Why are damage mods still a thing?

[Tellakey]

If DE wants to keep damage mods then at least add a separate mod slot specifically for them, as a form of "weapon level" if you will. I'm in total agreement with the OP. Damage mods are nothing but a hindrance to modding creativity. What's the point of niche mods if they pale in comparison to some of the more fundamental ones? Only by exhausting all of the fundamental mods can we even begin to consider using the rest.

[Teridax68]

14 hours ago, taiiat said:

well, there isn't an infinite number, since there's a finite number of Damage Mods. but removing any one Damage Mod from the game, does just mean the next most powerful replaces it.
because that's the point of the Modding system, to weigh choices and pick the strongest ones. so that's what people do.

The point of the modding system is to enable choice, diversity of playstyles, and additional gameplay avenues. If some mods exist that are considered essential to the near-totality of builds, without any real choice or further thought, and do not generate or enhance gameplay, those mods go against the design of the system, and so have no reason to exist. If some hypothetical next class of most powerful mods comes in to replace Serration, and leads to the same problem, the same reasoning applies, so I fail to see the issue here.

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the only way to get somewhere without reducing the strength of all Damage Mods, is to make separate categories. to force Players to use a lower number of Damage Mods. but that's also pretty massively disruptive to play and would necessitate updating a spreadsheet of all Weaponry to reflect the new landscape and adjust the Stats of some Weapons to compensate (the ones that lost significantly more than most).

How? Why do we need separate categories, when it would be far simpler to just tackle problem mods?

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i've made it very clear what the simple avenue to a resolution is. reducing the value of Damage Mods so the difference between no Mods and 8 Mods isn't 50-1000x Damage. Archwing Mods were a prime example of that in play, before they were strangely buffed. almost every single Archwing Weapon preferred a different Mod Loadout. it was quite excellent.

But that doesn't address the issue of those mods being mandatory, though. Perhaps if you nerfed those mods so badly that they ceased to have any real value, that could work, but that in itself just leaves behind a bunch of useless mods. I'm also curious to see what different loadouts existed for Archwing weapons, because from experience there were also some pretty consistent mods there, including that one +damage mod.

Edited March 9, 2019 by Teridax68

[taiiat]

8 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

How? Why do we need separate categories, when it would be far simpler to just tackle problem mods?

I'm also curious to see what different loadouts existed for Archwing weapons, because from experience there were also some pretty consistent mods there, including that one +damage mod.

which is... almost all of them? we don't need a 12 step program if we can do it in one.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

that's only because at the time Archwing Weapons basically only had 8 Mods anyways. more like 10 or 11 but it was far less apparent then because of there being less Mods.
there's more now, though ironically in trade the Stats of the Mods went up too.

[Teridax68]

1 hour ago, taiiat said:

which is... almost all of them? we don't need a 12 step program if we can do it in one.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

By all means, please detail how almost every mod in the game is problematic to the point of needing elimination, because I can think of quite a few that are fine (e.g. Argon Scope). This kind of broad, detail-free claim may sound nice because of how flippant it is, but in the end it's a pretty shallow position that is ignorant of not only actual mods in Warframe, but more generally of the many successful weapon customization schemes in other games.

1 hour ago, taiiat said:

that's only because at the time Archwing Weapons basically only had 8 Mods anyways. more like 10 or 11 but it was far less apparent then because of there being less Mods.
there's more now, though ironically in trade the Stats of the Mods went up too.

So were there or were there not diverse Archwing weapon mod setups? If so, what were the different setups? Right now, you seem to have flipped your position on the matter, by now stating that setups were not in fact that diverse.

[taiiat]

4 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

-snip-

Right now, you seem to have flipped your position on the matter, by now stating that setups were not in fact that diverse.

i think i've laughed at that response enough times now, i guess we're going to drop the subject. clearly no discussion was ever going to happen here.
and i don't like double standards.

more diverse than handheld/normal Weapons, because Stats not being infinity makes it possible to.
but since Stats were increased at the same time as diversity was increased, it gained ground and lost ground at the same time.

[Danivus]

They exist because of content scaling. A new player with a weapon with only a single maxed out damage mod is able to rip through content at a pace considerably faster than they should. 

Conversely an experienced player can make a new weapon usable quicker than if say the system was changed to weapons just gaining damage bonuses from levelling them up. 

[Teridax68]

9 hours ago, taiiat said:

more diverse than handheld/normal Weapons, because Stats not being infinity makes it possible to.
but since Stats were increased at the same time as diversity was increased, it gained ground and lost ground at the same time.

Sure, but are there concrete examples of this? How can this be used to improve discussion regarding non-Archwing weapons? I'm glad you dislike double standards, but that is precisely what you have been applying to your own reasoning here regarding different weapons in Warframe, as you just got done claiming Arch-weapons were/are more diverse in their setups than regular weapons, immediately before stating that it was impossible for this to be the case due to the small number of mods in the Arch-weapon pool. What is the truth?

Going back to the original point, the fact remains that, on both regular and Arch-weapons, there is a certain number of mandatory mods that do not enhance gameplay, whose removal could easily make room for at least some different mods. For sure, there are a lot of mods in the game that just add power, without adding to gameplay, but that simply means that addressing the problem comprehensively would be a large task. In the meantime, though, there is at least a subset of these mods where changing them could make for easy wins, as they are a) mandatory, b) devoid of gameplay, and c) easy to predict in how things will change with their removal. These mods are damage mods, particularly raw base damage increase mods like Serration. Removing or severely nerfing these would almost certainly cause new mods to become mandatory, but at the very least it'd still be a step forward.

[VenomousValentine]

On 2019-03-05 at 2:36 AM, 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.

Yeah let's just forget about damage types and crit and build diversity.

I can think of only two or three weapons that you don't put flat damage mods on. I can think of plenty of weapons that don't build crit and others that don't build status chance. And there are other mods than just that like fire rate and ammo mutation and punch through and status duration etc. Things you can't always fit because of those mandatory mods you have to put on every weapon. 

[taiiat]

7 hours ago, VenomousValentine said:

Yeah let's just forget about damage types and crit and build diversity.

I can think of only two or three weapons that you don't put flat damage mods on. I can think of plenty of weapons that don't build crit and others that don't build status chance. And there are other mods than just that like fire rate and ammo mutation and punch through and status duration etc. Things you can't always fit because of those mandatory mods you have to put on every weapon. 

ok, so we'll repeat like a broken record again:

you wouldn't gain any Utility Mods by deleting that one Mod off your Gun. you'd replace it with another Damage Mod, because that's literally how math works. you use __ because it performs the best, and if it wasn't there, you'd be using another Mod that gives a lot of Damage but was previously beaten by something else.

whoosh.

[VenomousValentine]

45 minutes ago, taiiat said:

ok, so we'll repeat like a broken record again:

you wouldn't gain any Utility Mods by deleting that one Mod off your Gun. you'd replace it with another Damage Mod, because that's literally how math works. you use __ because it performs the best, and if it wasn't there, you'd be using another Mod that gives a lot of Damage but was previously beaten by something else.

whoosh.

Maybe you would because you're a monkey that just likes big numbers,  but there are plenty of players that like to get all the utility they can afford without making a weapon unviable.

 

And moreover it would still be more diversity, because even if you did want more damage it wouldnt be the same mod on every single weapon. 

Edited March 11, 2019 by VenomousValentine

[taiiat]

13 hours ago, VenomousValentine said:

Maybe you would because you're a monkey that just likes big numbers,  but there are plenty of players that like to get all the utility they can afford without making a weapon unviable.

And moreover it would still be more diversity, because even if you did want more damage it wouldnt be the same mod on every single weapon. 

you can already do that currently. on many Weapons, the last Mod Slot adds a fairly small amount of relative Damage, making it easy to fit a Utility Mod.
people just don't.

it'd still be the same Mod on almost every Weapon, it's not really any better. just as i've been saying for 4 years - if it's not really any better mathematically, it's not really worth the money to do it.

[Teridax68]

9 hours ago, taiiat said:

you can already do that currently. on many Weapons, the last Mod Slot adds a fairly small amount of relative Damage, making it easy to fit a Utility Mod.
people just don't.

it'd still be the same Mod on almost every Weapon, it's not really any better. just as i've been saying for 4 years - if it's not really any better mathematically, it's not really worth the money to do it.

This isn't true, as there are so many redundant damage mods that it's easy to double a weapon's damage even on that last slot (e.g. with Vigilante Armaments). The fact that we can essentially double our weapon's damage to the power of 8, give or take a few, is one of the reasons the game is so hard to balance right now between newcomers and veterans. For sure, this means there are a ton of damage mods to look at, but that still does not make the task insurmountable, particularly as there are several ways of addressing the issue that aren't too conceptually difficult, e.g. by making damage bonuses conditional upon doing something interesting (e.g. headshots, wall-latching or aim-gliding, stealth finishers, etc.).

[taiiat]

4 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

This isn't true, as there are so many redundant damage mods that it's easy to double a weapon's damage even on that last slot (e.g. with Vigilante Armaments). .

if your calculator actually works that way, then this discussion is over because you're never going to agree with anyone else on any subject since your calculator makes different numbers than everybody else.
so then i have nothing more to say.

[Teridax68]

4 minutes ago, taiiat said:

if your calculator actually works that way, then this discussion is over because you're never going to agree with anyone else on any subject since your calculator makes different numbers than everybody else.
so then i have nothing more to say.

You are not "everyone else". The fact remains that there is nothing special about the last slot in a weapon, so there is nothing preventing the player from equipping any of the damage-multiplying mods that exist. This also raises an inconsistency with your argumentation: if there aren't enough damage-multiplying mods to insert into the eighth slot, then contrary to what you've been arguing before, there is in fact a fairly limited number of problem mods that need to be addressed. If there were indeed this infinite, or otherwise unworkably large number of problem mods to address, then there would be more than eight problem mods occupying a weapon's mod table.