please stop making enemies totally immune to status effects

[TaylorsContraction]

let me preface that this is not about demolysts.

 

In general crits have been king of melee for a very long. Then DE released condition overload and in so doing added diversity where players could choose to either use crit or status based melee weapons.  Great job,  I found that I prefer the status option as it fit the weapons I liked more.

But then you started releasing enemies immune to status effects and forced me to use crit weapons again.

 

The wolf boss is a perfect example. I could obliterate him in less than a minute using my crit weapons,  but it would take substantially longer with any status based weapon.  Nothing about this boss merited status immunity.  He had so much hp you yourselves had to nerf it multiple times.  Halving it would not have been a big deal at all.  His armor could be stripped by kavats, what would it matter if his armor was stripped through corrosive procs? The only status effect that could have made this fight strange or buggy is a radiation proc. But instead of simply making him immune to confusion toy have him immune to everything for literally no reason other than making status melee useless again while crits remain fortunately useful.

Now, he isn't the only enemy immune to status effects,  but every enemy that is,  is needlessly so.  What does it matter if you can apply a viral  proc on an eidolon, people one shot them anyway with chroma. making them affected by status effects will only increase weapon options,  nothing else.  An irradiated eidolon is no different from a non irradiated one.  There is just no justification,  so please stop it.

and if you truly want enemies immune to say confusion,  then just do that rather than immunity to all status effects.

[YUNoJump]

I think the reason they keep doing it is just because there are some OP procs like Viral and Corrosive, and they keep throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Viral taking a full 50% off of HP is absolutely ridiculous, and although armor scaling is definitely a problem, the fact that Corrosive can completely strip armor in a short time is also kinda OP.

DE probably just needs to balance procs better, so that they can all be considered equal rather than 1 or 2 being capable of breaking any enemy to pieces. Once they've done that then they'll be able to consider status resistance more carefully. 

[ShortCat]

You misplace cause and effect:

• ability spam rises -> so does the number of ability immune enemy types
• power creep enables way too much damage -> invulnerabilty phases on enemies or bosses
• status effects became too potent and bypass certain game mechanics -> status immunity or cleanse is introduced
• then there is base damage reduction to combat all of the above
• then there will be "kill with certain action" to combat all of the above

You got way too strong and do not want to lose a fraction of that power, now watch how you are disarmed step by step.

Edited June 14, 2019 by ShortCat

[Teridax68]

I think one of the current mistakes with status is that status effects like Electricity and Blast apply hard CC to enemies, preventing them from acting completely: this doesn't really work well when status can be spammed and/or raised to 100% status chance per shot, because it makes it easy to perma-CC enemies. However, there are less drastic solutions to that which don't involve simply eliminating all of status, e.g. by implementing diminishing returns on hard CC, and as the OP mentioned, simply making enemies completely status-immune just constrains the metagame severely by focusing it even more around a smaller subset of weapons, and pure damage over any form of utility.

[Xzorn]

3 hours ago, ShortCat said:

You misplace cause and effect:

• ability spam rises -> so does the number of ability immune enemy types
• power creep enables way too much damage -> invulnerabilty phases on enemies or bosses
• status effects became too potent and bypass certain game mechanics -> status immunity or cleanse is introduced
• then there is base damage reduction to combat all of the above
• then there will be "kill with certain action" to combat all of the above

You got way too strong and do not want to lose a fraction of that power, now watch how you are disarmed step by step.

 

This is fairly accurate. It's circulating cause and effect that's been going a long time and each time we complete the circle gameplay suffers.

The opposite spectrum can also work. Instead of players giving up power, enemies gain power through scaling.

Both are temporary solutions though. The only cure is Damage 3.0.

[DatDarkOne]

14 hours ago, YUNoJump said:

I think the reason they keep doing it is just because there are some OP procs like Viral and Corrosive, and they keep throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Viral taking a full 50% off of HP is absolutely ridiculous, and although armor scaling is definitely a problem, the fact that Corrosive can completely strip armor in a short time is also kinda OP.

You left out Gas.  The combo of Condition Overload and the Gas/Toxin proc AoE is also stupid powerful.  Most just don't realize it, and think because it was slightly nerfed that it's not powerful.  

That said, I agree with @ShortCat and @Xzorn.  

[TaylorsContraction]

13 hours ago, ShortCat said:

You misplace cause and effect:

• ability spam rises -> so does the number of ability immune enemy types
• power creep enables way too much damage -> invulnerabilty phases on enemies or bosses
• status effects became too potent and bypass certain game mechanics -> status immunity or cleanse is introduced
• then there is base damage reduction to combat all of the above
• then there will be "kill with certain action" to combat all of the above

You got way too strong and do not want to lose a fraction of that power, now watch how you are disarmed step by step.

while you're right to an extent,  I think the last item on your list doesn't belong there.

in my opinion,  enemies like bursas that have a front shield,  or nox that has a weakness,  or even the juggernaut are good enemy designs.  they introduce variety into the game by indeed forcing us to approach combat differently from the norm.  but we are able to do do while having access to our entire arsenal.  The juggernaut for example can be affected by abilities but cc doesn't have a big impact on him.  DE needs to release more enemies like the ones I listed and less like the eidolons.

the more tools they take away the more boring that portion of the games will be because we are restricted to whatever works,  which is the one thing.

[(PSN)Crixus044]

No enemy in this game has real resistance to us. They're all tissue paper with the occasional immunity to something here and there. Like zxorn said, scaling enemies up is a step into the right direction, but until i see some real dangerous enemies, nothing in this game will be something i ain't seen before.

Immunity is just a shortcut solution that i hate. It just shows DE ain't got a clue of what to do until damage 3.0. It isn't like this is anything new. Damage 2.0 hasn't changed since 2014, players are just slowly wising up (very very very VERY slowly) to how to play and build, yet DE insists on just adding new mods for no reason even though we only got 8 slots and 4 different kinds of attributes, fighting the EXACT same enemies.

I'm not gonna lie, I sometimes wish the majority of players leave the game so that DE could really get moving on what they should be working, but that's just my "complainy guy" coming out.

[ShortCat]

9 hours ago, TaylorsContraction said:

while you're right to an extent,  I think the last item on your list doesn't belong there.

in my opinion,  enemies like bursas that have a front shield,  or nox that has a weakness,  or even the juggernaut are good enemy designs.

I didn't mean those with my last bullet-point, Nox & Bursas actually shine compared to most other enemy designs. If I am not mistaken, in one of the later DevStreams they talked about new enemy type, that can only be killed with a finisher. Well, Exploiter Orb also kinda belongs in this category.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, ShortCat said:

I didn't mean those with my last bullet-point, Nox & Bursas actually shine compared to most other enemy designs. If I am not mistaken, in one of the later DevStreams they talked about new enemy type, that can only be killed with a finisher. Well, Exploiter Orb also kinda belongs in this category.

This is pretty S#&$ design that becomes a gear check whether you have a weapon capable of forcing finishers/a frame capable of forcing finishers.

DE is sinking to a new low if that stupid idea really makes it in. Although as a Destreza user I am not very worried.

[BL4CKN0ISE]

Yeah, I kinda agree. I feel that way about a lot of stuff in Warframe. It's just an artificial way to increase difficulty. It forces players to figure out some alternative builds and then it doesn't matter anymore. It just doesn't last that long, so it's not really adding any difficulty. People were killing the Hemocyte too fast, so DE added a damage cap, but then everybody started using high fire rate weapons and it was no different. Or basically forcing us to use snipers for a fight that doesn't really make sense for snipers, but they really wanted us to use them for PoE. 

Just imagine giant monsters attacking IRL and the answer is high fire rate assault rifles or sniper rifles. It just doesn't make much sense, but it does force us to figure out some different builds. I get it, but it doesn't feel cohesive with the rest of the game IMO. 

 

[(NSW)Belaptir]

SInce the introduction of Fortuna and the arbitrary immunities, I'm growing more and more tired of the game. To me, it seems they don't have an idea of how to figure out the problems of the late game. They just keep adding immunities and bigger hp pools that only thing it does is limiting the options we have to play the game. I understand with so many weapons, balancing the game is very hard. But we're moving to a point where in an effort for making the game more difficult, they are leaving behind a lot of weapons and frames that are literally useless to always more parts of the game.

I get there will always be a meta. I get it. But one thing is having a meta in a game and another different thing is having a game in which nothing is usable except meta. If so many enemies are becoming immune to abilities, what's even the point on having abilities? Just create 3-4 frames and a lot of skins for them. There's so many of them that you can't use that it makes no difference from having one or another, in many fights they just feel like different skins of your character.

[Kontrollo]

I've said it in another thread: instead of making them immune to status because of Condition Overload, they should cap Condition Overload's scaling where necessary.

[Xzorn]

On 2019-06-14 at 6:51 PM, TaylorsContraction said:

while you're right to an extent,  I think the last item on your list doesn't belong there.

in my opinion,  enemies like bursas that have a front shield,  or nox that has a weakness,  or even the juggernaut are good enemy designs.  they introduce variety into the game by indeed forcing us to approach combat differently from the norm.  but we are able to do do while having access to our entire arsenal.  The juggernaut for example can be affected by abilities but cc doesn't have a big impact on him.  DE needs to release more enemies like the ones I listed and less like the eidolons.

the more tools they take away the more boring that portion of the games will be because we are restricted to whatever works,  which is the one thing.

 

Sadly even good enemy design falls victim to fundamental flaws of the game. The Armor of Nox's head and Bursa's body continues to scale.

Bursa so much that they're one of the highest eHP enemies in the game and that's if you're hitting their weak spot. Add in that they're a Corpus unit with that much Armor and you've got a good concept dragged through the dirt of the game's core design. We need a new rule book to build on or even the best designs can break.

In a funny way Nox reminds me of Damage 1.0 without the Puncture gimmicks. He's pretty much how all enemy weak points worked.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-06-14 at 3:39 PM, Teridax68 said:

I think one of the current mistakes with status is that status effects like Electricity and Blast apply hard CC to enemies, preventing them from acting completely: this doesn't really work well when status can be spammed and/or raised to 100% status chance per shot, because it makes it easy to perma-CC enemies. However, there are less drastic solutions to that which don't involve simply eliminating all of status, e.g. by implementing diminishing returns on hard CC, and as the OP mentioned, simply making enemies completely status-immune just constrains the metagame severely by focusing it even more around a smaller subset of weapons, and pure damage over any form of utility.

We've talked about this before, but I'm still of the opinion that we need to implement Status Magnitude in some fashion. Status effects which deal damage already scale with weapon power, such that fast-but-weak autoguns can apply a lot of low-damage toxic procs, say, while the single-shot elephant guns apply a single high-damage toxic proc every so often. At the same time, a piddly spray gun with enough status chance will still burn through Grenier Armour substantially faster than even a high-status sniper rifle, because Corrosive is always the same 25% armour degradation proc.

Let's say we drop "Status Chance" altogether and replace it with "Status Magnitude." Weapons with low Status Magnitude would deal low damage on damage-dealing status Procs, reduce health, armour and shields by a lower amount and need more shots to actually stagger/shock/ragdoll an enemy. Weapons with high Status Magnitude, by comparison, would be better at stripping armour, applying control and dealing proc damage, even if they don't hit as hard.

This way, heavy enemies and bosses can have Status Resistance, rather than straight-up immunity. Say you want to knock down a level Nox, but all you have is a status-built Supra with blast. For the sake of simplicity, let's say the Nox has 1000 Cloned Flesh and your Supra has a *2 Status Magnitude and 40 damage. with Serration + Cold/Heat damage, that puts you at 106 physical damage, 190.8‬ Blast damage. The Blast proc, then, would deal 190.8*2 = 381.6 "ragdoll" to the Nox. Shot 1 wouldn't knock him down, shot 2 wouldn't knock him down, shot 3 would. Now assume the Nox has, say, 75% knockdown resistance. That means you're only doing 95.4 "ragdoll," meaning it'll take you over 10 shots to knock him down.

That's obviously just an example with mostly made-up numbers, but a system like this could work. Every shot deals SOME status, probably enough to affect low-level mooks. For anything serious, however - high-level heavy enemies - you'd still need a weapon with a high native status magnitude built for status and shooting sustained fire to eventually have an effect. This means bosses too could be susceptible to status effects, probably within some limitations (limit on health/shield/armour lost, cooldown on being staggered, etc). It means weapon damage starts to matter as procs are tied to it, it means enemies can resist status by different amounts. It means status pellet for native multishot can stop being so god damn weird. And generally, it makes for a more finely-granular system with more levers to pull in order to balance it.

[Teridax68]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Let's say we drop "Status Chance" altogether and replace it with "Status Magnitude." Weapons with low Status Magnitude would deal low damage on damage-dealing status Procs, reduce health, armour and shields by a lower amount and need more shots to actually stagger/shock/ragdoll an enemy. Weapons with high Status Magnitude, by comparison, would be better at stripping armour, applying control and dealing proc damage, even if they don't hit as hard.

I can agree with this, and I think that's more or less where DE has taken the current status system in a more rigid fashion, by letting us consistently mod status weapons to 100% status chance or close to it, and thus making status application a matter of weapon damage and attack rate. Letting us apply status consistently as a baseline would likely set a stronger foundation to then determine what status-based gameplay should actually involve. As you mentioned, making enemies more or less resistant to certain procs (e.g. heavier enemies more resistant to displacements and ragdolling, as you also mentioned) would also make for much more fine-tuned balancing, so that tougher enemies can be made more difficult to perma-CC or the like, without screwing over every other status-based build.

Edited June 17, 2019 by Teridax68

[Steel_Rook]

14 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I can agree with this, and I think that's more or less where DE has taken the current status system in a more rigid fashion, by letting us consistently mod status weapons to 100% status chance or close to it, and thus making status application a matter of weapon damage and attack rate. Letting us apply status consistently as a baseline would likely set a stronger foundation to then determine what status-based gameplay should actually involve. As you mentioned, making enemies more or less resistant to certain procs (e.g. heavier enemies more resistant to displacements and ragdolling, as you also mentioned) would also make for much more fine-tuned balancing, so that tougher enemies can be made more difficult to perma-CC or the like, without screwing over every other status-based build.

Right, that's been my impression, as well. At some point, DE seem to have realised that weapons which players can bump to 100% status chance can effectively be tuned "lower" than weapons with high critical stats or just straight up lots of damage, and we'd just naturally gravitate towards using them as support weapons - at least in part. The problem is that - as with a lot of other systems in Warframe - it's something of a retroactive kludge which ends up creating a lot of binary situations. I don't believe enemies are able to resist status effects partially at all, and plenty of status effects don't scale with the weapon they're placed on, which more or less enforces a pretty rigid meta.

And then you have the GIGANTIC problem which is status chance on native multishot weapons. Leaving aside my profound hatred for how that's calculated, it creates a major loop hole in the status system. 100% status shotguns with a large number of pellets and a fast rate of fire can apply so much status that the entire system breaks down, stripping even large amounts of armour in a few shots. And again - the system is ridiculously confusing to your average player who isn't going to dig through the wiki and then try to disambiguate the reverse function of a "at least once" probability calculation.

We seem to be in general agreement that a more finely-granular Status system would be superior to the current model. Ideally, players should have finer control over the amount of status they're imparting on the enemy, and enemies should have more in-between stages of resisting it between "vulnerable" and "invulnerable."

[TaylorsContraction]

10 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Right, that's been my impression, as well. At some point, DE seem to have realised that weapons which players can bump to 100% status chance can effectively be tuned "lower" than weapons with high critical stats or just straight up lots of damage, and we'd just naturally gravitate towards using them as support weapons - at least in part. The problem is that - as with a lot of other systems in Warframe - it's something of a retroactive kludge which ends up creating a lot of binary situations. I don't believe enemies are able to resist status effects partially at all, and plenty of status effects don't scale with the weapon they're placed on, which more or less enforces a pretty rigid meta.

And then you have the GIGANTIC problem which is status chance on native multishot weapons. Leaving aside my profound hatred for how that's calculated, it creates a major loop hole in the status system. 100% status shotguns with a large number of pellets and a fast rate of fire can apply so much status that the entire system breaks down, stripping even large amounts of armour in a few shots. And again - the system is ridiculously confusing to your average player who isn't going to dig through the wiki and then try to disambiguate the reverse function of a "at least once" probability calculation.

We seem to be in general agreement that a more finely-granular Status system would be superior to the current model. Ideally, players should have finer control over the amount of status they're imparting on the enemy, and enemies should have more in-between stages of resisting it between "vulnerable" and "invulnerable."

more granularity would be good but this is such a massive undertaking I don't see DE investing time in it.  I want it,  but this is like a 3 year rework for them,  where 3 years later they decide to scrap the whole idea and just leave things as it's.  Perhaps I'm being jaded but I've been waiting for   a meme rework for just as many years.  I don't even know what happened to the ips rework they talked so much about...

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, TaylorsContraction said:

more granularity would be good but this is such a massive undertaking I don't see DE investing time in it.  I want it,  but this is like a 3 year rework for them,  where 3 years later they decide to scrap the whole idea and just leave things as it's.  Perhaps I'm being jaded but I've been waiting for   a meme rework for just as many years.  I don't even know what happened to the ips rework they talked so much about...

Oh, it's certainly not simple, and liable to have balance issues of its own if player Status Magnitude is allowed to run away the same way Criticals are. However, DE have a track record of at least attempting large-scale, sweeping changes to core gameplay systems even years after the game has reached a semi-stable state. I'm of the opinion that when it comes to Status (well, and crits, but that's a whole other topic), there's a growing need to do something major. When we start seeing enemy after enemy immune to an entire subset of weapon builds, that's a sign that game mechanics themselves are breaking down to the point of being impossible to balance. That's where you either sit down to redo all of the stats, or gut the underlying mechanic and replace it with something else which offers more levers to pull with which to maintain balance.

[Twilight-Knight]

They make OP weapons and warframes, so they have no choice make OP enemies, instead balance things up, they choose not to think.

[ikkabotz]

On 2019-06-14 at 6:59 AM, Xzorn said:

 

This is fairly accurate. It's circulating cause and effect that's been going a long time and each time we complete the circle gameplay suffers.

The opposite spectrum can also work. Instead of players giving up power, enemies gain power through scaling.

Both are temporary solutions though. The only cure is Damage 3.0.

Rivens created way more problems for the game than solutions for something like Dmg 3.0 if you ask me. They gave the players something so pivotal and possessive to the player that development can't touch many things around them. All to basically avoid a Dmg 3.0 revamp in the first place. DE cutting corners to have it haunt them in a backlog they'll shelve the largest issues with again. I feel like they've had issues around dmg and armor scaling fooorrreeevvveeerrrr. So much of the conversation in forums circle around this issue over and over.

Edited June 18, 2019 by ikkabotz

[Teridax68]

9 hours ago, TaylorsContraction said:

more granularity would be good but this is such a massive undertaking I don't see DE investing time in it.  I want it,  but this is like a 3 year rework for them,  where 3 years later they decide to scrap the whole idea and just leave things as it's.  Perhaps I'm being jaded but I've been waiting for   a meme rework for just as many years.  I don't even know what happened to the ips rework they talked so much about...

On one hand, I can agree that DE tends to focus more on the shiny stuff, and the powers that be don't seem to place that much value on getting the details right (at least not when it comes to gameplay), but on the other, when DE applies themselves, they can do immense work, as was the case with the massive balance changes they implemented a little while back, or the ongoing Melee 3.0 update. Iirc, the IPS rework they attempted failed because their core approach was to try to make Impact and Puncture procs as strong as Slash, which from the looks of it was a) impossible because Slash was more valuable even with 90% damage reduction Puncture procs, and b) undesirable due to the power creep that'd bring. Hopefully, their next status/damage type rework will try to condense both and maybe even nerf the overbearing ones (like Slash), so as to make more types worth using.

[Steel_Rook]

5 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Hopefully, their next status/damage type rework will try to condense both and maybe even nerf the overbearing ones (like Slash), so as to make more types worth using.

My hope for a newly redesigned Status system is frankly more standartisation. Let all Status procs either deal DOT directly, or contribute to DPS by debuffing enemy defences (armour, health, shields, etc.), then let all status effects apply some kind of control on top of that. Even if they overlap somewhat, I'd say that's fine. That way, the primary difference between status effects would be the damage type or debuff, as well as personal preference about which control effect is better, be it a short confuse, a short knockdown, a short hold or long-term slowdown, etc. And for crap's sake, DO NOT have any of them deal True damage, seriously!

With all status effects dealing damage and status chance replaced with magnitude, status guns can be reliably built for damage, as status would contribute extra DPS by means of DOT. And because that would scale with weapon damage and status magnitude, high-damage slow-firing weapons could be viable with all damage types, not just Gas. When it comes to game design, I'm usually in favour of normalisation such that players aren't funnelled through only a small subset of choices, and right now only a few Status types are really worth considering, with Slash and Corrosive being the most prominent ones.

[Teridax68]

6 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

And for crap's sake, DO NOT have any of them deal True damage, seriously!

I think as a general rule, nothing in the game should auto-scale, including status effects: it's fine for Corrosive procs to reduce some flat amount of armor, Viral to reduce some flat amount of health, and so on, but when that amount is a percentage, or ignores part of the enemy's defenses, that creates an effect that levels up with the enemy, which defeats the entire point of enemy scaling in the first place. I suspect one of the major motors behind power creep on not just status, but also warframes, is that all of the frames with only flat damage need to be buffed to insane amounts to be able to even approach those given auto-scaling up the wazoo (*cough*Saryn*cough*). On the reverse side, the existence of defense-bypassing damage types such as Toxin, Slash and Puncture create a fair amount of inconsistency with our own frames and their defenses, e.g. Hildryn and damage that goes through shields.

[Steel_Rook]

5 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I think as a general rule, nothing in the game should auto-scale, including status effects: it's fine for Corrosive procs to reduce some flat amount of armor, Viral to reduce some flat amount of health, and so on, but when that amount is a percentage, or ignores part of the enemy's defenses, that creates an effect that levels up with the enemy, which defeats the entire point of enemy scaling in the first place.

Unfortunately, those exist for a reason. DE are often a bit too smart for their own good, as evidenced in the radical formula for status chance per pellet. In this case, my suspicion is that whoever designed Corrosive was looking for ad-hoc diminishing returns. By using percentage-based reduction, the first few applications are the most significant ones, with subsequent applications doing less and less. It's front-loading the effect, in essence. You can see the same behaviour with Nullifier bubbles, where every shot will reduce the bubble by a percentage, causing it to contract rapidly at first, but slower the smaller it becomes.

I'm not defending it, though. If "status magnitude" became a thing, heavier weapons would simply be able to strip more armour per shot, thus removing the need for diminishing returns. It would, of course, require far finer balance between armour-stripping capability and actual armour values, but I do agree that a linear progression is more preferable. Heavier weapons would strip armour in larger chunks, heavier units would take more shots to fully lose armour, and particularly armoured units could even resist the effect to some degree.

 

5 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

On the reverse side, the existence of defense-bypassing damage types such as Toxin, Slash and Puncture create a fair amount of inconsistency with our own frames and their defenses, e.g. Hildryn and damage that goes through shields.

I do actually wonder about that. Some damage hitting through shields or armour isn't necessarily bad, but... The damage resistance system largely handles this. Outside of edge cases where an enemy may have mostly shields but little health, you may as well just pick anti-shield status effects. That said, I'm somewhat partial to allowing shields to either negate or resist status effects to some extent. Shields in general are a weaker, less meaningful form of damage mitigation than armour over lots of health, so it would make sense for them to offer utility protections, instead. That's... Not trivial to design, however, and not something I'd want to try my hand at currently.