Let's Talk About it: Riven System Overhaul

[(XBOX)DarknessZeref]

On Xbox we can't Blink. We can't use Zenistar (Thanks for wasting my plat on rivens and such). Ember is unusable. I still miss Banshee Quake.
All we can do is ask why space mom is going around nerfing everything we actually like, then releasing new content and flexing about how "challenging" it is. It's not challenging, you're just reducing anything usable to rubbish.

A clanmate got on and was immediately upset to find his Cyanex riven get lowered in disposition. He exclaimed "Why is it that any time I find a weapon I love, they nerf it?" That hit me because I'm MR 28 and minmax, don't use the Cyanex AT ALL and yet I appreciate my different clanmembers having their preferences. What is the point of riven disposition if you punish the weapons people like the most? Even conceptually, if no one used the Skana yesterday and Melee 3.0 makes it viable today, the 5 disposition would get reduced. That is inherently detrimental to the health of Warframe. I love the concept of riven mods, I loathe the disposition. 

1 disposition weapons are better off having no riven mod most of the time, so why not make rivens unavailable completely for weapons that you think shouldn't have them? You really might as well considering how terrible 1 dispo is.
If the idea is truly to have a broad representation of weapon use, rivens should be competitive across the board. Even improving the lower limit of riven disposition reduction would be much appreciated.

[prodi1600]

Rivens are suppossed to be stronger for the least endgame viable choices as I understand Cyanex its not a bad one, so its understandable that it have bad disposition.

 

[Neon_Knight-]

Often people love things because they're busted compared to other things for little trade off, and thus deserve nerfs. Of course, in a perfect world, everything would only ever be buffed to avoid the bad feels of nerfs. But it's just unrealistic, and unfair to ask for that to occur every time something is put in the game that unintentionally turns out to be way too powerful.

Even though it's initially exciting to find something that seems to be very powerful and relatively under the radar, it isn't good for the health of the game if some things are ridiculously more powerful than other things that are supposed to be on the same playing field.

Lots of people have liked Redeemer since the moment it was released, and Redeemer Prime is hilariously powerful right now. And lots of people love it.  But you don't see it getting nerfed because it doesn't seem like it needs one. It doesn't make other weapons obsolete by existing.

Corinth, Grinlok, and Sybaris. are all weapons that people like, and they aren't getting nerfed. Akmagnus was popular in a similar way at one time, even though it's old hat now. People like those weapons, despite them not being busted. And somehow despite people liking some weapons, they are not nerfed.

On rivens though, I really don't think there's ever going to be saving some weapons, even with rivens. Like, the only way I see someone really going for a weapon like the Pangolin Sword with a riven, is if they're a new player that got lucky and decided to build a whole weapon around a riven, instead of trying to buy rivens for weapons they like.

 

[(XBOX)DarknessZeref]

On 2019-12-18 at 3:07 AM, Druidx said:

 

Even though it's initially exciting to find something that seems to be very powerful and relatively under the radar, it isn't good for the health of the game

 

AK47s are illegal because they are better at killing a lot of things than a revolver. 
We kill a lot of things in Warframe. 
Let AK47s be themselves, let the guns shoot.

I'd like to see the riven disposition/nerfing concept creatively spun into a black market system. Manufacturing and selling grineer, corpus, orokin and sentient tech for da low. It's just that games will always have their BFG's, the gjallarhorns of the world will persist just as a rocket launcher pointed at your sedan will never not be a threat. To inherently revisit weapons they create which happen to be effective is not productive. In terms of maintaining a fabricated reality, 'God' hasn't 'nerfed' our nuclear bombs yet. Several of them launched together will still destroy the Earth. As far as I know, 'God' has never nerfed a weapon. Unless of course it degrades. But that would make more sense than a flat "THIS DOES LESS DAMAGE" nerf. 

Ultimately, I just want people to use what they like to use and know that we'll all be killing the enemies we face together. The person bringing a jaw sword because it has 5 disposition is getting kicked...if I could kick. We'll all leave, you know what I mean..
Think about how much time the team spends looking back at this system up to 4 times a year when it should be revisited every two years. It's too much to sustain, and certainly too cumbersome to transfer so the change will have to come in one form or another, one way or another eventually. For our sake and for the Developer's sake, the approach to riven management needs to be easier, smoother and downright predictable. I believe that lady dealing with riven slivers has a lot of potential on this matter. 

[Neon_Knight-]

23 hours ago, (XB1)DarknessZeref said:

AK47s are illegal because they are better at killing a lot of things than a revolver. 
We kill a lot of things in Warframe. 
Let AK47s be themselves, let the guns shoot.

I'd like to see the riven disposition/nerfing concept creatively spun into a black market system. Manufacturing and selling grineer, corpus, orokin and sentient tech for da low. It's just that games will always have their BFG's, the gjallarhorns of the world will persist just as a rocket launcher pointed at your sedan will never not be a threat. To inherently revisit weapons they create which happen to be effective is not productive. In terms of maintaining a fabricated reality, 'God' hasn't 'nerfed' our nuclear bombs yet. Several of them launched together will still destroy the Earth. As far as I know, 'God' has never nerfed a weapon. Unless of course it degrades. But that would make more sense than a flat "THIS DOES LESS DAMAGE" nerf. 

Ultimately, I just want people to use what they like to use and know that we'll all be killing the enemies we face together. The person bringing a jaw sword because it has 5 disposition is getting kicked...if I could kick. We'll all leave, you know what I mean..
Think about how much time the team spends looking back at this system up to 4 times a year when it should be revisited every two years. It's too much to sustain, and certainly too cumbersome to transfer so the change will have to come in one form or another, one way or another eventually. For our sake and for the Developer's sake, the approach to riven management needs to be easier, smoother and downright predictable. I believe that lady dealing with riven slivers has a lot of potential on this matter. 

I suppose it depends on our definitions of "effective" for Warframe's weapons. I don't think it's fair for "effective" to be thought of as "has nigh infinitely scaling damage that trivializes almost all enemies". On the other hand, I don't think Warframe's enemies are fair either, so maybe unfair mobs need unfair strength to beat them. But I'd rather neither were so obnoxious.

Yes, meta will always exist. But there's a distinction to be made between unhealthy and healthy metas. Unhealthy metas are overly centralized around a couple things, and/or have a shallow degree of depth to them compared to the amount of depth the game could potentially offer. Something being top tier with almost no weaknesses or counterplay, while being absolutely braindead to use, is pretty unhealthy. Braindead high tiers are often particularly toxic.

Whereas, a healthy meta realizes the strongest aspects of a game, and pushes toward making those things as potent and optimal as possible, with the challenge of needing to counter other people doing the same thing in other ways. A healthy meta necessitates needing to take other things into account to try to compete with in some way.

I don't think Warframe has much healthy meta in it, and some weapons being in other leagues compared to others is one case of that. Another big one for me is how it's necessary for frames to either insane eHP, or have some form just denying enemies the opportunity to interact with the player's healthbar altogether, to survive in high level stuff. We know it's not a well balanced game (and in fairness it's an incredibly hard one to balance.) But I don't think the right response to that situation is "The game isn't balanced anyway, so let me keep this broken tool."

As far as just being able to use the weapon I wanna use goes, I wish they just buffed weapons instead of making rivens. I really don't like needing to spend potentially hundreds of plat for the investment of a single, limited but strong build with one weapon I wanna use. I'm not fond of riven dispo changes either, but I do think they're a necessary evil if rivens are going to exist.

Although I....also suppose, my distaste and disinterest in rivens makes it easier for me to not be irritated by their changes.

[George_PPS]

Rivens are great. Low disposition and constantly nerfing the most fun ones or ones for weapons players love the most is the worse game design. Warframe is about building the most powerful weapons and have god like abilities. Sad state now it is. 

[Uthael]

Lowest disposition Rivens (0.5) are still as powerful as a normal mod. And having 2 of the best mod in your build is still much better than any other mod. Especially if the riven is boosted ba a negative stat.

Panthera is a fun weapon (because of its alt fire), but it requires a range mod to be effective. A range mod means sacrificing a damage multiplier mod. This makes it trash in the eyes of vast majority of players. That's why it has a great riven disposition (1.4). But it's still trash. A fun weapon nerfed by default.

On 2019-12-25 at 7:14 AM, (XB1)DarknessZeref said:

(...), the approach to riven management needs to be easier, smoother and downright predictable. (...)

It IS predictable.

OP mentioned Cyanex. It's a new weapon, from Update 25. It is usually modded for 4 damage types and 100% status chance. If you mod for Blast, your CO melee sees 6 statuses applied to a group of enemies (gas, toxin, blast knockdown, blast stun, impact and stackable corrosive).

What could possibly happen once players figure that out? --> CO melee crit weapons with no mods used for status chance! I wouldn't be suprised if that riven goes down again next time dispositions change.

[Tyreaus]

On 2019-12-17 at 11:07 AM, (XB1)DarknessZeref said:

A clanmate got on and was immediately upset to find his Cyanex riven get lowered in disposition. He exclaimed "Why is it that any time I find a weapon I love, they nerf it?"

I feel a need to correct something here:

Weapons (and gameplay in general) aren't balanced around Rivens. Nerfs to Rivens aren't nerfs to the weapons. If a weapon isn't viable without a Riven, that's a weapon (or balance) problem, not a Riven one.

That's not to say the Riven system doesn't have a few issues—old Fang Prime was a good example of how Riven stats didn't really help some weapons—but those should be addressed independent of the weapons. Starting off with the psychology of "my weapon got nerfed" hides the actual issue of "maybe the weapon itself needs an improvement and not a purple bandaid".

[(XBOX)DarknessZeref]

1 hour ago, Tyreaus said:

"maybe the weapon itself needs an improvement and not a purple bandaid".

It's not that we use rivens as a purple bandaid, but that it becomes that after a disposition change. For example, I use a +multishot +status chance +fire riven on my Mara Detron to replace a gold status mod with a "better" gold status mod- being the addition of multishot. This enhances a traditionally tight build in an obscure, yet obviously beneficial way. If they nerfed the stats from like 60.3 and 60 to 59.7 and 59.2, the riven is now completely useless. 

I'm asserting that in the long term, an overhaul is necessary. In the short term, can we narrow the extremes on either side to maintain a sense of beneficial normalcy? Because rivens get lowered to a point of non-usefulness altogether right now at a rate frequent enough to significantly irk everybody all the time. 

 

[(XBOX)DarknessZeref]

4 hours ago, Uthael said:

OP mentioned Cyanex. It's a new weapon, from Update 25.

As far as I'm concerned, this is where I started and stopped with Cyanex. Built, leveled and shelved. Never to be cared about again. Considered the CO exploit, but they swiftly nerfed CO to recognize 4, so the exploit was taken out at the same time. My clanmate wasn't even doing that with it, he just liked it for his undoubtedly misguided build and the results he got shooting it. 

They released it as is then went "oh you can put mods on that? pfft, nerf" like why? This is a story by which I'm not even personally impacted, but illustrates the frustration exists no matter what weapon you choose because every tenno is looking through a different lens. 

[Tyreaus]

4 hours ago, (XB1)DarknessZeref said:

It's not that we use rivens as a purple bandaid, but that it becomes that after a disposition change. For example, I use a +multishot +status chance +fire riven on my Mara Detron to replace a gold status mod with a "better" gold status mod- being the addition of multishot. This enhances a traditionally tight build in an obscure, yet obviously beneficial way. If they nerfed the stats from like 60.3 and 60 to 59.7 and 59.2, the riven is now completely useless. 

I'm asserting that in the long term, an overhaul is necessary. In the short term, can we narrow the extremes on either side to maintain a sense of beneficial normalcy? Because rivens get lowered to a point of non-usefulness altogether right now at a rate frequent enough to significantly irk everybody all the time. 

Context is important regarding what you quoted. I.e., that's not my main point.

Also, your example maintains the coveted 100% shotgun status with that extra multishot tacked on top of it. If that is "completely useless" then I'd hate to see where you'd draw the line with this Riven trimming...

As for your assertion: the Riven system has wanted an overhaul for a while now, given its practically self-referrential intent (to even out weapon usage by boosting stats...based on weapon usage) hasn't worked out all that well. Not to mention what I pointed out regarding weapons like Fang Prime not working well with percentage increases, as DE should have learned regarding melee range updates. The proposition of cutting out the lower end (and higher end? Not sure what "extremes on either side" entails otherwise...) of weapons on the disposition scale isn't a solution nor a step in the direction of "beneficial normalcy", however. Partly because the issues plaguing both ends of the disposition spectrum are quite opposite: low disposition Rivens are worthless, many high-disposition weapons are terrible. Which is why I say it's important to divorce the two.