Why does ability power scale to terribly?

[AreliaTheShark]

5 hours ago, Majestic-scrub said:

most of the time yes, with end up so crap for endurance or any high level enemy in the range of 100 and up.

Level 100 is not high level what is considered high is level 200+ level 100s are kind of a joke

[Loza03]

6 hours ago, (XB1)Cubic Clem said:

Because of the forum knights that soon chime in telling you about balance and powercreep..

Ironically, this is an example of WHY the forum knights want better balance and don't like power creep.

Once upon a time those abilities were useful.

[stormy505]

50 minutes ago, engieboy said:

Level 100 is not high level what is considered high is level 200+ level 100s are kind of a joke

considering that even if you mod for stuff like wukongs one or four, or chormas 1 or 4. they end up having trouble killing at level 50. its kinda sad how little they actually do.

[0_The_F00l]

That's a three fold issue and not just with ability power, 

You need to consider enemy scaling (and faction) ,

Elemental effects of the ability, 

And how the damage propagates. 

You have taken example of garas 1 so let's work with that. 

It can do puncture (good against armor) or slash (good against flesh) but since it doesn't proc any status it is a pure damage ability, it scales with melee mods so having high Crit or elemental damage on it can make it a decent ability. OK tier elements. 

However barring infested most enemies will have high armor or shields so without some armor stripping it will indeed do poorly at high levels.

Once cast it will hit in a straight line ahead or in an arc, one time damage and done. So it can work as a small CC ability. But it's main purpose is breaking her vitrify wall (which scales into the millions) good mechanic. 

 

Now compare it to mags 4, 

It does magnetic damage one of the most disliked elements in the game due to the poor returns it gives against anything other than shield. Poor element. 

It's OK against corpus, but it's main advantage is the over shields it provides (too bad shields suck as a survival tool unless you have good DR) also cause decent CC as enemies are incapacitated for quite some time. Does fixed damage and does not scale by itself, but If you use polarize it can do OK damage (eventually) so OK against specific factions. 

The cast will cover an area around mag but is again a single instance. An OK mechanic. 

Now let's compare to the bottom tier damage ability. 

Boobens tesla balls, 

It does electric damage, it can propagate to more enemies if it procs, also does CC as enemies stay shocked. So a good element by itself. 

Electric does good damage against robots but it's mostly just corpus that use em, and shields get in the way. Kinda neutral as a faction element. 

The balls stay for a time (number of shocks) and damage things in a radius in tics, the amount of damage is miniscule though so it is more of a CC than damage and can get used up quickly. It sounds food on paper but the small ticks in just an area makes it non suitable for the games current pace. Meh mechanic. 

 

Now the most powerful ability. 

Saryn spores 

Corrosive damage is probably the most used element in the game, does extra damage against armor and strips armor in the process, the element itself has high scalability against armor, not good against shields or flesh though. Top tier element. 

Must have on any high level Grineer mission, and the staple for any "base" build. Top tier preference against faction. 

Cast on enemy, and then it spreads. It spreads! great for either clearing a room or to move through a mission quickly. Top tier mechanic. (it even has synergy for even more damage and spread) 

Hope this sheds some understanding. Why some abilities are good while others are just crap and others are God tier. 

 

 

Edited April 16, 2019 by 0_The_F00l

[Aldain]

3 hours ago, Autongnosis said:

Actually Tesla falls into a very specific category that's labeled "why the #*!% does this cost energy exactly?" 

Touche.

[supernils]

On 2019-04-16 at 12:01 PM, (XB1)Shodian said:

Well abilities like Gara's 1 is not meant to deal damage at a higher level. It's meant to be used for shattering her 4 so her 2 becomes more powerful.

What an incredible thing to say. I don't think it can be intended for abilities to be of reduced usefulness at higher level. Ideally all abilities should be useful all the time. That's the aim of game design. That's how it is let's say in World of Warcraft. Abilities scale optimally. I think the issue of Warframe is that the devs decided it wouldn't be fun to focus building your characters defense versus damage so that's why enemy defense scales so hard and we got a problem with ability power keeping up with that.

And sorry but pointing out that Gara's 1 is used to destroy her 4 is just admitting defeat, discussion wise. But I expected that to come.

Yes I certainly lack experience, I thought I already hinted that when I described myself as noob in my OP. So that why I couldn't give better examples.

[supernils]

On 2019-04-16 at 3:21 PM, IntheCoconut said:

I've never played Mag, so can't help you there, but Gara's 1 is affected by two things: Ability Strength and her Melee weapon's mods.

It does a base damage of 800 Puncture, or AoE 800 Slash when held down. With the correct mods (such as Intensify), you can increase this damage to 4,347. You can further increase it's damage by equipping mods on your Melee weapon such as Pressure Point (120% Melee Damage), Rivens, and Elemental mods.

thanks, I actually forgot that factor, equipped her with a high damage weapon and put that aspect aside. So there is some more scaling to that ability.

It was certainly exaggerated when I said "most abilities". But many abilities at least have an ability power related aspect that does scale very different than enemy level. And while many of those can at least keep some niche use I don't think that is ideal.

[angias]

Le 16/04/2019 à 04:29, (XB1)Cubic Clem a dit :

Because of the forum knights that soon chime in telling you about balance and powercreep..

Because there is none.

It is a smart move from DE to limit it, they struggle to "balance" ability with a softcap around 350% powerstrength.

But hey! It would be cool to have a quality build with 250% on every stats.

From an elitist that think that the game is too easy.

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

On ‎2019‎-‎04‎-‎16 at 11:24 AM, engieboy said:

Level 100 is not high level what is considered high is level 200+ level 100s are kind of a joke

"high level" is 100% subjective.

solo, 200+ is not high level either.  In a half decent squad, level 500 is not high level.

but for inexperienced or casual players, level 50 can be challenging.

In any event, I view abilities the same as weapons, companions, and everything else in this game: there is no one size fits all - pick the right tool for the job and everything is trivial.  Pick the wrong tool at your own expense.  Heck, there are somethings that work at level 100 and beyond that are a pain to use in low level missions due to killing enemies too fast in fissure missions.  Or builds that are inefficient at low level like a high powered saryn spore that kills the enemies before they can spread and you just end up working harder than you need to when a lower powered version would have been more efficient.

Expecting everything to work in every scenario is not what this game is about.  If someone is stubborn and wants their XYZ frame, weapon, or companion to work  everywhere rather than try different frames, weapons, companions, builds as the situation demands, they have only themselves to blame.

 

[Test-995]

Btw i think not much of frames can kill 100 level bombard with his/her ability.

 

Edited April 17, 2019 by Test-995

[Renginus]

cuz warframe is mostly about guns and swords i think there are just few skills that are realy ussable in most sitations and theyre cc

look skills are something not important most of them are just something that help you to kill enemy with weapons and if not they lose use with levels

tesla thing - vauban great example

3 inaros ...

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

8 minutes ago, Test-995 said:

Btw i think not much of frames can kill 100 level bombard with his/her ability.

 

You may be surprised at how many can when used … I hesitate to say "properly" because that implies if you can't you aren't doing it right, but that's not what I mean... When used in certain ways or with certain synergies...

 

[SneakyErvin]

35 minutes ago, Test-995 said:

Btw i think not much of frames can kill 100 level bombard with his/her ability.

Some can and some cant, most of those that cant arent built to rely on just their abilities, instead their abilities enhance their weapon play. Mag, Frost, Saryn, Volt or Oberon cant really 1HK a corrupted bombard at level 135 with their skills, however if you suddenly put just one or two shots in there from your guns you've suddenly wiped out a full 10 man group of some of the heaviest units in just a few seconds.

At the same time you have frames like Excal, Valkyr and Titania that can rip through them in the same time with their exalted weapons, or someone like Nezha that can just spear the group and wipe them out in seconds with a chakram or two.

Sure there are frames that need to rely completely on good weapons, but that isnt a game wide issue, it is more of a frame to frame problem. In general most frames can handle high level enemies well simply by utilizing their kits correctly.

[(XBOX)AlingsasArrende]

On 2019-04-16 at 1:24 PM, VanFanel1980mx said:

Banshee's 1 is a good example, its description even says it can kill the enemy but not even low level enemies die to it.

That ability is a great defensive ability, to prevent enemies attacking. It can also be used to strip armour when having the augment equipped.

[Lost_Cartographer]

The reason many abilities scale poorly is because they weren't meant to scale indefinitely.  We can take on level 100+ bozos because of how mechanics work out to make us either tanky as hell or shut down the enemy's capability to harm us.  We were never really meant to render level 100 enemies akin to cannon fodder.  The endless scaling aspect of endless missions is a simple design with the equally simple purpose of eventually crushing us into oblivion and forcing us to extract through sheer, overwhelming statistical weight.  This is why skills that do scale near endlessly (or even just ridiculously high) or work regardless of the enemy's stats are considered powerful.  There was a period where DE embraced giving us abilities that scaled, but they've since kind of gone back on that.  They realized what we're doing to win isn't really overcoming a difficulty, we're abusing a myriad of methods to quickly and effortlessly acquire energy to fuel our power spam which boils down to us just exploiting mechanics to neutralize any amount of scaling to begin with. 

And that is why we have nullifiers and why the game's balance is broken, folks!  Also, don't expect armor scaling to be fixed until they can overhaul everything else.  Balance was truly borked the moment they introduced energy pads and frames that could feed energy to everyone.  I guess they should have gone with cool downs after all.

 

[ranks21]

the days of just using warframe abilities are long gone, thanks to the p42w whiners. that kind of no weapons, badassery style of play has died killing the very meaning of what a warframe is. the op is right to state that, as I would like to drop all weapons and use any frame for any content in the game regardless of how long it would take.

add to the fact that the powers that were built into the abilities are in a redundant state. you now on most frame have to charge a frame's ultimate with 1 or 2 other abilities sometimes 3 to get what the ultimate used to do originally<< see saryn>> totally energy dependent. another thing to add to the madness, are arcanes and syndicate enhancements.

while they have been working on balancing,  it has been a fail in many ways because they have totally neglected what a warframe is or supposed to be. touting in lore how a frame's powers can destroy a planet in lore, but actual gameplay its limited to around level 80 or less when an ultimate looses all functionality when one doesn't equip weapons or sentinels/pets/ specters ect.

it isn't rocket science to use any frame, its only 4 individual buttons. so saying a player isn't using a frame right is nonsense.

Edited April 17, 2019 by ranks21

[flpxiao]

I agree that we have damage scaling badly with some abilitys, not all, some. And at very high levels weapons are the main damage dealer. And here's the reason I see. 

Now, Warframe is a game where the leveling system is highly conventional. In most conventional leveling systems, there are less stats that affect your damage, and the strength of your character scale linearly (or exponentially, which is linear after logarithm) as you level, which is really easy to balance. For example, they can implement +5 damage per level, and have the enemies have +5 hp per level, which is a very easy system to have balance throughout the levels. But that system is mundane and overused, because the difficulty of a level 5 player fighting level 5 enemy is the same as level 100 player fighting level 100 enemy. Now in Warframe, your level doens't really matter, since everything is easily level 30. The way that damage scale up is by using a variety of stats that are multiplicative in computing the final damage. For a ranged weapons we have (roughly)

total_expected_damage = base_damage * base_damage_modifier * elemental_damage * cirt_chance * crit_damage * multishot * attack_speed * combo_count * other_exteral_multipliers

(base damage is fixed, other stats can be changed by mods or special effects) So you can add 200% to your base damage which result in 300% total damage, or you can add 100% to both your damage and elemental damage, which makes a 400% total damage. This system allows players to scale up to a high damage if they optimize their stats properly. 

However, HOWEVER, many frame abilities do not benefit from the multiplicative nature of so many stats, which make them obsolete in higher levels. For example, EMBER, whose total ability damage is just

total_expected_damage = base_ability_damage * ability power

That means the only way to improve their damage is by adding ability power, and the best we can get (with eveything possible, including help from effects of teammates) is maybe 20 times the base damage? Where for a weapon we can easily build up to hundreds or even thousands times the original base damage. That means weapons will be able to fight very high level enemies where ability power become worthless tickles. 

So the ways I see to fix this problem: 1. give abilities more damage multiplier stats, for example an arcane that gives percentage chance to double cast an abiliy or make abilities crit. 2. reduce the number of multipliers on weapons, for example just remove multishot completely, or make base damage and elemental damage stack additively instead of multiplicatively. 

Anyway, I hope damage 3.0 balances this out. 

[Orblit]

Some abilities scale off power strength some...but mostly to whatever melee weapon you have equipped...notably gara. They could better indicate that but yea...

 

And other abilities can damage, but their main purpose is a side effect..aka armor strip..cc..etc

[(PSN)FunyFlyBoy]

@VanFanel1980mx What Warframes are dead weight at what parts of the game? 

[(PSN)FunyFlyBoy]

Edit: oops

Edited April 18, 2019 by (PS4)FunyFlyBoy
Phone didn't show my comment was posted

[Cephalycion]

On 2019-04-16 at 4:52 PM, Squick said:

I can't think of a frame that can't be modded so that their abilities are useful against sortie-level enemies.

Ember.

[Aldain]

18 minutes ago, Cephalycion said:

Ember.

Infested Sorties exist though, even at level 100 she can burn those pretty well.

[Cephalycion]

4 minutes ago, Aldain said:

Infested Sorties exist though, even at level 100 she can burn those pretty well.

Sounds pretty niche to me.

[Aldain]

14 minutes ago, Cephalycion said:

Sounds pretty niche to me.

A niche is a niche, at least Ember isn't like Vauban and no longer able to do anything before enemies die from AoE hell.

[Cephalycion]

1 hour ago, Aldain said:

A niche is a niche, at least Ember isn't like Vauban and no longer able to do anything before enemies die from AoE hell.

" I can't think of a frame that can't be modded so that their abilities are useful against sortie-level enemies."
So I'm right.