Self-Damage: How to Keep it Scaling, Effective, and Relevant but NOT Overwhelming

[TheLexiConArtist]

Self-damage has been a pretty hot topic on the Reddit of late, and since that place allows downvotes, determined naysayers can push down a real solution in favour of their demands that self-damage is made irrelevant in any number of ways.

I found a solution and I am here to share it with you all and DE - whom I implore to not cave in and outright kill off a weapon archetype because of this vocal subset.

Two facts we know:

1. The Tonkor Meta existed and was a horrible mistake. DE acknowledged, hard-argued as it was, that Self-damage should exist on explosives.
2. Cautious Shot is an attempt to rein in the scaling of self-damage (see recent 10x effectiveness buff) but the vocal minority demanding it are still not happy.

WHY the problem exists:

• Enemy health scales up indefinitely, and (especially courtesy of armour) exponentially. Our weapons' damage output has to match that.
• Our health does not scale indefinitely. We may have a lot of EHP in the end, but it is finite and absolute (we can only have so many Damage Reduction/Health buffs in a given squad)
• Self-damage is linearly linked with outgoing damage.

That last point there is the crux of the issue. When you have four or five multipliers scaling up damage to compete with exponential enemy growth, no amount of skimming-off-the-top is going to bring that linear-linked self-damage down to an appropriate level without completely breaking the risk-reward relationship. When you do a million damage, your innate 70% lower self-damage and 99% lower Cautious Shot is still 3000. Which is going to still be fatal to a lot of folks, even before all the rest of the factors get involved. Without Cautious, 300000 damage is going to drop even the beefy boys in short order.

Ill-fated 'solutions' and arguments against Self-Damage, with rebuttal:

• "Self-damage should be removed entirely"
  • No, as we had the Tonkor days and they were the most dull and unengaging of times. We know, see the big facts up there, that we want self-damage.
• "Self-damaging weapons are (mostly) outpaced by non-damaging alternatives"
  • An argument presented as corollary to 'just remove it or make it irrelevant'. But DE cannot make explosives powerful if people are going to still complain right now that they're killing themselves. With Cautious, even. We solve the self-damage scale, we can invite damage buffs to happen. Risk-reward curves where we don't have old Tonkors but you don't kill yourself on a half-modded weapon.
• "Self-damage [with Cautious Shot] should be a [flat value | capped value | percentage value]
  • With or without the mod slot given up, this has the effect of non-scaling risk/reward balance and/or functionally irrelevant self-damage. Sand daddy doesn't care about your capped 500 health self-shots. A Paper Loki should probably care a bit more about shooting his feet than Sand Daddy, which fails if it's percentage. Flat values? That's the Tonkor, and no. These defeat the fundamental draw of a risky explosive - you always get more risk with greater rewards. It's just no fun if you don't lose the occasional eyebrow.
• "I am careful, but enemies/people jump in front of me!"
  • This is not a self-damage problem. Enemies are your fault - situational awareness. For ally projectile blocking (and subsequent exploding-in-face), this issue is separate and affects other projectiles. It needs addressing but not specifically as self-damage.

 

SOLUTION:

1. Decouple the linear-linked growth of outgoing and self-damage.
2. Apply a formula which preserves early damage (teaching the weapon) while scaling up to damage that becomes dangerous (wielding the weapon) but only truly fatal at upper limit outputs (RESPECTING the weapon).
3. Cautious Shot can fulfil its intended role by sacrificing damage and a mod slot to take the damage down a step - e.g. 'fatal' back down to 'dangerous' - more effectively.

Full disclosure: I literally tinkered half an hour on a spreadsheet to find this formula. Someone more familiar with such things can probably make a similar, cleaner and more efficient analogue to this.

But here is an example of a possible self-damage formula with variables for DE to tweak as appropriate and some examples of self-damage values at different points of the scale depending on those variables:

Weapon damage X, with variables Y and Z in the following equation:
SELFDAMAGE = X * (1 - (Y / (X ^ (Z/X)))
Where Y is a variable (approaching or equal 1) determining growth rates
Where Z is a variable determining base reductions

Spoiler

 

For X = 500, 5000, 1000000 where Y = 0.98 and Z = 30
X = 500         : SELFDAMAGE = 162
X = 5000       : SELFDAMAGE = 344
X = 1000000 : SELFDAMAGE = 20406

For X = 500, 5000, 1000000 where Y = 0.99 and Z = 30
X = 500         : SELFDAMAGE = 159
X = 5000       : SELFDAMAGE = 297
X = 1000000 : SELFDAMAGE = 10410

For X = 500, 5000, 1000000 where Y = 1 and Z = 30
X = 500         : SELFDAMAGE = 156
X = 5000       : SELFDAMAGE = 249
X = 1000000 : SELFDAMAGE = 414

For X = 500, 5000, 1000000 where Y = 1 and Z = 10
X = 500         : SELFDAMAGE = 58
X = 5000       : SELFDAMAGE = 84
X = 1000000 : SELFDAMAGE = 138

For X = 500, 5000, 1000000 where Y = 1 and Z = 100
X = 500         : SELFDAMAGE = 355
X = 5000       : SELFDAMAGE = 783
X = 1000000 : SELFDAMAGE = 1380

 

All numbers shown with no Cautious Shot in a build.
I'd definitely recommend that Cautious actually be nerfed back to 90% with that formula in particular. Because look. Your innate self-damage reduction now already scales due to the inversion of exponential growth. You probably won't need 99% off that any more, assuming DE picks some appropriate variables up there.

Personal eyeballing says Y=0.99 Z=30 could be a good spot based on the three datapoints I worked from. You get up to a mil in that blast radius and you're fatal (but Cautious cuts that down to 1000-some, or 2k if that's pre-multishot.

So we can get ordnance buffs for all the underperforming non-Lenzes out there. We can actually have explosives that are dangerous for both parties again.

Now can we all agree that a solution actually exists to keep relevant scaling self-damage?

 

Additionally - for that ally-projectile thing. Can't we just restrict projectile ally-collision for things that "could have a reason to", like sticking Penta grenades with Adhesive Blast to your local melee enthusiast? I'm sure every one of the 12 people still using bows would also appreciate it if their friends wouldn't chew the arrow in midair of a shot that was perfectly lined up.

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

13 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

• "I am careful, but enemies/people jump in front of me!"
  • This is not a self-damage problem. Enemies are your fault - situational awareness. For ally projectile blocking (and subsequent exploding-in-face), this issue is separate and affects other projectiles. It needs addressing but not specifically as self-damage. 

I don't tend to kill myself from hitting enemies/allies. I tend to kill myself when trying to shoot around an obstacle only to learn that the hit-box of the obstacle does not match the visual representation. I am behind a box/barrel/crate, I aim, poke around cover, establish a clear line of sight based on my reticle, and then explode.

I am being careful, and my being careful is what is killing me.

Now, I admit that removing/flattening/capping self-damage is not the optimal solution to this problem, but it is likely the only solution DE would consider, since the other option would be redoing almost every object in every tileset, as well as re-working how projectile weapons function.

[TheLexiConArtist]

7 minutes ago, -AoN-CanoLathra- said:

I don't tend to kill myself from hitting enemies/allies. I tend to kill myself when trying to shoot around an obstacle only to learn that the hit-box of the obstacle does not match the visual representation. I am behind a box/barrel/crate, I aim, poke around cover, establish a clear line of sight based on my reticle, and then explode.

I am being careful, and my being careful is what is killing me.

Now, I admit that removing/flattening/capping self-damage is not the optimal solution to this problem, but it is likely the only solution DE would consider, since the other option would be redoing almost every object in every tileset, as well as re-working how projectile weapons function.

Not one I usually see, but I never meant that as an exhaustive list, just some common occurrences. I will agree that the 'hitbox porn' turns into hitbox gore in just as many places, but with a less immediately fatal, scaling risk to one's self, I imagine a genuine enthusiast of risky gear would internalise those odd hitboxes as much as they can.

_{Really, anyone who doesn't expect to still land themselves flat on their back on occasions (and is prepared to laugh it off when they do) probably should be looking into the other hundreds of weapons that have drawbacks in other areas than personal risk. But Cautious and rebalancing said risk would go a long way to bridge that gap of playstyles.}

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

22 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

"I am careful, but enemies/people jump in front of me!"

• This is not a self-damage problem. Enemies are your fault - situational awareness. For ally projectile blocking (and subsequent exploding-in-face), this issue is separate and affects other projectiles. It needs addressing but not specifically as self-damage

 

I find this is the issue - predictable weapons are tremendous fun. I'm find blowing myself up with the Lenz, it's aways my fault (and hence funny) when it happens.

The problem is that some explosive weapons are a bit odd. They bounce at odd angles or clip invisible things. That short wall you could shoot over with the your other guns easily? The Angstrum's gonna clip it and the Tonkor's going to bounce off it straight back in your face.

22 hours ago, -AoN-CanoLathra- said:

I tend to kill myself when trying to shoot around an obstacle only to learn that the hit-box of the obstacle does not match the visual representation. I am behind a box/barrel/crate, I aim, poke around cover, establish a clear line of sight based on my reticle, and then explode

Yeah, that.

I find allies get me killed too, as some weapons have a charge mechanic and no amount of situational awareness is going to save you if they don't and you've started charging your shot.

The result is that unpredictable weapons like the Angstrum just don't get used.

I think complicated formulas are great and all, but I'd rather keep it simple:

- Hitting allies nullifies the explosion (similar to how Lenz shots disappear if you hit a defence target, or Corinth secondary fire).

- Hitting the scenery self damage is capped at 75% shield or 50% health when no shield.

- Hitting an enemy can self damage can wipe out all shield and up to 75% health. If you have less than 4 points of health then you die.

This still punishes players who don't respect the explosion, but doesn't punish them for sloppy teammates and punishes them less for clipping invisible parts of the level.

 

[(XBOX)Zweimander]

A very simple sollution is to make self damage only the base damage of the weapon unaffected by mods, this isn't rocket science people! Still allow procs to go through and stuff but if the damage is no more then the base damage unmodded then the complaints will turn into next to nothing and Cautious shot may let the squishier frames live with the unmodded self damage and 99% damage reduction. My suggestion is much simpler and would be more or less effortless on DE's part so I believe this is the best course of action.

[TheLexiConArtist]

1 hour ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

I find this is the issue - predictable weapons are tremendous fun. I'm find blowing myself up with the Lenz, it's aways my fault (and hence funny) when it happens.

The problem is that some explosive weapons are a bit odd. They bounce at odd angles or clip invisible things. That short wall you could shoot over with the your other guns easily? The Angstrum's gonna clip it and the Tonkor's going to bounce off it straight back in your face.

Yeah, that.

I find allies get me killed too, as some weapons have a charge mechanic and no amount of situational awareness is going to save you if they don't and you've started charging your shot.

The result is that unpredictable weapons like the Angstrum just don't get used.

I think complicated formulas are great and all, but I'd rather keep it simple:

- Hitting allies nullifies the explosion (similar to how Lenz shots disappear if you hit a defence target, or Corinth secondary fire).
- Hitting the scenery self damage is capped at 75% shield or 50% health when no shield.
- Hitting an enemy can self damage can wipe out all shield and up to 75% health. If you have less than 4 points of health then you die.

This still punishes players who don't respect the explosion, but doesn't punish them for sloppy teammates and punishes them less for clipping invisible parts of the level.

There's no real difference between Lenz hitting scenery and other weapons hitting scenery that isn't solved by simple rescaling the mishap damage.
Capping is - as previously stated - not acceptable. Paper frames and tank frames should have different experiences - and capped damage just means that you're one Magus use / health pad use / Vazarin dash away from making that effect irrelevant. That's not a real risk or punishment.

You'll learn your scenery nuances in general (and can bug DE about bad hitboxing if you must). Every game with risk/reward weapons has the same experience in that regard, trying to claim special treatment is just being kind of entitled. You don't have to use the risky gear if you're not willing to deal with that, make sure you have clear shots, and over time, learn the little details of the finite tiles present in the game.

But okay, let's directly address bounces and ally fire:

• Allied collision is disabled in general. Projectiles which can have productive results from attaching to allies enables ally collision - this includes Abilities (e.g. Vauban teslas, Ivara cloak arrows), weapon innate effects (e.g. sending your friend in covered in Castanas) and mods that grant such potential (e.g. Adhesive Blast) since these are either non-intrusive or have a delayed/triggered effect to put the burden of misuse back on the player.
• For the sake of bouncing explosives / triggered explosives we can take a leaf out of the Elytron Archwing's book and draw UI markers on the fired projectile(s) which allows the player who used them to better operate around these bounces and know where their triggers are going off. Triggered explosives already have a limit on active projectiles, so we're not going to get into some sort of critical clutter situation.

 

12 minutes ago, (XB1)Zweimander said:

A very simple sollution is to make self damage only the base damage of the weapon unaffected by mods, this isn't rocket science people! Still allow procs to go through and stuff but if the damage is no more then the base damage unmodded then the complaints will turn into next to nothing and Cautious shot may let the squishier frames live with the unmodded self damage and 99% damage reduction. My suggestion is much simpler and would be more or less effortless on DE's part so I believe this is the best course of action.

That turns explosives into the Tonkor, which we already know is an undesirable outcome. My suggestion is equally effortless. It's literally "throw a formula at the damage if the player is hitting themselves". One and done.

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

5 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Capping is - as previously stated - not acceptable. Paper frames and tank frames should have different experiences - 

They will, Inaros with just 25% of his health left is better off than most frames start out.

Basically, you're saying Inaros/Rhino/etc should be able to survive when squishy frames don't, but that's going to be just about impossible because the band where self-damage reduction hits that sweet spot is going to be fairly small (compared to the total damage) and moving all the time.

You need all the explosive weapons to fit in the band, regardless of riven disposition and future mods.

A cap is just a more consistent way to do that.

5 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

just means that you're one Magus use / health pad use / Vazarin dash away from making that effect irrelevant

True of any effect that doesn't insta kill you, but those are also tools not every player will have.

5 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

You'll learn your scenery nuances in general

Yeah, I know them for most maps. Learning bugs is a poor excuse. It also doesn't work - I know taking an Angstrum to Eris or Derelict is suicide. It's just unworkable.

5 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

You don't have to use the risky gear

I know, but I'd like to because it's fun. I love the Lenz, but this is what I mean by predictable. When you blow yourself up with the Lenz it's always your fault, and that has a risk-reward dynamic.

Dying because you hadn't learned that this wall is invisibly slightly taller is not fun. It's not skill based, it's random.

The Prisma Angstrum is easily modded into the highest damage secondary in the game. There's a reason nobody uses it. 

It needs to be risky to use, but 

5 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Allied collision is disabled in general. Projectiles which can have productive results from attaching to allies enables ally collision -

Yeah, but if it can be off or on for different contexts then why not different weapons. I might want to stick a castanta to my teammate, I never want to bounce a Tonkor off them.

5 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

For the sake of bouncing explosives / triggered explosives we can take a leaf out of the Elytron Archwing's book and draw UI markers on the fired projectile(s)

That would help with the Tonkor and the the like. Just adding trails and a glow in the energy colour would be enough.

 

[TheLexiConArtist]

54 minutes ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

They will, Inaros with just 25% of his health left is better off than most frames start out.

Basically, you're saying Inaros/Rhino/etc should be able to survive when squishy frames don't, but that's going to be just about impossible because the band where self-damage reduction hits that sweet spot is going to be fairly small (compared to the total damage) and moving all the time.

You need all the explosive weapons to fit in the band, regardless of riven disposition and future mods.

A cap is just a more consistent way to do that.

Did you actually read my solution suggestion and the examples? It's incredibly easy to tweak with the formula to reach that sweet spot. Just need to slap a few datapoints in a spreadsheet and tinker with the two variables to get the right mix of base and growth.

And if power creep happens later, necessitating further buffs to avoid too-early fatalities? Just nudge the variables again.One of the examples in there, a very low base (10) with full (1) growth flattening causes one million outgoing to do 138 self-damage. Obviously that's way overkill for an actual balanced self-damage level but it goes to show how effective that downscaling formula can be.

54 minutes ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

True of any effect that doesn't insta kill you, but those are also tools not every player will have.

Everyone can craft health pads at the very least. The difference you're not seeing is that capping the damage means that it's never a risk because of that, where a more consistent scaling brings a healthier progression as modding increases. It keeps risk and reward linked, instead of just stretching the reward out past a capped risk.

You bring multiple weapons for that reason too. You try to 'thread the needle' knowingly at your own risk rather than getting a clearer shot in a more open area.

(Secondaries are currently universally irrelevant because of kitguns, but that's a whole problem of its own. They're the new-age Tonkor meta and I hope DE has the balls to address it soon.)

53 minutes ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

Yeah, but if it can be off or on for different contexts then why not different weapons. I might want to stick a castanta to my teammate, I never want to bounce a Tonkor off them.

That would help with the Tonkor and the the like. Just adding trails and a glow in the energy colour would be enough.

Those were both suggestions of additional changes that could be made - and exactly as you say, Tonkor 'nades wouldn't bounce off friends because it's vanishingly unlikely that you're going to want to do that for productive results. As opposed to Castanas naturally, or if you slotted Adhesive since that causes a delay on the explosion at worst, giving you a get-out chance like the Lenz does.

Edited May 19, 2019 by TheLexiConArtist

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

7 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Did you actually read my solution suggestion and the examples? It's incredibly easy to tweak with the formula to reach that sweet spot.

I have, and that tweaking is kind of my point. DE are terrible at rebalancing - they almost never do it and there are loads of unbalanced broken things in Warframe that have been like that for years.

It's easy - they just have to run your formula for all self damage guns every time they bring out a new gun with self damage, alter an existing one, change riven disposition, or bring out a new mod that affects damage, multishot or any weird stats that affect damage (like the Angstrum that scales with magazine size).

They aren't going to do that.

But let's look at the numbers...

On 2019-05-18 at 4:21 PM, TheLexiConArtist said:

Weapon damage X, with variables Y and Z in the following equation:
SELFDAMAGE = X * (1 - (Y / (X ^ (Z/X)))
Where Y is a variable (approaching or equal 1) determining growth rates
Where Z is a variable determining base reductions

  Hide contents

 

For X = 500, 5000, 1000000 where Y = 0.98 and Z = 30
X = 500         : SELFDAMAGE = 162
X = 5000       : SELFDAMAGE = 344
X = 1000000 : SELFDAMAGE = 20406

For X = 500, 5000, 1000000 where Y = 0.99 and Z = 30
X = 500         : SELFDAMAGE = 159
X = 5000       : SELFDAMAGE = 297
X = 1000000 : SELFDAMAGE = 10410

For X = 500, 5000, 1000000 where Y = 1 and Z = 30
X = 500         : SELFDAMAGE = 156
X = 5000       : SELFDAMAGE = 249
X = 1000000 : SELFDAMAGE = 414

For X = 500, 5000, 1000000 where Y = 1 and Z = 10
X = 500         : SELFDAMAGE = 58
X = 5000       : SELFDAMAGE = 84
X = 1000000 : SELFDAMAGE = 138

For X = 500, 5000, 1000000 where Y = 1 and Z = 100
X = 500         : SELFDAMAGE = 355
X = 5000       : SELFDAMAGE = 783
X = 1000000 : SELFDAMAGE = 1380

 

All numbers shown with no Cautious Shot in a build.
I'd definitely recommend that Cautious actually be nerfed back to 90% with that formula in particular. Because look. Your innate self-damage reduction now already scales due to the inversion of exponential growth. You probably won't need 99% off that any more, assuming DE picks some appropriate variables up there.

Personal eyeballing says Y=0.99 Z=30 could be a good spot based on the three datapoints I worked from

They're slightly odd datapoints, as most of the weapons we're talking about do 10-50k damage before crit/status.

2 of you examples end up too trivial - nobody's going to worry about 138 damage.

Your sweet spot will do nothing to tanks - Inaros will ignore 297 damage. They should still get punished (as it were) as otherwise it just makes a tank meta.

Any formula needs to account for the frame's health - I think we agree that we want self damage to feel painful. It should be a mistake, potentially a fatal one but often recoverable. You're XYZ formula probably has a sweet spot for most current weapons with a selection of tanky frames, but it's also complicated and needs constant balancing.

On 2019-05-18 at 4:21 PM, TheLexiConArtist said:

"Self-damage [with Cautious Shot] should be a [flat value | capped value | percentage value]

• With or without the mod slot given up, this has the effect of non-scaling risk/reward balance and/or functionally irrelevant self-damage. Sand daddy doesn't care about your capped 500 health self-shots. A Paper Loki should probably care a bit more about shooting his feet than Sand Daddy, which fails if it's percentage. Flat values? That's the Tonkor, and no. These defeat the fundamental draw of a risky explosive - you always get more risk with greater rewards. It's just no fun if you don't lose the occasional eyebrow

 

Yeah, it shouldn't be a flat value - it should be capped as a proportion of the frame's effective health. If you're down to 25% health, in any frame, tank or squishy, that's going to hurt and you're not going to want to do it again.

[TheLexiConArtist]

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

I have, and that tweaking is kind of my point. DE are terrible at rebalancing - they almost never do it and there are loads of unbalanced broken things in Warframe that have been like that for years.

It's easy - they just have to run your formula for all self damage guns every time they bring out a new gun with self damage, alter an existing one, change riven disposition, or bring out a new mod that affects damage, multishot or any weird stats that affect damage (like the Angstrum that scales with magazine size).

They aren't going to do that.

Ah, you're misinterpreting my intention then. It's not idealised for plugging into a weapon's calculations then tweaking for that weapon. It's for plugging onto the 'player gets damaged' routine, and tweaked on a global scale.

You did however make me realise that the flattened growth still exhibits linear properties with multishot. The Angstrum especially is an awkward beast. Maybe your expectation should actually be used instead, much like status being distributed among multishot - at moment of fire, the total damage is calculated and distributed among the individual projectiles.

Capped damage still suffers the same issue, though - what happens when you shoot 4 rockets, each capped at 25% of your health, and eat all of them? Yep, dead.

 

1 minute ago, (XB1)KayAitch said:

But let's look at the numbers...

They're slightly odd datapoints, as most of the weapons we're talking about do 10-50k damage before crit/status.

2 of you examples end up too trivial - nobody's going to worry about 138 damage.

Your sweet spot will do nothing to tanks - Inaros will ignore 297 damage. They should still get punished (as it were) as otherwise it just makes a tank meta.

Well, first of all, remember that we're looking to not only reduce fatality on the current output but also allow all explosives to be given greater outputs like the Lenz. Crit also does apply to self-damage - even if it's 5% you have to take that crit damage into account for self-murdering. You can't simply disable this as it removes the balance for any critical explosives, since they're getting better output 'for free' then.

Secondly, the examples - the formula itself - are just proofs of concept. Obviously the 1/10 is overkill, but like I said, that's just something I threw together in a half hour's testing. No numbers are final. There's a lot of range in those two humble variables.

For reference, a 'base' of 0 and 'growth' coefficient of 0.7 results in our current "flat 70% damage reduction". Any growth coefficient higher than that means we've got the potential for less damage than the status quo, but depending on itself and the 'base', early damage might be higher or lower.

For example: Y=0.8 Z=500

X = 500 = SD 499.20
X = 5000 = SD 3293.28
X = 1000000 = SD 205507

There due to the high base, we take pretty much the full force of base damage but still have almost one-third less self-damage than our baseline by 1 million output.

That's a terrible range though, we wouldn't use it. Just an example of how tweaky we can get with that.

 

I don't think it's a bad thing to let tanks shrug off self-damage more so than paper frames. The guy in the bombproof suit is going to be a bit more sturdy if the worst happens than Johnny Tourist in his t-shirt and shorts, isn't he?

Yes, you'll probably see more tanks using explosives in general, but cautious shot is going to level that playing field for the softer frames. You lose some output but get to potentially survive accidents as Loki. A fair trade. Besides, damage reduction effects make the options far wider. It's only the soft targets who lack such things - your Trinity with Blessing/Link active is going to have a grand time with 16 times her effective health and shields, or Gara with 10 times hers thanks to Splinter Storm.

[(PSN)chibitonka]

On 2019-05-20 at 5:17 AM, TheLexiConArtist said:

Ah, you're misinterpreting my intention then. It's not idealised for plugging into a weapon's calculations then tweaking for that weapon. It's for plugging onto the 'player gets damaged' routine, and tweaked on a global scale.

You did however make me realise that the flattened growth still exhibits linear properties with multishot. The Angstrum especially is an awkward beast. Maybe your expectation should actually be used instead, much like status being distributed among multishot - at moment of fire, the total damage is calculated and distributed among the individual projectiles.

Capped damage still suffers the same issue, though - what happens when you shoot 4 rockets, each capped at 25% of your health, and eat all of them? Yep, dead.

 

Well, first of all, remember that we're looking to not only reduce fatality on the current output but also allow all explosives to be given greater outputs like the Lenz. Crit also does apply to self-damage - even if it's 5% you have to take that crit damage into account for self-murdering. You can't simply disable this as it removes the balance for any critical explosives, since they're getting better output 'for free' then.

Secondly, the examples - the formula itself - are just proofs of concept. Obviously the 1/10 is overkill, but like I said, that's just something I threw together in a half hour's testing. No numbers are final. There's a lot of range in those two humble variables.

For reference, a 'base' of 0 and 'growth' coefficient of 0.7 results in our current "flat 70% damage reduction". Any growth coefficient higher than that means we've got the potential for less damage than the status quo, but depending on itself and the 'base', early damage might be higher or lower.

For example: Y=0.8 Z=500

X = 500 = SD 499.20
X = 5000 = SD 3293.28
X = 1000000 = SD 205507

There due to the high base, we take pretty much the full force of base damage but still have almost one-third less self-damage than our baseline by 1 million output.

That's a terrible range though, we wouldn't use it. Just an example of how tweaky we can get with that.

 

I don't think it's a bad thing to let tanks shrug off self-damage more so than paper frames. The guy in the bombproof suit is going to be a bit more sturdy if the worst happens than Johnny Tourist in his t-shirt and shorts, isn't he?

Yes, you'll probably see more tanks using explosives in general, but cautious shot is going to level that playing field for the softer frames. You lose some output but get to potentially survive accidents as Loki. A fair trade. Besides, damage reduction effects make the options far wider. It's only the soft targets who lack such things - your Trinity with Blessing/Link active is going to have a grand time with 16 times her effective health and shields, or Gara with 10 times hers thanks to Splinter Storm.

Tbh if you're using explosive weapons you are signing a non official agreement that you are fine with the chance of getting downed by it. 

The real issue is the players not the mechanic itself.

If people want no brain aoe they can always use beam weapons. 

Imo would be thrilled seeing aoe range of explosive weapons tripled and their dmg scaling better. 

Some ppl want to see the system burn. *raises hand smiling*

[DeadVoid118]

On 2019-05-18 at 9:21 AM, TheLexiConArtist said:

Two facts we know:

1. The Tonkor Meta existed and was a horrible mistake. DE acknowledged, hard-argued as it was, that Self-damage should exist on explosives.

I kind of miss the Tonkor, actually. Sure, it was broken, but at least I used it. Now it just collects dust.

On 2019-05-18 at 9:21 AM, TheLexiConArtist said:

Ill-fated 'solutions' and arguments against Self-Damage, with rebuttal:

• "Self-damage should be removed entirely"
  • No, as we had the Tonkor days and they were the most dull and unengaging of times. We know, see the big facts up there, that we want self-damage.
• "Self-damaging weapons are (mostly) outpaced by non-damaging alternatives"
  • An argument presented as corollary to 'just remove it or make it irrelevant'. But DE cannot make explosives powerful if people are going to still complain right now that they're killing themselves. With Cautious, even. We solve the self-damage scale, we can invite damage buffs to happen. Risk-reward curves where we don't have old Tonkors but you don't kill yourself on a half-modded weapon.
• "Self-damage [with Cautious Shot] should be a [flat value | capped value | percentage value]
  • With or without the mod slot given up, this has the effect of non-scaling risk/reward balance and/or functionally irrelevant self-damage. Sand daddy doesn't care about your capped 500 health self-shots. A Paper Loki should probably care a bit more about shooting his feet than Sand Daddy, which fails if it's percentage. Flat values? That's the Tonkor, and no. These defeat the fundamental draw of a risky explosive - you always get more risk with greater rewards. It's just no fun if you don't lose the occasional eyebrow.
• "I am careful, but enemies/people jump in front of me!"
  • This is not a self-damage problem. Enemies are your fault - situational awareness. For ally projectile blocking (and subsequent exploding-in-face), this issue is separate and affects other projectiles. It needs addressing but not specifically as self-damage.

Have a rebuttal for your rebuttals.

1. Eh, sure, I'd like self-damage on some AOE weapons. It's no fun if every weapon acts the same. Also, no self-damage has little to do with the Tonkor. The problem with the Tonkor was it had good amounts of damage for an AOE weapon and no self-damage and easy headshots and good crits. It was a cumulative thing and self-damage wouldn't have solved its capability to vaporize rooms, merely offered a possible drawback that might've made it a balanced weapon.

2. Sure, numbers can be changed, I agree.

3. I don't know about you, but I don't like losing eyebrows and having to rely on revives. Revives are a bad patch for bad mechanics (see how easy it is to die to random things and how buffs just don't work to certain things for no reason and how easy it is to make a mistake, dying instantly) and I don't want to add more bad mechanics for revives to try to work against. The point is that the percentage values/flat values are scaling to the base damage. Gun has X base damage so it has Y self-damage. Makes sense. The amount of damage you can achieve via mods is inevitably capped by base damage anyway. Also, see my previous points about the Tonkor. Numbers can be changed, and the Tonkor's cumulative badness doesn't mean flat values are bad in and of themselves. Also, also, we don't need to make glass cannons out of weaker glass. Sure, logically speaking, a lightweight like Ivara should be more conducive to blowing themselves up than someone like Inaros. However, what about mechanically speaking? You're only making health more important when it serves a fairly important purpose already. The risk is increased for your choice of frame/mods without reward. I see no reason for this.

4. This is a self-damage problem as much as situational awareness and clipping and glitching. The problem does not exist without self-damage. Weapons need to be reliable or have a defined chance to fail. And, as mentioned prior, there's too much clipping and glitching for some weapons to be all that consistent. In fact, I've used the Tonkor rather recently just for fun, and I found it worse than boring. The Tonkor right now has its grenades bounce all over, 50% of the time against invisible objects or hitboxes that don't align with visuals, and generally results in insane amounts of unpredictability. Shooting directly at a group of enemies within a hallway has my grenades disappearing and magically teleporting behind me while whispering 'heh, nothing personnel, kid' as I find myself relying on revives and melee/secondaries to actually finish the match.

Ultimately, your solution works no better (if not worse) than the proposed other solutions, all of which are still better than the current system.

On 2019-05-18 at 9:21 AM, TheLexiConArtist said:

Additionally - for that ally-projectile thing. Can't we just restrict projectile ally-collision for things that "could have a reason to", like sticking Penta grenades with Adhesive Blast to your local melee enthusiast? I'm sure every one of the 12 people still using bows would also appreciate it if their friends wouldn't chew the arrow in midair of a shot that was perfectly lined up.

Yes please.

[MJ12]

On 2019-05-18 at 5:21 AM, TheLexiConArtist said:

The Tonkor Meta existed and was a horrible mistake. DE acknowledged, hard-argued as it was, that Self-damage should exist on explosives.

The Tonkor meta was only a "horrible mistake" because the Tonkor's extremely high crit chance and crit damage multipliers made it put out more damage than it should, overshadowing other weapons. All DE needed to do to rein the Tonkor in was to reduce its crit chance and/or crit damage. If DE had done so and not touched the lack of self-damage on explosives, the Tonkor meta would have ended because it would no longer have outclassed other weapons. The horrible mistake was having self-damage in any way, shape or form in Warframe in the first place.

Like, your analysis is based on the implicit belief that risk-reward balancing is the be-all and end-all of all balancing systems, and then misunderstands how risk-reward balancing works in the first place.

Risk-reward balancing is a tool that is used to encourage players to engage in risky behavior that is desirable for pacing or gameplay experience reasons. Meld in XCOM exists as 'risk-reward balancing,' as does the bonus critical chance on flanking shots. The entire intent is to encourage players to make more risky tactical moves (aggressive flanking or aggressive forward pushes which risk activating more enemies and causing you to get overwhelmed) over extremely low-risk maneuvers (overwatch creeping), because although the latter is extremely safe, it is an extremely tedious and time-consuming strategy that turns even easy missions into absurdly long affairs as you creep a few tiles at a time towards possible enemies, turning what should be a twenty-minute mission into two hours of obsessively ending the turn after you move all your guys one or two tiles forward then tell them to overwatch. The entire point of the risk-reward balancing in XCOM is to keep players from doing that, because players will no longer feel like they're being punished for not doing slow overwatch creeping.

Similarly, the way Royal Guard works in the Devil May Cry series - where you can nullify all damage from enemy attacks if you block right when an enemy attacks - is a good example of risk-reward balancing. If Royal Guard merely neutralized a high proportion of incoming damage all the time but neutralized enough damage for it to be useful as an alternative to your other defensive maneuvers, no matter your timing, it would encourage hiding behind your guard whenever an enemy might attack and only poking occasionally when you know it's safe to attack. This would turn what should be a five-minute boss fight into thirty minutes of holding down the guard button and occasionally launching poke attacks to whittle away at the health bar. The entire point of risk-reward balancing here is to add a reward for engaging in risky behavior because the risky behavior is actually desirable. For that to be relevant, the risky behavior must be a moment-to-moment decision rather than something that locks your choices for a significant period of time (so feedback is immediate and you can take a different tack if your risky actions don't seem to be working or things change to make the risk too high), it must be beneficial compared to the less-risky behavior (so there's a reason you might want to encourage it), the risk needs to be low enough that players don't feel like they're being punished for trying to play the way the game designers want you to play, and the reward needs to be low enough that risk-averse players don't feel like they need to engage in risky behavior to stay competitive.

Self-damage in Warframe is actually anti-risk-reward. It punishes players for not playing it safe with explosives, because missed shots are extremely threatening, especially in high-level content. Instead, it encourages players who want to use explosive weapons to either avoid the most difficult content (because the opportunity cost of being downed is much lower in a low-difficulty mission where reviving a player is basically guaranteed) or to use explosive weapons in the most boring possible way, by standing on a vantage point and raining shots into a chokepoint, while depending on defensive mods and powers like Adaptation/Shatter Shield/etc. to make it so that you aren't significantly threatened despite staying absolutely still.

Furthermore risk-reward balancing is utterly irrelevant to the use of launchers, because it has absolutely none of the qualities which make risk-reward balancing desirable. The choice of whether you want to use a launcher or not is not a moment-to-moment tactical choice, but a massive investment which may take several hours and several formas. The risk of using a self-damaging weapon is significant in the relatively high-difficulty game modes where revives aren't guaranteed and going down might put you meaningfully closer to mission failure, and your argument is that you want to make launchers so overpowered that people might take them into arbitrations or whatever even so.

Your suggestions just lead to the Tonkor meta, except it's not just the people who dislike the Tonkor complaining, it's also the people engaging in the Tonkor meta complaining both about the non-Tonkor users (who are meaningfully reducing the overall firepower of their teams by refusing to use a launcher) and the Tonkor (because the weapon is frustrating to handle, has a mandatory anti-splash-damage mod if you want to not instantly fall over because explosives are 'dangerous to both parties', and now it's not just the people who want to play with launchers using them, you need to use a launcher if you want to keep up in the meta). So it's actually in all ways worse than the Tonkor meta.

Risk-reward is not the be-all and end-all of balancing, even in terms of risk management. Sometimes, however, what you want to do is to make it so that players are less likely to avoid certain risks, rather than encouraging players to actively take those risks. Perhaps it's because the current cost of taking that risk is high enough that even stacking a whole bunch of rewards doesn't make the risk desirable (loss aversion), or it's because the game design basically forces you to take that risk all the time, or it's because adding more rewards to the risky behavior would create an undesirable game state (because frustration isn't actually a useful counterbalance to power-all it means is that people will engage in the behavior that gets them the most possible power, then get frustrated about it) In that case, the better idea isn't to add rewards to the risk but rather to reduce the risk of the behavior until it's in-line with how often you think players should be engaging with it. Given that 'mash LMB' is a very common occurrence in Warframe, that risk probably should be extremely low.

The 'risk' of firing explosives in close proximity to yourself is mostly unavoidable in Warframe, short of not taking an explosive weapon into a fight in the first place or fighting exclusively on the open terrain of Plains of Eidolon or Orb Vallis. Fights are often in close quarters, enemy and player movement speeds are high, and enemies are extremely numerous and attack the player in constant hordes. In endless mission content, which is a disproportionate part of high-difficulty content, the players have little to no initiative-the place and time a player engages in combat is mostly up to things outside the control of the player and engagements are generally started when the enemy blunders into you. It is very unlikely that this will intentionally change.

The solution to this is simply to keep launchers on a level where they're competitive but not outshone by non-launcher weapons and remove self-damage. Dealing damage in a radius doesn't make it somehow impossible to balance and make viable-but-not-overpowering without adding in self-damage. In fact, I think the paranoia about the Tonkor meta is actually telling. DE changed the Tonkor a while ago so that unless you have Firestorm on it, you practically speaking cannot deal self-damage to yourself with it (because it detonates on impact and has an arming distance larger than its blast radius). Somehow, the Tonkor meta didn't return despite the fact that for all intents and purposes, the Tonkor no longer has any self damage.

The Tonkor became meta because its stats were out-of-line of other weapons, not because it lacked self-damage. After DE cut its effective damage by 75% (because it was no longer dealing critical headshot damage with every shot due to the explosion headshot damage bugfix) and reduced its critical chance so it no longer scored crits as reliably (further reducing its average damage by about 20%), the Tonkor was no longer a meta weapon because its stats were now in-line with other weapons, and even effectively removing the self-damage they introduced to it didn't change that. Or to put it a different way, I bet you could make any weapon 'meta' if you multiplied its damage per shot by 5, and make any 'meta' weapon non-meta if you reduced its effective DPS by 80%. No addition or removal of self damage required.

Edited June 5, 2019 by MJ12

[(PSN)chibitonka]

2 hours ago, MJ12 said:

The Tonkor meta was only a "horrible mistake" because the Tonkor's extremely high crit chance and crit damage multipliers made it put out more damage than it should, overshadowing other weapons. All DE needed to do to rein the Tonkor in was to reduce its crit chance and/or crit damage. If DE had done so and not touched the lack of self-damage on explosives, the Tonkor meta would have ended because it would no longer have outclassed other weapons. The horrible mistake was having self-damage in any way, shape or form in Warframe in the first place.

Like, your analysis is based on the implicit belief that risk-reward balancing is the be-all and end-all of all balancing systems, and then misunderstands how risk-reward balancing works in the first place.

Risk-reward balancing is a tool that is used to encourage players to engage in risky behavior that is desirable for pacing or gameplay experience reasons. Meld in XCOM exists as 'risk-reward balancing,' as does the bonus critical chance on flanking shots. The entire intent is to encourage players to make more risky tactical moves (aggressive flanking or aggressive forward pushes which risk activating more enemies and causing you to get overwhelmed) over extremely low-risk maneuvers (overwatch creeping), because although the latter is extremely safe, it is an extremely tedious and time-consuming strategy that turns even easy missions into absurdly long affairs as you creep a few tiles at a time towards possible enemies, turning what should be a twenty-minute mission into two hours of obsessively ending the turn after you move all your guys one or two tiles forward then tell them to overwatch. The entire point of the risk-reward balancing in XCOM is to keep players from doing that, because players will no longer feel like they're being punished for not doing slow overwatch creeping.

Similarly, the way Royal Guard works in the Devil May Cry series - where you can nullify all damage from enemy attacks if you block right when an enemy attacks - is a good example of risk-reward balancing. If Royal Guard merely neutralized a high proportion of incoming damage all the time but neutralized enough damage for it to be useful as an alternative to your other defensive maneuvers, no matter your timing, it would encourage hiding behind your guard whenever an enemy might attack and only poking occasionally when you know it's safe to attack. This would turn what should be a five-minute boss fight into thirty minutes of holding down the guard button and occasionally launching poke attacks to whittle away at the health bar. The entire point of risk-reward balancing here is to add a reward for engaging in risky behavior because the risky behavior is actually desirable. For that to be relevant, the risky behavior must be a moment-to-moment decision rather than something that locks your choices for a significant period of time (so feedback is immediate and you can take a different tack if your risky actions don't seem to be working or things change to make the risk too high), it must be beneficial compared to the less-risky behavior (so there's a reason you might want to encourage it), the risk needs to be low enough that players don't feel like they're being punished for trying to play the way the game designers want you to play, and the reward needs to be low enough that risk-averse players don't feel like they need to engage in risky behavior to stay competitive.

Self-damage in Warframe is actually anti-risk-reward. It punishes players for not playing it safe with explosives, because missed shots are extremely threatening, especially in high-level content. Instead, it encourages players who want to use explosive weapons to either avoid the most difficult content (because the opportunity cost of being downed is much lower in a low-difficulty mission where reviving a player is basically guaranteed) or to use explosive weapons in the most boring possible way, by standing on a vantage point and raining shots into a chokepoint, while depending on defensive mods and powers like Adaptation/Shatter Shield/etc. to make it so that you aren't significantly threatened despite staying absolutely still.

Furthermore risk-reward balancing is utterly irrelevant to the use of launchers, because it has absolutely none of the qualities which make risk-reward balancing desirable. The choice of whether you want to use a launcher or not is not a moment-to-moment tactical choice, but a massive investment which may take several hours and several formas. The risk of using a self-damaging weapon is significant in the relatively high-difficulty game modes where revives aren't guaranteed and going down might put you meaningfully closer to mission failure, and your argument is that you want to make launchers so overpowered that people might take them into arbitrations or whatever even so.

Your suggestions just lead to the Tonkor meta, except it's not just the people who dislike the Tonkor complaining, it's also the people engaging in the Tonkor meta complaining both about the non-Tonkor users (who are meaningfully reducing the overall firepower of their teams by refusing to use a launcher) and the Tonkor (because the weapon is frustrating to handle, has a mandatory anti-splash-damage mod if you want to not instantly fall over because explosives are 'dangerous to both parties', and now it's not just the people who want to play with launchers using them, you need to use a launcher if you want to keep up in the meta). So it's actually in all ways worse than the Tonkor meta.

Risk-reward is not the be-all and end-all of balancing, even in terms of risk management. Sometimes, however, what you want to do is to make it so that players are less likely to avoid certain risks, rather than encouraging players to actively take those risks. Perhaps it's because the current cost of taking that risk is high enough that even stacking a whole bunch of rewards doesn't make the risk desirable (loss aversion), or it's because the game design basically forces you to take that risk all the time, or it's because adding more rewards to the risky behavior would create an undesirable game state (because frustration isn't actually a useful counterbalance to power-all it means is that people will engage in the behavior that gets them the most possible power, then get frustrated about it) In that case, the better idea isn't to add rewards to the risk but rather to reduce the risk of the behavior until it's in-line with how often you think players should be engaging with it. Given that 'mash LMB' is a very common occurrence in Warframe, that risk probably should be extremely low.

The 'risk' of firing explosives in close proximity to yourself is mostly unavoidable in Warframe, short of not taking an explosive weapon into a fight in the first place or fighting exclusively on the open terrain of Plains of Eidolon or Orb Vallis. Fights are often in close quarters, enemy and player movement speeds are high, and enemies are extremely numerous and attack the player in constant hordes. In endless mission content, which is a disproportionate part of high-difficulty content, the players have little to no initiative-the place and time a player engages in combat is mostly up to things outside the control of the player and engagements are generally started when the enemy blunders into you. It is very unlikely that this will intentionally change.

The solution to this is simply to keep launchers on a level where they're competitive but not outshone by non-launcher weapons and remove self-damage. Dealing damage in a radius doesn't make it somehow impossible to balance and make viable-but-not-overpowering without adding in self-damage. In fact, I think the paranoia about the Tonkor meta is actually telling. DE changed the Tonkor a while ago so that unless you have Firestorm on it, you practically speaking cannot deal self-damage to yourself with it (because it detonates on impact and has an arming distance larger than its blast radius). Somehow, the Tonkor meta didn't return despite the fact that for all intents and purposes, the Tonkor no longer has any self damage.

The Tonkor became meta because its stats were out-of-line of other weapons, not because it lacked self-damage. After DE cut its effective damage by 75% (because it was no longer dealing critical headshot damage with every shot due to the explosion headshot damage bugfix) and reduced its critical chance so it no longer scored crits as reliably (further reducing its average damage by about 20%), the Tonkor was no longer a meta weapon because its stats were now in-line with other weapons, and even effectively removing the self-damage they introduced to it didn't change that. Or to put it a different way, I bet you could make any weapon 'meta' if you multiplied its damage per shot by 5, and make any 'meta' weapon non-meta if you reduced its effective DPS by 80%. No addition or removal of self damage required.

Or just be careful when using them lmao.

No self dmg in a game where explosives can be launched sounds like madness. Players can parkour far enough out of range of the blast, wall latch, aim glide, slide and blast. It's the players responsibility to themselves to not get caught in the fire of their own shots. If they can't even do that they shouldn't be using explosives to begin with. 

Has nothing to do with tonkor meta or w/e. It explodes, so does larkspur and phantasma when alt fired. If you get caught in your own blast that's on you. Only exception to that is if you get grabbed by scorpion wannabe enemies that pull you into it before detonation. 

Triple the effective range, and scale up it's dmg properties. Tbh still annoyed blast doesn't sunder armor, shields and blow corpses apart. That could just be me being a explosives freak tho.

[TheLexiConArtist]

9 hours ago, Keylan118 said:

I kind of miss the Tonkor, actually. Sure, it was broken, but at least I used it. Now it just collects dust.

Have a rebuttal for your rebuttals.

1. Eh, sure, I'd like self-damage on some AOE weapons. It's no fun if every weapon acts the same. Also, no self-damage has little to do with the Tonkor. The problem with the Tonkor was it had good amounts of damage for an AOE weapon and no self-damage and easy headshots and good crits. It was a cumulative thing and self-damage wouldn't have solved its capability to vaporize rooms, merely offered a possible drawback that might've made it a balanced weapon.

2. Sure, numbers can be changed, I agree.

3. I don't know about you, but I don't like losing eyebrows and having to rely on revives. Revives are a bad patch for bad mechanics (see how easy it is to die to random things and how buffs just don't work to certain things for no reason and how easy it is to make a mistake, dying instantly) and I don't want to add more bad mechanics for revives to try to work against. The point is that the percentage values/flat values are scaling to the base damage. Gun has X base damage so it has Y self-damage. Makes sense. The amount of damage you can achieve via mods is inevitably capped by base damage anyway. Also, see my previous points about the Tonkor. Numbers can be changed, and the Tonkor's cumulative badness doesn't mean flat values are bad in and of themselves. Also, also, we don't need to make glass cannons out of weaker glass. Sure, logically speaking, a lightweight like Ivara should be more conducive to blowing themselves up than someone like Inaros. However, what about mechanically speaking? You're only making health more important when it serves a fairly important purpose already. The risk is increased for your choice of frame/mods without reward. I see no reason for this.

4. This is a self-damage problem as much as situational awareness and clipping and glitching. The problem does not exist without self-damage. Weapons need to be reliable or have a defined chance to fail. And, as mentioned prior, there's too much clipping and glitching for some weapons to be all that consistent. In fact, I've used the Tonkor rather recently just for fun, and I found it worse than boring. The Tonkor right now has its grenades bounce all over, 50% of the time against invisible objects or hitboxes that don't align with visuals, and generally results in insane amounts of unpredictability. Shooting directly at a group of enemies within a hallway has my grenades disappearing and magically teleporting behind me while whispering 'heh, nothing personnel, kid' as I find myself relying on revives and melee/secondaries to actually finish the match.

Ultimately, your solution works no better (if not worse) than the proposed other solutions, all of which are still better than the current system.

1. To be fair, DE spent so much time reining in the power of the Tonkor that by the time they caved into accepting self-damage they also softened its efficacy to the point where self-damage wasn't just 'adding risk to justify the reward' any more. Arguably, because people were so argumentative for keeping self-damage off, they invited the power nerfs in much the same way as current complaints preclude relevant power buffs. It, too, could probably use bumping back up a bit once we resolve the self-damage overall.
   Agree that not all weapons need self-damage, in fact I've gone out of my way to observe that not all AOE weapons would be considered 'conventional explosive'. Even in the case of damage type - I don't think anyone would try saying the cubes of the Quanta are comparable to a bog-standard everyday grenade, so they could very well avoid the self-damage treatment on that criterion.
2. --
3. You might not want to risk yourself in the way I described. This is fine, of course, but you can't demand the entire archetype neutered for yourself when there are people who wouldn't mind. There are always going to be other options for those who abhor self-damage.
   I think the rest of your comment here is already answered in my original post. The trouble is the linear coupling of damage between the exponentially-required output (enemy scaling) and the limited buffer of the player's own health pool (for self-damage); this is why we apply a formula to flatten growth to preserve the idea that "More boom = more risk" without it getting too high too quickly that there's no dialling back to something sensible. Also, the tank/squishy difference is simply made up by the Cautious Shot mod remaining in existence. A tank is free to wield full power, a squishier frame who should have other appeal factors or benefits (but let's just agree that inter-Warframe balance being questionable is a separate issue) skims power off the top for a more survivable blast where needed. Depending on the variables DE gets fine control, and Cautious Shot itself would inevitably see nerfs now that it's no longer such an objective band-aid.
4. You should have all the time in the world to get used to such things during the mastery process, but besides that, the goal here is that you can generally survive a mishap at sub-'godly' builds. If it's incredibly important you don't ever drop, you go Cautious. Additionally, the suggestion I made about Elytron-like markers on active explosive projectiles would help you avoid weird Tonkor rebounds catching you unawares.

4 hours ago, MJ12 said:

The Tonkor meta was only a "horrible mistake" because the Tonkor's extremely high crit chance and crit damage multipliers made it put out more damage than it should, overshadowing other weapons. All DE needed to do to rein the Tonkor in was to reduce its crit chance and/or crit damage. If DE had done so and not touched the lack of self-damage on explosives, the Tonkor meta would have ended because it would no longer have outclassed other weapons. The horrible mistake was having self-damage in any way, shape or form in Warframe in the first place.

Actually, as you identify at the end of your post - they did try reducing the output of the Tonkor. By fixing automatic headshots, its damage dropped by a factor of 4.

Yet it still reigned supreme alongside the ever-obnoxious Synoid Simulor.

Only when they applied self-damage did it finally stop getting abused - although as I said in the previous portion, that came along with additional stat nerfs in the same patch that tipped the scale the opposite way instead of simply introducing the risk as inherent balance factor.

4 hours ago, MJ12 said:

Like, your analysis is based on the implicit belief that risk-reward balancing is the be-all and end-all of all balancing systems, and then misunderstands how risk-reward balancing works in the first place.

Risk-reward balancing is a tool that is used to encourage players to engage in risky behavior that is desirable for pacing or gameplay experience reasons.

Self-damage in Warframe is actually anti-risk-reward. It punishes players for not playing it safe with explosives, because missed shots are extremely threatening, especially in high-level content. Instead, it encourages players who want to use explosive weapons to either avoid the most difficult content (because the opportunity cost of being downed is much lower in a low-difficulty mission where reviving a player is basically guaranteed) or to use explosive weapons in the most boring possible way, by standing on a vantage point and raining shots into a chokepoint, while depending on defensive mods and powers like Adaptation/Shatter Shield/etc. to make it so that you aren't significantly threatened despite staying absolutely still.

Furthermore risk-reward balancing is utterly irrelevant to the use of launchers, because it has absolutely none of the qualities which make risk-reward balancing desirable. The choice of whether you want to use a launcher or not is not a moment-to-moment tactical choice, but a massive investment which may take several hours and several formas. The risk of using a self-damaging weapon is significant in the relatively high-difficulty game modes where revives aren't guaranteed and going down might put you meaningfully closer to mission failure, and your argument is that you want to make launchers so overpowered that people might take them into arbitrations or whatever even so.

--snipped for brevity--

The benefit of explosives is (was) large radial AOE damage. Self-damage was one of the drawbacks of conventional-typed explosives. You're mistakenly attributing the term to my entire argument when here 'risk-reward' only pertains to the relationship between damage dealt to enemies and damage dealt to oneself. That 'scaling risk-reward' simply means that you do more, you take more; the goal of rebalancing it without a cap means this relationship is maintained instead of simply falling apart past a certain point.

People used to use the Ogris, and Pentas, just fine. Contrarily, the Tonkor could be proven to outDPS the 'single target' poster child of the time even when considering its other drawbacks such as the more frequent reloads. Just because I didn't mention the fire rate, reload and all those other weapon balancing factors in this thread about the direct relationship of damage and self-damage does not mean that the self-damaging property is the be-all of balancing explosives against other weapon categories. It is, however, one archetypal facet of an explosive.

Let me give you a loose example:

• The Ignis is an AOE capable weapon which has drawbacks in exposure due to being continuous and not one large direct-damage blast, as well as some troubles with ammo economy.
• Explosive weapons have a wider area of coverage, deal large one-and-done direct damage; in the process, they trade the drawback of 'sitting out in the open streaming ammo into the enemy' for 'holds personal risk if misused'.

Different types of weapons with different balancing factors. The problem we have is not that 'personal risk exists on explosives', it's that 'the personal risk of explosives currently outweighs the additional rewards they bring'. Hence, we adjust that relationship.

After all, you can have your abilities, your sidearm, your melee and your Archgun for when an explosive isn't the right choice in the moment.

4 hours ago, MJ12 said:

Your suggestions just lead to the Tonkor meta, except it's not just the people who dislike the Tonkor complaining, it's also the people engaging in the Tonkor meta complaining both about the non-Tonkor users (who are meaningfully reducing the overall firepower of their teams by refusing to use a launcher) and the Tonkor (because the weapon is frustrating to handle, has a mandatory anti-splash-damage mod if you want to not instantly fall over because explosives are 'dangerous to both parties', and now it's not just the people who want to play with launchers using them, you need to use a launcher if you want to keep up in the meta). So it's actually in all ways worse than the Tonkor meta.

Just grabbing this bit out as its own bonus round because of the absurdity.

Because.. you know, we're not swaying full old-Tonkor on the damage dealt. Yes, I used data-points of 1 million damage, but that's not a recommendation of the levels to which I'm suggesting they buff launchers. It's just a data point to highlight the scaling.

The formula I propose has the variables in place to make "too godly, fatal now" land pretty much wherever DE sees fit. Cautious Shot no longer a band-aid, nerfed down as more of an impactfully 'corrupted' mod would ensure that if you're taking the risk down, you're giving up an appropriate proportion of whatever additional damage explosives actually got given.

The idea that all the paper warframes are going to be expected bring explosives for the damage while putting themselves at significant risk is frankly ridiculous. Peg the formula in the right place and it's just what explosives used to be before power creep on both ends skewed the balance. An option. Not an obligation.

 

Shotguns have the natural archetypal drawback of spreading out their damage instead of concentrating it, right?
So this approach has Cautious Shot work as counterbalance just like Tainted Shell does on Shotguns as opposed to Vicious Spread: One makes it less risky (more accurate) but reduces the reward (lower fire rate to pump out those more-accurate shots). One makes it more rewarding (more damage) but amplifies the risk (of missing so you only get partial damage).

[TaylorsContraction]

I'll just add that weapons like arca plasmor, catchmoon and whips do more damage, have just as much aoe and do no self damage. Self damage on explosives at this point in the game is just arbitrary nonsense. Aside from the tonkor, most launchers don't even do that much damage.

[TheLexiConArtist]

5 minutes ago, TaylorsContraction said:

I'll just add that weapons like arca plasmor, catchmoon and whips do more damage, have just as much aoe and do no self damage. Self damage on explosives at this point in the game is just arbitrary nonsense. Aside from the tonkor, most launchers don't even do that much damage.

see:

On 2019-05-18 at 4:21 PM, TheLexiConArtist said:

Ill-fated 'solutions' and arguments against Self-Damage, with rebuttal:

• "Self-damaging weapons are (mostly) outpaced by non-damaging alternatives"
  • An argument presented as corollary to 'just remove it or make it irrelevant'. But DE cannot make explosives powerful if people are going to still complain right now that they're killing themselves. With Cautious, even. We solve the self-damage scale, we can invite damage buffs to happen. Risk-reward curves where we don't have old Tonkors but you don't kill yourself on a half-modded weapon.

Plus the whole historic thing about auto-headshots, so the old launchers at least should be at twice the damage output they currently have to compensate what they lost back then courtesy of a non-damaging launcher being too broken.

[(PSN)chibitonka]

23 minutes ago, TaylorsContraction said:

I'll just add that weapons like arca plasmor, catchmoon and whips do more damage, have just as much aoe and do no self damage. Self damage on explosives at this point in the game is just arbitrary nonsense. Aside from the tonkor, most launchers don't even do that much damage.

then petition they get removed since it's such nonsense that something that explodes can do self dmg. 

Oh it does less dmg than the meta therefore it shouldn't have self dmg. 

Does it explode? Then it's getting self dmg. Otherwise it should just be removed from the game since it's not an explosive anymore cause it's discriminating against what targets it should hit. 

And while we're at it let's have beam weapons all just chain like amprex and pull saryn chain killing 😄

Ooh and glaives that home in on every enemy in the map. 

[DeadVoid118]

7 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

3. The trouble is the linear coupling of damage between the exponentially-required output (enemy scaling) and the limited buffer of the player's own health pool (for self-damage); this is why we apply a formula to flatten growth to preserve the idea that "More boom = more risk" without it getting too high too quickly that there's no dialling back to something sensible. Also, the tank/squishy difference is simply made up by the Cautious Shot mod remaining in existence. A tank is free to wield full power, a squishier frame who should have other appeal factors or benefits (but let's just agree that inter-Warframe balance being questionable is a separate issue) skims power off the top for a more survivable blast where needed. Depending on the variables DE gets fine control, and Cautious Shot itself would inevitably see nerfs now that it's no longer such an objective band-aid.

4. You should have all the time in the world to get used to such things during the mastery process, but besides that, the goal here is that you can generally survive a mishap at sub-'godly' builds. If it's incredibly important you don't ever drop, you go Cautious. Additionally, the suggestion I made about Elytron-like markers on active explosive projectiles would help you avoid weird Tonkor rebounds catching you unawares.

3. This doesn't refute my argument that flat self-damage works. You argued against the current system of self-damage, and then on percentages? A weapon's self-damage can be flat because health is too. Player health does not scale in-game outside buffs. Flat damage is fine. Percentage is also completely fine. If you make it different between squishies and tanks, then the reward/risk relationship changes. With it as a percentage, the risk remains the same between frames just as the reward does. Additionally, you place less of an emphasis on health because of this. It being a percentage means you're not indirectly nerfing all the squishies, and frames are already too squishy as is without substantial modding. Furthermore, the appeal between warframes regardless of weapon should be the same. If you start balancing with weapons, any weapon without self-damage becomes objectively superior for squishies and/or you make squishies objectively superior if you're not wielding a self-damage weapon.

4. This doesn't even acknowledge my point. Visual representations and hitboxes don't line-up, and it's stupid to expect the player to magically know/memorize all of these strange occurrences, especially when you throw glitches that sometimes happen into the mix (and they have to re-learn every time new content gets released). It's inevitably punishing the player for things outside their control, even if it doesn't outright kill them. Again, revives are a patch for bad design/skill. If you're skilled enough, you should never have to make use of revives. This is impossible with weapons like the Tonkor and a squishy frame even with your suggested changes, and the use of cautious shot is a band-aid that doesn't even remove the problem, just lessens it. If I'm skilled enough I should be able to avoid the self-damage from my own weapon. Warframe makes this impossible as it is with how unpredictable things can be.

[TheLexiConArtist]

21 minutes ago, Keylan118 said:

3. This doesn't refute my argument that flat self-damage works. You argued against the current system of self-damage, and then on percentages? A weapon's self-damage can be flat because health is too. Player health does not scale in-game outside buffs. Flat damage is fine. Percentage is also completely fine. If you make it different between squishies and tanks, then the reward/risk relationship changes. With it as a percentage, the risk remains the same between frames just as the reward does. Additionally, you place less of an emphasis on health because of this. It being a percentage means you're not indirectly nerfing all the squishies, and frames are already too squishy as is without substantial modding. Furthermore, the appeal between warframes regardless of weapon should be the same. If you start balancing with weapons, any weapon without self-damage becomes objectively superior for squishies and/or you make squishies objectively superior if you're not wielding a self-damage weapon.

4. This doesn't even acknowledge my point. Visual representations and hitboxes don't line-up, and it's stupid to expect the player to magically know/memorize all of these strange occurrences, especially when you throw glitches that sometimes happen into the mix (and they have to re-learn every time new content gets released). It's inevitably punishing the player for things outside their control, even if it doesn't outright kill them. Again, revives are a patch for bad design/skill. If you're skilled enough, you should never have to make use of revives. This is impossible with weapons like the Tonkor and a squishy frame even with your suggested changes, and the use of cautious shot is a band-aid that doesn't even remove the problem, just lessens it. If I'm skilled enough I should be able to avoid the self-damage from my own weapon. Warframe makes this impossible as it is with how unpredictable things can be.

Flat self-damage doesn't work. It destroys the concept of risk-reward scaling together and instead turns the launcher caste into a simple gear check - and that's if you remove Cautious Shot's current function. With it, you've just resurrected the irrelevant 50 damage of the old Tonkor, if that. All you have to do is make sure you can promptly restore that flat value (Magus Elevate, for example) and that you can survive that value. Your weapon mods are then meaningless, with the possible exception of Multishot. It can be incapable of clearing Saturn mooks, or it can be capable of one-shotting the Wolf of Saturn Six, doesn't make any difference to the gear-check.
Percentile health capping is effectively the same result of complete agnosticism of weapon mods, only this time you don't have the step of 'make sure you can survive that value' because.. it's not 100% total EHP and never will be. It takes longer for an Inaros to charge half their health into scarab armour than it does to return to full health, and people think a hard-capped quarter or half health is going to be relevant?

As for your entire other tirade, that's just a fallacy in perspective. Glitches will always exist, and if there's some dodgy hitboxes, then you raise issue with the hitboxes, not self-damage. Treat the cause, not the symptom. Every weapon will thank you for that. Besides, I think you underestimate people's ability to internalise things.. or, perhaps, you're just presenting your own opinion and capability as if it was objective fact for everyone. 

Personal anecdote of my own: I cannot remember the last time I killed myself with my explosives in a way that wasn't identifiably my fault. Usually, it's because I forgot or was not paying attention to which weapon I had out. Considering that a person typically expects to remember 'unfair' events much more prominently, I'd say that's quite telling. I choose when to actively use that risky weapon and I do my due diligence in getting a clear shot. 

[DeadVoid118]

43 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Flat self-damage doesn't work. It destroys the concept of risk-reward scaling together and instead turns the launcher caste into a simple gear check - and that's if you remove Cautious Shot's current function. With it, you've just resurrected the irrelevant 50 damage of the old Tonkor, if that. All you have to do is make sure you can promptly restore that flat value (Magus Elevate, for example) and that you can survive that value. Your weapon mods are then meaningless, with the possible exception of Multishot. It can be incapable of clearing Saturn mooks, or it can be capable of one-shotting the Wolf of Saturn Six, doesn't make any difference to the gear-check.
Percentile health capping is effectively the same result of complete agnosticism of weapon mods, only this time you don't have the step of 'make sure you can survive that value' because.. it's not 100% total EHP and never will be. It takes longer for an Inaros to charge half their health into scarab armour than it does to return to full health, and people think a hard-capped quarter or half health is going to be relevant?

As for your entire other tirade, that's just a fallacy in perspective. Glitches will always exist, and if there's some dodgy hitboxes, then you raise issue with the hitboxes, not self-damage. Treat the cause, not the symptom. Every weapon will thank you for that. Besides, I think you underestimate people's ability to internalise things.. or, perhaps, you're just presenting your own opinion and capability as if it was objective fact for everyone. 

Personal anecdote of my own: I cannot remember the last time I killed myself with my explosives in a way that wasn't identifiably my fault. Usually, it's because I forgot or was not paying attention to which weapon I had out. Considering that a person typically expects to remember 'unfair' events much more prominently, I'd say that's quite telling. I choose when to actively use that risky weapon and I do my due diligence in getting a clear shot. 

Flat self-damage doesn't destroy the concept of risk-reward scaling, it changes it. First of all, numbers can be changed. The 50 self-damage on the Tonkor was far too little, of course. However, 500 self-damage? 5000? We can pick any number we want. Secondly, the idea of flat self-damage is that it is based on the base damage of a weapon, so it does scale in a way. Mods can only increase damage so much. Besides, isn't the point of your scaling self-damage to not immediately be obliterated if you're 0.01 meters too close? I don't see why mods need to play into self-damage (except maybe cautious shot). If you mod a weapon improperly so that it doesn't murder an enemy when the weapon can easily do so, that's on you and not the weapon.
Percentile self-damage can 100% take health regen and other things into account, I don't see why you're dismissing that idea and saying it's impossible. People already calculate EHP. Does it need to be 100% accurate? No. Why would it need to be? Does it even need to work off of EHP? It could just do damage to HP and shields, or maybe just HP. Besides, how is your method any better? Against Inaros, it'll attempt to do X amount of damage and may or may not be enough damage. The percentage numbers merely need to be tweaked to be enough just as yours do.

That's not a fallacy, it's a valid concern. Glitches exist (and are common), and we must acknowledge them. Hitboxes exist, and they are not perfect. You want this implemented, you fix those problems first. Also, you seriously expect people to memorize every nook, cranny, and outcropping of any and all hitboxes? Really? Even if people could, they still have to fail once. Once on every single bad hitbox, and there are a lot of bad hitboxes, if not multiple times on every hitbox to discover their full form. It's not about my capability. The average player certainly isn't capable of doing all that, and not everyone is an elite veteran ready to beat down everything. Plenty of noobs already complain about how the game is hard and that's because they don't know and can't be expected to know how to make things easy. The game is already terrible for new players. Expecting them to know hitboxes only makes it harder, not easier.
And, as to your idea of fixing them, go ahead. Be my guest. However, I will avidly point out this flaw in your plan until that flaw is fixed because it is a flaw, regardless of the reasons behind it.

As to your personal anecdote, it's simply that, a personal anecdote. Based upon our conversation, I'd lean in to the idea that you consider any and all times you die to self-damage 'fair' sooner than I would expect you to consider bad hitboxes to be bad hitboxes. My personal anecdotes are directly contrary to yours (though, to be fair, the only self-damage weapons I have used more than levelling them up are the Ogris and Tonkor, and mainly the Tonkor) and say that most of the time one dies to self-damage it is because of an ally, bad hitbox, glitch, or the fact that the game doesn't actually tell you what gun you are using when you have your melee out yet you are allowed to immediately fire it (and part of the problem is rapidly-pressing to switch your gun can sometimes fail to bring out the appropriate gun based on how many times you pressed the button). That last part is particularly dangerous when a weapon can instantly vaporize you.

[5p33dy_01]

i dont know why people need to argue about this, the answer is simple.

if you can not play according to your weapon, you shouldn't be using that weapon.
(plays volt, shoots and chases to examine the explosion, then complains on forums about self dmg)

the tonkor is an insane damage weapon for its rank MR5 (i can even 1 shot enemies in sorties 80-100) and will be able to carry anyone through to a point where they can get something better (as long as you know it inflicts self damage).
play safe and you wont have a problem.

with great power, comes great responsibility.

if you dont like 1 shotting yourself, play something like hildryn, her 1 has 20k+ dmg and over 5m aoe (over 7.9m if you sacrifice 60% dmg) with no self dmg (again 1 shot enemies in sorties 80-100) (you also can not kill yourself by accident when using tonkor or any other self damaging weapons, unless your dmg manages to bypass shields)

maybe you don't like having to gear for a weapon, but nobody likes having to gear for anything.
e.g. changing elemental dmg depending on where you're going and who you're fighting.

you can not have everything in 1 basket.

complaints about logical mechanics lead to some unnecessary nerfs, when that time could have been better spent on something more productive.

aim your complaints at the weapons that are under-performing, there is a huge amount of higher ranked weapons that dont even get touched past the rank up to 30 phase (unless someone has nothing better to do, than tinker with a way to make it viable).
 

Edited June 5, 2019 by 5p33dy_01

[DeadVoid118]

54 minutes ago, 5p33dy_01 said:

i dont know why people need to argue about this, the answer is simple.

if you can not play according to your weapon, you shouldn't be using that weapon.
(plays volt, shoots and chases to examine the explosion, then complains on forums about self dmg)

the tonkor is an insane damage weapon for its rank MR5 (i can even 1 shot enemies in sorties 80-100) and will be able to carry anyone through to a point where they can get something better (as long as you know it inflicts self damage).
play safe and you wont have a problem.

with great power, comes great responsibility.

if you dont like 1 shotting yourself, play something like hildryn, her 1 has 20k+ dmg and over 5m aoe (over 7.9m if you sacrifice 60% dmg) with no self dmg (again 1 shot enemies in sorties 80-100) (you also can not kill yourself by accident when using tonkor or any other self damaging weapons, unless your dmg manages to bypass shields)

maybe you don't like having to gear for a weapon, but nobody likes having to gear for anything.
e.g. changing elemental dmg depending on where you're going and who you're fighting.

you can not have everything in 1 basket.

complaints about logical mechanics lead to some unnecessary nerfs, when that time could have been better spent on something more productive.

aim your complaints at the weapons that are under-performing, there is a huge amount of higher ranked weapons that dont even get touched past the rank up to 30 phase (unless someone has nothing better to do, than tinker with a way to make it viable).
 

I think you missed the point of the argument. It's not about what makes logical sense. It's about gameplay. How you calculate self-damage is important. It can change things drastically from vaporizing yourself to vaporizing nothing at all and being practically (or actually) nonexistent. It can do other things like change the dynamic between squishy frames and tanky frames as well.
Gameplay takes priority over logic. I want a game that is fun before a game that is sensible.

Additionally, about 'play safe and you wont [sic] have a problem', see:

6 hours ago, Keylan118 said:

Visual representations and hitboxes don't line-up, and it's stupid to expect the player to magically know/memorize all of these strange occurrences, especially when you throw glitches that sometimes happen into the mix (and they have to re-learn every time new content gets released). It's inevitably punishing the player for things outside their control, even if it doesn't outright kill them. Again, revives are a patch for bad design/skill. If you're skilled enough, you should never have to make use of revives. This is impossible with weapons like the Tonkor and a squishy frame even with your suggested changes, and the use of cautious shot is a band-aid that doesn't even remove the problem, just lessens it. If I'm skilled enough I should be able to avoid the self-damage from my own weapon. Warframe makes this impossible as it is with how unpredictable things can be.

Furthermore, you're correct in choosing weapons that suit you. That means having AOE and non-AOE weapons. It can also mean having AOE weapons with self-damage and AOE weapons without self-damage. It can also also mean having AOE weapons that calculate self-damage differently from each other.

P.S. I don't really understand what you mean by self-damage not being able to kill you if you have shields. Warframe does not have shield-gating, meaning if I do 10,000 dmg and you have 20 shields and 80 hp, you ded.

[(PSN)chibitonka]

20 minutes ago, Keylan118 said:

I think you missed the point of the argument. It's not about what makes logical sense. It's about gameplay. How you calculate self-damage is important. It can change things drastically from vaporizing yourself to vaporizing nothing at all and being practically (or actually) nonexistent. It can do other things like change the dynamic between squishy frames and tanky frames as well.
Gameplay takes priority over logic. I want a game that is fun before a game that is sensible.

Additionally, about 'play safe and you wont [sic] have a problem', see:

Furthermore, you're correct in choosing weapons that suit you. That means having AOE and non-AOE weapons. It can also mean having AOE weapons with self-damage and AOE weapons without self-damage. It can also also mean having AOE weapons that calculate self-damage differently from each other.

P.S. I don't really understand what you mean by self-damage not being able to kill you if you have shields. Warframe does not have shield-gating, meaning if I do 10,000 dmg and you have 20 shields and 80 hp, you ded.

Hildryn's passive is shield gating actually. If her 3 is used on others in group they get shield gating too.

[5p33dy_01]

1 minute ago, Keylan118 said:

I think you missed the point of the argument. It's not about what makes logical sense. It's about gameplay. How you calculate self-damage is important. It can change things drastically from vaporizing yourself to vaporizing nothing at all and being practically (or actually) nonexistent. It can do other things like change the dynamic between squishy frames and tanky frames as well.
Gameplay takes priority over logic. I want a game that is fun before a game that is sensible.

Additionally, about 'play safe and you wont [sic] have a problem', see:

Furthermore, you're correct in choosing weapons that suit you. That means having AOE and non-AOE weapons. It can also mean having AOE weapons with self-damage and AOE weapons without self-damage. It can also also mean having AOE weapons that calculate self-damage differently from each other.

i didnt miss the point.
 OP wants the self-damage formula changed to be only lethal as a mission progresses.
or removed entirely

the formula modification may look simple to implement, but nobody can guarantee that there will not be problems that require fixes for the formula to work as intended.
and because of this, DE will most likely use the easier option, remove self-damage, leave it as is or just nerf the stats on explosive weapons.

to round it up, there will be more disappointment from the modifications that happen, and ends up being almost a complete waste of time that could have been put into something a bit more constructive, like sorting out other problems in the game (like those hit-boxes mentioned below).

On 2019-05-18 at 4:40 PM, -AoN-CanoLathra- said:

I don't tend to kill myself from hitting enemies/allies. I tend to kill myself when trying to shoot around an obstacle only to learn that the hit-box of the obstacle does not match the visual representation. I am behind a box/barrel/crate, I aim, poke around cover, establish a clear line of sight based on my reticle, and then explode.

I am being careful, and my being careful is what is killing me.

Now, I admit that removing/flattening/capping self-damage is not the optimal solution to this problem, but it is likely the only solution DE would consider, since the other option would be redoing almost every object in every tileset, as well as re-working how projectile weapons function.

 

19 minutes ago, Keylan118 said:

P.S. I don't really understand what you mean by self-damage not being able to kill you if you have shields. Warframe does not have shield-gating, meaning if I do 10,000 dmg and you have 20 shields and 80 hp, you ded.

you can have 20 shield and 80 hp on hildryn and still not die from accidental 10,000 self dmg (as long as your passive is up)
(Hildryn becomes invulnerable to all damage for 3 seconds upon her shields being depleted.)