Maiming strike is a bad mod: here is how you fix it (without spin meta)

[Klokwerkaos]

To no one's surprise, DE overnerfed Maiming strike into oblivion to the point where it literally has no place in a build because it can't compare due to limited function by requiring a special action (slide) and with sacrificial steel or blood rush existing that don't require said special action otherwise it will simply become another slide spam fest, which while many have opinions to the contrary, I promise spin spam can still out damage meta saryn range spore with melee 3, but I'm glad we have build diversity options now as I think that's healthy for the game, because when there is one and only one ring to rule them all, it gets overly repetitive and boring if you want to be efficient, which you really have to if you want to pokemon all the gear.

That said, even if you buff maiming strike, it's not going to have any reasonably value to most all weapons because you'll be losing likely a mandatory 60/60 status to fit it, and it just can't compare to that utility, which is probably corrosive, but could be any combined status.  In theory you could drop it for heat, but again, if it becomes comparable to the others, then it starts to be another spin fest dominating everything, and spin is already in exactly the place it needs to be:  Highly expensive to build for (you need a perfect type of riven riven to manage it for a few select weapons), and not optimal for any but the most heavily invested players.

Since nobody wants an OP spin back (except maybe a few cheese fanatics), I'd propose the following since Maiming strike is absolutely a trash mod at the moment:

make it equal to organ shatter for crit damage, thus allowing the possibility to choose to stack them without making one objectively better.

This gives it an actual niche place to be and doesn't incentivise spin spam because it affects all your crit damage and stacks with organ shatter, or possibly replaces it if you want a gold mod instead.

What this does is that it makes you choose between your 60/60 mod and maiming strike... what weapons allow you to do that?  weapons that already have decent status and high crit multipliers so the status damage loss is no big deal because you swap to heat instead of corrosive, which lowers your status chance, but ups your base damage (ideally you'd still want to be proccing heat at least 50% of the time after your heat 60/60, and have a 2.5x base crit mult, which is not all weapons).  For people spamming heavy, yeah, they will see much bigger numbers, but that's already pretty irrelevant because not much stands up to heavy spam if it lands and the balancing factor is that you lose corrosive permanent armor strip for temp armor strip that has a lower chance to proc and heavy attacks open you up to damage by being slow AF, but gain a large amount of crit damage to make more juicy red crits that are mostly irrelevant in any content except endurance over 2 hours.

What does this do?

To 95% of the game, absolutely nothing.  You can already insta clear the starchart blindfolded with half a build as it is.  I know I've even done random load out auto install no forma sortie 3 for all 4 members (meaning, the worst possible trash build you could make unless you take out a catalyst, but you do need a catalyst since grineer heavies will just laugh at your damage if you don't), so given that most content won't be affected, why bother?

Well... since it affects endurance runners using only very specific load outs, what this does is it incentives those players to obtain that 4% drop chance mod in exchange for bigger red numbers, and lets be clear, they are the only ones that need it and are likely to bother to obtain it unless they A) don't have organ shatter before this mod drops for some weird reason, and since it's not bigger than that it doesn't actually matter, but does stack with it, and b) people looking to min max their endurance runs, which are the only people that really would want to target farm this mod since it's completely unnecessary in all other content and you get sacrificial steel for free just by playing the game anyway.

This gives this mod a unique niche for certain weapons that already have good status and have large crit multipliers to run a heat build.

It gives people an incentive to farm this mod on purpose.

It doesn't over emphasize spin as the only possible meta method.

We only have one non primed mod that is likely never to be primed (for balance) for crit damage if you don't intentionally build your entire load out around your melee with set mods and sacrifice almost all of your warframe and pet utilities in the process (which can be worth doing, depending on your play style)

It increases potential engagement because while you can heavy spam for bigger numbers, you have to choose selectively when to do that in high end 2+ hours endurance, because if that's all you do, you're just gonna eat bullets and rockets till you die because you're too slow (ie, this would be good as a one off in a narrow hallway with a few heavies clustered).

I honestly think this is the best solution overall after having dwelled on it forever and a day, and I just got thinking about it again with acolytes dropping, willing to hear criticisms, but would prefer they come with constructive criticisms on how to better implement rather than just be "this sucks".

As a reminder, as much as we want scaling rewards, they don't and likely never will, so staying longer in endurance is strictly a matter of enjoying the game a certain way and only offers potentially increased rewards in arbitration survival because you keep getting C rotations.  This doesn't apply to something like say, defense, because you're actually working against yourself by not resetting every hour because of scaling enemies, though that may change some, we shall see.

Additionally I'd strongly propose spin crit on rivens goes away entirely and is replaced with in order of non duplicate priority:
Crit chance, Crit damage, base damage (meaning if your riven has one of those it moves to the next one, and you can't have all three since you can only have 3 positive multipliers).

This is because rivens have a lower spin crit chance than they do a base crit chance, which makes them A) incentivise spin only playstyle and B) it's a trash roll you'd want to reroll if you can since just regular crit chance is superior in every way (since it still applies to spin as well).




 

Edited February 10, 2020 by Klokwerkaos