How does D.E. plan on bringing primary weapons up to speed with melee?

[Tiltskillet]

2 hours ago, ReddyDisco said:

Yes ranged combat should be on par with melee and it will be great and totally not nerfed in few weeks after release....oh wait the bramma

prenerf bramma was the only primary that could compete with the damage of melees and there was immense outcry about it and it got nerfed pretty quick, needless to say that this melee meta is here to stay 

I wonder if that nerf would even have happened though, if the Bramma hadn't been so loud and flashy about doing it.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with the Cedo.  Really powerful, really popular, just as or more flashy than the Bramma.  But now that we've got some ability to disable other players' effects, maybe it never gets our or  DE's attention the same way.   (Although even if that's how it plays out, we'll never really know if that was the reason.)

[ReddyDisco]

16 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

I wonder if that nerf would even have happened though, if the Bramma hadn't been so loud and flashy about doing it.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with the Cedo.  Really powerful, really popular, just as or more flashy than the Bramma.  But now that we've got some ability to disable other players' effects, maybe it never gets our or  DE's attention the same way.   (Although even if that's how it plays out, we'll never really know if that was the reason.)

Cedo is essentially kuva nukor but in primary form, its not as reliable as nukor because the glaive is kinda random sometimes but its very close. 

i don't believe cedo will get nerfed, its single target and given the glaive can hit muitiple targets it doesn't do much damage, its there to apply status so the primary fire of cedo can kill them 

[(PSN)FK2P]

13 hours ago, Orblit said:

Remember stances? The things that add about 2 formas' worth of capacity? Only reason melee has the illusion of easy modding to a finished build over primary and secondary.

Melee is for trashmobs. Guns are able to hit mounted health bars. 
 

Melee is the power fantasy, but it doesn’t eat into events/operations/bosses. This is how damage is managed.

Ash used to be able to hit any trashmob for any amount of damage.... it’s not OP to have unlimited melee damage. Anything melee can damage is simply fodder on the ground.

When content gets serious the health bars are mounted on limbs, walls, giant creatures and eidolons. 

[(XBOX)ONI Prowess]

cut the ammo by 90%

increase the damage by 900%

i would honestly love it if primary weapons were like a BFG, you had one shot but could delete a single enemy.

give me an anti material rifle with 1 round and 2 in reserve that does as much as a reaper prime heavy attack and let me go hunting.  

[_R_o_g_u_e_]

Personally I think melee should deal more damage than guns, but not by this amount. But I also don’t see how you could compete. When you compare condition overload or blood rush builds to guns, you’d have to increase the power of guns by a remarkable amount.

Maybe the solution could be extending the combo system from snipers and melee and giving it to other guns too?

The Soma recently got a mod that increases its crit chance by 1% per bullet landed. I think that could be an interesting direction to take guns in the future.

[ReddyDisco]

19 minutes ago, (PSN)FK2P said:

Melee is for trashmobs. Guns are able to hit mounted health bars. 
 

Melee is the power fantasy, but it doesn’t eat into events/operations/bosses. This is how damage is managed.

Ash used to be able to hit any trashmob for any amount of damage.... it’s not OP to have unlimited melee damage. Anything melee can damage is simply fodder on the ground.

When content gets serious the health bars are mounted on limbs, walls, giant creatures and eidolons. 

i would agree with you if i hadn't seen paracesis oneshot eidolon limbs and bonewidow bushwhack the venom event

[Danielw8]

3 minutes ago, ReddyDisco said:

i would agree with you if i hadn't seen paracesis oneshot eidolon limbs and bonewidow bushwhack the venom event

 

 

[Aadi880]

Exponentially increase enemy damage in close range and melee won't be viable anymore :0

On a more serious note:

Ranged weaponry should do better in range. Except, everyone is a parkour master and we can close that distance in mere seconds or milliseconds, that distance becomes a non factor.

On top of that, ranged weaponry don't scale as far as melee weapons do...

I think what they should do, is to remove the range-falloff of all primary and secondary weapons, and increase the headshot multiplier such the multiplier on the head allow primary weapons to scale. At the same time, increase enemy damage in close range and give status weapons to enemies. That way, melee would still be strong, but riskier, as it perhaps should be.

[Aadi880]

8 minutes ago, Danielw8 said:

 

 

Where's the one with the mining beam?

[ReddyDisco]

20 minutes ago, Aadi880 said:

Where's the one with the mining beam?

after the one with stug, Soon ^tm

[Dunkelheit]

Melee weapons get too much strength from too many directions:

melee become better via:

- melee combo counter directly via dmg modifier

- melee combo counter indiretly via Blood Rush 660% crit, Weeping Wounds 440% status

- dmg indirectly, because due to Weeping Wounds you can just install the big 90% dmg mods (or even the primed one for 165%), where as ranged has to rely on 60/60 mods for status

- melee combo counter is easy to uphold at 12x due to Naramon and Drifting Contact

- dmg via condition overload (with a nukor 600% is not that hard to achieve)

- no ammo

- very easy to aim

- every melee weapon is AOE, melee dmg staggers, so enemies cannot even fight back

- Bullet deflection when shot from the front

- easy "forma" via stances

- probably a lot more that I forgot

 

Solutions:

If you want to nerf melee, I think I would cut down on the melee counter. Use melee without Naramon and without Drifting Contact (and similar mods) and you will see that without a high counter, melee is very, very efficiently nerfed. Players should work with + melee counter mods or mod for high intitial counter. If you don't want to nerf melee counter, you need to nerf all the scalability for melee weapons. Which primary mod offers 660% crit? None comes even close, so Blood Rush, Weeping Wounds need to be hit with the nerf hammer, hard, to bring balance between melee and ranged.

Another solution if you don't want to nerf melee:

Add skill back to the game. There should be body parts that have either a very, very, very, very, very high dmg modificator (infested) and/or no armor(grineer)/shield protection (corpus), when hit with a shot, maybe there are mods for sniper rifles who grant instant KO with a headshot or stuff like that. But in the very end, you should be able to use a primary against 9999 mobs and it should work. It would be so satisfying to see big numbers fly across the screen when you aim correctly.
Additionally this should only work with non-aoe weapons. AOE weapons have an advantage in itself by adding dmg due to hitting several mobs at once.

Last but not least:

Don't try to bring secondary dmg up to par with primary, but give secondaries interesting interaction. Like oneshotting nullifier bubbles, be extra strong vs shields from corpus, shred armor fast.

And maybe bring enemies like the drones in arbitration which are so strong that they have to be eliminated from the far via ranged weapons, to stop the brainless melee meta and give some strategy and tactics back to the game.

 

In the very end, melees should be stronger than ranged though, due to the inherent weakness that you have to come close to the enemies. But I think it should not hurt to bring interesting interactions and thus give primary/secondary a purpose which is better than being "fun to use, but making every level last a lot longer".

This is at least my vision, I have cooked it up in 10 minutes, so obviously this is only a start and needs a lot more thought put into it. I also would not mind to leave the game in the current state, because brainless melee smashing with fancy moves is fun as well, at least for me.

[Otaku_Hyen]

When the melee weapons was weak and almost useless except few usable everybody wanted them to be buffed. Now the secondaries and primaries weaker in some cases and some another revisit needs to them to be more viable on late game. The first thing what need to be fixed in my opinion is what the game direction is. They need to decide if they want power fantasy or hard action rpg with skill and parkour knowledge involved or we just kill loads of enemies with a blink of an eye. A slight changes to the primaries and secondaries needs but then they will also change some part of the game. This is a never ending balance cycle because something always will be weaker than anothers.

Doing major and deep changes could cause left behind a major part of the playerbase and that is a revenue cut to them. Since Tencent is their new boss who wants more money back, they are in the need to earn more player and revenue so they will try the most casual way to do so.

[Hypernaut1]

With primaries already being good, this sounds more like a nerf to enemies than anything. 

So a player spins-2-win in a room full of close range enemeies, and some people think "I should be able to kill these enemies faster with my primary"??? No way. 

I think the way it's balanced, your supposed to want to go melee when in close range. 

[ReddyDisco]

3 minutes ago, Hypernaut1 said:

With primaries already being good, this sounds more like a nerf to enemies than anything. 

So a player spins-2-win in a room full of close range enemeies, and some people think "I should be able to kill these enemies faster with my primary"??? No way. 

I think the way it's balanced, your supposed to want to go melee when in close range. 

what range? that's the question isn't it. 

when have melee weapons with 8m range and parkour, range is covered in blink of an eye.

DE should give players a reason to want to use primaries and secondaries over melee

[CephalonCarnage]

1 hour ago, Otaku_Hyen said:

Doing major and deep changes could cause left behind a major part of the playerbase and that is a revenue cut to them

this is the core of t all, but I don't think this is where th emoney is at - most old players will be getting their platinum via trading prime parts and rivens. Its the new players (who want those things) that part with their cash for platinum to buy them, and the truly-annoying-grind-to-get frames and weapons. The only part old players have in the money game is to provide marketing to the new players (ie "you must have this") to encourage them to buy instead of grind.

Can we talk of sentinel weapons when we discuss damage imbalance to, as they were left behind so many times their 5 dps is embarrassing now.  That's a highlight of how bad the inflated damage system has become. The answer is not to buff ranged weapons though, as that will only encourage primaries to be dominant (if they don't need the melee combo to do more damage) or other even more broken mechanisms (melee and even sniper combo count is fundamentally just wrong anyway) that will only end up with even more dmaage reduction mechanisms on the higher level enemies. Its a spiral of increasing brokenness. The fundamental problem needs to be addressed, and power creep is not going to solve it.

[SneakyErvin]

I'd rather see melee nerfed overall and then have some ranged weapons buffed. The speed at which melee inflicts damage along with the amount of damage that it inflicts in such short time is out of hand atm.

We just dont need the power we have now, no matter how much people will scream "but muh powah fantazeeeereeee!".

[(PSN)sister-hawk]

When it comes to the stronger primaries and secondaries, I don’t think anything needs to be done. Sure they may not compete with melee at very high levels, but who cares? DE absolutely should not be balancing around the idea of going 6 hours in a survival mission. Frankly that sort of thing shouldn’t even be possible, as it’s not particularly healthy for players. But I digress.

When it comes to weaker primaries and secondaries, the only solution is to pull a melee 2.9999 and just buff the hell out of them. Higher base damage, higher crit and status. Maybe some faster reloads here and there.

But is that really a smart thing to do? Is it really wise to make even the Stug as capable in mid-game as the Ignis Wraith? Guns are gated by MR so that when you are new, you can only use weaker weapons, and by the time you’ve acquired more powerful weapons, you’ve already worked your way through the easy content anyway.

Buffing weak weapons so that brand new players get used to one-shotting everything in sight is moving in exactly the wrong direction. It’s the reason why the game is so wildly unbalanced in the first place. DE let the power creep go unchecked for so long, there’s no going back now.

Ideally, what needs to happen is to wipe the slate clean and completely re-do the damage system. But that means a comprehensive sweep over all mods in the game to bring their effects more in line. And I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. It would take a lot of time, money, and headaches, and could potentially mean wiping out some players’ real-money investment in their power progression. And I think that scares DE too much. They won’t do it.

The real solution to balancing primaries and secondaries with melee is to finally reign in the power creep. But DE has had 7 years to do that. 7 years isn’t a mistake, it’s a choice.

[Kaggelos]

What if we made some enemies that are dangerous up close (like Liches), plus telegraphed attacks to know when to get the hell outta dodge, or block. But like, you know, actually be able to counter them, unlike Liches or Ancient Disruptors.

[ebrl]

It sounds to me like a lot of people are probably just using the wrong primary weapons for the wrong purposes. Besides, if melee didn't do much better against things in melee range, what would be point of it?

[Uhkretor]

18 hours ago, Voltage said:

Top that off with zero consequence deaths, little reason for teamplay, and combat that has almost no interesting enemies besides VIPs in general gameplay because you can kill them faster than they can really react to your existence.

We had consequences before people actually DEMANDED REMOVING THEM.

 

... I'm calm, very calm... just had to point that out since, I don't know... has been something I've been warning about since U7...

 

Ok, back to shaving off relics... my 60k stock isn't going to disappear on its own...

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

2 hours ago, ReddyDisco said:

what range? that's the question isn't it. 

when have melee weapons with 8m range and parkour, range is covered in blink of an eye.

DE should give players a reason to want to use primaries and secondaries over melee

8m range is not a standard at all. If stats were available, I'm pretty sure majority of players don't have range rivens and/or spring loaded blade.

[Aadi880]

Just now, ebrl said:

Besides, if melee didn't do much better against things in melee range, what would be point of it?

Melee should do better in melee range.

Not in long range. And that is exactly the current problem.

The problem being discussed, is the fact that primary weapons do not do a good enough job at their operating ranges.

I can't melee someone further than 20 meters? So what? I can literally cover that distance in a split second. I am in a warframe designed for parkour and closing distances. 100 meters is nothing to a warframe. The group of enemies dies faster if I parkour 100 meters and melee them, than shooting them with most gun from 100 meters.

Most primary weapons ends up falling off at a range ~50 meters. And I haven't even talked about natural weapon inaccuracy and the random recoil.

And it doesn't help that enemies do absolutely no more damage at close range than any other distance. If they pose no threat, what's stopping me and making me consider primary weapons? Nothing.

Primary weapons have weaker modding potential than melee and have no access to scalability.

And perhaps subjective, but melee is just feels more satisfying. Most primary weapons don't seem to have enough artistic "oomph" in them apart from a handful few.

[ReddyDisco]

13 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

8m range is not a standard at all. If stats were available, I'm pretty sure majority of players don't have range rivens and/or spring loaded blade.

it may not be common but it isn't rare either, uncommon i'd say.

as you say there are no stats, best i can tell is what i've seen in pubs. 

 

[Aldain]

19 hours ago, _4shes said:

This is actually a very good question. I've seen riven dispo 5 god roles making a weapon mediocre at best. Either the damage output is too weak or the weapon's design is just clunky and hard to use.

-cries into my Veldt-

[Zimzala]

Melee does better in a game about Space Ninjas.

Imagine that!