Ideas to make status more competitive with crit

[Narrrz]

Currently, status is a good/great augment to the crit system, which is fine, but means that weapons which focus purely on status to the exclusion of crit chance are very much second-class. Certain status effects are obviously a great deal more powerful than others, too, and while it seems good that different status effects have utility in different circumstances, in practice this means some status rule unchallenged, while others have essentially zero utility.

Some ideas that i think would help correct this:

• First of all, All status effects should deal damage in addition to whatever other effects they have.
  • Impact simply deals an additional damage hit immediately.
  • Puncture deals a (smaller) initial hit and then causes an armor-ignoring bleed effect weaker than slash.
  • Slash obviously still deals an armor ignoring bleed. Should probably be one of the stronger damage status.
  • Burn could stay the same, and also should remain one of the strongest damage status.
  • Cold status would deal escalating damage over its duration.
  • Electric status should have a status chance of its own, allowing it to chain to affected enemies when it damages them (for diminishing effect)
  • Toxin would increase damage dealt by other status effects on the target, much the way viral & magnetic work now.
  • Blast damage should cause an immediate, area-effect damage effect around any target the status procs on.
  • Corrosive would have a damage over time effect, which additionally should deal permanent damage to the targets armor.
  • Magnetic should cause an area effect damage-over-time effect for its duration, and additionally should have a chance to chain to other nearby targets, magnetising them as well.
  • Gas should cause escalating, percentage based damage to the target as long as they remain in the cloud (as they asphyxiate)
  • Radiation should deal high initial damage which tapers off over its duration.
  • Viral should deal persistent damage over time for the effect, but also be able to infect other nearby enemies.
• Secondly, status effects should scale much more weakly with critical hits. This, for the simple reason that in order for status to compete with crits, it can't compund too greatly with them, otherwise status effects applied by critical hits will always outperform straight status. My thought is that status should scale with the square root of critical multiplier; a crit that deals 9x damage would only apply a status at 3x strength. The same would apply for body part multipliers. Instead, status effects should scale in damage as well as application chance from a weapon's (or ability's) status chance. The base damage of current status effects might need to be increased, too, to prevent status effects still being overwhelmingly weaker than critical hits.

Opinions?

[Magnulast]

Everything is good except for the Viral and Radiation. Viral is good enough as is, and Radiation already stacks on inflicted-to-inflicted damage.

As for corrosive, I really don't know if that's a good idea. 

[Narrrz]

You're right, a viral spreading dot might be too overpowered for non-status builds. For radiation, i haven't really noticed enemies doing exceptional damage to each other, even with it stacked up to the nines.

I assuem you mean the debuff dealing armor damage as well as health, for corrosive? I don't mean that it would deal equal amounts of damage, but it just seems a little peculiar that something that degrades armor should just suddenly revert once the debuff has fallen off. That idea is more from a suspension-of-disbeleif perspective.

[Drachnyn]

I like making all of your status proc ideas respecting the damage of the weapon that procs it. Currently slow fire rate, high status weapons have the giant problem of proccing the wrong status effects. Ogris' high base damage is rather wasted if it procs blast instead of a more useful element.

I also like you trying to prevent hybrid weapons to reap all the benefits but I think you should go a step further. Make status procs ignore crit multiplier completely. Otherwise I think all that's going to happen is maybe some different builds but still all on hybrid weapons that can combine crit and status somehow. IMO what we need in addition to that is modding for status damage on weapons.

Gas doing % damage sounds a bit wild. It might be a cool new build style but it also could just end up everyone ignoring enemy level scaling completely. I am not sure how you envision it working exactly, does every gas proc spawn a new cloud? Does the % damage stack from different clouds? How does it scale with weapon damage?

I think viral should keep the damage increasing effect instead of toxin, simply because a combined element is a bigger investment in terms of mod slots than a base element. We all know how powerful viral currently is so I think decreasing the mod space required to one is not a good idea.

Your ideas for blast and radiation sound pretty cool. 

I dont think every status effect needs to deal damage to the initial target, magnetic for example could be a more powerful dot than the others but on enemies around the target. We have quite a few damage types and there is the danger of them all doing basically the same thing. It would make the damage types more balanced but it potentially restricts modding to just looking at the healthtype of an enemy and only choosing damage types based on that, when with different enough status effects we would have the potential of needing to consider both health type and status effect.

[taiiat]

every Status Effect doesn't have to deal Damage. infact if they do, that devalues the ones that already do Damage, making them stand out less.
don't Homogenize choices that are supposed to be Heterogeneous!

Status is already very competitive with Crits, the problems that are left are in Weapons that are poor at applying Status despite made to rely on it, or things of that nature.

 

that being said, i do want anti-Armor in Warframe to be modifying the actual Armor value of the Enemy rather than dealing with it in an abstract sense, but that also necessitates coming along with making Armor a finite resource that acts more like a Shield of sorts, but is location specific and does not Regenerate.
so, that's out of scope of what's being talked about here.

and....

• the stacking part of Radiation is just crap really - it's not useful. so all anyone cares about with Radiation is whether the Enemy has it or not, not how many of it. so Radiation does need a more useful stacking trait - but Damage isn't it.
• Electricity made itself very similar to Gas, therefore making Gas not unique anymore, on top of Gas being nerfed to begin with. if Gas wants to be an AoE-DoT centric Status Effect, well, it's not very impressive compared to Electricty despite that.
• IPS was already heavily devalued due to losing extra weighting, so even Slash Status is kinda 'eh' now for the most part, outside of forced from Stances and Hunter Munitions.
  so all three IPS types, are largely insignificant as it is and serve as a Status dilution, offering some level of useful Utility but mostly making it a bit harder to get the Status Effects that you Modded for. Puncture could still use another feature perhaps, but idk what.

 

i'm not sure i see a problem with Crits being useful for DoT's. after all, you'll usually run out of Mods to put on if you didn't have Crits to Mod for.
also why the hell would you bar Status Effects from taking advantage of Body Part Multipliers? sorry, that's just dumb. if you don't feel like aiming, then just don't. don't tell other people that they should be punished because you don't feel like aiming.

[Narrrz]

1 minute ago, taiiat said:

every Status Effect doesn't have to deal Damage. infact if they do, that devalues the ones that already do Damage, making them stand out less.
don't Homogenize choices that are supposed to be Heterogeneous!

They're already heterogenous by virtue of their differing effects. The main problem with status is that its damage simply can't compare, except in niche scenarios e.g. slash vs high level, heavily armoured targets. And even then, you want a crit-heavy weapon to scale up the slash proc, otherwise it simply deals too little damage to matter.

Certain status effects help out with direct damage, but i really challenge you to find a status-only build that competes with the best crit & crit hybrid builds. Status simply doesn't deal enough damage without being applied by a high damage critical hit, and i think a good way to help solve that is a) reduce status' scaling with crit, and b) make status a damage dealer in its own right.

The current damage status can keep their place as the top dogs of dps, but a big problem with status is that if you don't get a proc from one of those effects, you don't deal damage. Making every status effect damaging at least addresses that issue.

[taiiat]

1 hour ago, Narrrz said:

The main problem with status is that its damage simply can't compare

Certain status effects help out with direct damage, but i really challenge you to find a status-only build that competes with the best crit & crit hybrid builds.

 

Status simply doesn't deal enough damage without being applied by a high damage critical hit, and i think a good way to help solve that is a) reduce status' scaling with crit, and b) make status a damage dealer in its own right.

but a big problem with status is that if you don't get a proc from one of those effects, you don't deal damage. Making every status effect damaging at least addresses that issue.

untrue. Status only just deals Damage in a different style.

you're never going to outperform Hybrid unless you make them mechanically incompatible, which only serves to nerf every piece of Equipment in the game and give it less things that you can Mod for. 

 

sure it does. going for "just Status" means having some Status Chance Mods on, and then after that you throw in every other type of Damage increase that isn't Crits that you can find. that's all there is to it.
you're combining Damage Mods with Status Effects. if you're exclusively thinking in low Rate of Fire Weapons, then don't. Status in the current state of the game is completely reliant on having atleast a decent Rate of Fire, preferably a fairly fast one. 

it seems like what you're complaining about is that simply spraying Enemies with lots of Debuffs doesn't Kill them. well... imagine that. making Enemies easier to Kill doesn't Kill them, dealing Damage to them does. 
if only you could make Enemies take more than quadruple Damage, move and attack slower, dramatically weaken any Armor they might have, while they take some DoT(s), potentially dealing AoE Damage to other Enemies, Multiplied by Body Part Multipliers.... oh yeah, and plus the actual Damage of your Weapon too.
you can't really say "i put a bunch of just Status Chance on and Enemies aren't dying just because of it" - because that's no different from "i put a bunch of just Crit Mods on and Enemies aren't dying just because of it". as both of these are true... neither of these tools will Kill things on their own, they're there to bolster other tools that you simultaneously Equip and use.

[ShortCat]

6 hours ago, Narrrz said:

First of all, All status effects should deal damage in addition to whatever other effects they have.

The problem is not that certain status effects deal no damage though. Corrosive or Viral are good even though their status effects do not cause any DoTs, but instead soften enemies or support other damage sources.
The other problem is that you homogenized every status effect, as taiiat alraedy mentioned, which will not make stuff competitive. As an example, your magnetic won't get better with a DoT since damage type itself is weak at its core.

6 hours ago, Narrrz said:

Secondly, status effects should scale much more weakly with critical hits. This, for the simple reason that in order for status to compete with crits

This makes no sense. All crit damage does is increase base damage, just like Serration, Heavy Calliber or Split Chaimber. The actual problem is not that crit stats increase damage of status effects, but that there are ways to cause status procs without relying on status chance, namely all forced procs on stances, weapon special effects or mods like HM. On the other hand, it is much harder to turn a non crit weapon into one.

6 hours ago, Narrrz said:

The same would apply for body part multipliers.

Why?

[Narrrz]

It kinda sounds to me like you just don't want the existing direct damage meta upset. That's fine, i guess, but that means this thread really wasn't aimed at you.

 

Quote

you're never going to outperform Hybrid unless you make them mechanically incompatible, which only serves to nerf every piece of Equipment in the game and give it less things that you can Mod for. 

I disagree. Hybrid should sacrifice something in both crit effectiveness and status chance compared to a pure a weapon. If it doesn't, that simply means that weapon is too powerful.

[Kainosh]

9 hours ago, Narrrz said:

• Impact simply deals an additional damage hit immediately.
• Puncture deals a (smaller) initial hit and then causes an armor-ignoring bleed effect weaker than slash.
• Slash obviously still deals an armor ignoring bleed. Should probably be one of the stronger damage status.

 

Better just combine all 3 into ONE.   Physical.  Proc is "Wound".  Wounded targets are bleeded, and get a stagger+weakened at several stacks.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

My suggestions:

(Physical)

Impact: Causes stagger and after 1 second delay creates a 1m explosion that deals 50% damage of the original hit with 100% status chance of the original hit with 0% chance of proccing IPS.

(Basically a delayed 0.5*multi-shot on proc with IPS itself removed from the table guaranteeing an elemental proc for faster ramp up. Benefits utility procs and less so for DoTs.) 

Puncture: 1st proc causes target to deal 30% less damage and take 60% more damage to health from all sources for 8 seconds. Caps at -75% and +150% at 10th proc.

(Additive with Viral = Less incentive to run Viral. Multiplicative with armor stripping, makes Corrosive more enticing and allows to scale against Viral/Slash better.) 

Slash: After 1 second delay, DoT deals 18% of Base Damage as True damage over 12 seconds.

(Same damage over longer period of time as a nerf as well as make Expedite Suffering more appealing.)

 

(Combined Elements)

Viral: Amplifies all damage to health by +70% for 6 seconds. Subsequent procs increase buff by 20% each, capping at +250%. Upon death, Viral stacks are transferred to nearest enemy within 6m.

(Weaker, but stacks aren't wasted if target dies.)

Corrosive: 1st proc reduces armor by 26% and causes Corrosive DoT that ticks each second for 8 seconds. Corrosive DoT tick: Each tick equal to (0.5 × Base Damage × Faction damage bonus) as Corrosive Damage. Subsequent procs reduce an additional 6% (capping at 80%) and increase DoT ticks.

(Extra utility against non-armored with minor extra damage.)

Radiation: Target emits a 3m Radiation aura for 12 seconds. Changes occupant faction and grants them +200% Radiation Damage dealt to non-Tenno. Subsequent procs add +100% Radiation damage, caps at +1100% Radiation Damage.

(Radiation damage has good modifiers against Grineer Alloy and Corpus Proxies while it already strips auras from Infested.)

Gas: Target is afflicted by a 3m Gas cloud that ticks Gas damage for all occupants inside it, Each subsequent proc increases radius by 0.5m. 7.5m max. Upon death, Gas stacks are transferred to nearest enemy within 6m. Uncapped. Gas DoT tick: Base Damage (1+Toxin mods %+ Heat mods %)× (1 + Faction Damage bonus)

(Adjust for Gas' bad modifiers.)

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.

(Larva, Ensnare as a damage proc. Good on utility weapons.)

Blast: Causes knockdown and 3m explosion that's 25% of original damage instance that procced Blast with 0% chance of proccing Blast or Impact. (AOE version of Impact.)

(On a standard IPS weapon only modded for Blast results in nothing but Puncture procs and 1/4 and 1/8 strength Slash procs replicating shrapnel. Super good for Condition Overload. Impact procs Blast procs Puncture and Slash.)

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

It used to compete with Crit until DE nerfed Condition Overload.

[ShortCat]

16 hours ago, (XBOX)GearsMatrix301 said:

It used to compete with Crit until DE nerfed Condition Overload.

Is CO dealing not enough damage atm?

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

5 hours ago, ShortCat said:

Is CO dealing not enough damage atm?

Yes, they turned it from a damage increasing mod to a finicky Pressure Point.

All because they wanted to fix the issue of the mod stacking with itself, but didn’t want to put in the extra effort to do that without killing the mod entirely.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

1 hour ago, (XBOX)GearsMatrix301 said:

Yes, they turned it from a damage increasing mod to a finicky Pressure Point.

All because they wanted to fix the issue of the mod stacking with itself, but didn’t want to put in the extra effort to do that without killing the mod entirely.

Next thing you know, they'll make the Critical Multiplier additive with Pressure Point as well. Instead of 2.0x Multiplier multiplying your damage by 2x, it just gives +200% Base Damage.

Still, we probably do need a damage rework where they flatten player damage scaling so we can actually have good boss fights without invincibility phases, damage caps or DPS based Damage Reduction.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

7 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

 

Still, we probably do need a damage rework where they flatten player damage scaling so we can actually have good boss fights without invincibility phases, damage caps or DPS based Damage Reduction.

Them gutting our damage against enemies just to make bosses better sounds like a genuinely horrible idea.

[ShortCat]

15 hours ago, (XBOX)GearsMatrix301 said:

Yes,

So, according to you CO does not enough damage. Must be lonely in your alternative reality.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

7 hours ago, ShortCat said:

So, according to you CO does not enough damage. Must be lonely in your alternative reality.

There’s no scenario I have found where CO is needed. Primed Pressure Point is more than enough for all content.

[Famecans]

 

"Warframe Arcane" Condition Overload Similar for Weapons

1 Status tik = 2% Critical chance Multiplier

1 Status tik = 3% Dmg Multplier

 

[BahamutKaiser]

Statuses need balance between statuses, not crit... currently various Status immune opponents make crit the best option for specific cases. Balance changes need to be founded on a better premises than similarity. 

[ShortCat]

23 hours ago, (XBOX)GearsMatrix301 said:

There’s no scenario I have found where CO is needed. Primed Pressure Point is more than enough for all content.

If CO's overkill damage is not necessary, why do you complain about it being nefed?

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

26 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

If CO's overkill damage is not necessary, why do you complain about it being nefed?

Oh no CO isn’t overkill. It’s just that enemies die before it can even begin stacking procs. So it’s better to go for PPP where you don’t have to build up your damage output from base.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

3 hours ago, (XBOX)GearsMatrix301 said:

Oh no CO isn’t overkill. It’s just that enemies die before it can even begin stacking procs. So it’s better to go for PPP where you don’t have to build up your damage output from base.

Yes, CO is bad because we already do overkill damage. Are you sure we don't need to flatten player damage scaling? 

If crits were additive with base damage, it would narrow the gap between hybrid weapons and pure crit/status.

Then they can start removing Lephantis damage caps and not resort to Glassmaker throwing mini games.