Damage 3.0 Suggestions (Conversion mods)

[Damocles]

I just made a big post on warframe reworks here:

and might as well go into Damage reworks to fully explain exactly why the system has pros and cons. Personally I dont trust DE to know why their system fails. For example, they gave sentinel health mods to Beasts so you wouldn't be tied to bringing Nidus with a pet, except Link Health in the worse case scenario still beats the sentinel's Enhanced Vitality. Another example: also DE Scott, mentioned slash proccs scale, puncture and impact does not, so they're looking into scaling puncture and impact proccs. These are completely wrong directions to pursue and here's why!

What damage is for

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Killing enemies. In order for damage to work, it needs to deal enough of it, and grant bonuses in certain scenarios that make them worth while options. Shields and Armor are good reasons why you cannot just stick with the same type of damage. It keeps players engaged in the content, and provides rewarding complexity to the game. The problem is Armor is the only thing in game that scales. Shields literally feel like paper, and can also be outright bypassed! Health Types are not too important as the bonuses and penalties are far too low to notice any difference. Added to the fact health types in missions are of mixed types, they'res usually never a superior option.

The problem with the current damage system

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Armor is king. Barely anything by passes it. It scales to an asymptotic damage reduction of 100% and nothing else comes close. Armor on enemies are the only thing players need to mod against. Anything that defeats armor is the only thing relevant by design. There are 2 types of armor, Ferrite and Alloy.

Ferrite is easy to take care of: Corrosive removes proportional chunks as well as having 75% of the corrosive damage outright bypass the damage reduction

Alloy is harder to take care of: Radiation has that 75% bypass, but ultimately wont scale like corrosive does by taking away armor until eventually removing it all. If you struggle against Alloy armor, it might be better to go with Corrosive. This is why Corrosive is very popular!

Shields are a joke. They have no damage reduction, their base values are super low and insignificant. Any weapon with mods in it would immediately remove all the shields in 1 hit. If you ever find yourself struggling with shields: the solution is ironically NOT magnetic (a procc that removes max shields permanently) but rather it is gas, which outright does damage ignoring 100% of shields. In most cases, gas would reduce shields to 0% anyways simply because shields offer paper-like resistance.

Health types: Not very complicated: everything is good against Health types. Cant go wrong with corrosive. Radiation for robots. Nothing else really matters

IPS, the infamous status dilemma
 

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Slash is king: It's reliable, it bypasses Armor and Shields, it's proportional to the damage of the base weapon. And in its 7 second duration, you can stack as many as you want, each dealing over 200% of the original damage should the entire duration transpire.

Puncture: Doesn't do anything puncture like. Does not bypass Armor nor Shields. For some reason reduces the damage output of a single enemy in a horde shooter. Would actually make sense if a portion ignored Armor like Corrosive or Radiation does. The ironic thing is that Puncture is designed to bypass armor in real life, but slash does that better warframe. A lot of veteran players already came to the consensus that weak points should be introduced by puncture proccs exactly the same way Helios and Banshee does.

Impact: for the longest time is considered THE WORSE damage type. It comes innately on most weapons making it non-optional. It offers no mechanics worth investing into. And the procc actually staggers enemies enough to make head shots impossible to maintain. Besides staggering reducing enemy aggro to 0 for 1 second, Impact offers nothing scalable nor useful. In real life, impact bypasses ALL FORMS OF DEFENSE. For example, the impact of a car crash does not care that you are encased in a ton of steel. A falling elevator doesn't care you're wearing armor. In fact, a stubbed toe over a table leg has been know to cause a blood clot capable of causing a stroke that killed a man. Impact should literally ignore Armor, while granting no damage bonuses to armor, shields, nor health types, The procc could feasibly be kept the same while scaling via lost aggro duration. It's called disorientation, mild concussion, concussion, and knock out. Each stage of impact should incapacitate the enemy for longer and longer durations.

Elemental Types, ranking, and possible changes

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From best to worst, lets rate and suggest changes:

Corrosive: Literally the model elemental. It focuses on Armor. It stacks on each procc

Radiation: Good at alloy armor and certain robotic enemies. Not very good at anything else. It solely deserves second place because it defeats an armor type, which is a testament to how absurdly strong armor is. Proccs do not stack. In real life, radiation is not very harmful, so we're probably dealing with Ionizing radiation which is the lethal form of radiation. Kills you in minutes with a strong enough dose. It rearranges your DNA and burns you from the inside out. Perhaps being one of the worst ways to die, the procc should be reworked to take away a portion of health away. That is, likely 5% of the current remaining health. Mathematically speaking, this is viral (half health) at ~14 proccs, except permanent as we will look at Viral later. Another 14 proccs would yield a total of 25% remaining health, so the scaling it there and is not immediately surpassing Corrosive. In fact, this procc alone will NEVER be able to kill off an enemy, but would greatly assist in doing so, much like the King of elementals, the Corrosive King.

Gas: Triple dips with bane, gas is practically and AoE slash, except it doesnt bypass armor. Instead, it takes damage bonuses from Bonus Damage mods cubed (that is X^3 = X*X*X) making it potent on Corpus and infested. This gives gas a good place as it's focused on dealing high damage on non-armored enemies.

Viral: Theoretically, it's double damage. Also theoretically, you still only solved half the problem. Viral halves the health of enemies, which is great, except it doesnt stack, and offers no advantages when the duration ends as any grounds gained during viral is reverted. Viral should instead reduce AI speed as a sick person would not be performing rigorous exercise and would take a sick day in bed. Their engagement distance should be lowered with each procc as a sick person is less violent and less combat effective. For melee, their running speed can be greatly reduced to the point of not moving.

Cold: Slows down enemies, but primarily increases the duration of other proccs such as Slash and Gas, the DoT proccs. Because it is not used in combination to form the top 3 elementals, on top of granting no penalties, it is a solid fallback element. Scaling should occur where you progressively slow an enemy more and more similarly to how Arctic Eximus Auras currently stacks onto players.

Electric: Basically impact, but less annoying. More effective, but the base range and and duration should scale.

Toxin: Similarly to Gas, except without the cubed multiplier advantage and is not an AoE effect.

Heat: Not very strong DoT. Doesn't stack. Doesnt scale. Recently being looked at to armor strip by DE. I believe this isn't the right direction to take. Heat should bypass Armor, but not shields. Should not reduce armor. Heat should be the equivalent to Armored enemies as Toxin is to Shielded enemies.

Magnetic: Reduces paper to shreds (impressive but not really). Seems to have a greater procc against players than it does against enemy AI. The procc should instead Magnetize enemies as Void proccs currently do. And who the hell thought 200 energy drain is a good number? That's more than what Ash/Rhino Prime currently holds at base!

Blast: The only thing worst than impact is a Blast. It prones enemies, effectively making enemies take evasive action, making them harder to hit. In fact, I would much rather be able to prone myself so I can reduce the damage I take in. Blast should AoE procc the reworked version of impact instead, to disorient and light CC enemies while providing scalable damage

Void Damage: Niche appearances. Only good for Eidolon shields because of narrative, and reset sentient damage immunity because... narrative reasons. Because of this, it cannot be modded for, and currently appears as very weak forms of damage output. To this extent, Void damage actually does not belong in the game because it is never integrated with the core mechanics of Warframe. It is a spin off of what could be a separate system entirely and is too attached to the narrative to evolve into active and engaging game play. Bottom Line, void damage needs a 100% rework as it currently servers no place in warframe's core game play.

Modding (For your consideration, the Conversion Mods)
 

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The game prides itself on Diversity. You can mod for what you want... Except that's not 100% true. Yes you can mod for Crit... it's just not going to work well on the Detron which has very low base stats. The problem brought up time and again is that the stats are proportional, and needs to earn the spot in the limited number of mod slots available. players simply cant use up mod slots of stats that wont yield results. There's simply no diversity in modding, only diversity in choice of guns. You cannot turn the Soma into a status gun, and Detron into a Crit gun. Having mods like maiming stike that provide a base stat boost is NOT the solution either. For example, if point strike went from +150% crit chance to +50% base crit chance, every weapon will become crit. The same applies for status, then every gun becomes a hybrid build which is not diverse in the slightest. We'd actually have a crit detron, crit everything, and everyone would just opt for the highest base damage thing out there. Instead, I am proposing what I like to call Conversion mods,

• Convert 25/50/75/100% of something, into 50/100/150/200% of something else

The reason for the 1:2 ratio is that this mod will take up a mod slot, so the output conversion has to be worth the slot it took up. This is called opportunity cost, which is also why Depleted Reload is considered the dumbest fix DE implemented for the Vectis Prime's design flaw (possibly fixed with weapon exilus slot). Secondly, you're not turning that Status Detron into a Hybrid Detron, nor that Soma into a status guzzler. That's too OP. Instead, you sacrifice Status Chance for Critical Chance, Status Duration for Status Chance, Critical Chance for Critical Damage, and vise versa. Note that Status Duration to Critical Damage is NOT an option as everyone would opt to get more Critical damage on a crit focused corrosive build which has no status duration. We can also get conversion from IPS to another form of IPS/Elemental, however, IPS to Elemental will have only a 1:1 conversion instead. There's a reason why Fulmin is top tier despite having mediocre stats. Because removing IPS proccs greatly skews procc chances, there's external benefits from removing IPS, and thus no longer a need to reward a bonus output for the conversion. Take note DE, as this is why negative IPS rivens are worth thousands of platinum on the market.

If conversion mods existed, there will be countless combinations to try. Old content instantly recycled to new content, bad weapons now good, etc etc. For a low effort implementation, the content yield far outweighs the dev time. We'd immediately have more things to try that we would otherwise not have the option before.

The way I see it, order matters, so you can combine Impact to Puncture, Puncture to Slash, and Slash to Corrosive, a 1:2->2:4->4:4 conversion to make a fully corrosive build at 4 times the damage of base for 3 mods. Normally, you'd have Serration and Split chamber, which is a 2.65*1.9 scaling. Effectively, it's not power creep as it's weaker than conventional modding, but it breathes new possibilities in conjunction with traditional modding. This solution encompasses the legacy framework that currently exists, while also generates a crazy ton of content to try