Honest question. Is self harm really necessary in this game?

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

Yeah sure there's a few frames that can exploit self harm to significant effect....

But on the whole there's a lot of weapons that are at best mediocre even if we removed self harm but manage to be specifically /terrible/ because we insist on self harm physics. I mean staticor................... Is right now quite honestly one of the best crowd control weapons in the game. Period. Primary, secondary, doesn't matter, it wrecks... can full on nuke whole crowds of enemies with a charged shot, and the rapid fire will tear through just about anything. But if it were self harm? Odds are most people would stop using it, and yet say concealed explosives is a useless perk... Then you have weapons like talons, castans, etc... Weapons that require you to place and then detonate them, where even one being just kinda sorta too close to your frame will probably one hit kill you if you're using anything less than Inaros or Valkyr... And even then it's iffy... 

 

What does it possibly benefit to make under-performing weapons capable of effecting self harm making people even less likely to use them? I'm sorry but this is pointless. My informed opinion based on the overall state of the game is quite simply that the physic should be overall removed or at least that any weapon that effects self harm should be buffed significantly to make up for the extreme danger the player is forced to endure in using them.

For talons especially it would be one thing if they were effectively a "tool weapon".... Right now you can break open damaged vents but if the talons could be placed on an "intact" vent, and blow it apart as if it were a damaged one for spy missions, that would be one thing...but that's not how it works. 

Anything that does self harm should in theory be one of the most powerful weapons in the game or else self harm should just not be a thing anymore...

[Oksanya]

No, it is absolutely NOT necessary!  You wanna know why?  Cause all it does it causes nothing but frustration.  Frustration is something that I honestly don't come to play games for, I play games to get away from that stuff.  Plus, aren't we supposed to be these big, bad, awesome and absolutely powerful warframes?  If so, why can an EXPLOSION, kill us?

I know, it likely sounds like i'm talking nonsense, but i'm my head, i'm making perfect sense.  So i'm sorry if this sounds odd or weird/whatever.

[Grimm]

there needs to be a mod for all wepaon types that makes damage taken from self harm weapons a % of ehp rather then your damage from your weapon. thats what i see as a fix that still lets self harm be useful well giving a safe guard from accidently insta killing yourself, as the mod that ats 99% resistance to self harm does nothing because your weapon gets moded so high for damage you still get wiped 

[seprent]

15 minutes ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

-words-

i find self damage for some of them kinda prevents them from being used at cheese weapons like the zarr for example but i feel most of the time people kill them selves with self damage its because they are not either aware they are carrying an explosive and use it like any other gun or just under estimate the radius of the explosive 

personally im indifferent about self damage while i do find cautious shot funny since 1% of damage we can pump out can still one shot us even when reduced by 15% but how should we buff them? personally i think most if not all explosive weapons should have the thing the tonkor has those dots when you aim to show you how its going to travel might help in not blowing your self up or some indication of blast radius like the lenz so you can work around it so you dont kill your self with it because if we did remove self damage we may just end up with the tonkor scenario again were every mirage was using either the simulor or the tonkor doing the same thing but more well explosive 

PS you might want to change self harm to self damage might just be me but it sounds way more serious then blowing your self up in a video game  

[--F--NerevarCM]

Yes. Why? Tonkor before the nerf. That's what happens when you have an AoE weapon with massive damage and no drawbacks. You use it like a shotgun.

[(XBOX)ShadowBlood89]

self damage is useful for those who use frames that can make use of self damage to do various things for them.
like those who use self damage to inflict burning on there mirage to always trigger the in light buff.
those who play a buffing chroma to get the damage buff to max.

if you do not like self damage then dont be using any weapons that have self damage 

[Grimm]

3 minutes ago, seprent said:

words  

one of the issues i find with self damage weapons doesnt come from myself but other people walking in front of hem as i fire.  thats why my suggestion is mods that make the self damage % of ehp, then you have more changes for things like this to happen without being wiped across the floor and this still allows other self damage to be used for chroma etc with full damage output, the % would give you a few chances to accidentally get hit but would burn your arse if you tried to just pump your shots like you would with a normal weapon

[seprent]

Just now, Grimm said:

one of the issues i find with self damage weapons doesnt come from myself but other people walking in front of hem as i fire.  thats why my suggestion is mods that make the self damage % of ehp, then you have more changes for things like this to happen without being wiped across the floor and this still allows other self damage to be used for chroma etc with full damage output, the % would give you a few chances to accidentally get hit but would burn your arse if you tried to just pump your shots like you would with a normal weapon

i thought of that or well something like that but id prefer if you could just shoot though allies to avoid the problem of allies going oops i walked infront of the person who clearly has a zarr and blew them up because i wanted to melee those lancers so then the only problem you have to worry about is knowing explosive radius of your weapon so you dont burn your self with that but your idea id replace cautious shot with that 

like for example self damage 5% hp to you -15% fire rate since if your being careful your not gonna do less damage your going to be checking more and shooting less

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

3 minutes ago, seprent said:

-words-

Suggesting that this physic exists to prevent people from trying to cheese the game is just ignorant given that none of them are all that good in their own right. The best of them only compete with the staticor. So ,what, instead we have mirage running around with the plasmafart cannon and staticor doing every bit as much damage and nobody's demanding staticor do self harm... If these explosive weapons at least produced a clearly defined area of effect so you actually knew where you're too close, then I could work with that. But no the explosions are invis.............. Okay it's been a while since I've used talons, maybe if they create a huge particle burst now I could deal with that, I'll check. But all I've ever been able to see is firecrackers going off and boom I'm dead because I was within a football field of my target. 

And you could very easily buff these weapons just by having them work as alt fire weapons for any weapon that doesn't have intrinsic altfire... Like you're using an an amprex? Or opticor? Hit r3 and you throw a castana at the target following typical arc only it detonates instantly on impact instead of needing to be triggered, where as equipping the secondary weapon allows you to place them more carefully and trigger them when you're ready. Hell as far as I'm concerned all thrown weapons should work this way, as long as your equipped weapon doesn't have a dedicated altfire just hit the altfire button to throw what ever thrown secondary you have equipped at the target,  it would overall provide a lot more utility to thrown weapons which right now, again, staticor aside, do not see much use in any end game scenario except maybe stealth missions. That is to say, you build your self some talons? If you're carrying a rifle with talons in secondary, press the alt fire button to throw them at the enemy as a grenade. Because that's sorta what they are. Need to carefully set them as if you were laying a demolition charge? Switch to them as your equipped weapon, set the charge, pull back, detonate, then switch back to your primary. It would add a lot of complexity to how the weapons are used.... And enjoyment.  Under that scenario I'm fine with them doing self harm, but under the way they current work, these self harm weapons are bad. 

I would rather like thrown weapons if I could just hit altfire to throw them without having to switch from my rifle................ Maybe significantly reduce fire rate if you do it this way since you can only throw with one hand obviously...

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

12 minutes ago, seprent said:

-words-

Oh wait wait, I know.............. You're going to tell me you object to use of talons or or castanas in a grenade role where you throw them with altfire and they explode on impact or after a three second delay because no one in their right mind would carry a rifle and grenades into a combat zone right? I mean, that does sound sorta silly right? Carrying a rifle and grenades into a combat zone...

You give me one example of a weapon that became a problem... Maybe you start the weapon off seeing how it works out for people and then add the self harm as a nerf later if it's creating too much trouble yeah?.... As it is the weapons I'm describing have an absolutely abysmal ammo economy... And every time they add a new self harm weapon *points to other posts on this page* people get ticked off. Let DE worry about breaking weapons that become a problem when they become a problem instead of just being like "here's a new weapon, build it, master it, and throw it down the incinerator because you're sure as hell never going to actually use this."

[seprent]

1 minute ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

Suggesting that this physic exists to prevent people from trying to cheese the game is just ignorant

i also said if we removed it we may end up with tonkor situation remember what it was like before it lost its ability to not hurt you people were using it like a high damage AOE shot gun now we add mirage and you have a similar problem to the simulor high damage in a very large area of effect.

now lets take a crit grenade launcher for this the tonkor before the nerf add hunter's munitions so now you have a high damage AOE explosive crit weapon that peopled used as a shotgun is now casually bleeding everyone around you as well. Because hunters munitions goes of each individual grenade of that launcher normal multi shot is 2 with odd 3rd shot in there so you always have 30%x2-3 chance to bleed everyone in a AOE blast for a large crit damage bonus. Then you add fire storm further increasing your range of this high damage AOE crit weapon that people used as a shot gun 

now if we flat out removed self damage every launcher is now the tonkor in that regard your telling me people would not shift to launcher weapons because they can no longer harm you and can let you pump out insane amounts of damage that can stack true damage from slash on top of it with NO risk to you in a large area of effect and people wouldn't cheese the game harder then they already do i good sir and or ma'am highly doubt that

but your idea for throwing secondary bombs like talons and stuff that idea i like but i think DE doesnt want to give us grenades but i like it none the less 

[OvisCaedo]

It's hard to imagine the removal of self-damage breaking the game much when there are so many mass AOE slaughter options without self-risk that are already allowed. Some of them even pretty much just explosives, like the Staticor! Opticor also just makes an AOE blast on every shot, but I'm not really sure on how strong it is compared to the direct hits.

but DE has tended to show repeatedly that they are VERY fixated on the idea; the laughable Cautious Shot mod that utterly failed to accomplish anything and the subsequent (possibly bugged, from some math I saw) buff to it also seeming to do nothing to help most frames.

Edited June 3, 2019 by OvisCaedo

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

41 minutes ago, seprent said:

Tonkor shotgun

+

but your idea for throwing secondary bombs like talons and stuff that idea i like but i think DE doesnt want to give us grenades but i like it none the less 

I'm glad we can agree on something.

I'm not disputing issues with the tonkor. But the tonkor isn't every weapon in the game. All I'm saying is that the self harm tactic is a scorched earth tactic equal to if they had tried to nerf Ember by causing her to set fire to her self and instantly burn to death every time she triggered her 4. Or caused amprex and atomos to inflict self harm if you get to close to what your shooting at, to me it seems like self harm should be a punitive mechanic used only for weapons that have defied every other attempt to control or balance them. I don't feel like any weapon should be introduced with self harm as a mechanic until the weapon establishes it's self as a problem, and I think most weapons that had self harm applied for arbitrary reasons up front should have it removed and test to see if they become a problem... The economy on most of these little explodey weapons I've been talking about is so bad it's going to be pretty hard for them to become the new meta...

With the exception of Sancti Castanas seeing a brief period of super popularity during the few weeks of trampoline trinity replacing saryn as the ESO meta, specifically /because/ of their self harm physics, in the last six months I've seen one person running talons or castanas..... And that person is me... No one uses the weapons at all and it seems like a waste of an opportunity..

[akots]

IMHO, self-damage is nice to have. It adds a pinch of realism into an otherwise not very realistic space fairy tale style game. It is very limited and has no noticeable impact in general apart from some occasional minor annoyance and similar minor exploitation by a few frames. IMHO, let it be, it is a little reminder that not everything obeys the space sorcery laws.

Edited June 3, 2019 by akots

[TheLexiConArtist]

Begging the question.

Here's a counter-argument for you to answer: Is it really necessary for every weapon to have no self damage?

That's rhetorical, the answer is no, there is no reason for that, when you have many alternatives - don't baby down the self-damaging of a conventional explosive which everyone knows poses a risk to the user.

You don't sit on a primed grenade and wonder where your gonads went all of a sudden. You know what happened and why.

30 minutes ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

I don't feel like any weapon should be introduced with self harm as a mechanic until the weapon establishes it's self as a problem, and I think most weapons that had self harm applied for arbitrary reasons up front should have it removed and test to see if they become a problem... The economy on most of these little explodey weapons I've been talking about is so bad it's going to be pretty hard for them to become the new meta...

Some self-damage is wrong. The Cyanex had it removed, for example, because when you use the weapon you realise that the homing function means that it might hurt the player after they no longer have any control over the weapon even when the initial trigger pull was perfectly made.

However, most self damage is not arbitrary. There was a convention which the Tonkor broke and we argued hard to get what belonged put on there. In the process, because of the Tonkor slaves crying out at the very idea, every explosive suffered a drastic damage cut due to indirect mechanical changes aimed at reducing the Tonkor's effectiveness without giving it the natural drawback of explosive ordnance. Every other conventional explosive from exploding arrowheads to claw-bombs to rockets had self-damage.

But here's the thing: Every thread like this prevents self-damaging weapons from getting brought to where they ought to be. DE has conceded self-damage should exist and as a result every complaint about killing yourself with it already is a complaint preventing more outward-facing damage because that just overkills you more. 

30 minutes ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

With the exception of Sancti Castanas seeing a brief period of super popularity during the few weeks of trampoline trinity replacing saryn as the ESO meta, specifically /because/ of their self harm physics, in the last six months I've seen one person running talons or castanas..... And that person is me... No one uses the weapons at all and it seems like a waste of an opportunity..

Well yes, but actually no.

The fault wasn't self-damage being redirected through Link. The fault was literally ignoring self-damage through additive resistances stacking to a full immunity.

What could have been DE resolving a problem that players face (ever brought a full-elemental weapon to Corpus sortie and gotten a couple shield ospreys tethered together? Literally can't damage them for the same reason, additive stacking resists) became a simple and direct nerf to Trinity herself. You can still ignore the Castanas self-damage with the same build, enemies can still become absolutely immune to your damage, but the self-damage doesn't travel down the link line any more, that's it.

 

Now, self-damage as we have it does have a problem. That problem is that outgoing damage and self-damage are linear while the health pools on either side of the equation are not. Enemies scale. We're set in whatever our squad and loadout are capable of. This is a risk/reward balance problem. The reward cannot scale with risk while the two are linearly linked together.

We solve that and everything else falls into place, from the natural learning process of dangerous gear, to scaling risk with reward, to Cautious Shot fulfilling a niche without going into absurdly small percentages of remaining damage, and of course - to actually having powerful explosives.

Ergo:

 

 

[NinjaZeku]

15 minutes ago, akots said:

IMHO, self-damage is nice to have. It adds a pinch of realism

Putting aside the whole "lol space magic ninja game tho" response,
weapon balance shouldn't be based on arbitrary cases of "realism" added for no good (enough) reason.

Like ... it would also be realistic if our weapons could damage our Squad members, for example.
But would that work in a game like Warframe? More importantly, would that be fun? No, it would not.

Mind, I don't even necessarily want full removal of self-damage, but the current implementations just don't work that well.

Launchers need either their self-damage brought down into not-immediate-suicide territory / replaced with other penalties
- without the use of bandaid Mods thankyouverymuch, Cautious Shot is an insult as far as I'm concerned -
or their mass slaughter potential stepped up a few notches, so that the risk vs reward deal gets skewed that way.

16 minutes ago, akots said:

It is very limited and has no noticeable impact in general

Almost nobody uses self-damage weapons, that's something lots of people have noticed, and is a shame.

Just for the record, do you use any Launchers on a regular basis?
And if so, does the suicide potential really enhance your enjoyment of them?

2 hours ago, -OP-NerevarCM said:

Yes. Why? Tonkor before the nerf. That's what happens when you have an AoE weapon with massive damage and no drawbacks. You use it like a shotgun.

Meh, you can use Revenant or Wukong to just shrug off self-damage and go point blank Rambo with Launchers,
yet this hasn't become a meta tactic or anything, so I can't really agree that it would be a massive problem in today's Warframe
where we also have e.g. Meme Strike Melee for close-range AoE enemy clearing (this is not a MS nerf demand kthx).

Tonkor Stronkor meta was not just about no (well, negligible) self-damage on an AoE weapon.

It came about because Tonkor was a stupid strong weapon available at a low Mastery Rank
(this was not least, IIRC, when explosion dealt automatic headshots, so lol Crit Launcher),
it had (again, IIRC) the largest blast radius at the time (I like to bring up Stug and how silly small its [still-suicide] AoEs are),
and it also didn't hurt to have a more generous reserve ammo count compared to other Launchers, plus whatever I forget.

It was just the best, obvious choice for a Launcher (something many hadn't given much of a try before because lol self-damage),
and it was also a step above almost any other weapon you could have at the time.

Then, Tonkor got hit with curbstomped by so many nerfs at once, it was brutal and very much an overreaction.
Self-damage, damage and Crit nerfs, no more auto-headshots, and whatnot, plus more changes over time.
(Of course, that auto-headshot thing was a bug fix, but said fix should've been considered in the balancing of AoE weapons.)

And now it's largely forgotten, at best an object of nostalgia for some players.

That's ... not fine, is all I'm trying to say with this very concise, straight-to-the-point post 😛

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

4 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

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

 

First off, I'm sorry. But you don't get to decide that the upvotes you get are legitimate but the downvotes are fraudulent. If you're getting that much negative feedback it's because you ARE the vocal minority. 

Sorry.

I'm looking to have a discussion here. Not be crowned "supreme overlord of correctness." The attitude you're bringing is "I am objectively right and it is impossible for me to not be"... It's not that simple. There is a solution out there but that solution is not "all the scrubs need to stop complaining". 

Second. Tell me. Every single videogame that has explosive weapons in it has a self harm physic. Rather it's destiny, call of duty, farcry... Or literally any game ever that has grenades................................................. But somehow. Against all odds.......... The only game people seem to have a problem with self harm explosions............. Is warframe.

Now. Take a deep breath. Accept that your preconceived notions might be wrong, that it might not be "just because kids don't like it"......................... Put on your thinking cap... Really think critically about it.... And answer me this. What is it that is making people's experience with those explosive weapons in warframe so different than their experience with explosive weapons in all these other games, what is making them legitimately okay with "oops it I was too close" in other games and "oh for ****s sake" in warframe? Clearly, there is something more going on than just people getting killed by their own weapon... So lets take a moment, and really think on what that difference may be...

[(XBOX)CertainLeader6]

5 hours ago, Oksanya said:

No, it is absolutely NOT necessary!  You wanna know why?  Cause all it does it causes nothing but frustration.  Frustration is something that I honestly don't come to play games for, I play games to get away from that stuff.  Plus, aren't we supposed to be these big, bad, awesome and absolutely powerful warframes?  If so, why can an EXPLOSION, kill us?

I know, it likely sounds like i'm talking nonsense, but i'm my head, i'm making perfect sense.  So i'm sorry if this sounds odd or weird/whatever.

How can you expect an explosion to not kill? What do you think grenades and nukes do?

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

5 hours ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

My informed opinion based on the overall state of the game is quite simply that the physic should be overall removed

I think you're missing the point: guns can't be all-powerful, as then they just become the only boring choice. That's why the Tigris has an awful reload, the Opticor Vandal has nerfed damage, and so on.

Self damage is one of the better negatives, when it works (and I agree that it doesn't everywhere). On a gun like the Lenz it's a fun risk that adds to the enjoyment of using the weapon. It would be severely OP for its MR otherwise, but it's also a negative that you can overcome with player skill.

5 hours ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

What does it possibly benefit to make under-performing weapons capable of effecting self harm making people even less likely to use them? I'm sorry but this is pointless

On an underperforming weapon I agree. For some amazing weapons I agree. For instance the Angstrum Prime is insane damage but also insta-self-gib whenever it clips an invisible part of the scenery.

A lot of older weapons that had it make no sense now. The Tonkor was once meta, now it's just a risky mess.

The problem is not the existence of self damage in the first place - that it works on some weapons is evidence that it is a worthwhile mechanic.

The problem is really the damage balance in this game - anything that does worthwhile damage to scaled enemies will frag even a maxed Adaptation Inaros.

There's a worthwhile discussion to be had about fixing that, but the mechanic is definitely one worth keeping.

[Teridax68]

The general player opinion on the matter seems to be a categorical no. Self-damage is a stupid mechanic in Warframe for a a number of reasons:

• The game emphasises constant mobility via parkour, meaning the player will be frequently travelling through rapidly changing environments at high speed. Killing the player just because some bit of level geometry went up in front of them makes no sense.
• A tremendous portion of the game's levels still are made of small rooms and tight corridors. It therefore makes no sense in this context to punish the player for firing a weapon too closely.
• For whichever reason, our weapons fire collides with our teammates, meaning that if a player steps in front of another with a self-damaging weapon (which happens often in defensive missions or cramped tilesets), the latter player will blow themselves up.
• For whichever other reason, self-damage scales with our own damage mods, and because we deal several thousands of times more damage to enemies than they do to us, this means any instance of self-damage is practically guaranteed to one-shot us. The fact that Cautious Shot, even after being buffed to 99% damage reduction, on top of the 15% lowered damage and lack of a damage mod in that same slot, still doesn't prevent even tank frames from one-shotting themselves, shows just how bad the situation is (and also how DE doesn't seem to have the best handle on their own numbers if they thought the buff would do anything).
• Every time self-damage has been used by players to their benefit, e.g. Trinity at the time of her 99% Blessing, or Chroma, DE treated that development as an exploit to be fixed, rather than an interesting player usage of mechanics. Self-damage is thus, by DE's own intentional design, a mechanic intended to have purely negative consequences upon our gameplay.
• Despite the fact that self-damage is cited as a balancing tool, self-damage does not adequately balance explosive weapons: one one hand, the Lenz's self-damage is so heavily telegraphed as to barely affect more experienced users (outside of freak accidents), whereas weapons like the Ogris, Penta, Castanas, and so on are infamous for being better at killing the player than enemies. None of these weapons need self-damage to balance themselves, and removing the self-damage on these weapons would not make them overpowered by any stretch (several of them would still not even be good).
• In general, the philosophy of expressly punishing the player for playing "poorly", by whichever nebulous standard we are setting in this context, through mechanics built into their weapons, just doesn't work. Warframe is not a game that aims to punish the player to begin with, and if only some weapons are made to apply disproportionate punishment just for using them like any other weapon, players are simply going to drop those in favor of weapons that don't try to screw us over, as is the case now.

So in short, self-damage is a mechanic that makes no sense with the way we move and fight in Warframe, that is poorly balanced in the extreme, and that fails to add any beneficial gameplay or balancing to the weapons it's on. It makes every weapon it's on feel flatly worse to play without any beneficial tradeoff, and so removing it outright would likely be the best way to go. The fact that DE has refused to do so thus far, and instead tried to give us band-aids, I think is one of those cases of the designers being obstinate and out-of-touch with the game, as has happened many times before (e.g. Vacuum), though if there's really insistence on having some sort of arbitrary punishment mechanic, there are many more ways of going about it. For example:

• Status procs on self (with damaging procs based off of a fixed amount, not scaling to our damage).
• "Evolving" shots that either get better with range or simply don't activate until they travel a certain distance, e.g. the Corinth's alt fire.
• Simply not having self-damage scale with our own damage mods (why is this even a thing to begin with?).

None of these would be ideal, I think, as they'd all run into the aforementioned gameplay issues tied to movement, tight spaces, other players, etc., but any or all of these would at least be a significant improvement over the current state of affairs. Self-damage in its current form needs to disappear, and DE should've known better than to put it on the Komorex and Cyanex (and the fact that they had to remove it from the Cyanex almost immediately should've been an indication to remove it from many more weapons).

Edited June 3, 2019 by Teridax68

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

Okay so as this debate continues... Since I asked this question and didn't get an answer, I want to address how warframe handles explosive weapons that self damage compared to how other games handle them. And why people who in one game might be fine that "oops, I screwed up"... Where as in warframe they'll be "damn it not again!"

Lets start with so called "skill games" like destiny (*snort*) or call of duty, others.... Where you're expected to sorta know how your chosen weapons work... In these games they have in game tells... Size of explosion as rendered on screen, screen shake, feed back, sound, a whole lot of process goes into subtle and not so subtle ques telling you "you are too close to target." Rather that's with rocket launchers, grenade launchers, grenades.... There is various feedback all of which tells you "man I need to be more careful with this thing..." You don't have to have just one hit killed your self to realize "that was a close call". 

Then lets take a look at more adventurous games that don't put a big emphasis on knowing all this intuitively. Many games from ratchet and clank(A game, i add, that DE has stated emphatically that they do take inspiration from, for instance the gear wheel) on a more pg level up to much more adult oriented games will often, when you hold down the grenade button, show a ballistic arc, with an on ground circle indicating area of effect, giving you clear distinct feedback "your grenade will go here, and it will damage this area, don't be there.

Some games even have a heads up for things like placed mines and such that will give sort of a pulsing sphere of influence telling you where the "Self harming weapon" is, and what it's area of effect will be.... 

Warframe... Does none of these. It doesn't give you feedback what the area of effect for your explosive will be until after you've pulled the trigger, and ultimately that feedback will be "you survived" or "you didn't survive"... You have no way of knowing if you are too close to your target or explosive other than rough guess... In many cases, unless things have changed since my last time using say the ogris or talons, you might not even see an explosion, you'll just set them off and be dead. 

There are in game ques in almost all other games that make your use of explosive weapons fundamentally different than they are in warframe... And I think DE needs to address that if they are going to keep this mechanic. 

I have always loved the idea of using alt fire to throw "grenade" throwables as a contact explosive which would be a use that actually makes them make sense in game. But they're not doing that... And if they're going to keep self harming weapons they need to do a better job of giving the player feedback... Or else do something to make them much more worth the risk than they currently are.

[Lone_Dude]

Self damage can be a great tool when it comes to weapon balance. If you have an extremely powerful weapon with perfect stats, that's also explosive in it's nature, giving it self-damage will not only give it a great disadvantage to counter all of it's advantages, it will also make this weapon feel more real. It might also force players to adapt to a new play-style, namely - actually thinking when and where you shoot.

However, it simply doesn't fit Warframe for multiple reasons:

• Warframe is not realistic. It could be at some point, earlier in it's development. Back when it was closer to Dark Sector. Nowadays we have so much flashy rainbow-laser toys that realism is the least of our concerns.
• When it comes to balance, Warframe has so much weapons that you can have a meta weapon of your choice. If one of them is capable of killing you, it will certainly be overshadowed by a safer option with the same output. Why use Tonkor if you can just use Ignis? Why use Penta if you can use Opticor? Weapons are also balanced around their MR requirements. At least developers say so, since Ogris and Ignis Wraith require same MR, yet Ignis stomps Ogris in every possible way.
• And finally, when it comes to gameplay, self-damaging weapons are easily overshadowed by their non-damaging brethren because they are not as easy to use, require user to position themselves properly or outright NOT use the gun in specific situations. Thus, leading to lower KPS, in a game where KPS is crucial in certain mission types. What's worse, certain circumstances in which self damaging weapons become unusable can be out of players control. For example, you can't control your teammate or your AI ally that decides that it's time to jump in front of you.

TL;DR - self damaging weapons in Warframe don't work because they don't reward the player for taken risks properly, they also don't synergise well with fast-paced gameplay and movement system the game has. And Warframe is certainly not realistic enough to use "explosions harm everyone logic".

Edited June 3, 2019 by Lone_Dude

[Azamagon]

I'll say the same thing I've been saying for years:

Self-damage? No, it doesn't need to exist in Warframe. The game (i.e. yourself, allies and enemies) is generally too fastpaced for selfdamage to work well. Not to mention how certain frames can "abuse" self-damage mechanics to their benefits.

Self-incapacitation though? Sure, that could work. If you, say, got staggered or knocked down by being in your Ogris' blast, there's still a risk involved, but a risk that doesn't mean immediate death. You'd still have to be careful (especially when fighting higher level enemies), so it's still not like you'll be spamming them point blank. They'd just have a more REASONABLE drawback. And modding to become immune or more resistant to these drawbacks (with mods like Fortitude, or Handspring etc) is a more organic way of modding against it, in contrast to the straight up bandaid modding of the Cautious Shot mod.

[akots]

9 hours ago, NinjaZeku said:

Just for the record, do you use any Launchers on a regular basis?
And if so, does the suicide potential really enhance your enjoyment of them?

I use Tonkor and Javlok occasionally and like both of these a lot. I have to remember to be careful and try not to blow myself up. It works. 😉 Most of the time. 🙂

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

Gotta say I've been enjoying using some of my neglected self damage weapons ever since Hidryn

They aren't particularly meta or useful, but they are Fun.

Especially now that Hidryn allows me to enjoy them without dying constantly.

 

I wonder if the shield gating mechanic, could work as a fix for self-damage in general?

accidentally shoot your squadmate in the back with your Ogris, and instead of insta death you lose all shields/health down to 1?

it would still 'punish' players for using weapons poorly; if you were to do the same thing in a crowd of enemies you'd die from taking normal damage immediately after.

But if you were using the explosives intelligently from a safe range, such gating would allow a safety margin for the uncontrollable/innacurate issues...(abovementioned squadmate)