What DE doesn't seem to get about the "Guns vs Melee" Balance Issue

[Roble_Viejo]

In Devstream #152, DE acknowledged the problem of "Guns vs Melee", but they only talked about Damage
(which is just a part of the whole issue), and something that I found personally concerning: They listed Melee
Attack Speed specifically as a problem, when its not, and in fact is one of the reason some melees are so fun in
the first place. Below I'm gonna list some of the components of Warframe (and any Shooter with Melee for that matter),
how and why they clash in the current state of Warframe's gameplay and how this is an issue which emerged
from the evolution of the game, and not something inherently good/bad about these weapons.
But before I wanna clarify I've been playing for over 6 years, I'm MR 30, +5000hs on Steam, so I've pretty much
experienced every weapon and gamemode in this game.

- Dynasty Warframe: Hordes and Cover
  So in the beginnings, Warframe was a Shooter like any other, couple of shots got you killed, getting in Melee range
  was a risk and using Cover was THE way of killing enemies and staying alive. A slower, more methodical gameplay.
  But because the AI has always been pretty much braindead, DE didn't have a way to scale difficulty but to make MORE
  enemies, with MORE Stats. Fast forward to today and using Cover is a joke, as enemies spawn constantly and from every
  direction, and for that reason even the act of Aiming puts you in a disadvantage unless you are paying constant attention
  to the minimap so you don't get flanked. This is what is usually known as "Horde Enemies". And of course, the way players
  play the game changed to adapt to this playstyle: AoE is king, and survivability depends on using abilities non stop, to either nuke, 
  perma cc or tank, because if you don't you will get overwhelmed and killed. As you might have noticed, this lines up 
  with the most used items, which could be considered "meta": Heavy hitting AoE (Bramma, Nukor, Khora), anything 
  that can Tank and/or Buff Itself (Inaros, Nezha, Rhino) and whatever can Perma CC (Vauban, Nova, Khora).
  So naturally the game shifted from a "Slow -Clean rooms shooter" to a "Fast -Stay alive hack and slash", meaning the only 
  missions that can be played purely as a shooter are those that don't spawn enemies constantly (Exterminate) or involve long 
  distances between players-enemies (Open Worlds). Sadly there is probably no way to revert the "Dynasty Warframe" enemy 
  Hordes gamestyle the game has now.

- Enemies killed per Swing/Shot
  This one is pretty simple: Melee will ALWAYS affect more enemies than (non AOE) guns, which means as long you are using a gun
  and actually aiming you are losing time, and there are more enemies spawning than being killed, meaning you are getting closer 
  to be overwhelmed and die. And even if the mission doesn't have quick spawns, you are still playing slower by using a gun, and
  in a looter game, specially with such amount of RNG and mission time adding up to a massive grind, you will ALWAYS want to 
  complete missions as fast as possible. 

- Evolutive Mods: Awful for Build Diversity, Awesome for Gameplay
  Now this what I think DE should address first, because this is the actual reason Melee dominate the meta, not because they
  have INHERETLY better stats, but because they have Evolutive Mods (Blood Rush, Condition Overload) which makes them stronger
  the more you actively use them. And I know what you might be thinking "Just add the corresponding version of each Evolutive mod
  to Guns" and I ask "What will happen? How will builds look like?" the answer is simple, the same copy+paste build on everything.
  So no, Evolutive mods shouldn't be added to Guns, but the Evolutive mechanics should be BASELINE in ALL Weapons. This will require
  some rebalancing across the game, for sure, but making the Weapons get stronger the more you ACTIVELY use them, is fun, rewarding
  and FAIR. Also the removal of Evolutive Mods would make room to actually diverse builds, because currently if you are not using either
  Blood Rush or Condition Overload you are doing it wrong. And this has to do with the Melee Attack Speed which [DE]Geoff listed as 
  a problem, it is not that Melees have too much Attack Speed, is that players build for it so the Evolutive Mods scale faster. 

- Pick Ups and Vacuum, the never ending battle between DE and the Community
  Guns use ammo, some have VERY small ammo pools, to get ammo you need to pick up loot, to pick up loot you need to get in melee range.
  Melees don't use ammo, in melee range you pick up loot instantly, so you get HP/Energy Orbs sooner, which adds to your survivability.
  So: Melees are inherently more convenient to use because of how Pick-Ups work, even if they were equally strong to Guns.

- Difficulty: Mechanical Skill vs Superior Stats
  All of the consecutive changes that led to "Dynasty Warframe", SPECIALLY the lack of ANY AI update whatsoever, made it so the only 
  way DE can ramp up the difficulty is making more enemies, harder to kill, with layers upon layers of Invulnerability Phases or Ability
  Nullification. Basically in Warframe you don't need to learn attack patterns and aim to weak-spots, you just need to pass the "Stats Check"
  meaning that Player's Skill and Weapon Mechanics are secondary to Raw Stats, so naturally the meta changed from "Git Gud" to "Git the Items that
  Make you Gud". The best example I can give is Steel Path, Kuva Fortress Disruption: The Demolisher Units have BOTH Ability Nullification and
  Stats Layers (and Invulnerability if you count the shield), so it doesn't matter the frame you have, you need the biggest DPS dispenser in your
  arsenal and you need to find a way to uber your build to not die because otherwise you are not gonna be alive for long enough to even damage
  the Demolishers, which cant be stopped as they are not affected by abilities. 

  Well, this took WAY too long and my time ran out, so I couldn't include everything or grammar check the whole post. 
  Please comment down below your thoughts on this matter. Tomorrow I'm gonna edit the post with anything I missed 
  and with any valid additions from comments. 
  Hopefully this gets traction, because we need to Discuss this before DE starts working on changes, so we have better
  chances of being heard. 

 Thank you VERY much for reading Tenno, have a nice day and take care. 
 Peace. 

EDIT - 17 hours later: 

- I want to include this comment from "PublikDomain" because it shows an issue in DE's development
  They throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks, and sometimes they seem surprised when stuff sticks.

- I think you're forgetting that the meta shift from CC to DPS was caused entirely by DE. Players didn't just adapt to this and get here on our own, DE themselves handed us the keys with years and years of unchecked powercreep. It's not the AI's fault that the game has changed, and there are a lot of interesting enemies in the game. My favorite example are the Amalgams: I think they're nifty, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what any of them actually do because they all evaporate a nanosecond after being spawned. One guy calls in an airstrike beam thing that does... something? And one supposedly grabs enemies and gives them some sort of buff? I don't know what that buff is, and I've never seen this happen, but supposedly it's there! I'm sure the enemies added in the Jovian Concord update have neat mechanics, too, like maybe the little bomb Moas do something interesting. Not that I ever see this happen. Kuva Jesters are neat and can cling to you, which does....? What did the new Sentients do in OV? I don't know, they weren't alive long enough for me to find out.

The game doesn't allow these mechanics to surface when players are so overpowered. Mechanical skill cannot exist when superior stats are everywhere. You don't need to learn weak spots or aim when you can just walk up with impunity and press E and blend the enemy to paste. The AI has no ability to react to this! The only thing DE can do is rely on annoying systems like nullification and hidden DR and status resist and so on because they have zero control over the player anymore.

And I'm doubtful that much will even change with this. DE mentioned buffing guns through mechanics similar to melee, which is just going to be yet another net increase in player power. And nerfing attack speed for melee don't sound like it'll do much of anything, since AFAIK few people actually stack attack speed mods that way. I don't use attack speed mods at all, and I'm still more than capable of blending enemies in Steel Path and everywhere else I go.

EDIT - 1 Day later: 

- So the Discussion pretty much faded, here and in Reddit.
- Im gonna pin-point what it was generally stated in the comments and let this rest for now

-  Evolutive Mods (Blood Rush, Condition Overload, Weeping Wounds) were stated as the 1# factor for 
    most of the disparity in "Melee vs Guns" powercreep. Personally I think they should be removed and 
    ALL weapons should be given Evolutive Attributes. This is how I stated it in my Reddit's post: 
    "Remove all Evolutive Mods. Every Weapon has different Evolutive Attributes that scale. For some Crit Chance,
     for others Status Chance, or Multishot, Fire Rate, maybe even stuff like +Elemental Dmg."
     This opens a LOT of possibilities, and a new Layer of Balance DE can make. Like "Well all players build this weapon for crit
     but it has good status chance, what if we lower the crit chance but give it +Elemental dmg on hit, so they could run it as an elemental
     weapon too?" Best way to balance is to give nerfs and buffs equally, and for that you need a variety of interactions.
     As it is now DE only have: Dmg, crit chance and riven disposition to balance the meta, that's why everytime a good weapon
     comes out, it overshadows all the ok weapons.

-- The blazing fast gameplay was an emergent phenomenon to a heavy grind game.
    This is simple, players will always try to run missions as fast as possible, so Kill-Time 
    will always be king. Is not just that Melees kill too fast, is that Guns kill too slow.

-- Dynasty-Warframe
    Hordes and braindead AI, the reason the game rewards "Stat Checks" and not Attack Patterns learning or Weakspot Aiming.
    There is probably no going back from this, but better enemy design, and less reliance on massive spawns and layers of dmg
    reduction for difficulty is the road to take to start improving on this aspect. Is not that Dynasty-Warframe is bad, is that the
    game wasn't designed as such in the beginnings and the older systems are starting to show their cracks.

-- Ludicrous Attack Speeds on Melees abolish Combos and disregard Animations
    A lot of people talked how the bind Melee Attack on Mouse Wheel so they don't destroy their keys, and how they would
    like to actually learn and use combos (if they actually behaved as combos and had scaling properties). Combo Counter 
    time is a BIG issue here. Personally I think the Timer should be removed, combos should have scaling properties (Evolutive
    Attributes) added to combos, and DE should balance Speed and DMG, slower attacks should be stronger than light attacks. 
    The combo counter should be STILL consumed on Heavy Attack tho, as it is now, Combos and Heavy Attacks are 2 completely
    separate things. 

   And.... That's pretty much it. I probably won't update this post any time sooner. 
   To all of you keeping the discussion civil, thank you VERY much, this is how we 
   keep a healthy community and make sure our Feedback is heard. And those who
   didn't, well.... Digging through my profile and calling names to justify your opinions
   is the reason I much prefer Reddit than the Forums, we should read Posts objectively, 
   and not base our thoughts on whoever posted it instead of what its actually written in it.

   Remember Tenno We All Lift Together
   Good Luck, Have Fun and Take Care

   Peace 🙏😊

  

[Voltage]

I definitely agree with most of your post, but you can see that this problem is so rooted in the game that you risk potentially killing the games identity that DE has instilled and created over the years. It's a simpler task if this was 2014, but we are 8 years in now.

I think the easiest approach to this problem without killing the game is addressing various broken math problems in the game. Standardizing damage bonuses and other mechanics like Multishot would balance the game without killing the gameplay or the way the game plays. Multiplication is dangerous to have all over the damage system, especially with enemies as weak as the ones offered in a majority of the game's content.

[Yamazuki]

21 minutes ago, Roble_Viejo said:

The Demolisher Units have BOTH Ability Nullification and
  Stats Layers (and Invulnerability if you count the shield), so it doesn't matter the frame you have, you need the biggest DPS dispenser in your
  arsenal and you need to find a way to uber your build to not die because otherwise you are not gonna be alive for long enough to even damage
  the Demolishers, which cant be stopped as they are not affected by abilities. 

They can be impacted by some abilities, the bubble simply removes negative effects and applies the effects a standard bubble does.

 

That aside, I do agree that DE is focusing too much on damage, but that's because that's all content creators are whining about; guns not being good in their endless runs. Other than insanely increasing their damage, they wont be satisfied, and even if they did, they still wouldn't be satisfied as the complaints would just be in the reverse like it was back in the day...

Other issues with less desirable weapons comes down to other things like downtime or range. Some weapons spend a lot of their time just reloading, during a reload other weapons or abilities would've cleared a room. Some short range weapons deal really low damage compared to weapons with longer range, and sometimes even aoe on top of their range.

Simply increasing damage across the board mainly serves as a benefit to already strong weapons, and does nothing for the less desirable.

[Roble_Viejo]

hace 3 minutos, Voltage dijo:

I definitely agree with most of your post, but you can see that this problem is so rooted in the game that you risk potentially killing the games identity that DE has instilled and created over the years. It's a simpler task if this was 2014, but we are 8 years in now.

I think the easiest approach to this problem without killing the game is addressing various broken math problems in the game. Standardizing damage bonuses and other mechanics like Multishot would balance the game without killing the gameplay or the way the game plays.

Yep. "Dynasty Warframe" is set and its not going anywhere. 

Personally if I had to resume this whole issue in a sentence it would be: 
"Remove Evolutive Mods and make them Inherent Mechanics; and for the love of God
 Rework the AI and allow players to rely on Attack Patterns and Good Aiming"

 In my experience Nullifiers are a good example, the Drone that sustains the Nullifying Bubble
 is the "weakspot" but you ALWAYS hit the Bubble instead of them, so you end up building for 
 Fire Rate instead of relying on good Aiming. A "Stats Check instead of a Aim Good" Scenario.
 And it could be easily fixed if: 
- The Drone was targetable regardless of position.
- Nullifiers themselves had MASSIVE Melee Damage.
- The AI goes suicidal because it knows it has the upper hand in close combat.

[CephalonCarnage]

I suppose you have to understand what the game is today - its a "grab the loot, repeat" game. The enemies are simply an inconvenience to obtaining the drops, and if you made them hard to kill, players would complain. (rightly IMHO - if you force players to run the same mission 30+ times to get all the drops via fixed RNG percentages, then making that mission quite difficult is going to kill the game. And DE is never going to make those drops happen in 4 runs!)

But we also have the steel path "hard mode" and a heap of mods that are almost designed for it - things like CO and WW and BR are not strictly needed for normal missions, not even for the infested ones where building combo is trivial.

So we have, right now, a situation where we have some mods that are needed but also not needed, and the game is kinda schizophrenic over this. The multiplicative mods can be done away with and nobody would really notice in normal missions, but the SPers (and those who just like moar dps) will squeal. And the reason those mods are needed is because the hard mode is still exactly like the normal one with excessive enemies.

 

So there is a way to fix this: remove the multiplicative mods (and combo counts, which I never quite understood the rationale for anyway) and reduce the enemies in SP to make it more like the original "kill things slow" game warframe apparently used to be. You have the run standard missions quick for loot that we have today, but also have a more considered, careful, space-ninja mode for players that no longer need the loot.

 

Ultimately, I think the enemy scaling is truly what needs to be looked at. The problem is not so much that weapons do lots of damage, its that they have to in order to defeat the 90% armour damage reduction, which only ends up creating other problems likle kuva nukor's status proc spreading, and things like slash procs as the only way to kill the big bad enemies. This is a nonsense that needs to go. Hard enemies should be difficult to kill but not impossible and not cheesed with an accidental game mechanic (or worse, designed to get round the problem they created in the first place!). So I would really reduce melee to be as powerful as guns, but also reduce the enemy scaling to match. The DPS inflation will only come back to bite if guns are made more powerful as the enemies will end up being made even more difficult to kill. and if they then ever gert rid of slash procs (for example) then the enemies become almost impossible. In all cases though, those multipicative mods are part of the problem and there is no place to keep them without players ending up having to use them in "the correct builds".

I suggest that armour DR be removed in favour of ablative armour values, which would be a lot more obvious to the player as it would show on the health bar and could be reduced by hitting the enemy often enough.

 

As for vacuum, why isn't it built-in as a default anyway!!!!!

[LegendaryNeurotoxin]

Great post!

 

Since we're sharing discussions, here's one I started while they were talking about the subject during the devstream. Feel free to chime in with more thoughts on how to resolve the power gap if you have any! 

 

[Roble_Viejo]

hace 2 minutos, LegendaryNeurotoxin dijo:

Great post!

 

Since we're sharing discussions, here's one I started while they were talking about the subject during the devstream. Feel free to chime in with more thoughts on how to resolve the power gap if you have any! 

 

😊 Yes! Thanks for passing by
Monkes-Together-Stronk
"Guns vs Melee" update could redefine Warframe
We need to let our thoughts be heard the day DE
acknowledged the problem. This is the Way.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

14 minutes ago, gbjbaanb said:

I suppose you have to understand what the game is today - its a "grab the loot, repeat" game. The enemies are simply an inconvenience to obtaining the drops, and if you made them hard to kill, players would complain. (rightly IMHO - if you force players to run the same mission 30+ times to get all the drops via fixed RNG percentages, then making that mission quite difficult is going to kill the game. And DE is never going to make those drops happen in 4 runs!)

But we also have the steel path "hard mode" and a heap of mods that are almost designed for it - things like CO and WW and BR are not strictly needed for normal missions, not even for the infested ones where building combo is trivial.

So we have, right now, a situation where we have some mods that are needed but also not needed, and the game is kinda schizophrenic over this. The multiplicative mods can be done away with and nobody would really notice in normal missions, but the SPers (and those who just like moar dps) will squeal. And the reason those mods are needed is because the hard mode is still exactly like the normal one with excessive enemies.

 

So there is a way to fix this: remove the multiplicative mods (and combo counts, which I never quite understood the rationale for anyway) and reduce the enemies in SP to make it more like the original "kill things slow" game warframe apparently used to be. You have the run standard missions quick for loot that we have today, but also have a more considered, careful, space-ninja mode for players that no longer need the loot.

 

Ultimately, I think the enemy scaling is truly what needs to be looked at. The problem is not so much that weapons do lots of damage, its that they have to in order to defeat the 90% armour damage reduction, which only ends up creating other problems likle kuva nukor's status proc spreading, and things like slash procs as the only way to kill the big bad enemies. This is a nonsense that needs to go. Hard enemies should be difficult to kill but not impossible and not cheesed with an accidental game mechanic (or worse, designed to get round the problem they created in the first place!). So I would really reduce melee to be as powerful as guns, but also reduce the enemy scaling to match. The DPS inflation will only come back to bite if guns are made more powerful as the enemies will end up being made even more difficult to kill. and if they then ever gert rid of slash procs (for example) then the enemies become almost impossible. In all cases though, those multipicative mods are part of the problem and there is no place to keep them without players ending up having to use them in "the correct builds".

I suggest that armour DR be removed in favour of ablative armour values, which would be a lot more obvious to the player as it would show on the health bar and could be reduced by hitting the enemy often enough.

 

As for vacuum, why isn't it built-in as a default anyway!!!!!

Or they can just make some tweaks like they're going to. Scaling was already looked at. We don't need your large sweeping changes. 

Dont like armor? Use corrosive like you're supposed to instead of viral and heat. Or maybe try some warframe abilities....

[Roble_Viejo]

I'm gonna leave a thought and come back tomorrow: 
- Remove all Evolutive Mods, but Weapons have Evolutive Attributes. 
For most of them, a little bit of Status and Crit per shot (or maybe kill), 
but others Multishot, or Fire Rate. Maybe +Elemental? 

 This would be: 
- More flavor. 
- Could be used to define Weapon Types
- Another Layer for DE to Balance (besides Crit Chance, DMG and Riven Dispo)

 

[Loza03]

I think the main thing about the scaling mods that would make me happy with them is pretty simple - make them per enemy, not overall. That is to say, more like Condition Overload. And I'd also make them mutually exclusive with the 'base' variants - i.e. you can have Blood Rush or True/Sacrificial Steel on a build. Not both. Likewise for Weeping Wounds.

 

The main reason being that Melee is currently far too Jack of All Trades. Sure, Dynasty Warriors does spend the majority of your time pitting you against throngs of hapless mooks, but it's also capable of throwing boss fights and more substantial targets at you. Simply put, when the game say DO NOT PURSUE LU BU, It means it. It can mean it. That's how Dynasty Warriors keeps itself fresh in an inherently reptitive experience - boss fights and other shake ups that cannot be solved just by brute force (albeit most tactics are deeply brute-force adjacent), things Warfra,e sorely needs.

 

Warframe, eh... not so much. Melee scaling mods being universal means that melee means that there's no give and take. Since you only need to hit an enemy every 15-odd seconds with even decent modding (which lets be honest is not hard in the slightest) it's a pretty easy task to keep up the 760% Crit Chance boost and/or 479% Status Chance boost throughout most of, if not the entire mission lets them pretty much trivialise most encounters, and generally means that there's no way for there to be any major encounters, since by the time the player's reached one they're almost certainly running godmode on their weapon. Making the combo count per-enemy would mean it's generally speaking inefficient to use on regular enemies, because although the stacking means it outstrips the base version... chances are the base version would have one or twoshot most regular enemies anyway, so by the time you hit the same crit chance, it was probably dead. But it'd make it a far superior choice vs tanky bosses or minibosses.

 

You'd still probably have to nerf them though because... like... 760% Crit Chance boost and 479% Status Chance boost. Outside of one incredibly specific weapon augment, there's no legal (and few illegal) full builds which can match the power of these individual mods, including for non-scaling melee mods which are frequently better than what guns can use already. To put that in even more perspective, if you were to make a build entirely around stacking as much status chance as humanly possible onto a Pistol, you'd have room for precisely one non-status mod, and you'd still be 29% off of Weeping Wounds alone.

[(PSN)Yggranya]

1 hour ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

Or they can just make some tweaks like they're going to. Scaling was already looked at. We don't need your large sweeping changes. 

Dont like armor? Use corrosive like you're supposed to instead of viral and heat. Or maybe try some warframe abilities....

Or let's call out DEs lazyness and make them work on their game for once. OK, they do work on it...by adding some random BS that nobody asked for, and the only reason it was added is that someone at DE had a wet dream about it. Cue railjack(off) and the rest. Don't worry, it's not like any of our opinions affect DEs decisions.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

1 minute ago, (PSN)Yggranya said:

Or let's call out DEs lazyness and make them work on their game for once. OK, they do work on it...by adding some random BS that nobody asked for, and the only reason it was added is that someone at DE had a wet dream about it. Cue railjack(off) and the rest. Don't worry, it's not like any of our opinions affect DEs decisions.

A game doesn't last for 7 years, with more to come, because the game wasn't worked on. 

How about we also call players out and make them work on themselves as well. 

I rarely if ever, see the community attempting to check itself. It seems like they can do no wrong and it's all DEs fault. Odd....who knew something could be so completely one sided.....

[Tiltskillet]

3 hours ago, Roble_Viejo said:

In Devstream #152, DE acknowledged the problem of "Guns vs Melee", but they only talked about Damage . . .

Not completely.  It was relief to hear them talk about winnowing out some of the CC effects in stances, as I think this is a subtle thing contributing to melee feeling OP to me.   When I'm trying to use ranged weaponry, if I'm starting to get overwhelmed by incoming damage, it feels as if the safest thing to do is to stop shooting and start hacking.  Which...doesn't make a ton of sense when you think about it.   This isn't purely because of stance staggers, knockdowns, etc., but they're  a major part of it.  And, if DE is also turning back the dial on attack speed, that will have a direct impact on the output of these CCs.

(The danger as always with DE, is they make too many and too large of changes at once, and overnerf and cause unintended side-effects.   I'm already betting this is going to be a  big adjustment when I'm playing frames like Banshee.  But I'm game.)

Hopefully they're selective in how they do this, so that stances that don't offer a ton of damage retain more in the way of CC effects.  It would be a nice point of differentiation for stances and weapon types that don't seem to have any role.  Not when you can get all the damage, multi-attacks, bleeds, -and- CC you could want on a stance like Sovereign.

[(PSN)Frost_Nephilim]

4 hours ago, Roble_Viejo said:

So no, Evolutive mods shouldn't be added to Guns, but the Evolutive mechanics should be BASELINE in ALL Weapons

Good points, im with you on this

4 hours ago, Roble_Viejo said:

the meta changed from "Git Gud" to "Git the Items that
  Make you Gud"

Preach!

3 hours ago, Roble_Viejo said:

Rework the AI and allow players to rely on Attack Patterns and Good Aiming"

I yearn for this too. 

3 hours ago, gbjbaanb said:

a "grab the loot, repeat" game. The enemies are simply an inconvenience to obtaining the drops, and if you made them hard to kill, players would complain. (rightly IMHO - if you force players to run the same mission 30+ times to get all the drops via fixed RNG percentages, then making that mission quite difficult is going to kill the game. And DE is never going to make those drops happen in 4 runs

Steel path is not "hard mode" its "Time mode". 

Hard = peaking your skill level

Steel path (SP) doesnt require any more skill. You just have to hit an enemy an extra 100 times. You have to "cheese" or "trivialize" any incoming damage like usual as theres still no other way to protect yourself from it

The word "hard" should never be used for any warframe related mission lol

3 hours ago, gbjbaanb said:

and combo counts, which I never quite understood the rationale for anyway

I believe DE wanted to use the combo counter as a way to reward players for using the heavy attack on a melee weapon which i think is fine, adds some thinking to the melee spam.

Problem though

Blood Rush

With that mod, using a heavy attack means losing so much of your flipping DPS just for one enemy, for like the next minute or 2 depending on your build.

Its really really bad

3 hours ago, gbjbaanb said:

reduce the enemies in SP to make it more like the original "kill things slow"

This sounds like a nightmare for Warframe. Id keep current SP and just change:

3 hours ago, gbjbaanb said:

enemy scaling

Warframe makes you feel like an immortal beast right now. Would hate to feel mortal and scared of every bullet again lol. Leave that stuff to games like call of duty imo

I think warframe should just make it harder to be god like. Batman, God of War, Devil May Cry, that type of difficulty except adding more precise aiming and movement (ninja things) into the mix.  

[(PSN)Frost_Nephilim]

1 hour ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

rarely if ever, see the community attempting to check itself

What do you think needs checking on the community's end?

[Leqesai]

3 hours ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

 

Dont like armor? Use corrosive like you're supposed to instead of viral and heat. Or maybe try some warframe abilities....

This isnt really related to the main argument of this thread but I do think it should be pointed out that the problem of armor scaling is the biggest issue in warframe, imo. The issues with guns vs melee is largely an issue against armored enemies. Corpus and infested enemies are really not terribly hard in steel path compared to grineer even when using guns.

Sure you can use corrosive or armor strip abilities but it is funny that people dont find it weird that you dont need to go with magnetic or shield strip abilities or auras, or infested specific strategies similar to what is needed for grineer.

The fact that corrosive projection is the most used aura should be the red flag needed to identify an issue with warframe's armor system...

Imo the damage reduction from armor should never have scaling attributed to it and the armor tenno have should be a different system. The amount of armor should simply provide a flat layer of damage reduction on top of a targets base damage reduction values, and the amount of armor should not scale so mods that reduce Amor on hit are not made useless in high level content.

 

Sorry for derailing a bit. Armor in warframe is really annoying...

[PublikDomain]

I think you're forgetting that the meta shift from CC to DPS was caused entirely by DE. Players didn't just adapt to this and get here on our own, DE themselves handed us the keys with years and years of unchecked powercreep. It's not the AI's fault that the game has changed, and there are a lot of interesting enemies in the game. My favorite example are the Amalgams: I think they're nifty, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what any of them actually do because they all evaporate a nanosecond after being spawned. One guy calls in an airstrike beam thing that does... something? And one supposedly grabs enemies and gives them some sort of buff? I don't know what that buff is, and I've never seen this happen, but supposedly it's there! I'm sure the enemies added in the Jovian Concord update have neat mechanics, too, like maybe the little bomb Moas do something interesting. Not that I ever see this happen. Kuva Jesters are neat and can cling to you, which does....? What did the new Sentients do in OV? I don't know, they weren't alive long enough for me to find out.

The game doesn't allow these mechanics to surface when players are so overpowered. Mechanical skill cannot exist when superior stats are everywhere. You don't need to learn weak spots or aim when you can just walk up with impunity and press E and blend the enemy to paste. The AI has no ability to react to this! The only thing DE can do is rely on annoying systems like nullification and hidden DR and status resist and so on because they have zero control over the player anymore.

And I'm doubtful that much will even change with this. DE mentioned buffing guns through mechanics similar to melee, which is just going to be yet another net increase in player power. And nerfing attack speed for melee don't sound like it'll do much of anything, since AFAIK few people actually stack attack speed mods that way. I don't use attack speed mods at all, and I'm still more than capable of blending enemies in Steel Path and everywhere else I go.

[(PSN)Frost_Nephilim]

4 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

I think you're forgetting that the meta shift from CC to DPS was caused entirely by DE. Players didn't just adapt to this and get here on our own, DE themselves handed us the keys with years and years of unchecked powercreep. It's not the AI's fault that the game has changed, and there are a lot of interesting enemies in the game. My favorite example are the Amalgams: I think they're nifty, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what any of them actually do because they all evaporate a nanosecond after being spawned. One guy calls in an airstrike beam thing that does... something? And one supposedly grabs enemies and gives them some sort of buff? I don't know what that buff is, and I've never seen this happen, but supposedly it's there! I'm sure the enemies added in the Jovian Concord update have neat mechanics, too, like maybe the little bomb Moas do something interesting. Not that I ever see this happen. Kuva Jesters are neat and can cling to you, which does....? What did the new Sentients do in OV? I don't know, they weren't alive long enough for me to find out.

The game doesn't allow these mechanics to surface when players are so overpowered. Mechanical skill cannot exist when superior stats are everywhere. You don't need to learn weak spots or aim when you can just walk up with impunity and press E and blend the enemy to paste. The AI has no ability to react to this! The only thing DE can do is rely on annoying systems like nullification and hidden DR and status resist and so on because they have zero control over the player anymore.

And I'm doubtful that much will even change with this. DE mentioned buffing guns through mechanics similar to melee, which is just going to be yet another net increase in player power. And nerfing attack speed for melee don't sound like it'll do much of anything, since AFAIK few people actually stack attack speed mods that way. I don't use attack speed mods at all, and I'm still more than capable of blending enemies in Steel Path and everywhere else I go.

This is so true xD

A few of those enemies i thought were new when facing them in steel path (cause they had more time to show what they can do), agree here 10 fold lol

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

58 minutes ago, (PSN)Frost_Nephilim said:

What do you think needs checking on the community's end?

Maybe doing things like not getting upset when they don't give details or information, then getting upset when they don't deliver on time.

[Leqesai]

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

Maybe doing things like not getting upset when they don't give details or information, then getting upset when they don't deliver on time.

[SenorClipClop]

7 hours ago, Roble_Viejo said:

they only talked about Damage
(which is just a part of the whole issue), and something that I found personally concerning: They listed Melee
Attack Speed specifically as a problem, when its not

They talked about more than just damage. One point they touched on -- and I'm glad they did, because it's the biggest issue I see with melee -- is that there's an abundance of forced lifts, knockdowns and staggers that melee imparts. Getting these effects so frequently (which gets exacerbated by huge Attack Speed) removes any sort of potential tradeoff to melee. Most games have a ranged/melee tradeoff where melee is more damaging but comes with the risk of closing a gap and being in a more dangerous spot, but with our ability to stagger all nearby enemies many times a second, using melee is almost always safer than keeping a distance.

If we're brainstorming solutions, I'll throw out there an idea of growing enemy resistance -- initial staggers are normally effective, but repeated applications increase the probability of enemies not getting affected, with this resistance decreasing after not getting procced. This would encourage players to deal with tougher enemies by dipping in for melee, back out for ranged and repeating. Just an idea, who knows if that'd translate well into WF.

7 hours ago, Roble_Viejo said:

Now this what I think DE should address first, because this is the actual reason Melee dominate the meta, not because they
  have INHERETLY better stats, but because they have Evolutive Mods (Blood Rush, Condition Overload) which makes them stronger
  the more you actively use them.

Hard agree, and I'll add that melee already has Evolutive features innately, in the form of melee combos and the Melee Combo Multiplier. Stance combos often end in something really effective (radial slam, huge forced proc, etc.), and the effects of the melee combo multiplier (even before mods that scale on it) need no explanation.

A couple of ranged weapons have Evolutive gimmicks (Arca Scisco, Dual Toxocyst), and Snipers as a whole have the Combo feature innately, but for one reason or another none of these perform on the level that all melees do. You suggest further in your post to remove all ranged Evolutive mods to bake those features into their respective weapons. My initial reaction to this was negative, but the more I'm thinking about the more it sounds like a fine idea. I still feel a bit averse to it from a design perspective, could be throwing too many features at new players at once, and some features would have potential to really mess with early-game balance.

And it still doesn't resolve the problem for the majority of ranged weapons. Would a combo system (a la current snipers) translate well to ranged in general? More spitballing: accrue bonus damage (or crit or status or multishot, depending on the weapon) with progressive hits, combo points decay over time, and (maybe) also decay with misses. Certain weapon types benefit differently. AoEs get fewer points per hit, semi-autos and bows get more.

[Aldain]

15 minutes ago, SenorClipClop said:

Would a combo system (a la current snipers) translate well to ranged in general?

Just as a personal stance/opinion, no it would not at all translate well.

I personally find the combo system something most people wouldn't even bother with if it weren't for the insane power mods that are related to it give, it excessively gives a bias to aggressive gameplay and only opens the floodgates for more nonsensical multiplication that only enables more power creep.

Evolutive mechanics for weapons are fine, but evolutive multipliers on mods are 90% of the reason why the imbalance we currently have even exists, the answer isn't just giving more multipliers to everything in a game already oversaturated with multiplication as is.

This is just my general stance on things however.

[Angwah]

7 hours ago, Voltage said:

I think the easiest approach to this problem without killing the game is addressing various broken math problems in the game. Standardizing damage bonuses and other mechanics like Multishot would balance the game without killing the gameplay or the way the game plays. Multiplication is dangerous to have all over the damage system, especially with enemies as weak as the ones offered in a majority of the game's content.

Yes, this.

Let's see what they will do, I guess, but hopefully they'll look at the underlying math of too. 

 

[nslay]

8 hours ago, Voltage said:

I definitely agree with most of your post, but you can see that this problem is so rooted in the game that you risk potentially killing the games identity that DE has instilled and created over the years. It's a simpler task if this was 2014, but we are 8 years in now.

I think the easiest approach to this problem without killing the game is addressing various broken math problems in the game. Standardizing damage bonuses and other mechanics like Multishot would balance the game without killing the gameplay or the way the game plays. Multiplication is dangerous to have all over the damage system, especially with enemies as weak as the ones offered in a majority of the game's content.

I remember when Blizzard standardized damage calculations in Diablo 3. The old damage system had a mixture of multiplicative % bonuses and additive % bonuses that interacted 4 multipliers... this was very confusing since it wasn't clear when a % was additive or multiplicative. They standardized the % increases to be multiplicative. Now doing trillions or quadrillions of damage is not unusual in that game. But GR 150 enemies I think must have hundreds of trillions to quadrillions of health!

Have to be careful about how the math gets standardized. Personally, I think the current math is pretty consistent (it's clear when mods/effects are additive or multiplicative) and still less bad than what D3 did.

[Aldain]

3 minutes ago, nslay said:

Have to be careful about how the math gets standardized. Personally, I think the current math is pretty consistent (it's clear when mods/effects are additive or multiplicative) and still less bad than what D3 did.

It might be consistent in understanding, but in application it really follows this non-linear and confusing scale, hell the difference between the eHP a level 1 and 100 Lancer in Warframe is just about 451 times the level 1 stat.

Final Fantasy 14 is actually undergoing a stat squish because the math is starting to both become hard to balance and actually causing bugs, on a recent Live Letter they said the highest HP total for a boss in an upcoming patch is just about 430,000,000, considering that most DPS player's attacks average between 20-50k without calculating Critical Hits saying the HP total for enemies is starting to get out of hand is a bit of an understatement.

So yeah I'd say even with properly standardized mathematics you can hit a point where, either for or against the player, the numbers start to break down and not work as well as they should. In a fun bit of trivia, one of the bugs I mentioned above actually has made things like having too much shielding on a character literally cause an overflow error and instantly kill them when they got attacked instead.