Resolving the Ranged vs Melee Power Gap

[LegendaryNeurotoxin]

So as they talk about it in the dev stream, what do we think about this? 

For the past year I've been thinking about this, and I usually end up coming to guns having their own combo system. This would mean some functionality would improve as players land successful shots, as well as allowing *new* combo scaling mods to kick in as the combo rises. I think it would need to be a different scaling than 1 hit = 1 combo, as that would differentially prefer rapid fire and high multishot weapons, while slower RoF weapons would get left behind. 

 

What would you do to resolve the gap? Do you believe there's a gap, or is that merely perception since you've got guns that kill as effectively as melee in Steel Path and other high-level content? 

[Berzerkules]

They were talking about making melee slower and if it's bad I'll just stop playing. I enjoy the fast paced game play that melee provides. Without that I have no reason to play anymore. 

I'm all for making primary/secondary more powerful but if melee suffers I want no part of it. 

[ToKeSia]

please fix whips category before nerfed melee pls.

[Nezha_Rose]

Same here, the flashiness of warframe is what carried me all the way to mr 30. I just want guns to be as good as melees, but I dont like to see melee suffer too much for it.

I understand the need to nerf it, a bit, but a big nerf will probably kill it for me.

[Sazero]

Nothing can be done. The Melee curse is eternal, and you're all damned to suffer it.

[nerfinator6]

Imagine buffing melee since it was really weak only to nerf it back into the ground a year later.

[ShogunGunshow]

I don't think there's any way that guns can ever be as good as melee without effective nerfs to the latter. Insane damage, mobility, and you don't even have to aim? Unless you're going to give every gun explosive rounds and make them Lenzs/Brammas, they're never going to be as good, period. Nerfs were inevitable, and if you didn't expect this you weren't paying attention.

11 minutes ago, nerfinator6 said:

Imagine buffing melee since it was really weak only to nerf it back into the ground a year later.

It must be nice to have the dank kush that allows one to live in an alternate reality where melee was weak pre-melee 3.0.

[DudeeDew]

3 minutes ago, ShogunGunshow said:

Nerfs were inevitable

Nobody asked for them, ever.

[(PSN)DidacoJack]

About time honestly.

I'm glad they're touching up speed in particularly, I love to see animations in a game and see how the frame has a seizure everytime I melee makes me a little sad tbh. 

@DudeeDew I did. 

[(PSN)Rebel-sonie]

Melee is what sets this game apart from Destiny and the other looter games. And it’s what keeps me playing. 
If they nerf melee I will stop playing. I don’t understand the complaints, in melee I just mash O. For guns I just hold R2 (Arca Plasma and signos Wraith especially)... what is the big difference. 
 

All those people crying over melee. Go play Destiny 

[DudeeDew]

3 minutes ago, (PSN)DidacoJack said:

I did

And that means you're one of the game's problems.

[Hypernaut1]

What I hated to hear is that it seems like they're balancing around steel path to make guns stronger. 

It's pretty much a SP and melee nerf. They can't just nerf melee because there will be an uproar. Guns are an already OP outside of SP. So the only thing they can do is make guns delete enemeies even faster at range in SP....a Steel Path nerf.

All of this to please youtubers making videos.

[LegendaryNeurotoxin]

4 hours ago, ShogunGunshow said:

I don't think there's any way that guns can ever be as good as melee without effective nerfs to the latter. Insane damage, mobility, and you don't even have to aim? Unless you're going to give every gun explosive rounds and make them Lenzs/Brammas, they're never going to be as good, period. Nerfs were inevitable, and if you didn't expect this you weren't paying attention.

That's interesting... so now I think of what kinda combo scaling mods we could see. They wouldn't stack but.... adding a slight radius that increases with combo, adding a slight target homing effect that increases with combo, increasing ammo efficiency so the magazine lasts longer, even adding an "overcharge shot" that expends combo for a mega shot with additional scaling like charged melee. 

Another one comes to mind, guns having a charged mode they can activate to expend ranged combo. This could use some of the effects of the above abilities, or something completely different like giving a few seconds of autofire in a cone or cylinder in front of the player (like McCree's Deadeye ult from Overwatch) or firing a gigantic anime beam that multiplies the gun's damage and makes the conversion for a sustained beam-type weapon. Each weapon could have its own unique charge power, or there can be a sort of archetype that weapons fall into. Maybe snipers do the Deadeye thing, only beams and propellant throwers do the beam thing, maybe rocket weapons get a mega explosion, etc.

[chainchompguy3]

1 minute ago, DudeeDew said:

Nobody asked for them, ever.

I, and at least 15 other people I know, HAVE. Multiple times. Basically anyone with the ability to think in game-design terms.

 ||

V

4 minutes ago, ShogunGunshow said:

and if you didn't expect this you weren't paying attention.

 

[ShogunGunshow]

2 minutes ago, DudeeDew said:

Nobody asked for them, ever.

Not a lot of people ever ask for nerfs, that doesn't mean they're not a good idea. It's a game developer's job to make systems that feel rewarding and don't undermine other aspects of the game. Melee is currently so strong that it invalidates almost everything else. It doesn't matter if people don't ask for it (which, you know, I did, I wanted melee nerfed and I've used almost exclusively melee since the game launched), sometimes you have to make that hard decision for the future of the game.

[Genitive]

Just now, DudeeDew said:

And that means you're one of the game's problems.

You seem like such a nice person.

Removing stagger from some attacks and putting a cap on weaopn speed doesn't seem too bad. But people will cry about nerfs no matter what DE will do, so it's just another day here.

[Yamazuki]

25 minutes ago, Berzerkules said:

They were talking about making melee slower and if it's bad I'll just stop playing. I enjoy the fast paced game play that melee provides. Without that I have no reason to play anymore. 

I'm all for making primary/secondary more powerful but if melee suffers I want no part of it. 

They mentioned attackspeed stacking through mods and limiting that, but I don't see what they mean. Part of the attackspeed someone gets is from Berserker and then the arcane as well as any buffs.

Although, trying to lower speed purely for artistic reasons is silly. Ranged weapons are also just a bunch of noise.

Just now, DudeeDew said:

Nobody asked for them, ever.

Content creators that pretend they care about anything have been whining about it recently. Despite saying they won't balance for SP/Endless runs, now they are going to for them.

DE didn't even address the low damage single target guns vs aoe/burst guns, which is a real imbalance issue. Buffing ranged weapons as a whole is going to do literally nothing other than make the already good options better.

I guess this means Warframe abilities need to be nerfed next, quite a few of them are already superior to melee and offer significantly more safety.

[(PSN)DidacoJack]

2 minutes ago, DudeeDew said:

And that means you're one of the game's problems.

Or maybe the game's problem are people that ask either directly or indirectly for more power creep in a game where you already clear content with a button press and has become a second-job farming simulator, rather than a videogame where you are actually supposed to press buttons.

 

[Hypernaut1]

I do agree with nerfing melee AoE damage and stun lock combos though

[(XBOX)Timidobserver]

I could go for some melee weapons that are slower but have a large pbaoe affect to balance it out. 

[-S4GE-]

i havent spent time and money making build buying formas and stuff just to see all this going to waste with nerfs just becasue a youtuber whined about it
no disrespect but them youtubers doesnt even play the game as much as most of us do and the just complain change this change that !!
why is it so hard to buff 1ry and 2ry weapons to be at same level as melee lol ?

[PublikDomain]

Meh. The nerfs to attack speed, which seems to be the biggest source of complaints, doesn't really sound like that big of a deal. Scott only talked about parented mods, where multiple mods are counted the as the same and can't be stacked. How many of your builds actually use more than one attack speed mod? And is it that big of a deal if you have to replace one of those mods with some other source of damage? I'm not really convinced that anything will change, or that what they talked about will go far enough to make a difference. I don't really think the idea to mix gun/melee will do much either, especially if it involves mods which need to take up space in a build.

[ShogunGunshow]

TBH, melee attack speed isn't even, like, a big factor. It's not like you should ever stack melee attack speed mods, because that's bad. You want to stack different multipliers as much as you can. Primed Fury or Berserker are more than enough on their own, and that's not counting other sources like Arcane Strike, or Warcry, or whatever.

DE categorizing attack speed mods together and making them mutually exclusive will do pretty much nothing.

e: What @PublikDomain said.

[MqToasty]

I'm willing to give DE the benefit of the doubt and wait to see how it turns out.  Although if the problem is melee being OP'd in Steel Path, why not just add more enemies that are basically immune to melee in Steel Path?  Like maybe enhanced Tower Shield Grineers, or even specter-likes that can "block" with their own melee weapon?

[PublikDomain]

Just now, MqToasty said:

Although if the problem is melee being OP'd in Steel Path, why not just add more enemies that are basically immune to melee in Steel Path?

In general, because players hate it when DE does stuff like that. Nullifiers, status immunity, CC immunity, hidden DR, etc. Players hate hate hate having their stuff not work "just because".

1 minute ago, MqToasty said:

Like maybe enhanced Tower Shield Grineers, or even specter-likes that can "block" with their own melee weapon?

Though this sounds like it's probably the direction they're going in. Scott mentioned "bringing back the danger", or something along those lines, which probably means more of a punishment for being sloppy inside of an enemy's melee range. Enemies that can counter or be more interactive in close quarters would probably be a good thing - as long as it's not making them "basically immune" en masse.