Why are damage mods still a thing?

[Ceadeus]

Honestly why are any mods that effectively just add flat DPS even a thing?  They're such a mandatory part of any reasonable build that you're basically actively hindering yourself if you don't use them, so why even bother having them be optional at all?  Why have all of these mods from flat damage to multishot not just been removed and added back into the weapons as a base damage increase?  We could have so much more build diversity if 4 of our 8 mod slots weren't already assigned to mandatory mods that are never swapped out until a new flat out better mandatory mod takes its place (Prime Pressure Point).
 

At least with Warframes you can argue that there might be 2-3 branches of mandatory mods you can go with, which still isn't great, but with weapons it's literally just flat damage.  That's all the weapons are meant to do is damage, so why would anyone ever not use these mods except as a meme?  Just get rid of them and buff weapons across the board.

[Guest]

Chroma wishes to have a word with you...

[Ceadeus]

1 minute ago, Datam4ss said:

Chroma wishes to have a word with you...

... Which is?  I don't see how Chroma plays a role in why we have to keep these diversity killing mods around.

[Guest]

Just now, Ceadeus said:

... Which is?  I don't see how Chroma plays a role in why we have to keep these diversity killing mods around.

There are some Warframes which buff using an addition similar to Serration, meaning diminishing returns if you slot base damage in them. Chroma is just one of these frames.

Which means if you play using those buffs, you are gimping yourself by not using another elemental in place of base damage.

[Ceadeus]

Just now, Datam4ss said:

There are some Warframes which buff using an addition similar to Serration, meaning diminishing returns if you slot base damage in them. Chroma is just one of these frames.

Which means if you play using those buffs, you are gimping yourself by not using another elemental in place of base damage.

But the exact reason he has that interaction is a balance check.  There would be no need for it if we didn't have the base damage mods in the first place and instead turned to a system that had you select what type of damage you wanted to do rather than how much of it you wanted to do.

The modding scene in Warframe is more or less this:
 

 

[DeckChairVonBananaCamel]

a damage 3.0 prototype is coming with railjack, we dont know all the details but hopefully it resolves this

[Ceadeus]

2 minutes ago, DeckChairVonBananaCamel said:

a damage 3.0 prototype is coming with railjack, we dont know all the details but hopefully it resolves this

Last we heard Damage 3.0 was about the effects of damage types, not mods.  When they were actually talking about Damage 3.0 before they realized that their plans atm were really bad, there was never any mention of it affecting the modding scene or any implication that it would remove existing mods.  It was an attempt to bring impact and puncture on par with the value of slash.

Edited March 5, 2019 by Ceadeus

[ViciousTeletuby]

I can think of three reasons why damage mods are useful: 

1. If you were to incorporate them in base damage you are removing a key progression path for a new player. The mod system is the biggest and most important sense of progression in the game for many players. While not fun for everybody, upgrading these mods over time does give many players the sense of accomplishment that keeps them playing.

2. Replacing the damage mod in a build is a valid build choice (can increase damage) in many scenarios where you get a base damage boost from a different source, including arbitrations where you use the boosted weapon, Mesa's peacemaker when you have high power strength, etc.

3. The amount of effort that would be required by the developers to re-balance the effects of such a change is staggering (see 2 and rivens for some complications). This effort can be better directed to other areas on the game in the opinion of most players I'm guessing.

[DeckChairVonBananaCamel]

9 minutes ago, Ceadeus said:

Last we heard Damage 3.0 was about the effects of damage types, not mods.  When they were actually talking about Damage 3.0 before they realized that their plans atm were really bad, there was never any mention of it affecting the modding scene or any implication that it would remove existing mods.  It was an attempt to bring impact and puncture on par with the value of slash.

i believe that was damage 2.5, which was exactly what you are describing, a "leveling out" of the 3 physical damage types

[Ceadeus]

Just now, DeckChairVonBananaCamel said:

i believe that was damage 2.5, which was exactly what you are describing, a "leveling out" of the 3 physical damage types

No that was Damage 3.0.  It was meant to ship with Khora as it's what her original design was completely based around, hence why Khora got delayed to be reworked when Damage 3.0 was scrapped.
 

2 minutes ago, ViciousTeletuby said:

1. If you were to incorporate them in base damage you are removing a key progression path for a new player. The mod system is the biggest and most important sense of progression in the game for many players. While not fun for everybody, upgrading these mods over time does give many players the sense of accomplishment that keeps them playing.

Mastery Rank, Weapon/Warframe Rank, and still plenty of other mods.  In fact, it would arguably keep players around longer if damage mods weren't a thing as build diversity would take the helm for priority since you wouldn't have to feel like time spent leveling other mods isn't a complete waste like most of them are now.  Leveling mods does not have to be a trait specific to toxic, required mods.
 

4 minutes ago, ViciousTeletuby said:

2. Replacing the damage mod in a build is a valid build choice (can increase damage) in many scenarios where you get a base damage boost from a different source, including arbitrations where you use the boosted weapon, Mesa's peacemaker when you have high power strength, etc.

Replacing a damage mod is never a good choice.  Base damage mods like Serration and Pressure Point affect all sources, meaning any mod that you would replace it with would have been also increased by having it in your build.  Like I said, any build that isn't using a base damage mod when it's available is done explicitly for a gimmick, not because it's actually a better or equally good option.
 

7 minutes ago, ViciousTeletuby said:

3. The amount of effort that would be required by the developers to re-balance the effects of such a change is staggering (see 2 and rivens for some complications). This effort can be better directed to other areas on the game in the opinion of most players I'm guessing.

1.  Staggering effort has never stopped large scale changes before.  Case in point, Melee 3.0 required a rebalance and revamp of a vast majority of melee content yet it's still being done.  2.  The effort required to do this is actually incredibly low if not simply tedious.  It's a simple matter of "How much extra damage % does this weapon class' damage mod (since every class has one) add to it?  Now just boost the base stats to reflect that.  Done."  Like I said, it's gonna be a lot of going into each individual weapon and changing it, but it's quite literally 1 cut and dry equation.  And 3.  I think most players would much rather have the ability for builds to be genuinely diverse instead of a pre-determined extra step to take to let a weapon reach its full potential and for weapons across the board to be generally more powerful.

[Teridax68]

I have to agree with the OP, and I'd even go further and question why we even need damage or multishot mods to exist at all. The idea that we need either type of mod for progression I don't think really holds up, because there are literally hundreds more mods out there for us to progress with, and I'd say these would actually be among the simplest mods to adjust for when nerfing them, as the easiest solution may just be to set a new, lower enemy level threshold as high-level (e.g. 50 instead of 100), and the most complicated change that may need to happen would be to increase the status chance on guns in proportion to the multishot lost. We do not need this damage, nor do we need the additional pellets pet hit, though we could certainly use more build diversity on our guns.

[DeckChairVonBananaCamel]

3 minutes ago, Ceadeus said:

No that was Damage 3.0.  It was meant to ship with Khora as it's what her original design was completely based around, hence why Khora got delayed to be reworked when Damage 3.0 was scrapped.

 

Wheras steve mentioned on his twitter a few of the problems he would like to be addressing in the railjack update:

1. Same-attribute mods stacking
2. Exponential armour scaling
3. Multishot interactions

If someone could embed the twitter post i would appreciate it as i dont know how to do that

[AXCrusnik]

55 minutes ago, ViciousTeletuby said:

1. If you were to incorporate them in base damage you are removing a key progression path for a new player. The mod system is the biggest and most important sense of progression in the game for many players. While not fun for everybody, upgrading these mods over time does give many players the sense of accomplishment that keeps them playing.

So replace them with "Weapon Amplifiers" or whatever you want to call them. Give new players damaged versions that are fixed/upgraded through quests or junctions. They rank up and work exactly like damage mods but don't need to be equipped. It's just a menu/item in your arsenal/mod bench.

[taiiat]

because if you remove all forms of ways to change the Damage that you deal as a Player, it is a purely Cosmetic game with nothing to grind for other than more Cosmetics.
which would then become a game that is literally just a collecting simulator, rather than technically one. i'm already not playing those sorts of games for a reason.

these are not the types of games that make a lot of money and top the charts in popularity either.

[Ulvra]

3 hours ago, AXCrusnik said:

So replace them with "Weapon Amplifiers" or whatever you want to call them. Give new players damaged versions that are fixed/upgraded through quests or junctions. They rank up and work exactly like damage mods but don't need to be equipped. It's just a menu/item in your arsenal/mod bench.

Replacing one set of essential mods with a different and potentially weapon specific one is not the answer. What I see them doing in the game is rather than removing content, which would cause an uproar they're instead doing the wise path and providing alternatives. One such is the upcoming amalgamods. They do the same as their regular counterparts, but they give you options to alter your build. There's still a lot to do besides the four we've seen so far, but giving alternatives to a single mod is a good way to go about solving the problem of essential mods.

In the end, no matter what DE does, there will always be essential mods, because most players are driven to try to push the effectiveness of weapons to their max and that is an impossible balance to hit in such a way that you eliminate essential components.

[Tsukinoki]

4 hours ago, Ceadeus said:

Replacing a damage mod is never a good choice.  Base damage mods like Serration and Pressure Point affect all sources, meaning any mod that you would replace it with would have been also increased by having it in your build.  Like I said, any build that isn't using a base damage mod when it's available is done explicitly for a gimmick, not because it's actually a better or equally good option.

Chroma would disagree.
Since base damage mods stack additively with vex armor damage boost its actually 100% viable to replace serration/horent strike/primed pressure point with other mods if you have a higher power strength Chroma.
After all if Chroma is giving you +1000% damage (which is doable) the +165% from serration, the +220% from hornet strike, and +165% from primed pressure point is fairly insignificant.

Also remember that Chroma can recast vex armor to refresh duration, and you can actually get more damage out of a weapon by not having the base damage mods on it and instead going with another elemental mod, or a crit mod.
Right now the meta for Chroma is to just ignore those mods, and its not a "gimmick", its an actually better option in terms of DPS that you can put out.

5 hours ago, Ceadeus said:

until a new flat out better mandatory mod takes its place

And what do you honestly think would happen if they removed the base damage increases?
People would just find the next meta and those slots you got back would all be used by a different set of mods that you never swap out because they are mods that directly affect damage...

The only way to prevent that would be to remove every mod outside of holster speed, recoil, and zoom modifiers and maximum (not clip) ammo modifiers, because all the rest do have direct impact on your DPS, either burst or sustained.

[Ceadeus]

2 hours ago, taiiat said:

because if you remove all forms of ways to change the Damage that you deal as a Player, it is a purely Cosmetic game with nothing to grind for other than more Cosmetics.
which would then become a game that is literally just a collecting simulator, rather than technically one. i'm already not playing those sorts of games for a reason.

these are not the types of games that make a lot of money and top the charts in popularity either.

You misunderstood the topic.  This is not saying that there should be no mods that alter your weapon's damage attributes.  This is saying mods like Serration and Pressure Point which are quite literally just "Weapon is objectively better" are pointless.  There's no reason you will ever not take those mods so all they do is reduce the effective amount of mod slots you have to make actually diverse builds.  Mods to add elemental procs and such are fine.
 

29 minutes ago, Ulvra said:

Replacing one set of essential mods with a different and potentially weapon specific one is not the answer. What I see them doing in the game is rather than removing content, which would cause an uproar they're instead doing the wise path and providing alternatives. One such is the upcoming amalgamods. They do the same as their regular counterparts, but they give you options to alter your build. There's still a lot to do besides the four we've seen so far, but giving alternatives to a single mod is a good way to go about solving the problem of essential mods.

In the end, no matter what DE does, there will always be essential mods, because most players are driven to try to push the effectiveness of weapons to their max and that is an impossible balance to hit in such a way that you eliminate essential components.

I take a couple issues with this.

1.  No, there won't always be essential mods, that's just a lazy outlook, the game could easily convert to systems that do not make any mods required.

2.  Considering DE's track record of trying to solve other modding sinkholes with similar practices, I don't see this doing much of anything.  The last time we had a successful version of this concept was Corrupted Mods.  Since then about every attempt at this has just resulted in underwhelming mods that are maybe used for a week or so before they're inevitably forgotten and people go back to the mods that are objectively better to put on literally anything all the time.

3.  I don't know why you people seem to think that people would rather cling to their arbitrary damage mods that do nothing but automatically hog a slot in their builds than to have plain buffs to the weapon equal to having that mod slotted in as well as getting an extra slot.  Do you really mean to tell me that if there were a gun that had base stats equal to another gun with these damage mods slotted in it, but couldn't slot those mods, that people would prefer to take the gun with lower stats to hold on to their mod?  Of course not.
 

12 minutes ago, Tsukinoki said:

Chroma would disagree.
Since base damage mods stack additively with vex armor damage boost its actually 100% viable to replace serration/horent strike/primed pressure point with other mods if you have a higher power strength Chroma.
After all if Chroma is giving you +1000% damage (which is doable) the +165% from serration, the +220% from hornet strike, and +165% from primed pressure point is fairly insignificant.

Also remember that Chroma can recast vex armor to refresh duration, and you can actually get more damage out of a weapon by not having the base damage mods on it and instead going with another elemental mod, or a crit mod.
Right now the meta for Chroma is to just ignore those mods, and its not a "gimmick", its an actually better option in terms of DPS that you can put out.

Which I repeat, after already stating this once in this thread, the entire Chroma interaction is purely a balance check because we have these mods.  If the mods didn't exist the entire interaction would no longer matter.  You can not use issues that rely entirely on the existence of the problem to justify keeping the problem around.

12 minutes ago, Tsukinoki said:

And what do you honestly think would happen if they removed the base damage increases?
People would just find the next meta and those slots you got back would all be used by a different set of mods that you never swap out because they are mods that directly affect damage...

The only way to prevent that would be to remove every mod outside of holster speed, recoil, and zoom modifiers and maximum (not clip) ammo modifiers, because all the rest do have direct impact on your DPS, either burst or sustained.

The entire point is to remove or alter mods that affect damage.  Obviously I'm not a moron who thinks that no mods would be mandatory if there are still a small handful of mods that increase damage.  Mods should be entirely utility and/or playstyle alteration, that's it, not stat increases where you can objectively single out the best build, or at the very least the best part of a build.

Edited March 5, 2019 by Ceadeus

[LuckyCharm]

Almost all the mods add dps. Fire rate adds dps, reload speed effectively adds dps, crit is dps, some status's are dps so adding that adds dps and the obvious, elementals and flat damage add dps. 

To ask for dps removed youre pretty much saying "remove all the weapon mods and start again" what really should happen is more of a path of exiles sort of attack modding system, where you can say.. Add chaining to shots at a detriment to your damage, or building full damage leaves you with less survivability etc. Even things like "shooting enemies within 10m has a 150% increased critical chance but you cant crit past 25m" conditional things with massive ups but also massive downs.  That way every build is unique but enemies can be balanced better around lower dps numbers finally

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, Ceadeus said:

Replacing a damage mod is never a good choice.  Base damage mods like Serration and Pressure Point affect all sources, meaning any mod that you would replace it with would have been also increased by having it in your build.  Like I said, any build that isn't using a base damage mod when it's available is done explicitly for a gimmick, not because it's actually a better or equally good option.

I have a beef with actually quite a few core game systems (multishot on shotguns, fixed-magnitude status effects, random criticals) but let's keep this restricted to damage so we stay on topic... The way damage buffs stack in Warframe needs a lot of work, both in terms of how it operates and how it's communicated to the players. To use slightly colloquial terms, the system is a frikkin' mess of additive and multiplicative buffs which can cause damage to cascade to ludicrous levels.

Let's tackle "base damage mods" first. To avoid a long lecture on how damage buffs work, we're looking at the following few steps. Base damage mods are added together and applied to damage first. This resultant modded damage is then used for the basis for damage type mods, which stack multiplicatively with based damage mods but increase only their respective damage type. This whole thing is then used as the basis for critical hits, which also stack multiplicatively with base damage and damage type mods. The result is something like this:

damage = base damage*(1 + base_damage_mods)*(1 + damage_type_mods)*(1 + crit_damage_mods)

All of these mod categories can add up together to pretty high values, which are then multiplied together for truly stupid amounts of damage multiplication. Serration and Heavy Calibre can stack for a *3.3 multiplier, you can easily stack elemental damage up to a *4.4 multiplier and some weapons can get a critical damage multiplier as high as *8. That right there is a weapon which deals over *116 its base damage. I feel justified in calling this a "stupid amount of damage multiplication", and I'm not even considering super criticals. I get why DE did it like this. At some point in development they decided that weapon damage should be handled by a single stat split up and modified into damage types, so doing this avoids having to deal with buff priority. Far as I'm concerned, this needs to go.

My conservative suggestion would be to make base damage buffs and damage type buffs additive, while also making base damage immutable. In short, apply Serration not as a buff to a weapon's base damage, but rather as a damage-type-specific buff to all damage types at the same time. That way, Serration + Heavy Calibre + 4*90% elemental damage would stack up to 1 + 2.3 + 3.4 = 6.7, rather than the (1 + 2.3)*(1 + 3.4) = 14.52 buff it is now. That right there cuts a lot of the ridiculous player damage power creep by flattening runaway multiplier stacking, in addition to making individual damage buffs more meaningful. An extra 40% damage from, say, Piercing Hit would be comparable to an extra 40% damage from Serration.

My ambitious suggestion would be to also make critical damage buffs additive with the rest of them. Granted, this makes crit damage substantially less powerful when stacked on top of a lot of other damage buffs. However, that also makes building for crit an actual choice for weapons with a 20%+ crit chance. Provided the base crit multiplier is high enough, this proposed system would ask players to choose if they want to slot for a lot of guaranteed weapon damage, or if they want to NOT do that but slot a chance at much higher critical damage, instead. In fact, I'd go all out and turn "critical damage" into a straight-up damage buff rather than a standalone multiplier, just to bring all stats under the same system.

The above also has the benefit of being dirt simple and easy to display in the UI. Players no longer have to guess (or wiki) whether the damage buff they're applying is increasing their phantom "base damage" stat and so improving the return on other damage buff mods, or if it's increasing just the final damage stat without affecting other damage mods. It would also bake natural diminishing returns into the system without having to introduce manual penalties. The higher your buff total becomes, the less significant individual buffs become as a fraction of the total. A 100% damage buff over nothing is a lot. A 100% damage buff over a 900% total damage buff is an increase of 10%, so not a lot.

"Damage" is always going to be mandatory for all weapons and all builds. The best we can hope for is diversifying which damage mods are useful for what builds and disincentivising the endless stacking of damage and nothing else. Yes, the net effect is a massive nerf to player damage, but I'm of the opinion that runaway player damage to the point of basic gameplay systems breaking down (i.e. enemy armour scaling) is one of the biggest issues with this game's balance.

[Xzorn]

Short Answer:  Because it wouldn't make much difference.

Long Answer:  "Staple mods" stem from multiple flaws in the damage system. It's so intertwined in the game the only mods they could remove without having a very large game-wide and weapon-wide imbalance are the Base Damage mods ie Serration, Hornet Strike, Primed Point Blank, Primed Pressure Point.

Removing Multi-shot has a serious impact on status effects across all guns. It impacts their ability to apply status effects but even if this is countered by an increase in base status it will still impact a weapon's ability to apply more than one status effect per shot. For instance I have a Viral + Slash Dread for 1.9 bullets fired per shot. I fire a shot and both arrows proc status. One is Slash, the other Viral. I miss the next shot but it doesn't matter. The enemy is dead by the combined might of those two status effects. If we remove Multi-shot it will always take at least 2 shots from that Dread to kill the same enemy.

A similar effect applies to Crit. The DPS of the weapon would not change but the spikes in damage would increase heavily.

The rest is a mix of Mod Design and Game Design.

• Mod Design: Most Utility mods just aren't good enough. Take Primed Quickdraw +88% Vs. Primed Fast hands +55%. Both of these mods are a DPS loss in majority of weapons though Primed Quickdraw in less. Primed Fast hands has no balance reason to be 55% instead of 88%. It's simply because of the base mod's value. Newer mods such as the Arch-Guns have a smarter design behind them. Deadly Efficiency and Sabot Round for example. Deadly Efficiency gives more +%Damage than the "Staple" Rubedo-lined Barrel mod but only after reload. Sabot Rounds gives 60/100 of the value but adds Punch-Through which can conditionally double or triple your DPS.
• Game Design: Not much to this point really. Players are simply going to choose Damage over Utility 99% of the time based on the game's design. Even if you removed Base damage mods and Multi-shot another Damage mod would replace it and not much changes.

Changing anything with the Damage system requires an entire core mechanic overhaul. Not just status effects or mods but damage types, how those types interact with armor and health types, armor scaling, Health scaling, weak points, eHP, Enemy damage scaling...  Just a ton of stuff. Prolly why DE backed out twice now.

[(XBOX)DA ZACHYZACHY]

It is to pose a means of progression so as you play, all your weapons upgrade simultaneously 

[Steel_Rook]

6 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

Removing Multi-shot has a serious impact on status effects across all guns. It impacts their ability to apply status effects but even if this is countered by an increase in base status it will still impact a weapon's ability to apply more than one status effect per shot. For instance I have a Viral + Slash Dread for 1.9 bullets fired per shot. I fire a shot and both arrows proc status. One is Slash, the other Viral. I miss the next shot but it doesn't matter. The enemy is dead by the combined might of those two status effects. If we remove Multi-shot it will always take at least 2 shots from that Dread to kill the same enemy.

Don't get me started on the rat king that is Status in this game. From the binary system of back-calculating per-pellet Status from vague "chance for one proc" metric for native multishot guns to how arbitrary status granularity is to how disconnected status effects are from the damage types which deal them and their associated resistances, the whole system is a mess, as far as I'm concerned. That Status - especially multi-Status - depends so heavily on Multishot is just one example of the kludges used to prop it up. I've spoken about this at length in other threads, but I'm of the opinion that Status Chance needs to go away and instead the magnitude of Status Effects needs to scale with a "Status Magnitude." That should cover native multishot weapons (i.e. shotguns), slow-firing heavy-hitters and rapidfiring scatterguns.

It's a whole kettel of fish that I'd rather not get into, though, as it's massively off-topic.

[taiiat]

10 hours ago, Ceadeus said:

You misunderstood the topic.  This is not saying that there should be no mods that alter your weapon's damage attributes.  This is saying mods like Serration and Pressure Point which are quite literally just "Weapon is objectively better" are pointless.  There's no reason you will ever not take those mods so all they do is reduce the effective amount of mod slots you have to make actually diverse builds.  Mods to add elemental procs and such are fine.

but that's a double standard. Multi-Shot Mods, Crit Mods, Elemental Mods, Fire Rate Mods, Punch-Through Mods.... almost all types of Mods in the game objectively increase your Damage vs all Enemies.

there's no reason you will ever not take almost all of these Mods on every single Weapon.

 

it's the exact same thing. so, what you're saying with this Thread, is that you want all of the Mods in the game to be Magazine Capacity, Reload Speed, Ammo, Flight Speed, Et Cetera.
and all of the Damage increasing Mods, no longer exist.
so, a cosmetic game. cosmetic games can't and don't expect you to play them for 10,000hrs though....

10 hours ago, Ceadeus said:

1.  No, there won't always be essential mods, that's just a lazy outlook, the game could easily convert to systems that do not make any mods required.

there will always be Mod choices that increase your effective Damage more than other choices. that's a completely natural thing to have in games and the real world.
the problem only comes when certain choices are so effective that they always (or close enough to always) win in the choice of what to pick.

[Femuru]

well for 1 im pretty sure there would be abit of outrage if they straight up removed or even nerf those mods currently as everyone will complain about their build and forma going to waste

2 adding them into the base damage will only further power creep to our weapons despite already killing lvl 100-(insert ludicrous number) no problem 

3 there is just barely any use for utility currently as we face more a power/difficulty/scaling struggle more rn so in the end ppl just want wat kills faster

4 itll kill quite abit of the general point of grind from getting the mods to ranking them up while low lvl stuff will feel more dull than usual from instant power 

5 a saying goes that players will always take the fun out of the game when given the opportunity and well even with those main mods gone ppl will still conjure a meta of mods to use

6 i feel this issue could be handled if they buff other meme mods but at the same time i feel we should first ask for damage 3.0, 3.5, 4.999999(i lost track at this point) for when they make puncture, impact, and whatever else as good as slash so it can open more paths like when they introduced hunter munition which made full crit builds more viable for high end content

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, taiiat said:

but that's a double standard. Multi-Shot Mods, Crit Mods, Elemental Mods, Fire Rate Mods, Punch-Through Mods.... almost all types of Mods in the game objectively increase your Damage vs all Enemies.

The issue at hand is with base damage mods, not with all mods which can in some ways be argued to increase your theoretical damage output. I covered this earlier in the thread, but the way base damage buffs stack with damage type buffs and then stack with critical damage buffs can produce massively cascading damage multipliers which can push even middling-damage weapons into ludicrous numbers. Base damage mods are "mandatory" because their values are typically in the *2-*3 range and they're multiplicative with damage type buffs which themselves can stack into *3-*4. When a weapon's damage can be increased a factor of 20, 50, 100, balance becomes difficult to the point of being impossible. The result is ridiculous situations like enemies with 96% damage resistance, sometimes more, sometimes 96% damage resistance with 75% damage resistance on top.

Base damage mods are mandatory because they enable this kind of damage buff stacking, and this kind of damage buff stacking is mandatory because very high-level content is balanced around it.