The zhuge prime

[vaarnaaarne]

Well the key thing there I feel is that the best AoE weapons never had self-damage to begin with. Something like Ogris can't even begin to compete with say Ignis Wraith or Staticor. Zhuge Prime is another good example of why self-damage has never worked out: There is no extraordinary benefit to justify the extraordinary drawback, it just isn't powerful enough for that. Self-damage is entirely a net negative for the weapon, like it is for almost every self-damage weapon.

[(PSN)big_eviljak]

1 hour ago, (PS4)Jedi_Arts_ said:

Self Damage has always been a controversial idea in this game. A lot of people (myself included) would see it as an improvement to abolish it entirely. I think that could be comfortably done without breaking...Warframe. A game where everything is already bonkers insane. Most people would probably just see it as some minor QoL really.

But that's not exactly the point I'm trying to make about the Zhuge. Self Damage really has no justification for existing except for serving as some sort of balancing factor. So, if your weapon has this big AoE explosion, some would argue that the Self Damage serves as a drawback to balance it out.

But, the Zhuge doesn't have a big AoE explosion. It's like, tiny. So, this honestly just reads as overbalancing. What's worse, the delay on the explosion makes it to where you can kill yourself just by running forward after you've already shot the weapon at a safe distance.  I imagine someone was just like "hey we're giving it an AoE effect, so it should have self damage too" without really thinking through if that was justified in this case.

The Zhuge Prime is more akin to Staticor or Tombfinger than Zarr or Penta. And the Staticor and Tombfinger don't have Self Damage, so why does this thing need it? Overall, Zhuge Prime just seems like a weak, inconvenient version of the Staticor that isn't worth using because it's ruined by its gimmick. I think that's the thought process that will go through a lot of players heads when they consider ever equipping Zhuge Prime again after leveling.

It reminds me of how the Cernos Prime was Dead-On-Arrival to the game, and everyone knew it was just because the gimmick was bad. And if the gimmick was done well, then people may actually want to use it. And eventually its gimmick got changed to something that actually makes sense, and now it's totally usable. When is Zhuge Prime going the get the Cernos treatment? (Sooner rather than later ideally)

Don't get me wrong, I think Prime weapons need to have special mechanics to stay interesting. It's just as puzzling to me when DE puts super forgettable Primes into the game with absolutely nothing special about them, aside from occasional Power Creep. But if the gimmick is terrible and it's obvious your community doesn't like it, then change it.

This is my request to remove the Self Damage from this weapon, please.

Self dmg isn't a problem. Play good.

[(PSN)Jedi_Arts_]

1 hour ago, (PS4)big_eviljak said:

Self dmg isn't a problem. Play good.

Actually it is a problem. The reasons why, I have already discussed on this thread.

"Play good" is not a valid excuse, as it can be used to brush off.. any existing problem.

[(PSN)big_eviljak]

23 minutes ago, (PS4)Jedi_Arts_ said:

Actually it is a problem. The reasons why, I have already discussed on this thread.

"Play good" is not a valid excuse, as it can be used to brush off.. any existing problem.

Dont shoot self dmg weapons point blank. Basically... Aim. Basically... Dont play in a way that is bad. Play good.

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

33 minutes ago, (PS4)big_eviljak said:

Dont shoot self dmg weapons point blank. Basically... Aim. Basically... Dont play in a way that is bad. Play good.

If it didn't have delayed detonation, sure. But when the bolts take ~1-2 seconds to explode, that's enough time for a melee unit to get to you while wearing them, or for you to get knocked into them, or dragged into them, or any other number of things that put you next to the explosives that you didn't fire near you and that you have no way to keep from detonating.

[(PSN)Jedi_Arts_]

20 minutes ago, (PS4)big_eviljak said:

Dont shoot self dmg weapons point blank. Basically... Aim. Basically... Dont play in a way that is bad. Play good.

Oversimplification. Most self-kills are not from players shooting enemies point blank. Most of the time it's just obstacles/enemies jumping in front of the player last second. Or just other crazy unpredictable stuff going down. It's kind of a hoard-shooter game right now.

Players are usually already trying to "Play Good" (Have I mentioned how close that phrase comes to the Git Gud cliché?) Yet, self-kills often happen despite being careful, because self-damage just doesn't work well in this game.

We haven't even addressed yet how it's a big ask to say that players can't shoot their weapons point blank, the most immediate range imaginable.

And none of this takes into account how disproportionate weapon damage and Warframe health is, almost guaranteeing instant self-kills. So the math isn't there for this to work right either.

Nothing is in place for it to work the way it should. So, it should be drastically re-imagined, or removed entirely. (Someone provided a good idea about self-damage gating)

But in the case of the Zhuge Prime, it's extra bad. And the reasons why have already been provided.

[Cyclouros]

I would like to support self-damage. Explosives are indiscriminate. There's no rule that you have to aim directly at the enemy instead of making use of the blast radius a.k.a play good.

[(PSN)big_eviljak]

1 hour ago, (PS4)Jedi_Arts_ said:

Oversimplification. Most self-kills are not from players shooting enemies point blank. Most of the time it's just obstacles/enemies jumping in front of the player last second. Or just other crazy unpredictable stuff going down. It's kind of a hoard-shooter game right now.

Players are usually already trying to "Play Good" (Have I mentioned how close that phrase comes to the Git Gud cliché?) Yet, self-kills often happen despite being careful, because self-damage just doesn't work well in this game.

We haven't even addressed yet how it's a big ask to say that players can't shoot their weapons point blank, the most immediate range imaginable.

And none of this takes into account how disproportionate weapon damage and Warframe health is, almost guaranteeing instant self-kills. So the math isn't there for this to work right either.

Nothing is in place for it to work the way it should. So, it should be drastically re-imagined, or removed entirely. (Someone provided a good idea about self-damage gating)

But in the case of the Zhuge Prime, it's extra bad. And the reasons why have already been provided.

I love Zhuge prime. Super op

[jmthebigman]

On 2019-07-21 at 10:41 PM, IceColdHawk said:

I dare you to use the same exact build on the Komorex.

I DARE YOU.

Chances are, you might be able to see the big issue that i'm trying to transmit. Komorex (MR8) does so much better and with less ammo spent than Zhuge Prime (MR14) + without having delayed explosives +++ being able to get even more damage out due to combo counter. Don't even get me started on Amprex.

So yeah, i'm still hoping DE fixes this. After their big weapon rebalance patch and adjusting most weapons to their MR requirement in terms of power, i can't see how Zhuge Prime's lack of power with additional risk to kill yourself can ever be intended.

Sniper vs crossbow

I also still stand that MR shouldnt be a marker for strength/power.

[IceColdHawk]

2 hours ago, jmthebigman said:

Sniper vs crossbow

I also still stand that MR shouldnt be a marker for strength/power.

Both have AoE. Both can kill yourself. Except one of them can justify having self damage while also having a purpose. I'm still struggling to find out what the purpose of Zhuge Prime is. Getting enemies dead for the MR it requires seems definitely not on the list.

I do think that MR and cost requirements should play a role of how performing a weapon can be. Doesn't hurt for Warframe to give players further incentives to progress. Though that's besides the topic.

[MJ12]

On 2019-07-24 at 3:08 PM, (PS4)big_eviljak said:

Dont shoot self dmg weapons point blank. Basically... Aim. Basically... Dont play in a way that is bad. Play good.

There is very little damage falloff on self-damage weapons, so it's not as if "don't shoot self dmg weapons point blank" or "basically... aim" is actually good or useful advice because the problem has never been firing them point-blank, it's miscalculating ever so slightly, winging yourself with the explosion (almost always an invisible part of the blast radius), and instantly falling down because players deal thousands of times more damage than enemies do and enemies have hundreds of times the health players do. If you want to avoid being downed by self-damage you need to never make a single mistake hundreds or thousands of times in a mission, which is kind of an absurd level of effort to require of weapons that don't bring much to the table. Launchers in Warframe aren't "super op," the only one which people claimed was "super op" actually got effectively changed to make self-damaging with it nearly impossible but shockingly enough isn't dominating the meta again because the reason it was "super op" was because of its absurdly high stats, not because of some lack of self-damage, removing self-damage from launchers wouldn't make them "super op," and they really shouldn't be "super op" to make up for self-damage because frustration isn't actually a good balancing point for power and in fact powerful but frustrating is the worst of all possible game balance worlds because not only are your players now being pushed towards a very small subset of playstyles but they're pissing themselves off while doing it because your overpowered stuff is frustrating.

Self damage weapons in Warframe demand a much higher workload than literally every other weapon in the game (no other weapon instantly kills you if you make a single mistake under any circumstance) despite bringing very little to the table. They underperform in usage stats because they bring very little to the table while being inexplicably and unreasonably punishing of even the slightest mistake, especially because the 'punishment' is all but perfectly designed to encourage bad gameplay rather than good gameplay-if you stay still on an elevated position while raining explosives onto a chokepoint you're never going to kill yourself but nobody is going to call mindless turret gameplay good or fun. And that's the fundamental problem here.

There's a fundamental mismatch between Warframe, which is a relatively forgiving game, and launchers in Warframe, which make weapons in even unforgiving hardcore shooters look kind and forgiving. Declaring that players should "play good" is not actually a counterpoint to this. Yes, you can "play good." Or we could make launchers as forgiving as other weapons in Warframe, which wouldn't affect the people who "play good," wouldn't ruin weapons balance, and would make the game more fun for everyone who doesn't reach your exalted prowess of never making a mistake ever.

Edited July 26, 2019 by MJ12

[(PSN)big_eviljak]

13 hours ago, MJ12 said:

There is very little damage falloff on self-damage weapons, so it's not as if "don't shoot self dmg weapons point blank" or "basically... aim" is actually good or useful advice because the problem has never been firing them point-blank, it's miscalculating ever so slightly, winging yourself with the explosion (almost always an invisible part of the blast radius), and instantly falling down because players deal thousands of times more damage than enemies do and enemies have hundreds of times the health players do. If you want to avoid being downed by self-damage you need to never make a single mistake hundreds or thousands of times in a mission, which is kind of an absurd level of effort to require of weapons that don't bring much to the table. Launchers in Warframe aren't "super op," the only one which people claimed was "super op" actually got effectively changed to make self-damaging with it nearly impossible but shockingly enough isn't dominating the meta again because the reason it was "super op" was because of its absurdly high stats, not because of some lack of self-damage, removing self-damage from launchers wouldn't make them "super op," and they really shouldn't be "super op" to make up for self-damage because frustration isn't actually a good balancing point for power and in fact powerful but frustrating is the worst of all possible game balance worlds because not only are your players now being pushed towards a very small subset of playstyles but they're pissing themselves off while doing it because your overpowered stuff is frustrating.

Self damage weapons in Warframe demand a much higher workload than literally every other weapon in the game (no other weapon instantly kills you if you make a single mistake under any circumstance) despite bringing very little to the table. They underperform in usage stats because they bring very little to the table while being inexplicably and unreasonably punishing of even the slightest mistake, especially because the 'punishment' is all but perfectly designed to encourage bad gameplay rather than good gameplay-if you stay still on an elevated position while raining explosives onto a chokepoint you're never going to kill yourself but nobody is going to call mindless turret gameplay good or fun. And that's the fundamental problem here.

There's a fundamental mismatch between Warframe, which is a relatively forgiving game, and launchers in Warframe, which make weapons in even unforgiving hardcore shooters look kind and forgiving. Declaring that players should "play good" is not actually a counterpoint to this. Yes, you can "play good." Or we could make launchers as forgiving as other weapons in Warframe, which wouldn't affect the people who "play good," wouldn't ruin weapons balance, and would make the game more fun for everyone who doesn't reach your exalted prowess of never making a mistake ever.

I play with my 5 forma ogris regularly and rarely miscalculate. Its the fun of it and its balance as well, as a heavily forma'd nightwatch napalm ogris is incredibly op.

[(XBOX)Skippy575]

Nah man, keep the self-damage guns coming. Spices up the gunplay.

[(XBOX)An Angry Mod]

Simple answer, shoot at the ground because complaint like this is using from someone playing an ever-moving-forward game mode, which means the likelyhood of you needing all 100% dmg is not likely. Its a stealth tool, meant for stealth frames (like ivara, who can set up an CO gas Zeni and load enemies to high hell with statuses). I personally feel any, and all explosive aoe weapons, regardless of range should deal self damage. You're a Space Ninja™, not a space god. To finish this off, I will end in saying git gud/play good/be gooder.

[Guest]

On 2019-07-25 at 9:43 AM, -AoN-CanoLathra- said:

If it didn't have delayed detonation, sure.

This guy gets it. The delay is what spoils everything, really.

I never seen people kill themselves with a concealed explosives Hikou Prime or that sort before. Even the Lenz at least prevents stuck enemies from making a beeline for you and shows the blast radius with a big, obvious marker.

[000l000]

Le 24/07/2019 à 23:42, (PS4)Jedi_Arts_ a dit :

But if the gimmick is terrible and it's obvious your community doesn't like it, then change it.

What community, a few guys complaining about anything considering any upteenth lament as proper feedback ? You're not the community, a few hundred people reading such threads aren't the community either unless you have some secret sources you forgot to mention. This forum is at best a vocal minority so you're perfectly right when you offer personal feedback, but stop talking in the name of something you know nothing about.

Just a hint though, this weapon is perfectly fine if you aren't running forward while shooting so maybe you should adapt your gameplay to different gimmicks and not the opposite - or keep playing with an Ignis.

Edited July 26, 2019 by 000l000

[Ikusias]

33 minutes ago, 000l000 said:

 

Just a hint though, this weapon is perfectly fine if you aren't running forward while shooting so maybe you should adapt your gameplay to different gimmicks and not the opposite - or keep playing with an Ignis.

No the weapon isn't fine at all due to the crap delay to the actual explosion: if the actual hit didn't stop/kill the target, it will bring the armed explosive right in your face like a damned suicide bomber

[000l000]

il y a 3 minutes, Ikusias a dit :

No the weapon isn't fine at all due to the crap delay to the actual explosion: if the actual hit didn't stop/kill the target, it will bring the armed explosive right in your face like a damned suicide bomber

Perhaps you should stop shooting at close range then ? Many people are able to not die with a Lenz, i'm pretty sure you could survive a ridiculously small area as Zhuge's.

[Ikusias]

The 1,5 -2 second delay is enough for most enemy units to close the gap in most tiles

[MJ12]

3 hours ago, (PS4)big_eviljak said:

I play with my 5 forma ogris regularly and rarely miscalculate. Its the fun of it and its balance as well, as a heavily forma'd nightwatch napalm ogris is incredibly op.

This is literally a non sequitur. If you "rarely miscalculate" and therefore self-damage isn't actually a major factor, self-damage is not "balance as well" and in fact is anti-balance because it creates an unnecessarily high learning curve to these weapons and makes them absurdly and inexplicably unforgiving despite how even your example of the "incredibly OP" Nightwatch Napalm Ogris isn't actually OP compared to meta weapons. Again, you can get literally 100% of the 'balancing factor' of self-damage in Warframe by simply making it so that if an explosive weapon would cause self-damage, it fails to detonate instead. This is literally how explosives in real life work. They have minimum arming distances that are calculated so you don't accidentally screw up and blow yourself up.

And with that arming distance, players have an incentive to "play good" that does the exact same thing self-damage does, which is "you cannot fire this weapon at point blank." And I mean the exact same thing because the self-damage implementation you are defending is in fact incredibly stupid. Normally, in a game with sane self-damage implementations, self-damage is a relatively reasonable, decaying spectrum that means that firing at close quarters is a spectrum of risk, with a point-blank at your feet shot doing relatively heavy damage, while being winged by your own blast radius does basically nothing. Therefore, self-damage is okay because the game encourages you to make judgment calls. Firing a self-damaging weapon at close range has a cost if you miscalculate, but the cost is proportionate to the actual miscalculation and there's a spectrum of acceptable risk. You will probably be willing to risk more damage if you've got lots of resources, or if you're getting swarmed under by high-damage enemies, or if you're going to end the fight with that shot and can heal up afterwards.

But that's not the case in Warframe. The amount of damage self-damage weapons is so out of line with player health that being caught in the blast radius of your own weapon is never desirable because it's instant death. At which point, why are we beating around the bush and pretending like self-damage is actually useful in balancing? Removing it, and simply making weapons fail to detonate if you misjudge the shot gets you the exact same benefit of self-damage's "balancing" by removing the ability of launchers to function at close range and does it in a way which is literally 100% less frustrating and gives you an immediate opportunity to correct your mistake, fitting with Warframe's relatively forgiving nature.

[vaarnaaarne]

Also, Staticor.

[(PSN)Jedi_Arts_]

4 hours ago, 000l000 said:

stop talking in the name of something you know nothing about.

I know I'm really going out on a limb here, but I decided to assume that most people don't enjoy blowing themselves up instantly upon a minor mistake (upon seeing that same complaint countless times over the years & with Zhuge Prime recently as well).

4 hours ago, 000l000 said:

You're not the community, a few hundred people reading such threads aren't the community either unless you have some secret sources you forgot to mention. This forum is at best a vocal minority so you're perfectly right when you offer personal feedback, but stop talking in the name of something you know nothing about.

If you're upset by the way I said that, then I'll edit it. I don't need a clear community consensus to make an argument that self damage is done poorly on the Zhuge Prime. Other players and I have already given reasons why.

But since you brought up sources, I'd like to make a guess. Maybe it's time that DE actually runs the usage stats on self damage weapons. Remember back when people told DE that not having UniVac is bad? Then when they pulled up the usage stats on the Devstream, it turns out Sentinels were overwhelmingly used over Cats & Dogs. Weird. That's when we actually got stuff done. That's when the upteenth lament comes in handy. These things often start out as people just trying to get DE to understand why stuff is bad. Sometimes the vocal few will turn out to not be in the minority.

I'm willing to make the claim that if DE ever runs the stats on self damage weapons, I think they will be in a usage minority. That's a predication that I'm willing to make. If I'm wrong about that someday, then whatever. People can laugh at me from across the internet if they even remember this thread. But do you disagree with that prediction? Like if you really had to pick, do the usage stats say self damage is good or bad?

Granted, they're probably not going to run the stats. But do you see the point I'm trying to make here? Are people like me the cult following, or the ones who don't mind outright killing themselves sometimes? Which is more likely?

p.s. can anyone saying to just change your play style or "Play Good" actually say that they don't still kill themselves sometimes? And that's not annoying and unfun?

Edited July 26, 2019 by (PS4)Jedi_Arts_

[(PSN)big_eviljak]

4 hours ago, MJ12 said:

This is literally a non sequitur. If you "rarely miscalculate" and therefore self-damage isn't actually a major factor, self-damage is not "balance as well" and in fact is anti-balance because it creates an unnecessarily high learning curve to these weapons and makes them absurdly and inexplicably unforgiving despite how even your example of the "incredibly OP" Nightwatch Napalm Ogris isn't actually OP compared to meta weapons. Again, you can get literally 100% of the 'balancing factor' of self-damage in Warframe by simply making it so that if an explosive weapon would cause self-damage, it fails to detonate instead. This is literally how explosives in real life work. They have minimum arming distances that are calculated so you don't accidentally screw up and blow yourself up.

And with that arming distance, players have an incentive to "play good" that does the exact same thing self-damage does, which is "you cannot fire this weapon at point blank." And I mean the exact same thing because the self-damage implementation you are defending is in fact incredibly stupid. Normally, in a game with sane self-damage implementations, self-damage is a relatively reasonable, decaying spectrum that means that firing at close quarters is a spectrum of risk, with a point-blank at your feet shot doing relatively heavy damage, while being winged by your own blast radius does basically nothing. Therefore, self-damage is okay because the game encourages you to make judgment calls. Firing a self-damaging weapon at close range has a cost if you miscalculate, but the cost is proportionate to the actual miscalculation and there's a spectrum of acceptable risk. You will probably be willing to risk more damage if you've got lots of resources, or if you're getting swarmed under by high-damage enemies, or if you're going to end the fight with that shot and can heal up afterwards.

But that's not the case in Warframe. The amount of damage self-damage weapons is so out of line with player health that being caught in the blast radius of your own weapon is never desirable because it's instant death. At which point, why are we beating around the bush and pretending like self-damage is actually useful in balancing? Removing it, and simply making weapons fail to detonate if you misjudge the shot gets you the exact same benefit of self-damage's "balancing" by removing the ability of launchers to function at close range and does it in a way which is literally 100% less frustrating and gives you an immediate opportunity to correct your mistake, fitting with Warframe's relatively forgiving nature.

It is balance, because i cant point blank everything. I HAVE to play good.

[MJ12]

Just now, (PS4)big_eviljak said:

It is balance, because i cant point blank everything. I HAVE to play good.

That's not balance. That's just creating a higher skill floor for launchers, by which I mean you're drastically increasing the minimum level of competence necessary to get enjoyment out of the weapon. Generally the goal for videogame balance is to create relatively low skill floors but relatively high skill ceilings so new players can enjoy the game right from the start and players feel like they're meaningfully improving in skill over time. High skill floors are generally bad, because first impressions are super important and even if something with a high skill floor becomes fun and worthwhile over time as you improve, a high skill floor makes for awful first impressions. And right now launchers are basically the worst of all possible worlds-they don't actually have much higher skill ceilings than other weapons and they have much higher skill floors for you to have fun and contribute with them. This is probably why they're actually rarely used weapons as their Riven dispositions reflect.

And again, there is literally nothing that the implementation of self-damage in Warframe does that couldn't be done better by removing self-damage entirely and making it so that explosives don't detonate if you would be in the blast radius. The exact same result would occur-you wouldn't be able to fire point-blank. The only change would be that it would feel better for everyone, because the people who are defending self damage now claim that they are never affected by it because they "play good" and therefore nothing changes for them, while the people who find it annoying, frustrating, or offputting will actually have a weapon with handling forgiving enough that they'll be more willing to put in the time to learn how to fire launchers and what their handling characteristics are because, again, the weapon still will be basically useless if you try to fire it point-blank but at least this way the result is that you don't do any damage and have to try again, which is what Warframe can and should expect from you screwing up a shot. Again, even assuming for the sake of argument that being able to point-blank everything would make launchers overpowered (which I don't think is clearly true given how powerful melee weapons are in the game and how melee weapons can easily sweep larger radii than launchers) removing self-damage and having minimum arming distances would actually retain the weapon's 'balance' by keeping the same skill ceiling and the exact same proficiency requirements (because the higher your skill level, the fewer whiffed shots you make and the higher your DPS, so you want to learn the characteristics of the weapon and not miss shots by landing them too close to yourself anyhow) while reducing the skill floor (because whiffed shots won't kill you, but force you to aim again).

[Ham_Grenabe]

Ouch. This makes me less regretful about scrapping my Zhuge riven. 

Edited July 27, 2019 by Ham_Grenabe