Suggestion: Simple Gas Damage Fix.

[STUVash]

Current Gas Status as a concept is great, I love it. But many things are wrong and fixing one of these would actually make it lot better.

I know that the elemental mods are not in the damage equation of the Gas Cloud, everyone is whining about it. To be fair I'm fine with it. When one offensive stat isn't working you use another, why not.
But here's the real issue. You can restrict the radius of the Gas effect but you shouldn't reset the damage stored in the stacks.

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Currently, Gas status stacks to 10.

I thought the stack limit was only limiting the radius of the gas clouds and not the damage of the stacks. After all, Slash, toxic, and heat do not fade away before their status duration runs out. Why would Gas be different ? Turns out I was wrong.

Each Gas proc damage over time is linked to a Gas stack. Since you can't have more than 10 stacks but still need to store the new ones, the oldest stacks are removed when new ones arrived.
Unfortunately since our damage is linked to this old stack, we actually lose damage.

If you land a red crit gas proc, and applied 10 new stacks before its status duration runs out, you remove it before the end, effectively removing the red crit damage stored in this stack.

What about this other scenario, you have a fast firing weapon meant to apply Gas to reach 10 stacks fast, the damage is alright. But each new stack you apply removes an old one, and you began to rely on attack speed since elemental mods are not raising the damage of Gas Clouds. The result is you firing faster but each new Gas proc has a duration of less than 2 second each, by resetting the damage stacks we reduced their duration. And by reducing their duration, we lost 2/3 of their damage potential.

This is where the design starts to contradict itself. Gas is interesting at 10 stacks, 6 meter radius area of effect. But firing Gas procs too fast normalize the damage over time to a lower level.
You'd like to keep the high damage within the gas clouds then you need to attack slower for the stacks to reach their full duration.
However if you're only attacking slowly, then the gas clouds is fairly small and have a hard time to damage the nearby enemies, you'd be running Gas for the Element and not the Status since the range is too short at low stacks.

So what then ? Are you supposed to play like a wanna be saryn ? You place your 10 Gas stacks with high status duration and run to another enemy that is out of Gas Stacks ?
Or ironically, are you supposed to play with slow weapons to land high damage on a shorter radius ? In this particular plan, "Greater than 100% Status" is NOT a good idea.

The solution is really simple.
-Either Store all the Gas Stacks, and clamp the amount to 10 for the Gas cloud radius and for the display. The rest of the stacks are used for damage until their duration run out just like Slash and Toxic status.

-Or Store only 10 Gas Stacks but remove the weakest damage in the list instead of the strongest one. The strongest DoT will fade eventually, just remove the weaker one instead of not making any distinction.

-Also, if you really want each players to be restricted to 10 DoT, then please store all Gas stacks like previously said and only use 10 out of the bunch for each players. In a squad, of 4 players we could have 4x10 Gas DoT instead of just 10. Making Gas squad an actual possibility.
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Either way something has to be done about it, current design simply kills itself, I didn't even started talking about the worst. You thought the previous examples were horrible, having one white damage replacing the red crit one with your decent weapon built for gas ?
How about having your weapon decent Gas DoT being replaced with your Sentinel weapon Gas DoT ? Built for status only no damage, it's not adding Gas, it's removing Gas, the damage become so low you'd think the sentinel has cured the enemies.

Or how about playing in a squad ? Each players keep replacing the Gas DoT of each other, the one firing the most get to inflict its Gas DoT more often, but since he fires faster he probably also has less crit and less damage compared to the rest of the squad, so this is simply removing the Gas clouds damage potential of the whole squad just because that one guy was firing lot faster.
In short, this one player NULLIFIES the rest of the squad Gas Status.

Current Gas damage is a joke, I can make it work in various ways, once you know what works and what don't you make something out of it but these findings are alarming and HIGHLY restrict the Gas weapons of choice or gameplay tactics.

Edited June 24, 2020 by STUVash

[Traumtulpe]

10 hours ago, STUVash said:

I know that the elemental mods are not in the damage equation of the Gas Cloud, everyone is whining about it. To be fair I'm fine with it. When one offensive stat isn't working you use another, why not.

You need Heat plus Toxin for Gas. Two mods.

If you remove one of them, you will deal more damage per proc.

That is stupid.

[STUVash]

il y a 1 minute, Traumtulpe a dit :

You need Heat plus Toxin for Gas. Two mods.

If you remove one of them, you will deal more damage per proc.

That is stupid.

Yes, but the design of Gas itself as a tool to enable an area of damage regardless of the weapon used still makes Gas valuable on paper. Even if Heat + Toxin is less proc damage than one of the two alone.

Gas would be lot more stronger if the other issue didn't exist.

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

Gas real problem is the damage chart. nobody has real issues at killing trash infested mobs, and the dot ain't enough to prevent from being meleed by them.

On the other hand you can just use corrosive + heat, which will also kill trash infested with ease, and be way more efficient against tankier infested, and have a heat status proc that also provide some crowd control.

[Traumtulpe]

30 minutes ago, MonsterOfMyOwn said:

[...]

While you are not wrong, the lack of damage is what kills Gas for me. Let me give you 3 examples.

Spawn a somewhat durable enemy in the Simulacrum, damage him until 50% hp:

• If your weapon is modded for Heat, the procs will kill the enemy.
• If your weapon was modded for Viral instead, the enemy would already have been dead by that time.
• If your weapon is modded for Gas... nothing much happens. The enemy is still standing at slightly below 50%.

The scaling is the real issue why I never use Gas anymore. Of course having a cap of 10 stacks, and no way to counter armor (Heat/Corrosive cannot be used with Gas) really doesn't help either.

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

I think if gas just update and keeps the highest base damage that procs the status is best. What I mean is: you use a heavy melee slam to proc the status then use melee strikes to increase the stacks and durations. As the melee combos damage isn't higher than the heavy melee slam, the gas damage won't be replace by lower numbers. Guns with high status chance usually don't have high crits. When the gun crits, the higher gas damage is replace.

[Hellmaker2004]

17 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

While you are not wrong, the lack of damage is what kills Gas for me. Let me give you 3 examples.

Spawn a somewhat durable enemy in the Simulacrum, damage him until 50% hp:

• If your weapon is modded for Heat, the procs will kill the enemy.
• If your weapon was modded for Viral instead, the enemy would already have been dead by that time.
• If your weapon is modded for Gas... nothing much happens. The enemy is still standing at slightly below 50%.

The scaling is the real issue why I never use Gas anymore. Of course having a cap of 10 stacks, and no way to counter armor (Heat/Corrosive cannot be used with Gas) really doesn't help either.

This is not entirely true, although i do agree that Gas status currently is lacking due to how it is calculated this comparison is unfair as it completely disregards the Strength Gas does have.

[DrivaMain]

1 hour ago, Hellmaker2004 said:

This is not entirely true, although i do agree that Gas status currently is lacking due to how it is calculated this comparison is unfair as it completely disregards the Strength Gas does have.

Electric, Toxin, and Heat included elemental mods into the calculations while Gas is left behind the dust.

I would dare say Electric outperforms gas because it has elemental damage bonus + the proc stacks infinitely.

Edited June 26, 2020 by DrivaMain

[Hellmaker2004]

16 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

Electric, Toxin, and Heat included elemental mods into the calculations while Gas is left behind the dust.

I would dare say Electric outperforms gas because it has elemental damage bonus + the proc stacks infinitely.

I am well aware how gas work. That does not change the fact that if you look at a fish and question why it can not fly, thinking it is a stupid design, when you are yourself a bird and have only seen the sky, is very bad and biased perception off the world.

Gas does have advantages that other status effects does not have, yet somehow no one look at the benefits and only look at the disadvantages, and yes i do agree that gas is lackluster.
But i could make a similar silly comparison with Viral, a status that i am pretty sure everyone can agree is great.

As a example: What is the point of applying a status effect on enemies that double the damage they take, if they already die in the first hit anyway?
That is equally silly viewpoint as a lot of people have towards gas.

That being said, i can not stress this enough, i do think Gas need some sort of buff, maybe making it scale with elemental mods would be enough, i don't know but it would perhaps be a good start.

[Krenlik]

That being said, i can not stress this enough, i do think Gas need some sort of buff, maybe making it scale with elemental mods would be enough, i don't know but it would perhaps be a good start.

 

I was thinking that a good fix might be that Gas damage bypasses 50% of shields and 50% of armor.  Sort of a half-strength hybrid of slash and toxin.  Would basically cancel the gas-resistance of some armor types, and give you back a little bit of the old gas perk  with the toxin bypassing shields.  It would also make sense... a Grineer is not avoiding breathing in the Gas just because he has hunky armor.   Shields have to be Gas-permeable for things to be able to breath.

 

 

[Traumtulpe]

19 hours ago, Hellmaker2004 said:

I am well aware how gas work. That does not change the fact that if you look at a fish and question why it can not fly, thinking it is a stupid design, when you are yourself a bird and have only seen the sky, is very bad and biased perception off the world.

Gas is not a fish, it is a bird with still bloody stumps in place of wings. It isn't that long ago that Gas got it's wings hacked off (got it's scaling removed). You can't possibly already have forgotten, can you?

Also, you are weird for pointing at a mutilated bird and calling it a fish, just because it cannot fly anymore.

[(PSN)Ragology]

The bird whose wings have been plucked will shed all its feathers and will turn into the beast it was before it evolved into a bird.

 

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