[Fun Experiment 5] Gas Status plans.

[STUVash]

Last week, out of nowhere, as usual, I wondered what I could do with the new Gas Status.
I almost never use it these days.

Previous Gas status version was about applying Toxic status in an area, the hit would be Gas element but the proc would inflict Toxic status in a radius.
New one is different. A Gas proc creates a cloud attached to the enemy dealing DoT on a short distance.
The player can keep stacking Gas proc to raise the damage of the Gas Cloud and its radius up to 6 meters. The Gas cloud remain after the enemy death.
On paper this is great, it'd be technically better than the old Gas version. In practice it is not so simple.

Each Gas stack has its own damage and duration. However, unlike the other damage status, your damage is replaced, as the damage over time and its duration is linked to their respective Gas Stack. Be mindful of the Gas Stacks could matter Say you land a heavy melee attack for high gas damage on the group of clouds, if you then proc 10 new gas stacks, the heavy attack gas stack will be replaced, in this scenario you'd be losing damage. Yes, I know, this is crazy. It is even worse in a Squad.

Here are some plans I liked enough to share on paper.
These are assuming you'd take into account the resistances and Armor of each faction before going into your mission with a Gas build.

1) Use it against Infected.

Révélation

The Toxic Ancient used to be a problem in high level endless missions, as the Ancients would spawn often enough to nullify your Gas damage.
You would have to switch weapons just to kill the Toxic Ancient and go back to use your Gas weapon. If you wanted to use it of course.

Somehow I missed the fact that Toxic Ancient do not have Gas aura resistance anymore after Update 27.3, when Scarlet Spear was out. Like other players I mostly paid attention to the the event.
This makes Gas the best element of choice against Infected Crowds.
You might be dealing alot of damage with Heat and Viral on one target, but in a crowded corridor, Gas will have a higher damage potential.

Infested are all about swarming the players so it works out fine.

2) Kickstart Gas radius, to turn any attack into an area of damage.

Révélation

Gas status strong point is supposed to be its area of damage, which radius increase the more you stack Gas procs.
The game supposedly reward you with bigger range if you have more stacks, that's the "why" you'd build status on a Gas build.

Using a fast firing high status weapon, it's possible to quickly get 10 stacks on Gas.
Modding sentinel weapons is lot easier now, some can fit this job if necessary.

While the tick damage of the last stack won't increase, it will still use the radius you built-up with the stacks.
The radius you can work with at 10 stacks is 6 meters. It's not alot, but it is still 6meters on your next Gas proc damage.
A high single target damage with a gas proc could spread this high damage to all enemies within 6 meters.
A status sniper or a melee heavy attack built to proc Gas could do this trick.

It's not the most comfortable use of Gas, and the 6 meters are rather small to focus on one target only but it's still interesting to know that you could technically get area of damage from any weapon with it. And in this example it does pack a punch.

----------
Make sure to not apply weaker Gas proc for the duration of the stronger Gas proc you previously landed. I know it's not pleasant but currently that's how it is.
it is ironically the method that brings out the most damage to Gas Clouds.

3) Gas status matter only at 10 stacks, and only for the Status Duration limited time.
(FireRate + Status build, if it was working properly)

Révélation

A Gas status is a tick of damage which can affect the surrounding enemies. At low stack the radius of effect is so small that it would act like Toxic or Heat status.
Except Gas do not affect Health directly like Toxic and its stacks duration can't be refreshed like Heat. Let's be honest, it's hard to work with this guy.
But at least something is clear now, there's no point to use Gas status if you can't build up to 10 stacks consistently and fast.
Bigger radius on Gas is the only reason you'd like to build around Gas.

We're looking at a fairly restricted profile to make good use of this Status.
- We need a weapon that can fire fast with decent status chance so that we get to 10 stacks quickly.

- We need a weapon that deals gas damage high enough to matter in the missions you'll fight in.
With these two factors, the weapon we'd have would already be making a decent use of status, but we could probably add another factor which is not much of a stretch.

-We'd like the weapon to be able to hit multiple enemies with each hit. This is where Gas status efficiency sky rocket.
(my favourite for this particular trait are Ocucor and Kuva Nukor)

With this weapon each hit could be hitting X nearby enemies, each would be a gas proc, inflicting damage on the target that got hit but also the surrounding enemies.
It'd be as if each proc was worth X proc of damage on each. Used in the right scenarios, this is a great weapon to have.

Now the last issue with Gas is its duration, like we said previously, Gas isn't like Heat which has all its stacks status duration refreshed on each new proc. Such feature make it possible to keep the damage you built up and stack Heat infinitely if necessary.
Since Gas isn't like that, the damage potential for a Gas proc at 10 stacks only matters for the time of its status duration.

Say you hit 4 closed enemies with a Gas proc, each suffer a Gas status from each other, it's as if each of them had 4 Gas proc worth of damage individually. It is a great story for the status duration you built for. But after that time, your Gas damage is no more compared to a Heat status. If you were built for Heat status, eventually it wouldn't be hard to go for 4 Heat proc and more with the time, in comparison your previous 4 stacks will be removed after some time.

For your Gas to be relevant and worth building you'd need the enemies to die fast or else Heat become a better option.
That's why you might consider these factors lot more.
It is really tough on you as a player since building for Gas require two elements, and it's asking for a lot of stats to perform properly in a fight.

- If damage can't be increased and nothing else is worthed adding, consider raising status duration.
If you don't have a Riven for your weapon, only go for a raise in status duration if you're using a Rifle primary weapon or a melee weapon.

If you do have a Riven for your weapon, you could go for status duration (if you want to) regardless of the weapon type. The bonuses are higher than the mods for Shotgun and Pistols, and having multiple stats on one mod slot can be a better plan.

----------
However, current Gas procs replace the oldest one, making Status duration irrelevant at the moment as a fast firing weapon will keep replacing old procs, it also cut their duration off. Most of your gas procs will only last 2 to 3 seconds with a fast weapon. Even if you built to reach 18 seconds status duration.
In the future, it wouldn't be surprising that Gas would be changed again to allow more DoT to be stored in one way or another. When that happens, this section will be relevant.

3-Bis) Gas status matter mostly at 10 stacks, and only for the Status Duration limited time.
(This Critical Build better suit the current Gas we have)

Révélation

Previous 3) presented what would be ideally good for Gas if its DoT was working like other DoT status.
However since it's not we're looking at a different profile.

We still want 10 stacks, but we want them to be strong.
Ironically, since replacing Gas stacks is bad for the overall dps, what we need is more damage than status.

We need a weapon that can set 10 gas stacks but not instantly.
We need a weapon that has a high base damage, but enough status to make gas proc possible.

Since damage is more important than the actual stacks, damage per bullet is a higher priority than overall dps.
Which means that we need a weapon that has high critical damage and high critical chances.

This is because multishot and firerate would provide more gas stacks but not more damage from these stacks, since they're being replaced.
The sad part about this route is that the Gas Clouds are not getting more damage from their elemental mods. The equation wouldn't be a big issue if we were to compensate with more firerate and multishot, but we're avoiding those.

We could use Faction damage mod, Status Duration mod, Riven, Critical Mods instead.

Since Gas Clouds are not getting stronger from their elemental mods, the fact your weapon would have Heat or Toxin or Gas as base damage would help you save some mod slots.

The status update was supposed to be an alternative to Critical builds, but for this specific Element, the best output would come from Critical builds. This is because of the limitation on the amount of Gas DoT per enemy.

The weapon that can produce the highest DoT per Gas stack ignoring snipers would be Kuva Bramma.
Spreading Gas with Mecha set might be important with such slow stack building.

4) Mecha Gas spread.

Révélation

Now you know the pros and cons of Gas, and there's not that much to help it.
Ideally, you'd want a way to spread your Gas stacks to more enemies. The more you spread, the more damage you get on all affected enemies.
Probably enough damage to take down the whole room.

But you're out of mod slots, that's when the Mecha Set comes in. While the mecha set would be good for pretty much any status you decided to build around, especially for Toxic or Heat status since it turns this one target death to act as a Gas proc except the radius is lot bigger ==> 30 METERS.

Spreading Heat status over 30 meters is bound to be destructive, Toxic would be quite powerful too against most Corpus.
But our Gas Build can also use such spread.
The damage output is consistently higher for Gas when the enemies are closed together, since you built for Gas you should make sure to fight in tight corridors or having ways to gather enemies often.

Even for one kill near another enemy the mecha set make it worth it.
The gas stacks stay at the death location, but mecha also spread the Gas status, so 6 meters around the death location, we actually have double Gas worth of damage.

Not only that, but the status which got spread by the Mecha Set effect got its damage and duration almost doubled.
When it procs at least.

As a solo player you could use these plans, I would recommend you avoid to do so in a Squad. Because the Gas status design contradicts itself all the time, you'll lose damage on your Gas DoT if multiple players have a Gas Build.
If you know for sure you're the only player running a Gas Build, then go for it, your plays won't be nullified by others even if Gas isn't in its best state yet. It needs to be changed again.

Edited June 29, 2020 by STUVash

[DrivaMain]

Problem is that DE messed up the gas cloud damage calculations to not include the toxin and heat mods into the equation. It gimps it’s damage significantly.

Another problem is that most of the grineer and corpus units resist it, which doesn’t make sense because toxic gas are dangerous to organic beings.

[STUVash]

Il y a 11 heures, DrivaMain a dit :

Problem is that DE messed up the gas cloud damage calculations to not include the toxin and heat mods into the equation. It gimps it’s damage significantly.

Another problem is that most of the grineer and corpus units resist it, which doesn’t make sense because toxic gas are dangerous to organic beings.

To be fair, I don't mind at all that the gas cloud wouldn't take elemental mods into account, just like I don't mind the grineer or corpus having more resistance to it than the Infested.
Infested are lot more organic than grineer and corpus.

What really bothers me though is the fact that the damage and duration of each Gas proc is actually linked to a Gas Stack, which is limited to 10. So when a new Gas proc occur with 10 stacks reached, the oldest Gas Stack is removed to add the new one, which also remove the damage it was dealing even if the status duration limit wasn't reached.

Being limited with 10 damage over time per enemy is one thing but, if at least it would not remove the strongest one of the bunch, the lucky Gas crits are wasted with such system.
Gas needs 10 stacks to affect a bigger area, but if you stack too much it will normalize your damage output.

In a way this is actually the much bigger problem.

Edited June 24, 2020 by STUVash

[(XBOX)Skiller115]

Gas needs a buff first, because it's laughably weak mainly because it doesn't scale with elemental mods AND it's limited to just 10 stacks so on high firerate high status and low damage weapons gas is utterly useless and the fact that gas has a high damage penalty to graneer and corpus organics and is mitigated again to armor as well!

[DrivaMain]

2 hours ago, STUVash said:

To be fair, I don't mind at all that the gas cloud wouldn't take elemental mods into account, just like I don't mind the grineer or corpus having more resistance to it than the Infested.

It is a problem, Viral have +75% and +50% Bonus against Cloned Flesh and Flesh and those 2 factions are where the late game content is. The Gap between Viral and Gas against those factions is pretty huge.

Infested? They are already so squishy that Viral still works on them and the TTK difference between gas and viral against infested is pretty huge aswell.

Edited June 24, 2020 by DrivaMain

[(XBOX)Skiller115]

1 hour ago, DrivaMain said:

It is a problem, Viral have +75% and +50% Bonus against Cloned Flesh and Flesh and those 2 factions are where the late game content is. The Gap between Viral and Gas against those factions is pretty huge.

Infested? They are already so squishy that Viral still works on them and the TTK difference between gas and viral against infested is pretty huge aswell.

Viral now is basically just Corrosive vs old gas 2.0 against infested. 

Still absolutely no point in using gas against infested when you can just use fire and viral for way more dps than weak gas. The only difference is that old Gas could be nearly totally negated, while new Gas does barely any damage and only has bonus damage against some of the weakest mobs in the game!

[0_The_F00l]

I would rather that all gas tics have a chance for all procs (including IPS). 

[(XBOX)Demon Intellect]

8 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

Problem is that DE messed up the gas cloud damage calculations to not include the toxin and heat mods into the equation. It gimps it’s damage significantly.

Another problem is that most of the grineer and corpus units resist it, which doesn’t make sense because toxic gas are dangerous to organic beings.

But strangely highly effective against a viral based enemy which ya know normally creates toxins and such.

[STUVash]

Once you know all the rules, you can make Gas work in very niche build and scenarios. But this design is highly restrictive, it can't stay that way.
It's already alarming as a solo player but in a squad, it's even worse. Players keep replacing each other Gas DoT, normalizing all Gas DoT and effectively reducing it.

The one with the highest fire rate and status will keep removing the Gas DoT of the other players, making his lower damage as a unintended priority.
In a squad, it makes Gas Build pointless if another player has this kind of build. It effectively NULLIFIES your Gas DoT, making Heat an actual better option, this is sad.

Edited June 24, 2020 by STUVash

[(PSN)Shelneroth]

Thanks for the very thorough description of how gas status works.

[Leyers_of_facade]

They should just revert gas changes

 

Gas in damage 2.0 was worth using occasionally. At least it is insanely good on weapons that has very high base damage (eg lanka, opticor, vulkar wraith)

now its just bad....

 

[STUVash]

Il y a 7 heures, DrivaMain a dit :

It is a problem, Viral have +75% and +50% Bonus against Cloned Flesh and Flesh and those 2 factions are where the late game content is. The Gap between Viral and Gas against those factions is pretty huge.

Infested? They are already so squishy that Viral still works on them and the TTK difference between gas and viral against infested is pretty huge aswell.

They are individual problems within Gas. The fact both problems exist at the same time is an actual catastrophe.
One or both has to be fixed someday.

I'd wager the damage gap between Viral and Gas isn't that important, since you don't build Gas for high single target damage and rather for a larger area of damage on all of your attacks.
Real problem is when the design of the Gas stacks actually prevent you from applying your damage properly in the area, regardless of the resistances, it contradicts itself.

This is the major issue.

Edited June 24, 2020 by STUVash

[DrivaMain]

16 minutes ago, STUVash said:

I'd wager the damage Gap between Viral and Gas isn't that important, since you don't to build Gas for high single target damage and rather for a larger area of damage on all of your attacks.
Real problem is when the design of the Gas stacks actually prevent you from applying your damage properly in the area, regardless of the resistances, it contradicts itself.

It is very important especially on AoE weapons. Take Kuva Ogris for example. With a status focused viral + heat build with Nightwach Napalm, it only takes the player 1-2 shots to completely demolish a group of level 140 Heavy Gunners. Gas + electric with Nightwatch Napalm? Can take up to 1.5- 2 full magazines to demolish them.

Yes, the max 10 stack is also big problem. 

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by DrivaMain

[(XBOX)Hyperion Rexx]

I would only ever put gas on a weapon I was using to proc statuses for condition overload where I've already got heat and viral on my melee.  Even then, I'd probably build radiation instead for bonus against alloy and mild cc.

For literally every other scenario against any faction, it's just heat and viral.

I'd find it way too annoying trying to keep track of the number of stacks to even think about trying this tbh.

[STUVash]

il y a 50 minutes, DrivaMain a dit :

It is very important especially on AoE weapons. Take Kuva Ogris for example. With a status focused viral + heat build with Nightwach Napalm, it only takes the player 1-2 shots to completely demolish a group of level 140 Heavy Gunners. Gas + electric with Nightwatch Napalm? Can take up to 1.5- 2 full magazines to demolish them.

Yes, the max 10 stack is also big problem. 

 

That's true, however, there's not much purpose in having Gas on your large AoE weapons. Especially as large as kuva Ogris.
Viral being a damage multiplier, it's like it was multiplying the amount of Heat stacks you had stored, and you say you're building with Nightwatch Napalm in your example.

So like you have 10 heat stacks rather easily, and at least one viral is the same as doubling this amount. Not only that but Heat is slowly removing the armor of your Heavy Gunner enemy, further increasing the potential damage from Heat.

You're already standing at +20 Heat stacks but 50% removal on an heavy gunner is almost doubling your damage output. You already have the equivalent of 40 Heat stacks worth of damage.
And the Armor removal + Viral stacks also make your next shots even more destructive.
If Element resistance didn't matter, it'd be as if you had 4 enemies with 10 Gas stacks packed every 7.90 meters.

Clearly you don't need Gas on such weapon.
However, some weapons who do not have a radius of effect as large as Kuva Ogris, would greatly benefit from the Gas proc design, since it turns your low radius attacks into 6 meters radius Gas clouds.

Some weapons like Ocucor and Kuva Nukor have no radial damage but they do hit multiple enemies, making Gas an interesting choice for such weapons.
It can even give single target weapon a mean to hit multiple enemies like most assault rifles, with a viral/heat build you'd just hit one target only (and abit more with punch through), but with gas you'd hit ALL enemies within 6 meters, with gas affecting enemies even after their death.

With the same build only difference is Viral or Gas against Toxic Ancient which have same resistance for viral and Gas. Gas take down the group of enemy 3 times faster than Viral with an Assault Rifle. Making it lot more interesting with the weapons lacking AoE if you need them to have some.

>> On paper of course. <<

Edited June 24, 2020 by STUVash

[(PSN)Onder6099]

Isn’t DoT dead?

[(XBOX)Skiller115]

17 hours ago, (PS4)Onder6099 said:

Isn’t DoT dead?

No only dead on gas, heat melts anything, slash doesn't hurt Corpus much but still cuts Graneer and infested to bits and toxin is still good against corpus and okay against Graneer but right now gas is useless unless you're running Condition Overload.

[(PSN)Onder6099]

5 hours ago, (XB1)Skiller115 said:

No only dead on gas, heat melts anything, slash doesn't hurt Corpus much but still cuts Graneer and infested to bits and toxin is still good against corpus and okay against Graneer but right now gas is useless unless you're running Condition Overload.

Correct me if I’m wrong. DoT was 1 Tick more then time duration, for example 7 Ticks over 6s, while now its Tick per sec for 6 sec. We loose 1 Tick, nothing special until you use Status Duration, f.e. 100%, while with old DoT we will get 14 Ticks over 6 sec now we will get 12 Ticks for 12 sec.

[nslay]

On 2020-06-24 at 2:15 AM, (XB1)Skiller115 said:

Viral now is basically just Corrosive vs old gas 2.0 against infested. 

Still absolutely no point in using gas against infested when you can just use fire and viral for way more dps than weak gas. The only difference is that old Gas could be nearly totally negated, while new Gas does barely any damage and only has bonus damage against some of the weakest mobs in the game!

I'm not saying Gas is great, but you can two shot 8 level 145 Toxic Ancients (AOE kills all of them) with a Gas Exergis (and the DoT tics are on the order of 10,000s)... that's purely from exploiting Exergis' enormous base damage, 100% status and the free slot for a faction mod (since Gas doesn't scale with elemental mods). I do like using this weapon with Gas against infested because it can instantly (in 1 shot) make large Gas clouds that tic for thousands of damage.

Otherwise, yes... Gas is just like Slash except it doesn't do anything interesting like bypass shields or armor... and it can't be easily improved with Viral (like Slash). With the exception of Infested and odd weapons with very high base damage like Exergis, Gas is painfully bad.

By the way, I hate Heat. While it's really really potent... it's sooo slooowww with those single 1 second DoT tics (as opposed to per-damage instance DoT tics like everything else).

[Galuf]

tl;dr;

When 10 stacks are reached, instead of replacing a status it should optimize the current stack(refreshing low duration, replacing a low dmg stack etc...)

When a gas status is applied, it should take into consideration, at worst, the toxing dmg mods of the weapon like toxin does

But in the end, I think everything comes down to statuses design as a whole. I explained on other threads how I think status should be streamlined in terms of damage, it is dumb that viral + armor cheating dots dominates universally. It is a real engineering issues, if statuses sux but are part of the gameplay the game can't be balanced properly. Warframe will never get a content rebalance if the tools at the disposal of the players are not balanced as well at first place. Start by balancing the tools then work on content. Every status should have the same damage potential as the best ones used except that for each extra benefit it should make the damage less instantaneous, for instance on IPS puncture procs could increase the damage taken(like impale in path of exile), impact could deal a delayed damage nuke(like an internal trauma), this way all the ips would have a chance to be considered... On elemental statuses, cold could example should increase the effect of other statuses(having just slow makes not sense), and overall most combined statuses could be streamlined the same way.

Edited June 25, 2020 by Galuf

[STUVash]

Status update was supposed to be an alternative to Critical Builds.
Ironically, with Gas, since the DoT stacks are limited to 10 per enemy, the only way to get a higher damage output on each stack is to use a weapon that has Critical damage potential and high base damage.

If only the limitation on Gas DoT per enemy was removed.

Edited June 28, 2020 by STUVash

[TARINunit9]

On 2020-06-23 at 5:02 PM, DrivaMain said:

Another problem is that most of the grineer and corpus units resist it, which doesn’t make sense because toxic gas are dangerous to organic beings.

Rebreathers. There's like three enemy units in the entire game that don't have either helmets, mouthpieces, or blood that's more toxic than the gas. And one of them is this guy

[(XBOX)DShinShoryuken]

Gas needs to have a more statusy effect to it to make it fun....yeah, yeah...each person's idea of fun is different 

What would be kinda coolz is if instead of damage, it did crowd control more. You shoot Gas into a face of an enemy and they canno see for a few seconds. The next body shot makes the enemy bend over coughing and unable to attack. Start a Gas cloud and the enemies start gagging and running away from us and the cloud area. Final form of Gas- if it ticks enough damage/enemies....it becomes a GAS MONSTER that attacks the strongest enemies and once they is dead, it dissapates

I know this is probably way past DE game making skills....but it would be cool to play with on a new Frame

 

[STUVash]

Il y a 2 heures, (XB1)DShinShoryuken a dit :

Gas needs to have a more statusy effect to it to make it fun....yeah, yeah...each person's idea of fun is different 

What would be kinda coolz is if instead of damage, it did crowd control more. You shoot Gas into a face of an enemy and they canno see for a few seconds. The next body shot makes the enemy bend over coughing and unable to attack. Start a Gas cloud and the enemies start gagging and running away from us and the cloud area. Final form of Gas- if it ticks enough damage/enemies....it becomes a GAS MONSTER that attacks the strongest enemies and once they is dead, it dissapates

I know this is probably way past DE game making skills....but it would be cool to play with on a new Frame

 

Gas will have to change one day or another, for now it's too restrictive. I'm not expecting big changes to happen fast either, but I can expect small ones.

I like your idea too.