Make Ability Damage scaling off Enemies or Player Weapons a UNIVERSAL philosophy. ALL damage abilities should be relevant from early to late game!

[(PSN)GingyGreen]

Right now most nukes in the game are only relevant in the Star Chart. No, wait, scratch that. They fall off even during Saturn onwards when enemy armour starts becoming more noticeable.

 

Old Ember was hot garbage that was only good for her CC. This is because her abilities didn't scale in any shape or form. It was only after Heat status rework and her full kit rework that she's even remotely useful because no her abilities all shred armour, or in the case of Fire Blast, a lot of armour...provided it doesn't bug out and actually hits the enemy.

 

Oberon's Smite scales off enemy health, so it's as strong in the early game as it is late game (provided you can take out some armour)

 

Grendel's powers either strips armour, or they scale off enemy quantity and their health. He's awesome! Not meta, but he's a functional and fun frame all game long.

 

Contrast this with 50% of Chroma's kit. Even with Heat colours, Spectral Scream and Effigy are both noob traps. Why? Because they don't scale off anything but Ability Power. And only barely at that. Early game they can hurt some Infested, but they absolutely fall apart as enemies start gaining more health and armour, whereas your damage capped off several planets ago.

 

 

Abilities should scale off a value that increases as players enter higher level content! Be it enemy levels, their health, their armour, player weapons, etc.

 

Possible Methods of Scaling

-ability damage scale off enemy levels

-ability damage scale off enemy health

-ability damage scale off player's weapons

-ability damage scale off weapon mods

-ability shreds enemy armour

-ability damage scales off enemy attacks to a ludicrous degree since enemies do very little damage and have insane health value (so less like Absorb and more like Defy)

-ability damage scales off some sort of resource that will be consistently relevant all throughout the game like Ember's heat gauge

[Steel_Rook]

This is a problem I've brought up many times before - Warframe damage abilities suck ass. DE know this, so they've employed a multitude of "dirty hacks" to try and get around this. Some damage abilities draw stats from "stat stick" weapons, thus behaving exactly like Exalted Weapons. Atlas' Landslide and Khora's Whip are two easy examples. It's why the Xoris became such an overnight issue. Some abilities scale with enemy health, enemy damage or enemy level (or some combination thereof). Pretty much all of Grendel's abilities do that, on top of stripping armour. Some abilities just have very high caps, such as Antimatter Drop capping out at 50K damage, Spores damage capping at 70K, Nidus being able to boost his ability damage up to *100 (or *300 with an Augment), etc. Not only is there no rhyme or reason behind which ability uses which workaround, but that still leaves plenty of abilities without workarounds which just suck.

A basic, classic damage ability's damage scales off of ability strength, and most builds are looking at 130%, 200%, maybe 300% Ability Strength. Compare this to firearms, where a simple Serration mod will up weapon damage by 165% just by itself. Then you add multishot, elemental damage, criticals, etc. Our weapons can easily achieve *20, *50, *100 and more damage, yet our abilities are lucky if they can double their damage. Unless damage-dealing abilities scale off of something besides their own stats, they're not usable.

Thus, I agree with the OP. Personally, I would like to see one of three things. Ideally, I'd like to see damage-dealing abilities turned into Exalted Weapons or retired. Then they can use weapon modding in order to deal decent damage. Failing that, I'd like to have the ability to mod for ability damage in some more felxible fashion than just the 5 or so Ability Strength mods we have. Failing even that, I'd like to at the very least hear DE's logic based on which ability should scale off of what. The problem with that last one is I don't think they HAVE any hard-and-fast rules on the matter. The balance of individual Warframes has always struck me as particularly chaotic and ad-hoc. Warframes use abilities, mechanics and design principles roughly based on what the developers were thinking when that Warframe was created and no other model.

[GPrime96]

Enemy Damage, Health, and Level are the most known ones to make a Frame scale to very high levels. Octavia’s Mallet scales off Enemy’s Damage and increase the damage received back to the enemies, Revenant scales off Enemy’s Health and he ignores Armor too so at 100% Damage to health, he can one shot his Enthralls all day. Garuda does the same but from Damage Captured during every cast and the damage gets multiplied after it get captured. That’s before she increase that damage further by letting enemies shoot at her Mirror. When you add the Slash from Seeking Talons for that Damage from Dread Mirror, she can one hit bleed out enemies for a long time. Vauban’s Orbs scales off Enemy’s levels and that works with Bastille since it removes Enemy Armor. Nidus is known to be one of those Scaling Warframe but that’s because his Tankiness scales off his Mutation Stacks and when he dies, he loses 15 of them. He gain 100 at max so he need to die 7 times to lose a Revive at max stacks. A good Nidus player can regain 15 Mutation Stacks in secs which makes him one of the best Tanks in the Game.

[Kaggelos]

Agreed, why is this not a thing already? 

[DrakeWurrum]

Genuinely surprised this isn't a thing.

[TheGrimCorsair]

Yeah, they should also increase the energy drain on Warframe damage abilities when they do this.

Make them drain percentage of your energy bar, with your energy bar serving as a health pool vs energy drain attacks which should drain fixed values/rates excepting magnetic procs, and not scale the way the Disruptor Ancient's energy drain does. No frame should be allowed to live and die solely on their casting and all of them should be required to engage in the rest of the systems at your disposal.

[(PSN)thegarada]

A better solution is to remove armor scaling entirely, or at least after level 30. Mobs should have a fixed armor percentage and that’s it. Example, bombard to have 600 armor. It does not matter what the level is, bombard will always have 600 Armor. This will resolve many of the issues of many weapons, skills and status being useless.

[Aratir]

On 2020-09-19 at 10:20 PM, (PS4)GingyGreen said:

Right now most nukes in the game are only relevant in the Star Chart. No, wait, scratch that. They fall off even during Saturn onwards when enemy armour starts becoming more noticeable.

 

Old Ember was hot garbage that was only good for her CC. This is because her abilities didn't scale in any shape or form. It was only after Heat status rework and her full kit rework that she's even remotely useful because no her abilities all shred armour, or in the case of Fire Blast, a lot of armour...provided it doesn't bug out and actually hits the enemy.

 

Oberon's Smite scales off enemy health, so it's as strong in the early game as it is late game (provided you can take out some armour)

 

Grendel's powers either strips armour, or they scale off enemy quantity and their health. He's awesome! Not meta, but he's a functional and fun frame all game long.

 

Contrast this with 50% of Chroma's kit. Even with Heat colours, Spectral Scream and Effigy are both noob traps. Why? Because they don't scale off anything but Ability Power. And only barely at that. Early game they can hurt some Infested, but they absolutely fall apart as enemies start gaining more health and armour, whereas your damage capped off several planets ago.

 

 

Abilities should scale off a value that increases as players enter higher level content! Be it enemy levels, their health, their armour, player weapons, etc.

 

Possible Methods of Scaling

-ability damage scale off enemy levels

-ability damage scale off enemy health

-ability damage scale off player's weapons

-ability damage scale off weapon mods

-ability shreds enemy armour

-ability damage scales off enemy attacks to a ludicrous degree since enemies do very little damage and have insane health value (so less like Absorb and more like Defy)

-ability damage scales off some sort of resource that will be consistently relevant all throughout the game like Ember's heat gauge

DE: So you are saying we need to nerf ember and oberon....