Stop nerfing things with a sledge hammer

[IggySnow]

Every time something needs a nerf DE decides to take a sledge hammer to it, instead of making smaller adjustments until its in a good power level.

the latest example being marked for death. Fixing mods being applied twice? makes sense and lowers its power. Arcane trickery not being applied for every enemy killed also makes sense and lowers its power.

But DE should have stopped there, monitored how powerful it is now, and then if it still needed tweaking, adjust it again in a couple of weeks, with a note on the current patch notes that more adjustments might still be made.

But instead they automatically assumed it would still be too powerful so they made it only do 75% capped damage, AND an additional damage cap based on the the targets health/shields.

 

I don't even use marked for death at all since it doesn't suit my play style. Im just tired of seeing things that people find fun nerfed into the ground to the point where its useless because it needed small adjustments.

[trunks013]

I must admit it was a pretty huge modification.

Having it like tweeked little by little until its perfect without going overboard would be great but of course i have not tryed it so i'm gonna keep my critique for when i try it^.^

I automatically remembered this funny picture.

Spoiler

 

[NineteenLettersLong]

il y a 4 minutes, HerpDerpy a dit :

Every time something needs a nerf DE decides to take a sledge hammer to it, instead of making smaller adjustments until its in a good power level.

the latest example being marked for death. Fixing mods being applied twice? makes sense and lowers its power. Arcane trickery not being applied for every enemy killed also makes sense and lowers its power.

But DE should have stopped there, monitored how powerful it is now, and then if it still needed tweaking, adjust it again in a couple of weeks, with a note on the current patch notes that more adjustments might still be made.

But instead they automatically assumed it would still be too powerful so they made it only do 75% capped damage, AND an additional damage cap based on the the targets health/shields.

 

I don't even use marked for death at all since it doesn't suit my play style. Im just tired of seeing things that people find fun nerfed into the ground to the point where its useless because it needed small adjustments.

Not too mention it not being able to crit, and also being ran through enemy armor again so you're not even getting that 75% damage. It's legitimately one of the worst skills in the game now. It's not worth the energy cost and animation time.

[Nazzami]

at this point would just be better removing the skill rather then bait people into adding it to a frame

[Syln]

Frankly i never liked that skill mainly due to the cast animation, (they should get rid of it now that it is overnerfed), but when i saw the patch note section about it, i was astonished by the massacre :D

[FlappyBerd]

The ability was never into the meta anyway. It required specific scenario and specific high damage one shot weapon to work. With the game full of nauseating AOE weapons, i was hoping it'll give some love to my precision weapons. I wouldve been happy if they just fixed the bugs.

So much for a "new level of customization". We'll probably be left with a handful of useful abilities. A sad day for my revitalized frames.

[DCaedus]

Totally agree.

DE has this tendency of nerfing stuff to the ground, either because they are good or popular.

In the case of weapons this makes it so that any weapon you invest into, and their rivens will eventually be useless and worthless, because old stuff bad, new stuff op.

In the case of Marked for Death, it was completely fine on release, it wasn't even broken to begin with. Now Marked for Death is just useless. It makes you deal less damage than if you just shot or melee or used other abilities, and it costs energy and is slow af to cast.

[SenorClipClop]

Quote

Fixed base Damage using the Health/Shield Damage dealt and not capped at the Health+Shield the target had prior (e.g. enemy with 5 Health gets hit by 100 damage, and 100 damage is shared in AOE. It should just be the 5).

This part is reasonable, imo. Overkill damage technically isn't dealt to the marked enemy, and letting it work that way made the ability a must-spam-on-first-enemy-you-see kind of gimmick. Now its nuke potential has a tactical caveat in that to optimize you need to be tagging tanky targets. Incidentally, if you Mark the tankiest target in the ability's radius, it functions exactly the same as if this clause weren't present. You can still nuke rooms, now you just have to pay a bit more attention.

[keikogi]

After seeing the marked for death changes: 

1 hour ago, [DE]Megan said:

Fixed base Damage using the Health/Shield Damage dealt and not capped at the Health+Shield the target had prior (e.g. enemy with 5 Health gets hit by 100 damage, and 100 damage is shared in AOE. It should just be the 5).

• Radial damage was never meant to exceed the target’s Health and this was our bad. The desired strategy we wanted was players prioritizing tank units like Heavy Gunners to do AOE clears since heavy units have more Health than normal, thus the radial AOE would likely be lethal, not just normal units. This issue combined with numerous bugs of Mods stacking meant this was way over powered. A key part of reviewing these changes will be ensuring that players understand the best case scenario we envision for the power is targeting high-Health enemies to do radial damage to weaker enemies. 

It made me wonder if DE understands their own armor scaling does. Going to use their own example. Let´s suppose you use marked for death on heavy gunner surrounded by elite lancers at level 100. Killing the gunner that has 700 k effective health will deal a whopping 31 k damage but each lancer surrounding it has 130 k health. It´s not good even against the light targets surrounding the heavy units and the more the lvls scale the worse the situation gets. It won´t be that good against corpus either due to shield gates.

[(PSN)Deeceem]

That didn't take too long. Also the expected approach as per usual.

I tried it on Ash and on him it didn't feel too crazy aside from the interactions you mentioned - the perma-invis with Trickery was the actual strong part imo. It was pretty cool but moreso showed how outdated Bladestorm is these days.

I think your suggestions would have been indeed the sensible route but we know DE doesn't do sensible when it comes to things getting popular or hyped by Youtubers (like Helminth Defy). 

Anyone 'member the BUFFS they mentioned they were going to do to the bad Helminth abilities at TennoCon? Seems like they barely do. We are at like what now? Two (?) "buffs" (Well of Life and Air Burst) and seven (?) nerfs (Roar, Dispenser, Eclipse, Defy, Larva, Warcry and M4D)? I'm not sure where to place the middle ground abilities due to frame specific mechanics like Fire Blast or Thermal Sunder but I might mention those as well.

DE gonna DE, I guess. Oh well, until next time.

[SneakyErvin]

I understand the fixes when it comes to the double dipping mods, being able to crit and the overkill damage. I dont understand why they placed a cap on it at 75%. The fixes were needed since they were obviously not intended (skill simply do not crit unless specifically stated, like with exalteds) and making use of overkill damage and double dipping on mods was silly.

But why cap it at 75% of damage done when everything that took it far over the edge was fixed due to not working as intended. They should have kept the scaling uncapped and seen how it turned out from there.

[IggySnow]

3 minutes ago, SenorClipClop said:

This part is reasonable, imo. Overkill damage technically isn't dealt to the marked enemy, and letting it work that way made the ability a must-spam-on-first-enemy-you-see kind of gimmick. Now its nuke potential has a tactical caveat in that to optimize you need to be tagging tanky targets. Incidentally, if you Mark the tankiest target in the ability's radius, it functions exactly the same as if this clause weren't present. You can still nuke rooms, now you just have to pay a bit more attention.

except that there are plenty of abilities that can nuke everything in a 20m radius without having to wait for a tanky target to show up. And in high levels you had to use 2 abilities to nuke groups using Marked.

thats the main problem with this nerf. you now HAVE to wait for a tank to show up to nuke a room. You cant even kill fodder enemies by marking other fodder enemies.

[SenorClipClop]

18 minutes ago, HerpDerpy said:

except that there are plenty of abilities that can nuke everything in a 20m radius without having to wait for a tanky target to show up.

And a MfD Fatal Teleport Ash or a MfD Revenant could outperform all of them for lack of setup and potency of payoff. Original Marked for Death was too strong, plain and simple.

18 minutes ago, HerpDerpy said:

you now HAVE to wait for a tank to show up to nuke a room. You cant even kill fodder enemies by marking other fodder enemies.

This is true, but not because of removing overkill Health. Now the main issue is that the transferable damage is capped at 75%. If it were capped at 100% there'd be no issue with nuke potential unless you were tagging fodder and expecting that to indirectly wipe tanks. Capping at 75% means that if you don't tag a significantly more beefy target, or an already-hurt target, you're not going to kill many enemies with this ability. And if you don't, you have significantly diminished returns on attacking anyone in the same area, since they're all hurt now and the ability scales from their now-lowered HP.

From initial testing, I'd be interested to see if putting one of the following into play made the ability seem more fair:

• Cap damage transferal at 100% or near 100% (like maybe 90%).
• Scale damage transferal on max HP instead of current HP (this may still have the potential to go wacky a la old Magus Lockdown).

[Tesseract7777]

Yeah there is no defending them on this. Nerf was total overkill. Totally don't know what they were thinking. I'm sure it was played too much, as that's what all their decisions seem to be based on. Well, they can enjoy that shiny new ability they made having no useage now because they nerfed it so hard they might as well remove it from the game. Can't even crit? Why was it even created...? Just... Silly. Very silly DE.

 

[Damocles]

It was probably the only ability that brought something new to the game, but didn't fit my playstyle either. Of course when they nerf it, they added 5 more nerfs to that 1 ability to ensure it was a closed casket funeral.

The only reason I'm here is because DE SUCKS (and I will never sugar coat this) at game design. They keep hiring artists that make great art, but art isn't playable content and their content is just reusing assets, buggy mess, and game modes that nobody wants to play. That said, they're not listening, they're not removing arbitration drones, they're not removing the steel path armor/health/shield boosts, they're not adding rewards to harder content, their game will always continue to suck with each update. They simply decide without listening

[GentlePuppet]

48 minutes ago, -Damocles- said:

They simply decide without listening

They listen, they just completely misunderstand the issue people are talking about and go about it in a very janky and backwards "This is what you wanted right?" way.

[Seriguela]

It's a questionable premise
They try to release new good stuff without testing, like the players wouldn't try to make a powerful loadout using a specific synergy, and guess what?
They usually gets at that point and the game designers, which didn't test anything before it happened, came with "it's not our intention to raise such a OP playstyle" and nerf hammer
I like a lot what DE are doing which the game, game modes, history, visuals, weapons... but in this aspect it's just poor game designer.
The nerf they did with Catchmoon in the past was so shocking that almost all players decide not to use this weapon anymore. 
If they nerf Mausolon too, which is almost like the only heavy gun that feels like a heavy gun, istead of buff all others heavy guns, this proves they actually don't test their own game.

[zakaryx]

I don't mind marked for death getting nerfed for high level content. Currently it can still do massive damage to level 165 corrupted heavy gunners IF you use it on another gunner. If you use it on a normal enemy it's basically COMPLETELY worthless with how little damage it does.

The ability is 100% broken at lower levels though. Here's a video of it failing to kill a level five enemy.

 

 

[Tesseract7777]

27 minutes ago, Seriguela said:

It's a questionable premise
They try to release new good stuff without testing, like the players wouldn't try to make a powerful loadout using a specific synergy, and guess what?
They usually gets at that point and the game designers, which didn't test anything before it happened, came with "it's not our intention to raise such a OP playstyle" and nerf hammer
I like a lot what DE are doing which the game, game modes, history, visuals, weapons... but in this aspect it's just poor game designer.
The nerf they did with Catchmoon in the past was so shocking that almost all players decide not to use this weapon anymore. 
If they nerf Mausolon too, which is almost like the only heavy gun that feels like a heavy gun, istead of buff all others heavy guns, this proves they actually don't test their own game.

I will say this: 

The fact they apparently didn't see it coming that Ash in particular would abuse it and that people would replace BS with it is... concerning, to say the least. 

[Seriguela]

10 minutes ago, zakaryx said:

I don't mind marked for death getting nerfed for high level content. Currently it can still do massive damage to level 165 corrupted heavy gunners IF you use it on another gunner. If you use it on a normal enemy it's basically COMPLETELY worthless with how little damage it does.

The ability is 100% broken at lower levels though. Here's a video of it failing to kill a level five enemy.

 

 

Big uf, that's worse than Soul Punch

Needs to be really bad to be worse than Soul Punch

[Kaggelos]

Wow, marked for Death can't even kill lvl 20 enemies now... Fatal Teleport+Skiajati combo did almost nothing... Am i doing something wrong here?

Tried it in the Simulacrum with Ancient Disruptor and Chargers, lvl 160, none of the Chargers died, only about 35% of their health was lost... And about Arcane Trickery, it was the only legitimately good synergy AT had, so there's that too...

Also, it says kill high health enemies for maximum effect, but i cant even clear lvl 20 enemies by attacking one of them, even with normal health... Again, while using a pretty good combo mind you... Generally i hate complaining, but this... I dunno...

[Mephane]

5 hours ago, HerpDerpy said:

Every time something needs a nerf DE decides to take a sledge hammer to it, instead of making smaller adjustments until its in a good power level.

the latest example being marked for death. Fixing mods being applied twice? makes sense and lowers its power. Arcane trickery not being applied for every enemy killed also makes sense and lowers its power.

But DE should have stopped there, monitored how powerful it is now, and then if it still needed tweaking, adjust it again in a couple of weeks, with a note on the current patch notes that more adjustments might still be made.

But instead they automatically assumed it would still be too powerful so they made it only do 75% capped damage, AND an additional damage cap based on the the targets health/shields.

 

I don't even use marked for death at all since it doesn't suit my play style. Im just tired of seeing things that people find fun nerfed into the ground to the point where its useless because it needed small adjustments.

One big problem with DE's approach is also this nerf hits everyone. No matter how you used the ability, how much (or how little) synergy you got out of it and your entire loadout, straight to garbage tier. For example, I agree that applying mods twice should be fixed, proccing Arcane Trickery from all enemies hit might be a bit too much (ceterum censeo Arcane Trickery should get a buff to its proc chance), yeah.

But what about a guy like me who just used the ability as is just with a regular well-modded Warframe? I had it at 90% damage spread, with a high damage weapon like Opticor Vandal, I would kill one tight group of enemies with some preparation and precision - read: skill! - because the damage spread was neither capped at 75% nor at the max health of the target, it was simply 90% of whatever damage the next it would do, so I could aim for a fully charged headshot (on a target flailing about during that stun). This use of the ability, a far cry from the more extreme builds, just became totally useless as well.

DE seems to have a tendency to nerf something because of one overpowered combination, but with the colleratal damage of hurting everyone who used the ability in a clearly not overpowered way as well.