What the Developers NEED to Know About Tenno

[Midas]

3 hours ago, (XB1)DarknessZeref said:

The thing is that we have multiple overpowered warframes, guns, and melees. They pick and choose for one reason or another which of the best working weapons gets a power loss. These same feedback threads are full of people complaining that "unless you have a chiseled build, you won't be killing much dealing with objectives.". If I could just bring Arca Plasmor or Kohm, Sobek, Lenz, Zarr, Rubico, Glaxion, Quartakk or etc I would consider this idea of "balance" to be real, but in reality Lenz isn't doing anything, Zarr will kill me if I don't put 8 or 9 forma in it. Rubico is single target, Glaxion simply got nerfed sideways and is laughable 6 forma riven, primed bane mod and all. Kuva Kohm is a yessir, Kuva Quartakk is a big yessir, Arca Plasmor is great elsewhere, but lackluster here. Sobek might work, might try later.

Those other weapons would ALL have been viable choices prior to their individual reworks. The idea is that I should have choices? Well they have effectively been narrowed. Having multiple standouts is a positive thing that allows players lower to the ground access to one gun or another that'll help them for longer periods of their playing career. It's certainly a discussion worth having, my point in contributing to the forums is to point out that the past 2 1/2 years has been absolutely gucci, but ya'll starting to trip now low key and it's making me and the homies frownie face a lil bit.

I think with melee there are many many more options now!

I believe if we do a mod rework for all primaries we can reach the same results.

[(XBOX)DarknessZeref]

3 minutes ago, Midas said:

I think with melee there are many many more options now!

I believe if we do a mod rework for all primaries we can reach the same results.

An optimistic point, it just might work too!

[Sylonus]

On 2019-12-17 at 1:27 PM, (XB1)DarknessZeref said:

Stuff.

I'm with you on point 1, while anecdotal, so many people, myself included, play this game for the power fantasy, we invest into things we like due to them seeming OP, and their nerf often dishearten us, making us feel like we made a mistake investing, punishing us, and remove a sense of progress, we like feeling OP.

Though I'll be honest, "Point 2" makes you seem really out of touch, I couldn't disagree more with most of it.

[Steel_Rook]

9 hours ago, (XB1)DarknessZeref said:

And on this note, I killed the Wolf 100 times in a day because I happened to have had a particular build allowing me to kill him and extract sometimes in as little as 40s. I concede to the truth of your points. Everything with armor gets the corrosive slash viral treatment and it doesn't deviate at all almost. Rather than curtail that though, couldn't they just make more enemies weak to magnetic or blast?

While that might mitigate the issue, it still suffers from the same fundamental shortcoming - you're still presenting an optimisation problem with a discrete solution. Let me explain...

An ideal RPG system is one where your build is determined at least in large part by your subjective preference. You build based on what you like, rather than what's optimal. Developers can achieve this either by using complex mechanics which are difficult to model without access to the source code, or else by gating optimisation behind options which are difficult to compare with each other. As an example, would you prefer a weapon that's more accurate at range, or one with a larger magazine? In my experience, most people tend to pick accuracy because "BOOM! HEADSHOT! SUCH SKILL!" and because that's more ammo-efficient, but I argue that volume of fire and less need for precision gives you improved headspace for decision-making. Ultimately, there's no "right" choice here because it comes down to personal preference.

Warframe's current damage system for ground combat has none of that. Your choice of damage type for non-status-heavy weapons is both entirely clear-cut and entirely determined by optimisation criteria outside of your control as a player. Let's take an existing example and try to design a rifle to fight Grineer. Looking at their resistances, your best options for combo damage types are Radiation, Corrosive, Viral. You want as much damage as possible meaning you probably want to use a Primed elemental damage mod. The only one Rifles have access to is for Cold, and the only one of the three you can make with that is Viral. There, that's our optimal solution and the ONLY actual decision I made in there was to use a rifle. If I next wanted to build a pistol, I'd have gone with Radiation because that's a thing Grineer are weak against and I have a Primed Heat mod for Pistols.

When your choice of damage type comes down to an optimisation problem, the choice itself becomes abstract. Your consideration isn't "which damage type to use" but rather "which faction am I fighting" with damage type being chosen for you by optimal build practices. At that point, you're essentially just choosing your favourite Bane mod - that's what that "decision" comes down to. I've suggested alternate weakness distributions in the past and this was precisely the response I got out of the community... Because it's kind of true. When damage type is chosen not by you but rather by the game's mechanics, that ceases to be a choice. Adding more special cases like this isn't going to help. Hell, plenty of things right now are weak to Magnetic - everything Corpus, for one thing. But even if we all decided to use Magnetic vs. the Corpus (which I've been doing since I started using my Primed Cold mod on rifles), that's still no different from using a Primed Bane of Corpus mod.

When a choice comes down to an optimisation problem, there is no real choice. DE seem to have recognised this issue, and the Railjack damage system is their response - just take that choice entirely out of the game. Rather than force people to use specific damage types against specific enemies for optimal DPS, just let everyone use all the damage types against all the enemies and get optimal DPS. The end result is the same, except NOW you're free to pick your status effect of choice. Unlike damage types which only affect your on-paper optimal DPS, status effects actually have tangible gameplay-changing impact. What's better - confusing enemies or slowing enemies down? Or, if you feel that control effects are for sissies and only want more damage... Would you rather deal extra DOT or progressively lower enemy damage mitigation capability? There's a tangible gameplay consideration there.

In short, I feel that removing damage-type-specific, health-type-specific resistances and vulnerabilities removes very little conscious choice from the game while at the same time enables quite a bit more conscious choice in terms of status effects. And again - DE seem to recognise this, which is why they're field-testing a potential new damage system in an area with no "status quo" to change. I personally hope they go through with it, but that would be... Fairly major.

[DrakeWurrum]

16 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

and for what? So we can have several different colours of Grineer soldiers who all behave the same?

Hence my complaint on enemy AI.

To be fair, I think all the "different" unit types is just to make the enemies more varied and less boring. I get pretty bored of Infested just because half the units I'm slashing through are Chargers, with the other half being Leapers, and who really notices the exploding ones?

At least with Grineer, there's Lancers and... whichever one is the shotgun guy. Then sometimes there's Hellions leaping around, Eviscerators using what look like Miters to me (could be wrong). Bombards and Napalms slowly taking up the back, causing different types of environmental threats. Heavy Gunners, of course. The occassional boomerang-throwing guy with his kubrows stealing your weapon, or the flamethrower guy with his kavats dropping flame-zones on the ground.

I mean, sure, there's Ancients in the back, and Moas. Sometimes the Osprey things float around. And then there's those weird bloaty ones... spawning maggots or else more units.
Well, maybe Infested are still pretty varied.

It doesn't really elicit a change in killing style for me, but it keeps them from being too boring, and in a sense forces me to think "Oh, I should go kill that guy first, he's annoying"

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

The only one Rifles have access to is for Cold, and the only one of the three you can make with that is Viral. There, that's our optimal solution and the ONLY actual decision I made in there was to use a rifle

Worth noting: on quite a few guns, I double up on the secondary element combos, or I'll toss in an extra single element, so there's a lot more choice than your example presents. I usually don't bother with Magnetic/Gas, mind you, but that's because status effects are poorly designed.

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Hell, plenty of things right now are weak to Magnetic - everything Corpus, for one thing. But even if we all decided to use Magnetic vs. the Corpus (which I've been doing since I started using my Primed Cold mod on rifles)

And see, right there, you've made a choice that I don't. I prefer to stick to Corrosive for Corpus because I find that dealing with shields is child's play, but dealing with the armor on their robotics is a genuine problem. There is choice, it's just not particularly interesting.
(And most of that choice is because armor is king and shields are worthless, which is a separate problem from damage types)

I think for your overall rant on this, though, I'm not so sure that getting rid of enemy weaknesses is the answer. You have, on the one hand, a problem where people decide which damage type to go with entirely by which enemy we're fighting. And then come up with different builds based on the faction we're facing. (Personally, I just always use Corrosive/Blast, but I'm also lazy) So a lot of the time, you might feel like you don't have any actual choice, because the content you're facing dictates it.

But if there are no weaknesses, if there are NO game mechanics dictating which damage types would be optimal for you to use, and only status procs matter, then you have a problem where literally your choice doesn't matter. Especially on guns that don't have high status chance. It's all just free damage, so who cares what your choice is?
And even on weapons that DO have high status chance, which status proc you go with is going to be purely decided by which one provides the most DPS. So in that sense, the game is still dictating your choice, because ultimately what matters is killing enemies as fast as possible.

Hence... Railjack damage, where realistically only Particle and Plasma matter, and the rest don't really mean anything. Maybe Incindiery, but we don't really get much choice there except on our Archguns. Most people pick which RJ guns to use based entirely on firing mechanism and raw DPS - Hence Cryphon is considered king.
And the result of the Railjack damage system is that only two Archguns are worth using: Phaedra and Cyngas. Pick your poison... automatic or burst? (To be fair, part of that is because everything in Empyrean is apparently projectile, making Fluctus completely useless... and Corvas range is just laughable)

Edited December 26, 2019 by DrakeWurrum

[chofranc]

They need to know that the tenno are lost...

[(XBOX)DarknessZeref]

5 hours ago, Sylonus said:

I'm with you on point 1, while anecdotal, so many people, myself included, play this game for the power fantasy, we invest into things we like due to them seeming OP, and their nerf often dishearten us, making us feel like we made a mistake investing, punishing us, and remove a sense of progress, we like feeling OP.

Retweet.

[(XBOX)DarknessZeref]

27 minutes ago, chofranc said:

They need to know that the tenno are lost...

Well our mom is pulling up with a sentient army to kill us so, cut us some slack?

[(XBOX)DarknessZeref]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Warframe's current damage system for ground combat has none of that. Your choice of damage type for non-status-heavy weapons is both entirely clear-cut and entirely determined by optimisation criteria outside of your control as a player. Let's take an existing example and try to design a rifle to fight Grineer. Looking at their resistances, your best options for combo damage types are Radiation, Corrosive, Viral. You want as much damage as possible meaning you probably want to use a Primed elemental damage mod. The only one Rifles have access to is for Cold, and the only one of the three you can make with that is Viral. There, that's our optimal solution and the ONLY actual decision I made in there was to use a rifle. If I next wanted to build a pistol, I'd have gone with Radiation because that's a thing Grineer are weak against and I have a Primed Heat mod for Pistols.

Like you said, this is your personal thinking path. I would not use those elements and consider myself taking the "optimal" path.

 

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I personally hope they go through with it, but that would be... Fairly major.

At least you know you're asking for a lot. I am explicitly not asking for a lot, seeking short-medium term satisfaction.

[DrakeWurrum]

1 hour ago, (XB1)DarknessZeref said:

Well our mom is pulling up with a sentient army to kill us so, cut us some slack?

Nope. Our mother's Mother is.

[(XBOX)DarknessZeref]

37 minutes ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Nope. Our mother's Mother is.

I mean either way 😂

[Steel_Rook]

20 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

To be fair, I think all the "different" unit types is just to make the enemies more varied and less boring. I get pretty bored of Infested just because half the units I'm slashing through are Chargers, with the other half being Leapers, and who really notices the exploding ones?

But you're kind of making my point with this line, though. You're not fighting just "Leapers" when you fight the Infested. Every mission spawns at least five different kinds of them, in different combinations of colours even. It's also spawning those "half a Leaper" Crawler things, too. The problem is that they're all basically indistinguishable from each other, to the point where what both of us see is "just a lot interchangeable melee crap." However, I feel the same way about Grineer ground soldiers, too. To me, it makes very little difference whether they're shooting a Grakata, a Miter, a Sobek or a Karak. It's still a bunch of dudes in WH40K armour who skipped leg day firing ranged weapons at me with no real mechanical distinction between them beyond adding more DPS.

Yes, I fully agree that the likes of Heavy Gunners and Bombards and such ARE distinctly different units. Those I would class as Specials and probably tweak their mechanics. For one thing, I'd give them Division 2 style breakable pieces which affect their behaviour. For another, I'd give them more "gamey" mechanics. For Heavy Gunners, for instance, I'd probably give them progressive DPS - the longer you let them shoot at you, the more damage they do so you either want to kill them quick or break line of sight periodically. Bombards need just fire slower and feature a unique sound pack so we KNOW when a Bombard is firing BEFORE we start taking rockets to the ribs. Probably ease off on the auto-tracking by a lot, too, but maybe make the rockets detonate on proximity instead of contact.

My point is that complexity in a horde shooter doesn't come from the complexity of the hordes of commons. It doesn't even come from the complexity of the Specials. It comes from stacking several fairly simple enemy mechanics on top of each other so the player's forced to pay attention to multiple things at once. Each individual enemy might be simple to duel, but all of them together is what leads to lapses of concentrations and simple mistakes. Payday 2's Cloakers are a perfect example of this (when they function correctly). They "hide" in very obvious spots and are trivial to shoot as soon as you see them... But you often run past them as you sprint from cover to cover and just miss the obvious Sam Fisher crouching next to that garbage container.

As long as an enemy's sole distinction is "shoots at player and comes in large numbers," then we don't need more than one enemy type who does that. I'd rather be attacked by hordes of identical Lancers who all have the same resistances and the same general behaviour than be attacked by hordes of different-coloured lancers each with their own resistances and their own weapons who all behave the same anyway. If you're looking for some visual variety you can always just randomly generate their armour like how Liches are put together, but I don't see the benefit to implementing unique mechanics to different enemies when we treat them all as interchangeable anyway.

 

21 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Worth noting: on quite a few guns, I double up on the secondary element combos, or I'll toss in an extra single element, so there's a lot more choice than your example presents. I usually don't bother with Magnetic/Gas, mind you, but that's because status effects are poorly designed.

While you absolutely CAN do that, this only really helps for Status-heavy weapons due to some of those damage types having pretty meaty DOT. For crit-heavy weapons, the weaknesses of the health types you're attacking matter a lot more, and none of the single damage types have large numbers, at least not against the Grineer where it actually matters. It's mostly 25% bonuses here and there. You're also limited to the mods you can use if you want to accomplish that. Since you can't stack copies of the same mod, you can only use one of the 90% Elemental damage mods per damage type. You could go with one of the 60/60 damage/element mods, certainly, but you're still losing damage. The way damage buffs stack and the way enemy armour works, that's a not-insignificant amount of damage.

And that's kind of where the Railjack damage system shines. It entirely removes the concept of resistances and weaknesses, meaning that entire thing I wrote just now doesn't apply to it. Because you no longer have to consider which damage type would do the most damage to your enemy, you're free to consider which status effect you like the feel of the most. Yes, it does mean that crit weapons basically don't care about damage type, but crit weapons basically don't care about damage type even now, given that optimisation chooses for you. DE seem to have recognised this and removed that consideration from the game entirely, which makes status effect consideration that much more meaningful. Better yet, the smaller number of damage types means fewer and more useful status effects. There's no more Magnetic damage, because it's simply merged together with Corrosive under the "Particle" status type. That reduces both armour AND shields with the same status effect, in practice serving as the "reduce enemy EHP" one.

My point is that there's not a lot of choice when the optimal option is mathematically derived.

 

21 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

And see, right there, you've made a choice that I don't. I prefer to stick to Corrosive for Corpus because I find that dealing with shields is child's play, but dealing with the armor on their robotics is a genuine problem. There is choice, it's just not particularly interesting.
(And most of that choice is because armor is king and shields are worthless, which is a separate problem from damage types)

What you say here is not quite true. Shields are worthless ON WARFRAMES, because our shields come in sane amounts. On enemies, this is a different story, however. A level 100 Terra Trencher has 22 000 Shields, a similar level Corpus Tech has nearly 14 000 Proto Shield which Corrosive deals only half damage against. Sure, maybe you have absurdly powerful Riven weapons which don't care for numbers like these, but when I take any of my Corrosive weapons against these guys I end up having to dump entire magazines. And while it might seem like these enemies are rare and shouldn't be considered, they do show up on Sorties and whatever Corpus counterpart we get for Kuva Liches will likely go up to the 90-110 range. In particular, though, high-level Terra Corpus have enough shields that Corrosive just doesn't work very well against them.

Moreover, the Terra Corpus Raknoids are armoured with "Robotic" health for their armour class, which is just not weak to Corrosive. Some of the older Corpus units ARE armoured with Grineer armour, such as Oxium Ospreys sporting Ferrite and Bursas sporting Alloy, but most of the newer units and seemingly all of the Terra Corpus units are just armoured with more Robotic. If anything, bringing Radiation is generally a better choice. It's still weak against shields, but the standard Shields this time around (so the shields of generally weaker units) and Robotic health (and thus armour) is weak to Radiation by 25%. Sure, you don't shred their armour, but I honestly gave up on trying to reduce enemy armour via Corrosive procs a long time ago. You need so many procs to shred the armour of a high-level enemy that kill times just... stretch on... forever... I mean, a level 100 Bursa has over 3300 armour. You need something like two dozen status procs to burn through that and not a lot of weapons can pull this off. Shoot it with Radiation, though, and you're dealing 175% damage against 25% of its effective armour value - you just cut through its health directly doing that.

I get your point, though. There's a certain amount of room for preference when it comes to damage types. Hell, I used to stick Corrosive onto everything up until the game started forcing me into level 100 missions in order to fight my Lich. Since then, though, I've found Corrosive to be underwhelming, especially against a lot of armour. It takes too long to shred high amounts of armour and it doesn't actually do enough damage to Alloy-armoured enemies to be worth it. A radiation gun or - even simpler - a Viral gun tends to cut those guys down with much greater ease. I recently moved my Tenora from 90/90 Corrosive to 165/90 Viral and its killing potential has spiked significantly, just from first-hand experience with it. Nothing else changed on the gun. It's even decent against Corpus when set to Magnetic, just because the extra 75% elemental damage seems to be offsetting not having bonus damage against specific units, and it does rip through shields remarkably quickly.

That's actually part of my beef with the current system. It's set up with clear optimal solutions to a lot of problems, but they're obfuscated behind a lot of enemy complexity and research. In a lot of cases, I've had to make decisions with limited information and limited ability to compare, then just stuck with them because they seemed to work. Due to Kuva Liches, I've been playing around with damage types again and found a lot of my old decisions to simply be sub-optimal. I don't know what level enemies you fight typically, but against the levels I fight, these do seem to give me more damage.

 

21 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Hence... Railjack damage, where realistically only Particle and Plasma matter, and the rest don't really mean anything. Maybe Incindiery, but we don't really get much choice there except on our Archguns. Most people pick which RJ guns to use based entirely on firing mechanism and raw DPS - Hence Cryphon is considered king.
And the result of the Railjack damage system is that only two Archguns are worth using: Phaedra and Cyngas. Pick your poison... automatic or burst? (To be fair, part of that is because everything in Empyrean is apparently projectile, making Fluctus completely useless... and Corvas range is just laughable)

I honestly fail to see how the Cryophon can be considered "king." Yes, it does a lot of DPS, but it does so at the cost of a slow-flying projectile, a low rate of fire and aggressively short range, not to mention utterly dreadful heat management even on the basic version of it. My side guns of choice are the Carcinox simply because they have fast-flying projectiles, a high rate of fire and a lot of heat capacity. Plus it does occasionally make enemy ships fire on each other, which opens them up for a solid burst. But even if I were to agree that you pick Railjack weapons purely based on their firing mechanisms, to this I say GOOD! That's how it should be. My all-time favourite rifle remains the Tenora not because of its DPS or about even damage spread, but because it's a fast-firing weapon with a large magazine and "regressive aim spread." As I explained above, this is the same reason I picked the Carcinox for my own ship - because I have an easier time landing shots with it, and being able to maintain fire on target makes a far greater difference in TTK in Railjack than the raw strength of your weapon, I've found.

I don't agree that Particle and Plasma are the only Railjack damage types "which matter." Not when that game mode has a bit more complexity to its gunplay that standard ground missions which often break down to a stationary damage trade. For one thing, these status effects only really matter with high-status guns which realistically none of the existing Railjack weapons are. Granted, if (hopefully when) transplanted to ground combat, it's entirely possible that Particle and Plasma damage types would be the only ones which matter like how people insist on using Corrosive against everything now. Myself having gravitated towards Radiation damage for so long, however, I would say that the other damage types can be just as useful. Confusing enemies might not help with DPS (though it does since they shoot each other), but it offers a LOT of additional mitigation, especially if you have an AoE gun of some sort. Hell, I get more use out of my Cryota Moa's Blast proc knocking people down and opening them up for ground finishers than I get out of its Corrosive effect.

Point being, I'd rather pick my guns based on how they operate or what effect I want them to have on the enemy vs. "which ones have the highest numbers."

[DrakeWurrum]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Moreover, the Terra Corpus Raknoids are armoured with "Robotic" health for their armour class, which is just not weak to Corrosive.

Gonna snip this bit out, because I specifically did test different damage types against those Raknoids a while back. They were that frustrating for me.

Corrosive killed them fastest. I tried Magnetic first, because their shields, especially the overshields, got annoying. I tried Radiation, because robotics are weak to that.

Corrosive proved best, though, every time. Armor beats shields, even on enemies with a lot of them.

This is, again, more of a problem with how shields are designed than the damage system.

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

While you absolutely CAN do that, this only really helps for Status-heavy weapons due to some of those damage types having pretty meaty DOT. For crit-heavy weapons, the weaknesses of the health types you're attacking matter a lot more, and none of the single damage types have large numbers, at least not against the Grineer where it actually matters. It's mostly 25% bonuses here and there.

Honestly, when building only for crit, I still just universally go Corrosive/Blast, stacking all the damage I can, and don't sweat the factions. (Note: this only means a neutral damage resistance against Corpus, and results in bonuses against both Grineer and Infested)
But I also rarely use crit-only weapons. What few crit-heavy weapons I use also have at least a "respectable" amount of status that I can count on due to how often attacks hit (like with Soma Prime, or Machete Wraith). So in those cases I'm still building Corrosive/Heat, if not Corrosive/Viral

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I honestly fail to see how the Cryophon can be considered "king." Yes, it does a lot of DPS, but it does so at the cost of a slow-flying projectile, a low rate of fire and aggressively short range, not to mention utterly dreadful heat management even on the basic version of it.

Like I said, that's what the community is treating as king, because they have the highest DPS, and pack a punch in one shot. Both these factors make them great pilot guns. Most people put Carcinnox for side-guns. Side-guns are easier to track targets with, so wasting shots doesn't matter, and Carcinnox has higher DPS than every other option besides Cryophon.

Photor is worthless, because tracking the enemy model isn't always easy. (maybe rank 10 Gunnery will help?) Probably easier on side-guns, but ultimately still a pain. They're both lower DPS *and* harder to aim than Carcinnox, so why bother? Their only benefit is damage-per-heat.

Apoc could be better than Carcinnox... if it's status proc chance wasn't so low.

Pulsar use isn't about DPS, but disabling enemy vessels, and is likely better for pilot guns TBH. But again, Cryophon is better here. Zetki Cryophon MK3 is the more popular option because it has the highest DPS, AND has a 45% chance to freeze enemies, meaning Pulsar loses even with it's one benefit.

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I don't agree that Particle and Plasma are the only Railjack damage types "which matter."

Mostly referring to Arch-guns, to be fair. People have found that Particle and Plasma procs are so powerful that high status is the way to go with Arch-gun, focusing on Slash and Puncture, which means Phaedra and Cyngas. In other words, DE hasn't learned their lessons from Damage 2.0, where the problem isn't resistances/weaknesses, but about status types actually mattering equally, and simple raw DPS being the deciding factor.

Considering this discussion is about making damage types better than the Damage 2.0 system we have, I figured that was more relevant than the Railjack guns anyways.

Edited December 27, 2019 by DrakeWurrum

[Steel_Rook]

4 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Gonna snip this bit out, because I specifically did test different damage types against those Raknoids a while back. They were that frustrating for me.Corrosive killed them fastest. I tried Magnetic first, because their shields, especially the overshields, got annoying. I tried Radiation, because robotics are weak to that. Corrosive proved best, though, every time. Armor beats shields, even on enemies with a lot of them. This is, again, more of a problem with how shields are designed than the damage system.

All I can say is that hasn't been my experience. I do have a Corrosive fallback weapon on my standard Fortuna build (high-status Twin Kohmaks) and have on occasion been able to strip the armour from Raknoids. I still have an easier time killing them with my Radiation/Critical Opticor Vandal - easier than trying to strip their armour first and THEN deal damage to them. Regenerating overshilds do sometimes get in the way, but I can typically let those time out while I fight other stuff. And mind you - that's with a Radiation build using non-Primed elemental damage mods. I've not even considered trying to rework my Opticor Vandal to use my Primed damage mods yet.

 

4 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

But I also rarely use crit-only weapons. What few crit-heavy weapons I use also have at least a "respectable" amount of status that I can count on due to how often attacks hit (like with Soma Prime, or Machete Wraith). So in those cases I'm still building Corrosive/Heat, if not Corrosive/Viral

In my experience, mixed critical/status builds just don't do enough damage overall, especially on slower-firing weapons. The only reliable way I've found to build for high status is the 60/60 element/status mods, which take up a lot of space for quite a bit less damage, usually coming at the expense of firing behaviour mods like reload, magazine size and such. There ARE a few weapons with both a high critical hit chance and a high status chance, but I typically don't even consider Status unless it's over at least 75% or so. Below that, it's too unreliable for an effect I'm going to need to stack with itself over and over again. Some shotguns can get around this because per-pellet status chance is an utter mess, but that's a very small subsection of weapons. If a weapon is going to be proccing Status 30-40% of the time, then that's not something I can rely on and so not something I'd build for its status type.

I used to think I can make it work. I used to think that slapping Corrosive on my Tenora was helping me against the Grineer because "corrosive reduces armour." I recently swapped over to Viral and have found that to work far, FAR more reliably. It does considerable extra damage against all types of Grineer, I can build for that using my Primed damage mods and I genuinely don't notice any apparently lack of armour-stripping, since not a lot of that was happening anyway. And sure, I could just build my Tenora with four elemental damage mods, but I happen to feel that an extended magazine and extra critical chance help more.

Additionally, I'm not sure how you're able to pull off Corrosive/Viral when both of those use Toxic as a component. The only thing you can pair with Corrosive is Blast, else some of your elemental mods will merge into more corrosive damage.

 

4 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Apoc could be better than Carcinnox... if it's status proc chance wasn't so low.

None of the Railjack weapons have status chance worth a crap, far as I'm concerned. Certainly not enough to rely on. They do trigger every so often, but nowhere near enough to have a meaningful impact on the game, as far as I'm concerned. Unless there are status-altering Avionics, I don't see how Railjack is even to the point where status guns are even viable. Maybe DE will let us mod turrets directly at some point - I don't know. But until then, even the 45% status chance on the Cryophon doesn't seem worth it - especially for a weapon that slow-firing.

 

4 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

Mostly referring to Arch-guns, to be fair. People have found that Particle and Plasma procs are so powerful that high status is the way to go with Arch-gun, focusing on Slash and Puncture, which means Phaedra and Cyngas. In other words, DE hasn't learned their lessons from Damage 2.0, where the problem isn't resistances/weaknesses, but about status types actually mattering equally, and simple raw DPS being the deciding factor.

I'd argue that's more an artefact of the existing damage types applying to Railjack, though, rather than with the status effects themselves. I'm also a bit leery of accepting what "people have found" on its face. So far, the Wiki appears to offer no specific numbers or mechanics beyond a blanket "reduces armour and shields" and "enemies take more damage" descriptor. DPS will always be of primary importance so it's entirely possible Particle and Plasma simply offer too much of both. However, I've not noticed a significant difference myself, either in Archwings or in the Railjack. I don't have any Level 7 Intrinsics so I don't know what the situation is in Veil Proxima, but I've not had real issues killing things via Archwing in Saturn Proxima so far. If DE literally enabled the 30% armour decrease from Corrosive to Plasma, though, then that would indeed be an issue. And I will straight-up agree that having Particle "increase received damage" is entirely redundant with Plasma's EHP-reducing effect.

Depending on the numbers, I could grant you that the status effects themselves are not well-balanced (I'm still not sure what the difference between Ionic and Frost damage is, in practice). My argument was that essentially unhooking status effect from damage type allows you to do optimal damage to an enemy and STILL retain your favourite status effect, rather than being forced into one you dislike simply based on what damage type enemies are vulnerable to. To be perfectly honest, I still find Railjack to have too many damage types even as cut down as they are. From old suggestions, I'd personally go with some kind of anti-EHP status effect, something anti-DPS, one or two kinds of control (say, hold vs. confuse) and maybe some other kind of wildcard, like bullet attract or knockback or something else oddball like that. Right now, Railjack has 7 damage types and I still find some of them redundant.

I also feel that DE rely a bit too much on bloated EHP for enemy critters, to the point where an EHP reduction equals higher DPS across the board, where that should only be the case for individual special enemies. My biggest beef with Grineer design, for instance, is the fact that easily their most common high-level enemy (the Elite Lancer) has Alloy armour and a LOT of it. Obviously anything that bypasses or strips this armour is going to DRASITCALLY increase the player's effective DPS. So yes, setting all damage types to deal *1.0 damage against all health types means eliminating anti-armour damage types like Corrosive, Radiation and Viral, which will require an across-the-board reduction in either armour amounts or armour mitigation. I don't expect the Railjack damage system to drop into ground combat as-is, but I'd rather retain the "all damage types deal the same damage against all health types."

[RamonLLLL]

Damn, the mental gymnastics of this thread

[Fiddlestixxx]

On 2019-12-25 at 6:55 PM, DrakeWurrum said:

Wait, what? If anything there aren't enough spawns!

For my personal preference, I heartily disagree here. Here's my experience; endless hordes of trash mob spawns that get irritating fast. So what do I (and apparently everyone else) do? Get a big blast weapon to make all of those nuisances go away and blast through the mission, literally and metaphorically, as quickly as possible to get it over with because it's actually irritating and not fun.

The other option that I use often is playing solo, which culls the herds (much lower spawn rate) of mindlessly facerolling enemy AI into something that you could imagine a ship or base's population to actually be, instead of a constant, endless torrent of billions of goons that just make you want to rely on room clearing abilities and weapons so you can enjoy that three seconds of peace before then next obnoxious mob closes the gap.

Frankly, I think the battle flow in multiplayer is absolutely terrible. I switch between having fun with gameplay in solo and having fun with other people in multiplayer.

[(XBOX)Calliber]

Have to disagree on both points.

Point 1 is subjective and my take on why I play breaks that point: I play the game because of the movement aspect, concept, and variety. I don't like being over-powerful because it's boring.  I like that the lore is vague and can go anywhere, I like that it takes time and dedication to get to the point of being a Vet (100 hour tutorial is no joke, and I don't think it's a bad thing), there are so many open ends in the storyline that every need lore drop is a surprise.  I'm having my most fun when I'm struggling to stay alive and defeat enemies.  I can handicap myself with mods (I don't bother fully leveling damage or elemental mods), but I really appreciate when they drop new content that pushes the build I have so effectively built to a breaking point that I actually get downed by the game.

Point 2: To excel at this game you don't need money at all.  You need dedication in regards to time, and resourcefulness (smart does help).  Let's assume you're billionaire, you buy everything....well that didn't get you crap, you still need to level items and frames, you need to build your MR, you need to forma to make those items and frames strong, you still need to clear nodes, learn or look-up how to mod, level your mods....you still need to PLAY.  Buy everything sure....you now have rank 0 items with rank 0 mods and you can only access Earth, congrats.  You can get everything (non-cosmetic, but even those are obtainable with trading) for free in this game, you spend money on it because you want to, not because you have to.    

[(PSN)CodyXSavageX]

Well, some of us are intelligent one way or the other

[Ham_Grenabe]

I want to thank the OP for their challenging and bracing contribution to the ongoing Warframe discussion, and to say we're all awfully impressed at how smart and wealthy they are. 

[GKP_light]

Le 17/12/2019 à 20:27, (XB1)DarknessZeref a dit :

We respect your immense programming talent

"bugframe"

[Aesthier]

On 2019-12-26 at 6:42 AM, Steel_Rook said:

While that might mitigate the issue, it still suffers from the same fundamental shortcoming - you're still presenting an optimisation problem with a discrete solution. Let me explain...

 

SNIP

^ This a thousand times over.