Viral was good. It is now above everything.

[GKP_light]

When they take a good status, make it stack, and nerf most of the other status : what are they hoping for ?

Viral is now the best status. You can try to take an ennemis with high armor, and see if you kill it faster with viral or corrosive. the answer will be : "viral". 

Play and Ignis with Primed Cryo Rounds and Malignant Force : nothing will survive. The Ignis wraith, which before, was not very strong past the level 120, can now easily kill the greener level 150.

[SpringRocker]

Pretty much 😕 .

9 minutes ago, GKP_light said:

Primed Cryo Rounds and Malignant Force

This compounds the shift as well...

 

EDIT: Also now that the status weight changes went from 0.25x to 1x it makes non-ips procs happen A LOT more and a lot more often.

Edited March 6, 2020 by SpringRocker

[(XBOX)GodMasterTP]

They nerfed corrosive to the ground, while also nerfing Grineer armor so corrosive was already going to fall in the meta. As I have stated before, I really do think they just throw some numbers and pray for it to work, there is NO OTHER explanation.

[WarmongerExtraordinare]

i dunno man

spent some time trying out new statuses and combos against heavy gunners and corrosive gave me much better results than viral

[EDM774]

use high status gun (kuva kohm) to load mobs with the max viral prock, proceed to 1 shot it with heavy crit based melee (lvl 170 heavy gunners btw). yep totally balanced.

[GKP_light]

il y a 7 minutes, GerberaOverture a dit :

i dunno man

spent some time trying out new statuses and combos against heavy gunners and corrosive gave me much better results than viral

i did my test on level 155 Corrupted Bombard with a full build kuva nuko 80% status.

[Traumtulpe]

16 minutes ago, GKP_light said:

i did my test on level 155 Corrupted Bombard with a full build kuva nuko 80% status

Bombards are extremely weak to radiation damage. Your weapon deals radiation damage.

Status changed a lot, and viral became a lot better, but it is a supporting status effect - you still want to target the enemies weakness in addition to it.

Before, you would build for Corrosive, Slash/Viral, or Gas. Corrosive was best against Grineer, Slash/Viral killed everything slightly delayed, Gas deleted corpus. Against Infested you would add radiation to disable ancients.

Now Slash/Viral is grineer only, Gas is useless, and Corrosive a bit weaker. If you want a setup for all factions I'd suggest Viral/Heat, but ideally you would get a weapon with an innate combined elemental (Synoid Gammacor for example) and mod opposed to it (Corrosive or Viral/Heat in this case).

[Serafim_94]

I don't like that new status system. Viral multiples damage now, to my understanding. Soooo... how is it mechanically different from crits? That's system homogenization.

[Traumtulpe]

Just now, Serafim_94 said:

I don't like that new status system. Viral multiples damage now, to my understanding. Soooo... how is it mechanically different from crits?

A single viral proc does exactly the same it did before - only in a less convoluted way.

The big thing is that you can proc additional viral effects on an enemy, at 25% strength each.

[Countess_Hapmuhr]

Since I'm getting so tired of these meta shifts, I'm just going to swap my most used corrosive weapons to viral and call it a day. This update accomplished very little in changing anything. There's no other auras I find usable, so I might as well just slap on Energy Siphon like we all originally did and call it a day. I just don't get why this even had to happen.

Edited March 6, 2020 by Countess_Hapmuhr

[Aliothale]

Corrosive is still better than Viral against armored enemies. Not a single damage test I did put Viral ahead of Corrosive in that department.

[kevoisvevo]

Tested viral+blast vs corrosive+blast on lvl 100 corrupted heavy gunners with a redeemer prime hybrid build. I was getting anywhere from 5000-19000 damage per pellet on the viral blast setup. With corrosive blast I got 7000-23000 damage

Edited March 6, 2020 by kevoisvevo

[Steel_Rook]

13 hours ago, GKP_light said:

Viral is now the best status. You can try to take an ennemis with high armor, and see if you kill it faster with viral or corrosive. the answer will be : "viral". 

So I meant to respond to this yesterday, but my math was coming up wrong at 5 AM. Let's give this another shot today. Let's do an experiment. To do that, let's establish a few correlations.

EHP, or "effective health," is how much damage a player needs to take in order to lose all of their actual health, provided they take damage at an increased or reduced rate. If a player has 1000 health but takes only 25% of all incoming damage (75% damage resistance), then we ask the following - how much EHP does a player need to have for EHP*0.25 = HP, or EHP = HP/0.25 = HP*4. Because damage resistance is usually presented as a positive number (i.e. 75% damage resistance), this is typically generalised to EHP = HP/(1 - R).

Warframe models Resistance as a function of armour, specifically this one: R = A/(300 + A). When we swap resistance to this in the above formula, we get EHP as a function of health and armour, which looks like this:

EHP = HP + HP*(A/300) = HP*(1 + A/300)

Now, suppose you're attacking an enemy with all Flesh health (no shields, no armour) with Viral damage. What does this do to their EHP? Well, it does the same thing as we listed above, in that it functionally reduces HP for the purposes of HP calculations, or:

EHP = HP*(1 + A/300)/(1 + W)

where W is "weakness," or 75% for Viral against flesh. With all of this said, we just need to pick a target to test against. Now, the Warframe Wiki hasn't updated enemy level scaling calculations to the new values so I don't have an easy way to check the new values. Yesterday I used the armour formula someone else posted to calculate that a level 100 Bombard has just shy of 6000 armour so I'm going to use that value. The current Bombard has 41 000-some health, so let's assume he has less than that and go with 30 000 for the sake of round numbers. At 30K health and 6K Alloy armour and no other factors, that Bombard will have 30 000*(1 + 6000/300) = 630 000 EHP. OK, that's our baseline.

Now, I'm going to take a bit of a guess here. I'm going to guess that DE weren't stupid and they rolled the new Viral changes into the Flesh health types' resistance calculations rather than slapping on a new multiplier. That would give us 75% weakness from Viral naturally, + 325% from a saturated Viral proc for a total of 400% more Viral damage against the affected target, or *4. This gives us EHP = 30 000*(1 + 6000/300)/(1 + 4) = 126 000. Now let's assume we're shooting the same Bombard with Corrosive and we've somehow managed to stack the full 80% capped armour strip before we've done any damage, which is to say we've reduced his armour to 1200. This is not realistic but I don't feel like dealing with progressive armour strip and I gave the same consideration to Viral anyway. This gives us EHP = 30 000*(1 + 1200/300) = ‭150 000‬.

Hmm... So yes, with max-stacked Viral, our theoretical Bombard will have 126K EHP, while having 150K EHP (i.e. slightly more) with max-stacked Corrosive. Now considerations do need to be made that Viral's damage boost applies to the Viral component only and relies on squad mates also having Viral while Corrosive applies to all damage types. Considerations should also be made that this is against Alloy Armour which has no weaknesses against Corrosive itself. Against Ferrite Armour (so Heavy Gunners, Drakhmasters, Hyeka Masters, etc.) the picture is a lot more devastating. However, yes - on its face, the calculation does favour Viral, which I was not expecting.

At this point, I think two things ought to happen. For one thing, we need to re-examine enemy health type weaknesses and resistances (i.e. why is Alloy not weak to Corrosive to any capacity, why is Ferrite not weak to Radiation to any capacity). For another, we might need to implement an "Armour-like" system for handling health type weaknesses and strengths. Right now, enemy EHP is a rational function of their individual health types' resistances, and that produces uneven returns (actually diminishing returns for weakness and increasing returns for strength). We might need to apply an armour-like system such that EHP becomes a linear function of health type resistances.

Having gone through the numbers myself, I'm left feeling more needs to be done.

[GKP_light]

il y a une heure, Steel_Rook a dit :

[lot of math]

an easier vertion :

with lot of armor (when 300 is negligeable compare to the total amount), the EHP can be aproximate to : HP*armor.

in this contexte, 1 stack of corosive will reduce the EHP of 26%, that is aquivalent to increase the damage of ~35,1%.

with 9 stacks of corosive, it will reduce the EHP of 74%, that is aquivalent to increase the damage of ~284.6%.

with 10 stacks of corosive, it will reduce the EHP of 80%, that is aquivalent to increase the damage of 400%.

(and with less armor, the increase will be less.)

With 1 stack, the viral increas the damage of 100%.

with 10 stacks, the viral increas the damage of 300%

with 10 stacks, the viral increas the damage of 325%

 

So the corisive only better than Viral when it have 10 stacks, and on an ennemis with high armor.

This "high armor" is 6500. Above 6500 armor, have 10 stack of corosive is better than 10 stack of viral.

and the difference is not big.

[Traumtulpe]

9 minutes ago, GKP_light said:

the difference is not big

That is because you forgot that Corrosive also ignores 75% of the remaining Ferrite Armor, and additionally deals 175% damage to it.

[GKP_light]

à l’instant, Traumtulpe a dit :

That is because you forgot that Corrosive also ignores 75% of the remaining Ferrite Armor, and additionally deals 175% damage to it.

I voluntarily ignore this, because i speak about the status proc.

[5H4DE]

46 minutes ago, GKP_light said:

I voluntarily ignore this, because i speak about the status proc.

But in gameplay you're not gonna ignore it so you can't ignore it on paper either, doing so you get misleading results that don't add up when put in practice.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, GKP_light said:

an easier vertion :
with lot of armor (when 300 is negligeable compare to the total amount), the EHP can be aproximate to : HP*armor.
in this contexte, 1 stack of corosive will reduce the EHP of 26%, that is aquivalent to increase the damage of ~35,1%.
with 9 stacks of corosive, it will reduce the EHP of 74%, that is aquivalent to increase the damage of ~284.6%.
with 10 stacks of corosive, it will reduce the EHP of 80%, that is aquivalent to increase the damage of 400%.
(and with less armor, the increase will be less.)
With 1 stack, the viral increas the damage of 100%.
with 10 stacks, the viral increas the damage of 300%
with 10 stacks, the viral increas the damage of 325%

Easier, but both less reliable and not actually true. There's no point in which 300 is negligible. Even with 6000 armour, that 300 constitutes ~9.1%. Considering EHP is rational function of damage resistance which trends towards positive infinity at 100% resistance, even minor differences in resistance value will cause substantial differences in pracrice once you go over 90%. Moreover, I don't like trying to model the effect of armour as a damage multiplier because "damage" doesn't tell the full story. EHP does.

Modelling the effects of Corrosive and Viral through EHP also allows you to quite easily factor in the effects of health type strengths and vulnerabilities. Even if you're speaking purely about procs, you can't really ignore that. Viral procs only affect Flesh, Cloned Flesh and Infested Flesh and only for the strength of the Viral damage component. At least, as far as I can tell from the release notes. That means that any time you're talking about Viral procs, you're talking about the damage Viral does to a Flesh health type, and there are always going to be additional modifiers there. The same can't be said about Corrosive, because Corrosive affects both Ferrite and Alloy armour but has an inherent damage modifier against only one of the two. This is why I proposed making both Ferrite and Alloy weak to both Corrosive and Radiation but to different extents the same way both Shields and Proto Shields are weak to Magnetic. This would allow the performance of Corrosive to be consistent - at least broadly - against all types of armour. And that's not even accounting for Terra Corpus units who are armoured with Robotic health, rather than either Alloy or Ferrite.

I would strongly recommend not going with "easier" math whenever you have the opportunity to do so. Sure, you can ignore aspects which aren't relevant if you can abstract them out of both sides of an equation or guarantee they'll be some inert value (0 for addition, 1 for multiplication), but trying to draw information from calculation steps in the middle of the calculation when you can draw that same information from the end results is generally not recommended. The whole reason I went with EHP instead of damage mulipliers is because the functions are not linear at pretty much any step of the way. Max-stack Viral is *3.25 damage while max-stack Corrosive reduces 6000 armour to 1200 armour, reducing resistance from ~90.9% to 80% and in theory only a little more than doubling the damage taken to health. However, that *3.25 multiplier is itself being resisted by armour, and looking at it in isolation doesn't give you the full picture.

[GKP_light]

il y a 18 minutes, Steel_Rook a dit :

here's no point in which 300 is negligible. Even with 6000 armour, that 300 constitutes ~9.1%

6000 armour is ~95,24% réduction (not ~90.9%)

(if you take the aproximation to ignore the 300, it is 95%. it make a diference of ~5% for 6000 armor. and the aproximation is in favor of corosive. )

 

so : "6000 armour to 1200 armour, reducing resistance from ~90.9% to 80%"

it is 6000 armour to 1200 armour, reducing resistance from ~95.24% to 80% ; so a bit more than multiply by 4 the damage, so a bit more than increas the damage by 300%.

 

"Max-stack Viral is *3.25 damage while max-stack"

max-stack viral is *4.25.

 

"However, that *3.25 multiplier is itself being resisted by armour, and looking at it in isolation doesn't give you the full picture. "

the *5 of the vrey high armor is also reduce by the remaining armor.

It is equivalent to think in "EHP after reduction by increasing damage" or "incresed damage to destroy a not modify number of EHP"/

 

il y a 34 minutes, Steel_Rook a dit :

Viral procs only affect Flesh, Cloned Flesh and Infested Flesh and only for the strength of the Viral damage component.

It is totaly wrong.

Viral status affect all damage, and affect all health, even if there is armor on it.

only the shield id not affected.

[Steel_Rook]

Yes, I got the armour calculation wrong. I was doing it by hand and typed in 600 when that should have been 300 and threw off my calculation.

 

3 hours ago, GKP_light said:

it is 6000 armour to 1200 armour, reducing resistance from ~95.24% to 80% ; so a bit more than multiply by 4 the damage, so a bit more than increas the damage by 300%

Yes, going from taking 5% of all damage to 20% of all damage (roughly) is an increase of about four times, but that's specific to these armour values. It's not directly applicable to all armour values - which I thought you pointed out before. An 80% reduction in armour will constitute a consistent reduction in EHP for a given health value, but it's not always going to map to a consistent increase in damage dealt. Because care was taken to model EHP as a linear function of armour, I see no reason to try and depict the effect of armour as resistance, which is a rational function of armour, and of which EHP itself is a rational function. The numbers aren't going to map out in an intuitive manner and thus are less useful. I see no benefit to trying to judge the power of Corrosive or Viral in terms of multipliers to damage when EHP already exists to account for this.

 

3 hours ago, GKP_light said:

"Max-stack Viral is *3.25 damage while max-stack"

max-stack viral is *4.25.

It is not. You cited "lots of math" when you responded to my previous post, so I assumed you'd read the formulae I provided. I calculated Viral's contribution to reducing health as (1 + W), or "(1 + Weakness)." I did this deliberately, because I also included the 75% weakness from Viral against Flesh. Precalculating base values into your multipliers is bad form in general because it complicates calculations down the line, especially if you end up with other additive modifiers to that multiplier. If it bothers you that I stuck a * sign in front of it, then sorry about that. As you can tell, the above post was made in a rush, but it was also made with the belief that you'd read the post you were responding to and that these things would have been cleared out there.

 

3 hours ago, GKP_light said:

the *5 of the vrey high armor is also reduce by the remaining armor.

It is equivalent to think in "EHP after reduction by increasing damage" or "incresed damage to destroy a not modify number of EHP"/

I have no idea what any of this means. I can tell English is not your native language (nor is it mine) so I'm not saying this as criticism. Rather, I'd ask that you try and rephrase this because between clear typos and odd grammar I genuinely don't know what you're trying to tell me here - not even a broad guess. "Increased damage of destroy a not mdifiy number of EHP" makes no sense to me. Nor do I have any idea of what "*5 of very high armour" is or how that could be reduced by remaining armour.

 

3 hours ago, GKP_light said:

It is totaly wrong.

Viral status affect all damage, and affect all health, even if there is armor on it.

only the shield id not affected.

Have you tested this? Because this is not how DE made it sound. They sold Viral as the counterpart to Corrosive for Armour and Magnetic for health. If this works over any health type - including Robotic and including enemies with Ferrite/Alloy health types (i.e. Thumpers) then that makes it substantially more universal than either of those damage types. Just for reference, I went back to the release notes and those state simply "additional Health damage." Are you inferring from this that Viral applies to all Health types but NOT to shields (despite them being a health type)? I understand it not applying to armour since that isn't reduced by direct damage. Because I was under the impression that Corrosive would work on Ferrite and Alloy, Magnetic would work on Shields and Proto Shields and Viral would work on Flesh, Cloned Flesh and Infested Flesh.

Considering how much contradicting information I've been given regarding this new update, I feel we're going to want a citation on this one just so we're sure we're operating on real ino

[Fiddlestixxx]

Instead of hitting the calculator, I just tested for a while in the Sim.

Corrosive is good for Ferrite and the likes. Not so good against anything else, even and especially heavily armored targets that aren't weak to corrosive. However, when coupled with the element that the targeted armor type is weak to, it's pretty solid but very hard to pull off, since making the corrosive combo already greatly limits what other elements you can put on a weapon (for example, Kuva Nukor with innate Radiation and Magnetic, modded for Corrosive and Primed Heated Charge kills literally anything level 100 in 2 seconds or less with only body shots, even a friggin Ambulas. I almost peed. Granted, the Ambulas may have been headshots though; hard to remember).

Viral vastly outperformed corrosive vs Bombards. Pair it with Hunter Munitions, Slash, or Heat, this is the best all around, even now that shields bleed instead of being bypassed by slash (LOL WTF). Basically, if Hunter Munitions isn't viable on the weapon (low crit or not a primary), it's Viral/Heat. Even though these combos aren't quite as effective against Ferrite, it's still plenty effective (lvl 100 Heavy Gunners; they die in 3 seconds instead of Corrosive taking 2 seconds, both tests with nothing but body shots), it's a more 'take all comers' build. Granted, you do have a secondary slot if you want the variety, but by the time I have the alternate weapon drawn and kill the enemy with it, I could have just killed it with the initial weapon and reloaded by then.

Radiation vs Bombards was also very effective (arguably moreso than only Corrosive depending on the status and fire rate), but still didn't compete with Viral+Heat.

Now that physical damage is on a level playing field with elements for proc priority, you don't get as much impact stagger from auto fire weapons and can headshot more reliably (unless of course the weapon has a lot of innate impact).

For melee, Condition Overload + Weeping Wounds + Blood Rush + 3 elemental procs is enough to kill pretty much anything in 2 seconds once you are ramped up to combo 12. But, a Galatine Prime that gives up the elements to be a pure slasher is way better. A heavy attack build on a weapon that procs slash on heavy attack is way better. Was before and still holds.

 

Edit: just retested some things and the kill time is a bit optimistic on my comment. Kuva Nukor took out lvl 100 Bombards in 3 seconds with no buffs (I may have had a kavat buff before but not sure). One clip wiped out 8. The ambulas definitely took some time (about 7 or 8 seconds, even with headshots).

Edited March 7, 2020 by Fiddlestixxx

[kwlingo]

In some of the weapon testing Corrosive still performs better than Viral. But Viral has climbed up the ranks. Heat now is super good now also, ticking scales of 300 and above. Pure Heat can take out most enemies now. Corrosive and Viral only help it scale better.

Edited March 7, 2020 by kwlingo

[GKP_light]

Il y a 3 heures, Steel_Rook a dit :

Have you tested this? Because this is not how DE made it sound.

it seemed evident to me.

now, i made the test, and yes, it work like i said.

[Steel_Rook]

21 minutes ago, GKP_light said:

it seemed evident to me.

now, i made the test, and yes, it work like i said.

Well... This surprises me. OK, if Viral works on ALL health types as long as they aren't used as shield, then I agree - that's probably going to end up being vastly more powerful than either Magnetic or Toxic. Everything has health all of the time. Not everything has shields or armour, and not all of the time. The numbers for Viral aren't low, either. I wouldn't be surprised at a nerf.

Speaking of - do you have any idea how the Viral damage buff is calculated? Originally I assumed it was simply added together with the health type weaknesses, but if Viral can work on anything including Robotic and Machine health, then chances are it might actually be multiplicative. That might mean that instead of doing *(1 + 3.25 + 0.75) = *5 damage, you might be doing (1 + 3.25)*(1 + 0.75) = *‭11.6875‬ damage to Flesh and Cloned Flesh. If that ends up being the case, then DE would have added more damage creep rather than subtracting from it. I've said this before, but I consider multiplicative buff stacking to be easily the most severe balance issue in Warframe and the underlying cause for a lot of the other questionable balance decisions which DE are currently trying to address.