Elemental Damage Scaling

[thurmack]

Please consider a rework of elemental damage so it scales off the amount of damage done with that element, rather than an odd mix of base damage (much of it not part of the element) and elemental mods (of which there are none for Gas).

That will likely mean scaling it up, but it would also mean that doing more Gas damage would mean stronger Gas procs, which makes perfect sense.

 

[taiiat]

uhh....

but that's already the case for every Elemental Type? Mod Scaling, Crits, and Health Type Modifiers already determine the strength of DoT's.
Gas is the only odd duck out that its DoT's scale with Mods in a really weird way rather than the standard way that the other ones do.

Edited March 20, 2020 by taiiat

[Birdframe_Prime]

I'm not sure this actually means what you think it means. And I'm not sure what you're actually trying to achieve, because as far as I'm concerned making all procs scale exclusively off what damage came from that Element alone is a nerf.

For example, Slash procs Bleed, bleed is calculated off a percentage of the total damage of all Impact, Puncture and Slash on a weapon, after mods and bonuses (such as Crit) have been applied. What this means is that weapons that are not biased towards Slash, or even weapons that simply use Hunter Munitions to create bleeds when no Slash is present, have a chance to tick for high damage.

DE attempted to make what you requested before the release of Khora, with Bleeds only calculated off the amount of Slash on the actual weapon, not the total IPS, and the community vehemently rejected it. DE did not carry on with those changes and Khora as a frame had to be reworked to change her abilities away from the reliance on switching between IPS states (she was supposed to be the flagship of the new system).

Meanwhile, the actual Elemental procs, like Toxin, is actually benefited from having not just its total Toxin damage, but also the base IPS calculated in. So when you proc a Toxin effect under your example, you'd get around 50% of the total Toxin damage (on a weapon that has 100 base, and a 90% Toxin mod on it, this means that you'd tick for 45 damage per second at base) while under the current you get the benefit of all the other damage on top (so instead of 45 per tick you would get 95 per tick).

Similar calculations are made for Heat and Gas.

It can seem confusing, when you try to parse it all out, but having done the maths both for this thread and for the previous (failed) attempt for DE to do exactly this to the IPS status effects, the simple answer is that having the combined damage contribute to the total for damage-over-time is way more effective than only having it based off the elemental damage.

This is because the most of any one element you can get on a weapon, if you want single element, is 150% of the weapon's innate damage (after raw damage mods), and while you can get more if you stack in for the combined elements (you get 300% for something like Gas with both 90% and the 60/60% mods) the results would still be better if you included the base damage as part of the calculation on top of those numbers.

The only saving grace in your suggestion is the part where you suggest maybe 'scaling it up', which I take to mean that maybe you would change the percentage of that damage that's carried over into the damage-over-time effects? But even then, I still don't think that a Heat or Gas proc would be stronger with only that type of damage coming across unless you made damage-over-time equate to more than... 80-90% of the base damage of that element. You would have to weight it really, really carefully across each element.

[thurmack]

I'm not sure what you mean by "the only saving grace". My suggestion is only three lines, one of which addresses the need to up the damage to compensate for the loss of base damage mods. It's part of the same suggestion.

I'm not arguing for increasing or decreasing the damage at all. If they think the current damage is good, that's fine with me. I'm saying it should be more accurately related to the elemental damage being done. I'm just arguing that heat damage DOT should be tied to the amount of heat damage being done. The community outcry against slash/bleed isn't easy to quantify, and there's no way to measure how much of the pushback was because people just like powerful meta.
 

[Birdframe_Prime]

7 hours ago, thurmack said:

I'm not sure what you mean by "the only saving grace".

Unless you're being sarcastic; 'only saving grace' means that I think your other suggestions are, at best, silly and inaccurate.

If your changes were made, the one thing that could possibly save them would be over-compensating with the damage increase you suggested.

Without that aspect, nothing you've suggested would be any kind of improvement, and even with it you'd have to have a very, very extreme level of compensation the maths doesn't add up to what can be achieved under the current system.

[DrBorris]

On 2020-03-20 at 2:14 PM, Birdframe_Prime said:

-snip-

Okay, but you do know that other changes can be made, right? If DE were to change how elemental status damage calculations were done they would be easily capable of just, you know, changing them a little bit more?

I get that if you take the OP at the most literal then this will be a nerf as you suggest, but give the idea the benefit of the doubt. Don't bash down a concept just because one implementation of said concept is bad.

In the case of all of the elemental (not physical) damage procs, the damage of the proc is divided by two after adding together the modded elemental damage and the base damage. So if DE were to remove that 0.5 multiplier then we would be at a something that would be far more feasible.

Spoiler

Now: Status Damage = 0.5 x ( Base Damage + Modded Elemental Damage )

Suggestion: Status Damage = ( Total Elemental Damage )

But let's think about this a bit more, what are the consequences? For one, if the status effect has anything less than +100% modded damage than this would still effectively be a nerf. So throwing on a single heat mod on your Viral/Heat build will have less of a DoT. On the other hand, for any build that has higher than +100% elemental damage (effectively any elemental combo) then this would be a buff. Now things are getting interesting, modding for more elemental damage is now twice as effective at increasing the DoTs of status effects. This could actually shake up modding a bit, maybe you will want to drop some mods to stack a bit more elemental. Your decisions made while modding are more impactful.

This isn't even getting into how this will work with weapons that have an innate element. If anything these weapons may be overbuffed.

 

As for slash, it wouldn't be that hard to make an exception for IPS given that we have so little say in innate IPS stats. And if something has "forced" status effects those could just use base damage.

 

Edit: I would go so far to say that ALL status effects, including the debuff effects, should scale with damage instead of stacking. But that is a conversation for another time.

Edited March 22, 2020 by DrBorris

[Arcira]

Maybe it´s an odd suggestion but since they changed the IPS status share mechanics this might work now:

- Each weapon gets a special category only for "Ammunition" with (?) slots and (?) capacity.
- Only the 60/60 (like High Voltage) and 120 (like Stormbringer) mods for each damage type are now ammo types and can be changed there
- The rank can be changed (because of the capacity limit not all ammo types can be max level at the same time).
- Each weapon get´s a set of pre installed mods For example Boltor Prime (mostly puncture) would have a low level "Rupture" (Impact), a "Piercing Hit" and "Piercing Caliber" (Puncture).
- The added damage depends on the base damage of the weapon (Boltor Prime 46 total base damage)

Bonus: possibility to change the magazine inside a mission e.g. switch between frost and puncture ammo.

Edited March 22, 2020 by Arcira

[Birdframe_Prime]

3 hours ago, DrBorris said:

Don't bash down a concept just because one implementation of said concept is bad.

I wouldn't, except that's all you presented.

Besides, they've literally just changed the way all of this works. Based on the repeated way DE have implemented updates, made changes based on feedback, and then left alone for longer testing... You could either be in luck and there are more changes coming, or they'll satisfied with the results after the Impact and Gas changes in the next update. Since this thread isn't part of the actual Feedback threads on the topic, it's going to make zero impact in any case.

[DrBorris]

30 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

I wouldn't, except that's all you presented.

This doesn't make sense.

You say you wouldn't, implying that you are willing to look past the details to see an idea for its greater concept. But then you say "except that's all you presented", implying that you are only taking into consideration what was explicitly written.

Also, not sure if you saw, but I am not the person who started this thread. I just came in here, found the idea interesting, then saw some other people strawman the idea apart. So I decided to try and clarify on it myself and give a suggestion on how I think that the OP's idea could better be implemented.

 

I know it is asking more of the reader, but anytime someone does put forth the effort to go into detail most people either ignore the entire thing because "too long" or only skim the detailed concept, criticizing it based on what they think someone is trying to say (which means the original writer wasted their time with detail). Don't immediately look for what is wrong, look for what is right and judge if that concept is worth exploring further. In addition, it is ridiculous to expect a single person to be able to think through every issue with a concept. There is a reason that it is TEAMS of people that put together new content/reworks. No single suggestion will ever be perfect, if anything it is the responsibility of us as the community to help each other attempt to perfect each of our ideas. If you only ever accept perfection, then no concept will ever be good enough.

 

Also DE have repeatedly said that they read the entire Forums, even General Discussion. Those "This is in GD, DE doesn't look here" posts are BS. The original post isn't really a feedback on the latest status changes, this "problem" has existed since Damage 2.0. And a change like what the OP suggests, because it i something outside the scope of the recent status changes, should probably see a separate conversation about it more specifically.

... but there will never be a conversation if people say "Well, if you implement this in this way it is a nerf, so this whole idea is bad".

Sorry about ranting, I'm just getting tired of seeing this same pattern over and over and over again.

Edited March 22, 2020 by DrBorris