Mandatory Mods - Still Hasn't Been Fixed 3+ Years Later

[Grav_Starstrider]

Just now, Traubenzuckr said:

yes i refuted your claim to greater build diversity by proving that elemental damage will be stacked instead of the then-defunct damage and multishot bonuses 

instead of trying to counter that you simply called me a tryhard

a rather tryhard move on your behalf

You keeeeeeeep ignoooooooring that the hope and intent would be that DE makes it so that whatever the damage meta would be post-change, the TTK would be the same. Whether that's more elemental damage mods, or something else. You have been missing that this whole time. I am keenly aware that there will pretty much always be a supposedly "optimal meta" build or tactic, in most games. We're just talking about making it less punishing to choose non-meta mods.

Love the "no u" retort, btw. You proved nothing. You repeated what I always said would happen, and what I predicted you'd do. You came in screaming that there will always be a meta. I KNOW. EVERYONE KNOWS. Shut up for 5 seconds, and recognize that this isn't about smashing or eradicating any semblance of a modding meta. This is about recognizing very clear outliers, of the universally top 2 picks for 99% or more modding configurations, whether meta or otherwise, because they're just that effective at increasing damage output, and recognizing that they reduce build diversity by 2 out of the 8 (+1) available slots, almost every single time. And that changing any single mod on a meta build can do worse than halve the damage output. How are you so blind that you don't see that as a problem? That it oppressively discourages deviation from the perceived "meta" in it's current state?

[Vahenir]

The downside of this would be that it kind of nukes the reward of getting good mods and learning to mod properly. Since if you do decouple damage from the mods enough then what's the point of farming mods/forma in the first place? Regardless a new meta will show up and there will be new no-brainer mods to slot in place of the current damage/multishot mods. Probably just rate of fire and elemental damage. Status weapons will be in the toilet without the multishot so if you want to apply status effects you will still go with multishot or more or less anything.

Basically the entire objective of modding your weapons is to make them more efficient at their job, killing enemies. So this kind of change would barely change anything. You would just end up with a new set of mandatory mods for different weapon types and shifting the meta to something like crit/rate of fire/viral with hunter munitions.

How much of a damage boost do you want mods to give over the base damage with just the weapon "aura" mod? To make builds with current "trash" mods useful this total would have to be very low.

Another issue that this change would present is that it would throw the early/mid game balance out the window even more than now. So at the end of changing every single weapon in the game along with reworking the entire starchart level scaling to keep it from getting absurdly easy from the get go, probably pissing off a lot of people in the process. You then end up with two mod slots having been saved and a new meta being formed within the first month with new "mandatory" mods springing up. On top of that its not unlikely that a lot of guns people like now would end up getting nerfed to death due to the changes to the mechanics in general, with different guns taking their place.

At the end of all that youre back with a new status quo and back where you started more or less.

[(PSN)psycofang]

On 2020-10-07 at 12:11 AM, TheGrimCorsair said:

This is all just a solution in search of a problem.

 

Agreed. The problem is if they baked in the mandarory mods other mods will just become mandatory which re creates the issue.

 

Choice is an illusion vs optimization which this game encourages through its bottleneck design.

[DArthurVaderian]

You know why mandatory mods exist? Cause to kill higher level enemies you need more damage, and those mods provide more dmg. basically ditto Vahenir

[MacIntoc]

It is not the mods that are mandatory, but the effect they produce (damage, multishot, crits and elemental).

I think ArcKnight9202's approach is a good one to explore: avoid single stat mods for these mandatories effects and give some of these mandatories effects to almost all mods.

[(PSN)camwyn-xenos]

Simple answer remove serration, split chamber, point stike and vital sense and there pistol and shootgun types. Add them to all to the weapons as a bonus stat at lvl30 same as warframe bonus. However there are a few weapons you wouldn't even use crit mods on in the shootgun class because the base crit is so low.

Maybe a better answer then is not the mandatory mods, but re-stating and modeling of damage dealt from weapon then selves atfter all single digit damage numbers on high mr weapons is a joke and no matter how you juggle mods weak weapons will not be popular or get the job done. 

Another option could be for de to limit the use of mandatory mods to steal path (a place were build is important) and then buff base weapon damage on the normal game this would reduce power creep as higher damage mods wouldn't be available in normal game mode. After all the challenge for endurance and builds was supposed to be steal path.

 Work needs to be done but removal of so called mandatory mods is not the asnwer better balance to base weapon stats is, because as others have said higher level bosses and enemies are a thing, and not everything should be easy which normal game is.  

[Vahenir]

1 hour ago, (PS4)camwyn-xenos said:

Simple answer remove serration, split chamber, point stike and vital sense and there pistol and shootgun types. Add them to all to the weapons as a bonus stat at lvl30 same as warframe bonus. However there are a few weapons you wouldn't even use crit mods on in the shootgun class because the base crit is so low.

 

How would you handle the primed versions of those mods? If they are still around but with lower numbers after the change they will be "mandatory" because a small boost is better than no boost. Or do all the stats get boosted by as much as the top mod for that weapon? What happens to the mods themselves? Are they deleted or altered into something new?

As for the steel path side, just no. That game mode should never be made as an endgame, especially not by nerfing everyone outside of it.

Mandatory mods will exist in one form or another unless the mods are basically nerfed and changed to the point where you can no longer increase your damage or ability to kill anything with them or they all give static boosts that are always the same so it doesn't matter what build you have at all.

[(PSN)camwyn-xenos]

De has a way of changing things that players don't always think of, they also do it over a long period of time, the game will change or die. Personaly i see the one size fits all ranks de has been implementing as slowly killing the game. And i think DE is trying to change it. That means mandatory mods may well change. So no to game modes will only lead you to get mad. The game may well split into hard and easy modes. Something for veterans/ experienced players and new player/casual.

[DoomFruit]

21 hours ago, Vahenir said:

How would you handle the primed versions of those mods? If they are still around but with lower numbers after the change they will be "mandatory" because a small boost is better than no boost. Or do all the stats get boosted by as much as the top mod for that weapon? What happens to the mods themselves? Are they deleted or altered into something new?

My take? Get rid of the primed versions entirely. There are a lot of mods whose best effect on the game would be if they were to be removed entirely (eg. corrupted mods - extreme minmaxing is not good for game balance).

If base damage mods need to stick around to serve as some kind of long-term power growth mechanic, keep them as some kind of "intrinsic" to which we feed endo in order to level them up.

[Grav_Starstrider]

7 hours ago, DoomFruit said:

If base damage mods need to stick around to serve as some kind of long-term power growth mechanic, keep them as some kind of "intrinsic" to which we feed endo in order to level them up.

That's my exact reason for having the dedicated damage mod slot above the standard 8 (plus exilus) :D glad you agree, haha. Make them weapon-type intrinsic mods that you rank up over time. I had an additional neat thought. Make broken mods partway ranked, but un-rank-able, as an entry option that can allow people to start experimenting with other weapon classes without having to spend absurd endo/credits first.

@everyone else. YES. There will always be a "mandatory" and "meta" mod build, no matter how they change the mods. WE GET IT. But making deviation from the meta a 5-15% loss in DPS would be healthier for providing player choice, compared to the 50% loss currently occurring when you swap one meta mod out for a less meta one. Like how they made sure Itzal wasn't as overwhelming a utility option, by making Blink a baseline archwing ability, and how they made K Drives more compelling alternative travel options by allowing players to use their secondary while shredding with hoverboards. Will there be many players that never touch K Drive because Archwings are faster for bypassing terrain? Yes. But now players can feel a bit less punished to choose K Drives if the urge strikes them, because they're not being handicapped out of doing any damage at all (aside from goomba stomping, or the niche K Drive damage mods). The same could be made true for deviating from the modding-for-damage metas.

I love the strawman argument a bunch of you (not you, Doom) keep making, and the way you keep insisting that metas will always exist, as if these suggestions have no merit in them at all. Why do you care whether a meta will always exist or not, if it's going to be the same for you, because you insist on using the meta? Let me suggest my recommendation for how to make the less meta-enslaved modders less punished. I'm not advocating for the true removal of any mods at all, so please stop making that strawman argument. Decoupling damage types from each other, and making them not stack and stack and stack multiplicatively 4 different ways, is not the same as suggesting that damage and crit mods should be removed outright.

[Vahenir]

The thing with modding, at least in my opinion, is that its one of the more fun things to do in the game. It is so not despite the damage mods getting extreme, but because of it. A 5%-15% difference in damage between something like primed heated charge and ammo stock would basically make modding and mods fairly optional. Thus turning the entire modding system boring because theres nothing to really build for. I know i would likely have quit ages ago if modding was basically for nothing or just tiny changes.

Why waste the endo on a primed mod over the normal one if the change in damage is in the low single digits? I don't even know what the "fun" mods you want to use are unless you mean augment mods and such. The problem isn't so much with the meta really as with a lot of mods just being straight up terrible. Like do you want more maximum ammo or more rate of fire for instance? Thats a no brainer given how easy it is to get more ammo.

In either case i think your suggestion is basically to tear up the current modding system and pretty much build a new one from scratch for no real benefit other than making it mostly irrelevant apart from the "aura" mods. If going by your suggestion then no mods will actually increase damage whatsoever after all other than i guess crit and status chance. So all weapons will now use the crit mods, status chance, viral, heat and hunter munitions along with rate of fire, probably magazine capacity or more rate of fire depending on weapon.

I could see the straight up damage mods getting their own slot and no longer cost capacity to fit being handy at least. What really needs to happen is that the currently trash mods need boosts in general. Too many mods are just horrible overall. Either basically not helping the weapon at all or working against it entirely and in the end the only thing that matters is killing enemies.

 

As for your examples with the archwings and k-drives. 

The blink change made itzal trash, id rank it just barely above elytron now. So now everyone just uses amesha instead, especially in railjack.

K-Drives are still terrible compared to archwings. Fun, sure, but terrible and in a public team setting you shouldn't use them if you want to keep up. The recent change that allows the secondaries to be used also broke something so you cant get off them as quickly anymore since you need to hold the interact button for like a second or more. I used to just hop off and spray the enemies with my primary before hopping back on, but that is kind of clunky now.

[Scar.brother.help.me]

would be nice to get at least a few new mandatory-like Nightmare mods that kill crits but give huge boosts in other stats to give a non-crit weps a good boost and not be useful to crit ones, i.e: 
+200% multishot/-300% crit chance
+120% status chance/-150% crit chance
+200 (melee) damage to non-crit shots (hits)
+300 (melee) damage to non-crit status proc shots (hits)

whatever appealing to choose a non-crit weapon as crit is too much king to use something else

[Famecans]

fire rate is similar to multishot because you have more tiks status in a short period of time however, you need more ammo in magazine or a efficiency mods, ops these ammo efficiency mods don't exist

I was going to make a topic about the survival problem of the 3rd skill of the banshe on the steel path, it seems broken, but that same frame can be mentioned in this topic, the banshee's sonar make light points to 5x of damage this is like a serration with 500% base damage, without any mod strength of the ability

there are other skills to replace serration and release a mod slot, mirage, rhino and chroma are other frames that do not need serration but everyone needs to save energy in your builds or prefer a predetermined builds on weapon

[Scar.brother.help.me]

On 2020-10-20 at 12:08 AM, Famecans said:

mirage, rhino and chroma are other frames that do not need serration

Roar is not the same, it increases the overall damage of everything, including Serration.