What makes slash strong and how I'm going to balance it

[RazerXPrime]

2 minutes ago, vegetosayajin said:

It takes the backseat because at the end of the day corrosive does damage to the armour. When the armour goes to insane levels you will still have bonus damage, but bonus damage to 500 armour and bonus damage to 5 million armour with the same damage output it's significantly worse, same with heat
True damage(bleed is true damage) works completely different.
True Damage

Well armor scaling isn't as terrifying as it used to be and you missed the part where not only corrosive has a damage bonus to armor, it also shreds armor just like heat does which makes consecutive hits deal more damage. 

My viral/radiation/heat phantasma kills a lvl 120 heavy gunner in half a clip. That being tougher than any content in WF other than endurance runs or steel path goes to show that for normal content it doesn't really matter what you use as long as you understand your build. But for anything other than that, or for weapons that cannot utilize status with heat procs or strip armor with corrosive you're just stuck with whatever damage the weapon does. Meaning it becomes less potent the stronger the enemies become.

People complained the game was too easy because they abused the million damage viral/slash melee builds so we got steel path. And now people complain that the rest of the weapons cannot keep up. I mean. That was already the case before steel path was introduced. I just feel we need to hit slash in where it hurts instead of trying to patch things up. I rather see more build diversity rather than a game that is catered around a single status effect.

[vegetosayajin]

15 minutes ago, RazerXPrime said:

I rather see more build diversity rather than a game that is catered around a single status effect.

That's literally what I was saying in all of my posts.
 

15 minutes ago, RazerXPrime said:

I just feel we need to hit slash in where it hurts instead of trying to patch things up.

That's exactly what nerfing it will do, it will patch things up and all of the people will be equally unhappy and diversity will be the same but with less fun. 
 

15 minutes ago, RazerXPrime said:

My viral/radiation/heat phantasma kills a lvl 120 heavy gunner in half a clip.

Again why are we talking about peasant levels that die from everything? Your viral/radiation/heat phantasma or any primary will kill lv120 in half a clip but it will kill lv 1200 in a minute(maybe or maybe it won't) and lv5k+ in never if you don't include hm(that is slash).
If you are balancing something it should include all of the game. Doesn't matter if 10-20 people go to lv10k or not, it's still in the game.
I think you choose to ignore this fact, by the old argument: "Long runs represent 1% of the community, balance should not be about them" etc.
As long as something is in it has to be considered.
If de chooses to limit levels to 200-500 we will have a different conversation, but not now. 

[RazerXPrime]

2 minutes ago, vegetosayajin said:

That's literally what I was saying in all of my posts.
 

That's exactly what nerfing it will do, it will patch things up and all of the people will be equally unhappy and diversity will be the same but with less fun. 
 

Again why are we talking about peasant levels that die from everything?
If you are balancing something it should include all of the game. Doesn't matter if 10-20 people go to lv10k or not, it's still in the game.
I think you choose to ignore this fact, by the old argument: "Long runs represent 1% of the community, balance should not be about them" etc.
As long as something is in it has to be considered.
If de chooses to limit levels to 200-500 we will have a different conversation, but not now. 

the only way you can achieve that would be to have everything scale, but then that would also make it kind of meaningless in terms of difficulty, unless you choose to go for a lower % scaling and not 1-1. But yea all of the game bla bla. you're not wrong, but trying to defend something that is such a small part of the game kind of gives away the priority it will get. No priority. You can stick to your beliefs, but it's not going to get you anywhere.

And I will happily laugh at people crying on the forums that they can no longer abuse the slash damage procs. Because that's what it is. Abuse. I don't care what people are used to. People need to get used to something else. And yep, that will create some crying over spilled milk.

So what is your suggestion? That we balance everything to true damage instead? If slash is unchanged, then no one will use anything else unless it is buffed x1million so I can oneshot everything with everything. That's not how the game should work. One the one hand we have something that is too dumb powerful and then we got everything else. Buffing everything else isn't going to fix it. I'm not saying balance doesn't include buffing other things by the way. Other damage types should definitely do something more than they are currently doing. DE needs to decide whether they use scaling or just nominal values to deal damage and not give one type an advantage over another. That however still does not fix slash.

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

And you can see the "sins" of warframe. Grineer are less annoying than other factions for long runs, their only specificity is high armor, that scales up to ridiculous values for long runs, which narrow the weapons / damages to a few options.

Then anything that is strong against grineer is also strong against infested (slash, heat, viral proc').

Corpus have tons of different weakness that are usually mutually exclusives (radiation is supposed to be not bad against alloy armor robotic, but is bad against shields), but as their eHP is not that high except for armored ones the big damage mix expected ends up with almost the same builds as grineer / infested, because i still works decently and avoid being super bad against one of the corpus type. Except perhaps if you plan to kill a steel path treasurer...

Armors should be fixed and higher at low level (and not asymptotic value to 100%RD)

Impact / puncture should be more efficient against shield / armor

The whole damage chart has to be modified so that factions have their own strength / weakness that shouldn't overlap that much, and combined elements should still allow to have 1 or 2 single elements that are still OKish (actually against grineer viral + heat is ok, corrosive + heat is ok, against corpus mixing anything with toxin or magnetic is bad)

[vegetosayajin]

1 minute ago, RazerXPrime said:

So what is your suggestion? 

When there is such scaling in the game you have no choice except to "abuse" the thing that work. I said it many times, in the current system this is not abusing, it's the way to kill fast, because the game requires you to kill fast - in a survival mission you have to kill 200-300 dumb ai 2 min to be able to keep the life support.
You ignore the gameplay and the game itself and focus on something that you see as op, when it's actually the only viable way to do the mission, no matter the level(the scaling that's in the game)
The thing that you want requires a compete overhaul of the whole game(scaling, enemy count per second etc) for the only purpose of making slash not the only descent choice.
The thing that I suggest will not make the game harder, it will not make it easier, it will make it more diverse in terms of builds, choices etc. 
And I'm not talking about one shots, but a descent ttk compared to what the game wants.

[ReddyDisco]

rather than nerf slash, just buff the other physical types to be equally competitive. just my 2 quarters

Puncture should be very good against armor, bypassing it entirely with 10 stacks

Impact should make enemies more vulnerable to all damage, and they shouldn't mimic wacky flailing inflatable tubeman in front of car dealerships when hit.

 

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Yea I hope DE ignores this whole thread. Nerfing slash won't do anything if the other elements aren't reworked. 

The people that fight level 9000 enemies or whatever already know how to beat them and mod properly, and you don't even need slash for anything in the regular levels that people actually fight like 200.

[RazerXPrime]

33 minutes ago, vegetosayajin said:

When there is such scaling in the game you have no choice except to "abuse" the thing that work. I said it many times, in the current system this is not abusing, it's the way to kill fast, because the game requires you to kill fast - in a survival mission you have to kill 200-300 dumb ai 2 min to be able to keep the life support.
You ignore the gameplay and the game itself and focus on something that you see as op, when it's actually the only viable way to do the mission, no matter the level(the scaling that's in the game)
The thing that you want requires a compete overhaul of the whole game(scaling, enemy count per second etc) for the only purpose of making slash not the only descent choice.
The thing that I suggest will not make the game harder, it will not make it easier, it will make it more diverse in terms of builds, choices etc. 
And I'm not talking about one shots, but a descent ttk compared to what the game wants.

I do agree, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. Is the scaling built around slash or is slash the only thing that can keep up? Do we want everything to be able to keep up or do we nerf slash and enemies at the same time, while tuning other status effects to be useful?

Impact damage should be ff-ing powerful. Especially since in reality crushing damage types don't care what kind of armor you wear. Only in movies and video games can you cut through a piece of steel armor with a steel sword. Hammers and maces are much more effective the better the armor. Well whatever, I'm not trying to make Warframe realistic, but it should at least kind of make sense.

[vegetosayajin]

2 minutes ago, RazerXPrime said:

...

I completely agree. The way it's up to de, if it happens or even if it happens we better hope it's implemented the right way(not like they handled self damage removal).
My point was that only nerfing slash will not solve or change anything and it will only make the current game more annoying. That's the only thing it will do.

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

On a side note warframe damage meta still looks visually better than borderlands 2 meta, where you had to paint enemies in purple (slag) before being able to efficiently kill them (fire / corrosive)

[RazerXPrime]

4 minutes ago, MonsterOfMyOwn said:

On a side note warframe damage meta still looks visually better than borderlands 2 meta, where you had to paint enemies in purple (slag) before being able to efficiently kill them (fire / corrosive)

Meh, can do fine without slag.

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

il y a 24 minutes, RazerXPrime a dit :

Meh, can do fine without slag.

Meh, the same as banshee can do fine without viral / slash... remove armor with her 1st, buff damage with her 2nd, grofit

[TheArmchairThinker]

11 hours ago, ReddyDisco said:

rather than nerf slash, just buff the other physical types to be equally competitive. just my 2 quarters

Puncture should be very good against armor, bypassing it entirely with 10 stacks

Impact should make enemies more vulnerable to all damage, and they shouldn't mimic wacky flailing inflatable tubeman in front of car dealerships when hit.

 

For puncture, what part of the damage that will bypass it entirely on 10 stacks? If all damage types ignore armor entirely with 10 stacks, what's the point of having corrosive to reduce armor?

And for impact, if you make them more vulnerable to all damage, what's the point of having weakness and resistance then? And what will happen if you pair it with viral? Does that mean impact makes everything become "true damage" before amplified with viral to untold level of power?

And that doesn't help that slash is still beating all damage type with DoT (gas, electricity, heat) by dealing true damage that ignores armor when the rest will need that niche impact proc to be able to compete with slash DoT stacks

11 hours ago, vegetosayajin said:

I completely agree. The way it's up to de, if it happens or even if it happens we better hope it's implemented the right way(not like they handled self damage removal).
My point was that only nerfing slash will not solve or change anything and it will only make the current game more annoying. That's the only thing it will do.

This is the thing though, how can you buff the other damage types to be on the level of one damage type that deals stacks of armor ignoring DoT?

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

1 hour ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

 

This is the thing though, how can you buff the other damage types to be on the level of one damage type that deals stacks of armor ignoring DoT?

You can't unless the other damage types also have a way to circumvent armor scaling.

Scaling armor is the core problem and Slash meta is just a symptom of that.

Bleed ticks always deal 35% of Base as True Damage, while all other damage types get increasingly worthless as Damage Reduction from armor approaches 100%.

Corrosive used to be able to strip armor completely. It just took a few more procs at higher armor levels. Being capped at 80% strip now, that remaining 20% armor can still be 99.9% Damage Reduction at high enough levels. 

Easiest solution:

Armor Shouldn't Scale.

Or.

All physical procs deal Bleed (which is what they're going for with band-aids like Internal Bleeding anyways). 

Impact: Stagger + 0.5x Bleed, Puncture: Damage Debuff + 0.7x Bleed, Slash: 1x Bleed

[ReddyDisco]

1 hour ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

For puncture, what part of the damage that will bypass it entirely on 10 stacks? If all damage types ignore armor entirely with 10 stacks, what's the point of having corrosive to reduce armor?

Armor damage reduction gone i mean with 10 stacks. yea corrosive would be made redundant. More thinking required for this but i just woke up, maybe later

1 hour ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

And for impact, if you make them more vulnerable to all damage, what's the point of having weakness and resistance then? And what will happen if you pair it with viral? Does that mean impact makes everything become "true damage" before amplified with viral to untold level of power?

i was thinking more on the lines of nezha's chakram type damage vulnerability which increases with stacks, could start as low as 5%., my thought process is you get hit by a large hammer and your puny armor crumbles and breaks with each hit. ever since they changed viral everything's gone to heck, wouldn't mind seeing a  little reduction in the bonus damage

1 hour ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

And that doesn't help that slash is still beating all damage type with DoT (gas, electricity, heat) by dealing true damage that ignores armor when the rest will need that niche impact proc to be able to compete with slash DoT stacks

slash damage won't be effective against armor, its the bleed status effect that has true damage. it will remain strong but the other elements won't feel like wet tissue paper in comparison as they are now at least

[TheArmchairThinker]

On 2021-04-08 at 9:47 AM, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

All physical procs deal Bleed (which is what they're going for with band-aids like Internal Bleeding anyways). 

Impact: Stagger + 0.5x Bleed, Puncture: Damage Debuff + 0.7x Bleed, Slash: 1x Bleed

So should we change the DoT to basic slash instead so slash doesn't go beyond the rest when damage reduction approaching 100%? I don't mind that

On 2021-04-08 at 10:15 AM, ReddyDisco said:

Armor damage reduction gone i mean with 10 stacks. yea corrosive would be made redundant. More thinking required for this but i just woke up, maybe later

If that's how it goes, there's barely any reason to mod for elements for +75% on armor and you would make elements redundant then

On 2021-04-08 at 10:15 AM, ReddyDisco said:

i was thinking more on the lines of nezha's chakram type damage vulnerability which increases with stacks, could start as low as 5%., my thought process is you get hit by a large hammer and your puny armor crumbles and breaks with each hit. ever since they changed viral everything's gone to heck, wouldn't mind seeing a  little reduction in the bonus damage

Nezha's chakram works similarly to viral, making enemies take increased damage from all sources instead of increased vulnerability. And yes, I would change viral to not give 325% damage increase anymore

On 2021-04-08 at 10:15 AM, ReddyDisco said:

slash damage won't be effective against armor, its the bleed status effect that has true damage. it will remain strong but the other elements won't feel like wet tissue paper in comparison as they are now at least

Isn't that what I put in my post? The status effect that deals true damage while able to stack means it needs a toning down to make it not too strong compared to other damage types.

Or I can make the bleed deals slash instead of true damage, making the bleed effective against flesh but worse against armor for that damage type where impact works better on shields, puncture against armor and slash against bare flesh

[bnuy]

This does nothing but make the game's balance even worse. You don't seem to understand how these things work and are making incorrect claims and assumptions.

All this does is make slash even more powerful than it currently is.

Slash procs have the worst scaling out of any procs in the game. Slash is strong because of the way armoured unit EHP works, not because it's numbers are too high. Their EHP is so vastly different with armour to without, that if you take a level 100 Heavy Gunner, the Grineer heavy unit, and a Corpus Tech, the Corpus heavy unit, and you compare their EHP values, when accounting for armour the Heavy Gunner's EHP is about nine times larger. Now you might say well what about armour strip! You're meant to strip armour, duh. Well we take 90% of that Heavy Gunners armour, let's say from corrosive + heat 90% armour strip. The Heavy Gunner still comes out on top, with 25% more EHP at level 100 (Sortie level), even with 90% of it's armour stripped off. All of this despite the fact that the Heavy Gunner has less than half the health of the Corpus Tech, which means if you are able to bypass the armour, then you are able to cut their ridiculous EHP values of 700k all the way down to 30k, as opposed to the still ridiculous 100k with 90% of the armour stripped. This issue only gets worse as enemy levels scale, and even moreso in The Steel Path.

For this reason it is impossible to balance the game in it's current state without addressing the real issue, armour.

[TheArmchairThinker]

On 2021-04-09 at 3:51 PM, Maggy said:

This does nothing but make the game's balance even worse. You don't seem to understand how these things work and are making incorrect claims and assumptions.

All this does is make slash even more powerful than it currently is.

Slash procs have the worst scaling out of any procs in the game. Slash is strong because of the way armoured unit EHP works, not because it's numbers are too high. Their EHP is so vastly different with armour to without, that if you take a level 100 Heavy Gunner, the Grineer heavy unit, and a Corpus Tech, the Corpus heavy unit, and you compare their EHP values, when accounting for armour the Heavy Gunner's EHP is about nine times larger. Now you might say well what about armour strip! You're meant to strip armour, duh. Well we take 90% of that Heavy Gunners armour, let's say from corrosive + heat 90% armour strip. The Heavy Gunner still comes out on top, with 25% more EHP at level 100 (Sortie level), even with 90% of it's armour stripped off. All of this despite the fact that the Heavy Gunner has less than half the health of the Corpus Tech, which means if you are able to bypass the armour, then you are able to cut their ridiculous EHP values of 700k all the way down to 30k, as opposed to the still ridiculous 100k with 90% of the armour stripped. This issue only gets worse as enemy levels scale, and even moreso in The Steel Path.

For this reason it is impossible to balance the game in it's current state without addressing the real issue, armour.

If you say armor being the real issue, we can nerf armor scaling first and I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to fight enemy with level scaling to infinite and even if you want to say slash procs have the worst scaling out of any procs in the game, I think having a stacking true damage DoT is not the way to go just because an enemy faction has armor that makes them having higher EHP

[bnuy]

3 hours ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

If you say armor being the real issue, we can nerf armor scaling first and I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to fight enemy with level scaling to infinite and even if you want to say slash procs have the worst scaling out of any procs in the game, I think having a stacking true damage DoT is not the way to go just because an enemy faction has armor that makes them having higher EHP

Level scaling isn't the issue, if anything the level scaling needs to be brought up. The scaling as it is right now is absolutely fine, just base values need to be brought up and rebalanced. Removing damage reduction scaling from armour greatly reduces the power discrepancy required between factions, allowing them to be balanced around each other more effectively. Bypassing armour and shields with toxin and slash procs is a very unhealthy mechanic, and this combined with the eHP difference between factions makes balancing around their "uniqueness" of armour vs shields vs healthy factions much easier to achieve. If you're not able to bypass armour and shields directly, this makes them already infinitely more relevant than they were before. This along with some armour changes alone (removing scaling, potentially separating armour from health pool) would bring much greater balance to the status system across the board, and would remove the game being balanced around damage types that actively work against the enemy design by removing anything unique about them and allowing you to just have a blanket build effective for everything.

[TheArmchairThinker]

On 2021-04-12 at 12:12 PM, Maggy said:

Bypassing armour and shields with toxin and slash procs is a very unhealthy mechanic

And why is it unhealthy? Toxin bypassing shield is an uniqueness for corpus so there's a niche load out for them but slash? Pairing it with viral makes grineer taking a massive amount of true damage makes everything obsolete

On 2021-04-12 at 12:12 PM, Maggy said:

If you're not able to bypass armour and shields directly, this makes them already infinitely more relevant than they were before

Sure, we can change slash proc to deal slash damage instead, making them deal far decreased damage to armored enemies then we can talk about reducing armor scaling

[bnuy]

3 minutes ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

And why is it unhealthy? Toxin bypassing shield is an uniqueness for corpus so there's a niche load out for them but slash? Pairing it with viral makes grineer taking a massive amount of true damage makes everything obsolete

The bypassing effects are unhealthy because when you are directly able to ignore the difference between units, and make it so you only need a single damage type for an entire faction, this shoe-horns build diversity and makes the gameplay one-sided and stale. Bombard with Alloy, Heavy Gunner with Ferrite? Who cares about their weaknesses, just use slash! They need to make the difference between specific enemies even among factions relevant, otherwise gameplay will always be one-sided and incredibly boring.

9 minutes ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

Sure, we can change slash proc to deal slash damage instead, making them deal far decreased damage to armored enemies then we can talk about reducing armor scaling

Remove armour scaling entirely, it should not exist. Slash and Toxin should not bypass armour and shields.

[TheArmchairThinker]

1 minute ago, Maggy said:

The bypassing effects are unhealthy because when you are directly able to ignore the difference between units, and make it so you only need a single damage type for an entire faction, this shoe-horns build diversity and makes the gameplay one-sided and stale.

Depends on what you see as diversity, toxin alone is pretty low in number and you will need several hits to take down one corpus unit and it's not shoe-horning since other elements still able to take down the shield. I'd say having a little niche for that is alright and usually other games have different loadout/element to deal more damage

Slash in the other hand, no

7 minutes ago, Maggy said:

Remove armour scaling entirely, it should not exist. Slash and Toxin should not bypass armour and shields.

I'd say we reduce the scaling to be linear, not removing them entirely so higher level enemies will be tougher with stronger armor but not being overkill

Slash itself doesn't bypass armor, the bleed effect does and if you insist, we can change bleed to deal slash damage instead of true damage but that means slash will be very weak against armored enemies

[bnuy]

1 minute ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

Depends on what you see as diversity, toxin alone is pretty low in number and you will need several hits to take down one corpus unit and it's not shoe-horning since other elements still able to take down the shield. I'd say having a little niche for that is alright and usually other games have different loadout/element to deal more damage

Slash in the other hand, no

I'd say we reduce the scaling to be linear, not removing them entirely so higher level enemies will be tougher with stronger armor but not being overkill

Slash itself doesn't bypass armor, the bleed effect does and if you insist, we can change bleed to deal slash damage instead of true damage but that means slash will be very weak against armored enemies

If you're not killing with toxin in one hit then I dunno... You ain't got the damage I guess. Relatively though, it will take much much more toxin to kill shielded units than it takes slash to kill armoured, this discrepancy is massive and only gets larger the higher the levels scale. It absolutely does shoe-horn because why would you blast through shields if you can just ignore them and one-shot... Regardless of even status weapon or not, since toxin damage itself bypasses shields not just procs, this means no matter what if you're taking longer to kill through the shields then you just lack the damage. 

The way armour and scaling damage reduction works, if you have armour scaling at all, it will inevitably cause such a large divide in EHP and balance that it's not possible to balance armoured units against non-armoured or shielded at all levels of play. 

[TheArmchairThinker]

12 minutes ago, Maggy said:

If you're not killing with toxin in one hit then I dunno... You ain't got the damage I guess

So you're killing Veil Corpus with toxin in one hit from normal assault rifle with no boost whatsoever?

13 minutes ago, Maggy said:

Relatively though, it will take much much more toxin to kill shielded units than it takes slash to kill armoured, this discrepancy is massive and only gets larger the higher the levels scale

And that's why I said we're nerfing the armor scaling along with slash. Maybe cool your head first because you've repeated that disrespancy multiple times

14 minutes ago, Maggy said:

The way armour and scaling damage reduction works, if you have armour scaling at all, it will inevitably cause such a large divide in EHP and balance that it's not possible to balance armoured units against non-armoured or shielded at all levels of play. 

IF the scaling being high enough to make a large divide on all levels of play. Make them linear instead of curving and you will have smaller divide that makes armored enemies tougher than non-armored enemies but not by a large divide like what we have currently

[bnuy]

4 minutes ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

So you're killing Veil Corpus with toxin in one hit from normal assault rifle with no boost whatsoever?

You should be, yeah? The only enemies that would present an issue for one-shotting would be the ones with the special damage reduction that scales with the player's on paper DPS. It's an obscure mechanic people don't seem to know about, and it's the only reason why the enemies there ever seem tanky. This damage reduction is what DE attempts to use to level the playing field between factions but it does an incredibly poor job of it.

7 minutes ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

And that's why I said we're nerfing the armor scaling along with slash. Maybe cool your head first because you've repeated that disrespancy multiple times

Slash is underpowered though, the only reason it is even relevant is the fact the EHP discrepancy exists. A level 100 Heavy Gunner has 30k hp to a Corpus Tech's 80k, slash has lower scaling than all of the other status types to account for this, because EHP scaling is an issue which DE attempts to correct by lowering base health values on armoured units, which just makes slash even more prevalent because now if you bypass shields it still takes over 2x the damage to kill an enemy with shields than it would to bypass armour on an armoured unit with slash. Slash needs to be buffed, as well as slash and toxin no longer bypassing their respective types.

Basically, shield bypass on level 100 Corpus Tech means you need 80k damage, armour bypass on level 100 Heavy Gunner means you need 30k damage. If you're not bypassing armour on the Heavy it now takes 700k damage, and if you're not bypassing shields on the Tech it only takes 90k. Massive balance divide.

10 minutes ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

IF the scaling being high enough to make a large divide on all levels of play. Make them linear instead of curving and you will have smaller divide that makes armored enemies tougher than non-armored enemies but not by a large divide like what we have currently

Lowering the scaling does not remove the issue, the issue is still very much present. The only way to negate the issue without removing armour scaling is to make armour scaling so incredibly small that it doesn't matter in the first place, which is the equivalent of removing it.