The quest for consistency.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

The self-damage changes, becoming self-stagger, came with some "interesting" new features.  Damage falloff was added to ensure "balance."  Self-stagger was added to be pretty much just as annoying as self-damage was.  The players gained no ground in the quest for quality of life, and in fact, lost some.

The Acceltra, the Astilla, and the Staticor are the examples I'd like to use for this point.

The Acceltra comes with almost no reserve ammunition.  This is a "balance" feature to ensure that you can't just spray the whole map down with rockets.  Yet its already small damage radius was reduced even further with the addition of falloff damage, and it still has self-stagger, assuming you're chasing your rockets down.  Did it gain any reserve ammo now that it was receiving "balance" nerfs elsewhere?  Nope.  It does less damage, is just as frustrating to use on the self-damage/stagger front, and still has almost no reserve ammo.  

The Astilla was in a good spot.  It didn't need a nerf, and honestly could have used a small buff.  Yet, it too was nerfed with falloff damage and self-stagger.  The thing here is that the Astilla didn't have self-damage before and already had a very small damage radius.  Why was it nerfed then?  "Consistency."  That's what people kept parroting over and over every time anyone complained about the changes to weapons that never had self-damage but now had stagger and falloff.  No one could explain why consistency for consistency's sake is a good thing, or how it helps the game or the players, but it's totally for the best.  It's consistent.  

A weapon that had already received a nerf not long before this debacle, the Staticor, also fell victim to the Consistency.  It was given falloff damage after already having its damage radius cut in half, and it was given self stagger that, shown in testing, has a larger radius than the damage itself.  Very consistent.  Fantastic.

Why am I bringing this up?

Enter the Juno Elite Crewman.  Let's ignore that the Juno Elite Crewman is an incredibly common enemy on the Corpus Ship tileset, meaning that a lot of them will have their weapons pointed at you during a mission.  Let's talk about the weapon they use instead.  The JEC comes equipped with a Supra.  But not just any old Supra, it's a special Supra, just for JECs.  It comes with what appears to be a 3-5 meter (it's really hard to tell with how rapidly it fires.) radial damage effect.  It's essentially a fully automatic grenade launcher.  Kind of like the Acceltra!  Except it doesn't have ammo restraints, or the need to reload.  I'm not sure I've ever seen the enemy reload.  The Trumna has a reload long enough that you can start it, go take a leak, and it might be done when you get back.  It's for "balance."  But this weapon doesn't need that kind of balance.  So it's a fully automatic grenade launcher with unlimited ammo!  There's absolutely nothing to see here!  Nothing wrong at all.  This was absolutely not a horrible design choice.

But that's not the real issue.  See, we have to have consistency, for the sake of consistency, because consistency is good (or so I'm told).  But something fun that I've noticed is that the Bombards, Napalms, and yes, the Juno Elite Crewmen all have explosive weaponry with large damage radii, and yet...  There's no falloff damage that I can tell from testing.  They hit just as hard on direct impact as they do if they hit several meters away from you.  There was a lovely video on the subreddit for a while of a JEC firing a supra at something behind a cloaked Ivara and that Ivara still taking large amounts of damage.  And to make matters worse, I've never once seen an enemy stagger itself from AOE damage.  Not once.

So, DE:  Where's that consistency?

[BoomyGordo]

de's response: haha nerf bat go brrrrr

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

11 minutes ago, (XB1)TyeGoo said:

every Warframe that exists, is able to prevent self stagger

If you slap a couple extra forma on every single warframe so you can take up a mod slot to install a 16 drain primed mod that only comes from login rewards, sure.  Otherwise, most of the frames that can prevent it were the frames that could survive self damage in the first place.

 

13 minutes ago, (XB1)TyeGoo said:

I haven't been staggered once since the update, not once.

First off, I honestly don't believe you in the slightest.  And secondly, to counter your anecdote with my own, I died to self-damage FAR less than I have staggered myself with these weapons now, especially because it's on every single AOE.  The fact that they added it on every single AOE along with all the other nerfs already makes the changes as a whole worse than what we had before.  Many weapons feel several orders of magnitude worse after the changes to them because of the self-damage rework, and that's not a good trade imo.  I have also died because of self-stagger far more than I died to self-damage.  The changes that came with knockdown animations and being staggered feel twice as slow as they did before, and it's maddening every single time I'm spamming jump trying to get my warframe to act like a warframe and not a decrepit old man as it slowly struggles to get off the ground.  And it's during that eternity of watching my warframe get up that I'm open to enemy fire, which basically means it went from death from self-damage to death from enemy damage because I have zero control over my frame while it reels back in slow motion.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

51 minutes ago, (XB1)TyeGoo said:

And I'd also like to see changes to the safety measures on weapons, or make them optional. Like Acceltra etc. Having these protection methods that don't serve a purpose now and are rather more annoying.. there's nothing more annoying than akarius not going off because of the safety measures

Yeah, I love being .00001 meters inside the safety range for one of my launchers and having it do absolutely nothing.  Especially when that launcher has a long reload time.  That's my favorite.

[DrakeWurrum]

I don't understand how our warframes, which have enough raw strength to rip off a giant spider robots head with their bare hands, get staggered by their own weapons or even experience recoil.

[BahamutKaiser]

4 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

I don't understand how our warframes, which have enough raw strength to rip off a giant spider robots head with their bare hands, get staggered by their own weapons or even experience recoil.

They shoot planet buster ammunition? 😅

[OmegaVoid]

On 2020-10-25 at 6:24 AM, (XB1)TehChubbyDugan said:

Except it doesn't have ammo restraints, or the need to reload.  I'm not sure I've ever seen the enemy reload. 

In this thread Xzorn said: "The AI's shooting has a rotational limit. It was done for performance reasons if I recall. Only a certain number of enemies of a certain type can shoot simultaneously. It's most notable with Bombards and Nullifiers. Only one of each enemy type can fire at once though having two on the screen removes their need to reload so two is still more dangerous."

Having the enemy's magazine capacity flip between finite and infinite dependent on how many are present seems pretty inconsistent too! 🤨

[LarenaBot]

I dont get why people complain about stagger so much. Just... dont blow up explosives right in front of your face. It isn't a difficult proposition

[DoomFruit]

4 hours ago, Larena said:

I dont get why people complain about stagger so much. Just... dont blow up explosives right in front of your face. It isn't a difficult proposition

Go equip an amp for your operator which uses the Shraksun scaffold then use the alt-fire. Come back after doing that a few times.

EDIT: or use the Opticor or Ferrox.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

18 hours ago, DrakeWurrum said:

I don't understand how our warframes, which have enough raw strength to rip off a giant spider robots head with their bare hands, get staggered by their own weapons or even experience recoil.

There are so many contradictions like this in the game, and if most of them were removed with the changes favoring the idea of warframes being strong we would have a much more fluid experience.

[ngamer000]

I just tried to kill a corpus nullifier from within the bubble using the scourge. Impossible as I would shoot once then prompt fall flat on my ass due to self stagger. So infuriating.

[Mortico]

Hey guys :]

well .. it seems DE just doesn't like consistency ..

safety measures for one explosive weapon ( kuva tonkor ) while the normal one doesn't have that ..

conservation on orb valis or the plains will get you standing AND badges for floofs .. on deimos there are only tokens to trade for floofs OR standing ..

 

let's just see what the next revised update will bring :[

stay healthy