The problem with Raijack weapons and Arch-weapons and how to fix it

[lukinu_u]

As you may have experienced with Railjack, the Raijack weapons and Arch-weapons share an awkward place. On one side, you have gun you hold in your hands, and on another side you have ship mounted weapons that could shoot sniper bullets at 6000rpm without recoil, but here in Warframe, both have globally the same use and some Arch-guns are much better than Raijack weapons.

So right know, we can consider Arch-weapons are better since the best guns (highest DPS, status and crit stats) belong to the Arch-weapons category. Since Railjack weapons are ship mounted guns that logically should do more damages plus the fact with play Raijack missions, we could buff Railjack weapons to make them overall more useable, but it's not the solution since it lead to another big problem :
If Railjack weapons are better than Arch-weapons, you have no reason tu use them and vice versa, so however we tweak the damage numbers of weapons, there always will be one sitation where one is better and you don't use the other one, unless you find a perfect balance between both and they are both decently usable, but then, it become a preference choice because they both perform exactly the same and it's even worse...

My solution here is to give them both different use, so regardless of the situation you still will use both :
The idea is to make Raijack weapons the only way to destroy ships while Arch-weapons are usable to destroy weapons spots on ships to weaken them. So let's imagine there is a small fighter you can OS with your Raijack weapon, you don't need Arch-weapons but when there is a stronger ship you have troubles damaging, you're better go into Archwings, weaken it by destroying all weakspots and go back to the ship to kill it.

All enemies, even the smallest would have weakspots, but bigger ships would get more and different variety with each their own use, here are a few I think of :

• Thrusters : All ships has at least one thruster. Destroying them reduce their movement speed by 1/<thrusters number>, which mean the ship stop when there is no more thrusters.
   
• Turrets : Turrets are the additionnal turrets a ship can have, but is has at least one non-destroyable one, to avoid negating the damage by destroying all of them. Destroying one turret reduce their damage by 1/(<thrusters number>+1).
   
• Armor plates : Armor plates are big armor parts than can be destroyed by shooting at smalls screws on the side of it, the number of srews depend on the size and placement of the plate on the ship. Destroying armor plate reveal a weaker part of the ship that take double damages, and sometime reveal protected weakspots.
   
• Shield generator : Shield generator are small parts that protect the whole ship from damages, but it can pass through with your archwings. You will need to go inside and destroy all shield generators to deactivate it.
   
• Generator : Generator are parts that require great cooperation between Raijack and Arch-weapons. The part is generally hidden by armor plates and once revealed, you need to overheat it with Arch-weapon for it to deploy for a short durationn during which Raijack weapons can destroy it. The generator has super low health and destroying it reduce total ship health by 1/<reactor number>. Most of ships have 1-2 reactors, while big ships would have 3-5 reactors, which mean you generally one shot the ship by destroying its reactor.

So as you can see, Railjack weapons keep the same use while Arch-weapons get a more utility use, but still allow you to deal heavy damages to ship by exposing the reactor if your Railjack weapons are bad. It overall mean Railjack weapons are much easier and comfortable to use, but Arch-weapons still can do the job in their own way, which encourage farming for Railjack weapons without being frustrating when you start your Railjack experience.

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

Biggest issues for me with RJ weapons, aside from their overall damage, is that unless you're the pilot, actually tracking and killing something is atrocious on public.  The pilot zigs when you needed a zag, the ships are out of effective range, etc.  And on console, being the pilot still sucks because they took away the ability to aim independently of ship movement - ie. the damn pilot guns are fixed forward facing.

Also, even if killing a single ship is faster with perhaps a more powerful RJ gun, the rapid maneuverability of the AW means multiple target killing is still faster for me in AW - I can turn instantly, track perfectly, and dash to a nearby enemy.  (things like void hole etc not applicable here - just referring to RJ vs AW guns.)

and lastly, being primarily a solo player, RJ is simply not efficient as soon as it starts taking damage and you spend 1/2 the time putting out fires or dealing with boarders rather than doing the only RJ objective which is exterminate (no, 2 minute side objectives don't count).

 

 

Edited January 14, 2020 by (XB1)Tucker D Dawg

[Cicasajt]

the problem is that archguns are a lot weaker and have a lot slower projectile speed than railjack guns. also arcwings are very slow compared to fighters

[lukinu_u]

il y a 23 minutes, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg a dit :

Biggest issues for me with RJ weapons, aside from their overall damage, is that unless you're the pilot, actually tracking and killing something is atrocious on public.  The pilot zigs when you needed a zag, the ships are out of effective range, etc.  And on console, being the pilot still sucks because they took away the ability to aim independently of ship movement - ie. the damn pilot guns are fixed forward facing.

Also, even if killing a single ship is faster with perhaps a more powerful RJ gun, the rapid maneuverability of the AW means multiple target killing is still faster for me in AW - I can turn instantly, track perfectly, and dash to a nearby enemy.  (things like void hole etc not applicable here - just referring to RJ vs AW guns.)

and lastly, being primarily a solo player, RJ is simply not efficient as soon as it starts taking damage and you spend 1/2 the time putting out fires or dealing with boarders rather than doing the only RJ objective which is exterminate (no, 2 minute side objectives don't count).

Yeah, didn't mention this but asside from higher DPS, Arch-weapons are also overall easier to use, which reduce even more the use of Railjack weapons.

 

il y a 19 minutes, Cicasajt a dit :

the problem is that archguns are a lot weaker and have a lot slower projectile speed than railjack guns. also arcwings are very slow compared to fighters

From my experience and calculations, Arch-weapons tend to be much better than Raijack weapons, at least Phaedra and Cyngas with radiation full status / firerate buildsn even with the drawback projectile speed is.
 

[Avienas]

1 hour ago, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg said:

Biggest issues for me with RJ weapons, aside from their overall damage, is that unless you're the pilot, actually tracking and killing something is atrocious on public.  The pilot zigs when you needed a zag, the ships are out of effective range, etc.  And on console, being the pilot still sucks because they took away the ability to aim independently of ship movement - ie. the damn pilot guns are fixed forward facing.

And this is why if we had rank 10 intrinstic replaced with mini-fighters that are semi-independent from the railjack where they can fly around and act in the same way as fighters, but could be destroyed (preferably with durability based on the ship`s durability, same with its flight speed), but would be a much more easier way to manage since you are not forced to trust the pilot knows how to fking keep the ship still. Which they arent since just as you stated, D.E. had the stupid idea to make camera controls move the ship instead of the turret while your the pilot. Which honestly while in aim mode, should change to the precise aim mode for the turrets, since people could still move the ship around with the left stick while doing so.

Oh, too bad the ships move way too fast and your aiming angle is not exactly the best of things in terms of being able to hit said enemies unless they fly straight at you or are close enough while flying away (which we all know they will always fly FASTER then your ship even with 700+ km/h engine), to still be within shot range, which last i checked the fall off is around 600~1000 or so give or take???

1 hour ago, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg said:

Also, even if killing a single ship is faster with perhaps a more powerful RJ gun, the rapid maneuverability of the AW means multiple target killing is still faster for me in AW - I can turn instantly, track perfectly, and dash to a nearby enemy.  (things like void hole etc not applicable here - just referring to RJ vs AW guns.)

I say the main point was archwings were able to disable the 2nd most frustrating element in railjack combat, the mobility of the enemy ships. You either have to shoot humming birds that move at the speed of cheetahs who have a infinite supply of red bull or you deal with flying immortal fortresses which can only be killed by raiding that crewship and blowing the reactor, joy riding it by killing the crew (which i never figured out how the fk do those things have seeking guns) or waste tungska cannon shots which could take up to all 5 shots just to kill veil tier crewships, only when your close enough to hope fall off does not fk you over so you can get one of the 6 or even 8 that might be blasting you, despite having around 90~95% D.R. which should mean your ship should be practically immortal, but its not. Since your ship lacks a Arcane Grace which was the third step that allowed people in regular gameplay to last super long in high level content without absurd C.C. measures.

Plus archwings in plural do not really exist in railjack, only AMESHA. Any other archwing is garbage in terms of dealing with it since d.e. never really nerfed the damage fighters/crewships could deal, besides maybe getting yeet`d by missiles which is not something common. Since its the only archwing that can Slow enemy fighters OR have the capability to survive thru the b.s. damage aka be immortal, since fighters are dealing the same absurd amount of dps that lets them nuke thru 90% D.R. and a 5k+ health pool rather effectively, how much durability can you expect a 900~1300 health archwing with likely less then 50% D.R. would do?

1 hour ago, (XB1)Tucker D Dawg said:

and lastly, being primarily a solo player, RJ is simply not efficient as soon as it starts taking damage and you spend 1/2 the time putting out fires or dealing with boarders rather than doing the only RJ objective which is exterminate (no, 2 minute side objectives don't count).

This is also why i wish the railjack was alot more resistant to taking hazards, it should only be taking 10 maybe 30% of the occurence rate on how many hazards pop up, PLUS, having a actual immune to those issues for a good 10 to 20 seconds to be fair, which honestly it should also get double the resistance after being repaired for a good while to prevent people having to leave seats every minute to fix the ship. 

There is no special engineer console where they could be doing remote repairs (without the double cost b.s.) while also launching tactical functions like decoys to soak up enemy fire, hack into enemy fighters to seize the controls and ram them into other fighters or even deploy our own healing bubbles or capture fields to let us pull that Balor fomorian card and round up the enemies so we can easily take them down. Its another case of Kuva Liches just bullying you out of resources by being a major DIK to harass you. Instead its you having to waste time to constantly repair the ship while your dealing with a ridiculous number of fighters, even if you have 1 or 2 competent players who know how to get stuff done right.

As for boarders, they honestly need to have like a 40~70% success rate to actually board your ship, depending on how reinforced your ship is(aka how much health your ship has VS enemy level and how many hull rupture hazards are present), i would rather we would take about 2k~3k damage instead before armor mitigation in place of a dozen enemies getting to yolo in the ship so often if they were to fail to board instead and would just act like a battering ram that could cause potential hull damage instead.

Can`t wait to imagine what the corpus will do, probably fire a fking space laser pike at us which allows them to just TP straight onto our ship till we deal with the spike, but knowing d.e. they will probably require us to get out of the ship to shoot the spike since unlike the ramsleds it only would need to attach to the ship. -_-

[Cicasajt]

2 hours ago, lukinu_u said:

Yeah, didn't mention this but asside from higher DPS, Arch-weapons are also overall easier to use, which reduce even more the use of Railjack weapons.

 

From my experience and calculations, Arch-weapons tend to be much better than Raijack weapons, at least Phaedra and Cyngas with radiation full status / firerate buildsn even with the drawback projectile speed is.
 

idk what im doing wrong then. i build my phaedra correctly and deal >50 dmg/hit

[lukinu_u]

il y a 1 minute, Cicasajt a dit :

idk what im doing wrong then. i build my phaedra correctly and deal >50 dmg/hit

Phaedra has 35 base damage with 18.75 fire rate, 25% base status and kinda low crit stats we won't consider in this calculation.
This mean a 35*18.75=656 base DPS.

If you add damage, multishot, fire rate (since you have infinite ammo), Market Target for status, two 60/60 mod, a +120% damages mods and maybe save the lasts slots for QoL, you would get 656*1.6*1.6*1.6*(1+.6+0.6+1.2)=9135.71 DPS and bring you status chance to 25*(1+1.2+.6+.6)=85% per bullet, which is 85*(18.75*1.6)*1.6=4080% per second, purely IPS if you go for a dual element (preferably radiation), so with Pahedra IPS repartition, you get about 4 Particle procs and 26 Plasma procs per second.

• Particle status is additive 7.5% damage staying for 20 seconds, 4 procs per second mean 4*20*7.5=600% additional damages.
• Plasma proc work the same but reduce 25% armor and shield the same way as corrosive so maximum armor reduction is 1-0.75^(26*20), which is basically 99.9....9%, with 65 "9", which more that enough to shred any armor in the game.
• Considering enemies never reach more than lvl 45 and the max armor raijack enemies have is 600, their max armor is 2855.09, which is 90.49% damage reduction, so stripping their armor is equal to 1051.52% more damages.

Considering these, Phaedra range between 9135.71*(1+6)=63945 DPS and 9135.71*(1+6)*10.152=649169 DPS depending on target armor after 20s shooting. Compared to +60% fire rate Mk III Zekti Carcinnox, which only has 3330*1.6=5328 DPS, have no reliable way to proc status and is the highest Arch-weapon DPS, Phaedra damages are ridiculously high...
 

[Tempvirage]

21 hours ago, lukinu_u said:

Considering these, Phaedra range between 9135.71*(1+6)=63945 DPS and 9135.71*(1+6)*10.152=649169 DPS depending on target armor after 20s shooting. Compared to +60% fire rate Mk III Zekti Carcinnox, which only has 3330*1.6=5328 DPS, have no reliable way to proc status and is the highest Arch-weapon DPS, Phaedra damages are ridiculously high...

 

This is because archguns have something like a flat 85% damage reduction in Railjack missions. Rather than, you know, multiplying the base dmg on Railjack weapons by 10x or such to match the scale of archguns. The new damage model is highly flawed because they're trying to match a new system to old tech (being archguns) which are already far behind the rest of the weapon system in terms of potential dps. DE would probably have to reinvent archguns and give them 2 damage models similar to how conclave weapons work for them to actually balance things properly. So for now, they're going to likely have to bounce between "Archguns are too strong, oh crap wait now they're dealing pitiful dmg and RJ guns are the only thing viable in space."

[lukinu_u]

il y a une heure, Tempvirage a dit :

This is because archguns have something like a flat 85% damage reduction in Railjack missions. Rather than, you know, multiplying the base dmg on Railjack weapons by 10x or such to match the scale of archguns. The new damage model is highly flawed because they're trying to match a new system to old tech (being archguns) which are already far behind the rest of the weapon system in terms of potential dps. DE would probably have to reinvent archguns and give them 2 damage models similar to how conclave weapons work for them to actually balance things properly. So for now, they're going to likely have to bounce between "Archguns are too strong, oh crap wait now they're dealing pitiful dmg and RJ guns are the only thing viable in space."

Didn't know about that, but it make sense, the results were much higher than what I tested ingame, but Arch-weapons are still better. Even with -85% damages, 63945-649169 to 9551.75-97375.35, which i still 1.7-18.2x the best DPS Raijack weapons have.

As you said they must do big changes to Arch-weapons to avoid one or the other to be better, so completely changing their utility is probably the easiest solution.