Improve Safety Functions on Self-Damaging Weapons

[MJ12]

Self-damaging weapons that have a minimum arming distance should also have their projectiles programmed to fail to detonate if the player is in their blast radius as a result of movement (or simply because of mods like Firestorm).

It's clear that the intention of these safety functions is to prevent players from taking damage from self-damaging weapons while still making self-damaging weapons less effective at very close ranges. I am glad that DE is starting to recognize that the nature of self-damage in Warframe is not good and changes are necessary to protect players from the arbitrarily unfair and excessively punishing nature of self-damage in Warframe. 

However, the gameplay of Warframe encourages rapid movement in a way that makes these safety functions imperfect because projectiles in Warframe do not inherit momentum fast Warframes can easily wander into the blast radius of their own weapons by accident. To ensure that the intent of these features is respected while preventing this sort of edge case from happening, explosive weapons should not detonate if the player would take damage from the detonation. 

This would not make these weapons 'overpowered' because they would still be failing to detonate if you misjudge your movements, greatly reducing their effectiveness (especially because these weapons are often slow-firing or inaccurate) in a situation where you would self-damage instead. However, this change would make the handling of these weapons feel significantly better, making them more desirable and viable.

 

[(PSN)Spider_Enigma]

2 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

And the reason for this is... what, exactly?

if ur dumb enough to walk into where the grenade is, then its ur fault that u did, jsut because u cant see the explotion sre, if the arming distance becomes slightly more then the blast radius of the explosive, then thats fine

but walking into a timed explosion is u own fault and u should be punished for it

now if only they would bring back the aiming line on the toncor ad also add it to he zar an all the rockets that fly in an arch

Edited September 4, 2019 by (PS4)Spider_Enigma

[MJ12]

Just now, (PS4)Spider_Enigma said:

if ur dumb enough to walk into where the grenade is, then its ur fault that u did, jsut because u cant see the explotion sre, if the arming distance becomes slightly more then the blast radius of the explosive, then thats fine

but walking into a timed explosion is u own fault and u should be punished for it

In a game where tight quarters, rapid movement, and hordes of enemies are commonplace, the game should expect mistakes and permit players to recover from them. Given the player health/enemy health imbalance, and the resulting damage imbalance, self-damage as implemented in this game does not allow any sort of recovery and counterplay. Furthermore, the entire argument that you need to be punished for using a launcher at close range is just that launchers should not be good close-range weapons, which is actually still accomplished by ensuring that a launcher's safety function is actually safe-making your shots do minimal direct and no splash damage if you accidentally wander into the radius is punishing the player, it's just a punishment that telegraphs what happened ("you ended up in the blast radius") and gives you the immediate chance to recover from the punishment (by opening the distance and firing again) but provides a reasonable incentive to avoid the punishment the next time (you wasted ammunition and time that you can't recover).

Warframe isn't Dark Souls or Sekiro, it's not intended to be a hyper-punishing almost puzzle-like game where the tiniest wrong move can put you in a world of hurt and you're expected to fight the same encounters again and again, learning their nuances, to advance. It shouldn't try for Dark Souls-like super-harsh punishments, especially when you're talking about potential punishments for the action of firing a weapon-something you're going to be doing a lot in Warframe. The punchline of this joke, though, is that Dark Souls is much more forgiving than Warframe's self-damage system is because you don't instantly die if you're so much as nicked by an enemy once.

[peterc3]

17 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

In a game where tight quarters, rapid movement, and hordes of enemies are commonplace, the game should expect mistakes and permit players to recover from them. Given the player health/enemy health imbalance, and the resulting damage imbalance, self-damage as implemented in this game does not allow any sort of recovery and counterplay. Furthermore, the entire argument that you need to be punished for using a launcher at close range is just that launchers should not be good close-range weapons, which is actually still accomplished by ensuring that a launcher's safety function is actually safe-making your shots do minimal direct and no splash damage if you accidentally wander into the radius is punishing the player, it's just a punishment that telegraphs what happened ("you ended up in the blast radius") and gives you the immediate chance to recover from the punishment (by opening the distance and firing again) but provides a reasonable incentive to avoid the punishment the next time (you wasted ammunition and time that you can't recover).

Warframe isn't Dark Souls or Sekiro, it's not intended to be a hyper-punishing almost puzzle-like game where the tiniest wrong move can put you in a world of hurt and you're expected to fight the same encounters again and again, learning their nuances, to advance. It shouldn't try for Dark Souls-like super-harsh punishments, especially when you're talking about potential punishments for the action of firing a weapon-something you're going to be doing a lot in Warframe. The punchline of this joke, though, is that Dark Souls is much more forgiving than Warframe's self-damage system is because you don't instantly die if you're so much as nicked by an enemy once.

This is an argument to completely get rid of the extreme AoE weapons, not just alter the self-damage rules. Wasting ammo is not a punishment.

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

I prefer if there was a dead zone for each individual weapon that has self damage. Wasting bullets for not being at the optimal range rather than shooting the kavat that happens just want to rush toward the enemy in front.

[MJ12]

1 hour ago, peterc3 said:

This is an argument to completely get rid of the extreme AoE weapons, not just alter the self-damage rules. Wasting ammo is not a punishment.

A punishment is merely a negative consequence that is inflicted as a result of your actions. Using up ammunition is by definition a negative consequence inflicted on you as a result of your actions, as it means that the enemy is still alive, you will need to reload sooner, and you will take extra damage owing to the fact that the enemy which would have been dead but for your mistake is still alive.

Wasting time and resources is the most basic core punishment of the vast majority of games. A badly timed attack or maneuver means you lose time and resources such as health, ammo, or energy. Yes, this is a light punishment, but Warframe is not designed around the idea that every action must be correctly executed or it must be harshly punished, and the idea that lightly punishing people isn't a punishment leads to bad game design when you're talking about a game intended to be accessible and forgiving.

I would prefer to get rid of self-damage entirely, but if DE is of the mistaken belief that self-damaging weapons are somehow so inherently overpowered in Warframe that they need to be made ineffective at close range, DE should make sure that they're still about as forgiving as any other weapon to use, rather than being the absolute most unforgiving weapon class in the entire game, orders of magnitude harder to use than literally any other weapon.

[Teridax68]

This is probably going into broken record territory, but: why not just remove self-damage completely, then? Why are we designing a counter-mechanic to a punishment mechanic just so that the punishment mechanic doesn't function, but in such a way that the counter-mechanic doesn't function properly and lets the punishment mechanic accidentally function when it's not supposed to? It's utter insanity, and the far simpler solution would be for explosive weapons with "safeties" to not deal self-damage at all, and instead just maintain the mechanic where the projectiles explode only after a minimum range. There would still be a punishment mechanic, as already mentioned in the OP, except it wouldn't randomly blow the player up just because the two contradictory mechanics put up against each other haven't been implemented intelligently.

Side note, but I'm singularly impressed that the weapon whose sole weakness is being able to outrun the projectiles and step into the blast radius has been specifically associated with the fastest frame in the game, whose kit explicitly encourages him to barrel into enemies. It's quite possibly the worst case of anti-synergy in Warframe so far.

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

Go test these "self damaging weapons" with a mod or riven that has -projectile speed. It will occasionally blow up in your face.

[MJ12]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

This is probably going into broken record territory, but: why not just remove self-damage completely, then? Why are we designing a counter-mechanic to a punishment mechanic just so that the punishment mechanic doesn't function, but in such a way that the counter-mechanic doesn't function properly and lets the punishment mechanic accidentally function when it's not supposed to? It's utter insanity, and the far simpler solution would be for explosive weapons with "safeties" to not deal self-damage at all, and instead just maintain the mechanic where the projectiles explode only after a minimum range. There would still be a punishment mechanic, as already mentioned in the OP, except it wouldn't randomly blow the player up just because the two contradictory mechanics put up against each other haven't been implemented intelligently.

Side note, but I'm singularly impressed that the weapon whose sole weakness is being able to outrun the projectiles and step into the blast radius has been specifically associated with the fastest frame in the game, whose kit explicitly encourages him to barrel into enemies. It's quite possibly the worst case of anti-synergy in Warframe so far.

I mean, I am absolutely down for removing self-damage from the game entirely and I think I've said as much several times, but if DE believes that explosive weapons are so inherently unbalancing and so inherently powerful that they need to be made ineffective at close ranges, it would be much better to simply make them refuse to detonate if they could harm the firer in any circumstance, rather than letting you blow yourself up because Gauss encourages you to run forward really fast and the Acceltra encourages you to run into fights and this makes the safety system ineffective.

[TheGrimCorsair]

They should remove the safety features on all AoE weapons and make it easier to blow yourself up so you actually have to think about your positioning and whether or not you should pull the trigger.

If combat happens too fast for you to do that, then maybe AoE weapons aren't for you.

[EinheriarJudith]

10 hours ago, MJ12 said:

~snip~

 

i agree with everything you've said in this thread. im of the mind that they should just remove self damage. the staticor itself deals more damage than the majority of self damage launchers and deals no self damage.

they removed self damage from javlok and cyanex. DE should just retire this ridiculous mechanic.

Edited September 5, 2019 by EinheriarJudith

[Teridax68]

8 hours ago, MJ12 said:

I mean, I am absolutely down for removing self-damage from the game entirely and I think I've said as much several times, but if DE believes that explosive weapons are so inherently unbalancing and so inherently powerful that they need to be made ineffective at close ranges, it would be much better to simply make them refuse to detonate if they could harm the firer in any circumstance, rather than letting you blow yourself up because Gauss encourages you to run forward really fast and the Acceltra encourages you to run into fights and this makes the safety system ineffective.

That's also my point: Gauss is without a doubt the absolute worst frame in the entire game to give a signature weapon with that kind of safety mechanic, because he is one of the very few frames who can bypass it and get himself killed, and in fact runs that risk constantly. Perhaps this was intended by some designer at DE who felt very clever about creating a minigame where Gauss has to watch his shots and Mach Rushes to avoid blowing himself up, but as you pointed out in other threads, players are more likely to drop the Acceltra for an alternative that won't completely screw them over by surprise, rather than "git gud" by whichever poorly thought-out standard has been applied to explosives.

I also completely agree: DE seems to have gotten themselves in a tangle over their own design, because we've recently got a ton of anti-self-damage mechanics to weapons that are presumably not intended to deal self-damage, but still have self-damage because... reasons. Either those weapons aren't meant to ever damage the user, in which case their self-damage should be removed completely, or they are, in which case they shouldn't be given safeties. Having both just makes for needlessly complicated and bad weapon design by creating edge cases where the safeties fail. To some extent, it almost feels like there's some internal politicking going on at DE internally, in addition to the debates on these forums, over self-damage in Warframe. 

[(PSN)Hopper_Orouk]

I think i'm the only one who doesn't mind, yet encourages self damage in warframe

Imagine blasting lenz bolts all over the place with no penalty...it's ridiculous 

Having self damage makes things more FUN for me

I recently tried the tonkor and forgot it got a rework...now it's just a boring grenade launcher...no rocket jump...no trickshots 

Just shoot it like any other boring weapon in the game 

 

[MJ12]

8 hours ago, TheGrimCorsair said:

They should remove the safety features on all AoE weapons and make it easier to blow yourself up so you actually have to think about your positioning and whether or not you should pull the trigger.

If combat happens too fast for you to do that, then maybe AoE weapons aren't for you.

The idea that making it easier to blow yourself up with launchers would make it so that "you actually have to think about your positioning and whether or not you should pull the trigger" is stupid because we have seen several years' worth of evidence that this is not true. Instead, what actually happens is that players either engage in degenerate strategies, like standing still on top of crates and spamming launchers into chokepoints, or they simply don't use launchers in the first place.

Absurdly harsh punishments don't encourage players to learn to "git gud," they encourage players to quit because a new player screws up, as new players generally should be expected to do, gets kicked in the face repeatedly by the absurdly harsh punishment, and now the lesson they've learned is "if you try a new and different thing, you will be forced to suffer over and over again and you will not have fun" rather than whatever you actually wanted to teach them. And self-damage in Warframe, where a weapon which takes multiple direct hits to kill middling-level enemies can kill even a super-tanky Warframe build with the slightest nick-is an absurdly harsh punishment in proportion to the actual action being taken and the actual 'mistake' the player is making.

Edited September 5, 2019 by MJ12

[EinheriarJudith]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

That's also my point: Gauss is without a doubt the absolute worst frame in the entire game to give a signature weapon with that kind of safety mechanic, because he is one of the very few frames who can bypass it and get himself killed, and in fact runs that risk constantly. Perhaps this was intended by some designer at DE who felt very clever about creating a minigame where Gauss has to watch his shots and Mach Rushes to avoid blowing himself up, but as you pointed out in other threads, players are more likely to drop the Acceltra for an alternative that won't completely screw them over by surprise, rather than "git gud" by whichever poorly thought-out standard has been applied to explosives.

I also completely agree: DE seems to have gotten themselves in a tangle over their own design, because we've recently got a ton of anti-self-damage mechanics to weapons that are presumably not intended to deal self-damage, but still have self-damage because... reasons. Either those weapons aren't meant to ever damage the user, in which case their self-damage should be removed completely, or they are, in which case they shouldn't be given safeties. Having both just makes for needlessly complicated and bad weapon design by creating edge cases where the safeties fail. To some extent, it almost feels like there's some internal politicking going on at DE internally, in addition to the debates on these forums, over self-damage in Warframe. 

i quite honestly like the arming mechanic. to me its like if you manage to hit an enemy that is not close its aoe but if you hit a close range enemy its like regular gun fire as seen with akarius and acceltra. the damage they deal close range is still good and the bonus is that at long range its AOE. this is what they really should focus on and remove self damage altogether.

[Teridax68]

6 minutes ago, EinheriarJudith said:

i quite honestly like the arming mechanic. to me its like if you manage to hit an enemy that is not close its aoe but if you hit a close range enemy its like regular gun fire as seen with akarius and acceltra. the damage they deal close range is still good and the bonus is that at long range its AOE. this is what they really should focus on and remove self damage altogether.

I really like the mechanic as well! I just think, like MJ12, that it deserves to be the actual core mechanic to some explosives , with self-damage being removed completely, so that the player can have this close-versus-mid-range distinction without the random chance of exploding.

[DarcnyssWolfe]

I'd be fine with more safety measure for those that can't deal with self-damage so long as such weapons get a safety toggle for those of us that can handle a little blow back and want to use the weapons in all situations (face tanking included).

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

19 hours ago, MJ12 said:

Self-damaging weapons that have a minimum arming distance should also have their projectiles programmed to fail to detonate if the player is in their blast radius as a result of movement

Weapons with minimum arming distance tend to really suffer for it, I'd rather never have that mechanic.

Instead, self damage just needs to be proportional to Warframe health, not enemy health (like in almost every other game ever made that has explosive weapons).

DE aren't going to do either however. None of these issues are new, they've had a 1000 chances to change it and the only solution is a waste of a mod slot (where you can still kill yourself). Someone at DE just wants all explosive weapons to carry risk of instant death with the reward of being mediocre weapons anyway.

Just take an Ignis/Amprex like everyone else does.

[Aryustailm]

First off Chroma would disapprove. Second, the minimum arming failsafes on the Acceltra and Akarius are both a meter or so too far to begin with.

Now if the argument was "let's just do away with self-damage" Chroma would still disapprove, but at least it would be a reasonable discussion of whether the risk is worth the reward. But further deprecating the close range capabilities of these late-arming weapons in case someone happens to forget there are directions other than "towards center of reticle as fast as you can dash" harms the value of the weapons in any non-fatal moments of that particular situation, and makes them clunkier to use in several others.

"Not always mod-enhanced-bullet-jumping-slide-chains at whatever you aim your Angstrum at" is a far cleaner solution that creates less potential problems, but consider the self-safe Cyanex, or the Zakti which is explicitly designed to maximize the end-results of you going full-tilt towards whatever you're shooting, and overwhelmingly in your favor at that.

[Sikelh]

Self damage just needs to not be based on how much damage you do but a relatively low flat value or percent of your health . Something like 15-25% per projectile so you can eat a mistake here and there and not go down in one shot but you still can't just ignore it entirely unless you are specifically a tank frame. And tank frames SHOULD just be able to stand in their own explosions and not care. Make use of that durability.

[Aldain]

What confuses me about these threads are how many people come in saying "keep self damage" and likely don't actually use the weapons that can do so in the first place.

Not gonna lie, the last time I saw anyone using a Tonkor it was some newbie on an Earth defense relic mission.

Also another question, why use AOE weapons that have self damage when Warframes can do the whole AOE thing better in most cases with no drawbacks at all?

[Aryustailm]

Nobody uses Tonkors, sure, but some weapons do rather spectacular AoE like Lenz, or a lot of it real quick like Secura Pentas which are kinda fun, or the Komorex. These all do self damage. Zarr too I guess but I didn't even know you could hurt yourself with that thing's alt-fire. Now, personally, I don't really give a damn whether my Komorex virals me or not... but I'd vote for it not to if I had to choose.

In that case though, we have two important questions:

1) Is the weapon actually worth the Risk? I'd easily say yes for the Lenz, for sure, but the not-so-accurate sprays of a multishotted Angstrum are a different (and somewhat limiting for the weapon) story.

2) Would there be a cost to removing the self-damage, and if so is it worth that too? For example, some weapons may be so unpopular or mediocre overall that removing such a risk from them should by all means 'cost' nothing to the rest of its stats - more like it might be a *part* of an overall review and buff of it. On the other hand, if your Secura Penta or Lenz would lose a bit of performance, most users of the things might well argue "go Fulmin yourself"

[LascarCapable]

I'm not against self damage. In fact, my most played weapons are explosive weapons. I do however agree that risking to one hit kill yourself with those can be one hell of a major deterrant, as well as a major source of frustration (though in my case it's mostly a major source of hilarity). I don't really mind it as it is today, but I perfectly understand why some players are upset about it.

Simple solution would be just to make self damage more fair. The two most recent explosive weapons implement that feature by imposing an arming time on your projectile so they don't explode at your face if you fire them at close range. It is a feature on Tonkor as well since its small rework. Other weapons like Lenz or Javlok leave a chance to leave the explosion radius for the user. In other cases, simply reducing the amount of self damage to, let's say, a percentage of your health, would be great. Or at least making it so you can't go below 2hp shall you explode yourself.

[Aldain]

You know, I could see that working, convert the current Cautious shot to be a "Caps self damage at X" mod where higher ranks have a lower amount of damage, it would stop weapons from instakilling the player while still leaving a chunk of damage that would deter firing without any care in the world.

Obviously the precise numbers of each rank would need to be thought about by somebody who isn't falling asleep as he's typing this, but I think making the mod a hard-cap rather than a percentage reducer would solve the issue in a way that more people might be open to.

[000l000]

Le 04/09/2019 à 21:28, MJ12 a dit :

In a game where tight quarters, rapid movement, and hordes of enemies are commonplace

Most area damage weapons have a 5m radius only, do you really think that there's an enemy every 5m in the whole map ? I've killed thousand of various enemies in various places with every single explosive weapon in the game and tbh you can die only if you're not careful enough. Maybe infested could be an issue since they're running for you but once again, shooting at short range with such gun is just stupid, blame players here.

Seriously, if you want to run into enemies stop using explosive guns, that's just common sense.

Edited September 8, 2019 by 000l000