Viral is too overpowered. Please fix and other Status complaints.

[Graavarg]

On 2020-05-20 at 6:07 PM, Xydeth said:

u can do that urself...why would i do that for u ? do u know how many weapons there are ? if u dont believe ppl then do some research on ur own instead of trying to make other people do it for u.

otherwise its ur loss.

Yes I can, and I actually have my own Excel Warframe calc-ecosystem.

But math was your argument, an argument which now seems a bit... ...not there. I mean, you claim something and then ask me to prove it myself? 🙂

I'll give you a hint, just do the math on at what number of "close by" lvl 50 enemies gas & viral breaks even for the different factions, with viral normally stacking up on single enemies and gas normally proc'ing on multiple nearby enemies. Just those single damage types, with the same damage & 100% status chance (to make it easier) and no other extra tricks (explosions/punch-trough, weapon abilities etc.). It's an interesting comparison, since they function in different dimensions, a viral shot does it's damage and then procs the virus damage increase on the same target (100%, rising to a max of 325% at 10 stacked procs), a gas shot does it's damage and then procs gas cloud, which will do another 300% damage (6 ticks of 50%), but will also proc gas cloud on nearby enemies (from 3 meters to max 6 meters at the max of 10 stacked procs) and can occur in multiple instances (though exactly how that happens is a bit unclear, to me at least). Anyway, you might be surprised by the results. And how heavily influenced the overall dps/damage/enemies killed is dependent on the amount of enemy abundance (enemies/square meter).

Now I am not claiming that gas is better than viral (or vice versa), what I am saying i that the relative effectiveness is quite situational and gas is nowhere as bad as some think or believe. However, the visual effects for gas really suck (you can't even see which enemies are affected, and the "slivers of blackness" that is supposed to be the gas cloud is ridiculous) and using a gas-based weapon is quite different from the normal "mow one enemy down at a time" or "ka-bramma them in groups". To maximise the effectiveness you need to let the gas cloud damage tick for up to 6 seconds (by switching to another target) and how many times you proc the gas cloud (and on which enemy) depends on how many enemies there are, if they are spread out and even where they are coming from. 

[Bristoling]

That's a nice neat graph on the previous page but it does not account for the 75% extra damage that Viral deals against Cloned Flesh for the Grineer, or how Corrosive works against Alloy armor, which some of the tanky Grineer units possess (Bombard, Napalm), and where Corrosive loses badly vs Viral.

Corrosive+Heat in real game scenarios is only 20% more effective than Viral+Heat vs Grineer (CHG+CB), IF you apply all 10 stacks of each status. With only 1 status each (low status weapon), Viral is boosting dps by 100% while Corrosive deals with 20%-something less armor. It's not comparable.

Also, even when you talk purely about the graph presented on the previous page, it is clear that even once Corrosive+Heat overtakes Viral+Heat, it does so, but by a very, very small margin. 

To say that Virals status proc isn't too strong is a bit delusional.

Edited May 23, 2020 by Bristoling

[Dragazer]

32 minutes ago, Bristoling said:

That's a nice neat graph on the previous page but it does not account for the 75% extra damage that Viral deals against Cloned Flesh for the Grineer, or how Corrosive works against Alloy armor, which some of the tanky Grineer units possess (Bombard, Napalm), and where Corrosive loses badly vs Viral.

Corrosive+Heat in real game scenarios is only 20% more effective than Viral+Heat vs Grineer (CHG+CB), IF you apply all 10 stacks of each status. With only 1 status each (low status weapon), Viral is boosting dps by 100% while Corrosive deals with 20-something armor. It's not comparable.

Also, even when you talk purely about the graph presented on the previous page, it is clear that even once Corrosive+Heat overtakes Viral+Heat, it does so, but by a very, very small margin. 

To say that Virals status proc isn't too strong is a bit delusional.

It also doesn't account for 75% bonus damage and 75% armor ignore that corrosive has against ferrite armor.

You seem to not understand how the graph works at all.

For example at 20k armor (lvl 175 gokstad officer), corr+heat has a damage multiplier of 0.231x vs 0.124x of viral+heat

0.231/0.124 =1.8629    In other words if DE buffed corrosive to 90% armor removal, then corr+heat would deal 86.29% more dmg than viral+heat and that's before accounting for corrosives innate dmg bonus/armor ignore on ferrite. 

Its not delusional when considering how ridiculously hard DE nerfed corrosive and gas. Or how a simple buff to 80% to 90% armor removal (remember corrosive used to strip 100% armor b4 the nerf) on corrosive would have it outdo viral on armored targets 

Edited May 23, 2020 by Dragazer

[Bristoling]

2 hours ago, Dragazer said:

It also doesn't account for 75% bonus damage and 75% armor ignore that corrosive has against ferrite armor.

You seem to not understand how the graph works at all.

For example at 20k armor (lvl 175 gokstad officer), corr+heat has a damage multiplier of 0.231x vs 0.124x of viral+heat

0.231/0.124 =1.8629    In other words if DE buffed corrosive to 90% armor removal, then corr+heat would deal 86.29% more dmg than viral+heat and that's before accounting for corrosives innate dmg bonus/armor ignore on ferrite. 

Its not delusional when considering how ridiculously hard DE nerfed corrosive and gas. Or how a simple buff to 80% to 90% armor removal (remember corrosive used to strip 100% armor b4 the nerf) on corrosive would have it outdo viral on armored targets 

This Gokstad Officer level 175 only exists in the Simulacrum.

Lets entertain level 175 Heavy Gunner example instead (that's still over an hour or two of endurance run). She has 9791 armor. Let's say your weapon has 10k damage. You deal 17.5k (Ferrite bonus), and bypass 75% of the armor (0.891% reduction). Let's assume you stripped 80% of armor, then another 10% with Heat - down to 244 (0.445%). Your end damage is 9712. 

With Viral, you deal 17.5k (Cloned Flesh bonus), strip 50% of armor (0.942% reduction), get 4.25x multiplier from status. End damage is 4287, so only half as much. You could say that it is proven without the shadow of the doubt that Corrosive+Heat is better than Viral+Heat.

But you completely ignored other part of my post, because Grineer also have Alloy armor.

Take level 175 Bombard or Napalm. 9874 armor. With Corrosive+Heat, this is 987 armor, 0.767% reduction. If you deal 10k damage, your final damage is 2330.

If you take Viral+Heat, you are dealing 17.5k damage vs 4937 armor, 0.943% reduction, but get 4.25x multiplier. Your final damage is 4239, so Viral+Heat deals almost twice the damage of Corrosive.

Majority of bosses, good chunk of Grineer units (the common ones like Elite Lancers, or tanky ones like Bombard/Napalm/Nox) and all Index enemies have Alloy Armor, vs which Viral is usually twice as strong IF we assume high status weapons. If we assume weapons with low status chance, Viral straight up doubles the damage on first proc, while Corrosive has to stack multiple times to achieve the same effectiveness. If we assume crit weapons, Hunter Munitions + Viral shreds. Slash based weapons, again, Viral shreds. Most of melee weapons have high slash or stances forcing slash procs, and Viral shreds, again.

You shouldn't trust the Corrosive damage to be in a good spot compared to Viral based on only one graph presenting only one possible scenario. Grineer have 2 armor types. Vs Ferrite, Corrosive is twice as strong. Vs Alloy, Viral is twice as strong. Slash or Crit HM weapons, Viral is stronger.

Viral is performing too good. It isn't even a discussion at this point and majority of people agree.

Edited May 23, 2020 by Bristoling

[Xolgys]

vor 6 Stunden schrieb Graavarg:

lvl 50 enemies

lv 50 doesnt matter at all. u can tickle enemies and theyll die...why talk about balance and then base it on low level enemies ? anything works there and it will suffice.

armor scaling is really weak now but still renders gas totally pointless. elec is better than gas now which says a lot in itself.

vor 6 Stunden schrieb Graavarg:

Now I am not claiming that gas is better than viral (or vice versa), what I am saying i that the relative effectiveness is quite situational and gas is nowhere as bad as some think or believe.

just that it is. compare gas before vs now. its a dead shadow of what it was before and theres hardly any arguing about that. the AoE it now has is not important when the status overall performs like hot air. grab urself an oldschool lanka and see how good it is. spoiler: any "veteran" who loved the combo with mag will have 100% chance to cry and +500% amount of tears. 

vor 2 Stunden schrieb Bristoling:

To say that Virals status proc isn't too strong is a bit delusional.

again, viral is not too strong. the other competing status effects got nerfed into the ground for no real reason which means the only one remaining is viral/slash combo. theres nothing too strong here, only too weak.

why would anyone nerf things for no reason and then to balance things out bring the functional rest down to that weak state ? makes absolutely no sense. they couldve kept the armor scaling as it was...that state of the game was better actually than what we have right now.

vor 5 Minuten schrieb Bristoling:

Viral is performing too good. It isn't even a discussion at this point and majority of people agree.

i wonder what statistics of an average players opinion u have at hand. most ppl i talked/chatted with or watched videos of agree that the rest needs a buff as i described before: virals competition got nerfed into the ground. ofc viral then performs much better than the rest and seems "too strong".

Edited May 23, 2020 by Xydeth

[Bristoling]

23 minutes ago, Xydeth said:

any "veteran" who loved the combo with mag will have 100% chance to cry and +500% amount of tears. 

Use Electric+Viral instead, the combo still works albeit it is weaker.

23 minutes ago, Xydeth said:

again, viral is not too strong. the other competing status effects got nerfed into the ground for no real reason which means the only one remaining is viral/slash combo. theres nothing too strong here, only too weak.

Enemies health and armor was also nerfed so there is no point in saying that other effects got nerfed. Everything was nerfed, enemies included. In fact the enemies are way too weak now.

If other statuses are much weaker and Viral stands out, then yes, Viral is too strong in comparison to them. Other statuses being weak, or Viral being too strong, is a separate issue but end of the day it is just sematics. If you stand on a mountain, are you the one who is too high, or are the hills below you too low?

Meaningless discussion until you are certain what elevation is the baseline. But we can still have a discussion about why the hill and the top of the mountain aren't on the same level, or if there should be mountains, hills and valleys in the first place.

Edited May 23, 2020 by Bristoling

[Dragazer]

1 hour ago, Bristoling said:

This Gokstad Officer level 175 only exists in the Simulacrum.

Lets entertain level 175 Heavy Gunner example instead (that's still over an hour or two of endurance run). She has 9791 armor. Let's say your weapon has 10k damage. You deal 17.5k (Ferrite bonus), and bypass 75% of the armor (0.891% reduction). Let's assume you stripped 80% of armor, then another 10% with Heat - down to 244 (0.445%). Your end damage is 9712. 

With Viral, you deal 17.5k (Cloned Flesh bonus), strip 50% of armor (0.942% reduction), get 4.25x multiplier from status. End damage is 4287, so only half as much. You could say that it is proven without the shadow of the doubt that Corrosive+Heat is better than Viral+Heat.

But you completely ignored other part of my post, because Grineer also have Alloy armor.

Take level 175 Bombard or Napalm. 9874 armor. With Corrosive+Heat, this is 987 armor, 0.767% reduction. If you deal 10k damage, your final damage is 2330.

If you take Viral+Heat, you are dealing 17.5k damage vs 4937 armor, 0.943% reduction, but get 4.25x multiplier. Your final damage is 4239, so Viral+Heat deals almost twice the damage of Corrosive.

Majority of bosses, good chunk of Grineer units (the common ones like Elite Lancers, or tanky ones like Bombard/Napalm/Nox) and all Index enemies have Alloy Armor, vs which Viral is usually twice as strong IF we assume high status weapons. If we assume weapons with low status chance, Viral straight up doubles the damage on first proc, while Corrosive has to stack multiple times to achieve the same effectiveness. If we assume crit weapons, Hunter Munitions + Viral shreds. Slash based weapons, again, Viral shreds. Most of melee weapons have high slash or stances forcing slash procs, and Viral shreds, again.

You shouldn't trust the Corrosive damage to be in a good spot compared to Viral based on only one graph presenting only one possible scenario. Grineer have 2 armor types. Vs Ferrite, Corrosive is twice as strong. Vs Alloy, Viral is twice as strong. Slash or Crit HM weapons, Viral is stronger.

Viral is performing too good. It isn't even a discussion at this point and majority of people agree.

You are using the current armor strip value of corrosive at 80%. All of my entire posts on this thread have been advocating for buffing corrosive to 90% from the beginning. And comparing how a simple buff to 90% armor strip will have it outdo viral easily. 

On 2020-05-21 at 11:53 AM, Dragazer said:

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/ibzbbomrep

Here is what viral vs corrosive would look like if they simply buff corrosive up to 90% armor removal.

You are also assuming the weapons will have nothing but viral+heat or corr+heat. Many weapons will also have base ips or other elements in the dmg mix that wont benefit from either corrosive or virals respective dmg bonuses. Your heat procs/modded heat dmg for example won't receive the bonus 75% to cloned flesh that viral has

 

Edited May 23, 2020 by Dragazer

[Bristoling]

10 minutes ago, Dragazer said:

You are also assuming the weapons will have nothing but viral+heat or corr+heat. Many weapons will also have base ips or other elements in the dmg mix that wont benefit from either corrosive or virals respective dmg bonuses. Your heat procs/modded heat dmg for example won't receive the bonus 75% to cloned flesh that viral has

Well yes of course they won't benefit from +75% vs cloned flesh, but they will neither benefit from +75% vs ferrite + ignore 75% of armor. Sure, reducing 90% of armor (Corrosive 80% + 10% remaining with Heat) will benefit other damage types but so will damage multiplication from Viral status (+50% armor strip). That's why I only compared pure Viral vs pure Corrosive damage.

10 minutes ago, Dragazer said:

You are using the current armor strip value of corrosive at 80%. All of my entire posts on this thread have been advocating for buffing corrosive to 90% from the beginning. And comparing how a simple buff to 90% armor strip will have it outdo viral easily.

I missed that. We are on the same page then, because I do believe that currently Corrosive is kind of underpowered in comparison to Viral which is just such a good all rounder currently that there is little benefit to swapping to Corrosive vs Grineer.

However I still think buffing Corrosive instead of nerfing Viral might not be the best way to go about it. It might balance it better vs high level enemies, but for majority of playerbase (or new players) Viral would still be the number 1 go to status. It makes the game very uninteresting as there is little choice for levels 1-60 for example, if there is only 1 good element combination that doesn't has to be swapped out for the first 150 or 300 hours of gameplay.

We need to remember that its the new players that pay the bills, and if their choice is limited to only Viral (because everything else is meh in comparison), they will get bored faster and might not buy this plat pack, which will mean less money to pay the devs, which means slower development, which means less content for us.

Edited May 23, 2020 by Bristoling

[Dragazer]

38 minutes ago, Bristoling said:

We need to remember that its the new players that pay the bills, and if their choice is limited to only Viral (because everything else is meh in comparison), they will get bored faster and might not buy this plat pack, which will mean less money to pay the devs, which means slower development, which means less content for us.

It's been awhile since I was a new player but, iirc lvl 100 content: sorties/liches/kuva floods can be accessible at mr 5 after completing The War Within

I'm going a bit offtopic now but: https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/fpgzve/2019_warframe_revenueuser_data_read_it_if_you/

"As indicated in their Annual Result for the year 2019 announcement, while Warframe's players base recorded an increase of 19.5% in registered accounts (48 to 57.5 million accounts), their revenue had actually gone down by 12.2%."

Seems like new players aren't really the ones paying the bills, but the long term players. 

Edited May 23, 2020 by Dragazer

[VoidArkhangel]

I don't see a lot of difference in my weapons, now some weapons deals more damage with viral but the rest are the same (with corrosive).

[Xylena_Lazarow]

Corrosive is finally fine, leave it alone. The meta wasn't better when everyone used Corrosive instead of Viral.

Viral is strong, but instead of nerfing it, they could give Viral resistance to robots and fossilized Infested heavies.

The type chart needs a lot of love. Magnetic, Gas, Blast, and Cold should have their negative type modifiers removed.

[Bristoling]

11 hours ago, Dragazer said:

It's been awhile since I was a new player but, iirc lvl 100 content: sorties/liches/kuva floods can be accessible at mr 5 after completing The War Within

I'm going a bit offtopic now but: https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/fpgzve/2019_warframe_revenueuser_data_read_it_if_you/

"As indicated in their Annual Result for the year 2019 announcement, while Warframe's players base recorded an increase of 19.5% in registered accounts (48 to 57.5 million accounts), their revenue had actually gone down by 12.2%."

Seems like new players aren't really the ones paying the bills, but the long term players. 

It simply means more players created new accounts due to hype, but quickly realized the game isn't for them or the hype was fake news (Lich/Railjack release fiasco + content drought lasting many months). This revenue for 2019 doesn't inform us on anything other that more people tried the game but less people liked it.

To be back on topic, it is true that you can theoretically access level 100 content at MR5, but realistically players will be MR10-15 by the time they can actually compete in this content. Most of these lower MR players are simply carried by vets in public matchmaking.

Edited May 24, 2020 by Bristoling

[TeCoolTenno]

side note, 80 -> 90 is not a small buff for corrosive, it's actually doubling+ the power.

When a number is 0-100% removal, balance is based around the remaining amount. Aka, 20% to 10% 

 

I think as 'small' as 80% -> 85% on the status and 75% -> 80% on the weakness/inherent armour ignore can bring corrosive back to having a niche against heavy armoured grineer

Edited May 25, 2020 by TeCoolTenno

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

Corrosive+heat is slighly better than viral+heat against heavy gunner, and better against infested (but killing them ain't an issue tbh)

But the real problem is that the rock / paper / stone is still almost inexistant due to shield scaling and the base modifiers.

Appart from heavy gunner / bombard, you should also check how to efficiently kill a lvl 150+ kyta raknoid, which is another bullet sponge but with huge shield (and immune to magnetic proc', wild lvl 125 can appear if you farm toroids)

[FrailDK]

alot of these issues remind me of one of the first RTS games i can remember where "armor type" VS "weapon type" actually mattered monumentally. 

The game was Dawn of War. regardless of whether you liked this game or not. if you were facing any type of vehicles that wasnt (buggys) or (rhinos) which were still amazing hard to take out using even their type of heavy infantry weaponry similar to heavy machine guns. And trying to take on the heavier armor with anything not ment for it resulted in weapons dealing 1 dmg. all of them vs this armor. it would be like firing a rifle at a tank. you will NEVER even dent it no matter how many magazines you fire at it. 

Why not differentiate armor types and shields vs the damage types we have alot more? if they all just work on anything what is even the point of them ? 

thats how i see it anyway. i wouldnt mind actually feeling the burn of picking stupid elements against certain factions in this game. that would actually be nice. 

 

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

6 hours ago, FrailDK said:

alot of these issues remind me of one of the first RTS games i can remember where "armor type" VS "weapon type" actually mattered monumentally. 

The game was Dawn of War. regardless of whether you liked this game or not. if you were facing any type of vehicles that wasnt (buggys) or (rhinos) which were still amazing hard to take out using even their type of heavy infantry weaponry similar to heavy machine guns. And trying to take on the heavier armor with anything not ment for it resulted in weapons dealing 1 dmg. all of them vs this armor. it would be like firing a rifle at a tank. you will NEVER even dent it no matter how many magazines you fire at it. 

Why not differentiate armor types and shields vs the damage types we have alot more? if they all just work on anything what is even the point of them ? 

thats how i see it anyway. i wouldnt mind actually feeling the burn of picking stupid elements against certain factions in this game. that would actually be nice. 

 

That's exactly why they nerfed Corrosive. When Corrosive had the ability to completely strip armor, it was better than Radiation against Alloy. 

It's just that they also buffed Viral that still retained its synergy with Slash procs (Bleed). They removed the 4x proc priority to nerf Slash, but Hunter Munitions and Bleed from melee stances exist. It really goes back to how Bleed is an outlier that DE is afraid to directly touch due to the huge public outcry when they were proposing Damage 2.5 a few years ago. Granted, most procs for Damage 2.5 weren't worth it to build status for at all. 

Players naturally gravitate to the path of least resistance, which is why Bane mods aren't very popular (Gas used to triple dip on it) and why everyone used to run Corrosive against everything. Due to how armor-class modifiers work, Corrosive deals 6x more damage than neutral against Sortie Level Heavy Gunners before procs. (It was the best elemental period except for status immune units.) Corrosive is pretty much neutral against everything else (and armor stripping proc dealt with Alloy nicely). The penalty for not running Corrosive (6x less damage against Ferrite and no armor stripping proc) was larger than any gain of running anything else with the exception of Viral/Slash that bypassed armor scaling. 

The problem we still have is that anti-armor damage types and procs are the only ones that matter.

Edited May 25, 2020 by DealerOfAbsolutes