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Warframe Revised: Hotfix 27.2.2


[DE]Rebecca

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With the hype for Scarlet Spear, and seemingly everyone losing their mind with fear, maybe it's time for one last review of where we currently stand.

 

Railjack is a mess.  This weekend I played 5 games, discovered you could get stuck in an endless revive animation in space if reviving when a crewship blows up, got to watch 2 people AFK from a mission and get the rewards, got to encounter a crewship that decided to suicide by space rock, and my favorite was that about 25% of the time I couldn't use my melee because the only melee which loaded was my arch-melee.  This is going to be the focus of your next event....and I'm immediately cautious.

 

 The shotgun status changes are....not great.  The Phantasma, Strun, Strun Wraith, Phage, and Boar largely function only slightly better than before.  The Tigris series and Boar Prime are nominal increases in functionality.  The Kohm is really the only weapon out there that gets better on paper with the status boosts.  Then you run it in practice, and get sad.  The reason that the Kohm was amazing was stacking tons of slash damage, which not is too dilute to consistently hit.  The potential backup with corrosive is worthless, because on enemies who are spongey enough to require a timed armor strip you can't really enjoy armor stripping that just stops working.  The viral avenue is interesting, but double of almost no damage is still negligible damage.  In practice the sheer quantity of status effects is great, but in practice you need even more shots on the targets to put them down.  Maybe the gas and impact fixes will make this better, but I've given enough time to this to see too many glaring flaws to call it a leap forward.

 

Arcanes....yep.  Let's not focus on the Eidolon angle right now, and just focus on the Arbitrations.  A game mode where all the broken things seem to rest, and RNG makes it difficult to have any fun.  Is it a challenge, maybe.  Is it rewarding, again maybe.  Is a 5% drop chance possible once per hour requiring you to get the thing 21 times really a reward.  Consider my response to be a no and deep swearing below my breath to be the reasonable response.

 

 

Finally, let's talk grind.  I am at 8 in everything for Railjack, with enough to make one 9.  I'm done with the mode, because after 3 months (and 1.5 years of hype) it's just not worth the final two levels.  A 100% increase in grind for 10% more mission rewards is stupid, but a 300% for remote repairs at high cost is even dumber.  Please don't make the Focus system mistake again.

 

I'm done talking until the new flop comes out.  It'll be a bold experiment, which you've already hedged bets on by not giving us the full rewards on because "some clans exploit issues for gain."  Yeah, I'm looking at another 6 months of railjack to unlock all of it, and I now wish I cheesed intrinsics.  That's pretty dire, when your game engagement is built upon grind and you're competing at the levels Terraria does.  A game that pushed its final update back 5+ months and people are still salivating over the hype for.

 

-edit-

For those who initially called the changes to status and shotguns bad, I still disagree.  The knee-jerk reaction calling this out as turning some shotguns into garbage is still a bad hot take.  If the status weight for IPS (4x) wasn't removed the status weight on the Kohm would still be for slash damage status effects.  If that were the case, instead of an average of about 17.65% of the status effects being slash we'd be looking at 37.5% of all status effects being slash with a 100% chance of inflicting a status.

The happy medium here would be to add back in the IPS weight, but instead of a 4x weight put it at 2x.  This would mean that if you wanted to weight for an element it would be easy (60+60+90=210, 210>200), but normal operation would still favor the IPS spectrum of status.  It's something I suggested that we wait and see on because the practical application of running the weapon looked great when I saw literally dozens of status effects popping out on enemies.  After tooling around, the practical benefits of most (82%) statuses not being slash is a net nerf.  

I will admit my ignorance, and foolish optimism, in asking for people to wait on judging this.  The combined status changes and weighting changes really are not driving a net change positive.  I will admit to the foolish and wrong optimism that I had.

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19 hours ago, master_of_destiny said:

For those who initially called the changes to status and shotguns bad, I still disagree.  The knee-jerk reaction calling this out as turning some shotguns into garbage is still a bad hot take.  If the status weight for IPS (4x) wasn't removed the status weight on the Kohm would still be for slash damage status effects.  If that were the case, instead of an average of about 17.65% of the status effects being slash we'd be looking at 37.5% of all status effects being slash with a 100% chance of inflicting a status.

The happy medium here would be to add back in the IPS weight, but instead of a 4x weight put it at 2x.  This would mean that if you wanted to weight for an element it would be easy (60+60+90=210, 210>200), but normal operation would still favor the IPS spectrum of status.  It's something I suggested that we wait and see on because the practical application of running the weapon looked great when I saw literally dozens of status effects popping out on enemies.  After tooling around, the practical benefits of most (82%) statuses not being slash is a net nerf.  

I will admit my ignorance, and foolish optimism, in asking for people to wait on judging this.  The combined status changes and weighting changes really are not driving a net change positive.  I will admit to the foolish and wrong optimism that I had.

I think removing the status weight for IPS was a huge net positive personally, at least as far as weapon variety goes. Unless DE completely reworks impact and puncture procs to actually benefit your dps in some way (not actively decreasing it as impact does), this is the only way to keep status weapons that aren't highly slash-weighted from being dead in the water without a -imp/-punc riven. One thing to keep in mind if you're worried about slash builds without hunter's munitions is that the viral proc (which scales up to 4.5X damage on health) affects slash proc damage as well, so even if you're getting around 1/4 the number of slash procs you used to, each of them is a lot stronger if you're also stacking viral procs. You'd be surprised how strong a slash proc off a single exergis or tigris pellet is now, with a bunch of viral procs on the target. That being said, I can understand your disappointment because even 1/4 the slash procs doing 4.5X the damage is basically just breaking even.

The bigger issue is just how bad the corrosive proc is now. Considering how logarithmic the raw armor to damage reduction scale is (and how much armor high level enemies have relative to that conversion, even with the new S-Curve), removing 80% of a high level enemy's armor translates to a pretty minor change in their damage reduction. It's a catch 22; by the time enemy armor gets high enough for an 80% armor removal to outperform multiplying your damage by 4.5, their damage reduction is so high that slash procs (or the handful of warframe abilities that can still fully strip armor) are the only reasonable ways of bypassing it, in which case viral becomes way better than corrosive again. You could make the argument that corrosive's bonus to ferrite armor makes up for this, and it sort of does (against half of the armored units you'll find), but I don't think it's a good tradeoff to kill heavy gunners a bit quicker while being useless against bombards, versus killing both of them reasonably quickly with viral (and that's not even getting into the fact that viral works on every faction and corrosive does literally nothing to most corpus/infested).

One solution to this problem could be something like changing the corrosive proc to cap out at ~95% armor reduction (maybe even have this cap scale somewhat with enemy level, from 80% up to ~95%), and change viral so it only boosts damage to health (red health), including slash procs. This would make viral still the go-to element as a complement to slash builds, or in conjunction with warframes that can fully strip armor (turn armored health from yellow to red), without it actively competing with corrosive for up-front damage against armored targets.

 

EDIT: Another solution to the corrosive/armor problem would be to maybe differentiate how armor translates to damage reduction based on whether it's tenno armor or an enemy armor type (the same way we recently got a new health/shield type to smooth out enemy damage output). The scale it's on now makes sense for our own EHP; we want to see significant changes based on modest armor increases on the low end of the spectrum and I actually think the balance of health, armor, shields in our own survivability equation is pretty good now. If, for example an enemy with 2000 alloy armor would have something like 65-70% damage reduction versus the (off the top of my head) close to 90% they have now, removing 80% of even a high level enemy's armor would be much more impactful. At the same time, this would probably mean the armor scaling curve would have to be pushed up a bit to keep that armor worth stripping off rather than brute-forcing through.

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