Universal Fix (or band-aid) for non-scaling Damage

[Grav_Starstrider]

tldr/summary for the second spoiler below:
Give Ability damage sources a very modest %-health damage component (I'm thinking 3% at the very most for Ultimate abilities and such), so that there's a maximum number of ability casts necessary in order to kill any given standard enemy. %-health damage bonus from the same source repeatedly in a short period can be reduced down to as much as 1/4 of the effectiveness. 130 ultimate-ability casts should definitely kill level 100 non-boss enemies.

See below spoiler: Even Miasma, as an ability, does hardly anything against level 100 Corrupted heavy gunners.
 

Spoiler

The current reality: 10 standard-ability-strength Miasma casts against level 100 Corrupted Heavy Bombards do close to nothing.

That doesn't remotely look like a 10th of the health bar is gone. Another 10 Miasma, spam-casted to rack up Viral procs, still only nets you this amount of health gone.

I know Miasma, with the Viral procs, is supposed to be more of a setup for clearing enemies with weapon damage, but this damage output by itself is just pitiful! Resonating Quake on Banshee, even when cast directly on top of these enemies, is even more pitiful! So many abilities that should be horrifyingly potent , when they cost energy, one of the more precious resources in the game, do so little, because they've been designed completely without any scaling damage mechanics whatsoever. Augments that strip armor, or Slash damage that ignores it, all well and fine, but requiring that you use those in order for your abilities to not be useless at performing damage, is obnoxious game design. 2x the damage output? 10x the damage output? I can live with that being the punishment for not using an "optimal" damage build or setup. But making things practically useless, by being 100 or 1000x less damaging than other options, because you're not using very specific combos or setups, is obnoxious game design. Making all Ability damage do a small amount of % health damage, would make it so that abilities are at least capped at only being 100x worse at damage output than other options.

Below: In-depth breakdown of proposed %-health damage update concept, and why it seems necessary aside from the above-spoilered points.

Spoiler

There are some abilities that are relatively lackluster when it comes to dealing damage. Many Abilities, even ones like Ash's damage-focused Shuriken, do only around 1000 damage at base ability strength. Banshee's Sonic Boom, Nekros' Soul Punch, Atlas' Landslide, Mag's Pull, Limbo's Banish, all of their damage numbers are miniscule. I recognize many of these have utility, but even Ash's damage-only Shuriken only throws 2 500-damage shuriken at base power strength. A forum user a year ago calculated the effective health of a level 100 Corrupted Heavy Gunner at about 2,278,809. It would take even a 200% ability strength Ash around 1000 casts of Shuriken in order to kill this heavy gunner. What hope does Atlas' Landslide have, or Nekros' Soul Punch, or Banshee's Sonic Boom if she's stuck indoors in a ship, where she can't stage-kill enemies?

Implementing a % Health damage, even as small as 1%, 2%, and 3%, for 25-energy abilities, 50 energy abilities, and 100 energy abilities (ults), would establish a maximum cast-to-kill ratio of 100:1, 55:1, and 33:1.

You wouldn't even really have to display this in the UI if you implement this standard across the board for single-damage-instance abilities, and just have reasonable rules for DoT/Duration or Channeled damage abilities, like even smaller % damage per individual strike instance, like .1% per strike, or only 1% health damage per a single ability's damage instances every 3 seconds or so.

If you're worried about people spam-casting things in order to kill enemies, first of all, currently Mesa's 4 exists, and Saryn's 1 and 4 exist.
Second of all, something that could additionally serve as a solution to the conundrum of the above-mentioned question of how DoT, duration, multi-projectile, or channeled ability's % health damage would function, is that there could be a decaying debuff to the amount of % health damage dealt by a single ability against a single target. If you make it so that after 5 casts, ticks, or strikes of the same ability on an enemy, you're performing only half, a third, or a quarter as much % health damage, you'll be making the maximum cast to kill ratio up to nearly 400:1 for single-damage-instance abilities (or 400 ticks/projectiles/strikes for DoT/Channeled/etc). 
Third of all, let's be real, having to cast the same ability 400 times on a single enemy to kill them would be so not-broken (or 130 ults). But it would really help a lot of the lesser-used damage abilities shine just a bit more, by punching a bit harder, in Steel Path, Sortie, Lich, or Railjack levels and such, regardless of the modded numbers.

Adding even just a small amount of % health damage would make it so that you would rarely ever feel regret for casting an offensive ability, outside of outright whiffing with your aim.

 

And voila, there's your universal fix (or band-aid) to "trash" damage abilities. This will help too-weak abilities way more than it will any other abilities. The few that it'd feel like overkill on, are honestly the ones that are already sticking out like sore thumbs as OP abilities, like Mesa's Peacemaker or Saryn's Spore/Miasma, as previously mentioned. Please don't let the few edge cases of OP things that honestly may need nerfs, prevent you from applying much-needed buffs to other abilities. Switching, even just partially, to a %-health damage system, will help prevent the star chart from so wildly swinging between "this is trivial" and "this is impossible" with only a bare few levels of "challenging but fair" in between. Bosses, and even mini-boss-like enemies like Liches and "Invading" enemies like Zanuka, Gustrag, or Stalker/Acolytes, etc, could be exempt from the % health damage system, if you wanted to retain additional challenge in facing them, or cut the initial % health damage value by half, or more.

Actually, that thought about making bosses more immune to, or receiving mitigated amounts of, % health damage, could actually serve to implement another change I've always thought was due in the game, which is to more greatly differ the Light and Heavy enemies from each other. If Light, Medium, Heavy, Minibosses, and Bosses all had different amounts of susceptibility to % damage, you'd be able to preserve more of the existing difficulty of the heavier ranked units, but you'll help ensure that, across the board, Light enemies would remain more easily killed, preserving the "power fantasy" of Warframe, and allowing Warframes or Weapons or Mods with on-kill-effects to consistently be able to proc those effects or bonuses against Light enemies.

Hmm. As an additional thought, I just realized that all Weapons could benefit from a similar approach as well. Decide on a really, far-smaller % health damage output per fire rate on guns, and per attack speed on melee weapons. In an ideal world, it shouldn't take more than a magazine (or a few in low-mag-size guns) to kill light or medium-class enemies, even at high levels.

200% ability strength Seeking Shurikens should do more than half-kill two level 100 corrupted butchers, in my opinion.

 

I just think it's more frustrating to be whaling away on standard enemies for entire minutes, than it is a way of providing "challenge". It also ruins the power fantasy, when your stuff doesn't effectively do damage despite.... Firing bullets or stabbing metal into enemy's faces. ESPECIALLY for the Light or Medium class enemies. 

I welcome thoughts, critiques, and additions ^_^ (I really hope you check the spoilers to make sure I haven't already covered any concerns though. I also know that some other things in the game should be fixed, and if they were fixed, this fix would be less necessary, just consider this a potentially relatively easy fix across the board for Warframe Ability damage scaling as the game currently stands, as it'd just be adding % health damage to damage sources, and with varying amounts of resistance per enemy class/tiers. This sounds like it's just armor and armor-stripping of another flavor, but armor-stripping or ignoring is not universally possessed by warframe abilities or weaponry, sooooo. Yeah, need another dimension added to Damage to get around that)

[Mu_Gera]

health based scaling might not be it, it always either scales too much or too little depending on bunch of other factors. level scaling, like grendel, vauban, or xaku have, on the other hand is way simpler and has been extremely consistent so far on the frames mentioned.

[Grav_Starstrider]

1 minute ago, cococciolo said:

health based scaling might not be it, it always either scales too much or too little depending on bunch of other factors. level scaling, like grendel, vauban, or xaku have, on the other hand is way simpler and has been extremely consistent so far on the frames mentioned.

Fair enough. Unfortunately, I don't think DE has anywhere near the bandwidth to individually rework every damage ability to have scaling mechanics. And per-level is bad (compared to a reliable %-health) when they're making Railjack or Deimos or other new-areas' enemies twice as tanky as their equivalent-leveled counterparts in the normal star chart.

It'd be better if they had every individual number balanced so that it was fair and effective. I just think they'll more readily classify all damage abilities into a few categories/classes of damage-instances-per-energy counts, and have it apply to a few classes of enemies as different %-health damage. Simpler, broader strokes that'd be reasonably effective. They shouldn't be too ambitious and try and use it to turn "trash" abilities into new metas, but as long as they keep single-chunks of damage from abilities down to a bonus 3% health at most for ults, or many-instances-of-projectiles-or-splash-damage-or-DoT (like Fletchette Orb or Tempest Barrage or Maim) down to .5% health damage per tick, they'd see already super-effectively high-level-murdering abilities barely improve (since they're already way-outpacing 1-3% health in damage in a second or few), meanwhile abilities that would have taken hundreds or thousands of casts to murder an enemy, would do so in only 200 or so casts.

Also, if they know an ability is already hyper-competitive, they could just exclude specific abilities on already wicked-potent Warframes from having the %-health damage bonus. Things like Saryn's already semi-infinitely ramping Spores, or Ash's already reasonably lethal Blade Storm, or things that, while doing damage, are more intended to enable and multiply other-ability damage or weapon damage, wouldn't really make sense to put %-health damage onto. Breach Surge, Seeking Talons, and despite being one of my previous examples of "why doesn't this kill on it's own", debatably Miasma, since in conjunction with weapons and Spores it already wrecks face, bigtime.

[Grav_Starstrider]

Note, this would likely cause a minor shift away from people exclusively using very strength-oriented builds to kill things as fast as possible, as people could use high efficiency, duration, and range builds, to hit more things with more procs more often, taking advantage of %-health damage. This would in theory be mitigated by DE implementing that "stale move" mechanic, where repeated/subsequent procs after the intial proc, decrease in their %-health damage inflicted over time. This prevents 4 Equinoxes from using Maim constantly to kill anything within a minute or two across the whole map, and prevents the return of other things like AFK Banshee (already alleviated by altering the Resonating Quake augment). They could always err on the side of making the more AFK and the more brainless-auto-targeting abilities do lower %-health, like Zephyr's roving Tornados, Ember's Inferno, Hydroid's Tentacles, Equinox's Maim, etc, do disproportionately less %-health damage regardless of whether the gains would theoretically still be miniscule, just to ensure they aren't encouraging AFK gameplay.

non-targeted gameplay rant spoilered below.

Spoiler

To be fair though, I think half of DE's game balance kinda went out of whack when they stopped (if they ever started with) balancing enemy damage against health drops, and weapon damages to their ammo drop rates, and ability damage against the rarity of energy drop rates, and then throwing balance out of the window by allowing us to be ridiculously saturated with energy at all times with energy pads, Zenurik, and Energize. Kinda feels like they lost sight of overarching game design/balance where each tool in our arsenal had a proportional cost, and benefits and downsides. I think they could turn it around if they took this message to heart, and were willing to re-investigate their base gameplay principles and balance though, haha. Fundamentally decide on what niche or objective each weapon class or equipment would offer, and provide varieties of options to approach various enemies, and provide incentives/rewards for facing/beating them in certain ways, and ways that it would be discouraged or punished for inflexibility. Lots of great pieces in this game, just need to combine all of these separate content islands into a coherent whole. That's a whole 'nother argument though. Point stands, they can discourage AFK-ability-play by just making the already-AFK-abilities barely benefit from the proposed nigh-universal %-health bonus damage.

 

[(PSN)CommanderC2121]

I like the idea, but Im not sure how well it could be implemented without a case by case basis. Some recent frames like Xaku and grendel both have scaling damage, xakus 2 and literally of all grendels kit, but they also have a secondary ability/feature that makes that scaling damage viable. For xaku its the 100% defensive strip, and grendel can both strip armor and apply toxin to ignore shields. I dont know if you could apply a blanket buff of x% max hp damage with ease for that reason, but it would certainly help. 
 

I also dont know if DE would truly want to make that the norm with their apparent aversion to extended endurance runs :/ 

[Mu_Gera]

23 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

And per-level is bad (compared to a reliable %-health) when they're making Railjack or Deimos or other new-areas' enemies twice as tanky as their equivalent-leveled counterparts in the normal star chart.

depends on the ability and that serves as a testament to how well level scaling can easily be balanced around if need be, besides there are instances of health based scaling where it doesn't ignore armor.

 

23 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Fair enough. Unfortunately, I don't think DE has anywhere near the bandwidth to individually rework every damage ability to have scaling mechanics

It'd be better if they had every individual number balanced so that it was fair and effective

that's one other grace of level scaling, I imagine it would be extremely simple to implement universally compared to health based scaling. compare a simple damage multiplier that changes depending on enemy level alone to the way you described health based scaling and all the factors it needs to take into consideration. you can even see how will it would work because grendel and vauban have the exact same multiplier across different abilities and it still reminds consistent outside of base ability differences.

[(PSN)mahoshonenfox]

Damage based on enemy health isn't the only way to go. Our weapons are already very strong. Even an hours long kuva survival in steel path that spawns lv250+ enemies can be one shot by a heavy attack zaw dagger. No rivens even or armor stipping or anything. I use Limbo and boost my damage based on the number of enemies in the rift. Most of the time, I can get +600% bonus damage but I've seen +2000% to +7000% on other people's videos based on the enemy density. I guess if the mission goes longer, I will eventually encounter enemies that need 2 shots to kill but why would most players stay for more than an hour? I only did it because I was farming the jesters for pigments. I don't think anyone will really need to do anything like that most of the time.

Instead of damage scaling with enemy health, how about powers that snow ball? Kind of like Nidus. He gets stronger as he gains more stacks. Just change the upper limit and he can scale higher. Same with Mesa's Ballistic Battery. Change the upper Limit. Atlas's Landslide. Don't stop at x4. Imagine if Chroma;s bonuses got stronger the longer he maintains his Vex Armor. To me this seems like a more balanced thing since you actually need to stay longer in a mission to reach strong enough enemies that actually need that much power to kill anyway.

[Grav_Starstrider]

On 2020-12-27 at 7:06 PM, (PSN)CommanderC2121 said:

I like the idea, but Im not sure how well it could be implemented without a case by case basis. Some recent frames like Xaku and grendel both have scaling damage, xakus 2 and literally of all grendels kit, but they also have a secondary ability/feature that makes that scaling damage viable.

Sounds like we can only really think of a few frames that already have scaling mechanics though. Which would mean they'd only have to make exceptions for Oberon's Smite that already does % damage, Saryn's theoretically infinitely up-ticking Spores, and Xaku and Grendel's kits. Makes it a pretty easy and short list to exclude from having additional % damage. Or level-based mechanics, as the others have said.

18 hours ago, cococciolo said:

that's one other grace of level scaling, I imagine it would be extremely simple to implement universally compared to health based scaling. compare a simple damage multiplier that changes depending on enemy level alone to the way you described health based scaling and all the factors it needs to take into consideration. you can even see how will it would work because grendel and vauban have the exact same multiplier across different abilities and it still reminds consistent outside of base ability differences.

I wouldn't imagine deciding on a %-health damage quantity per damage ability would be... Particularly more or less work than by-level scaling, to be honest. But I suppose it may allow them more wiggle room with making certain enemies more uniquely, consistently tough, by having level-scaling, and allowing certain enemies to become even more difficult per level than others.

1 hour ago, (PSN)mahoshonenfox said:

Damage based on enemy health isn't the only way to go. Our weapons are already very strong. Even an hours long kuva survival in steel path that spawns lv250+ enemies can be one shot by a heavy attack zaw dagger.

Instead of damage scaling with enemy health, how about powers that snow ball? Kind of like Nidus.

Fair enough. I thought about it more, and yeah, balancing across different weapon types, and in general boosting weapon damage, isn't really that necessary. Rivens exist, and there's a certain amount/degree to which the concept of "mastery fodder" exists, so it's more that there are a lot of abilities that feel not worth using at all in high level content, that need the assist in per-level or %-health effectiveness, whichever one DE thought was more prudent/appropriate. I was just remembering Steve's observation in one of his dogfooding streams or whatever, where he briefly flirted with the idea of TTK mechanics to compress the difficulty, so % health was my default thought.

 

Love all of your observations, they're good ideas! If DE was able to implement per-level scaling, and/or more fun ramping-up features/functions for more frames that see their abilities being lackluster at the moment, those would make good, possibly better, alternatives to %-health damage!

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

Easier method would just be to flatten player damage scaling and get rid of armor scaling.

Damage reduction from scaling armor by design will surpass the value of flat resistances. That was why pre nerf Corrosive was so important and why Bleed procs continue to be so.

Flat armor values would carry over the early game IPS balance instead of Slash becoming the best because it's proc is the best against the thing that resists it.

Make critical damage and Viral additive with Base Damage, so Serration isn't mandatory. We won't need so many damage multipliers if enemies don't have a scaling health multiplier.

[Grav_Starstrider]

2 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

Easier method would just be to flatten player damage scaling and get rid of armor scaling.

Damage reduction from scaling armor by design will surpass the value of flat resistances. That was why pre nerf Corrosive was so important and why Bleed procs continue to be so.

Flat armor values would carry over the early game IPS balance instead of Slash becoming the best because it's proc is the best against the thing that resists it.

Make critical damage and Viral additive with Base Damage, so Serration isn't mandatory. We won't need so many damage multipliers if enemies don't have a scaling health multiplier.

Pretty true points. I separately made another post a while back asking them to de-link most damage types from each other, so that we don't see the bonkers-crazy multiplication of multishot on top of damage on top of critical damage on top of elemental damage. They wouldn't need to struggle as badly to figure out non-trivial, non-impossible higher values for challenging enemies, since they'd be working with additive damage values rather than multiplicative values. If they therefore make everything effectively 8x tankier by nerfing damage mod synergies, the answer *should* be to just reduce enemy health/armor or the health/armor scaling across the board, to match. THEN you wouldn't even need to adjust damage output of abilities further very much, since the damage output of guns and EHP of enemies is compressed and normalized already, at that point.

[Mu_Gera]

16 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

I wouldn't imagine deciding on a %-health damage quantity per damage ability would be... Particularly more or less work than by-level scaling

eh like I said, there's alot more factors scaling off of health depending on enemy types and health types, amount of percentage, if it's based on max health, current health, or missing health, ability base stats and so on. level scaling just cares about the level of the enemies and that's it.

[_R_o_g_u_e_]

On 2020-12-28 at 5:13 AM, cococciolo said:

health based scaling might not be it, it always either scales too much or too little depending on bunch of other factors. level scaling, like grendel, vauban, or xaku have, on the other hand is way simpler and has been extremely consistent so far on the frames mentioned.

I see what you’re saying, but OP only suggested 3%.
against level 200 enemies that’ll be thousands of extra damage, but it’s also only 3% of their health. I think it’s a pretty reasonable suggestion.

[Mu_Gera]

12 hours ago, _R_o_g_u_e_ said:

I see what you’re saying, but OP only suggested 3%.
against level 200 enemies that’ll be thousands of extra damage, but it’s also only 3% of their health. I think it’s a pretty reasonable suggestion.

yeah but I keep saying that it's probably not actually a reasonable or simple solution. depending on the ability, level, and enemy you'd still need to hit an enemy around 33 times to kill them at 3% health scaling damage, and that's assuming you use maximum health scaling instead of current health scaling. it'd probably be far simpler to place a universal level scaling mechanic and then fine tune abilities as needed.

[Grav_Starstrider]

On 2020-12-30 at 4:25 PM, cococciolo said:

yeah but I keep saying that it's probably not actually a reasonable or simple solution. depending on the ability, level, and enemy you'd still need to hit an enemy around 33 times to kill them at 3% health scaling damage, and that's assuming you use maximum health scaling instead of current health scaling. it'd probably be far simpler to place a universal level scaling mechanic and then fine tune abilities as needed.

Additive 3% health damage to an ult means that in addition to dealing weapon and ability damage, you just have a flat "you will need to hit these enemies with 33-ish more ults at MAX".  As me and Rogue have said, it just establishes a maximum number of casts any ability will take to kill an enemy, which will be a boon for the cheapest, most spammable abilities, that are routinely the most underwhelming for kill-power in the game's later, higher levels. See un-augmented Banshee's Sonic Boom, Ash's Shuriken, Frost's Freeze, Hydroid's Tempest Barrage, etc. You say it'd make more sense to use levels to scale ability damage, but that would make it so that DE could just make super-low-level super-tanky enemies to get around the scaling damage. Just making a universal %-health damage helps preserve the power fantasy of "at least it only takes x number of ability casts to kill an enemy, rather than 1000+". Energy is (in theory) one of the most valuable in-mission drops in the game, and Abilities are supposed to be the most powerful, gamechanging, gameplay-defining features of the game, and our combat approach. Worth making them pretty universally potent, imo.

If we're faced between a nebulous hope/promise from DE that everything will be reworked a bit, vs a universal tweak that may do too little for some things, but would be reasonably effective right away, I'd take the latter.

[Mu_Gera]

On 2021-01-01 at 4:54 PM, Grav_Starstrider said:

Additive 3% health damage to an ult means that in addition to dealing weapon and ability damage, you just have a flat "you will need to hit these enemies with 33-ish more ults at MAX"

alright so it's maximum health scaling, would face the same problems as shattering impact compared to old corrosive. 

 

On 2021-01-01 at 4:54 PM, Grav_Starstrider said:

You say it'd make more sense to use levels to scale ability damage, but that would make it so that DE could just make super-low-level super-tanky enemies to get around the scaling damage

doesn't make sense because, being super low leveled, no enemy could withstand against even the base damage of most abilities unmodded.

[Grav_Starstrider]

On 2021-01-04 at 3:51 PM, cococciolo said:

alright so it's maximum health scaling, would face the same problems as shattering impact compared to old corrosive. 

 

doesn't make sense because, being super low leveled, no enemy could withstand against even the base damage of most abilities unmodded.

Okay, but shattering impact required you opt into using the mod, taking away from other DPS options. And the level point I was making was devil's advocacy, but to be honest, it would make sense to allow DE to decide what will remain tanky or lightweight at various levels, so fair enough for you to point out. Doesn't make the rest of the idea behind the suggestion invalid, it would be really worth having them either do %-health or scaling-per-level damage across the board.

[Mu_Gera]

1 hour ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Okay, but shattering impact required you opt into using the mod, taking away from other DPS options

it wasn't about the dps part, more about the part where it would really and kinda still only really be useful against when you can hit an enemy really fast or multiple times at once. most abilities don't.

1 hour ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

it would be really worth having them either do %-health or scaling-per-level damage across the board

yeah ofc both would work in any way possible, it's just that level scaling has so far been more consistent, fair, and simpler than any health scaling despite only recently being added to a few frames.

[Grav_Starstrider]

Fair enough! And yeah, inherently this kinda fix would be extra-ludicrously effective on spam-usable options, but that would be the point of ensuring that there's A) a "stale move" feature that reduces effectiveness of any given type of thing when repeatedly used, so that cycling through different options kills something faster than spamming one fastest option, and B) having the amount be pretty darn low in the first place, where the spammability of the option barely becomes a factor. Ideally DE would thread the needle and choose either a %-health or per-level amount that makes things feel effective in a consistent way across the board, without being too easily abused. And I'm okay with them erring on the side of *avoiding abuse*, because some improvement would be better than none, but I wouldn't want them to regret or have to undo work that they do.