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

[Tesseract7777]

1 minute ago, kyori said:

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

I know you aren't being too serious, but my guess is that they really don't have only one job, lol. I get the idea most DE employees are constantly shifted between projects and don't really have a dedicated thing that they are usually spending time on, hence, why stuff like this happens relatively frequently. For example, I got the impression the entire team was shifted over to Heart of Deimos stuff to meet the crunch, some of that team may have been working on systems they weren't as familiar with to get it done on time. 

[trunks013]

Thanks for the intel Kretsy you rock ^.^ 

[Gaz_TTV]

Really appreciate you guys listening to feedback that the nerf was much too hard for the amount of work/grind it required to get this ability unlocked in the first place.

 

but I’ve got to say this “post nerf buff” is way too tame. Please reintroduce critical chance to explosion, I do not want to be forced to use slash procs with marked for death for good results. 150% damage increase will require a ton of strength would should hurt your range (xaku syndrome) and it will still be utter trash when not using slash procs. There are more changes I would suggest but bringing back crit explosion would be a good start imo.

 

thanks again

[Grav_Starstrider]

2 minutes ago, Radagosh said:

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

At that point, I point to Brozime's commentary. "If you thought it was too powerful or too obvious a universal pick, why on earth didn't you choose a weaker ability, and buff it if necessary?" to paraphrase.

Regarding your earlier response, you have a fairly valid point about clearing rooms with other options, but Warframe has.... Lots of options. Everywhere. And comparing guns to melee to abilities is comparing apples to oranges, one costs ammo, one costs nothing, and one costs energy. They're all intended to kill things. So I feel like it's best to stick with a single argument. Separate out the advocacy for sweeping balance changes between what abilities (energy) affects, what guns (ammo) do, and what melee is for, separate from the conversation about where this specific ability falls in place for, compared to other abilities. Should probably compare it to other abilities that cost the same amount of energy, or just note the scale at which it works compared to similar abilities that cost different amounts of energy.

[kazeyama]

How is this a good change? You nerfed the starting damage even more and now require us to build for both strength and range to get the most out of it. You killed the ability and then putting a bandaid on the corpse won't bring it back to life. Atleast give us back crit or something else to make builds more functional than apparently you need to just stack slash damage. 

[mikakor]

get rid of this asinine mechanic that is damage cap, then we'll talk. in more easy to understand words for the team...

"i paid for the whole speedometer, i'm gonna use the whole speedometer"

Stop trying to limit the players by arbitrarily deciding that some of our tools, powers, or equipment don't work at their full extend with no reason. devs don't create the M.E.T.A. the player do. PERIOD.

Edited September 24, 2020 by mikakor

[GrowthProfitGrofit]

With the current implementation, MfD is only useful when used in combination with Finishers. Changing the damage amount doesn't change this.

I think the correct solution is to either limit the ability so that it only works on Finishers (and balance around the limitation) or get rid of the damage transfer and make it always deal True damage.

As a side note, capping effectiveness is kind of silly - you could just reduce the base effect to 50% and most builds would struggle to reach 150%. Outside of damage reduction, caps are an unusual and unexpected mechanic in Warframe and I do not think this situation justifies such an unconventional mechanic.

[Tesseract7777]

Just now, kazeyama said:

How is this a good change? You nerfed the starting damage even more and now require us to build for both strength and range to get the most out of it. You killed the ability and then putting a bandaid on the corpse won't bring it back to life. Atleast give us back crit or something else to make builds more functional than apparently you need to just stack slash damage. 

I think that's the thing though... if you read his post, he says they specifically wanted it to work best with dot.

Hence, they expect you to use slash, they want you to. That is purposeful. Not saying I am sure it's the best change yet, I'm reserving final judgment until I get to test these changes out. 

[Rebore]

NGL someone must have had a grudge with M4D. capped the % to 75% when the base was already 50% smh kinda sus.

Reg intensify would only make it 65% then umbra was 72% could not even max it without dying inside with using higher strength mod.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Rebore

[Drachnyn]

vor 31 Minuten schrieb [DE]Marcus:

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. 

But it wasnt meta. An ability with 10m base range and line of sight restrictions on top will never be meta. Calling it large AOE range is just nonsense.

Have you looked at the description and the tooltip video? it performed exactly as expected (apart from whatever double stacking). 

[SprinKah]

21 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. make it actually work with multishot and multihitting finishers so snipers can also make use of it at least.

so what if it's only fully effective on only a few frames, not everything should be for everything. 

[Kaotyke]

12 minutes ago, Radagosh said:

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

Yeah, remember the Xaku nerf?

[Tesseract7777]

Just now, GrowthProfitGrofit said:

With the current implementation, MfD is only useful when used in combination with Finishers. Changing the damage amount doesn't change this.

I think the correct solution is to either limit the ability so that it only works on Finishers (and balance around the limitation) or get rid of the damage transfer and make it always deal True damage.

As a side note, capping effectiveness is kind of silly - you could just reduce the base effect to 50% and most builds would struggle to reach 150%. Outside of damage reduction, caps are an unusual and unexpected mechanic in Warframe and I do not think this situation justifies such an unconventional mechanic.

I don't like damage caps in WF either, but I think the reason why in this case is because of three frames who don't play nicely with their intentions for the ability:

Ash

Excal

Banshee 

Or rather, their augments. If I am understanding correctly the point of the damage cap is so it can be buffed for other frames, without making it ludicrously powerful (again) on those three worst offenders. 

[Hoppyscotch]

MFD was the final straw for me. You take an already harshly restricted but usable ability and nerf it to the ground because it dared to be usable and then after a week of outcry you walk it back from might as well delete it from to game to why on earth would you ever choose this and call it balance. I knew this was the direction DE would go the second they announced that they were preemptively nerfing abilities they THOUGHT would be too good instead of buffing abilities that were bad like they explicitly said they would. Then they have the devstream where you admit that oh balance team wasn't even around for the nerf and then won't even commit to even considering using hemolith data for buffs. It's the final straw that you would nerf something for daring to be a somewhat competitive choice instead of fixing all the terrible abilities in the pool. I started out actually excited for once about demois but then everything from the tennocon announcement to now happened. It's been nothing but disappointing update after disappointing update for years and years now. After 6 years of playing I'm done. I uninstalled the game. I don't know what changed where updates went from exciting to me fearing every single update is just going to nerf anything I dare to like through the ground or be a horrible mess all around and maybe 2 years from now we'll actually fix something instead of bandaid after bandaid but I don't want to deal with it anymore.

[Drachnyn]

vor 41 Minuten schrieb [DE]Marcus:

We are changing Marked for Death to start its base damage at 65%, 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!

So does that mean it will take actual damage dealt like the ability says it does (but currently doesnt in the nerfed state) or will it still be just health lost? 

Contrary what you said in the nerf post: damage dealt means something entirely different to health lost. If you let it be at health lost it will always perform like trash in a team situation because someone will have dealt damage to your target, making the ability S#&$ again. Make it be damage dealt again and not health lost.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Drachnyn

[DCaedus]

I'd also like for M4D to have a fixed range of 20m or so, not affected by mods, so that we don't have to build for lots of range to make use of it. Because quite honestly the base range is kinda short, so it limits our builds possibilities. Just a suggestion.

[GrowthProfitGrofit]

1 minute ago, Tesseract7777 said:

I don't like damage caps in WF either, but I think the reason why in this case is because of three frames who don't play nicely with their intentions for the ability:

Ash

Excal

Banshee 

Or rather, their augments. If I am understanding correctly the point of the damage cap is so it can be buffed for other frames, without making it ludicrously powerful (again) on those three worst offenders. 

As far as I know, both Excal and Banshee augments still apply after this ability is calculated. Also the damage is already capped by the enemy's health which should theoretically prevent those augments from being overpowered. The 150% transfer cap is a second cap on top of the one which already exists and I do not see the purpose for such a complex and unintuitive mechanic.

[Arsonistic]

43 minutes ago, [DE]Marcus said:

We are changing Marked for Death to start its base damage at 65%, which will cap at 150% with Mods.

Does this mean that it scales up to the 150% cap with Ability Strength? I.e: 231% Strength will make you reach the cap?

[InfamousDerp]

I do hope it's still viable with Ash Fatal teleport combo, im tired of using bladestorm (and i actually got a sprained wrist from just marking enemies with bladestorm left and right... not really how it supposed to end but oh well). Also please do remove the "damage cap based on enemy max hp" and also finisher damage... remove the cap on finisher damage, increase the energy cost just to balance it out.

Just remove the damage cap (that includes the "only max hp of enemy"), crits are gone so might as well remove the cap and also bring back the Arcane trickery combo.

[Arsonistic]

Overall, it sounds like it'll be way more usable, but how about balancing some base abilities while at it?

Loads of people are very reluctant to have what is essentially Ability Dispositions with the Helminth system nerfing some abilities.

If Roar/Eclipse is too strong then nerf the base ability or buff the bad abilities, because introducing Ability Dispo is pointlessly complex and confusing.

[Grav_Starstrider]

4 minutes ago, Tesseract7777 said:

I don't like damage caps in WF either, but I think the reason why in this case is because of three frames who don't play nicely with their intentions for the ability:

Ash

Excal

Banshee 

Or rather, their augments. If I am understanding correctly the point of the damage cap is so it can be buffed for other frames, without making it ludicrously powerful (again) on those three worst offenders. 

Capping the effectiveness or the stacking effects of things is actually rather sensible imo. It prevents things from becoming a mandatory meta. "You HAVE to use Marked for Death if you're using Ash/Excal/Banshe/Snipers/Daggers/Slash" would be an annoying meta to have to intentionally nerf yourself by not going with. I kinda feel like Damage, Multishot, Elemental Damage, and Crits all stack up together is pretty bogus too. If I had my way, I'd make modding be how you modify your effects in combat, and combat style, rather than defining your maximum damage. Kinda bogus that changing 1 mod on my Vectis Prime can double or halve my damage output. For example, I'd prefer if multishot was a "make this a shotgun" mod that split the coin flips on crits and status more ways, rather than increased the damage outright. THEN we wouldn't be having these complaints about "Marked for Death doesn't play nicely with Multishot" because Multishot wouldn't be a mandatory mod at that point. Of course, if DE de-couples Multishot from being a damage mod, and/or decouples elemental damage mods or crit mods from all stacking with each other, I'd severely hope that they'd buff the base damage output accordingly, or nerf enemy health accordingly. That's more of a game-wide critique though, than a targeted response to a specific ability.

[(PSN)ForNoPurpose]

Cool, what about the hp cap where the aoe can only a max of 75% of nearby enemies hp?

Without changing that back this ability will still not be a "use on tough to kill nearby weaker" ability.

 

[SprinKah]

4 minutes ago, Arsonistic said:

Does this mean that it scales up to the 150% cap with Ability Strength? I.e: 231% Strength will make you reach the cap?

I don't think you will need that much. There are already a lot of warframe abilities with capped  %. Like Nova's Molecular Prime for example, you only need like...25% of sth power strength to reach the 75% slow cap. Adding more strength won't do anything more. 

Here's hoping but I doubt they're going to make it too unreasonable. 

[Testostzzet]

I don't usually jump in on these discussions and this might be better suited to a video soapbox, but I feel like this is a good example where it's worth it to bring up to the people getting heated about the nerf/new buffs not being "enough," that part of balancing sometimes means bumping stuff around until the numbers fit right. I won't speak for DE but from my own observations on the community, for every complaint about nerfs there's equal complaints about the game being too easy or pointless.

The way the old MFD worked, from what I saw, was a quick 2-3 click setup led to a huge chunk of a room getting melted no matter what level the enemies were. Yeah it was pretty cool, but, I hope anybody who wanted that to stay the way it was thinks for a second before turning around and saying there's no challenge/endgame.

You can have both, yes, but it's insanely difficult to do without creating an infinite cycle where DE has to keep churning out harder and harder content that puts so much focus on challenging the sacred non-nerfable meta that the large part of the playerbase that doesn't like or care for min-maxing gets totally locked out of it.

tl;dr if you're one of those people that want DE to not nerf anything ever then make sure you're not also complaining when all you run is a build that turns the game into a point-n-click adventure where the only challenge is grinding your face into RNG.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Tavanaka

[Grav_Starstrider]

2 minutes ago, Arsonistic said:

Overall, it sounds like it'll be way more usable, but how about balancing some base abilities while at it?

Loads of people are very reluctant to have what is essentially Ability Dispositions with the Helminth system nerfing some abilities.

If Roar/Eclipse is too strong then nerf the base ability or buff the bad abilities, because introducing Ability Dispo is pointlessly complex and confusing.

ALL OF THIS!!! Ability disposition is SO needlessly complex. Make Decoy or Mind Control actually worth using, or give us one of their better abilities, rather than just nerfing the "only good abilities" and giving them "dispositions".