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

[TheLexiConArtist]

4 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

Here's the thing. You seem to think that explosives with 'safety features' are less dangerous than explosives without. This isn't true. The benefit of directionally fused explosives is that they actually deal damage more effectively to targets because they waste less energy on things that aren't the target.

Your entire post is based on the belief that weapons more effective against enemies must also be more dangerous to the users. --

And no, according to my argument Bombards and Napalms should work just fine. Napalms don't actually use explosive blast (they're incendiaries) for one, which aren't completely ineffective against hardened targets. Nothing in the game or out of game suggests that Bombards don't use some sort of selectively aimable warhead which would channel the blast towards enemies rather than having an ineffective omnidirectional blast-and in fact the Ogris blast radius when used by enemies (i.e. against Tenno) is much smaller than the Ogris blast radius against other targets. This suggests that against Tenno, you need to use more focused warheads, or that Tenno use HE-FRAG instead of HEAP rounds because many of their foes aren't heavily armored, and therefore the Tenno Ogris shouldn't do significant self-damage.

Hold on, don't mis-represent. I never likened the safety features to lessened effectiveness. That segment of my post was for the argument that "Warframe too stronk for tiny baby explosive", that's all. Arguably not when in relation to enemies (too little information to make such an absolute statement) and objectively not when those weapons came from the enemies.

I'll set aside Napalms as that was mildly a stretch more so because we mod the Ogris for the same so it starts on the same basis.

But Bombards? No, if anything this refutes your own argument that Tenno are harder targets. If we could 'choose to use different rounds' then we'd have it as a fire mode or a weapon variant and suddenly, Grineer aren't magically more difficult to pierce. But we're stuck with mods acting as surrogate and while I see 'reduced radius' on the Napalm patch, I don't see any "+armour piercing -blast radius" mod. Smaller blast radius though they may have, that doesn't make it any less omnidirectional.

This feels like you're trying to draw the target around the shots you've already taken as far as the argument goes.

4 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

The enemies of the Tenno are not some primitive bunch who can't build modern technology, so this doesn't countermand the idea of future tech smart fuses. The idea that they can harm Tenno also supports the idea of future-tech smart fuses, because dumb explosives are inefficient and ineffective ways to harm fast-moving armored targets, while smart fuses make these weapons more effective.

Some could build modern technology, but the point is that they generally wouldn't in the cases where the option is there.

Omnidirectional explosives are good for fast moving targets, because you don't have "this end towards enemy" find an enemy no longer that way. 100% waste from a directed jet of force not pointed in the right direction is not better than 50% waste from a dumb explosive that spreads the payload. As for armour, well, we disagree on this idea. Isn't the whole point that we're too self-fatal because enemies are beefier than us, in gameplay?

4 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

The Grineer use extremely hastily grown and deformed clones as line troops, who cannot be trusted to use unsafe explosive weapons effectively. Meanwhile, they are led by fairly intelligent, tactically adept commanders. Grineer explosive weapons should all have safety measures because the Grineer don't want an idiot clone blowing up their entire squad and disrupting their battle plans. Furthermore we know that Grineer are actually surprisingly technologically adept, this is literally stated in the Fragments. They make extensive use of smart weapons like the Bombard Ogris and the Buzlok. The Bombard who, by the way, is more than willing to fire his Ogris at point-blank range, almost as if he wasn't concerned about self-damage. Ghouls are flash grown creatures that are used as initial vanguards and exist mostly to absorb fire, and the Ghoul Expired is in fact a literal Ghoul corpse that is incapable of doing much more than being a fast zombie. Importantly, Ghoul expired explosives aren't nearly as self-destructive as Tenno ones either, because if you set off one of their bombs it just blows off their arm. This suggests directional explosives with greatly reduced backblast.

The Corpus sell their weapons to others. The buyers of said weapons would probably want basic features like "won't be more dangerous to us than to the enemy" included in their weapons and "will actually be able to direct their force effectively against hardened targets" as well, since that's kind of the point of a weapon. Furthermore the Corpus probably wouldn't want a single incorrectly brainwashed Crewman with a launcher to sabotage their entire operation by firing their launcher inside of their dropship or something. This means safety systems to stop mutinies from leading to mission failure.

The infested would probably want their munitions to not, you know, blow up their relatively advanced assets, because unlike Volatile Runners, the Infested units which actually wield what we think of as 'weaponry' are significantly rarer and more elite.

And fairly obviously the Tenno would want safe weapons because they're an elite force which doesn't want to lose their assets to accidents.

So there's sufficient justification for all major factions to use non-self-damaging weapons, especially when you consider that things like directional explosives and selectively aimed warheads exist not primarily as safety mechanisms but because by aiming the blast and shrapnel at things you don't like, rather than having it hit both things you do and don't like, you do more damage to the things you don't like. In fact, you have to jump through hoops, and deliberately make the game less realistic, to maintain an insistence on the frankly comical self-damage that exists in Warframe.

Most of this is covered by a big old ^{[citation needed]}

We know Grineer are haphazard stick-stuff-together types. We know they give their mad lads cleavers for the risk of gun misuse instead of giving those guns 'future-safe targeting'. The Bombards don't always do self-damage largely for metagame reasons; simplified Horde AI would just have it going off on themselves constantly and be a joke. Notice that when they have friendly-fire enabled from Radiation they don't murder each other instantly from direct hits with these 'heavy piercing' rounds you theorise? Could a regular human take a focused AP blast to the face and survive?
And doesn't the Ghoul explosive taking off their arm at all work against the idea that it's directed payloads? You're just setting it off, not pulling a 'stop hitting yourself' on them. Logically it'd just go outwards. Also, they use the sheer concussive force of bombing behind themselves to propel forwards, which could be argued in favour of  "generic shockwave" where the directed would be too unhelpfully precise.

Corpus.. well, what's your argument here? That greedy profiteers have never once knowingly sold unsafe products to their customers? Oh, it 'doesn't make sense' to put big capital at theoretical risk like that, you say.. but short-sighted CEOs literally do that by unsafe practices all the time. A lawsuit. A malfunction causing more damage than cutting the corner saved. Recalls. It happens, and Corpus are the pinnacle of that exact sort of abject disdain in favour of pocket change going up.

Infested was largely theoretical, since we don't have examples of Infested self-damage weaponry that is in active use by current units.  But it's the infestation. A growing mass that reclaims and corrupts anything. Volatile Runners may be shrugged off by us, but that's just how it be. The individuals don't matter. Sacrifice a bunch of drones to neutralise a threat if need be. It's also intelligent enough to make that call - 'if need be' - and favour the nuclear option.to cut off the external risk at that cost to themselves when the risk is high enough rather than gradually working up. Even non-hiveminds can exhibit this practice - lizards that drop their tail for instance. Why struggle when threatened at the cost of worse, when you can just give a chunk up to solve the problem outright?

Tenno, as I agreed, would care. However, much of their tech comes from the Orokin, who while not precluding safety measures, sure as hell wouldn't care about consequences. Just look at the.. everything they did that came back to haunt them.

 

None of this means these factions couldn't use safety features - Corpus directors, ranking Grineer over grunts, etc, where they can afford and care to be a little more wary - but it absolutely means that it's very unlikely that rank-and-file equipment would have them.

[Kefirno]

Some devs just don't play their own game. With Warframe's damage scaling even "-90% self damage" mod makes you oneshot yourself with any viable gun (while also wasting mod slot making it less viable). It's embarrassing how Warframe is the only shooter where explosive weapons are absolute miserable trash.

Tonkor was FUN, it should go back to what it was before. I loved it not for damage numbers but for how I could have a pocket trampoline with it.

For the rest of explosive guns.. Hey, DE, let me do your job for you:

a. Fixed flat self-damage number.

b. % of current health.

c. No damage but blast proc or stagger.

d. No instant damage but heat proc.

Here you go. Four different ways to make players more aware of consequences of shooting someone a rocket in the face at point blanks range (which isn't really that wrong tbqh) while keeping guns somewhat viable and adding more variety with different drawbacks.

Edited June 7, 2019 by Kefirno

[MJ12]

2 hours ago, (PS4)chibitonka said:

 

Ah yes because Mag = Rhino. Not all warframes are tanky.

Mag is too tanky for self damage to be anything but trivial. Rhino is even more tanky. In fact, one of the Tenno tips for tanky Warframes like Rhino should be "fire explosives at your feet to 'scratch your back' by killing nearby enemies."

2 hours ago, (PS4)chibitonka said:

Armor is such a loose term. *puts on cardboard shaped like armor* Look i'm wearing armor. 

Armor doesn't mean jack in this game unless you have several thousands of it. Otherwise you're counting on an ability like Iron Skin or similar to mitigate the dmg which proves that the armor isn't doing anything of value. 

Yes, because the epitome of Orokin bioengineering mated with an advanced nanotech virus that caused their skin to harden into "sword-steel" and their organs to interlink into structures of "untold resilience" (by Orokin standards, even) is just "cardboard shaped like armor." Your argument is literally self-parody.

And frankly, armor that "doesn't mean jack" against guns is extremely good at mitigating explosive effects because as it turns out, most shrapnel is way weaker than bullets, there's just a lot more shrapnel flying around in the aftermath of an explosion. This is literally why the US Army issued people in Vietnam flak jackets. They didn't mean jack against bullets. They did a pretty good job keeping people safe from artillery and mortars and grenades. And the actual lore makes it clear that all Warframes, not just the "tanky" ones

2 hours ago, (PS4)chibitonka said:

Don't take much dmg? Nightmare mode enemies would like to have a word with your frame. Same with Simulcrum minions for testing.

Funny the grineer have the same TYPE of armor the tenno have outside a few that are alloy armored. Yet our explosives can shred them so easily, and when we're not playing under lv100 stats they shred back just as well. Cause anything under lv100 is too weak to use for any serious argument.

Ah yes, "lv100 stats." Because these are representative of the average enemies the Tenno face, when they literally do not exist in the wild outside of sorties and endless missions. The forces guarding the Queens-Grineer elites with special equipment-are level 30. Your argument is flawed in the first place.

This is ignoring that for all we know, levels don't actually mean anything, they're just an arbitrary game difficulty slider, and the actuality is that you spend the entire game facing enemies with base stats and the only reason enemy stats scale is because otherwise the game wouldn't be a challenge.

2 hours ago, (PS4)chibitonka said:

Heh maybe self dmg would make sense in this ones eyes if we were using nuclear weapons. 

Actually we should just delete all existing self dmging weapons and replace them with nuclear launchers instead. Then ppl will stop this nonsense, cause it blowing up isn't enough of a reason for ppl to not just try rocket jumping off them like it's team fortress 2 or some crap.

 

Sure, we could implement your blatantly bad-faith 'solution.'

Or maybe, get this, we can make the game simultaneously better to play, have mechanics that match better with the actual gameplay expections, and also make the game more "realistic" (although the latter is entirely an incidental in a far future science fantasy setting like Warframe's) by deleting self-damage, or at most implementing a combination of minimum arming distances and a self-knockdown if you somehow manage to blunder into the edge of your own explosive through heroic effort.

[Ragingwasabi]

On 2019-06-03 at 2:14 PM, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

 

yes, because its how aoe is balanced. and by the sounds of it, its working pretty well. people arent spamming the crap out of it with no drawbacks.

i will agree that getting 1 hit by ur weapon no matter the range or DR mod installed is stupid. we should be punished for blowing our self up like an idiot, but it shouldnt be insta kill all the time. there needs to be a flat damage cap of say 300. that would take out the entire shields of a normal warframe. another 1 or 2 shots would kill them. so this way we are allowed a few mistakes before dying.

[(PSN)chibitonka]

24 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

Ah yes, "lv100 stats." Because these are representative of the average enemies the Tenno face, when they literally do not exist in the wild outside of sorties and endless missions. The forces guarding the Queens-Grineer elites with special equipment-are level 30. Your argument is flawed in the first place.

This is ignoring that for all we know, levels don't actually mean anything, they're just an arbitrary game difficulty slider, and the actuality is that you spend the entire game facing enemies with base stats and the only reason enemy stats scale is because otherwise the game wouldn't be a challenge.

nightmare mode stat multipliers make it so one doesn't have to camp in endless like a braindead chimp to get hard hitting enemies. 2x defenses, 3x dmg output of their lv value. Meaning lv50 nm = lv150 atk values and lv100 def values.  

Nightmare mode enemies feel like how they should be to begin with.

Even then it's just making numbers bigger ie Artificial Difficulty, besides the point. 

Bad faith solution? Hm wonder why I might be annoyed by the topic at all. Maybe just maybe because I use explosives in the game every ducking day without undeserved incident because I pay attention, something that the majority are too impatient or too lazy to do. 

Meanwhile the crap that really needs addressing is ignored cause some mooks can't figure out explosion in face = bad for player.

Edited June 7, 2019 by (PS4)chibitonka

[(PSN)chibitonka]

16 minutes ago, Ragingwasabi said:

yes, because its how aoe is balanced. and by the sounds of it, its working pretty well. people arent spamming the crap out of it with no drawbacks.

i will agree that getting 1 hit by ur weapon no matter the range or DR mod installed is stupid. we should be punished for blowing our self up like an idiot, but it shouldnt be insta kill all the time. there needs to be a flat damage cap of say 300. that would take out the entire shields of a normal warframe. another 1 or 2 shots would kill them. so this way we are allowed a few mistakes before dying.

shield gating could just become a passive trait for shields instead. Would accomplish the same thing and free up hildryn's passive for something else. 

Tbh tho just picking up the weapon type is like signing a contract to yourself. I realize by picking this weapon up and die from it's explosions it's my fault for not being careful. Or something like that xD

[MJ12]

12 minutes ago, (PS4)chibitonka said:

nightmare mode stat multipliers make it so one doesn't have to camp in endless like a braindead chimp to get hard hitting enemies. 2x defenses, 3x dmg output of their lv value. Meaning lv50 nm = lv150 atk values and lv100 def values.  

Nightmare mode enemies feel like how they should be to begin with.

Even then it's just making numbers bigger ie Artificial Difficulty, besides the point. 

Bad faith solution? Hm wonder why I might be annoyed by the topic at all. Maybe just maybe because I use explosives in the game every ducking day without undeserved incident because I pay attention, something that the majority are too impatient or too lazy to do. 

Have you seen literally any of the Warframe trailers? The Tenno in them are never actually challenged by the enemies. In fact, the enemies get slaughtered without putting up anything resembling resistance. This doesn't make it seem like lv100 enemies are representative of enemies as they actually are.

And the obsession with going "but I use explosives and I pay attention, clearly these other peasants are just bad at the game" is funny because people like @Teridax68 have pointed out objective, useful reasons for why self-damage is bad in Warframe even if you're actually used to it.

On 2019-06-03 at 12:07 AM, Teridax68 said:

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).

[MJ12]

Frankly, if 'explosives can't be used too close to you' is actually a necessary part of balancing, the easiest, least frustrating way to do it is to just give them a minimum arming distance. Your Tonkor shot doesn't arm until it's (blast radius + 1) meters away from your Warframe. Until that point, if it hits anything, it only does base projectile damage and doesn't explode at all. While aiming with an explosive weapon that has an arming distance, you get an indicator on the side of your reticule which gives you the range in meters and gives an indication if your round will explode after hitting the point of impact.

This gives immediate feedback of whether you will get a dud round or not, will provide the same balancing benefit as self-damage (giving launchers minimum ranges) with none of the annoyance, and puts the punishment for a misaimed explosive shot in line with the punishment for misaimed shots from every other type of weapon in Warframe-your shot becomes ineffectual and you need to retarget and try again. Player skill still matters, and there's still an incentive to learn how to do snap-shots with launchers by getting used to their blast radii, but the process of gaining that skill isn't ludicrously punishing, nor is the punishment for a moment's inattentiveness or a single mistake out-of-line with the otherwise forgiving nature of Warframe.

I'd prefer that self damage not actually exist, but if you insist on giving explosives minimum ranges, a minimum arming distance is a much more elegant way of doing it than extremely high self-damage. Especially because if your hypothetical weapons are balanced only because they have a minimum range, this means that your weapon won't become inadvertently unbalanced because of the existence of an invulnerability power.

Edited June 7, 2019 by MJ12

[TheLexiConArtist]

16 hours ago, MJ12 said:

And the obsession with going "but I use explosives and I pay attention, clearly these other peasants are just bad at the game" is funny because people like @Teridax68 have pointed out objective, useful reasons for why self-damage is bad in Warframe even if you're actually used to it.

(Emphasis mine)
Hardly objective. That is a lot of arguably-objective observations about the game, but judging them as 'why self damage is bad' is purely subjective for most of that. The only parts we can all agree on is that the actual relation of self-risk to enemy-risk is no longer appropriately proportioned at the current level of power (and expectation of power, more importantly), and that ally-collision is a dumb thing (which also applies to non-explosive projectiles for that matter - people love to eat arrows too) but that's why I have my own solutions for those already given that do maintain the mechanic's fundamental design.

It also cites the Cyanex being a 'proof' that shows it should go away from more weapons, which is blatantly opinionated. As I see it, the Cyanex shouldn't have self-damage because the player could take a perfect shot and then have it come back to punish them through no fault and with little agency of their own due to the automatic homing properties. Every other weapon they have predictable control enough over that the onus is back on them. Including the Komorex.

 

Since your last post there also highlights 'extremely high' self-damage, I'm also wondering if you've looked at my address of that over in the other thread at all? With Cautious Shot still available (to some extent as it'd be too strong in its current band-aid form) afterwards, applying a formulaic reduction to how 'extreme' the self-damage can become provides a range of risk-to-power that need only become fatal if you're making it fatal without trying to safeguard yourself by your chosen frame's resilience or slotting Cautious to drop the risk down at the cost of power.

We could have balance where explosives have greater output than the current 'safe' AOE analogues naturally due to the (better-proportional) added risk, but they can be reined in to a nearer-'safe' AOE that is roughly equivalent in power to the non-explosives which have a similar general safety. Would that not satisfy both camps? You get a safe soft boom, players willing to risk themselves get some reward satisfaction out of it.

[MJ12]

2 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

(Emphasis mine)
Hardly objective. That is a lot of arguably-objective observations about the game, but judging them as 'why self damage is bad' is purely subjective for most of that. The only parts we can all agree on is that the actual relation of self-risk to enemy-risk is no longer appropriately proportioned at the current level of power (and expectation of power, more importantly), and that ally-collision is a dumb thing (which also applies to non-explosive projectiles for that matter - people love to eat arrows too) but that's why I have my own solutions for those already given that do maintain the mechanic's fundamental design.

It also cites the Cyanex being a 'proof' that shows it should go away from more weapons, which is blatantly opinionated. As I see it, the Cyanex shouldn't have self-damage because the player could take a perfect shot and then have it come back to punish them through no fault and with little agency of their own due to the automatic homing properties. Every other weapon they have predictable control enough over that the onus is back on them. Including the Komorex.

 

Since your last post there also highlights 'extremely high' self-damage, I'm also wondering if you've looked at my address of that over in the other thread at all? With Cautious Shot still available (to some extent as it'd be too strong in its current band-aid form) afterwards, applying a formulaic reduction to how 'extreme' the self-damage can become provides a range of risk-to-power that need only become fatal if you're making it fatal without trying to safeguard yourself by your chosen frame's resilience or slotting Cautious to drop the risk down at the cost of power.

We could have balance where explosives have greater output than the current 'safe' AOE analogues naturally due to the (better-proportional) added risk, but they can be reined in to a nearer-'safe' AOE that is roughly equivalent in power to the non-explosives which have a similar general safety. Would that not satisfy both camps? You get a safe soft boom, players willing to risk themselves get some reward satisfaction out of it.

I've looked at your address in the other thread and it's got the flaw that it's stuck in a flawed risk-reward paradigm.

Risk-reward is a tool to encourage players to do certain risky things. This is generally because you want players to take those specific risks. XCOM provides rewards for flanking shots because it wants players to move aggressively. XCOM used Meld as a reward because it wants players to charge in forward rather than overwatch creeping one tile at a time. Metal Gear Rising provides high-damage parry counters as rewards because it wants players to stay stuck in and use the parry system rather than try to dodge attacks and poke at enemies when it's safe.

If you don't actually want someone to engage in that behavior, risk-reward is completely inappropriate because the result of attempting to do 'risk-reward' balancing to something leads to people engaging in behaviors you don't want them to.

So let me ask you this core question. Why do you want players to blow themselves up?

Edited June 8, 2019 by MJ12

[TheLexiConArtist]

2 hours ago, MJ12 said:

I've looked at your address in the other thread and it's got the flaw that it's stuck in a flawed risk-reward paradigm.

So let me ask you this core question. Why do you want players to blow themselves up?

Well, inviting powerful explosives, like I said, regaining their appropriate power when the risk is in play. Currently they're matched or exceeded by the safe alternatives, but that can't be resolved until people are less inclined to complain they're killing themselves at the extant level of power. Hence, rework the curve to something better befitting the game's expectations.

The reward then becomes "covering an area, dealing above-average damage to everything in it" at the risk of.. well, personal risk.

But other than that, look at the people defending it. The people here who use them already quite happily. Why, exactly, do you feel it's your right to deny those players their enjoyed danger/power dynamic when alternatives already exist to avoid it?

I blow myself up sometimes and it's generally my fault for not paying attention. That's on me. I'd be fine with leaving it just as fatal.
But if the vocal minority are still going to complain then let's address that so you're at least outright killing yourself at full build, rather than merely halfway into the modding power scale.

That leaves people who like to feel the danger of their weapon (and feel skillful for not murdering themselves) able to slam in the full build and play their playstyle, while absolutely risk-averse players have the option of entirely different weapons not featuring self-damage, and people who fall somewhere in between can use Cautious Shot for some mitigated-risk but lessened-reward on the explosive weapons.

Not everyone has to like every weapon, you know. We who like the risky explosives currently certainly don't like them for the fallacious reasons of "meta-Tonkor [was] 'fun' (being so overpowered)", since they are far from it right now, so how do you justify an argument that we are not allowed that playstyle you don't enjoy?
If it's, "I'd like to use the weapon", then you can't argue to remove the core dynamic of the weapon. Implicitly then you wouldn't actually like to use the weapon, you want to use something in the safe-alternative AOE category.
If it's, "I'd like to use the weapon as it is but the risk/reward is inadequately balanced", then you should support the change that maintains the mechanic's functionality and design as much as possible while bringing it into line, as my proposition does. This is why I argue things like "percentile health self-damage is inadequate" because it's taking away an extra facet that it doesn't need to.

Edit: I should probably point out that there's a separate additional path for future, new weapons to potentially feature smart-arming payloads. But that doesn't mean you have to retrofit that onto everything currently in usage. Not for 'realism'/thematic reasons or any gameplay reason when alternatives already exist in the interim.

Edited June 8, 2019 by TheLexiConArtist

[Kontrollo]

By the way, I have only skimmed this thread, so excuse me if it has already been brought up:

 

You guys realise there's a multiplier on the self damage of explosives, right? If they wanted they could tweak that for every single weapon, too.

[MJ12]

4 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Well, inviting powerful explosives, like I said, regaining their appropriate power when the risk is in play. Currently they're matched or exceeded by the safe alternatives, but that can't be resolved until people are less inclined to complain they're killing themselves at the extant level of power. Hence, rework the curve to something better befitting the game's expectations.

The reward then becomes "covering an area, dealing above-average damage to everything in it" at the risk of.. well, personal risk.

But other than that, look at the people defending it. The people here who use them already quite happily. Why, exactly, do you feel it's your right to deny those players their enjoyed danger/power dynamic when alternatives already exist to avoid it?

I blow myself up sometimes and it's generally my fault for not paying attention. That's on me. I'd be fine with leaving it just as fatal.
But if the vocal minority are still going to complain then let's address that so you're at least outright killing yourself at full build, rather than merely halfway into the modding power scale.

That leaves people who like to feel the danger of their weapon (and feel skillful for not murdering themselves) able to slam in the full build and play their playstyle, while absolutely risk-averse players have the option of entirely different weapons not featuring self-damage, and people who fall somewhere in between can use Cautious Shot for some mitigated-risk but lessened-reward on the explosive weapons.

Not everyone has to like every weapon, you know. We who like the risky explosives currently certainly don't like them for the fallacious reasons of "meta-Tonkor [was] 'fun' (being so overpowered)", since they are far from it right now, so how do you justify an argument that we are not allowed that playstyle you don't enjoy?
If it's, "I'd like to use the weapon", then you can't argue to remove the core dynamic of the weapon. Implicitly then you wouldn't actually like to use the weapon, you want to use something in the safe-alternative AOE category.
If it's, "I'd like to use the weapon as it is but the risk/reward is inadequately balanced", then you should support the change that maintains the mechanic's functionality and design as much as possible while bringing it into line, as my proposition does. This is why I argue things like "percentile health self-damage is inadequate" because it's taking away an extra facet that it doesn't need to.

Edit: I should probably point out that there's a separate additional path for future, new weapons to potentially feature smart-arming payloads. But that doesn't mean you have to retrofit that onto everything currently in usage. Not for 'realism'/thematic reasons or any gameplay reason when alternatives already exist in the interim.

That's not answering my question. I didn't ask you why you think players deserve rewards for "their enjoyed danger/power dynamic."

I asked you why you think Warframe should encourage players to commit suicide. Answer me-why do you think that the game itself should encourage players to blow themselves up?

Because that's what risk/reward balancing is all about. It's about encouraging players to do things that would otherwise be stupid. It's about deliberately making certain low-risk playstyles less optimal. It's about encouraging players of XCOM to rush into unexplored parts of the map and possibly activate six aliens rather than creep forward one square at a time. It's about encouraging players of Devil May Cry to constantly be in the enemy's face and attacking rather than spending five minutes wearing each one down with guns and dodging whenever there might be a threat. It's about encouraging a player in a MMO to advance to higher level zones rather than sit in the newbie zone farming boars for several months straight. It's about encouraging a player of a platformer to actually explore the level rather than beeline to the exit. Fundamentally, risk/reward balancing exists because the developers want to force players to encounter that risk.

So when you say explosive power is "risk/reward" and your "reward" for saying that you're okay with "blowing yourself up sometimes" is more power, what you're saying is that the game should encourage you to blow yourself up. So again, why is it that players should be encouraged to blow themselves up?

Edited June 8, 2019 by MJ12

[TheLexiConArtist]

2 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

That's not answering my question. I didn't ask you why you think players deserve rewards for "their enjoyed danger/power dynamic."

Why do you think Warframe should encourage players to commit suicide?

That's what risk/reward balancing is all about. It's about encouraging players to do things that would otherwise be stupid. It's about encouraging players of XCOM to rush into unexplored parts of the map and possibly activate six aliens rather than creep forward one square at a time. It's about encouraging players of Devil May Cry to constantly be in the enemy's face and attacking rather than spending five minutes wearing each one down with guns and dodging whenever there might be a threat. It's about encouraging a player in a MMO to advance to higher level zones rather than sit in the newbie zone farming boars for several months straight. It's about encouraging a player of a platformer to actually explore the level rather than beeline to the exit. Fundamentally, risk/reward balancing exists because the developers want to force players to encounter that risk.

So when you say explosive power is "risk/reward" and your "reward" for saying that you're okay with "blowing yourself up sometimes" is more power, what you're saying is that the game should encourage you to blow yourself up. So again, why is it that players should be encouraged to blow themselves up?

I didn't answer your question because it's not the one that should be asked.

Players aren't made to suffer the risk 100% of the time in risk/reward dynamics. They're encouraged by the reward to invite the possibility of that negative outcome and operate around it thus making the exchange worthwhile.

Your own analogies show this. It's not "players are forced to rush blindly and invariably die" in XCOM, it's "players advance quickly but strategically" so as not to run afoul of the risk of ambush. Royal Guard in DMC likewise. Being open to more attacks, the damage is the failure state, not an obligation. The player's skill operating around it gains the reward of parry-damage and full blocks if done right.

So, your question is flawed at its foundation. Players aren't being encouraged to blow themselves up, they're encouraged to play around the possibility of blowing themselves up in order to enjoy the reward of big group damage. If they shoot risky explosives right, then they will, generally speaking, not be blown up by their own fire.

[Kefirno]

5 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

The people here who use them already quite happily. Why, exactly, do you feel it's your right to deny those players their enjoyed danger/power dynamic when alternatives already exist to avoid it?

Fix self-damage and add mod that instantly kills you from getting caught in your own explosion. Problem solved, everyone can enjoy the game.

[MJ12]

7 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

I didn't answer your question because it's not the one that should be asked.

Players aren't made to suffer the risk 100% of the time in risk/reward dynamics. They're encouraged by the reward to invite the possibility of that negative outcome and operate around it thus making the exchange worthwhile.

Your own analogies show this. It's not "players are forced to rush blindly and invariably die" in XCOM, it's "players advance quickly but strategically" so as not to run afoul of the risk of ambush. Royal Guard in DMC likewise. Being open to more attacks, the damage is the failure state, not an obligation. The player's skill operating around it gains the reward of parry-damage and full blocks if done right.

So, your question is flawed at its foundation. Players aren't being encouraged to blow themselves up, they're encouraged to play around the possibility of blowing themselves up in order to enjoy the reward of big group damage. If they shoot risky explosives right, then they will, generally speaking, not be blown up by their own fire.

Yes, players are encouraged to engage in behavior that allows for that negative outcome. In other words, the negative outcome is encouraged. The fact that the negative outcome is not guaranteed is utterly irrelevant, because risk-reward is about encouraging playing through the consequences of the negative outcome. In XCOM, advancing "quickly but strategically" is impossible to completely mitigate the risk-if you do seek Meld or flanking shots, you will inevitably run into three pods at once and have to plan around it. In DMC, you will, unless you're extremely good, screw up a parry and take full damage and suffer the consequences of being right in the enemy's face.

Risk-reward exists to get players in these situations, because the game designers believe that these situations are both some of the most fun situations you can get yourself into-I know that my most exciting moments in XCOM and XCOM2 were when a flanking move or a meld dash revealed additional pods and I suddenly had to salvage a bad situation-but no gamer who wants to win would ever willingly just throw themselves into it. So instead, they design the game to reward you for taking actions which will inevitably put you into those situations so that getting into those situations (which they want you to get into) feels like it's not your fault, you made a good tactical decision or were playing optimally, and this is an inevitable consequence because you can't avoid the cost of that decision all the time.

The core of risk-reward is therefore encouraging players to suffer the risk itself. Because the risk is fun, but if you don't reward it, taking that risk is suboptimal. In other words, the core reason to engage in risk-reward balancing is if you believe that suffering the risk is actually so fun that players should be encouraged to do it.

When you don't actually want players to experience that negative outcome reasonably often, risk-reward balancing is inappropriate.

So why should players be encouraged to blow themselves up? Why is blowing yourself up fun in Warframe? Why is it fun for you to instantly die because of a single missed shot and wait for a revive?

Edited June 8, 2019 by MJ12

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

On 2019-06-07 at 6:47 AM, Ragingwasabi said:

yes, because its how aoe is balanced. and by the sounds of it, its working pretty well. people arent spamming the crap out of it with no drawbacks.

i will agree that getting 1 hit by ur weapon no matter the range or DR mod installed is stupid. we should be punished for blowing our self up like an idiot, but it shouldnt be insta kill all the time. there needs to be a flat damage cap of say 300. that would take out the entire shields of a normal warframe. another 1 or 2 shots would kill them. so this way we are allowed a few mistakes before dying.

Then explain the staticor.

People keep avoiding this topic.

If you feel you are right.... Explain the staticor that basically does everything I want explosive secondary weapons to do but without the drawbacks....

Hay. If you want to say "primary explosive weapons that can cover half the map need to be self damaging" fine... The secondaries don't do that.

So if you really think that DE is confident that this is how area of effect secondary weapons should work. Explain the staticor. 

[(XBOX)CertainLeader6]

On 2019-06-06 at 4:03 AM, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

I was about to be like "wut...."

 

I was looking at it, and since I use mobile, my tablet understands sh1t3 about what I'm trying to tap.

[(XBOX)CertainLeader6]

On 2019-06-06 at 3:03 AM, Lone_Dude said:

Well, you see, the point is that I don't have to worry about making mistakes as long as I have a non-self-damage weapon. There are no high rewards for high risks. My KPS is much higher if I use just about ANY meta weapons, than let's say Ogris when it comes to higher level play. That's the point. Such weapons simply don't pull their weight. If Ogris dealt 3000 damage per rocket or had crits - there would be a "high reward" for my troubles. Right now there is none, yet it kills me all the same. So I can just use something like Opticor over it and lose NOTHING. Why bother slowing myself down, while in game modes like ESO and survival I literally have to be quick about killing things?

Movement in warframe is not made for stealth. It's meant for moving fast lmao. Your wet dreams about stealthy ninjas died long ago, this game is now a full on shooter. Unless you think that sliding around as an invi frame with a melee modifier is a pinnacle of stealth. And buddy, if you can't rely on guns - your guns are bad. Try harder.

You've forgotten about spy missions, where you must (yes, your right) be fast, but you can also entirely screw yourself if you trip the alarm, starting the computer "clean up", breaking under the stress, and the files are going going gone. And what you said about not having to worry when not using self serve weapons, everyone makes mistakes. Your no exception.

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

48 minutes ago, (XB1)CertainLeader6 said:

You've forgotten about spy missions, where you must (yes, your right) be fast, but you can also entirely screw yourself if you trip the alarm, starting the computer "clean up", breaking under the stress, and the files are going going gone. And what you said about not having to worry when not using self serve weapons, everyone makes mistakes. Your no exception.

Literally no one uses these weapons for spy missions. There are two types of player in spy missions, those who know what they're doing and those who try to just brute force it because running that sortie 5 times as fast as possible hoping you can out race the timer is better than doing it the right way once. Those who know what they're doing are using one of a specific set of frames. None of which need something like talons. Most people just pull out ivara and if, if, they have to kill someone in the mission, it's in the form of a bow, a silenced sniper, a baza, or a dagger with covert lethality, if you kill them using channeling there's not even a body left behind. 

Now I have already said, talons would absolutely have a place in this game as a tool that can be used as a weapon... Because if you could use it to break open the "non damaged" vents... Being that usually you can only break open "damaged" vents... Granting more methods of entry, yes, this weapon would suddenly become very useful for covert missions like spy or break out missions. But as you can't do that, all that using your talons is likely to do is get your paper frame splattered across the wall because you were just /sliiiiiiightly/ too close to it when you pressed altfire.

There is no "risk reward" here. It is just a weapon that is extremely likely to cause you to kill your self while not being any better than any other weapon in the game. Sure... If say concealed explosives were buffed so that they delivered the entirety of the weapon's damage across the entire area effected by the explosion, it would make thrown weapons suddenly very popular and very powerful.... Which right now they are /neither/. And having self harm might be useful to temper people from using them exclusively to destroy everything in every corner of the game... But because CE does literally nothing past lever 40 or so, that's not even a valid excuse. 

there is no corner of the game where any of the weapons that have been discussed here are "meta". No corner where they would become meta if self harm was removed. It's just an arbitrary physic that's irrelevant and only makes certain weapons worse than useless. 

Unless they intend to nerf every crowd controlling weapon and frame into the ground to the point that it's going to make ESO a nightmare to play because nobody can make it through round 3 because nothing is efficient at controlling crowds anymore, then they need to abandon the physic. It doesn't make sense for how the game is played anymore. If they removed self harm from talons today. People would still not use them. That means there's no reason for the physic to be on them.

 

Who on earth is going to run around throwing fire crackers when they could just play saryn and watch everything in the world die around them? After maybe like, two or three button presses? Build saryn for range and power, put on growing power, cast spore on something and watch everything fall over dead. Repeat. DE seems okay with this. So all arguments about self harming weapons possibly becoming meta are kind of irrelevant. 

Edited June 9, 2019 by (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx

[TheMostFrench]

On 2019-06-07 at 7:31 PM, MJ12 said:

Frankly, if 'explosives can't be used too close to you' is actually a necessary part of balancing, the easiest, least frustrating way to do it is to just give them a minimum arming distance. Your Tonkor shot doesn't arm until it's (blast radius + 1) meters away from your Warframe. Until that point, if it hits anything, it only does base projectile damage and doesn't explode at all. While aiming with an explosive weapon that has an arming distance, you get an indicator on the side of your reticule which gives you the range in meters and gives an indication if your round will explode after hitting the point of impact.

This gives immediate feedback of whether you will get a dud round or not, will provide the same balancing benefit as self-damage (giving launchers minimum ranges) with none of the annoyance, and puts the punishment for a misaimed explosive shot in line with the punishment for misaimed shots from every other type of weapon in Warframe-your shot becomes ineffectual and you need to retarget and try again. Player skill still matters, and there's still an incentive to learn how to do snap-shots with launchers by getting used to their blast radii, but the process of gaining that skill isn't ludicrously punishing, nor is the punishment for a moment's inattentiveness or a single mistake out-of-line with the otherwise forgiving nature of Warframe.

I'd prefer that self damage not actually exist, but if you insist on giving explosives minimum ranges, a minimum arming distance is a much more elegant way of doing it than extremely high self-damage. Especially because if your hypothetical weapons are balanced only because they have a minimum range, this means that your weapon won't become inadvertently unbalanced because of the existence of an invulnerability power.

The Tonkor short range dud was a good solution imo, I was excited by the idea of grenade punching enemies. I remember before Onslaught mode there would be parties with 4 tonkors sitting in Hydron not having to move because they could kill everything from the top level by aiming at each spawn point. Enemies could barely get out of the rooms they spawned in, it was definitely a little too good. Finding balance for high damage explosive weapons is tricky, but accidentally killing yourself is the most annoying punishment, because using up your revives could cost you a lot. Stuff like lowering the ammo and magazine count, or making it reload more slowly work just as well to keep people moving around.
 

 

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

If you feel you are right.... Explain the staticor that basically does everything I want explosive secondary weapons to do but without the drawbacks....
 

This is a really good point.

Anyway, I think launchers and explosives should AT MOST just knock you over or stagger you instead of doing self damage. There is still some small risk associated with being reckless, but at least you won't accidentally blow yourself up because someone jumped in front of you, or because the projectile collided with an invisible hit box on a piece of scenery.

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

3 minutes ago, TheMostFrench said:

Anyway, I think launchers and explosives should AT MOST just knock you over or stagger you instead of doing self damage. There is still some small risk associated with being reckless, but at least you won't accidentally blow yourself up because someone jumped in front of you, or because the projectile collided with an invisible hit box on a piece of scenery.

I fully agree... Those area of effect stomps some enemies are capable of that will send you flying and then flat on your back? I'm fine with that happening if you were too close to the show. Hell in end game content, knocking your self down like that really will cause you to die because everythings going to concentrate fire on you and you'll be dead in a heartbeat. But at least that's leaving you a chance to recover if it knocked you behind a wall or something.

I am /great/ with things just knocking you flat on your shiny nanobiomech assets if you were too close... The self kill thing needs to just go.

[Ragingwasabi]

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

 

its a bloody anomally. an oversight? im not de, i dont know. u think i dont want that sht nerfed?

Edited June 9, 2019 by Ragingwasabi

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

So basically what you're saying is that you're one of those people who believe that balance can only be achieved by making everything weaker and weaker, basically you are in the "no buff, only nerf" camp... 

You know "power crunch" is as big a problem in long term game environments as power creep.

Any weapon that is, by nature, weak and under used, but also has special detrimental physics that make people even less likely to use it, needs to either be buffed in it's effectiveness to be worth the risk, or have the risk removed so that the item's overall lack of usefulness won't be further diminished by additional negative effects. Long story short. Explosive weapons need to either be buffed massively to make up for the risk, or have the risk removed to make up for their overall lack of effectiveness. 

If /you/ really want balance... The only way we are going to achieve that is if the entire system, from enemy levels, player levels, mods, weapon mechanics, everything, is all thrown in the trash, and they start /everything/ over to create a truly new paradigm addressing all of the balancing issues. And thank heaven they are never going to do that.

Because.

Fun is more important than balance, and that is why the staticor exists. 

[TheLexiConArtist]

13 hours ago, MJ12 said:

{{The literal definition of a strawman argument, repeated.}}

It's clear from that response you have no interest in the actual debate. Not even worth continuing.

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

So basically what you're saying is that you're one of those people who believe that balance can only be achieved by making everything weaker and weaker, basically you are in the "no buff, only nerf" camp... 
You know "power crunch" is as big a problem in long term game environments as power creep.

Any weapon that is, by nature, weak and under used, but also has special detrimental physics that make people even less likely to use it, needs to either be buffed in it's effectiveness to be worth the risk, or have the risk removed so that the item's overall lack of usefulness won't be further diminished by additional negative effects. Long story short. Explosive weapons need to either be buffed massively to make up for the risk, or have the risk removed to make up for their overall lack of effectiveness. 

If /you/ really want balance... The only way we are going to achieve that is if the entire system, from enemy levels, player levels, mods, weapon mechanics, everything, is all thrown in the trash, and they start /everything/ over to create a truly new paradigm addressing all of the balancing issues. And thank heaven they are never going to do that.

Because.
Fun is more important than balance, and that is why the staticor exists. 

Both nerfs and buffs are equally viable, and need not be mutually exclusive to approach balance ideals. Being ideals, approach is all we can hope for, because of the other mitigating factors that aren't simply statistical and logical like per-player preferences and skills.

You present a false dichotomy in addressing explosives: Overpowering reward for overpowering risks, OR removing risk entirely. 
In this case, as evidenced by my alternate solution thread, I'm recommending a partial application of both tweaks. Better output of explosives, and rebalanced self-damage that makes them usable in more than a strict binary fashion. Risk doesn't have to be removed entirely when it can be reduced to a more accurate proportion, and we don't have to incite a broken Suicide Squad wielding invariably self-destructive explosives becoming the only endgame option because they vastly outstrip any competition. They can just be.. a bit better, and especially against a clustered group, like they always were.

Fun is not unilaterally more important than balance. No, not even in PvE. The arguable 'fun' of Tonkor meta was shallow for its users, and detrimental to non-users for its imbalance much the same way as trying to compete with Mesa and Saryn can be now; it might be 'fun' for you, but it comes at the expense of those around you getting a chance to operate and seek their own fun.

I don't play enough public to know relatively how much the Staticor actually sees use, but I do know that we have the same shallowness issue with Kitguns in general. They're so much better than almost every other option, and nothing really acts as counterbalance - especially with the added perks of their Arcanes. But.. well, people do riot more about their shinies getting rebalanced down than they would about other things being brought up. We see that even when it's riven dispositions.
The Staticor's disposition is atrocious for a reason. Dispos that low are tantamount admissions that even DE knows something is pretty OP, they just haven't dared hit the base stats.