Perhaps it's time for Weapons 2.0

[Mrevasivepants]

Hello everyone,

 

For a long time now I've played Warframe, had times in which I left, and times in which I came back such as of 2 months ago. I went through a lot of things that DE did both good and bad in the game and today I want to talk about a bad one.

Veterans such as I will remember the time in which DE's strategy for content was to weekly drop in Weapon Reinforcement updates. It was fun in the beggining with the new weapon designs and everything but it soon became a bore to get them and they had no really intrinsic value. How many times did you saw a weapon reinforcement update and thought to yourself: "God damn it... another mastery folder piece of equipment." ? Many times I reckon.

This is a problem now to new players as well, they'll look at it and often judge the weapons through its price(as in, resource cost to craft it). You know how disappointed I was to craft the Sibear only to realize it is one of the worst weapons (argueably) in the game? Not as much as you'd think because I needed to mastery folder that as well, painfully.

The damage has been done, the weapons are already here and they're staying for sure. Removing them is out of the question since a lot of people depend on them for mastery rank exp and the design of them of course is really unique. So... what options does DE have to fix this mistake?

That's what I would like to suggest today. I know it's a long and painful process what I'm about to suggest, but it opens up to a lot of new creative mechanics and a chance to turn a bad event into a really good one, and that is giving weapons(the ones that lack it) an unique passive mechanic.

Much like Warframes themselves, weapons with unique mechanics would definitely open up to a new meta and creative ways of playing the game, and I'm not talking about the stuff that already exist like "Snipers deal more crit damage than other weapons when you zoom in." No, i'm talking about each individual weapon doing something that the other doesn't in its own way.

There are weapons that already do that, the tiberon fire modes with its different stats is already interesting, the Lenz explosion is very cool as well, and the phage spreading out everywhere before finally tighting the spread as you hold on to the trigger. Old weapons could be fixed with unique things like that.

Look at the Magnus/Akmagnus, no one plays with them, why? because they're slow, don't deal a lot of damage relatively, and they're plain boring to the point they added a skin for it first and it didn't save it. Why not make it so each shot has a stagger effect much like Impact, but more reliable? it'd be a nice CC weapon(even though it's becoming obsolete the notion of CC) and would definitely stand out. What about the karak? It resembles the AK-47, so why not give it innate punchthrough?

As I said, it's something that definitely would take its time, but I'm sure it would make more weapons viable to use and if not at least fun.

I'm looking forward for your input guys, thank you for reading.

 

[Lone_Dude]

You're proposing manually balancing all of the weapons in the game to the team that balanced certain weapons without considering their reload speed and accuracy while calculating DPS.

While I agree that all weapons should have a reason to be used, you cannot disregard the existence of equipment tiers and how it ties in with mastery rank. It's pretty funny that you mention Sibear and how you were disappointed with it, even though it has that gameplay gimmick mechanic that you mention later on. It grants additional status after charge attacks. About your proposed Akmagnus/magnus change. Staggers on headshots would make it harder to land following headshots which will instead decrease the DPS of the weapon. Vast majority of players and even developers consider DAMAGE to be king. Not CC, something that even you mention. And I don't think this trend will change any time soon. You see, even gimmicks need to be balanced. What if a gimmick that you give some MR2 weapon allows it to be so powerful that it has the same power level as MR12 weapons? What's the point of MR requirements then? It's already weird with weapons of the same rank requirements being drastically different in terms of killing power.

What's worse, every major update breaks certain weapons. Currently Arca Titron is bugged for example, Sancti Magistar works in some weird way, projectiles from Tatsu sometimes orbit the enemies instead of striking them. And that's just GIMMICK bugs.

I can tell DE agree with ideas like yours, as they try to add gimmicky stuff to the weapons, but currently they simply don't have enough manpower/experience to do that consistently and keep it from breaking.

This comment of mine might come off as agressive, but I'm not. English is not my native language and I just speak from my experience and observations. I wholeheartedly agree with your idea, but I think nothing like that will be added any time soon.

[TheGrimCorsair]

Wait, I've been using Arca Titron a bit as of late and haven't noticed any bugs with it. What are you talking about?

[Mrevasivepants]

15 hours ago, Lone_Dude said:

You're proposing manually balancing all of the weapons in the game to the team that balanced certain weapons without considering their reload speed and accuracy while calculating DPS.

While I agree that all weapons should have a reason to be used, you cannot disregard the existence of equipment tiers and how it ties in with mastery rank. It's pretty funny that you mention Sibear and how you were disappointed with it, even though it has that gameplay gimmick mechanic that you mention later on. It grants additional status after charge attacks. About your proposed Akmagnus/magnus change. Staggers on headshots would make it harder to land following headshots which will instead decrease the DPS of the weapon. Vast majority of players and even developers consider DAMAGE to be king. Not CC, something that even you mention. And I don't think this trend will change any time soon. You see, even gimmicks need to be balanced. What if a gimmick that you give some MR2 weapon allows it to be so powerful that it has the same power level as MR12 weapons? What's the point of MR requirements then? It's already weird with weapons of the same rank requirements being drastically different in terms of killing power.

What's worse, every major update breaks certain weapons. Currently Arca Titron is bugged for example, Sancti Magistar works in some weird way, projectiles from Tatsu sometimes orbit the enemies instead of striking them. And that's just GIMMICK bugs.

I can tell DE agree with ideas like yours, as they try to add gimmicky stuff to the weapons, but currently they simply don't have enough manpower/experience to do that consistently and keep it from breaking.

This comment of mine might come off as agressive, but I'm not. English is not my native language and I just speak from my experience and observations. I wholeheartedly agree with your idea, but I think nothing like that will be added any time soon.

Don't worry at all, only someone who is blissfully dense would take that comment as aggressive.
As I did mention, I know this would be something that'd take time in fact I wouldn't expect ever to drop all of the weapons with a new mechanic in one patch, but rather patch by patch in certain given time. I'm in no rush to have them fix this, it's just so it'd be more fun to play with different stuff rather than just the average "Pick the weapon that deals the most damage".

I know well that an invisible tier of weapons exists in the game, it's just that with the existence of prime weapons I fail to see the point in it. Besides I was suggesting stuff that would consider the amount of resources you craft them with. Don't you think that it's disheartning the fact that a Rubico Prime that is priced at 40p in the market casts a long shadow over.. say the Hema that takes 15000 mutagen samples to research only to find out it's a really, really poor weapon?

While in retrospect, I do agree that my example with the sibear for this thread was a really poor choice, it doesn't hide the fact that for its price it's a really bad weapon with a stupid mechanic, I would change it so that every strike that it deals upon the ground (slams, combos, etc) it'd create a mini ice path, it'd be at very least way more awesome and insentivize people to forma it and make a decent build in it, that or actually buff the stupid thing and keep the mechanic, it's still unique.

About the magnus, I did meant each shot, not each headshot. Of course this would be regulated with a % of triggering, say like 70%. I'm suggesting this because I really want to be a balance between CC and Damage again, else I'd suggest so that each shot (at a %) would hit the enemy so hard that it'd blow him away a bit and deal damage to people behind him at a certain angle(hey that's actually cool.).

I can honestly live without new weaponry/warframes for a while because these new mechanics would serve as new weapons in a way for me.

Thank you for your input.

 

[Lone_Dude]

3 hours ago, Mrevasivepants said:

Don't worry at all, only someone who is blissfully dense would take that comment as aggressive.
As I did mention, I know this would be something that'd take time in fact I wouldn't expect ever to drop all of the weapons with a new mechanic in one patch, but rather patch by patch in certain given time. I'm in no rush to have them fix this, it's just so it'd be more fun to play with different stuff rather than just the average "Pick the weapon that deals the most damage".

I know well that an invisible tier of weapons exists in the game, it's just that with the existence of prime weapons I fail to see the point in it. Besides I was suggesting stuff that would consider the amount of resources you craft them with. Don't you think that it's disheartning the fact that a Rubico Prime that is priced at 40p in the market casts a long shadow over.. say the Hema that takes 15000 mutagen samples to research only to find out it's a really, really poor weapon?

While in retrospect, I do agree that my example with the sibear for this thread was a really poor choice, it doesn't hide the fact that for its price it's a really bad weapon with a stupid mechanic, I would change it so that every strike that it deals upon the ground (slams, combos, etc) it'd create a mini ice path, it'd be at very least way more awesome and insentivize people to forma it and make a decent build in it, that or actually buff the stupid thing and keep the mechanic, it's still unique.

About the magnus, I did meant each shot, not each headshot. Of course this would be regulated with a % of triggering, say like 70%. I'm suggesting this because I really want to be a balance between CC and Damage again, else I'd suggest so that each shot (at a %) would hit the enemy so hard that it'd blow him away a bit and deal damage to people behind him at a certain angle(hey that's actually cool.).

I can honestly live without new weaponry/warframes for a while because these new mechanics would serve as new weapons in a way for me.

Thank you for your input.

 

I talk about weapons having damage related gimmicks because when it comes to the majority of community, they don't care about anything else. You can even see that in the way riven economy works. People go for multishot, crit, status or damage. Many of my rivens are utility rivens(-recoil, +reload, +attack speed and combo time), yet when the nerf hammer comes for riven dispo, they get nerfed the same way damage and multishot does. Why would I need a riven that gives me 20% reload speed, when even a non-prime reload mod would do more and cost less? There are some problems when it comes to utility and they are at the core of the game.

I can totally see new players being amazed by each weapon having some kind of quirk. I certainly was back when things like that just started appearing in the game. Although I was rather easy to please since when I started weapons didn't even have reload animations heh.

I think you have a point when it comes to scaling usefulness of a weapon depending on how hard it is to acquire it. However, as you pointed out you can get everything through trading. You can even buy Hema from the market for plat. DE stated that they don't want to create any "exclusive" equipment(aside from Founder stuff), so scaling power off of that is out of the question. It would be nice, of course, if the process of acquiring a weapon was considered during the balance phase, but game economy and philosophy simply does not allow that. And I say that as a man who wasted 700 plat on a Wolf Sledge(set+riven) yesterday, so I have a personal bias, but still lol.

I can certainly see potential in non-damage-related-gimmick weapons such as Sancti Magistar, as it provides status damage reduction when held and radial healing on charged attacks, so that weapon should work great on frames like Harrow or Hildryn. Sadly DE seem to have this urge to absolutely butcher a weapon stat-wise when it has a gimmick. It reminds me of the situation with Ballistica when Steve didn't want to buff it and said something along the lines of "but it has this cool mechanic it doesn't need a buff". It applies to Sibear too. Imagine if it had slash damage. Add a toxin mod on top and you have viral+slash combo. Do a charge and you have 4 seconds of Slash/Viral proc machine. Melee is a difficult topic though, as stances can have their own gimmicks as well, such as forced bleeds, KOs, finishers and all that.

I can kind of understand where you're coming from with your Magnus idea too. It would be pretty cool to have a pistol that packs such a punch that it staggers enemies. And I think this is exactly what DE were going for, considering that this weapon has a rather high amount of impact and status. For it to work though, stagger animations have to be toned down, I suppose.

I think Warframe has a lot of potential when it comes to weapon balance, since we also have to consider mods and how they can affect everything. Napalm mod for Penta changes the way it works entierly. Then there is also a promise of Damage 3.0. So as disappointed in weapon balance as I am, I'm not really surprised that it is the way it is. Developers are so busy working they don't even know how new frames work lol, you can see it during latest devstreams. Maybe one day DE will create some kind of balancing team, just like something they did for Conclave. I can only hope.

[Mrevasivepants]

1 hour ago, Lone_Dude said:

I talk about weapons having damage related gimmicks because when it comes to the majority of community, they don't care about anything else. You can even see that in the way riven economy works. People go for multishot, crit, status or damage. Many of my rivens are utility rivens(-recoil, +reload, +attack speed and combo time), yet when the nerf hammer comes for riven dispo, they get nerfed the same way damage and multishot does. Why would I need a riven that gives me 20% reload speed, when even a non-prime reload mod would do more and cost less? There are some problems when it comes to utility and they are at the core of the game.

I can totally see new players being amazed by each weapon having some kind of quirk. I certainly was back when things like that just started appearing in the game. Although I was rather easy to please since when I started weapons didn't even have reload animations heh.

I think you have a point when it comes to scaling usefulness of a weapon depending on how hard it is to acquire it. However, as you pointed out you can get everything through trading. You can even buy Hema from the market for plat. DE stated that they don't want to create any "exclusive" equipment(aside from Founder stuff), so scaling power off of that is out of the question. It would be nice, of course, if the process of acquiring a weapon was considered during the balance phase, but game economy and philosophy simply does not allow that. And I say that as a man who wasted 700 plat on a Wolf Sledge(set+riven) yesterday, so I have a personal bias, but still lol.

I can certainly see potential in non-damage-related-gimmick weapons such as Sancti Magistar, as it provides status damage reduction when held and radial healing on charged attacks, so that weapon should work great on frames like Harrow or Hildryn. Sadly DE seem to have this urge to absolutely butcher a weapon stat-wise when it has a gimmick. It reminds me of the situation with Ballistica when Steve didn't want to buff it and said something along the lines of "but it has this cool mechanic it doesn't need a buff". It applies to Sibear too. Imagine if it had slash damage. Add a toxin mod on top and you have viral+slash combo. Do a charge and you have 4 seconds of Slash/Viral proc machine. Melee is a difficult topic though, as stances can have their own gimmicks as well, such as forced bleeds, KOs, finishers and all that.

I can kind of understand where you're coming from with your Magnus idea too. It would be pretty cool to have a pistol that packs such a punch that it staggers enemies. And I think this is exactly what DE were going for, considering that this weapon has a rather high amount of impact and status. For it to work though, stagger animations have to be toned down, I suppose.

I think Warframe has a lot of potential when it comes to weapon balance, since we also have to consider mods and how they can affect everything. Napalm mod for Penta changes the way it works entierly. Then there is also a promise of Damage 3.0. So as disappointed in weapon balance as I am, I'm not really surprised that it is the way it is. Developers are so busy working they don't even know how new frames work lol, you can see it during latest devstreams. Maybe one day DE will create some kind of balancing team, just like something they did for Conclave. I can only hope.

I agree. I can only hope that DE makes at least something of the weapons that are in the trash bin for most people. 

[Loza03]

There's another variable you've not taken into account here: Progression. That's the real reason you never see Magnus - it's an early-game weapon. If every weapon was 100% endgame viable like in more traditional shooters, that would include the weapons you pick up at the start of the game. Meaning that, in all honesty, you'd never have a reason to start collecting weapons in a game about collecting weapons - it's a concept called 'first order optimal strategy'. People have a tendency to stick with something powerful that works well early-game unless something kicks them in the teeth to get them to experiment. In Warframe, it's the fact that Mk1 weapons are really, really weak.

The early game is about that power progression, starting weak and becoming strong. This game isn't Halo on a fundamental level. What you're suggesting would lead to either the power curve becoming extremely wonky or non-existent, or something like now where many weapons with unique mechanics get left behind because they're, well, weaker weapons. Looking at stuff like Harpak, Flux Rifle and even my beloved Scourge. All of them are weaker weapons (Scourge is pretty strong vs Grineer but not against everything else), all have unique mechanics, all are rarely used.

Now, should more weapons have unique mechanics? Absolutely. I agree entirely that this should be the case - I love unique mechanics. The Magnus idea sounds like it'd be a really fun way to differentiate it from the Vasto and Lex families. But just applying them without taking into account the above is a recipe for disappointment. 

I think that a system that allows low MR, weak weapons to get a buff to endgame power levels, balanced by the devs (Destiny has such a system IIRC), would be better as a starting point. Maybe in a world where such a system exists this could be implemented, but right now I don't think that this would fix too much.

[(XBOX)DarkWo1f997]

I just wish most firearms this game DIDN’T look like deformed play dough with pieces of metal stuck in it with a handle. Where’s the tekna 9mm? 

Edited April 21, 2019 by (XB1)DarkWo1f997
Fixed typo

[Mrevasivepants]

20 hours ago, Loza03 said:

There's another variable you've not taken into account here: Progression. That's the real reason you never see Magnus - it's an early-game weapon. If every weapon was 100% endgame viable like in more traditional shooters, that would include the weapons you pick up at the start of the game. Meaning that, in all honesty, you'd never have a reason to start collecting weapons in a game about collecting weapons - it's a concept called 'first order optimal strategy'. People have a tendency to stick with something powerful that works well early-game unless something kicks them in the teeth to get them to experiment. In Warframe, it's the fact that Mk1 weapons are really, really weak.

The early game is about that power progression, starting weak and becoming strong. This game isn't Halo on a fundamental level. What you're suggesting would lead to either the power curve becoming extremely wonky or non-existent, or something like now where many weapons with unique mechanics get left behind because they're, well, weaker weapons. Looking at stuff like Harpak, Flux Rifle and even my beloved Scourge. All of them are weaker weapons (Scourge is pretty strong vs Grineer but not against everything else), all have unique mechanics, all are rarely used.

Now, should more weapons have unique mechanics? Absolutely. I agree entirely that this should be the case - I love unique mechanics. The Magnus idea sounds like it'd be a really fun way to differentiate it from the Vasto and Lex families. But just applying them without taking into account the above is a recipe for disappointment. 

I think that a system that allows low MR, weak weapons to get a buff to endgame power levels, balanced by the devs (Destiny has such a system IIRC), would be better as a starting point. Maybe in a world where such a system exists this could be implemented, but right now I don't think that this would fix too much.

Gotta say, this is the finest critique I've had, to the point i was hesitant on the whole thing you were pointing out and only to end up fully agreeing with you.

However, progression in this game is already bad in my opinion. You start in a relatively weak planet and you proceed to go onto the next one that is.... weak as well. The new enemy progression through levels is well done in my opinion, but I think the level scaling doesn't prepare anyone for future events such as arbitration, ESO,Exploiter Orb, etc etc.

But now that you mention the notion of progression, why not make a gild system for the weapons as well? I'm pretty much shooting this idea into the air without much thought, but how about when you first adquire the weapons they'll be in a sort of "prototype" stage, just like the MK-1 weaponry, and once they're lv 30 they automatically evolve into their real, true stats in full glory.