Status Procs Re-revised

[Lanaestra]

So, it's no secret that since the last status revision weapon builds are following a pretty limited set of trends. Since there's been talk of another revision pass on the latest Devstream, I've been gathering my thoughts on the state of status and the meta.

My overall thesis, which is probably uncontroversial, is that people gravitate to statuses that contribute noticeably to killing enemies, since that is generally the goal of building weapons. Crowd control effects that have a strong visual indicator also see some use, generally, but some status procs in particular just don't feel like they do anything useful, either at all, or because they are so niche in application that they have no effect on 2/3ds of the game.

I think there is plenty of space to bring status procs to a baseline where they all feel like they contribute something valuable, and then buildcraft can be a process of experimenting with ratios to see how much of each is more effective, and in what ways and combinations. In particular, the status types that are used more often tend to have positive interactions between each other as well, and I think this kind of synergy between damage types is something to consider.

Without further preamble, some thoughts on possible changes to status procs, by category (and in order of importance).

Impact, Puncture, and Slash

Spoiler

These really need to be competitive with each other as the current state is very biased toward slash. If nothing else I say is given attention, making Impact and Puncture equal in value to Slash will improve the overall meta dramatically and open a lot of design space (There are multiple notably slash-based damage warframes like ash and garuda but nobody thinks of like rhino as an "impact damage warframe" or whatever). Basic compatibility with all other elements is key here as it allows flexibility to experiment with status combinations on a wide variety of weapons, since these damage types are most often the ones baked-into a weapon.

Slash- Fine as-is.
Puncture- Permanent base armor strip over time, like a DoT that triggers Shattering Impact instead of dealing damage. This will deliver armor strip in a way that is meaningfully different to corrosive and heat (base armor reduction is more effective against lightly armored grineer enemies) while still offering it an effect that scales with additional procs.
Impact- Causes a percentage of all incoming damage to be converted to true damage that bypasses shields and armor (even as little as 10% could be pretty significant I think). In practice I think this effect will work like a less drastic version of viral that will still scale up well and synergize with basically any damage type or other status.
 

 

Combined Elements

Spoiler

By the nature of the way these mix and are made certain damage types should ideally work well together. For example. viral and radiation work together synergistically because radiation increases the damage the affected enemy deals to other enemies and viral increases the damage they take in retaliation. Changes to the other combined elements should keep that idea of synergy in mind.

Viral- Fine as-is mostly, could probably survive a nerf to the effectiveness of stacks after the first but I would especially leave the base 1 proc effect alone.

Radiation- Fine? I conceptually at least like the synergy with viral and it's okay as soft-cc.

Gas- Damage needs to scale better with more stacks, just generally needs better damage output but the concept is fine. It just underperforms all the other DoT effects by a pretty noticeable amount in testing, I find.

Magnetic- It could really use some kind of utility against non-shielded enemies (most things in the game) and some kind of synergy with Gas. Solution- Magnetic procs cause enemies to pull other nearby enemies toward them, scaling magnetic pull strength(/range?) with number of procs. This bunches enemies up which Gas damage procs love and provides CC-utility that is valuable against all enemy factions. Magnetic damage already has a great multiplier against shields which is an okay amount of niche, but then having the status proc double up on that one niche makes the damage type feel overly inflexible.

Corrosive- Fine as-is.

Blast- Blast is in a weird place where it's hard to tell if it's even really doing anything a lot of the time, and doesn't really feel desirable because it's not doing anything to make enemies any deader. One would intuitively think modding for blast damage was a way to make a weapon deal AoE damage, so... maybe do that? Blast procs just deal a burst of additional damage in a radius around the target. Like Gas, but the damage is all up-front. Could maybe have a synergistic effect of spreading existing statuses on the target in an AoE as well?
 

 

Basic Elementals

Spoiler

These are mostly in an okay place I think, but I'll include my thoughts for sake of completeness.

Heat- Great already, no need to touch it.

Toxin- A little niche but makes the best combined elements so basically fine.

Electric- Another weird one, don't really know if it's in a good place or not. Not clambering for any fixes, at any rate. Probably fine to leave as-is.

Cold- Make the slowdown scale up to 100% at which point enemies freeze, for rule of cool. Maybe make frozen enemies susceptible to impact and blast damage. I don't know, it's not terrible but it's also kind of boring right now. The freeze might seem a little strong but considering heat already hard-CCs enemies on top of armor strip and damage I think it will be fine.

 

[m3stuart]

Puncture could be changed to something like: Hitting the same spot to an enemy has increased damage on each additional shot. (Your sounds wonky imo)

Impact it's as as it is right now imo.

If people only knew how op Electric is right now. My Elemental Ward Electric Hildryn it's quite the DPS god and Tank at the same time. Don't even need weapons.

 

 

[Lanaestra]

Yeah, that's why I lean towards leaving electric as-is. It does cool things on several abilities, even if it feels hit-or-miss on weapons.

Impact, though, I feel like you could literally remove from every weapon in my arsenal, with the base damage reduction that entails, and I'd hardly notice.

[Okaazkul]

Il y a 7 heures, m3stuart a dit :

If people only knew how op Electric is right now. My Elemental Ward Electric Hildryn it's quite the DPS god and Tank at the same time. Don't even need weapons.

 

 

Don't say that ! I don't want my girl to be strike by the Nerf-hammer !

[z3us32610]

I think there is one thing that is always overlooked when I read proposals about reworking status: balance. Almost every single proposal keeps all the benefits of the really powerful status types and buffs all the others. However, we are already insanely strong as is. Even if we don't mod ideally. So while a lot of the proposals I read, including this one, have great ideas, I feel that it would require toning down the status effects that a really strong.

For example, slash's DoT "bleed" is obviously the strongest of the IPS effects. Buffing puncture to strip armor or having impact convert a percentage of damage to true damage are great ideas, but would exponentially increase the amount of damage we would do. This has to be taken into account for any changes such as these to take place. 

Say we changed Puncture to strip armor in some fashion or create weak spots on the enemies. Say we change Impact to converting damage to true damage. Well, in order to not just give everyone an exponential buff to their damage, we would have to nerf Slash appropriately. This is where possibly not having slash procs mix with critical damage scaling could be plugged in, as a suggestion. (Don't crucify me lol)

I understand nobody wants to see the good status effects get nerfed. But I personally would welcome it (a change to the bleed proc) if it meant we got much more useful i.e. damaging Puncture and Impact procs. It would open up much more options when building weapons.

This also applies to the elemental status effects, but to a lesser extent. Specific elemental combinations are either very common, or very rare. Viral and Heat are easy to mod for but it is impossible to get Viral and Corrosive or Viral and Magnetic without having a weapon that has one of those innately. This makes balancing the elementals much less tedious, but it still has to be considered. If say Gas is buffed and becomes really great, it could be that weapons like the new Zakti Prime with Viral added become insanely OP. (Not that I would totally hate that lol)

I undersnd, no matter what changes happen, there will always be the "most efficient" combinations i.e. meta. But one has to consider that when it comes to damage types and their status effects, specifically IPS, buffing the weaker ones would invariably demand a look at the stronger ones.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

DE has specifically stated that they don't want a single status to provide 100% efficacy on an enemy defensive stat if bosses were to become status vulnerable. That's why they capped Corrosive, so they'll never give full strip to an element. Damage 1.0 had armor piercing which was supposedly just true damage and that was canned. Slash is powerful. At high levels, armored enemies have 90+% damage reduction, so that 35% Base Damage per tick feels like a 350% neutral elemental before Viral. 

Status Predictions:

(IPS)

Impact: Causes stagger on first proc, on 10th proc, target is automatically parazon finished. (Ala Ripline-Fatal Teleport)

Puncture: 1st proc causes target to deal 30% less damage, take 30% more damage to health from all sources for 12 seconds, caps at 75% at 10th proc. (Mini-Viral)

Slash: DoT deals 18% of Base Damage as True damage over 12 seconds. (Slightly more damage over longer period of time to make Expedite Suffering more appealing)

(Combined Elements)

Viral: Target is afflicted by a 3m Viral cloud that amplifies all damage to health for all units inside it by +100%. Subsequent procs increase radius by 0.5m each. 7.5m max. (Combo with Electricity?)

Corrosive: 1st proc reduces armor by 26% and causes Corrosive DoT for 8 seconds, subsequent procs reduce an additional 6% and increase DoT ticks. 

Corrosive DoT tick: (0.5 × Base Damage × Faction damage) as Corrosive Damage. (DoT is secondary to armor strip and doesn't scale with elemental damage, gives some utility against non-armored.)

Radiation: Target is afflicted by 3m Radiation Field for 12 seconds. Changes occupant faction and grants them +100% Radiation Damage dealt to non-Tenno, subsequent procs add +50% Radiation damage, caps at +550% Radiation Damage.

(Change the damage buff to a Radiation buff, because enemies use subpar damage types ill-suited for each other, while Radiation has good bonuses against Grineer and Corpus)

Gas: Target is afflicted by a 3m Gas cloud, each subsequent proc increases radius by 0.5m. 7.5m max. 

Gas DoT tick: 0.5 × Base Damage (1+Toxin mods %+ Heat mods %)× (1 + Faction Damage bonus)

(Just buff the equation for Gas so elemental mods are included again, throw in heat too to make up for the terrible resistances Gas has)

Magnetic: Target is afflicted by a 3m Magnetic Field. Enemies inside Magnetic Field are pulled towards the target. All damage against shields is amplified by 100% while inside the field. Subsequent procs increase radius by 1m. 12m max.

Blast: 1st proc knockdown, subsequent procs: target takes +50% finisher damage per stack of Blast.

Warframe is a Horde Shooter, so it would be nice if procs were AOE debuffs.

[Lanaestra]

Yeah, I balanced my assumptions against slash at the current level of slash's power because slash actually works as a usable solution against the higher end of content in the game. There's probably some wiggle room on the numbers but if you nerfed slash by changing the fundamental mechanics of it and then balance against that then we could easily reach a point where all status procs are equally unusable in things like steel path. The whole point of my suggestion is to reach a point where weapons aren't automatically counted out for being impact/puncture based by balancing against what works. You need a reference point and if you nerf slash at the same time you try to bring the others up you risk ending up in a position where none of the physical status types are any good which is even worse than where we are now.

[(PSN)m3wheeling]

Am I the only one who is tired of status changes.? DE make up your mind already.  I had builds using Corrosive and Slash that I had to reoptimize when DE made changes to these damage types and now there is talk of another rounds of status change which I think will mean a nerf to Viral and so once again I will need to realign my weapon builds around  another arbitrary status change.  Look there is always going to be one status effect that will rule them all.  The sooner DE gets that the sooner we can go back to playing the game instead of wasting time adjusting builds.

[Teridax68]

22 hours ago, z3us32610 said:

I think there is one thing that is always overlooked when I read proposals about reworking status: balance. Almost every single proposal keeps all the benefits of the really powerful status types and buffs all the others. However, we are already insanely strong as is. Even if we don't mod ideally. So while a lot of the proposals I read, including this one, have great ideas, I feel that it would require toning down the status effects that a really strong.

I'm in general agreement with this; some of our Status procs are already nuts, Viral especially, and buffing everything to that standard is going to risk power creeping us even further, and consequently trivializing the game even more. There's also inevitably going to be a meta given that all the different factors status plays with are themselves imbalanced, and so trying to put everything on the same level with the system we have I think is a doomed endeavor. Personally, I'd much rather simplify the elemental damage and status system, which is bloated and full of overlap as is. However, Scott apparently wants to nerf nothing this time, and only buff everything up to presumably Viral's standard of nearly quintupling our damage against most enemy types, so it's going to be interesting to see what comes of it.