Solution to the 90% explosion falloff - Nerf kuva bramma.

[Test-995]

17 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

It's not unfair to die because you made a mistake with self-damage any more than it's unfair to die because you sat stationary in front of a Fomorian murder-laser. You make a mistake, you pay the price, you strive to do better next time. It's predictable risk, the controlling factor is your own judgement.
Again, though, that doesn't mean 'everyone has to get good with self-damage weapons'. It means 'people CAN get good with self-damage weapons, if they enjoy the process of doing so'. You don't like that ultimate risk? That's perfectly acceptable. You demand that risk removed to suit your own personal tastes? No, that's not okay.

Yes, everyone makes mistake eventually regardless of how skilled they are (esp in warframe, this is the game that will be played braindead 80% of times), and if you need to sacrifice life or damage to counter it, most people will just ignore those.

Those weapons were nearly same as nonexistent, now it's weaker but still exists (or maybe not, 90% falloff is ridiculous)

Edited March 5, 2020 by Test-995

[TheLexiConArtist]

9 minutes ago, Test-995 said:

Yes, everyone makes mistake eventually regardless of how skilled they are (esp in warframe, this is the game that will be played braindead 80% of times), and if you need to sacrifice life or damage to counter it, most people will just ignore those.

Those weapons were nearly same as nonexistent, now it's weaker but still exists (or maybe not, 90% falloff is ridiculous)

So everyone makes an occasional mistake. Do you demand all enemies never to deal any damage because once in a while you happened to stand in front of a Seeker and his Kraken planted your frame on its back? No. You accept it and move on. Maybe you say that the Seeker, individually, has overtuned damage and ask for the balance to be addressed more in line with its counterparts (just like addressing the self-damage formula to a more appropriate risk-reward ratio).

We (who enjoy the risk and accept our mistakes) do the same with self-damage. If you're not willing to do that, you take steps to avoid it. There's no shame in playing a tank frame over a glass-cannon if you absolutely want to live. There's no shame in playing a rifle over a rocket launcher if you absolutely want to minimise the impact of user error.

Also, have you considered that many players using explosives may just be doing so in private/solo play? That deals with most of the arguable 'unpredictability' that is Ally Collision problems, leaving the rest purely up to competence. Nothing wrong with a niche when, I point out yet again, self-damage was present in less than 10% of the weaponry available (and less than 4% if only counting purely dumbfire).

Edited March 5, 2020 by TheLexiConArtist

[Test-995]

3 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Also, have you considered that many players using explosives may just be doing so in private/solo play? That deals with most of the arguable 'unpredictability' that is Ally Collision problems, leaving the rest purely up to competence. Nothing wrong with a niche when, I point out yet again, self-damage was present in less than 10% of the weaponry available (and less than 4% if only counting purely dumbfire).

I don't think de would do anything if those 10% weapons are actually popular, i'm not talking about personal experience there.

 

[CopperBezel]

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'm personally fine with 90% damage falloff, as long as it's not linear. Quadratic falloff with that low a boundary could work. Look at something like:

distance_multiplier = -0.9*distance^2 + 1

For distance 0, that gives you 1, or 100% damage. For distance 1 (i.e. max distance equal to radius), that gives you 0.1, or 10% damage. Crucially, though, for distance 0.5 (i.e. half-way to the edge of the AoE), that gives you 0.775, or 77.5% damage, NOT the 45% damage that linear damage dropoff would have. I mean, sure - it's an ugly-ish equation that you probably don't want players to see, but it does the job.

Yes please. Just curve the falloff instead of making it conical for everything.

I've said before that I think universal falloff could be a good idea if implemented well, but that doing so would require hand-tuning. This is not well or tuned, it's a universal nerf to all AoE, even weapons that fill a role more similar to wave guns like Arca Plasmor and Catchmoon, like the Astilla, Acceltra, and Battacor. If the explosion radius is 2m, linear falloff to nothing is effectively negating the AoE outright except for status procs. A quadratic curve would be the appropriate starting point, then hand-tune it for the mechanics of how that particular gun is meant to work.

And add falloff and stun to Khora's Whiplcaw because that didn't need to become even more opaf in comparison

11 hours ago, Kainosh said:

IMO, Bows should always deal more damage with Direct hit...and explosions or any other effect should just add some flavor.   

Bramma and Lenz are launchers. They're in no way designed to be ordinary bows and impossible to confuse for one.

 

 

Edited March 5, 2020 by CopperBezel

[Kainosh]

5 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

Bramma and Lenz are launchers.

Type: Bow.

Spoiler

 https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Kuva_Bramma

 

So it is written.

[CopperBezel]

Like the Ballistica is a pistol, yes, the point is that they're not designed to be ordinary bows and you clearly already know that, so what exactly is your point? Are you trolling right now?

[Fellas92]

16 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

Like the Ballistica is a pistol

 Type Crossbow 

[TheLexiConArtist]

37 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

Like the Ballistica is a pistol, yes, the point is that they're not designed to be ordinary bows and you clearly already know that, so what exactly is your point? Are you trolling right now?

See also: Searching 'sniper' in the Arsenal and coming out with a Miter and an Ogris due to the ammo type.

Can't just blindly point at one strand of Warframe spaghetti without thinking, or you'll never have a clear picture of where it comes out of the local tangle.

[CopperBezel]

I honestly think it's deliberate equivocation. Bows (in the sense of ordinary examples of the weapon category) do X, therefore bows (in the sense of all weapons classified as X) must do X.

26 minutes ago, Fellas92 said:

 Type Crossbow 

That's not really a thing? It takes pistol mods and in all respects acts as a pistol with a cosmetic difference. Which is kinda the point, the implication is that @Kainosh would be happy if the Bramma and Lenz weren't bow shaped, or presumably if they were exactly the same but classified as snipers or unique launchers.

[Kainosh]

8 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

I honestly think it's deliberate equivocation.

No. In my opinion it is better for this specific weapon to have a different explosion mechanic instead of trying to "balance" the current Clusterfuc mess.

You see....Its hard to make cluster bomb feel "balanced" because if it doesnt kill instantly, that amount of explosives and sht will feel weak anyways.  

So I just suggested my own "way" to fix this issue.  It is to make it more bow than laucnher.  I believe that will help, considering it already looks like a bow and sht.

 

You can either nerf cluster and aoe, making it feel "nerfed" for how its animation looks.....or you can change explosion shape and add shrapnel, turning this into a "bow that fires shotguns on a stick".  Still less AOE and lower chance to deal self damage....but it will be unique and will feel less like a launcher and more like a Bow.

I prefer second variant, because i dont quite like the current one. 

 

[Steel_Rook]

4 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Besides, if anything I was mocking DE's change, not your offering. Especially the latest one that completely kills off reward. I mean, sure, I was raising concerns about Tonkor Meta myself, but the second lesson of those days was the collateral damage that killed every other explosive because they didn't just give Tonkor the self-damage it needed immediately. A mistake now repeated by making all AOEs boring and mediocre because they won't just let the self-damage risk niche remain fundamentally, mechanically intact.

My reading of the change was that the 20% damage bonus DE were proposing isn't being retracted so much as suspended. They seem to have grown worries of overpowering explosive weapons and would want to see what we do with them before they start buffing them. If explosive weapons remain underused, THEN we might see the promised damage buff, probably to everything but the Bramma. If they suddenly become meta and stay meta with the self-damage removed, then we might not see that. Honestly, though - I rather doubt the latter. Like I said before, explosive weapons are "neat" but don't really scale well. Removing self-damage will definitely bump their use, but I doubt they'll see much use outside of "for fun" hobby use. Expect to see that buff later down the line.

[TheLexiConArtist]

4 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

My reading of the change was that the 20% damage bonus DE were proposing isn't being retracted so much as suspended. They seem to have grown worries of overpowering explosive weapons and would want to see what we do with them before they start buffing them. If explosive weapons remain underused, THEN we might see the promised damage buff, probably to everything but the Bramma. If they suddenly become meta and stay meta with the self-damage removed, then we might not see that. Honestly, though - I rather doubt the latter. Like I said before, explosive weapons are "neat" but don't really scale well. Removing self-damage will definitely bump their use, but I doubt they'll see much use outside of "for fun" hobby use. Expect to see that buff later down the line.

I've been observing the history myself when it comes to risk of overpowering, but like I said, that was only half of the lesson to be learned. With or without the damage buff, with or without the falloff, there's no 'fun' left in the weapon category with the changes intended. Without the real mechanical identity of risky explosives, for those who enjoyed them, it is at best going to become a mindless tool just like I might take Saryn and Ignis through any busywork exterminate or defense mission, just to get it over with. At worst, they're not even going to be good enough for that, with falloff and the mere inconvenient annoyance of staggers.

[CopperBezel]

Well, it isn't any particular category of "risky" explosives that's getting the 90% falloff. This isn't about self-damage, it's about AoE. Weapons that previously didn't have self-damage are getting stagger and falloff added with no other changes, which tells you exactly how seriously DE took the risk-reward argument. 

[Steel_Rook]

1 minute ago, CopperBezel said:

Well, it isn't any particular category of "risky" explosives that's getting the 90% falloff. This isn't about self-damage, it's about AoE. Weapons that previously didn't have self-damage are getting stagger and falloff added with no other changes, which tells you exactly how seriously DE took the risk-reward argument. 

And then there's that, yeah. DE's approach suggests that they're looking at this situation from a balance perspective. That is to say, AoE damage potential as compared to non-AoE damage, as well as a normalisation pass between all AoE damage sources. Near as I can tell, the "But I like the risk of killing myself!" side of the argument is being entirely disregarded and given no weight of consideration. The AoE as DE originally presented them seemed aimed at reducing AoE potential while improving raw damage and removing extant mitigating factors. Which honestly, they should have done a long time ago.

Not to keep bringing up "other games," but that's more or less what City of Heroes did back in the day. People were pulling 50 Werewolves into a single dumpster and nuking them at the same time. After that, everything got a target cap in the 3-8 targets range, specifically to prevent runaway damage multiplication from large-scale AoE. Overkill could have gone with an AoE target cap, but instead they went with focusing the AoE towards the centre and weakneing it towards the edges. The self-damage threads might have brought explosive weapons to the forefront, but the balance pass isn't being done for sentimental reasons.

[CopperBezel]

Someday, I really hope they remember Khora's Whipclaw exists and nerf it, because that's a typically 10m explosion that can go into the millions of damage, and it certainly doesn't have falloff or stagger. 

There's just something very panicky about all of this, isn't there? Last year we got a pile of new AoE weapons and a melee rework that encouraged 5-6m range on every weapon. Now they're suddenly worried about the fact that players don't have to aim anymore. Did they just kinda not notice that half the new guns they were adding had AoE, and half of those had no self-damage or strong self-damage prevention?

[TheLexiConArtist]

21 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

And then there's that, yeah. DE's approach suggests that they're looking at this situation from a balance perspective. That is to say, AoE damage potential as compared to non-AoE damage, as well as a normalisation pass between all AoE damage sources. Near as I can tell, the "But I like the risk of killing myself!" side of the argument is being entirely disregarded and given no weight of consideration. The AoE as DE originally presented them seemed aimed at reducing AoE potential while improving raw damage and removing extant mitigating factors. Which honestly, they should have done a long time ago.

Not to keep bringing up "other games," but that's more or less what City of Heroes did back in the day. People were pulling 50 Werewolves into a single dumpster and nuking them at the same time. After that, everything got a target cap in the 3-8 targets range, specifically to prevent runaway damage multiplication from large-scale AoE. Overkill could have gone with an AoE target cap, but instead they went with focusing the AoE towards the centre and weakneing it towards the edges. The self-damage threads might have brought explosive weapons to the forefront, but the balance pass isn't being done for sentimental reasons.

It would have been fine to use the stagger as a 'self-risk' exclusively for the AOEs without a drawback that deserve one (let's say, Sonicor et al). But that didn't need to come at the cost of self-damage on the weapons currently using it.

That way, we'd have another step-up subcategory to allow players to find the level of 'risk' they like, with all the reward balances treated accordingly:

1) Minimal risk (stagger) but lowest AOE reward

2) Moderate risk (all non-dumbfire self-damage) with moderate AOE reward

3) High-risk (pure dumbfire self-damage) with highest AOE reward

Sure there'd be some pushback for people currently YOLOing their way with things that would get added to 1, but that's a fair balancing change, not a wholesale mechanic removal (with total shake-up of balance) as is currently being ideated upon.

[kwlingo]

20 hours ago, NinjaZeku said:

(Also, stuff like adding a stagger drawback on Simulor and Pox ... I certainly question how necessary / sensible that is.)

Wait these have stagger now? lol Never knew that. Wonder what other weapons have staggers now

[Xikto]

Couldn't agree more when bramma is introduced all other explosive weapons it power creeps so much and when they nerf explosive as a whole instead of just bramma everything else becomes unplayable, nerf bramma a bit and give everything else a good buff to be competitors not dead weapons.