Viral is too overpowered; the damage system is senseless

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

Hello!

Not so long ago, DE introduced some changes to existing status effects and improved the efficacy of most of them (Blast, Gas and Puncture have questionable worth). Particularly, Viral saw an extreme rise in damage potential by simply increasing the damage dealt to health by absurd amounts. This very unnecessary and unbalanced change has made Viral/Slash Viral/Heat the superior damage choice in any scenario in which enemies are affected by status effects. Even Infested and their resistance to Viral stand no chance at all against this. Moreover, some status effects make absolutely no sense (how do robots get sick or poisoned with Viral or Toxin?). Which is why I am going to propose some balancing changes to the current status effects and how it interacts with enemies.

I believe that, depending on the element, distinct effects need to be applied if dealing with either organic (Grineer troops) or inorganic enemies (Corpus Robotics). For simplicity' sake, numbers and values after the maximum number of stacks will not be proposed here; only a general guideline. As such:

Physical Damage types:

1. Slash - Status effect length and damage is increased for organic enemies, and severely reduced for inorganic enemies.

2. Impact - Procs now, in addition to the stagger, have a chance of temporarily disarming organic enemies (knocks the weapon off their hands, makes sense, right?).

3. Puncture - Repurposed from Viral: Increases damage against armor by X%. Robotic enemies take Y% more damage. Armored robotic enemies take Z% more damage. Currently, Puncture is arguably the most senseless (reduced damage? why?) and worthless proc (Impact stops damage by 100% by staggering opponents). The idea behind this change is that Puncture pierces armor/robotic exoskeleton and exposes vital spots/circuitry. Therefore providing increased damage potential.

Primary elements:

1. Heat - Stays the same

2. Cold - When maximum number of stacks is reached, the enemy is frozen. Frozen enemies take vastly increased damage from Impact, Puncture and Blast sources.

3. Electricity - Status effect length and damage are considerably increased against inorganic enemies. In addition, circuitry is fried; vastly reducing accuracy. Stays as is against organic enemies.

4. Toxin - I seriously fail to grasp how Toxin affects robotics. I'll go ahead and boldly suggest that inorganic enemies are immune to Toxin procs (not the damage per se). It's not that big of a deal considering you have a myriad of other options to choose from.

Secondary elements:

1. Blast - Return the forced knockdown. The new inaccuracy buff is next to negligible compared to a 5m AoE knockdown. This was especially valuable for melee weapons.

2. Gas - Gas status effects create lingering, expanding clouds of Gas damage. Organic enemies that inhale the gas will choke and begin to cough. Providing some form of crowd control. Damage penalties against Flesh are removed. Inorganic enemies take reduce damage from the cloud and suffer no effects from the gas itself (due to not breathing)

3. Radiation - Stays the same (already deals 25% more damage to robotic enemies)

4. Magnetic - Procs now disable robotic weaponry, shield regen and eximus auras (both organic and inorganic). Magnetic deals more damage against inorganic enemies.

5. Corrosive - Corrosive now seeps acid unto inorganic enemy weapons; potentially jamming them

6. Viral - Return to previous state. Honestly, Viral was great as is. Presently, it's just ridiculous. Now, in addition to halving organic enemy health, Viral procs can now spread to enemies within X meters from the infected target. Robotic enemies are unaffected by Viral procs. Infested don't have their health halved, instead reduced by 25%.

Summary:

1. Slash, Heat, Toxin, Gas and Viral work best against organic enemies (Flesh, Cloned Flesh etc.)

2. Puncture, Electricity, Magnetic and Radiation work best against inorganic enemies (Machinery and Robotics).

3. Impact, Blast, Cold, Corrosive remain relatively neutral in regards to effects on either organic or inorganic enemies. They're mostly used for shields (Impact/Cold), crowd control (Blast/Impact/Cold) and armor (Corrosive/Cold).

 

Are these proposed changes drastic and will they change the meta should a similar idea be implemented? Absolutely, that's the idea.

Will it force players to actively think about their damage mods before a mission instead of sticking Viral/Slash/Heat on everything? Hopefully, yes.

Edited May 25, 2020 by (PS4)LoisGordils

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

So you want to turn viral into new gas. 
Hell no.

[(PSN)DARK_WIZARD999]

This all sounds like convoluted nonsense that's just going to make things even more messy. Most of the damage types are useless filler, and you get to a point where any of it only matters on very high level content anyway. You can kill just fine with a no added element at all even. Really, I'd like if the base damage types had effects, like puncture pins them against the wall, impact smacks them into other enemies, slash cuts them in half and yields health orbs, toxin makes them fall to the floor and spasm, electric the same as when volt shocks them, fire they do as they do now and run about, and cold where they freeze in place. 

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

4 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

So you want to turn viral into new gas. 
Hell no.

How is returning Viral to its previous state turning it into Gas? Viral was great as it was and it's stupidly powerful at the moment and that absolutely needs to change. It's bad design. 

Edited May 26, 2020 by (PS4)LoisGordils

[keikogi]

I find most of the damage types over convoluted nonsense I would rather just have physical damage, fire, electric , Cold , Poison , Void , Tau and True.  Most damage types are pointless anyways so might as well trim down the fat. I still think damage 2.0 was the worst change on warframe design history because it shackled the game to an over convoluted damage system that has no depth. It was a misguided attempt to address the rainbow build and serrated blade meta but the real issue was elemental mods were the best damage per slot mod available at the time and armor was the biggest source of EHP. Behold after the rework corrosive and slash became meta (right now viral is better but the point still stands ). Seriously, the damage triangle of Fire emblem with its simplicity has way more gameplay depth than the warframe´s 15+ damage types.

I don’t think we should add even more stuff to it, in fact I think we should dial it down. Streamline it

[Steel_Rook]

Yup. I'd personally scrap the majority of the damage types and go with just one physical and four equivalent elemental damage types. Give physical overall better damage, then spread the following among the elements - debuff, control, DoT, anti-EHP. Damage 2.0 is already so overly needlessly complicated that several years later I still have to refer to the quick-reference tables on the Wiki because I can never remember what damage type does what damage to what health types.

[Rixuel]

how about: don't effing touch viral and buff other elements??????

[Avienas]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Yup. I'd personally scrap the majority of the damage types and go with just one physical and four equivalent elemental damage types. Give physical overall better damage, then spread the following among the elements - debuff, control, DoT, anti-EHP. Damage 2.0 is already so overly needlessly complicated that several years later I still have to refer to the quick-reference tables on the Wiki because I can never remember what damage type does what damage to what health types.

Scrap dual elementals, scrap the 3 physicals, replace with Physical, Shock, Acidic(basically think new toxin), Cold and Heat. End of story. Because lets be honest, they can just straight up buff elementals and make penalty dmg less of a thing or better yet: JUST MAKE ELEMENTAL DMG GET PARTICULAR BONUS DAMAGE AGAINST X FACTION & X-ub GROUP IN SAID FACTION AND NO DAMAGE PENALTIES PERIOD!

Outside of those wanting to pull the fun glory of slapping a huge dmg nuke on a enemy and walk away as it kills the mobs fast, usually not even a concern when most enemies would die from the initial hit. If people wanna cry about slash, blam: New combined physical status proc is called Hemorrhaging, aka enemies get INTERNAL bleeding to thar internals that causes effectively the same thing as true damage slash. If people want to complain about causing stuns or what not? Basically have repeated fire in general can cause semi-stuns to be the advantage low-impact, high fire rate types of guns & melee attacks get in favor of bigger boom types.

Very sure i talked about this minimization of statuses before but just to give the simple summary: Shock yeets shields. Heat yeets health, Acidic yeets armor and cold is just the bonus duck that could slow units in general, even if technically it could be removed, but then that might make builds way too easy with only 3 elemental types to pick (aka everyone runs heat alongside acid for grineer/infested and shock alongside heat for corpus). Maybe if D.E. actually also simplified the elemental s, maybe arcanes like Arcane Warmth might be enjoyable if people are already not abusing rolling guard & Rapid resilience to trivialize status effects, especially COLD and TOXIN ones currently.

Plus of course, this means much more user friendly, easy for people to identify elemental setups, builds become more flexible and its not like we have condition overlord edgelords have the right to fuss about running a dozen different statuses on a enemy before they finally yeet them when they could of done it with a single nuke to the enemy`s face.

2 hours ago, Rixuel said:

how about: don't effing touch viral and buff other elements??????

Pretty much i would say thats a good idea too, but lets be honest: Too many elementals, most are garbo and not enough build space when every single one is gonna be constantly Viral cause anything else is rather pointless when one only has to waste a third mod slot for a heat mod to G.G. Armor, one of the few things that could get in the way of Viral.

Aint liking the opening posters rather retarded approach on how to change elementals, but i still say it would benefit if they downsie the 10 or something ones we have right now to a simple count of 5, with no dual elemental mixing involved anymore and not needing to read freaking enemy pages to not have to loop needles thru microscopic thread`holes, where it just becomes a game of bring X element that is strong against X enemy type, not having to literally run specific dual elemental comps in most cases to abuse a status proc effect more then the damage bonus itself.

Edited May 26, 2020 by Avienas

[keikogi]

9 minutes ago, Avienas said:

Aint liking the opening posters rather retarded approach on how to change elementals, but i still say it would benefit if they downsie the 10 or something ones we have right now to a simple count of 5, with no dual elemental mixing involved anymore and not needing to read freaking enemy pages to not have to loop needles thru microscopic thread`holes, where it just becomes a game of bring X element that is strong against X enemy type, not having to literally run specific dual elemental comps in most cases to abuse a status proc effect more then the damage bonus itself.

I do agree the whole 10+ damage types did more damage to the game than improved it but OPs is , unfortunately , in line with what DE usually does. If A system does not work slap even more non sense on top of it.

Edited May 26, 2020 by keikogi

[(XBOX)GodMasterTP]

23 hours ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

Hello!

Not so long ago, DE introduced some changes to existing status effects and improved the efficacy of most of them (Blast, Gas and Puncture have questionable worth). Particularly, Viral saw an extreme rise in damage potential by simply increasing the damage dealt to health by absurd amounts. This very unnecessary and unbalanced change has made Viral/Slash Viral/Heat the superior damage choice in any scenario in which enemies are affected by status effects. Even Infested and their resistance to Viral stand no chance at all against this. Moreover, some status effects make absolutely no sense (how do robots get sick or poisoned with Viral or Toxin?). Which is why I am going to propose some balancing changes to the current status effects and how it interacts with enemies.

I believe that, depending on the element, distinct effects need to be applied if dealing with either organic (Grineer troops) or inorganic enemies (Corpus Robotics). For simplicity' sake, numbers and values after the maximum number of stacks will not be proposed here; only a general guideline. As such:

Physical Damage types:

1. Slash - Status effect length and damage is increased for organic enemies, and severely reduced for inorganic enemies.

2. Impact - Procs now, in addition to the stagger, have a chance of temporarily disarming organic enemies (knocks the weapon off their hands, makes sense, right?).

3. Puncture - Repurposed from Viral: Increases damage against armor by X%. Robotic enemies take Y% more damage. Armored robotic enemies take Z% more damage. Currently, Puncture is arguably the most senseless (reduced damage? why?) and worthless proc (Impact stops damage by 100% by staggering opponents). The idea behind this change is that Puncture pierces armor/robotic exoskeleton and exposes vital spots/circuitry. Therefore providing increased damage potential.

Primary elements:

1. Heat - Stays the same

2. Cold - When maximum number of stacks is reached, the enemy is frozen. Frozen enemies take vastly increased damage from Impact, Puncture and Blast sources.

3. Electricity - Status effect length and damage are considerably increased against inorganic enemies. In addition, circuitry is fried; vastly reducing accuracy. Stays as is against organic enemies.

4. Toxin - I seriously fail to grasp how Toxin affects robotics. I'll go ahead and boldly suggest that inorganic enemies are immune to Toxin procs (not the damage per se). It's not that big of a deal considering you have a myriad of other options to choose from.

Secondary elements:

1. Blast - Return the forced knockdown. The new inaccuracy buff is next to negligible compared to a 5m AoE knockdown. This was especially valuable for melee weapons.

2. Gas - Gas status effects create lingering, expanding clouds of Gas damage. Organic enemies that inhale the gas will choke and begin to cough. Providing some form of crowd control. Damage penalties against Flesh are removed. Inorganic enemies take reduce damage from the cloud and suffer no effects from the gas itself (due to not breathing)

3. Radiation - Stays the same (already deals 25% more damage to robotic enemies)

4. Magnetic - Procs now disable robotic weaponry, shield regen and eximus auras (both organic and inorganic). Magnetic deals more damage against inorganic enemies.

5. Corrosive - Corrosive now seeps acid unto inorganic enemy weapons; potentially jamming them

6. Viral - Return to previous state. Honestly, Viral was great as is. Presently, it's just ridiculous. Now, in addition to halving organic enemy health, Viral procs can now spread to enemies within X meters from the infected target. Robotic enemies are unaffected by Viral procs. Infested don't have their health halved, instead reduced by 25%.

Summary:

1. Slash, Heat, Toxin, Gas and Viral work best against organic enemies (Flesh, Cloned Flesh etc.)

2. Puncture, Electricity, Magnetic and Radiation work best against inorganic enemies (Machinery and Robotics).

3. Impact, Blast, Cold, Corrosive remain relatively neutral in regards to effects on either organic or inorganic enemies. They're mostly used for shields (Impact/Cold), crowd control (Blast/Impact/Cold) and armor (Corrosive/Cold).

 

Are these proposed changes drastic and will they change the meta should a similar idea be implemented? Absolutely, that's the idea.

Will it force players to actively think about their damage mods before a mission instead of sticking Viral/Slash/Heat on everything? Hopefully, yes.

Nah, all trash. Have a nice day

[(PSN)LoisGordils]

51 minutes ago, (XB1)XG1anBl4derX said:

Nah, all trash. Have a nice day

Too much reading for you? My bad

[Voltage]

8 hours ago, Rixuel said:

how about: don't effing touch viral and buff other elements??????

More powercreep doesn't accomplish much of anything.

[taiiat]

there's sense to the Damage Types, but stacking Status brings options that weren't there before and apparently not accounted for much. on top of simultaneously adding >100% Status plus changing Weapons that fire multiple Projectiles.

so many things changed all at once, heh.

 

for what it's worth though, Viral isn't just 'always the best' choice, even so. Damage Types strong vs Armor are still generally better when Enemies have enough EHP to matter. and vs like Corpus, Viral was already a preferred Damage Type just for Damage so nothing changed there anyways.
there's some issues but the 99% are also kinda blowing it out of proportion too.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

22 hours ago, (PS4)LoisGordils said:

How is returning Viral to its previous state turning it into Gas? Viral was great as it was and it's stupidly powerful at the moment and that absolutely needs to change. It's bad design. 

The fact that you’re replacing the increasing damage with an AOE.

also fun fact. Reducing enemy health by 50% = doubling damage. So viral still has the same effect it just applies it in a different manner.

The only reason people like you think Viral is so broken is because we have access to viral heat. Which is an offshoot of viral corrosive which was already a very power combo that only a few weapons could access. Well now every weapon can access it.

[ShortCat]

24 minutes ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

The only reason people like you think Viral is so broken is because we have access to viral heat. Which is an offshoot of viral corrosive which was already a very power combo that only a few weapons could access. Well now every weapon can access it.

Why would you run Viral/Heat in the first place? Viral+Slash/HM is the more powerfull combo. Even a bane mod instead of a fire mod will massively improve your performance. Who cares about 80% armor strip, especially when target still has ~80% DR afterwards, when you can damage HP directly with armor ignoring bleeds with a 4x boost. Mostly secondaries and some melee weapons (like Hammers) cannot execute this combo and thus are unfortunately out of favor in the current meta. 

Easely stackable damage aplifier is broken in any context.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

2 hours ago, ShortCat said:

Why would you run Viral/Heat in the first place? Viral+Slash/HM is the more powerfull combo. Even a bane mod instead of a fire mod will massively improve your performance. Who cares about 80% armor strip, especially when target still has ~80% DR afterwards, when you can damage HP directly with armor ignoring bleeds with a 4x boost. Mostly secondaries and some melee weapons (like Hammers) cannot execute this combo and thus are unfortunately out of favor in the current meta. 

Easely stackable damage aplifier is broken in any context.

Why not run viral heat slash? Best of all the worlds.

[(XBOX)GodMasterTP]

4 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

The only reason people like you think Viral is so broken is because we have access to viral heat. Which is an offshoot of viral corrosive which was already a very power combo that only a few weapons could access. Well now every weapon can access it.

Explaining basic interactions, I am really amazed that the other guy is so ignorant that he doesn't know this (assuming that, because you had to explain and that he somehow thinks viral/slash is better than viral/heat). 

Just to further complement, Viral is only "OP" because shields are trash and Infested don't have enough EHP. Magnetic does the same as Viral, nobody is claiming that Magnetic is overpowered because shields are trash. 

The thing is, the problem was never with the elements, but rather with what they were targetting. Corpus and Infested are the problem.

[ShortCat]

3 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

Why not run viral heat slash? Best of all the worlds.

How does Heat complement Viral/Slash? Armor reduction from its proc is irrelevant, since you have armor ignore. A significant part of the damage Heat does, even boosted by Viral, is negated by armor, especially if you hit higher lvls. Panic animation from Heat makes it harder to land headshots. Heat dilutes possible procs with one additional element. It takes a mod slot, which could be used to improve Slash even further.

 

1 hour ago, (XB1)XG1anBl4derX said:

Explaining basic interactions, I am really amazed that the other guy is so ignorant that he doesn't know this (assuming that, because you had to explain and that he somehow thinks viral/slash is better than viral/heat). 

That's a big oof on your part. I guess we have to wait till your most trusted YTuber explains it in a video. In the meantime, you can try to oneshot a lvl 100 Gokstad Officer with Viral/Heat modded Dread.

[Rixuel]

22 hours ago, Voltage said:

More powercreep doesn't accomplish much of anything.

well nerfing either

[DrivaMain]

My simple proposal.

1. Nerf Viral stacking instead of just going back to old Viral.

2. Corrosive should strip 98% armor at max stacks  instead of 80%. Allowing it to compete with Viral and 99% armor strip with Heat.

3. Gas now scale with elemental mods and flesh resistance is removed. Seriously how did DE mess this up?

4. Blast should cause an AoE knockdown and Damage on proc, it’s an explosion at least make it deal some damage.

5. Puncture damage bypass armor, let it be a toxin variant against armor. 
 

 

Edited May 28, 2020 by DrivaMain

[Leuca]

I honestly think the damage system should be simplified to be somewhere in between damage 1.0 and 2.0.

Status chance is still a nice mechanic, but damage types should have clear advantages on a per-faction basis imo. Example: making Corrosive decidedly less effective against alloy armor when corrosive procs affect *all* types of armor the same way is completely unintuitive; make armor just "armor", just like enemy shields were simplified.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

5 hours ago, ShortCat said:

How does Heat complement Viral/Slash? Armor reduction from its proc is irrelevant, since you have armor ignore. A significant part of the damage Heat does, even boosted by Viral, is negated by armor, especially if you hit higher lvls. Panic animation from Heat makes it harder to land headshots. Heat dilutes possible procs with one additional element. It takes a mod slot, which could be used to improve Slash even further.

Because you’re still dealing additional damage on top of the slash procs. Also IDK of slash procs scale off total damage or damage dealt. If it’s damage fealty then reducing armor benefits slash procs as you’re dealing higher damage for it to scale off of.

[ShortCat]

10 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

Because you’re still dealing additional damage on top of the slash procs.

Which is mostly insignificant in case of armored targets; in other cases you can get more just by stacking even more Viral.

10 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

Also IDK of slash procs scale off total damage or damage dealt.

Its total base damage. Thus -Impact or -Puncture Rivens are highly valued, since like regular IPS mods they do not influence base damage/bleed strength, only proc priority.

 

Edited May 28, 2020 by ShortCat

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

1 hour ago, ShortCat said:

Which is mostly insignificant in case of armored targets; in other cases you can get more just by stacking even more Viral.

*Baruuk killing level 100 corrupted heavy gunners in 4 hits using just viral, heat, and corrosive and no slash procs. Get some pretty strong heat procs tho.*
Yep, that damage is totally insignificant. /s

[KittySkin]

Personally I would rather buff magnetic to make it cause AOE damage based on shields depleted. Said damage ignores shields.

Explosive damage its like AOE damage. Simply as that. A portion of the damage its spread across a 5m radius on procc.

Puncture marks a body part that gets 2x damage if hitted (4x from criticals) and can proc up to 4 spots per enemy (without possible overlaping), impact remains as is.

Cold at max stacks freeze enemies in place and increase damage received by 50%.

Gas scales its damage from toxin and heat mods used but dont reduce armor, nor bypass shields making it the highest damage potential if combined with armor/shield stripping.

Fixed! Corrosive its better than viral at high enough level (100+ that will be a common sight on new hard modes) so theres no changes needed here and other elements are good as they are.