Mod polarities? Can we finally do away with them?

[LuckyCharm]

Hey all, so since I started playing warframe 6+ years ago I've always wondered why mods had polarities. I couldn't see any other reason than to limit builds. Back then it hampered you because any pistols that were being released only had one polarity and that was for the cold damage mod so you were always stuck with that. Now however we have forma to remove that. The only issue now is we've got such little customisation room in builds now because you have to set a polarity thats permanently on there once you forma things. I find it very strange that warframe is the only game to my knowledge that actually limits your choices the more work you put in rather than freeing up more options to do things with. 

Now i could be asking for universal forma but that still means that weapons need to be formad to even start being customisable. Can we please just get rid of the polarity system all together and simply mark mod slots with a "your mods cost half as much in this slot" symbol where the current polarities would be. (yeah basically universal forma but effecting all slots so you can use whatever exilus and aura you like from the start too) it'd cut forma usage a bit for the aura and exilus slots but more than make up for it with the ability to hotswap whatever mod config you like. 

It not only will simplify the mod system but people can actually test and try different builds much more frequently which leads to players modding knowledge improving and more people willing to try and share their builds around. At least id think so. 

 

[Voltage]

No thanks. The current system creates player choice on how they want to design a build. If you remove polarities, then the game is boring and there is little build depth. You would just polarize a Warframe 10 times or a weapon 9 times and slot every build you feel like for whatever application. We don't need to dumb down the game anymore in this regard.

Edited April 14, 2020 by Voltage

[Avienas]

51 minutes ago, Voltage said:

No thanks. The current system creates player choice on how they want to design a build. If you remove polarities, then the game is boring and there is little build depth. You would just polarize a Warframe 10 times or a weapon 9 times and slot every build you feel like for whatever application. We don't need to dumb down the game anymore in this regard.

Most build depth is kind of simplified to a META on every single build:

1. General Damage mod (Hornet strike in terms of pistols).
2. Multishot mod for guns(such as barrel diffusion), Reach for melee weapons(ESPECIALLY if you have primed reach), since skipping out on either of them is a death sentence on overall DPS.
3. Less your weapon has NO USE for critical chance and critical damage, Which lets be honest, SMEETA & ADARZA kavats exist, arcane avenger, Vigilante mod series and even just having a harrow in your party can make any non-crit weapon into crit-able weapons. You are NEVER skipping the critical chance and critical damage mods ever in your kits.
4. There is basically no reason, to ever skip a dual elemental status on your weapons, so yeah your going to either have 2 60/60 mods for both status chance and sizable elemental damage. Where EVEN IF the weapon has 0% status chance, you can still run 2 elemental silver mods cause yeah, ELEMENTAL DAMAGE BONUS still exists. Where like-wise, even if your guns have no crit/crit-dmg, you would likely just run 3-4 elemental mods instead cause Viral & Heat will dominate practically anything and even in cases where enemies do not have armor, you have plenty of other options to stack elemental damage bonus modifiers instead (Radiation on Corpus for example).

So overall, that makes 6 mods in any build that never really changes, Likely only melee gets some flexibility, but your likely going to have condition overload, sacrificial steel, organ shatter and blood rush crammed into your loadouts somewhere amongst the majority of them. P.S. i did not even throw in how plenty of guns want reload speed, fire rate or how most people just shove a riven mod onto a weapon. In addition to how some just LIKE to use hunter munitions in thar setups for high level enemy yeeting, but honestly is not necessary in most cases anyway.

So honestly once again, D.E. needs to redesign sheet, which i would not mind if they got rid of polarities and replace it with some kind of mod bench where we have 10-12 slots, 1 for aura, 1 for exilus, 4 for OFFENSIVE mods and 4 for utility/gimmick mods, at the very least. It would certainly require people to have a little more brain power when it comes to builds, then just stack every damage mod in existence on your build, especially when it comes to WARFRAME BUILDS, where they skip out mandatory important mods like Adaptation & Vitality(redirection in the case of shield frames) or even ARMOR for example, Thinking they can just kill everything and not get deleted by level 50+ enemies easily because they forgot to bring some form of survivability, especially on a frame who has no abilities to vastly reduce damage they would take or C.C. the majority of enemies to prevent them from getting yeet`d themselves.

Edited April 14, 2020 by Avienas

[TheLexiConArtist]

50 minutes ago, Voltage said:

No thanks. The current system creates player choice on how they want to design a build. If you remove polarities, then the game is boring and there is little build depth. You would just polarize a Warframe 10 times or a weapon 9 times and slot every build you feel like for whatever application. We don't need to dumb down the game anymore in this regard.

The current system is just an old and outdated system that no longer accurately reflects the game's modding economy. Still, I wouldn't ask that polarities be removed outright, rather that the point of Forma in extending flexibility for expensive builds be returned. It currently does the opposite; you forma slots for expensive mods, whoops! Can't vary your build. New shiny mods come out? Too bad, you have to overwrite previous effort.

Instead of polarising slots, we should polarise items, then be allowed to mix and match those unlocked polarities into our standard slots in any combination of using and not using what we've paid for.

No forma becomes more valuable than it already is, and it encourages more forma investments to keep adding permanent flexibility that will never screw you over in any future mod additions or changes.

We'd lose most of the 'cross-polarity' penalty, which is hardly a bad thing, but if desired by DE, some of this could be kept if 'non-polarity' is treated as a quantified number as well; baked-in polarities could still imply cross-polarity modding until the respective 'no polarity' quantity is increased to cover them.

2 minutes ago, Avienas said:

Less your weapon has NO USE for critical chance and critical damage, Which lets be honest, SMEETA & ADARZA kavats exist, arcane avenger, Vigilante mod series and even just having a harrow in your party can make any non-crit weapon into crit-able weapons. You are NEVER skipping the critical chance and critical damage mods ever in your kits.

This is oversimplified and inaccurate.

Harrow, Adarza and Avenger are additive crit chance. Point Strike (etc) doesn't multiply on these, so you'd probably be less likely to still use Crit Chance, even if you might feel spicy enough to still roll Crit Damage on this, depending on uptime.

Smeeta is assignment crit chance, precisely 200% no matter what your mods or base chance are doing, so you absolutely would not use Crit Chance mods. The fact you're direct to orange-crit in some cases might minimise the value of initial Crit Damage (it only accounts from White to Yellow anyway, any tier above is 200% damage not a further exponent of crit damage multiplier) making it less worth the slot in some cases.

Vigilante mods are simply 'chance to upgrade critical tier', so this again doesn't particularly incentivise Crit mods. At best, you're seeing a Nukor-type crit damage upgrade happen when it's otherwise unreliable (so modding Crit Damage good, chance still not so worth the slot). If you're already hitting yellows or above, though, it's once again just 200% damage regardless the initial Crit Damage multiplier.

Edited April 14, 2020 by TheLexiConArtist

[MagPrime]

It shouldn't be removed out right, especially with nothing to replace it.  The system serves a purpose that the game still needs but it does desperately need a rework. 

[Avienas]

4 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

-snip-

Instead of polarising slots, we should polarise items, then be allowed to mix and match those unlocked polarities into our standard slots in any combination of using and not using what we've paid for.

Better idea, i say that D.E. needs to capitalize on the mastery system with an extension:

1. When a player MASTERS a weapon for the first time, they CONSUME a forma or its new named item in order to gain a PROFICIENCY point in that weapon, so whenever they use that weapon, whether its a copy or not, they are able to select up to X number of slots on that weapon and put a proficiency slot on, where they can change that polarity to what they want, but the weapon gets reset every time they do that application, BUT, once a proficiency is applied then they can freely change its polarity to whatever they want, once its back up to 30
2. In the case of a new weapon, if you had say 5 proficiency with that weapon, you can immediately change 5 slots to whatever polarity you want. Plus just for SHEETZ and giggles, lets say variant weapons, once they have reached 30 for the first time, will share the same `proficiency points` with the regular weapons. basically a nice nudge to have those who mastered the base version of the weapon get a accelerated pass to getting the variant ready much sooner.

Anyway this is me just honestly quipping up a idea i came up with a minute ago on how D.E. could improve the forma system, so that making new copies of a weapon OR dealing with variant weapons, could take a whole lot less tedious grinding to have it ready for some fun. Plus it would be nice to just freely change polarity once we already have this proficiency point system applied to it and also allow configs able to have completely different polarity line ups, but the same exact number of polarity slots as before.

Oh plus weapons that had polarity by default would just be treated as procifiency value once you get thru the first maxing of it so applying a proficiency point when 2 polarity already exists would turn into 3 polarity one can flexible around.

PLUS JUST to point out agian, i am not talking about this proficiency point system being consumables like forma, you are basically creating a pool where you can apply slots for a specific weapon and freely change the polarity once said slots have had some application in place.

4 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

-snip-

Anywho just to end this portion of the quote, i honestly would like mastery to start giving some huge boon, like every 10 mastery would grant a +1 FREE polarity one can apply when they first apply a forma to a weapon, so a MR 28 would be able to immediately apply 3 polarity, 2 of them for FREE, basically as ANOTHER WAY, to nudge the thing into a much nicer system. Though i still want to stand by the idea of letting us freely change polarity slots to other types of slots, once we have polarized a slot to begin with.

4 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

This is oversimplified and inaccurate.

-snip-

The point is that you can take advantage of it to FORCE crits on even weapons with 0% crit chance, But honestly is not something reliable, just me JOKING at the fact we can make any weapon in existence crit if we wanted to push it. Its not guranteed crit obviously in most of the cases, but having around a 20~50% base on a rapid fire gun is more then reliable and a 60% or higher on something like a sniper rifle or bow like the kuva bramma is more then enough to achieve satisfactory chance to crit.

ULTIMATELY, the point still stands that your still going to run those 6 same mods i listed out in my list in almost every build with very little exception, No one builds ONLY for a single element of damage without the intend to mix it with another element, unless your using that single element in conjuction with a dual element aka Heat & Viral. Just as much as no one will slash IPS increasing mods on thar mod bench unless its name is a RIVEN MOD and usually with the intent for a impact or puncture negative to make Slash more prevalent.

This is ultimately why D.E. needs to revamp the modding system in plenty of ways, especially just for the simple fact to PURGE a bunch of mods that are quite literally just endo fodder garbage at this point, like the single damage IPS mods, warmcoat and its similar sibling mods, mods with extremely worthless types of stats like accelerated blast, a GREAT NUMBER of augment mods that can honestly go be smelted down into new augments that will have an excuse to be used, once D.E. gives us an augment slot, if they have not drastically narrowed down the mandatory mods by making them more innate stats, then making it a mod that is a must-have in setups, such the `serration` of all weapons.

 

[TheLexiConArtist]

5 minutes ago, Avienas said:

Better idea, i say that D.E. needs to capitalize on the mastery system with an extension:

-snip-

I recently dredged up my original suggestion from years ago to show to someone else, so here, let me go grab it to clarify:

Quote

Quote

In this mockup we can see:

• This Warframe has two optional Aura slot polarities - Madurai and Naramon - with the polarity currently in use (Naramon) highlighted.
• This Warframe has one optional Exilus slot polarity - Naramon - which is not in use, allowing an Exilus mod of Madurai polarity to be used without penalty.
• This Warframe has a bank of polarity options for regular slots, still kept separate from 'special' mod slots:
  • One Madurai polarity - currently in use, allowing Primed Continuity to be reduced in drain.
  • One Naramon polarity - in use, for Constitution.
  • One Vazarin polarity - in use for Redirection.
  • One Zenurik polarity - not in use because the build in use has no Zenurik mods, retaining the 'unpolarised' slot for free normal-draining use by a mod of any other polarity.
  • Zero Unairu polarities - no Warframe mods are currently in the Unairu school, but this would be an option for future mod releases.
• (Ignoring the stars of the old Forma indication), this Ivara has had four Forma installed - unlocking, in addition to its native Naramon Aura and Regular slot polarity and native Vazarin Regular-slot polarity: the extra Aura polarity, the Exilus polarity, one (used) Madurai polarity, and one (unused) Zenurik polarity.

Since then we've had a bunch of UI tweaks, and the area I put the polarity bank now holds rankup stats, but there's still real-estate that could be leveraged.

It also accounted for Auras separately than normal slots to preserve the existing system - this would be less necessary now we have Aura Forma but could still be applied to keep the Exilus slot separated (unless and until we get a uni-polarity for that too).

Umbra polarity could be added in, with minimal intrusiveness. The design allows for aggressive storage optimisation to cut the result down to a maximum of 6 new bytes per item (using four bytes split into 4-bit nibbles for the banks stored in pairs, as no more values than 0-9 are required for each polarity, and 1 additional dedicated byte per 'special' slot).

So, minimal database load too. Really wish DE picked it up.

 

DE are more likely to rework the Polarisation system in a way that preserves the individual Forma value (and incentive) because I'd wager Forma are probably one of the bigger plat sinks out of the market. Some people, like myself, don't consume Forma much explicitly because of the result in the current modding economy, inflexibility isn't worth that extra 15% power strength or whatever.

So, by moving to this system, it improves the QoL for polarisation, gives a better (and respected) incentive to invest more heavily, as you could forma up all the way to 8/8 of each polarity if you wanted, without ever coming to find you 'wasted' it (variant equipment aside).

It'd also partially remove the need to ever have duplicate equipment since you can rearrange at your leisure, and if DE also permitted the slot polarity config to be saved as a part of the loadouts when implementing this, then the only salient 'reason' to have equipment dupes would be for different focus lenses, I think!

[LuckyCharm]

I do understand your reasoning, but I also am very questionable what purpose the polarity system actually serves besides restricting you. What I proposed mostly was that you'd still be able to "forma" to get the added mod juice into your frames/weapons/etc, but mainly remove the lockout that comes with lots of forma, the constant need to reforma things when reworks and mod changes happen, and it'd make the very redundant aura forma, stance forma etc redundant. They were bandaid fixes at best any way and only really used in niche circumstances even though they cost just as much or more than normal forma. 

Umbral mods however are indeed powerful so I'd agree those should probably stay as the current umbral polarity. the rest though, for me personally i'd do away with it. My kubrow for example has 10 forma in it. My atomos has about 15 from all the times I had to re-forma it when it was nerfed or mods changed.  Getting 3 forma back when things are changed for your many hours needed to redo all your hard work on a weapon doesn't feel right, and it happens literally every time a weapons nerfed or changed to function differently. Sometimes like recently it's been your entire weapon roster. It's a lot of work that simple universal polarities would have fixed instantly 

[TheLexiConArtist]

9 hours ago, LuckyCharm said:

I do understand your reasoning, but I also am very questionable what purpose the polarity system actually serves besides restricting you. What I proposed mostly was that you'd still be able to "forma" to get the added mod juice into your frames/weapons/etc, but mainly remove the lockout that comes with lots of forma, the constant need to reforma things when reworks and mod changes happen, and it'd make the very redundant aura forma, stance forma etc redundant. They were bandaid fixes at best any way and only really used in niche circumstances even though they cost just as much or more than normal forma. 

It's out of date, that's all. In the past we didn't really have a pile of 14+ drain mods to stack in our builds. The Exilus slot - and its additional drain - didn't exist. Primed mods didn't exist. Rivens didn't exist. The worst offenders were a core mod here and there like your Damage, your Multishot, and your basic Effective Health modding; maybe a fatty Corrupted mod. Three or four, not several fat Primed mods and/or several fat Corrupted mods and/or the core mod(s) all stuffed in possibly alongside a Riven or an Exilus. (Or both, now weapon exilus are a thing!)

Cutting down three or four fatties left the rest basically free pickings. Now you can need 6 or more polarised slots just to fit a complete build.

 

Free uni-polarity won't happen though, because the need for more Forma while having a 23 hour build time means the bundle is always an attractive buy. That's why I proposed something that would make people more likely to invest more - by only removing the disincentives.