why is khora's whipclaw not an exalted weapon?

[CopperBezel]

I don't know how to further explain to you that it could, in fact, be swapped out for an exalted weapon without an extensive rework. There is literally nothing preventing that, which has been here explained in excruciating detail. 

[Birdframe_Prime]

Hmmm... for those that are wondering about the answer to the original question; why is it not an Ability Melee (Exalted Blade wasn’t the first, and calling them all ‘exalted’ is damn silly).

It’s just from the dev cycle she went through.

Khora apparently had the whip as her 4th ability. We were never shown it in the DevStreams due to them being more concerned with her original theme of the ‘IPS’ frame, where she would have debuted the status updates for IPS changes that ultimately... didn’t happen because the changes were flawed and counter-productive. Especially the Impact change which would have had high Impact weapons yeet enemies out of the map instead of killing them...

She was going to have a whip where the special ability (like Excal’s waves) was free switching between the IPS bias.

Since the changes didn’t happen, they decided against a damage ability at all and gave her the CC that has bonuses for using her 1 on it instead.

Her Passive became an entire Ability because the IPS switch ability couldn’t be used either and so here we are with Venari as the only thing controlled by the ‘switching’ ability. Fun times.

tl;dr Khora doesn’t have an Ability Melee as a deliberate change by DE after her theme fell through. We’re probably not going to get it because of that.

[(PSN)Apoleon_amarr]

Because it would have 1 meter range, just like the other melee 2.999 whips

[CopperBezel]

2 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Hmmm... for those that are wondering about the answer to the original question; why is it not an Ability Melee (Exalted Blade wasn’t the first, and calling them all ‘exalted’ is damn silly).

Yeah, I knew she'd had it before her emergency pre-release rework. A rework that of course made the frame what she is, namely a CC goddess instead of a gimmick. At the same time, I look at Garuda and Hildryn and have to conclude that ability weapons that draw from mods equipped on other weapons are just not a thing anymore, and if Khora were being released today, her whip would not work this way. While it adds a bit of context to know that it was originally intended to be separately moddable, the fact that they left in most of its moddability and tied it to two of her three other abilities with synergies means that the part of that equation they left out is an inconvenience and an exploit, not a basic difference in her gameplay. 

[Birdframe_Prime]

5 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

weapons that draw from mods equipped on other weapons are just not a thing anymore

No, but as a point to clarify my opinion on the matter; I don't think this should make them Ability weapons either.

I genuinely believe the ability should function on its own at the intended damage ranges for that ability without having to rely on a stat-stick at all. The ability works fine, it doesn't have to be turned into an Ability Melee, it just needs the stats that support using it when you don't have a specific melee setup equipped.

[CopperBezel]

Maybe you haven't noticed that direct damage doesn't scale then? =/ There are very few direct-damage abilities in the game that are useful in high level content. The ability wouldn't "work fine" if you took away all the things that scale its damage and status and give it armor strip and all of the other things that weapon mods do. It would "work fine" up to level 30 enemies, level 40 with a power strength build on the frame, and then cease to exist. You know, like all other direct damage. Alternately, if you want it dealing 50k damage on a fresh, unmodded frame purchased from the shop by an MR2, I don't know what to tell you. It's a good gameplay balance when my Whipclaw is dealing about half the damage of my Destreza Prime, a statstick build causes it to deal quite a bit more than any regular melee, and the most wildly powerful base damage will be a token scratch against high level enemies.  

Particularly when the solution is sitting right there with Garuda, who doesn't use it. She's got a moddable weapon that doesn't do anything outside of melee-excluding sortie conditions, isn't an ability in its own right, and is used in her ability animations but does not respect its own mods. It's completely daft that that exists, but these other frames with built-in weapons used in damage abilities can't mod them. Meanwhile, weapon buff abilities, abilities that absorb damage from weapons, and Peacemaker all still exist, and will continue to be the only meaningful damage abilities against high level enemies.

(And no, scaling damage on enemy level like Vauban isn't a solution - particularly since he partly gets away with that by having an independent armor strip ability, but mostly because it's just an inherently cheap bandaid fix.)

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 hour ago, CopperBezel said:

Maybe you haven't noticed that direct damage doesn't scale then?

I... am confused. This ability does scale, and scale well, it also combos with her other abilities to scale better. With the right stats it could quite easily keep scaling without any interference from melee mods, let alone an Ability Melee mode. I said that it should scale without the mods, not that it shouldn't scale with the combo counter as it currently does ^^ Besides that there's a functional augment that scales her damage even further.

I understand that direct damage caps out, but that's the point of having combination abilities and functional enemy debuffs within a Warframe's kit; to make mechanical functions that last longer than even melee-buffed damage does.

Abilities should work without stat sticks, and even direct damage abilities should have functions within the kit that make them relevant to the same level as other forms of damage.

There's no real negative to that concept, and I'm surprised that you're standing against it with such a simplistic 'direct damage caps out' argument, you know that the function of Ability based damage is more nuanced than that. At least... I credited you with knowing that, was I wrong?

1 hour ago, CopperBezel said:

an inherently cheap bandaid fix

I think I said to you before, although if it was a different person I apologise because I do tend to have this conversation a lot with people;

Yes it is, but it addresses the reality of the game. DE made bad choices in their method of enemy scaling, enemy damage and how our damage/survivability systems address that. To fix that is a massive task and will not happen fast. Especially not when they've got things they would rather be bringing out like more Railjack, more Liches, Planes of Duviri... and a metric ton of other things that need to be fixed that can be fixed in a far shorter time-scale.

There is absolutely no point in not giving Warframes a way to address the current game. The only reason not to is if DE were to be in the actual process of reworking the damage system and enemy scaling at the time. Which they aren't.

Armour stripping on one side, damage reduction on the other, and as an underlying concept the function of multiplying our damage to keep up with the enemy effective health, are all concepts that a frame should consider being able to access. Not all the same way, not all the same functions, and sometimes as little as only one aspect of those three, maybe even needing an Augment for it.

The reality is that until the game is actually fixed, then band aids are always going to be necessary. In fact, calling armour strip or scaling damage a band-aid isn't even precisely right, it's more like an interim stage. Something between the old game, where there weren't so many enemy types and mechanics, and the future game where these mechanics aren't needed. Many people had problems with Melee 2.999997, but it had to exist in order to transition from 2.0 to 3.0.

The same can be said here. We are reaching the saturation point where these mechanics are cheap, but viable answers to problems within the game, and once we're past that point DE will have to actually do something to the base game to make these functions unnecessary/adapted into the new aspects of the game.

Arguing that they shouldn't include these functions because they're cheap bandaids and you'd rather see the entire game revamped is like saying you'd rather not spend money on warm clothes in the winter because summer will roll around some time in the future and you won't need them then.

Edited January 16, 2020 by Birdframe_Prime

[CopperBezel]

2 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

There's no real negative to that concept, and I'm surprised that you're standing against it with such a simplistic 'direct damage caps out' argument, you know that the function of Ability based damage is more nuanced than that. At least... I credited you with knowing that, was I wrong?

I mean, which would you like, that it's not a nuke at MR5, or that it's still usable at MR20? Do you want to sidestep the status system and give it inherent armor strip? There's not even an established bandaid for that one. An ability that scales on the full suite of melee mods is one that can work for players who haven't been able to max out their Pressure Point yet, and for players who can drop on Primed Pressure Point, Sacrificial Steel, Blood Rush, and a couple of dual stats.

There's nothing simplistic about "the game does not in fact contain any ways of scaling ability damage as players advance." The way it works now, the big special you save for a special occasion at MR5 becomes something you can spam as fast as you can cast, and on particular frames it might get as much as double damage from ability strength on a particular build or double again with a little more work thanks to an ability synergy. Accumulating Whipclaw and a generally dedicated build could give you a bit under 20x the damage you started with, depending on how you want to treat that 4.75x from the combo counter that's baked into the ability but could conceivably be harder to maintain for a player earlier in their Warframe experience. 

Meanwhile, the ridiculous exponential scaling that is Warframe weapon damage (and Warframe enemy health and armor) exists. For instance, taking crit into account, it looks like my berivened Battacor deals 124x the unmodded base damage, most of which is in a more effective damage type that partially ignores armor while bringing a 1/4 chance of removing 25% of it each hit, after accounting for the other half of its procs doing less useful things. 

We could not here suggest a base damage value for Whipclaw that's going to be relevant against a level 100 Grineer enemy that won't one-shot everything at level 20. That number does not exist. There is no "right stat". 

So no, it's really not more nuanced than that. Ability damage is broken and dead unless it's based on weapon mods or modded weapons, and otherwise is not usable at sortie level. Khora's numbers look better with the augment, which, you know, requires an augment, but even that's unusual and even that does nothing for armored enemies. The few real exceptions - Saryn, and now Ember and Vauban - are all very large numbers to begin with that can be expected to one-hit kill heavies at low levels, and all come packaged with armor strip in another ability. All of the other relevant damage abilities draw on weapon mods or weapon damage in some form or another. All. Not even absorbing enemy damage can make the difference, because durability for armored enemies is scaling exponentially while their own damage scales only linearly.

There aren't enough bandaids in the world to hold this mess together, and ability damage scaling on installed weapon mods is one of those bandaids right now already. And innate weapon builds for any frame intended to have serious damage abilities would merely, you know, solve the problem instead of multiplying it, so I can see why that's not a serious suggestion.

(Probably well beside the point to note that having Whipclaw still interact with the combo counter means that it is, in fact, going to be benefiting from melee mods. At the very least, Drifting Contact / Bodycount, but using your melee to build up a combo counts for something as well, and there are piles of mods to expedite that.)

2 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

[On enemy level scaling damage being cheap]

Yes it is, but it addresses the reality of the game. DE made bad choices in their method of enemy scaling, enemy damage and how our damage/survivability systems address that.

I honestly think the armor scaling gets more flak than it needs to. Like, the purpose of armor scaling as it stands is to make even very big bullets take more than one hit and bend that exponential player damage curve back down into a straight line. Every form of armor strip is also by % rather than a direct number except Polarize. I can't pretend it's not a bandaid fix for out of control player damage scaling, or that making corrosive damage (or funny business with slash procs) mandatory is a good idea, or that the game wouldn't be better off if DE had just nerfed all our mods instead. But if you can accept the loss of damage types and status procs that aren't invisible, it kinda fixes the problem. Changes like Melee 3.0 are certainly better, just taking that ugly exponential curve and hitting it over a rock until it's roughly straight. (Still a lot steeper than the one for ability damage but that's a digression.)

The thing that makes level-scaling abilities so inherently cheap is that it takes this whole idea of continually improving our kit for tougher and tougher enemies and tosses it out the window. More precisely, it hands the improvement over for free when the game feels we need it. I don't really see how that can live alongside the weapon mod system. Stating the obvious, if every stat in the game scaled this way, levels wouldn't mean anything at all. I get that there's an immense gap between CC that works the same against enemies of any level, and damage that multiplies by 100, with another 100 times that in the final eHP. But it's been okay for incomparables to scale differently, so that the range and spamminess of your CC makes it feel like a progression from where you started even if the numbers aren't the same (ridiculous) ones used in the damage scaling. If more abilities are scaled this way, getting bigger numbers just for showing up to the party, it's going to be very hard to take the rest of the progression seriously. 

And, you know, again, it's something that could be solved by just ... letting the frame use weapon mods in a coherent way, give Vauban an innate grenade to mod with pistol mods or something, but that would only solve the problem, not bandaid it, so I can see why that's very important to avoid. 

Edited January 17, 2020 by CopperBezel

[Birdframe_Prime]

8 hours ago, CopperBezel said:

So no, it's really not more nuanced than that.

You say that, but you’re completely isolating the ability from the context I gave; raw damage is either OP or under-par unless the entire kit has mechanics to allow that to scale.

No, Whipclaw shouldn’t get armour strip or scale based on enemy level, it should instead be allowed to scale by the other abilities in the kit.

What would be so wrong with situational scaling? Like enemies bound with her 2 take bonus damage, meaning that lower level players that can’t mod for spam gain a way to progress through star-chart levels, but her 4 has synergistic stacking resistance strip, so that when you can actually mod for it then using Whipclaw against Domed enemies means that they take more damage from consecutive casts, or a single cast is enough that a weapon could then finish them easier.

Mechanical power buffs are adjustable, can be buffed or nerfed depending on where the damage system progresses, and are independent of a modding system that isn’t built for abilities, but for Melee stats.

8 hours ago, CopperBezel said:

levels wouldn't mean anything at all

Levels don’t mean anything at all now.

Take a look at games the world agrees are great, like The Witcher. In that there is always a rough guide for levels where anything within your level range is normal, above it is a challenge and below it will only hinder you and is only a challenge if you forget yourself. They even have a point where if an enemy is too high above you, no matter what that level may be, it will likely stop you.

You can use modifications, abilities and gear to compensate for level differences. Meaning that a fully kitted out level 30 Witcher with good gear and stocks should be able to complete level 40-50 content with effort (and sometimes luck). But the challenge is definitely there.

In Warframe our gear hits 30 and it’s expected that we should be able to down level 100+ with it with a general setup, and more specific setups and tactics will hit the 500+ if the player knows their tactics.

8 hours ago, CopperBezel said:

And, you know, again, it's something that could be solved by just ... letting the frame use weapon mods in a coherent way, give Vauban an innate grenade to mod with pistol mods or something, but that would only solve the problem, not bandaid it, so I can see why that's very important to avoid. 

And, you know, this would normally be a fantastic end summary to your point if it wasn’t for you already noting this:

8 hours ago, CopperBezel said:

ability damage scaling on installed weapon mods is one of those bandaids right now already.

So no, I do not agree.

Making the abilities work at base is better than any band-aid, and giving a Warframe access to functions that allow direct damage to stay relevant, such as multipliers or debuffs as part of their overall kit, will address the situation better.

Not only that, once the abilities are able to do enough to stay relevant, whether in combination with weapon play, absorbing damage or self buffing, they can more freely be adjusted later when the game changes.

Relying on external mods to stay relevant will only end up with more situations like we had with the Acolyte mods, ones that are powerful on the weapons they’re intended for, but dis-allowed on the Abilities because... DE says so?

Our abilities should complement the regular weapon play, not force us to use some meta to even be relevant.

[zuraja]

On 2020-01-15 at 12:17 PM, Shonaney said:

I'd like to get rid of all of these "pseudo" exalted weapons, with the melee rework id like to use my melee and not build it only for a skill use...at the other side i also like the dmg of my high disposition riven stat sticks 😄 .... so change to exalted with a slight buff?

If they're going to do something like this, they should just give her a dedicated stat stick slot like Mesa's pistols.

[CopperBezel]

That's sort of the idea. Like, the OP didn't go into details on what a real exalted weapon (which Mesa's is also considered to be, but this is beside the point) would entail, but the simplest change would be to give it its own build and leave everything else as is, which would remove rivens and statsticks from the picture.

8 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

And, you know, this would normally be a fantastic end summary to your point if it wasn’t for you already noting this:

The existence of this thread is an illustration of the fact that the two things you're trying to equate, having a separate build vs. drawing from mods equipped elsewhere, are in fact different things. Drawing from equipped mods elsewhere is a bandaid for not having the damage scaling that would come from being able to equip them directly.

8 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Making the abilities work at base is better than any band-aid, and giving a Warframe access to functions that allow direct damage to stay relevant, such as multipliers or debuffs as part of their overall kit, will address the situation better.

They do work at base, though. They tend to be incredible damage dealers up to a given level cap, which means a player whose equipment and skill are just on-level with those enemies will find them to be very useful in that application. 

For some, the cap is an outright good thing, because it changes the ability into something more complex as the content level gets higher. My favorite example is Nezha's Divine Spears, which is a radial nuke for new players, but later becomes instead a very good CC with a synergy bonus for damage vulnerability that comes with a health and energy drop chance boost with another of his abilities.  Energy costs get lower as you progress, so you don't expect every ability to be a big special move, and you get to see this one unfold into something more interesting.

An ability that's only the radial damage has a lot less to go on.

8 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Relying on external mods to stay relevant will only end up with more situations like we had with the Acolyte mods, ones that are powerful on the weapons they’re intended for, but dis-allowed on the Abilities because... DE says so?

They're not any more "external" than any other mods that exist for weapons, or indeed abilities. But yeah, you'd be pulling a lot of additively stacking bonuses from a shrinking pool of mods. If Whipclaw played as it does but had a separate build, it couldn't benefit from speed and range mods, and I have no doubt it'd lose Blood Rush as well. Landslide and Shattered Lash benefit from even less thanks to nonexistent crit. This isn't different from weapons with no base crit, or reload and ammo mods on Regulators; you pile onto some other stat instead and have a somewhat shallower growth curve. Or a straight line in the case of Shattered Lash since everything after Pressure Point is additive. 

8 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

What would be so wrong with situational scaling? Like enemies bound with her 2 take bonus damage, meaning that lower level players that can’t mod for spam gain a way to progress through star-chart levels, but her 4 has synergistic stacking resistance strip, so that when you can actually mod for it then using Whipclaw against Domed enemies means that they take more damage from consecutive casts, or a single cast is enough that a weapon could then finish them easier.

This sounds like a hypothetical, but Ensnared enemies do, in fact, take double damage from Whipclaw, which was one of the factors of 2 in my quick rundown of applicable multipliers earlier. It's a very good synergy (in the general sense of the term, not just the "combined power bonus" sense in Warframe) since Ensnared enemies tend to be balled up within the range of a Whipclaw AoE and will of course trigger Accumulating Whipclaw as well. 

Strangledome, since it's not in fact identical to Bastille, gets damage propagation instead of armor strip; hitting any one enemy with Whipclaw propagates half that damage throughout the rest of the dome.

8 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Levels don’t mean anything at all now.

Take a look at games the world agrees are great, like The Witcher. In that there is always a rough guide for levels where anything within your level range is normal, above it is a challenge and below it will only hinder you and is only a challenge if you forget yourself. They even have a point where if an enemy is too high above you, no matter what that level may be, it will likely stop you.

You can use modifications, abilities and gear to compensate for level differences. Meaning that a fully kitted out level 30 Witcher with good gear and stocks should be able to complete level 40-50 content with effort (and sometimes luck). But the challenge is definitely there.

In Warframe our gear hits 30 and it’s expected that we should be able to down level 100+ with it with a general setup, and more specific setups and tactics will hit the 500+ if the player knows their tactics.

This feels like an unrelated aside and I'm not sure whether you maybe missed what I was saying. I don't think anyone who's played Warframe for a week or so is really confusing ranks with levels, or that anyone really confuses those things with MR. The thing that gets you to level 100+ content is mods, polarizations, and being familiar enough with the mechanics to be dealing with more of them in play at a time at a much faster pace, with conditional mods and ability interactions and maintaining stacks and rubberbanding health and energy and so on. All of that is what level means. It doesn't correspond to some other number, it's a representation of enemy strength that implies a mix of a lot of separate mechanics and the player's own ability to deal with it, with a lot of different mixes possible for different players. (And past level 110 or so, it doesn't mean anything, because that's not really in the game, but. X / )

[Birdframe_Prime]

11 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

I don't think anyone who's played Warframe for a week or so is really confusing ranks with levels, or that anyone really confuses those things with MR.

Are any of them any more or less meaningful anyway? MR means absolutely nothing and is a counter for how much Stuff you have in game, gating you on what Stuff you can acquire without paying for it ahead of time, but aside from convenience of starting mod points and greater daily caps has nothing to do with game play. Ranks only mean anything when you're actually levelling by playing instead of levelling with intent to level, and after you have your preferred build they literally never matter again. And Enemy level is a joke, as I mentioned.

What I was getting at is that in comparison to any of the games out there with actual Progression, instead of Loot Grind, the levels mean something more.

They can dictate not just what you get to, but what level of things you can get to within a category, meaning that the game can place its gear on a meaningful progression. They dictate what the enemy can do, not just how much damage it can deal, making enemies smarter or perform different actions based on their actual level and in direct proportion to what the player can achieve.

Since Warframe's basic account level doesn't equal progression, since the gear's rank doesn't equal progression, and since the enemy level you can reach doesn't equal progression either... none of it means anything to the practical application of playing the game the way that it really should.

The reason I went down this tangent is because you were talking about how scaling our damage up is so cheap because it negates the progression of getting better gear. And the answer to that is that there is no tangible progression in the game anyway. There's power creep, where newer released weapons are inherently more powerful than the ones released towards the beginning of the game, but being able to access tons of things easily just by a little Plat injection or by trading off a generous veteran means that even grinding for progression isn't any kind of limitation. Even MR limits can by bypassed with Plat.

And this, again, is the fault of DE's bad choices, where their enemy scaling is a direct line of 'EHP' and 'Damage Output', with no challenge or difficulty increase at all.

We are not required by the game to think or act any differently between MR 5 and MR 28, nor between Enemy Level 1 and Enemy Level 1000. The way to address the current game's scaling is to also have scaling, or the correct kind of enemy debuffs.

When you say 'a player with skill up to that level cap' it doesn't exist. It's not a matter of skill because the enemies don't get any more difficult to defeat, only have more sponge and more damage.

What I think you might be mis-understanding about this view I'm holding is that I don't think it's good. I think it's necessary and the lesser of the possible evils we have to take.

The ideal for this game does exist, but it isn't here. We have to deal with the here and now first, before we reach the ideal.

And I believe that using non-Warframe mods to influence Warframe Abilities is a dead-end evolution to progress down. It is, in itself, a band-aid for increasing the base damage and providing mechanics that the ability itself doesn't have access to.

The abilities in the kit should be able to be cast, whether in un-forced or forced Synergy, to keep the Warframe relevant at dealing with the enemies we face. And we should not be making the decision of how to mod a Melee based on whether it's good for the abilities of a Warframe as an opposing concept to modding for the strengths of the Weapon. We should be choosing our mods for a weapon to compliment our style of play, in the same way that we choose the weapon itself for that, and choose the Warframe for that.

It should not be the case that we choose to take a specific Melee just because we have a Riven for that melee. And we won't even have that amount of variety if the Ability itself becomes a moddable function. We will have a build that works for that Ability and nothing more, with no trade-off whatsoever in modding the actual Warframe.

Even now, we don't mod our Khora for Whipclaw, outside of maybe choosing to put on the Augment, we mod our Khora for her other abilities and leave the stats of Whipclaw to the Melee we've picked for the mods we put on that. There is no actual functional choice there. It's literally a forgettable function in terms of modding Khora, because the non-Warframe mods take care of it.

There should be a functional reason on the frame to mod one way or another that considers whether Whipclaw is to be used for its damage or its mechanics in synergy, or even a balance of both. Using Warframe mods. Using a Khora Build. Not a Melee build.

Because in my eyes the ability should function at the same levels it can function now with or without having a melee equipped. A player without all the Warframe mods will not be able to get the most out of it, without the right Focus school will not be able to exploit it, and a player that has the mods and the Focus, one that's put in the grind for those will. And it's as simple as that because there is no actual Progression in the game right now that actually matters.

Depressing point of view, yes, but I don't think it's the wrong one to have with the game in the state it is.

[CopperBezel]

Okay. So for the game and progression as it exists, we have one of two fixes for a problem that exists, and mine is actually in keeping with the math that exists and the general spirit of the game as it exists, and yours isn't. 

20 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

And we should not be making the decision of how to mod a Melee based on whether it's good for the abilities of a Warframe as an opposing concept to modding for the strengths of the Weapon.

Thus the thread.

24 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

It should not be the case that we choose to take a specific Melee just because we have a Riven for that melee.

Thus the thread.

21 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

And we won't even have that amount of variety if the Ability itself becomes a moddable function. We will have a build that works for that Ability and nothing more, with no trade-off whatsoever in modding the actual Warframe.

Except to exactly the extent this is the case for any ability, since it scales with power strength and range right now and would regardless of melee mods. Like, your perfect solution with numbers that don't exist has exactly the same flexibility and not a jot more or less.

28 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

There should be a functional reason on the frame to mod one way or another that considers whether Whipclaw is to be used for its damage or its mechanics in synergy, or even a balance of both. Using Warframe mods. Using a Khora Build. Not a Melee build.

Because in my eyes the ability should function at the same levels it can function now with or without having a melee equipped. A player without all the Warframe mods will not be able to get the most out of it, without the right Focus school will not be able to exploit it, and a player that has the mods and the Focus, one that's put in the grind for those will. And it's as simple as that because there is no actual Progression in the game right now that actually matters.

But not melee mods, of course. That's straight out. Because that's different. In a way that's not at all as subjective as my aversion to free damage scaling.

30 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Even now, we don't mod our Khora for Whipclaw, outside of maybe choosing to put on the Augment, we mod our Khora for her other abilities and leave the stats of Whipclaw to the Melee we've picked for the mods we put on that. There is no actual functional choice there. It's literally a forgettable function in terms of modding Khora, because the non-Warframe mods take care of it.

Yeah, because the damage is through the goddamn ceiling because the statstick unsystem is broken, thus. The. Thread.

[Educated_Beast]

Maybe it is as simple as to much MR on one frame.  We already get MR for her and the cat, if she also had an exaulted weapon, she would grant the most MR of any frame.  

Maybe ...

Edited January 17, 2020 by Educated_Beast

[KaijuKraid]

3 hours ago, Educated_Beast said:

Maybe it is as simple as to much MR on one frame.  We already get MR for her and the cat, if she also had an exaulted weapon, she would grant the most MR of any frame.  

Maybe ...

I'm pretty sure none of the exalted weapons give MR except Venari. 

Personally, I still prefer Khora and a Statstick style for her because I think it would ultimately be a net nerf for her since an exalted mod slot usually doesn't allow the use of Blood Rush/Rivens. If they do remove the Statstick style and do make it more like an Exalted Weapon, they would need to buff her 1 considerably. Especially since most other melee exalted weapons are apparently in a bad spot at the moment.

[Mephane]

On 2020-01-15 at 6:30 PM, (PS4)Shaun-T-Wilson said:

Possible reason is energy management changing to full exalted weapon would mean changing it to a drain type, which reduces energy gains eg not affected by energy vampire etc.

Not necessarily. Some exalted weapons don't have a continuous drain, but one per attack, for example Balefire Launcher (Hildryn) and Artemis Bow (Ivara). Imo all exalted weapons should function like that, both so that all the energy regeneration effects can take place, and so that you are not put on a timer when having them drawn.

[taiiat]

because it's literally less 'janky' as it is now. if you want to change about how it determines its Damage and does not use your Melee Weapon, the base Stats could be compensated for to account for losing as such but.... it shouldn't become an Ability Weapon, that would make it clunkier to use.
it is not an Ability that is suited to becoming an Ability Weapon, so don't try to force it to 'make the Warframe better' when all it'll do is nerf the Warframe mechanically. (before you respond to me, read that a second time - mechanically, not numerically)

 

every Warframe doesn't need an Exalted bent toothpick, that's called oversaturation.

Edited January 18, 2020 by taiiat

[(PSN)Shaun-T-Wilson]

7 hours ago, Mephane said:

Not necessarily. Some exalted weapons don't have a continuous drain, but one per attack, for example Balefire Launcher (Hildryn) and Artemis Bow (Ivara). Imo all exalted weapons should function like that, both so that all the energy regeneration effects can take place, and so that you are not put on a timer when having them drawn.

Those 1s are gun type exalted weapons all melee exalted weapons are drains.

[Birdframe_Prime]

On 2020-01-17 at 7:38 PM, CopperBezel said:

Thus the thread.

Except your solution is to just make the stat-stick into a stat-stick that none of the other frames can use. A private stat stick. It doesn't fix the ability at all, it doesn't fix the kit at all, it just takes the problem and moves it somewhere else.

Rather than fix the Warframe and its overall kit, your solution, and the OP's, is just 'I want to take this existing band-aid function and move it over there'. Actually in OP's case it's 'I want to take this existing band-aid function, move it over there, and also give it a Drain function' which is counter-productive.

That's not addressing any of the actual problem with how we mod the Ability, and it doesn't fix the problem of band-aiding the ability with non-Warframe mods because they couldn't figure out at the time how to make an ability scale without being over-powered.

[Mephane]

4 hours ago, (PS4)Shaun-T-Wilson said:

Those 1s are gun type exalted weapons all melee exalted weapons are drains.

Yes and my point still stands. The melee exalted weapons should be changed to drain on hit then.

[CopperBezel]

13 hours ago, (PS4)Shaun-T-Wilson said:

Those 1s are gun type exalted weapons all melee exalted weapons are drains.

Well right now, Whipclaw is a hitscan grenade. It's a melee in the sense that Deconstructor is. Not that it makes any difference, as exalteds can work differently from one another, and Mesa's is a pair of pistols with an ongoing drain and no per-shot cost.

19 hours ago, taiiat said:

because it's literally less 'janky' as it is now. if you want to change about how it determines its Damage and does not use your Melee Weapon, the base Stats could be compensated for to account for losing as such 

They literally can't be. That's the whole point. The base damage shouldn't be over 1k, which is enough to one-shot any trash mobs up to around level 20 without the combo counter bonus or Accumulating Whipclaw. That corresponds pretty fairly to its existing 300 base damage multiplied over the kind of melee build you expect someone who's worried about level 20 enemies to have. At max combo and Accumulating Whipclaw, you can multiply that by 21.4. A Whipclaw build isn't going to touch 200% power strength since it requires full efficiency and AW and at least a bit of range or we have to start rethinking that last number, so we're looking at thirty-odd times the damage. So thirty-k in physical damage with no armor strip. I'd say that you could still use it situationally up to the 80s and it'd fall off somewhere in stage 3 sortie level range, but the trouble is that if you're only using it situationally, you're probably not keeping up your AW, so the tools it's giving you aren't fitting together (and disintegrate completely 10 enemy levels later regardless).

11 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Except your solution is to just make the stat-stick into a stat-stick that none of the other frames can use. A private stat stick. It doesn't fix the ability at all, it doesn't fix the kit at all, it just takes the problem and moves it somewhere else.

Rather than fix the Warframe and its overall kit, your solution, and the OP's, is just 'I want to take this existing band-aid function and move it over there'. Actually in OP's case it's 'I want to take this existing band-aid function, move it over there, and also give it a Drain function' which is counter-productive.

That's not addressing any of the actual problem with how we mod the Ability, and it doesn't fix the problem of band-aiding the ability with non-Warframe mods because they couldn't figure out at the time how to make an ability scale without being over-powered.

I'm not sure what exactly you feel the problem is. Removing the interaction with an unrelated melee so that Whipclaw doesn't sacrifice Khora's melee slot, doesn't benefit from rivens, and probably doesn't benefit from Blood Rush does in fact solve the actual problems that exist. I see that you have some kind of conceptual problem in the spheres of the Platonic forms, but those are the gameplay problems that would actually be solved here. Your own very specific problem, "melee mods shouldn't be used to modify abilities", would not be solved, but no one but you is trying to.

I also don't care about changing how you build Khora, except to make AW properly mandatory for endgame Whipclaw use. Certainly not to do with damage. Doubling range does much more for Whipclaw than doubling power strength and comes cheaper.

On 2020-01-17 at 6:06 PM, KaijuKraid said:

Personally, I still prefer Khora and a Statstick style for her because I think it would ultimately be a net nerf for her since an exalted mod slot usually doesn't allow the use of Blood Rush/Rivens.

She deeply needs it. There are so many separate multipliers going that you can push her damage per AoE hit into the millions. I haven't bothered with Accumulating Whipclaw since someone told me Blood Rush was legal with Old Blood, and AW is a 4.5x mult. Blood Rush isn't quite so special; Sacrificial Steel without the set bonus puts Whipclaw at 80% crit, so most of your hits are already in the first tier and would only be getting the same bonus over again per tier after that. As a result, adding on Blood Rush works out to granting about 3x the damage you'd get without it at max combo. Factor in what losing a high-dispo riven from your build does and the nerf would be about equivalent to canceling out AW. 

Edited January 19, 2020 by CopperBezel

[taiiat]

1 hour ago, CopperBezel said:

They literally can't be. That's the whole point. The base damage shouldn't be over 1k, which is enough to one-shot any trash mobs up to around level 20 without the combo counter bonus or Accumulating Whipclaw. That corresponds pretty fairly to its existing 300 base damage multiplied over the kind of melee build you expect someone who's worried about level 20 enemies to have. At max combo and Accumulating Whipclaw, you can multiply that by 21.4. A Whipclaw build isn't going to touch 200% power strength since it requires full efficiency and AW and at least a bit of range or we have to start rethinking that last number, so we're looking at thirty-odd times the damage. So thirty-k in physical damage with no armor strip. I'd say that you could still use it situationally up to the 80s and it'd fall off somewhere in stage 3 sortie level range, but the trouble is that if you're only using it situationally, you're probably not keeping up your AW, so the tools it's giving you aren't fitting together (and disintegrate completely 10 enemy levels later regardless).

it's a lot of words but just like last time, you don't actually have a point. except maybe complaining that Warframe doesn't follow WoW as design guidelines of what Characters/Classes should be.
though not copy pasting those old and tired rules is a good thing.

[CopperBezel]

Then give me a number for what "the base Stats could be compensated for to account for losing as such" means, because I am telling you in exactly that many words that no such number exists.

Edit: I want to be clear that I don't know what the digression about WoW has to do with anything. You didn't start by saying that the stats shouldn't be adjusted to compensate at all, and then have me argue that they should be. You said that they should be adjusted to compensate, and I illustrated that they can't be. 

Edited January 19, 2020 by CopperBezel

[Birdframe_Prime]

10 hours ago, CopperBezel said:

Your own very specific problem, "melee mods shouldn't be used to modify abilities", would not be solved

See, this is where we're not seeing eye-to-eye.

My problem is band-aids in general. Melee mods accounting for the strength of an Ability is a band-aid. These need to be addressed better than the concept of 'just make it a melee that's specific to that frame and has its own rules'.

The only way to move forward, to put Warframes in a position where they can both adapt to anything new, like a change to the damage system or scaling system, and have the base functions to deal with what is current is to ensure that they actually have a set of four abilities and a passive that work with Warframe specific Mods.

Otherwise you end up with dead end evolutions of that system when something new actually happens with even more work required at the time to put it right.

It's the exact kind of change that will need to happen in the future, so cut out the middle-step and fix the ability itself instead of further band-aiding it by making it rely on modding either an Innate weapon or an Ability weapon separately.

[CopperBezel]

If a future update breaks the scaling of weapon mods, we'll have a larger problem than the handful of frames with direct damage abilities; using weapon mods should actually be a pretty resilient scaling system since it's already the curve the rest of your damage is on. On top of that, it's just pure wishful thinking to say that whatever system might be used to determine the damage in lieu of the current one, that system would automatically remain relevant even after a big change of meta.