Status Effect Overhaul

[xxswatelitexx]

Status Effects is an interesting way to add new mechanics to damage enemies the problem is certain status effects are underwhelming ( magnetic ) and basic status effects ( Besides Toxin ) are not even considered viable. While other status effects are almost always used ( Radiation \ Corrosive ).

I feel like Status Effects needs another look at, for example my suggestions
 

Toxin - applies DoT toxin damage - when 10 stacks of toxin are on an individual causes abilities to be disabled and cool down of abilities to be reset and doubled. 
Fire - applies DoT fire damage - when 10 stacks of fire are on an individual armor gets reduced by 10% per second. 
Cold -applies DoT Frostbite damage and enemy is slowed - when 10 stacks of cold are applied enemy temporarily freezes and impact damage against it is always crit. 
Electric - Applies flat damage - at 10 stacks enemies are stunned then knocked down. Decreases resistance to electric damage by 10% every 5 stacks. Damage against shield is doubled.

Viral - Reduces hp by 50% - when an enemy dies to viral damage 25% chance to spawn a Larva that health leech for Tenno
Radiation - Applies confusion at Death causes AoE damage based based on overkill damage
Magnetic - Applies Blind to Infested and Corpus - Aim accuracy drops by 80%. Applies Magnetize to Grineer causing them to take more damage from bullet weapons.
Gas - Applies DoT toxin damage - causes a gas cloud to appear on Death for 3s. If an enemy on Fire enters gas cloud - causes an explosion applying 20 stacks of fire to any enemy caught in blast radius.

[-VS-Zany]

vor 18 Stunden schrieb xxswatelitexx:

basic status effects ( Besides Toxin ) are not even considered viable.

Sorry to correct you in this.  They are more than viable. When someone is telling you otherwise: Do NOT listen to him. Slash is with Toxin and Gas the best effects you can have.

Edited October 10, 2019 by -VS-Zany
rewrote since I read it wrong

[Cloudyvisage]

This sounds interesting but has the notable drawback of status based slow firing weapons, how would you help Status focused bows, shotguns that can't hit 100% status before multishot and snipers with high status? There are plenty of Status weapons that don't fire fast enough to impart those required 10 stacks, making them balanced heavily in favor of fast firing status weapons, or even fast firing weapons with mediocre to low status.

A Viper can land those 10 status procs despite having pathetic status faster than a Daikyu can. If electricity can bring resistance into the negative a whole new can of worms is opened too.

[xxswatelitexx]

4 hours ago, -VS-Zany said:

Sorry to correct you in this.  They are more than viable. When someone is telling you otherwise: Do NOT listen to him. Slash is with Toxin and Gas the best effects you can have.

Slash \ Puncture \ Impact are not elemental effects - which is why I never mentioned them.

Even then Puncture and Impact are pointless - high impact can followed by a meele finisher on knock down incase of Hammers but because of the extremely long animation it is a death sentence in high zones. 

More importantly gas is a Compound effect of Heat + Toxin and cannot proc against shields.

 

3 hours ago, Cloudyvisage said:

This sounds interesting but has the notable drawback of status based slow firing weapons, how would you help Status focused bows, shotguns that can't hit 100% status before multishot and snipers with high status? There are plenty of Status weapons that don't fire fast enough to impart those required 10 stacks, making them balanced heavily in favor of fast firing status weapons, or even fast firing weapons with mediocre to low status.

A Viper can land those 10 status procs despite having pathetic status faster than a Daikyu can. If electricity can bring resistance into the negative a whole new can of worms is opened too.

While your point is true - you forget certain abilities and mods give 100% status chance on use.
Tweaking those mods and abilities to grant multiple stacks as well would balance slow firing weapons. 

Edited October 10, 2019 by xxswatelitexx

[Cloudyvisage]

50 minutes ago, xxswatelitexx said:

Slash \ Puncture \ Impact are not elemental effects - which is why I never mentioned them.

Even then Puncture and Impact are pointless - high impact can followed by a meele finisher on knock down incase of Hammers but because of the extremely long animation it is a death sentence in high zones. 

More importantly gas is a Compound effect of Heat + Toxin and cannot proc against shields.

 

While your point is true - you forget certain abilities and mods give 100% status chance on use.
Tweaking those mods and abilities to grant multiple stacks as well would balance slow firing weapons. 

But that simply exacerbates the issue with fast firing weapons, it doesn't ease it, for example, if you were to get 200% status chance by going all out on a Daikyu it would take you three shots, assuming you put a fire rate mod on that's about half a second plus human hesitation between shots, let's say about .6 seconds per shot, it will take the daikyu 1.8 seconds to apply the electric debuff or 3 seconds to apply the other status effects once under ideal circumstances.

If we assume that the electric debuff can lower resistance into the negative then any fast firing status weapon could blow the slow firing status weapons out of the water, you get about 150% status chance on a Synoid Gammacor, you can apply an electric debuff in 7 shots, it fires with lethal torrent at about 20 rounds per second. In about a third of a second you can apply a normal status and half that for electricity. In the time it takes to fire the Daikyu the Gammacor can be dealing almost 20% more damage and only going up from there.

Basically, just suggesting more status mods doesn't solve the issue of slow firing status weapons, as that equally affects the fast firing status weapons which are already quite strong.

[SECURATYYY]

Puncture should make them bleed as well.

[Cloudyvisage]

That's an interesting idea, maybe do something odd like all the physical damage types types can cause bleed(Impact internal bleeding) and a secondary effect like what they do now, maybe slash applies a reduction to healing or damage reduction effects. Dunno. 

[Avienas]

On 2019-10-10 at 1:13 PM, -VS-Zany said:

Sorry to correct you in this.  They are more than viable. When someone is telling you otherwise: Do NOT listen to him. Slash is with Toxin and Gas the best effects you can have.

The main issue is some are absurdly useless, nichie or mandatory or require a combination of them to even be decently feasible. Plus unless your running some kind of condition overload weapon, you likely will next to never cram a single-type element(such as heat/cold/toxin) on a weapon(except early on when you have not many mods) when you already have a dual elemental on it, usually needing the weapon to have a innate element so your not wasting a mod slot when you already have absurdly limited space for modbench building, unless the weapon has non-existent crit at all.

Oh and also even if the weapon is basically a `status focus` weapon, most would likely just use 2 dual elemental effects instead, without the mod space, people likely can`t be something smart and having a mix of 2 dual elementals to cover 2 factions at once, which would make more sense then having to constantly changing your loadout every time you start up a mission with a different enemy faction. Which does not also help when doing fissures where the void can just screw you and bring every enemy type, but your likely going to stick with corrosive all the time cause grineer are the most over-all frustrating one due to being annoyingly tankie with not really any flip side to them being tankie as the Achilles heel they get.

Despite the fact we have magnetic, people will likely use radiation instead since its a more viable element. Blast likely is a element not thought about much and usually if someone wants to use Viral, which should be a freaking plague to `meatsack` type enemies, is basically useless against infested and you are likely using it alongside slash to abuse the potential combo they have.

Anyway lost my train of thought on what else i was going to say but the point is, Elementals need some smoothing out and loads of them need to also get stacking gimmicks to make them on even ground. OTHERWISE, they need to have the status effects they bring if they cannot stack at all, HAVE a actual strong effect to stand out better with them.

 

Oh Double P.S. since i saw some commentary about the issue of fast firing vs slow firing weapons. They could also re-tune how statuses work where a potency value could be present that maybe gets modified by status chance also which the higher the potency value, the more `stack value` that could be slapped on a status effect/proc, so slower, heavy hitting weapons could have much higher `potency` value, since it would be like a sprayer gun slowly putting paint on a wall vs you literally taking the bucket and throwing a huge glob of paint straight onto the wall instead.

HELL on that same note: Status types could honestly use something as the equilvency to over 100% crits aka tier crits aka orange/red crits. Namely it would be nice if something like applying a bunch of a particular status effect could cause some kind of over-dose effect which could lead to a strong detriment, would certainly be nice both ways such as having on the enemy side where you can probably cause some enemy to fall down in a extremely disabled state by plaguing the heck out of said enemy or in the player side, it could be something to make players not be letting themself keep a status effect on themselves on and letting a enemy constantly reapply the stuff so it could lead to a annoying downside on your part, though honestly it would be nice if they retuned how cold effects work where its a minor slow down and you need to have a stacking effect of it to really affect you hard, aka why i wish things like Eximus b.s. auras such as the Cold Eximuses would get rebalanced so they aren`t able to have several of them in a room, able to stack their auras and then your basically stuck in slow-mo, when you can`t do much of the same with your own way of applying cold effects.

Edited October 13, 2019 by Avienas

[Steel_Rook]

I realise this isn't exactly what's being talked about here... But I honestly feel that Warframe just has far too many damage types. I'd argue twice or thrice the damage types we actually need, judging by how the community seems to have settled on Corrosive, Radiation, Gas and Slash as being the only ones worth using predominantly. I'm also of the opinion that the way status chance is handled - especially per-pellet for weapons with native multishot - is highly problematic. As such, I have a couple of RADICAL proposals:

Drop most of the damage types entirely. Stick with just one catch-all Physical damage type and four elemental damage types - Fire, Cold, Electric, Corrosive. Corrosive would be good against armour, Electric would be good against shields and robotics, Fire would be good against flesh, Cold would be all-around decent but not excelling at anything. This vastly simplifies the relationship of what's good against which enemy type, making it more easily intuitive without always having to check the Codex and the Wiki, and it removes the pressure to build for a specific damage type. I'd further give all the damage types 25% bonus against "light" armour/health/shields" and 10% bonus against "heavy" such, with no penalties. Still a bonus, just not as large of one. Corrosive would strip armour, Electric would strip shields and shut down shield regeneration, Fire would shut down health regeneration and debuff maximum health, Cold would progress from a slow to a freeze with applications, physical would simply stagger. No more Slash procs.

After that, I'd dump Status Chance entirely and replace it with a Status Magnitude stat. The severity of status effects would scale based on this Status Magnitude stat, which would vary per weapon and be calculated per pellet. Thus, slow-firing Status weapons would simply have a very high Status Magnitude, potentially stripping most of a Grineer's armour or instantly freezing an enemy in a single hit, where a scattergun might need 10-15 shots to do the same thing. Weapons not designed to be built for status would naturally have a low status magnitude. If necessary, a "per shot" or "per second" measurement might be offered so players don't have to crunch their own numbers, but this would be purely informative.

Generally speaking, I'm in favour of a simpler system to keep track of with more "levers to pull" when balancing it - hopefully one which will encourage people to more proactively tailor their damage to their enemies, or at the very least use a larger subset of all damage types. And yes, I'm aware that doing anything with Slash procs is a non-starter, but I did say this was going to be a radical proposal.

[Teridax68]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Generally speaking, I'm in favour of a simpler system to keep track of with more "levers to pull" when balancing it - hopefully one which will encourage people to more proactively tailor their damage to their enemies, or at the very least use a larger subset of all damage types. And yes, I'm aware that doing anything with Slash procs is a non-starter, but I did say this was going to be a radical proposal.

I completely agree with this. To a large extent, I think we're all sort of looking at the problem backwards here, in that we're trying to conjure up useful status effects to justify the existence of currently useless status types, instead of asking ourselves if Warframe really benefits from sixteen different damage types, and fourteen different status effects. Even when looking past at all the useless or redundant status effects, the current janky nature of status has clearly not aged well: we've come to expect 100% or near-100% status weapons purely so that we can apply status reliably, and stack Corrosive procs consistently until full removal. Balancing through random status chance hasn't worked, because RNG isn't a reliable balancing factor when we're only looking at a small number of instances at a time (i.e. the few shots you will need to kill a target), whereas a different paradigm where status weapons applied status reliably, but at varying magnitudes depending on the weapon, would cut out the middle man and make for a much more consistent and easily balanceable system.

Going a bit beyond, I also question why we even need different damage types in the first place, or a fixed status system: the current system of resistances and vulnerabilities hasn't really enriched the game, as all of it has condensed down to maybe one or two optimal damage type combinations. Even if there were more diversity, it wouldn't fit the game as we know it to constantly have to go through spreadsheets to figure out which combination of damage types would be optimal for each mission we undertake. Similarly, I think status limits what our weapons can do more than it enables them, because it means that our utility weapons can only produce a limited number of standardized outputs, instead of being able to do something more bespoke that would differentiate them better. A weapon that took the Nukor's gag mechanic and properly enlarged enemy heads might make for some very fun gameplay, as would a gun that could remotely hack machinery, another that'd create weak spots to pop for added damage, etc., but so long as we equate utility/CC on weapons with status, none of those mechanics could really be expanded much upon.

[(PSN)Onder6099]

Status effects are now somewhere where CC Frames are because Enemies are weak and can be easily OHKO with Raw Dmg, so there is no place to Proc Status.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-10-14 at 6:54 PM, Teridax68 said:

I completely agree with this. To a large extent, I think we're all sort of looking at the problem backwards here, in that we're trying to conjure up useful status effects to justify the existence of currently useless status types, instead of asking ourselves if Warframe really benefits from sixteen different damage types, and fourteen different status effects. Even when looking past at all the useless or redundant status effects, the current janky nature of status has clearly not aged well: we've come to expect 100% or near-100% status weapons purely so that we can apply status reliably, and stack Corrosive procs consistently until full removal.

Yup, that's consistent with my goals on both counts. I personally feel that "diversity" works better with fewer but more meaningfully distinct options, so having fewer damage types with a clearer distinction between what they're good and bad at would make for more meaningful choice. Throwing more damage types into a combat system makes it more complex in theory, but people end up ignoring the vast majority of them in practice.

As to randomness... I'm just recycling the old argument we had for reducing or even removing randomness from the combat system 🙂 Basically, I'd rather all weapons deal some status all of the time, with the amount dealt per shot/second/pellet being what differentiates "status guns" from the rest. The effect might end up being the same in the long run, but it should at least cut down on the "100% or GTFO" breakpoint, especially for shotguns. While the current system for handling status for native multishot is certainly clever, it creates a MASSIVE bias towards getting 100%, to the point of a binary state. Even if nothing of what I'm suggesting here happens, THAT system needs to be looked at because it has utterly devastating effects on shotgun diversity and design.

 

On 2019-10-14 at 6:54 PM, Teridax68 said:

Going a bit beyond, I also question why we even need different damage types in the first place, or a fixed status system: the current system of resistances and vulnerabilities hasn't really enriched the game, as all of it has condensed down to maybe one or two optimal damage type combinations. Even if there were more diversity, it wouldn't fit the game as we know it to constantly have to go through spreadsheets to figure out which combination of damage types would be optimal for each mission we undertake.

That's a bit more radical than I was going for, but it's honestly a good question. Multiple damage types and resistances have been with RPGs for as long as I remember and they make sense intuitively. You hack zombies to pieces, you bash skeletons apart, you stab people, you burn trolls, etc. Actually stopping to think about it, though... I too am not entirely convinced that the gameplay complexity this creates really accomplishes much of anything. I can kind of see it in something like DMC, where Dante has instant access to three damage types and certain enemies can only be hurt with one of them, meaning the challenge is switching on the fly. Even there, though, it comes down to just holding the right-coloured button. In a horde shooter where enemies come in a throng with all types mixed together, all damage types end up doing is enforcing specific builds. You plan what you're going to fight beforehand, pick some combination of damage types that's going to be overall good against all of the enemies you'll be fighting and then just fight them as normal. It adds no complexity to actual gameplay and what complexity it adds to the building part of the game is mostly busywork. Go through the Wiki or the Codex, figure out what enemies you'll be fighting, tally their resistances, pick a damage type that nobody is going to resist, go with that.

I've often argued in favour of removing "build challenges" if they simply boil down to an optimisation problem. Optimisation problems simply require one person to solve them, post the solution and everyone else just parrot it without need for knowledge or understanding. That doesn't add more complexity, it just adds more busywork. It also creates sucker traps for people who haven't found the out-of-game guides or read the Wiki yet. For complexity to have a reason to exist, it must offer some form of challenge or engagement unique to an individual person's experience with the game not easily solvable by simply being told how to build. One of the design discussions Payday 2 spawned, for instance, was between DMRs and LMGs. Before the massive LMG buff, those weapons were kind of crap for damage being very inaccurate and lacking iron sights, but I felt they made up for this with large magazines, ammo capacity and pick-up. I personally could kill faster with bodyshots and continuous fire because I was decent at controlling recoil than I ever could popping headshots with a "stronger" gun. Choice came down to personal preference and what I in particular was good at. That's the sort of complexity that actually matters, in other words.

To go back to your original point, though - I personally have no issue playing games with a single damage type. I doubt Warframe could go quite that far at this point which is why I've proposed pairing them down instead, but I too question what the merit of the system is in the first place. In fact, I've noticed that a lot of recent games have been dispensing with a lot of their damage types either largely or altogether. The Surge is a good example. The original game had four physical damage types and none of us could ever figure out how they worked, while "Elemental" resistance was a single stat. The Surge 2 has just a single physical damage stat (just called "damage") with most weapons doing that. Elemental damage still exists, but each has its own mechanic similar to Warframe. Fire damage starts dealing DOT once it builds up, electric damage stuns the player once it builds up, Nano damage just deals a burst of damage once it builds up, etc. And honestly... I personally feel that's made the game a lot more enjoyable to build in. It's stripped a lot of the min/maxing busywork and the carrying of multiple redundant sets. Now everything does physical damage, with some things also having status effects. I would honestly quite enjoy a Warframe doing something like that.