Glaive Prime does not behave correctly

[_BringerOfRain]

Greetings,

recently I have decided to build Glaive Prime as the main weapon for my Ivara. I was expecting high aoe damage, bonus movement speed from Dispatch Overdrive and good synergy with Navigator.

I'm quite disappointed...

I have encountered several problems that I would like to list here:

 

1) Heavy attack explosion cannot crit. Critical chance mods have 2x multiplier for heavy attacks, yet they do nothing. It feels like explosion has not even its base critical chance.

Meanwhile, explosion benefits as expected from base damage mods (Pressure Point), combo counter (also initial combo), elemental damage mods (Fever Strike) and status chance mods (Virulent Scourge).

Damage bonus from Steel Charge aura is also applied correctly.

 

2) Mods like Life Strike, Killing Blow affect Glaive's heavy attacks. However, Dispatch Overdrive gives its bonus sometimes.

 

The video below shows the two mentioned above abnormalities. 

As we can see, explosion damage has white, non-crit color and crit mods have no effect on value of the damage. Additionally, the Dispatch Overdrive buff was activated 3 times during the murder of 20 Corrupted Bombards using explosion in almost every throw.

I repeated tests connected with those issues few times in different conditions. I'm assured that there is no mod/aura that breaks functionality of crit mods/Dispatch Overdrive - they do not work even if there are no other mods or auras/arcanes equipped. I reentered Simulacrum before each experiment.

 

3) Empowered Blades aura does not affect Glaive's explosion.

I tested this several times reloading Simulacrum each try.

 

4) Life Strike heals you from slash proc of heavy attacks - is this intended?

 

5) Throwing speed is affected by "Heavy Attack Wind Up Speed" while using only Glaive Prime. However, during dual wield only attack speed has an impact on this process.

 

6) There is no way to know if performed throw was empowered (dual wield).

 

7) You can hold Melee Attack button or press Melee Heavy Attack button to perform heavy attack if you use only Glaive. Meanwhile, there is no such a choice while dual wielding.

Imo for normal melee attacking there should be option to disable holding melee button option. There are many people who simply dislike this idea and prefer to have normal attacking and heavy attacking splitted between two different buttons.

There should be also option to split those two types of fighting for dual wielding.

 

 

Thanks for reading. This is my first bug report so I'm open to suggestions how can I improve it. Also, don't burn me for language mistakes - English is not my native form of communication.

Best regards,

_BringerOfRain

 

 

 

 

Edited February 5, 2020 by _BringerOfRain

[Litus42]

Just to let you know for point 6, you're performing a charged throw with dual wield as soon as you get to the blue reticle. There doesn't seem to be a way to screw it up. I thought it was a timing window (and perhaps it used to be) but currently once you see the blue reticle you're guaranteed your throw will be charged even if you don't let go of the melee button.

Otherwise the are other bugs with glaives, some of which are:

* Can't block nor auto block in dual wield

* Can't throw Glaive while in the air unless dual wielding

* Condition Overload only works on melee attacks

* Power Throw mod seemingly does nothing, with glaives bouncing no matter what

* Only dual wield charged throw has punch through

* Dual wield uses its own stance

I'm probably forgetting a few bugs.

 

[DeVaY4x1]

I was testing it myself and i can only add that slash proc on charged throw explosion can be increased by combo counter and melee damage (elemental damage, crit and e.g. buzz kill dont increase proc damage)

Edited January 13, 2020 by DeVaY4x1

[_BringerOfRain]

2020-02-05 Update

Quote

I was testing it myself and i can only add that slash proc on charged throw explosion can be increased by combo counter and melee damage (elemental damage, crit and e.g. buzz kill dont increase proc damage)

Quote

 Slash damage's status effect is Bleed, lacerating the enemy with a damage over time effect that deals damage equal to Base Damage × Bleed Multiplier per tick for 7 ticks over 6 seconds as  True damage. 

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Damage/Slash_Damage

Bleed procs do not scale with elemental damage / slash damage mods - everything works fine.

 

Update 27.1.0 has fixed issue 7). Every other problem was not solved.

Also, there is no way to throw glaive weapon while dual wielding atm.

[Asphyxxia]

On 2019-12-29 at 1:11 AM, _BringerOfRain said:

4) Life Strike heals you from slash proc of heavy attacks - is this intended?

Yes this is intended. Heavy attacks now partially replace channeling and a long time ago if you procced Slash and then channeled, it would heal for no energy cost at all. This was later changed to if slash procs while channeling, life strike will heal for all damage dealt with that attack even if you're no longer channeling. So yes, no problems there.

Also for empowered throw while dual wielding, it doesn't count as a heavy attack. Heavy attacks can only be executed in dedicated melee mode with alt fire so everything else doesn't count as a heavy attack.

[_BringerOfRain]

5 minutes ago, Asphyxxia said:

Yes this is intended. Heavy attacks now partially replace channeling and a long time ago if you procced Slash and then channeled, it would heal for no energy cost at all. This was later changed to if slash procs while channeling, life strike will heal for all damage dealt with that attack even if you're no longer channeling. So yes, no problems there.

Thanks for clarifying

7 minutes ago, Asphyxxia said:

Also for empowered throw while dual wielding, it doesn't count as a heavy attack. Heavy attacks can only be executed in dedicated melee mode with alt fire so everything else doesn't count as a heavy attack.

Executing heavy attack (explosion) used to be possible before 27.1.0 by holding melee button. Also, throwing glaive without ability to detonate it makes dual wield mode entirely useless. I assume this to be at least a problem.

[Nyxbit]

On 2020-02-05 at 10:40 AM, _BringerOfRain said:

Thanks for clarifying

Executing heavy attack (explosion) used to be possible before 27.1.0 by holding melee button. Also, throwing glaive without ability to detonate it makes dual wield mode entirely useless. I assume this to be at least a problem.

You can still throw and explode glaive while dual wielding, but this is done with the usual "hold melee to charge" mechanic. To explode, simply press melee again while the Glaive is airborne. 

HOWEVER

I'm really happy someone posted on this, I made a similarly detailed forum post about this (that was archived due to inactivity on my part probably) Minus video, and yes it's safe to say Glaive Prime at the very least is either riddled with bugs or very unclear with it's intended performance. I think someone above me said it as well, but Condition Overload currently does not work on throws at all? I would have to test it again but it seems neither the throw impact or heavy explosion works with it. 

I also noticed, since I recently built a Falcor, and I had not used another glaive that was not Glaive Prime for a long time, that Glaive Prime forces punch through vs enemies, when thrown while dual wielding, even if no Power Throw for thrown equipped. The Glaive travels a straight line, piercing through enemies without altering its trajectory, assuming no terrain is encountered, and comes back again, incosistent with dedicated melee mode, where the Glaive does appear to bounce between surfaces and enemies. Falcor has the bouncing mechanic on both modes (dual wield and dedicated melee) 

I did additional testing on Empowered Blades and... sometimes it seems to drain shields? Very rarely, on heavy attack explosion while in Melee Only mode, the explosion seems to drain shields depending on enemies hit. It felt very similar to what happens with Dispatch Overdrive on your video

On the topic of crit I should add that even the Smeeta Kavat's forced 200% crit chance on weapons, via Charm ability, does not work for Heavy Attack explosions. It kind of defeats the purpose of adding flat crit mods for heavy attack builds, specially with the x2 crit chance change on heavies, changed so recently?

I should most, if not all these Glaive issues started with Update 26 with the big melee rework. It's been mostly untouched since then, except that I think just a bit after that they made it so only the explosion would count as a Heavy Attack.

All in all, the intended use of Glaive right now seems a bit of a mixed bag, awkward but barely functional at best, unwieldy and inefficient at worse. It's a shame, because they (Glaives) look great and used to feel nice to use, even in their unpopularity. I'm going to follow this post closely to see if it gets more attention. As a Glaive Prime main and fan, I would very much like for it to get some love. At the very least, if the intent is to make it so building for Heavy Attack is a different build than building for melee (like most melee that can have both builds viably) make it so the explosion can benefit from criticals or Condition Overload? Fix a couple of mod inconsistencies (i.e, Empowered Blades, Dispatch Overdrive, etc) besides that and I think we would have a weapon that feels satisfying to use, feels like it has versatile building, and is actually viable for high level play, although in that department it doesn't need that much help.

Right now it just feels like it's awkward, and has a strange ratio of "ways to play this weapon" vs "ways to deal damage with this weapon", particularly with such unique mods in this category like Quick Return or Rebound, or Power Throw, or Whirlwind, that modify its mechanics in a more meaningful way than just building attack speed or damage, like a lot of other melee weapons. 

I will definitely be attentive and see if we can maybe get a dev give us feedback on this. 

[_BringerOfRain]

Greetings,

it was a very busy time for me recently, so I couldn't actively track this post. However, I'm now a proud developer of tenno-builder.com 🙂

 

Back to the topic:

I did some testing today(2020-04-09) and (as you probably expect) nothing has changed. All listed here issues are still present.

Also I would like to add that:

-Critical Chance Mods (e.g. Sacrificial Steel) apply x2 modifier for the throw, but Heavy Attack Damage modifier from Killing Blow does not. If it is not a bug, then more clarity is expected from the game anyway.

-"Flat" Critical Chance bonus (Arcane Avenger, Harrow's Covenant, Smeeta's Charm) works correctly for the throw, but does not amplify critical chance of the explosion.

This one was also mentioned by Nyxbit.

-Explosion seems to take no benefits from Condition Overload. I did multiple tests on this one, because its hard to get reliable results with the new falloff mechanic. However, final verdict is that Condition Overload (as also posted by Litus42 some time ago) has no impact on glaive's explosion.

 

Quote

You can still throw and explode glaive while dual wielding, but this is done with the usual "hold melee to charge" mechanic. To explode, simply press melee again while the Glaive is airborne.

Thanks for clarifying 🙂

Due to both my health problems and overall laziness I use a macro for rapid slashing with melee, so I couldn't detect this new yet old feature.

 

Thank you all for contributing to this post!

It is a shame that the game is overflowing with half-made content now. So many things need to be fixed, yet much more things are added instead 😞

We shall see if some DE dude notices this post and makes glaive niche of players happy.

 

Best regards,

_BringerOfRain

Edited May 1, 2020 by _BringerOfRain