Marked For Death: Where We’ve Been, and Changes to Come

[Marcooose]

As many of you have likely been following, one of the most intensely discussed Helminth abilities has been Marked for Death. Upon releasing the Helminth, we knew that it would be a system that had the potential to shift strategies in Warframe drastically. Helminth is a system in the vein of what we find most exciting about creating a game like Warframe, which is to design something that feels truly exciting to us as Devs, and hopefully to you Tenno as players. 

With the Helminth System, we knew that abilities/systems may need to be tweaked back and forth to help prevent anyone from feeling as though there was only one ‘good way’ to use the Helminth System. We’re still tweaking resource costs as we speak! A key part is ensuring the Helminth System aligns with how it should fit into the overall ecosystem of Warframe instead of dictating the ecosystem. 

Enter Marked for Death. When we discovered the several unintentional effects that Marked for Death was occurring we knew we had to act efficiently before more resources went into Tenno carving out a build for it, and for how this unintentionally insanely powerful synergizing ability may fit into a new niche meta. Marked for Death had several problems which added up to an ability that had a large AOE range, had mods stacking twice (yikes!), which led to distributing millions of unintentional damage.

The spirit of Marked for Death was to only consider the effective damage on the targeted enemy. It was intended that if you took out a heavy unit, enough damage could be dealt to units with lower health around to kill them (or come very, very close). It was not intended to use finishers that overkilled a unit with lower health that had enough MFD power to kill much larger and heavier units around it. 

Enter last Thursdays re-balancing effort.

Spoiler

Fixed Mods applying twice to the Marked for Death Damage portion dealt in the AOE.

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. 

Removed Critical Chance from Marked for Death radial AOE. 

Capped Damage multiplier stat to 75% and normalized Damage type mults.

Here’s an example of normalized Damage type: if the Damage you deal is 0.5 Impact, 0.4 Slash, 0.3 Heat that sums to 1.2x but after normalizing they become 0.42 Impact, 0.33 Slash, 0.25 Heat.

Fixed Marked for Death with Arcane Trickery equipped triggering invisibility almost every time, because each enemy hit by the AoE has its own 15% chance to activate Arcane Trickery.

Our team made the decision to change Marked for Death, but based on community feedback and our own testing, the hammer was swung too hard on the changes - (compounded by the major fixes). The scenario we had re-balanced Marked For Death around was too rare to be useful and satisfying. We knew that the conversation was not over on Marked For Death, and we committed to taking another look to hopefully restore balance to this ability. Now that the facts have been laid out, here’s where that conversation continues today:

We are changing Marked for Death to start its base damage at 75%, which will cap at 150% with Mods.  Since the ‘Damage Type In = Damage Type Out’, this will scale well with certain damage types, specifically ones with DOTS s which is what we envision. 

Simply put: We’re bringing the damage back up!

The Dev work behind the scenes has already been completed, so we are now looking to submit the changes in a HF that will hopefully be going out next week with Helminth Bile changes as well!  

Sept. 25th update - As Pablo noted on Prime Time last night, the MFD base damage is going to be 75% instead of 65% as previously indicated. The ceiling will remain the same! This change has already been submitted and should release alongside the other MFD changes. 

[Kylo.]

Sounds like it'll be usable. Not overpowered, but usable.

[_sandsoftime_]

Cool, finally some good news

[Tesseract7777]

Sounds like a solid plan for now, hard to say until the changes are in game and we really test them, I don't like theorycrafting from an armchair, but it definitely at least sounds like a good starting point and other adjustments can be made if needed down the road.

Thanks! 

[Synpai]

I'm interested to give the new MFD a try. I didn't particularly feel the damage was all that different with my tests, it just required a more and more niche set up depending. I found issues more so in the amount of information I have as a player: "What enemy has the most health?" and partially the value of Arcane Trickery vs the Skiajati, trickery has maybe too small of a base chance, maybe higher proc chance and shorter duration would be a better place for it to be. 

After a few rereads, I have a question though: could MFD, not just spread a special finisher DOT? I'm trying to understand the exact vision for this ability so I can better provide feedback as it's hard for me to tell where it should be.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Synpai

[Crevab]

Cool, thank you for listening!

Sorry things have been getting so vitriolic though

[Radagosh]

get rid of the health limiter from enemies, overdamage should count especially with all the downsides like LoS, range, efficiency and str investments and the loss of survivability due to the trickery fix (which was one of the two only justified nerfs during your overreaction last week).

An ability that's worse than just using a soma or melee spam in 90% of your game (except for steel path) isn't balanced well/

[Grav_Starstrider]

Thanks for taking the time and effort to take a balanced look at it's place in the game and in isolation, to find a happy medium that makes the ability fun and effective, without making it dictate the meta.

Can we get similar passes on more of the abilities in Warframe? Rebb's stat-stream highlighted some consistently replaced-by-helminth-infusions abilities (Mesa's Ballistic Battery, Chroma's Breath Attack), and some of the least-Infused abilities (like Decoy, Mind Control, etc)?

[Rage_Inducer]

Looks promising, Wukong really needs this.

[SpicyDinosaur]

Since I know any more changes are unlikely as DE tends to "fix" and forget at best, I'm still skeptical, but hopefully these changes fix the ability.

[Kontrollo]

Good. Take your time and don't buy into all the outrage.

At the end of the day it's still an ability that replaces another one in a kit which is "useless" for some people. So if after you're done rebalancing and MFD still finds use, that is what counts.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Kontrollo
typo, clarified

[Grav_Starstrider]

Just now, Radagosh said:

get rid of the health limiter from enemies, overdamage should count especially with all the downsides like LoS, range, efficiency and str investments and the loss of survivability due to the trickery fix (which was one of the two only justified nerfs during your overreaction last week).

An ability that's worse than just using a soma or melee spam in 90% of your game (except for steel path) isn't balanced well/

Isn't the Soma fully automatic? The entire point of Marked for Death is to make a damage instance into a "nuke". You're supposed to use it with something like Garuda's fully charged Blood Ball, to make enemies in it's area of effect receive even more damage, or multiply a sniper shot to a whole crowd.

[Aldrr]

Mark a tank enemy, release an AoE around it that kills surrounding marshmallows, or close to it.
Liking it so far.

And it's a conversation, bonus kudos for that. 🙂

[Zeclem]

this wont fix its problems at all. right now its usable on like 3 frames, none of which really needs this buff. make it actually work with multishot and multihitting finishers so snipers can also make use of it at least.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Zeclem

[An8rchy]

Ah yes, capped dmg.. ._. 
Monkey Paw goes Brrrrrt

[Vespilan]

Still doesnt sound like a viable ability to me. The biggest downer about the MfD nerf was that the damage, no matter how you twist and turn it, was capped to the targets maximum HP. I know, the idea was to force players to swat out stronger targets to use MfD on, but as of right now there are a whole bunch of abilities on frames that dont force you to jump through hoops to get their full potential. MfD was on par with these broken abilities, like Khoras Whipclaw, not better and did not deserve the nerf.

If you are wondering why the maximum HP thing is a problem, compare these armor and health numbers between a variety of common grineer units on Lv. 100

• Bombard: 31k Cloned Flesh, 6.6k Ferrite Armor
• Heavy Gunner: 31k CF, 6k FA
• Scorpion: 15k CF, 1.9k FA
• Lancer: 10k CF, 1k FA
• Butcher: 5.3k CF, 67 FA (no, I did not forget the "k")

As a result of this, MfD will do chip damage, even at 150%, to the units you actually want dead the quickest. Even with DoTs, come on, thats just sad.
My suggestion? Keep everything as is, revert the damage-capped-to-enemy-max-HP change. 

[Tesseract7777]

5 minutes ago, Crevab said:

Cool, thank you for listening!

Sorry things have been getting so vitriolic though

I want to second this. I myself feel bad because I feel like I was too harsh recently over Heart of Deimos bugs and hiccups and such. They are human trying to do their best. Constructive Criticism is fine, but I need to remind myself that they are still human, and have feelings just like me. DE is a company, but a company is made up of a bunch of people. 

[Cubewano]

You can still one shot nuke steel path enemies with ability so not sure it needed a buff but hopefully it'll calm down the outrage crowd at the least. Sorry this is where we have wound up though. Hopefully this submissions won't egg people on further the next time an entirely justified rebalance takes place. 

Edited September 24, 2020 by Cubewano

[Radagosh]

vor 2 Minuten schrieb Grav_Starstrider:

Isn't the Soma fully automatic? The entire point of Marked for Death is to make a damage instance into a "nuke". You're supposed to use it with something like Garuda's fully charged Blood Ball, to make enemies in it's area of effect receive even more damage, or multiply a sniper shot to a whole crowd.

i was making the point that a mediocre weapon from 5 years ago is better than an ability at clearing rooms. Should have maybe chosen the boltor instead as the new soma augment is actually quite nice.

[SneakyErvin]

That was pretty much the only thing that didnt add up in my mind "why did they cap it to 75%?". The actual fixes with double dipping etc where understandable. Glad you are putting it back as a power strength scaling ability. Should have some potential as a 150% capped skill. Which also means that builds dont need to go ape on strength to cram everything out of it.

[Gpblack123]

Seems solid, i like it

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

3 minutes ago, Zeclem said:

this wont fix its problems at all. right now its usable on like 3 frames, none of which really needs this buff. 

That's your opinion and that is all. After this change it will be much more useable.

[Amazerath]

8 minutes ago, [DE]Marcus said:

With the Helminth System, we knew that abilities/systems may need to be tweaked back and forth to help prevent anyone from feeling as though there was only one ‘good way’ to use the Helminth System.

That's quite a claim considering you people only care about making strong options weaker while letting the already weak options remain weak.

[kyori]

18 minutes ago, [DE]Marcus said:

unintentional

Interesting. Actually sometimes I'm thinking about the more serious problem underlying these kind of problems... that is the one/them who designed the abilities or doing the math etc. It has been 7-8 years making a single game but seems every time there are 'unintentional' mistakes. It might be harsh but... do they not only have 1 job? hehe

[Radagosh]

vor 3 Minuten schrieb Amazerath:

That's quite a claim considering you people only care about making strong options weaker while letting the already weak options remain weak.

oof, spitting them facts. cant wait for roar to be nerfed to 10% just for it to still be the most infused ability.