My concept for Damage: Revised

[Loza03]

Warframe Revised was, in my opinion, one of the best things to happen to Warframe. Not just for what it has done, but for what it says for the future. That we'll be getting a more balanced Warframe all around, and I want to contribute my ideas on this, being that I'm pretty invested in the idea of a more balanced Warframe. And, since I know this community pretty well by now, if you're planning on decrying this on any grounds of balance/difficulty/challenge/whatever being bad because 'stop nerfing everything that's fun' or 'don't nerf, only buff' or anything else, read this first:

Spoiler

 

I know that the idea of Balancing Warframe has some... controversial implications around here, so I do want to get one thing out of the way - this isn't a 'difficulty' thread. That might be something else I'm in the camp for, but in my eyes, it's a means to an end, that being a more interesting game. The odds can still be stacked as heavily in your favour as ever, or perhaps not, that is completely besides the point of this suggestion. Right now, Warframe has a constant problem of a lot of playstyles and weapons just being second-rate, no matter how powerful they are or how many buffs they get. A big example was the old Covert Lethality, a mod that let you oneshot any non-boss enemy in the game with a finisher. But it wasn't meta because, no matter how easily you can kill one enemy... nuking everything is always going to be better. There's also examples found in the likes of Supports trying to shore up mount Everest, or jack-of-all-trade weapons being less desirable because many of the trades they are a jack of are mostly overshadowed by straight crowd-clearing, meaning they functionally serve as sub-par crowd clearers. And, as such, players who like these other gameplay styles get left out in the cold.

This leads to a big problem - content becomes less interesting as a whole. If the road to success is linear because one route is just so much better, than everything else becomes linear too. All weapons and content have to match up to that one route, and that leads to the persistent problems of MR fodder weapons, loot grinds that aren't interesting, new game-modes that feel samey. And, yes, power creep, because DE has to hype up their playerbase for the shiny new weapon that is the reason they're playing the content somehow! And, of course, there's a number of other complaints and problems - I'm not going to get into that now. No one suggestion can fix all of this, but I believe my suggestion is a good step in the right direction.

Besides - if we get less cheese on our end, DE doesn't have to resort to as much on theirs. If abilities aren't trivialising content with no player interaction anymore, then DE can stop throwing legions of Nullifiers and ability-immune enemies at us!

And with that, preamble over.

 

 

I call my suggestion 'Damage classes'.

These are, in effect, a broad-stroke addition to the damage system that lets the game differentiate between trash enemies and more significant ones, and letting different weapons or frames shine in more areas. The damage classes are 'area' and 'precision'. All sources of damage belong to one or the other (including different parts of the same attack, such as the Chakhurr's impact and explosion), and it's divided based on logic. If something explodes, is a cloud, or some kind of indiscriminate pulse, then it's probably area damage. If it's a bullet, a laser, or any other kind of package of damage, then it's probably precision damage. On their own, damage classes are calculated identically. The main difference lies in enemies and health types. Some health types have broad, innate resistances to one or the other. Primarily, Proto Shields and Alloy Armour have an innate amount of resistance to area damage, and this applies first - so damage over time procs will deal less damage if they were triggered by an area damage, even if that proc would normally bypass the damage mitigation. So this weakens out area-of-effect slash procs and toxin procs.

The idea is that when you're launching an Ignis Wraith's flame down a choke point or spamming out Volt's discharge, your average everyday goon is erased from the game's coding as easily as ever. However, certain heavy units (or potential support units), they can power through it much more easily, taking dramatically reduced damage. However, if for whatever reason they lose whatever armour or shield is giving them this resistance, they then once again die as fast as ever. The values I tentatively am looking at is a 50% reduction for Alloy Armour and 90% for Proto Shields (since Shields are designed to disappear, whereas armour isn't, so Corpus with only are going to have protection for less time, on average).

 

This would naturally require some reshuffling of health types to better suit the new paradigm. For Grineer, Eviscerators and Elite Lancers lose their Alloy Armour (being 'regular' enemies), whilst Heavy Gunners and Manics gain it, for a total of seven enemy types at present. Since this would open out some design space, there could be room for more such 'tactical' enemies in the future, but that's too many hypotheticals. Corpus, meanwhile have Scrambus, Bursas and Shield Ospreys get Proto Shields. This is only four, two being very rare enemies, but there's a particular twist. This also includes a rework for Shield Ospreys - they now only produce their buff when fully alerted, similar to Nullifiers, and instead of increasing the amount of shields, what they do is change enemies shield types to Proto Shields. Sentients, meanwhile, either get their own armour type that's similar to Alloy armour, or somehow get their own universal resistance to area damage.

The idea here is to give each Faction a different relationship with area-of-effect damage. Grineer, being relatively 'vanilla', have several regular enemies that can resist nuking strategies, but many that can't. Corpus initially are much worse-off in the face of nuking strategies, especially with high-speed tactics, but once their support networks and alarms are raised, they require more deliberation. Infested, being the slavering horde, are highly vulnerable to area-of-effect weapons intended to be used on hordes to begin with, and Sentients, being relatively few in number but stronger, generally shrug it off. In turn, this helps increase faction diversity in a way that's a bit more meaningful without just throwing some arbitrarily immune enemies at us *coughnullifierscough*

It would also help make builds as a whole more important, since in many cases, you'd want ways of dealing with both classes against the main two factions. Be it that you bring a frame that's great at purging weaknesses to open doors to nuking, or you bring one weapon that's a great area weapon and one that's a precision beast; perhaps you find a good all-rounder. Maybe you even play with other people, hoping that they bring something that helps cover your own weaknesses.

 

Of course this doesn't 'fix' everything. It does nothing for Crowd Control or immortal frames, it does add yet another thing to learn for new players and there's several weapons where the specifics might not work too well or be exploitable., and some damage sources where the balancing might get iffy (Peacemaker for example). I realise. However, I do believe that, as a whole, this would do more good than harm. It would increase the variety of weapons and frames that are viable in content, or at the very least, increase the design space for further developments to make Warframe a better game for everyone.

[Corvid]

I had myself been thinking of ways to differentiate "fodder" enemies from "heavies" (taking into account the way the Dynasty Warriors series handles enemy balance, as a reference).

This seems like a fairly decent way to go about doing it.