Self-Damage-Style Penalties Done Creatively

[ArcKnight9202]

It is absolutely no secret that self-damage in this game is a horrible mechanic. The scaling between players and enemies is so asymmetrical that I can't actually believe it is reality. However, it is what it is. Area-of-effect weapons are desirable for clearing capability. This is usually countered with a penalty and it is understandable to put a drawback on something so advantageous.

So, what can we do about it? No, not Cautious Shot. That is hot garbage. A straight up removal would be ideal but they don't seem to want to budge on that. Although, they made a special exception for the Staticor which is most peculiar.

What are some more creative solutions that don't involve the player redistributing themselves across several planets? I had a few ideas. Please, feel free to share others.

Idea 1: Add a guaranteed Blast effect to the player knocking them down. That's easy. It provides a penalty and a potentially dangerous situation but it doesn't instantly kill you.

Idea 2: Jam the weapon for X seconds. This way it still encourages better shot placement instead of face-tanking the shells/missiles.

Idea 3: Add a "blue health" mechanic. If you are unfamiliar with this, this is something used in Fighting Games. It's basically taking "soft damage" but if you do not take any hits you start to regenerate the health. However, if you take hits, you forfeit whatever you didn't yet regenerate.

Again, feel free to add/tweak or share any other ideas. I wish they would just remove the mechanic and balance it some other way but that may never happen.

Edit - Idea 4: Perhaps this is being looked at in the wrong way. What if instead of dealing horrendous amounts of damage to yourself, your shot received a damage penalty if you catch yourself in the blast? By this I mean, if you shoot at your feet, your rocket/whatever gets a 50% damage penalty to all hostile targets around you and does 0 damage to yourself. When you are not caught in the blast, the shot deals full damage. This heavily incentivizes the player to aim properly but doesn't instantly kill them if a mistake is made or something jumps in front of them at the last second. The only penalty is the shot did less damage.

This works around this game's broken scaling completely. DE can save face by not having to release a mod to reduce 99%!!! of self damage for these things to be remotely survivable.

Speaking of Cautious Shot, what do we do about it? Well, we can change this mod slightly to deal increased damage when fired ideally. They could even add a greater penalty when fired too close to offset the bonus though this might not even be necessary. This will help these weapons scale better as well. This also has the amazing super power of allowing the mod to retain its name: Cautious Shot.

The last benefit of this change is that it will end the "learn to aim" comments completely(maybe). Having a teammate or kavat/whatever suddenly jump into your line of fire is something we have all faced. Now, it doesn't have to result in early retirement.

Edited May 16, 2019 by ArcKnight9202
Had a new idea.

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

Mostly pissed about Cautious Shot myself. It was lauded as the solution, but it's indeed hot garbage:

* Doesn't work on all primaries (why no lens, c'mon it's probably the one weapon that absolutely needed it).

* Can't be equipped on Secondary and Melee weapons with self damage.

* It's percentage based and it simply often doesn't work since most weapons crit and deal a hellalot of damage , even with 90% reduction.

* Should probably be a warframe mode not to gimp one damage slot on weapon.

* It's expensive as hell to get and to level up.

So yeah, either they fix Cautious Shot (the bandaid mod) or they find a way to make self-damage less annoying... Maybe putting a cap on the max amount of damage you can deal to yourself would help, like let's say regardless of the damage your weapon does to you , you will only recieve at worse half of your remaining HP and Shield per hit.

[Andele3025]

Id just make self damage cap at 25~50 when it comes to shields, but keep it as is on hp.

[AshenHaze]

Honestly, I just think a lot of this revolves around the enemy damage/HP scaling vs Tenno damage/HP scaling. 

[ArcKnight9202]

I also thought about weapons dealing a fixed/flat amount of self-damage. This obviously incentivizes HP mods and the like. This gives you more room to play around with higher HP/Shields but it's still viable to use without them.

In a game with more controlled scaling this would work a lot better. The current penalty is fairly harsh. Especially for solo players.

[Teridax68]

Honestly, I think the baseline should be to just remove self-damage as a generalized mechanic. After that, if a weapon is intended to punish the player for getting caught in its blast, it likely should have its own, bespoke effect:

• The Lenz I think is one of the few weapons for which self-damage could be fine, though it should not scale with the player's damage mods.
• Blast procs on some other explosives makes sense.
• The blue health mechanic sounds like it could be most closely emulated with a Viral proc in Warframe, which could work for the Pox.
• Beyond that, I think self-applying specific status procs could be one generalized way of punishing the player for getting caught in their own weapon AoE.
• Alternatively, one could use the mechanic for certain weapons like the Corinth, and have the explosive fizzle out if shot from too closely -- in other words, the shot would need to be fired at a distance in order to come online and do some real damage. This would work well for launchers like the Ogris or Tonkor.

[(PSN)theMycon]

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

 

If Cautious Shot we're instead "punch through allies and abilities, but not enemies" it would have prevented 95% of self-damage deaths without impacting DPS too badly.

 

You don't die because you shot a wall or a too-close enemy and take 5-10x more  damage than you can handle.  You die because an ally choses to pick a shooting position right in front of someone already shooting/realizes melee won't work & bullet jump straight at you/puts up that fifth snow globe in an overlapping honeycomb, and you take 80-1000x too much damage

[shut]

I'm of the opinion that self-damage and shield gating can be addressed at the same time with relative ease. Like, imagine if you looked at the patch notes one day and saw this:

Quote

Plains of Eidolon Remaster: Hotfix 24.8.X

Changes:

• Players can no longer lose more than 150 shields in a single instance of damage.
  • Nidus cannot lose more than 150 health in a single instance of damage.
  • Inaros cannot lose more than 500 health in a single instance of damage.

And just like that, boom, players:
- will no longer get oneshotted from full health+shields from poorly telegraphed attacks
- will no longer oneshot themselves from full health+shields by sticking a pinkie into their Penta blast radius (provided that they have over 150 shields)
- will actually have a reason to build for Shields, without overshadowing the usefulness of health+armor
- will still be on their toes when using self-damaging weapons or facing high-leveled snipers, as dying is still possible if their shields are down

 

Not perfect by any means (explosive weapons' multishot or Toxin damage hasn't been accounted for, etc), but you get the main idea.

Edited April 29, 2019 by SortaRandom

[MJ12]

How about just getting rid of self-damage period? Again, people insist that there should be some penalty for shooting too close to yourself in Warframe, but from what I see, the reasoning is actually being done in reverse. Self-damagers treat self-damage as a sacred cow that cannot be questioned, and therefore fill in things to justify continuing to worship that sacred cow.

The self-damage weapons in Warframe aren't actually nearly good enough for self-damage to have any reasonable use for game balance. The entire design of the game makes self-damage a largely worthless game mechanic, because self-damage weapons are comparable, or in many cases inferior, to non-self damaging weapons in most engagement ranges and at just about every job.

And there's no real good reason to have self-damage because Warframe's not ArmA. Warframe's not a realistic tactical sim where something like this is expected because of realism. Warframe's a fast-paced game where engagements take place at short ranges and weapons fire is spammed at close ranges. If you're firing a lot of self-damaging weapons in a mission (and you will be, because they're not treated as 'power' weapons and you do have to spam them) screwing up once every thousand shots or so is still pointlessly annoying. Pointless, because you'll just be angry that you wasted a revive or were put into time-out for 10 seconds. Annoying, because wasting a revive or being put into time-out is annoying. In contrast, ArmA engagements take place at tens or hundreds of meters, expected weapon accuracy is ludicrously low (so self-damaging weapons are incredibly powerful because you can miss by a whole lot and still kill someone), and you only get a handful of rocket/etc. shots per engagement, so you're practically speaking never going to kill yourself with a rocket outside of gross negligence.

Furthermore, if almost all engagements take place at close ranges (and in fact pretty much all self-damaging weapons are only normally good at relatively close ranges due to low projectile velocity and lack of guidance) the point of self-damage is reduced significantly, because normally self-damage exists to tell people that they shouldn't engage in close quarters firefights with rocket launchers. But you know, this is a game where every fight is close quarters. So then why have self-damage?

Maybe it's because you're like Team Fortress 2 or Quake Champions, where self-damage lets you trade health for mobility. Plasma climbing and rocket jumping are ridiculously good in those games, and self-damage exists because otherwise you could have those advantages with no cost. It's important to remember that in Team Fortress 2, they made a variant rocket launcher that did no damage, so all you could do with it is rocket jump with it. They had to nerf that zero-damage rocket launcher again and again because being able to rocket jump without self-damage was so overpowering that it more than made up for losing most of your offensive capability. But this doesn't exist in Warframe. You have ludicrously high speed by default, and explosions don't normally have impulse.

Maybe you want self-damage because you don't want to allow people to clear hordes of enemies which are swarming them, like Left 4 Dead or the like. You want it to be hard for players to get out when swarmed. But in Warframe, you have extremely powerful melee weapons with wide swings and fast attack speed that easily clear nearby enemies, to say nothing about the fact that plenty of Warframes get area-clearing powers or area CC.

There's no good game reason to have self-damage in Warframe, and in terms of 'realism' Warframe's enough of a weird transhumanist space fantasy setting that lacking self-damage wouldn't fatally ruin immersion.

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

On 2019-04-28 at 12:31 PM, Andele3025 said:

Id just make self damage cap at 25~50 when it comes to shields, but keep it as is on hp.

That's a big FU to Inarus or Nidus, so no. Bad idea.

[Andele3025]

4 minutes ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

That's a big FU to Inarus or Nidus, so no. Bad idea.

They already dont care about self damage (unless its the Lenz), if anything it would show that not having shields is not a entirely net positive.

[(PSN)BenHeisennberg]

On 2019-04-27 at 12:44 AM, ArcKnight9202 said:

A straight up removal would be ideal but they don't seem to want to budge on that. Although, they made a special exception for the Staticor which is most peculiar.

It's really weird.  Would the Ogris be OP without self damage?  No.  The Ignis Wraith clears mobs better, with no self damage. 

That's not a call to give the Ignis self damage, but to give some serious QoL to my favorite launcher, Steve.

[Tiltskillet]

18 minutes ago, (PS4)BenHeisennberg said:

give the Ignis self damage

Agreed!

On 2019-04-27 at 2:44 AM, ArcKnight9202 said:

Although, they made a special exception for the Staticor which is most peculiar. 

Staticor self damage was removed presumably because they decided it was a bad idea to put it on a weapon that had never had it before.

(Yeah, I'm not serious about the Ignis.)

 

Edited May 1, 2019 by Tiltskillet

[TheGrimCorsair]

Seems like a solution in want of a problem.

[ArcKnight9202]

*This was added to the main post so please ignore this if you have already read it.

I had another idea on how to tackle this problem so I decided to post it.

Idea 4: Perhaps this is being looked at in the wrong way. What if instead of dealing horrendous amounts of damage to yourself, your shot received a damage penalty if you catch yourself in the blast? By this I mean, if you shoot at your feet, your rocket/whatever gets a 50% damage penalty to all hostile targets around you and does 0 damage to yourself. When you are not caught in the blast, the shot deals full damage. This heavily incentivizes the player to aim properly but doesn't instantly kill them if a mistake is made or something jumps in front of them at the last second. The only penalty is the shot did less damage.

This works around this game's broken scaling completely. DE can save face by not having to release a mod to reduce 99%!!! of self damage for these things to be remotely survivable.

Speaking of Cautious Shot, what do we do about it? Well, we can change this mod slightly to deal increased damage when fired ideally. They could even add a greater penalty when fired too close to offset the bonus though this might not even be necessary. This will help these weapons scale better as well. This also has the amazing super power of allowing the mod to retain its name: Cautious Shot.

The last benefit of this change is that it will end the "learn to aim" comments completely(maybe). Having a teammate or kavat/whatever suddenly jump into your line of fire is something we have all faced. Now, it doesn't have to result in early retirement.

Btw, thanks everyone for your posts and feedback.

Edited May 16, 2019 by ArcKnight9202

[(PSN)Ozymandias-13-]

On 2019-04-27 at 3:44 AM, ArcKnight9202 said:

Idea 1: Add a guaranteed Blast effect to the player knocking them down. That's easy. It provides a penalty and a potentially dangerous situation but it doesn't instantly kill you.

Idea 2: Jam the weapon for X seconds. This way it still encourages better shot placement instead of face-tanking the shells/missiles.

There's a lot of good, creative ideas in this thread for dealing with self damage. I really like the idea of removing self damage and instead using both of these two ideas. Use either a Blast proc or Viral proc depending on what fits better for the weapon. Both can be deadly, but aren't inherently damaging.

On 2019-04-29 at 2:18 PM, SortaRandom said:

Plains of Eidolon Remaster: Hotfix 24.8.X

Changes:

• Players can no longer lose more than 150 shields in a single instance of damage.
  • Nidus cannot lose more than 150 health in a single instance of damage.
  • Inaros cannot lose more than 500 health in a single instance of damage.

And I love this just in general, not exclusively in relation to self-damage mechanics. I'm not sure what secret little testing DE did that they determined shield-gating would be pointless before scrapping the idea, but I suppose that's a question for a different thread.