strong gear fighting tough enemies well enough. That stops in the 40-60 range somewhere, but I'd argue that's far enough. Anyone going past that point can be assumed to be looking for challenge specifically, and becoming progressively weaker relative to enemies is part of that proposition. I'm not saying level 100 enemies shouldn't be balanced better, but rather that their dynamic relative to the player is different from the dynamic up to the game's "soft cap" of normal content.

Sure, but what I'm saying is that mods are ultimately the middle man here, and that their function as a raw power boost can be cut out. Even if the player were to gain exactly zero power from the start, and were balanced around being able to take on wimpy enemies easily, then it would be equally easy to make tougher enemy types, throw them at the player at the same power level, and implement greater difficulty without the player feeling weakened, as they'd still be able to kill the wimpy enemies just as easily. Mods only complicate this process by forcing these enemies to also operate on a sliding scale of power to capture a greater range of power levels, which is bound to fail due to how the game is currently incapable of syncing its difficulty directly with any individual player's power. Any player at any given power level is doomed to run against content that is poorly balanced against them, with the game's current methods of power and difficulty scaling, and that I think is why those systems need to change.

Steel_Rook · February 8, 2019

23 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

The only reason the two conflict is when a game bases its difficulty around scaling both the player and the same enemies up in stats, because at that point the game can only be difficult by making the player feel comparatively weaker. By contrast, if difficulty scaled through mission conditions, even a godlike player character would eventually run the risk of failure, without feeling like they were weaker than their opponents. It is perfectly possible for a game to be fun and challenging at the same time, and when a game can't have that, then there is an issue with its balance or design that needs to be resolved.

I disagree. For eight years, the MMO City of Heroes did just fine scaling both players and enemies and kept both a sense of difficulty and a sense of power fantasy. And this was a game where player performance was literally tied to the level difference between the player character and the enemies. A +2 enemy was considered pretty high, regardless of whether that was a level 7 vs. a level 5 hero or a level 52 vs. a level 50 hero. Sure, some people were able to make utterly broken builds and run roughshod over content regardless due to the game's tacked-on loot system three years in, but that's besides the point. Point being, that game managed just fine on theme and visual predominantly. You start out fighting street punks armed with knives and baseball bats, progress to fighting goon squads armed with machineguns, wizards throwing magic and walking mutant plants. Eventually, you progress to fighting world-conquering aliens in power armour, a global conspiracy deploying futuristic paramilitary hit squads and clashing with emissaries from the very Prince of Demons over a "deal-with-the-devil" 14 000 years in the making. Granted, the general super hero genre offers a lot more thematic freedom and City of Heroes was a far more narratively-driven game (in the sense that nearly all content had a unique story attached to it of some fashion, enough to level up from 1 to 50). The fact that Warframe doesn't even attempt to do that in any meaningful way takes away a lot from its feeling of progression.

Narrative aside, though, City of Heroes proved something else to me. You could keep the player and the enemy roughly even throughout the entire reasonable level range by tweaking absolute level and relative level modifiers. I've mentioned this before, but the game starts out with player damage and accuracy modifiers being REALLY high, such that even Low and Medium damage attacks with no enhancements slotted in are pretty reliable. As the player levels up, their damage and accuracy drop off, but more powerful enhancements become available which bridge the gap. A level 30-35 player will be downing enemies in roughly the same number of hits, except using fully-slotted Superior and Extreme damage attacks. Yes, there are a few moments where player performance falls off drastically - typically level 11 when Training Enhancements are under-levelled but Dual-Origin Enhancements won't be available until level 12, and again at level 21 with Single-Origin Enhancements. However, very next level with the actual transition offer a major power boos and - at least for me - a very satisfying feeling going back to those Spectral Demons giving me trouble before and actually matching them blow-for-blow.

The same, by the way, is true with new enemies being introduced. Every 10 levels or so, a new enemy faction pops up. The Crey Corporation's miltaristic security forces, for instance, are REALLY rough when they first pop up at level 30, but by level 32 with a new stock of level 35 Single-Origin enhancements and the level 32 ability unlocked, they start being manageable. The same goes for Malta's appearance at level 40, before they start being manageable by level 42, albeit with some issues due to their Sappers capable of draining all of your energy and shutting down your powers. Because apparently no game is immune to "Nullifier" enemies.

There's nothing inherently wrong with scaling both player and enemy stats with level progression. In fact, I'd argue it's an easy and handy tool to ease newer players into the game before scaling them up to the game's "stable state" balance point. Even City of Heroes actually reached an equilibrium at level 30 where player-to-enemy stats find their stable state and then scale lineary from that point on. Up until that point, player damage scales at a far slower pace than enemy health. Past that point, "shots-to-kill" remain the same. Warframe itself already does this to a point, offering low-level enemies with very little health for unmodded weapons to feel strong against, very little damage for unmodded Warframes to not be completely overwhelmed, and low enough levels of armour for players without elemental damage mods to not have to worry about it. It's all a matter of how stats scale against each other with level.

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 8, 2019

5 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

But it's not a player-friendly scaling system at all, again because the very fact that enemies scale up in power, and Tenno do not mid-mission (or at least hit some sort of cap) means that eventually the fantasy breaks, precisely because the game's current means of making itself more difficult is by making enemies eventually more powerful than the player. Making enemies scale only a little simply makes for a difficulty system that has trouble being difficult in due time for the player, as is already the case with enemies taking hours in endless missions to become challenging for some frames, while still not resolving the core issue. There is a fundamental logical contradiction with what you are advocating.

I really don't see why advocating a system where enemies don't scale, but where some other condition scales in difficulty, e.g. mission objectives, is "wishful thinking" or "hurts the argument", and I feel both of these claims are dismissive, particularly as your only backing for either so far has been your personal idea of how levels should work, which I disagree with. My very simple request is for the game to adjust itself so that enemies feel satisfying to fight, without being too weak, too spongey, too pea-shooty or too one-shotty, and keeping itself at that same level of stats in combat so that players can participate in fine-tuned combat. With this established, the game could find other ways of implementing difficulty that do not involve breaking its own balance or core fantasy.

Well of course I'm pushing for my own idea. This thread was largely created to propose and refine my idea. I understand and support adding criticism to my idea, but to just utterly throw it out and replace it with your own is rather poor taste.

My idea, in its current state, is to adjust the scaling mechanics while being relatively non-intrusive to other gameplay aspects. Essentially I'm taking baby steps so the course of action is much more plausible for DE. Other issues that still plague Warframe's enemy mechanics would by all means still persist, but with the new scaling system there would be a common ground to better adjust them. As it currently stands DE's only real means to creating "Endgame" is to fudge with enemy damage/defense values, which in turn further throws off the math down the road. By creating a common mathematical ground, we can then look at the other problems.

I really don't want to deny your ideas, but at the same time this is not a good stage in discussion to bring them up. Once Warframe's scaling groundwork has been revised, then it would be a good time to propose more direct ideas.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

This is sort of why I (admittedly tersely) asked you for specific implementations earlier in the thread. When it comes to scaling, the devil is in the details - or rather, in the mathematical functions. Granted, my own background in applied mathematics makes me naturally biased towards this, but I really do feel solutions will come down to what formulas we can come up with over and above broad game design ideas. What you're proposing here - linear scaling of effective enemy health per level - is entirely possible. In fact, keeping armour fixed per enemy type and scaling health as a multiple of level would absolutely do this, albeit enemies with higher health and more armour would scale more aggressively. Ultimately, the secret to success is keeping your numbers within reasonable bounds where scaling can't run away from you too much. Because realistically speaking, ANY mathematical model is going to break eventually, if you push numbers too far in either direction.

The above statement can hopefully give you a satisfactory answer. We need baby steps right now. As everything is closely linked by the math, the groundwork has to be set before fixing up anything else. I appreciate further criticism and suggestions, but as of right now excessive ambition will just be counterproductive.

Teridax68 · February 8, 2019

23 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

I disagree. For eight years, the MMO City of Heroes did just fine scaling both players and enemies and kept both a sense of difficulty and a sense of power fantasy. And this was a game where player performance was literally tied to the level difference between the player character and the enemies. A +2 enemy was considered pretty high, regardless of whether that was a level 7 vs. a level 5 hero or a level 52 vs. a level 50 hero. Sure, some people were able to make utterly broken builds and run roughshod over content regardless due to the game's tacked-on loot system three years in, but that's besides the point. Point being, that game managed just fine on theme and visual predominantly. You start out fighting street punks armed with knives and baseball bats, progress to fighting goon squads armed with machineguns, wizards throwing magic and walking mutant plants. Eventually, you progress to fighting world-conquering aliens in power armour, a global conspiracy deploying futuristic paramilitary hit squads and clashing with emissaries from the very Prince of Demons over a "deal-with-the-devil" 14 000 years in the making. Granted, the general super hero genre offers a lot more thematic freedom and City of Heroes was a far more narratively-driven game (in the sense that nearly all content had a unique story attached to it of some fashion, enough to level up from 1 to 50). The fact that Warframe doesn't even attempt to do that in any meaningful way takes away a lot from its feeling of progression.

Narrative aside, though, City of Heroes proved something else to me. You could keep the player and the enemy roughly even throughout the entire reasonable level range by tweaking absolute level and relative level modifiers. I've mentioned this before, but the game starts out with player damage and accuracy modifiers being REALLY high, such that even Low and Medium damage attacks with no enhancements slotted in are pretty reliable. As the player levels up, their damage and accuracy drop off, but more powerful enhancements become available which bridge the gap. A level 30-35 player will be downing enemies in roughly the same number of hits, except using fully-slotted Superior and Extreme damage attacks. Yes, there are a few moments where player performance falls off drastically - typically level 11 when Training Enhancements are under-levelled but Dual-Origin Enhancements won't be available until level 12, and again at level 21 with Single-Origin Enhancements. However, very next level with the actual transition offer a major power boos and - at least for me - a very satisfying feeling going back to those Spectral Demons giving me trouble before and actually matching them blow-for-blow.

The same, by the way, is true with new enemies being introduced. Every 10 levels or so, a new enemy faction pops up. The Crey Corporation's miltaristic security forces, for instance, are REALLY rough when they first pop up at level 30, but by level 32 with a new stock of level 35 Single-Origin enhancements and the level 32 ability unlocked, they start being manageable. The same goes for Malta's appearance at level 40, before they start being manageable by level 42, albeit with some issues due to their Sappers capable of draining all of your energy and shutting down your powers. Because apparently no game is immune to "Nullifier" enemies.

There's nothing inherently wrong with scaling both player and enemy stats with level progression. In fact, I'd argue it's an easy and handy tool to ease newer players into the game before scaling them up to the game's "stable state" balance point. Even City of Heroes actually reached an equilibrium at level 30 where player-to-enemy stats find their stable state and then scale lineary from that point on. Up until that point, player damage scales at a far slower pace than enemy health. Past that point, "shots-to-kill" remain the same. Warframe itself already does this to a point, offering low-level enemies with very little health for unmodded weapons to feel strong against, very little damage for unmodded Warframes to not be completely overwhelmed, and low enough levels of armour for players without elemental damage mods to not have to worry about it. It's all a matter of how stats scale against each other with level.

But if such a tiny difference in stats is enough to generate a massive difference in power, how exactly did the game manage to deliver a consistent challenge? What happens when a high-level player faces up against low-level enemies, or vice versa? What you are describing to me also are differences in enemy types, not scaling enemy stats, which lends further support to my own proposed way of scaling complexity and difficulty in Warframe.

19 minutes ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Well of course I'm pushing for my own idea. This thread was largely created to propose and refine my idea. I understand and support adding criticism to my idea, but to just utterly throw it out and replace it with your own is rather poor taste.

But I'm not throwing out what you're proposing without reason, though, I pointed out a fundamental logical contradiction in your proposal:

When the same enemies increase in stats and the player remains at the same level, the player regresses in relative power against those enemies (by your own admission).
It is undesirable for the player to feel like they are weak or regressing in power, as Warframe promises a power fantasy (also by your own admission).
You want the same enemies to increase in stats.

The logical conclusion here is that your proposed model will simply continue to run counter to Warframe's proposed power fantasy. While I have proposed examples of alternatives, I am by no means trying to say that my specific suggestions are the only way to go, particularly as the only times where I've claimed a necessity is in very broad lines, e.g. "the game cannot scale the same enemies in stats and guarantee the player a power fantasy". It is not "poor taste" to point out the problems with your proposals, or even to suggest alternatives, and I find it concerning that you would view it as such.

Quote

My idea, in its current state, is to adjust the scaling mechanics while being relatively non-intrusive to other gameplay aspects. Essentially I'm taking baby steps so the course of action is much more plausible for DE. Other issues that still plague Warframe's enemy mechanics would by all means still persist, but with the new scaling system there would be a common ground to better adjust them. As it currently stands DE's only real means to creating "Endgame" is to fudge with enemy damage/defense values, which in turn further throws off the math down the road. By creating a common mathematical ground, we can then look at the other problems.

I can agree with this, but the problem is that your suggestions simply do not match up to your stated goals: if your goal is purely to make enemies stop scaling exponentially, then sure, but your stated intention here is to redo the way Warframe implements its endgame, and the title "The Scaling Renaissance" itself does not really suggest baby steps. A major problem with the analysis in your OP is, as I mentioned in my first reply to this thread, that it does not capture the actual problems with scaling: sure, enemy stats get super high, but even those super high stats are conducive to trivially easy gameplay for us, because we are just that powerful. Squishing these stats and slowing down enemy scaling would only further contribute to an overall problem of Warframe being too easy past its initial learning hurdles, and so because it ignores the fact that these stats have inflated as a direct consequence of our excessive, non-interactive power. Exponential scaling in this respect may therefore not even be a problem at all, at least not in the current situation, and fixing this is unlikely to happen through "baby steps".

Quote

I really don't want to deny your ideas, but at the same time this is not a good stage in discussion to bring them up. Once Warframe's scaling groundwork has been revised, then it would be a good time to propose more direct ideas.

... which is exactly what I'm saying as well, except I'm proposing to set our frames to a baseline level of good design, balance, etc. first, so that enemies can be deflated to match us, not the reverse. One of the advantages of the current system is that it ultimately does not matter how powerful we players are in terms of raw damage or durability numbers, because if we all become too weak to deal with level 100 content, DE can just squish level ranges accordingly. Reworking the way we players scale, however, is a far more complex matter, and is what needs to be addressed directly to fix the game's problem with its difficulty. This means addressing our power creep, as well as the level of interaction baked into many of our abilities.

Edited February 8, 2019 by Teridax68

(XBOX)Avant Solace · February 8, 2019

8 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

-snip-

Alright, then I'll state my intentions as plainly as I can.

All enemies should scale linearly. The difference between a level 1 and level 50 enemy should be roughly the same as a level 50 and level 100.
Armor values remain largely static. This will prevent compounding effective health, alleviating the need for Corrosion builds.
Enemy damage should also scale, but to a much smaller degree. The exact balance (so they aren't pee-shooters at low level, but aren't OP at high level) is still up in the air.
Tenno weapons (and mods) should have their damage values revised to match this scaling. Ideally there should be some damage fall-off past level 50, but not so much that non-niche weaponry becomes obsolete. Basically putting more value to type-matching and clever modding.
Tenno ability values should be revised so they can be effective at higher levels with proper modding.
Overall gameplay should be largely untouched. Only the numbers should be revised for now. This is largely due to the fact that Warframe's current system is a touchy amalgamation of different mechanics. It is my hope that changing the "core" of this system to a smoother design will allow for easier assessment and adjustment of the other mechanics down the road.
The end goal is to ensure all Warframes have viable survivability and utility at late-to-endgame levels, and to ensure most weapons(when properly modded) have utility at late-to-endgame. It is my personal belief that if a weapon(s) performs too well, then it should be nerfed rather than buffing the enemy. Likewise and enemy that has an unfair gimmick should be nerfed rather than creating tougher weapons to fight them.

Sorry if I wasn't being too clear. I'm not really the best at conveying my intentions.

Teridax68 · February 8, 2019

Okay, but then how does this:

Quote

All enemies should scale linearly. The difference between a level 1 and level 50 enemy should be roughly the same as a level 50 and level 100.

Armor values remain largely static. This will prevent compounding effective health, alleviating the need for Corrosion builds.

Contribute to this:

Quote

The end goal is to ensure all Warframes have viable survivability and utility at late-to-endgame levels, and to ensure most weapons(when properly modded) have utility at late-to-endgame. It is my personal belief that if a weapon(s) performs too well, then it should be nerfed rather than buffing the enemy. Likewise and enemy that has an unfair gimmick should be nerfed rather than creating tougher weapons to fight them.

What you suggested about rebalancing weapons and abilities gets much closer to this, but then that also implies balancing all of those against some consistent baseline: which level would that be? What about effects that auto-scale? I can also sympathize with changing the way damage scales to makes Warframes get one-shot less, but scaling nonetheless implies frames inevitably get to that territory. The same can be said for weapons, whose damage will eventually fall off, as you mentioned. The question then becomes: what are you defining as "late-to-endgame levels"? How quickly should enemies or players die then?

Edited February 8, 2019 by Teridax68

Steel_Rook · February 8, 2019

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

But if such a tiny difference in stats is enough to generate a massive difference in power, how exactly did the game manage to deliver a consistent challenge? What happens when a high-level player faces up against low-level enemies, or vice versa?

You don't. Despite having an "overworld" ala more traditional MMOs of the age (EverQuest, Star Wars: Galaxies, Dark Age of Camelot, etc.), City of Heroes was a predominantly instanced game, more so the older it got. Players would run to doors on the map, click on them and be transported to a private instance entirely analogous to a Warframe mission. Enemies in this instance were all scaled around the player's level, with difficulty settings able to alter this to the player's desire. In the event that multiple people were on the same team, the "Sidekick" system would kick in. This system would set the player's "character level" to that of the team leader to whom the mission was scaled. "Security level" was a sort of fake level which determined combat modifiers comparative to enemy level. This meant low-level characters would hit substantially harder and have their health and other stats scaled up proportionately, while high-level characters would have their "security level" lowered to in the same way, losing access to powers earned later in their progression. This is evident in all Cryptic Studios games moving forward, as well, such as Champions Online, Star Trek Online and especially Neverwinter where the entire concept of "level" is hidden from the player altogether, despite having the exact same sort of level scaling anyway.

Trust me, I'm not talking out of my ass on this one. This system works in a very predictable, dependable fashion while allowing for substantial flexibility. In fact, that MMO designers keep refusing to learn this lesson and proclaim to have reinvented the wheel every time they do is one of my long-standing gripes as a player. I've desperately wanted to see this added to The Division so that playing with newbies as a level-cap character was actually possible. You know, instead of completely ROFLstomping their content or them being completely ineffectual in your content. Near as I can tell, The Division 2 has some amount of this "normalisation..." In PvP only, leading me to suspect it's going to be just as naff trying to introduce friends to the game. At least in Warframe I can throw on a new Warframe, grab some S#&$ guns and have SOME semblance of a comparable experience to players I'm trying to introduce... Even if MR and high-level mods and a stockpile of Platinum mitigates that to a large extent.

And yes, I'm aware that this doesn't entirely work in Warframe since there's no single stat to denote a player's power. There's no "level" nor "gear score" to consider, no "DPS" or "Toughness" metric to normalise by. Well, yet anyway - these CAN be introduced, as other people have suggested in the past. My argument, though, was more in the abstract - it's entirely possible to scale players vs. enemies in a controllable, predictable fashion and offer on-screen stat increases up to a point while the system still works just fine. As with many of its other aspects, Warframe's design makes this difficult for frankly no real benefit in return, and that's on DE for having given themselves extra work and painted themselves into a corner. Flat stat increases are core to their business model as a F2P, at least up to a point, so quite why they didn't come up with controllable and scalable metrics to deal with these increasing stats is a bit beyond me.

I understand we're not going to agree on this, but that's simply how I feel on the matter.

2 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

The above statement can hopefully give you a satisfactory answer. We need baby steps right now. As everything is closely linked by the math, the groundwork has to be set before fixing up anything else. I appreciate further criticism and suggestions, but as of right now excessive ambition will just be counterproductive.

Right, fair enough. I suppose an easier question would be - as stated above - what kind of metrics do you intend to evaluate performance? Even ignoring catch-all categories like "DPS" and "Toughness," how do you measure the "right" amount of health and armour for an enemy? Do you envision some kind of "shots to kill" or "time to kill" metric? I find game balance to be a bit like 3D animation. While you CAN animate by rotating every bone individually down the chain, it's usually simpler to go with an Inverse Kinematics solution where you can position the foot or the arm and let the computer back-calculate the elbows, knees, hips and such. When playing a video game, players generally tend to experience the statistical metrics more than they experience the base stats regardless of what they use to inform themselves. We might gawk at dealing 100 000 damage intellectually, but intuitively we "like" the fact that that one-shot an enemy. Inversely, dealing 10 000 000 per hit doesn't feel like a lot of the enemy has 100 000 000 health, aka the Clicker Heroes problem. That's why I typically push for metrics first, balance those metrics second, figure out base stats last.

Incidentally, a TTK metric is good for both balancing enemies AND balancing guns, just as a random thought of the moment. It's what I'd seriously recommend going with if you don't already have anything planned.

The Scaling Renaissance

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