Non-damage Status Effects are useless.

[Teridax68]

37 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

Because just for a second I thought we could go ahead and try and approach this like a normal discussion topic without your hyperdefensiveness, and I'd like you to try and picture how other people would have responded to a similar suggestion? = /

It is clear you are bringing a past grudge to this discussion, and it would be better if you were to stop. As it stands, it is not me who is being overly defensive, so much as you being excessively argumentative by bringing up conflict incongruous to conversation. Seeing how the ideas I wrote here were the product of an exchange you yourself chose to initiate, and are clearly the product of compromise between my viewpoint and those of others, I also don't quite see why consideration of the opinions of others ought to be called into question either.

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There's a difference between complete neutrality and relative flattening. What you're suggesting is in fact a flattening. As I said, I was acknowledging that you like a more neutral system before talking about this flattening, it's - not an attack, man, context.

Context that does not fit this exchange, given that my proposal is by your own admission here not power-neutral, nor does it even aim towards power-neutrality. The only mentality under which this makes sense is one in which any change that even incidentally flattens our power constitutes a deliberate attempt to move towards a power-neutral modding system, which is clearly not the case here.

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If you're removing damage types as a thing in terms of X element deals Y bonus damage to Z health, as you've clarified here, then you don't need to "convert" anything really, do you? The damage dealt is the same and status is an independent factor. All these mods are doing is increasing the chance of procs in a given type. You probably would want to rework the cards as +60% Poison chance, etc., but that could work.

Sure, though that changes more components to the system, namely how the +status mods would function, and would itself just lead to needing only one damage type, with status being a separate affair. At that stage, might as well get rid of status as an overarching system and simply give different weapons and mods procs as desired.

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And we're saying the same thing about the +90% mods, except that I'm saying I think it's a bad thing. If you want to maintain some amount of the build system, you're going to want to have some options. Again - I understand that we've talked about this before and neither of us really likes weapon builds as a thing, but in this context we're aiming to keep them and make them interesting, and I think you're removing degrees of freedom that could potentially make them so. 

I really don't think we're saying the same thing, because the point I am making about the +90% status mods is that they would become more viable than they currently are, as currently they still do not hold a candle to the elemental+status mods so long as the latter offer a significant damage increase. One could buff the increase on the pure status mods, though that would likely not be necessary if the player had to choose between an additional +30% status and an additional status effect to use, which would present more choice overall than what we have now in an environment where pure status mods are still not that great.

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Puncture and Impact are universally regarded as meaningless status effects. You can only meaningfully build for three status effects on a given weapon unless it has a combined elemental base damage component, and one of the three can only be Slash, and only if the weapon supports it. So a given weapon meaningfully supports two to four. This is meaningfully restrictive and prevents builds that would otherwise be viable or even overpowered, which means it's an element that's actually providing some mechanical depth. I wouldn't be so quick to toss it out. 

Whether or not those status effects are "meaningful" is irrelevant, as ultimately the weapons under my proposed system would be outputting, at the very most, the same amount of status effects as they would now, and the more status effects they'd be saddled with, the more diluted those status applications would be. The system balances itself out, ergo there should be no need to force a lockout of elements.

Edited March 17, 2020 by Teridax68

[CopperBezel]

2 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

It is clear you are bringing a past grudge to this discussion, and it would be better if you were to stop. As it stands, it is not me who is being overly defensive, so much as you being excessively argumentative by bringing up conflict incongruous to conversation.

Look again at what I said in the first place, as opposed to what you decided it meant. = / Any and all reference to a prior conversation is not inherently an attack, man.

11 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

The only mentality under which this makes sense is one in which any change that even incidentally flattens our power constitutes a deliberate attempt to move towards a power-neutral modding system, which is clearly not the case here.

Or the one I'm approaching it from myself, which is "oh hey, that'd also be nice if it could have a flattening effect". "Deliberate" makes it sound like some kind of nasty accusation. What I'm actually saying is, "this is in line with other suggestions you've had, so I can see why it's appealing to you". Also not a nasty accusation: Pointing out that a lot of the ideas you propose tend toward simplifying and flattening, and acknowledging I know that's what I'm getting into! Again, that's not even an evaluative statement, certainly not when you and I both know Warframe is loaded with complexity that doesn't contribute to depth and massive multipliers stacked on multipliers with wildly counterintuitive results. 

4 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Sure, though that changes more components to the system, namely how the +status mods would function, and would itself just lead to needing only one damage type, with status being a separate affair.

Again, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're proposing, I just think you're already doing that. I think you could have converting damage into another type with a status attached, or damage types having no weakness or resistance, and not do away with damage types entirely, but once you have both of those factors in place you really just don't meaningfully have damage types anymore at all and might as well refactor on that assumption, because elemental mods don't add damage and they don't change how damage counts against enemies. And then you do get to change how those +status mods function and don't have to deal with questions of, like, can I stack more than 100% damage conversion and what happens when I do, etc. because we're only stacking status chances.

If you kept the same numbers as now but used damage conversion as the basis, you wouldn't want to give additional damage just for crossing the 100% threshold. You have to decide what happens at that point, among a number of different options with different consequences, and I don't know which you have in mind. The first that comes to mind for me is to just treat any amount of damage conversion more than 100% as 100%, and treat the status distribution across the total. More 60/60s would still add more status chance, so a status build might still use three 60/60s and a +90% chance mod, and the build logic makes internal sense. Still feels like we're talking about status type conversion rather than damage conversion per se, so long as we're assuming that damage type resistance and weakness isn't a thing, but yeah, maybe that's still better than trying to rework the numbers and remove the "conversion" aspect entirely. 

9 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I really don't think we're saying the same thing, because the point I am making about the +90% status mods is that they would become more viable than they currently are, as currently they still do not hold a candle to the elemental+status mods so long as the latter offer a significant damage increase. 

Sorry, I meant it'd be a pity to lose the +90% elemental damage mods completely. This is true, you'd have a better balance between these two SC types. 

11 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Whether or not those status effects are "meaningful" is irrelevant, as ultimately the weapons under my proposed system would be outputting, at the very most, the same amount of status effects as they would now, and the more status effects they'd be saddled with, the more diluted those status applications would be. The system balances itself out, ergo there should be no need to force a lockout of elements.

Yeah, that makes some sense. I think you'd be removing some potentially interesting layers from the system, but they're not interesting in practice now, so simpler might be better.

[Teridax68]

3 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

Look again at what I said in the first place, as opposed to what you decided it meant. = / Any and all reference to a prior conversation is not inherently an attack, man.

Sure, except you are bringing a rather pointed and combative tone to this conversation that clearly does not stem from this exchange alone, and are trying to tie this conversation to a heated argument we had that has strictly nothing to do with what is being discussed. You are clearly not over it, and you really ought to get over it, because we're talking about status effects now, not power neutrality.

3 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

Or the one I'm approaching it from myself, which is "oh hey, that'd also be nice if it could have a flattening effect". "Deliberate" makes it sound like some kind of nasty accusation. What I'm actually saying is, "this is in line with other suggestions you've had, so I can see why it's appealing to you". Also not a nasty accusation: Pointing out that a lot of the ideas you propose tend toward simplifying and flattening, and acknowledging I know that's what I'm getting into! Again, that's not even an evaluative statement, certainly not when you and I both know Warframe is loaded with complexity that doesn't contribute to depth and massive multipliers stacked on multipliers with wildly counterintuitive results. 

If you say so, but again, as I have already stated, the power flattening in my suggestion is incidental to the core idea behind the proposal, which is merely to streamline the damage and status types we have now to a smaller set of effects that would have some usefulness. This is distinct from our prior conversation where finding ways of flattening our power was in fact a key topic of discussion. I am very well aware that some people have an aversion to the very notion of flattening our power, but then again, I am also by no means the first person to suggest the idea of elemental conversion as a replacement to bonus elemental damage.

3 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

Again, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're proposing, I just think you're already doing that. I think you could have converting damage into another type with a status attached, or damage types having no weakness or resistance, and not do away with damage types entirely, but once you have both of those factors in place you really just don't meaningfully have damage types anymore at all and might as well refactor on that assumption, because elemental mods don't add damage and they don't change how damage counts against enemies. And then you do get to change how those +status mods function and don't have to deal with questions of, like, can I stack more than 100% damage conversion and what happens when I do, etc. because we're only stacking status chances.

If you kept the same numbers as now but used damage conversion as the basis, you wouldn't want to give additional damage just for crossing the 100% threshold. You have to decide what happens at that point, among a number of different options with different consequences, and I don't know which you have in mind. The first that comes to mind for me is to just treat any amount of damage conversion more than 100% as 100%, and treat the status distribution across the total. More 60/60s would still add more status chance, so a status build might still use three 60/60s and a +90% chance mod, and the build logic makes internal sense. Still feels like we're talking about status type conversion rather than damage conversion per se, so long as we're assuming that damage type resistance and weakness isn't a thing, but yeah, maybe that's still better than trying to rework the numbers and remove the "conversion" aspect entirely. 

It is worth noting that removal of special traits and resistances inherent to damage types are themselves ancillary to the key proposal -- you could very well keep those, even though I'm personally not a fan of them, and the model as I'm proposing is sufficiently close in that respect to what we have now for there to still be a design choice to make. By contrast, removing damage types altogether doesn't allow for that, even though that is in fact the kind of more radical change I would personally prefer.

3 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

Sorry, I meant it'd be a pity to lose the +90% elemental damage mods completely. This is true, you'd have a better balance between these two SC types. 

That's fair; you could just make those mods totally convert damage/status to a certain type, and make those specific ones mutually exclusive. I'm not sure they'd still be viable, but at least they'd get to stay.

3 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

Yeah, that makes some sense. I think you'd be removing some potentially interesting layers from the system, but they're not interesting in practice now, so simpler might be better.

That might be worth exploring more, in that case, because if there are interesting elements being abandoned, it might be worth seeing how they could be preserved. Reducing complexity is only good insofar as it doesn't unnecessarily sacrifice depth: if even a small increase in complexity were to bring about much greater depth, that could be an increase worth incurring.