bnuy Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 Grab a drink and sit back, this is a very long read. In this post I cover the core issues with Warframe's current balance. I will break this post into sections so you can look through the headers to find something you're looking for, do however keep in mind that this will be a massive update with changes to many of the facets that affect balance. What I mean by this is that if you don't read the entire post you may lack understanding of the reasons for some changes. You may also end up entirely missing some things that affect how you would have felt about the parts you did read. That aside, thanks in advance for the time you take to read my post, regardless of how much you make it through. Good luck Tenno and I look forward to hearing your input! Today I bring you the wynnie (my name) edition "Warframe Rebalance"Note: This is a jarring change to how much of the game's balance functions, it may be difficult to imagine all these changes together. Design Direction / Design Goals I have a few design goals in mind with making this thread, so before I get to the fixes I'll explain all of that. To begin with, all of my changes are intended to deal with long-standing deep rooted issues within the current systems. For each section I will first go over the issue(s) that the changes are meant to address, then I will explain the changes in detail. There are a few core concepts I wish to put forth with this rebalance, and those are increased enemy and build diversity, standardizing things to make them easier to understand, and finally fixing forced metas and band-aids.Table of Contents General Mechanic Tweaks hit-scan weaponry and counter-play aoe damage & terrain weak-points & on-hit effects crowd control 'vulnerable' state Parazon Improvements ranged parazon finishers ranged parazon void-grapple Shields Revised shield-gating shield modding resistance changes Armour Revised armour bar armour break new enemy health ui resistance changes Health Revised gray-health regeneration resistance changes Enemy Scaling Revised equalizing stat scaling scaling formula changes Status Revised core changes proc cap removed status efficacy tweaks to all procs Final Tweaks and Cohesive Changes mod changes arcane changes warframe changes focus changes Now, onto the good stuff. Beware, math.Tip! ctrl + f "TLDR" to jump to issue summaries for each section.General Mechanic Tweaks Spoiler The Issues: One of the over-arching issues with Warframe's design is many of it's combat systems lack counter-play, and the guns are no exception. When it comes to enemy accuracy and avoiding their attacks, as long as they have hit-scan weaponry it is impossible to dodge. This ends up creating a system where the important movement system is now punishing in some aspects, because no matter how well you dodge some bullets are unavoidable. The result of these unavoidable hits is a frustrating system in which the player loses all agency when it comes to dodging attacks in many situations, and they instead must rely on other things like invulnerability. The current weapon meta is heavily shaped by AOE weaponry, having them be dozens of times quicker for clearing out groups of enemies. Due to AOE weapons being so much more powerful, players tend to stick to these types of weapons only. AOE does not need many tweaks to make it a properly balanced contender in the meta. The simple and easy change to curtail the AOE meta would be to simply make all AOE weaponry abide by line of sight rules, and then standardize falloff. The main issue long-time players have with impact procs is that the staggers prevent you from hitting the enemy's weak-points, whether that be their head or even a MOA backpack. If things like impact procs and other crowd control sources did not make hitting an enemy's weak-points more difficult, then they would be regarded as much more relevant. Flipping this around... what if crowd control like impact staggers didn't make weak-points harder to hit, but instead easier?TLDR: Hit-scan weaponry has no counter-play. Area of effect damage ignores terrain. Staggers and ragdolls make hitting weak-points more difficult. The Fixes:Suggested New Mechanics; Terrain Blocks AOE Damage Terrain now blocks all instances of area of effect/radial damage. some unique abilities can still be allowed to ignore terrain, but as a general rule weapon damage will not Hard CC Renders Enemies 'Vulnerable' Hard crowd control effects consist of things like ragdolls, knockdowns, and staggers. 'Vulnerable' units take all incoming damage as weak-point damage. if the enemy has a head-shot bonus of +100% damage then you deal this no matter where you hit them this damage bonus will always choose the enemy weak-point with the highest damage multiplier, for instance a moa backpack would be picked over the moa's head Parazon Improvements Spoiler The Issues: Parazons and their mercy finishers have added lots of flavour to combat, but there are still some issues with the system. First and foremost, the finishers are not designed to synergize well with gunplay. If you knock an enemy into the mercy finisher state, you are now forced to close the gap between you to initiate the finisher. This leads to players in most cases entirely ignoring this system of the game, as it would break the flow of combat to engage with if you use guns regularly. If players were able to use the finishers themselves to close the gap toward the enemy in question, this would greatly smooth the combat flow and allow mercy finishers to be much more relevant. We have plenty of movement and mobility options in Warframe, and the parkour system is one of the core parts of the game's identity. Despite this, there are some obvious ideas for new mobility options that could be implemented. One such idea would be to implement a grapple type system with the Parazon. The tool itself could be used as a grappling hook, extending out and embedding itself into walls or surfaces to swing from. There are lots of interesting mechanics that could be worked into this system, and it would add even more emphasis to the parkour system. TLDR: Can't initiate mercy kills from afar. New Parazon grapple mechanics. The Fixes:Suggested New Mechanics; Parazon Gapcloser Finishers While aiming at an enemy that is downed in the mercy finisher state, you can press 'X' to do a Gapcloser Finisher. gapcloser finishers will close the distance and launch you to the enemy, simultaneously executing them (with style!) gapcloser finishers have a limited range of 15.0m keybind defaults to "interact" key Parazon Void Grapple Defaults to interact keybind, the 'X' key. When there is no interactable object, pressing X will instead perform a void-grapple. Upon performing a void-grapple, the characters double jump is reset, allowing you to bullet jump multiple times without touching the ground. The void-grapple has a single charge, resetting only upon touching the ground. Airborne: Tap Cast: Manifest a void-grapple point 5.0m above your character, suspending yourself from the grapple point and hanging from it until further inputs. allows you to suspend a fall and hang in the air by your parazon grapple Hold Cast: Manifest a void-grapple point 20.0m from you in the cast direction, before grappling off of it and flinging yourself forward. allows you to launch yourself forward, similar to a bullet jump, except it can be performed at any time Grounded: Tap or Hold Cast: Manifest a void-grapple point 20.0m from you in the cast direction, before grappling off of it and flinging yourself forward. allows you to launch yourself forward, similar to a bullet jump, except it can be performed at any time Shields Revised Spoiler The Issues:Shield gating is a wonderful mechanic that has added further distinction between health, armour, and shields, but it has some glaring issues. One issue clear when you look into how shield-gating works with different shield values. The gating invulnerability is two fixed amounts depending on if the shields were partially or fully charged, but the amount of shields in question does not have any effect on it. Having more shields does not increase the invulnerability period, and having more also means that shields take longer to recharge. So having more shields effectively punishes you with the gating period, since you wait longer to get the same benefit.Another issue with shields is that they're always less effective than building for health and armour. The issue is because shields can't increase their damage reduction by any means, so the only way to get more EHP from shields is to add more shields. You can also add external damage reductions, however they will also apply to health, which means health is still above shields in those cases for survivability. Even if you choose to max out your shield capacity, the minimal 25% damage reduction they grant to incoming damage won't grant any significant amount of EHP. You are able to increase the damage reduction your health has to it via mods, which allows you to increase the EHP health will grant you by multiple times, which shields can't.TLDR: Shield-gating Issues counterintuitive scaling abusability Shields lacking in EHP they have a weak static damage reduction The Fixes: Since there are many sources to replenishing shields, the gate being tied to the shields being replenished leads to an easily abusable mechanic. If you have methods, like an ability, to replenish even the tiniest amount of your shields, you can easily abuse an infinitely spammable invulnerability period. To prevent this, the method of refreshing the shield-gate needs to be tied to something that is not achievable via plenty of external means and not an issue to achieve. The shield-gating invulnerability period is counter-intuitive. With the way it works, having more shields makes them take longer to regenerate, which means having more shields gives a longer duration between being able to refresh shield-gates. To counter this, shield regeneration needs to be changed. They currently regenerate at a fixed rate with an added percentage of your total shields per second. The reason it takes more shields longer to regenerate is the fact that there is the flat value in the formula. If shields were made to regenerate at a rate only tied to your maximum shields, then it would take the same time regardless of shield amount. Along with the shield-gate abuse, shields as a whole need to be brought up to a level where there can be front-line shield tanks if built appropriately. Currently shields can never compete with health and armour as a form of front-line tanking, it is too easy to buff the damage reduction armour grants. Shields have a fixed damage reduction of 25%, while armour is many times more powerful than this, and also able to be increased via mods. Shields need new methods added for buffing the damage reduction granted by them. If there was a mod that increased the damage reduction granted by shields, say up to 70%, this would drastically increase the useability of shields for front-lining.Suggested Core Changes; Shield gate now works off of a charge system. shield gate is consumed upon shields breaking and must be recharged when shield gate is activated it grants 100% damage reduction for it's duration can only be consumed if it's charged shield gate recharges upon meeting the following criteria out of combat for 1.5s (partially depleted shields) out of combat for 3.0s (fully depleted shields) getting hit while invulnerable still counts as being in combat and resets the timer Shield gate duration now scales. base shield gate duration of 500ms duration is increased by 1ms for each point of maximum shields if shields and overshields are depleted in one damage instance, shield-gate duration is increased by current overshields Shield regeneration now works differently. shields recharge upon meeting the following criteria out of combat for 1.5s (partially depleted shields) out of combat for 3.0s (fully depleted shields) getting hit while invulnerable still counts as being in combat and resets the timer shields recharge at a base rate of 40% maximum shields per second Enemy / AI / non-player shield-gating. shield-gate duration is a base 250ms unaffected by level or enemy scaling this applies to anything that has a form of level based shield scaling, specters, enemies, ai allies, etc Shield damage reduction can now be modified by external means. there are mods, arcanes, and other sources that grant damage reduction to shields, allowing you to effectively build "shield armour" to be a shield tank if you opt to build for it Shield Resistance Mods: Spoiler Mods: (New!) Deflective Shielding (Warframe): +40% shield resistances to all damage types(New!) Shield Surge (Companion): +40% shield resistances to all damage types(New!) Heavy Shielding (Mech): +40% shield resistances to all damage types(New!) Shield Overflow (Archwing): +40% shield resistances to all damage types(New!) Void Shielding (Railjack): +40% shield resistances to all damage typesArcanes:Arcane Barrier: On Shield Damaged: 6% chance to instantly restore all shields, 6s cooldown -> 15% chance for +25% resistances to shields for 15sArcane Guardian: On Damaged: 15% chance for +900 armour for 20s -> 15% chance for +15% resistances to armour and health for 20s This this would be a very large buff to shields overall, allowing you to benefit from increased shields in many ways. These changes make it so building shields no longer punishes you, and now actively rewards you with a longer invulnerability period. This can find use on Warframes that only need short bursts of survivability, as opposed to up-front tankiness. You will be able to build for more shields, affording you a longer grace period to prevent being bursted down with heavy damage suddenly. This along with being able to increase the shield damage reduction means there are now two effective ways to build for shields. Build solely for shield capacity for the gating duration on frames that just need short bursts of survivability, or build for reduction as well as capacity, allowing you to be a front-line tank with plenty of EHP to absorb incoming fire.Shield Resistance Changes:Before I show the first damage type rebalance, all resistances need to be capped to 95 or 99%, so you can not reach a true 100% damage immunity to any specific type. Spoiler Three unique shield types. Tenno Shields Shields Proto Shields Each shield type now has the following resistances (except for Tenno Shields, -20% across the board to incoming damage). 0 x -75% 1 x -50% 2 x -25% 5 x +0% (void not counted here as it's the true neutral) 2 x +25% 2 x +50% 1 x +75% Armour Revised Spoiler The Issues:The main concern with armour is how it poses an issue with EHP scaling. An enemy with armour will have dozens or hundreds of times more effective health than any unit without it. This leads to the factions that have armour, and even some specific units in factions that normally don't, requiring an incredibly inflated amount of damage to die. It leads to poor balance between factions, and even among units.Armour functions as a triple stacked damage reduction. You have the elemental and physical type damage reductions from your health applied, then combined with the ones from your armour type, and then that is finally slapped on top of the scaling damage reduction armour has. These health and armour resistances combined lead to armoured units in general taking less damage across the board than any other units, even before you account for the scaling reduction armour has.Another issue is armour scaling, but the scaling is only an issue because of how armour functions. With changes to it's core function (which are shown below in the fixes section), the scaling would not be an issue. However, armour currently functions as a multiplier to your effective health. The fact that a multiplier to effective health, which nothing aside from armour works as, also scales, leads to it giving enemies hundreds of times their actual health value as total effective health. When you need 10x more damage than an enemy has in health to kill it, even with it's main weakness, that's a massive issue.I will use a quick example below to demonstrate effective health discrepancies between enemy types. Heavy Gunner: level 100; ~32,000 health ~6,400 armour ~95% damage reduction ~700,000 effective health Corpus Tech: level 100; ~70,000 health ~11,000 shield ~81,000 effective health Okay, so armoured units are indisputably the tankiest... well how do I kill them then? And now to compare slash to the weaknesses of both armour types and how effective they are at different points.Weakness (Radiation / Corrosive) Effectiveness on Armour300 armour: 1.40x effectiveness900 armour: 1.00x effectiveness1800 armour: 0.70x effectivenessNeutral Type (Heat / Toxin) Effectiveness on Armour300 armour: 0.50x effectiveness900 armour: 0.25x effectiveness1800 armour: 0.14x effectivenessSlash Proc Effectiveness on Armour300 armour: 1.00x effectiveness900 armour: 1.00x effectiveness1800 armour: 1.00x effectiveness Well then... why is slash so special? Due to how weaknesses work, no damage type can ever surpass the limit of 1.75x effectiveness. At a measly 900 armour is where slash procs become more powerful than any other damage type unless you have stripped armour. Slash bypasses this reduction to damage effectiveness with it's procs, as they deal true damage and entirely ignore armour, leading to your damage always being 1:1 with your DPS, or in other words, 1.00x effectiveness. This discrepancy only continues to get wider as enemy armour scales, leading to slash becoming the true and uncontested king of end-game armour builds. This is the reason for slash being a forced meta against high level armour, it becomes dozens of times more effective than any other type.TLDR: Armour EHP Scaling too much ehp from armour relative to health and shields Armour Triple Stacked Reduction health type reductions + armour type reductions + armour scaling reduction The Fixes:The only way to fix the EHP issue armour poses is to entirely re-think the mechanic as a whole. To do this, I will be removing armour as a damage reduction, and shifting it to a third health-bar in essence. Converting armour to a life pool, similar to shields and health, is that they are now all 1:1 ratios to effective health. Enemies can simply be balanced off of their base values, an incredibly simple type of balancing, enemies of roughly equal base EHP values will take roughly the same time to kill. This will allow DE to easily balance among and across factions, simply comparing two unit's base values.Armour having a triple stacked reduction is quite silly, and is definitely on the chopping block. Armour being shifted to a health bar may sound odd, and you will immediately assume they will be less tanky, but this is not quite the case. Since armour is being changed to a life pool, the only natural reductions that will apply to this pool are of your armour type. No more health type bonuses with your armour, and no more reduction stacked onto it. Each unique armour type has newly rebalanced damage modifiers to all physical and elemental types, and in general the armour types have many more resistances, and stronger resistances, than health and shields. This is where the distinction for armour will come into play, the weaknesses of the armour types, and how they are much stronger than the other types. As explained in the issues section, scaling was an issue only because of the way armour functioned as a percent reduction on top of everything else. With armour being converted to a life pool like health and shields, it having scaling is a must. Suggested Core Changes; Armour Bar armour now exists as a second health-bar between health and shields the armour values of all everything entities will be converted 1:1 to the armour bar the only innate damage reduction that applies to this armour bar is the elemental resistances the armour type has this consists of things like the +75% bonus corrosive damage has against ferrite armour Armour Break armour break is consumed upon armour being depleted and must be recharged when consumed "armour break" cleanses all status effects from the target can only be consumed if it's charged armour break recharges upon meeting the following criteria armour bar reaches 100% Replenishing Armour any healing or regeneration while health is full is converted 1:1 to armour healing while you have no gray-health and are out of combat (no health or armour damage taken in 3s) you will regenerate 3.3% (1/30th) of your maximum armour per second takes 30.0s to regen to full armour naturally All "armour strip" is now converted to armour removal, an armour debuff, or flat damage. percentage based armour strip now removes that percentage of the target's armour based on that same value 100% armour strip -> 100% armour removed some percentage based armour strips can be changed to a debuff that grants the corresponding value as increased damage to armour 100% armour strip -> 100% bonus damage to armour flat armour strip converted to flat armour damage 100 armour strip -> 100 damage dealt to armour (converted to a damage type of choice) Health Damage Weaknesses no longer apply to armour reductions. health type resistances now only apply to the health bar External Tweaks needed to make new armour work properly. passive / permanent +armour buffs grant an increase to the size of the armour pool +100% armour changed to now grant an increase to your total armour pool duration based +armour buffs grant an increase to armour resistances +100% armour converted to something similar to +10% resistances to armour all armour based ability scaling will be changed to either scale with resistances, or kept as scaling off of current armour scaling with current armour = current armour * ability power (just as an example) New Enemy Health-bar UI:With all of these changes and the addition of a third health bar in essence, the health bar UI needs to be heavily reworked. I did a small horribly low quality rendition of what that might look like, that is below. This is of course a low quality MS Paint edit, but it gets the point across. You will have all of your health bars layered, health at the bottom, armour in the middle, and shields on top. When a part of a bar is depleted you can see the other bars peeking through behind it, denoting they have that resistance type underneath. Along with this, it will show a breakdown at the top of the UI, that shows all types the enemy has, as well as what percentage of their health is that type. As for colouring, I would give each health type a colour depending on if it's organic or inorganic, since each faction will only have one health type for each, you can know the exact health type based on the faction + colour. Then for armour and shields, since they are not per faction, those would simply be given unique colours to identify them by. Armour Resistance Changes: Spoiler Five unique armour types, these can apply to any faction (except Tenno of course is reserved for the player), infested armour types can be used for Ghouls and the like, cross-sharing armour types between factions that use them for specific unique units would be a fine thing to implement, adds some extra diversity and spice. Tenno Armour Ferrite Armour Alloy Armour Mutation (can be used for Ghouls) Fossilized (can be used for Ghouls) Each armour type now has the following resistances (except for Tenno armour, -40% across the board to incoming damage). 1 x -75% 2 x -50% 3 x -25% 4 x +0% (void not counted here as it's the true neutral) 1 x +25% 1 x +50% 1 x +75% Health Revised Spoiler The Issues: Unlike other resistance types, like armour and shields, health doesn't have many glaring issues. Despite not being a core reason there is much imbalance in the game, with the changes to how armour now functions, I felt the need to standardize health in some ways. Along with the standardization I am doing to everything, I also feel there is a core component the game is lacking that is simple yet impactful in the feel of it. This would be a passive health regeneration mechanic. As a new player, the only way to heal your frame once you have taken health damage is to get enemies to drop health orbs. Having to rely on these orbs or be forced into some method of healing you have to invest into, like Arcanes or Focus skills, feels very bad for the player. Not having any methods as a beginner to heal up aside from killing enemies is very counter-intuitive and doesn't feel engaging. Health regeneration is not a must, but I felt it would help the gameplay and pacing, especially as a beginner, feel much more kind and enjoyable.TLDR: Passive Health Regeneration we lack regen without optimizing for it The Fixes: To address the aforementioned issues, I will be adding a new unique function to health to further distinguish between armour and health. Health will now have a temporary regeneration effect that is tied to being out of combat. You will need to occasionally duck into cover or find a way to avoid damage, so as to allow your health to regenerate. It will have a limited window however, otherwise it would always be able to regenerate to full like shields.Suggested Core Changes; Health Bar and Gray Health health now has a unique secondary component to it, known as gray-health gray-health does not absorb damage like regular health all depleted health will be converted to gray-health gray-health vanishes 30.0s after it is made, it doesn't last forever healing effects will first add the healed amount to the remainder of missing health that isn't gray-health, if there is no missing health then the healed amount will instead carry over to gray-health or armour instead Gray-Health Regeneration gray-health starts to regenerate upon meeting the following criteria out of combat for 3.0s getting hit while invulnerable still counts as being in combat and resets the timer while in the regeneration state, gray-health is converted back to regular health at a constant rate gray-health is converted at a rate of 10% maximum health per second This would be a small change that adds tons of engagement to combat itself.Health Resistance Changes: Spoiler Two unique health types per faction, one health type for fleshy units and one for inorganic health units. Tenno: Tenno Flesh Grineer: Cloned Flesh, Machinery Corpus: Flesh, Robotic Infested: Sinew, Technocyte Each health type now has the following resistances (except for Tenno Flesh, +0% across the board to incoming damage, no picture because duh). 0 x -75% 1 x -50% 1 x -25% 8 x +0% (void not counted here as it's the true neutral) 2 x +25% 1 x +50% 0 x +75% Enemy Scaling Revised Spoiler The Issues: Currently enemy scaling has a few issues. The first and most important issue is that nothing scales equally, this leads to all different enemy factions and types of enemies not remaining balanced against one another at all levels of play. Scaling being imbalanced also leads to specific factions posing more difficulty and threat than other factions. With the above changes in mind, if enemy scaling was to be kept the exact same, then armoured and shielded units and factions would fall drastically behind health factions due to the scaling discrepancies.Along with the imbalanced scaling, the scaling as a whole is far too weak. Enemies at the top end, level 9999, are still incredibly weak when faced with a properly modded Tenno. With properly optimized builds you can dispatch these level capped units with ease. These issues being addressed would add lots of enemy and build diversity to the game, adding further distinction between unit types and making all elements shine in their own way. current enemy level scaling for health, armour, and shields TLDR: Imbalanced Scaling health, armour, and shield scaling not equal Scaling too Low enemies currently do not scale enough The Fixes:The scaling formulas for health, armour, and shields, all need to be made equal. If health, armour, and shield scaling are to remain separate formulas, despite them all working as effective health, enemies would still differ in strength as levels change. If you keep the current differing scaling for each type, then any unit with the lesser scaling types would fall behind as levels increase. This is very poor design, meaning you need to worry less about shields and armour than health, simply because they don't scale as much. Along with being made to have equal level scaling, the scaling multiplier should be increased drastically. Currently a level 9,999 Corpus Tech only has 1,150,000 effective health, this enemy can be easily killed by just a few headshots with quite a few different weapons in the game, even without external buffs. This shows just how weak enemy scaling really is, and since armour scaling is being removed and now armour affects EHP in the same way that shields and health do, effective health ranges should be roughly equal across the board at all levels. Once they are equalized, and the scaling is level across the board, then scaling can be brought up drastically. Scaling could be made linear, and increased by about 10x what it currently is, this would bring the effective health values at level 9,999, which should be considered a tough level to compete at, to a healthy level which could then be further tweaked if needed.Suggested Core Changes; Health, Armour, and Shields now all scale equally. armour and shield scaling will be brought up to match health scaling Enemy scaling increased. enemy scaling at the top end should be increased at least 10 fold, enemies currently do not scale enough either change scaling to be linear, or keep a similar function of the current formula but increase the top-end scaling by roughly 10x Status 3.0 Spoiler The Issues: Despite armour posing the biggest balance issue, the status system has more issues as a whole than armour did.To begin with, plenty of status procs have just not received any love in a long time. Lots of the procs have become obsolete at this point in time. Every single proc in the game needs to be gone over in depth, and be tweaked to be engaging and balanced. Currently too many status procs outshine the other 90% of them, and their is only a few statuses you truly every want to build for. There is an issue present in the current implementation of status that most players are not actually aware of, but is quite annoying when you are aware of it. There are in essence, two types of status procs, these are debuffs and damage procs. Debuffs apply an effect to the target, while damage procs simply deal damage in some way, usually over time. Currently if you build for debuff procs, they will give more or less output depending on factors that are not your status chance. Having the output effectiveness of a status proc tied to external factors aside from status chance makes building very misleading. Two weapons of equal status chance benefit the exact same amount from damage procs, but not from debuffs, which I am looking to correct. Proc application order is not a massive balance issue, but it leads to odd interactions and feeling unrewarded when it comes to status procs. If you shoot an enemy, even if you procs a status like electricity, if the direct hit damage of your attack kills the enemy then the proc will simply do nothing. I see all the time running around with my guns build for electricity, I shoot and kill an enemy in one hit, and despite seeing three or more electricity procs trigger, they do nothing because the enemy instantly died. This feels very counter-intuitive and unrewarding for the player, being punished for killing an enemy before a proc can trigger. Status duration is a useful stat, but only for a select few of the existing dozen status procs. The reason for this is obvious when you consider the pacing of the game and what the stat does. Warframe is a fast paced hoard shooter, you are not wanting to be sitting around for extended periods of time doing any one thing. When it comes to status duration as a stat, it boosts the duration of debuff procs like viral and cold, which is very helpful, but it also boosts the duration of DOT procs which is... a weird interaction. In theory, adding more duration to a proc means it will damage the enemy more times, and it will do more total damage. There is one fatal flaw in this assumption though, and that is that you are sitting around for six or more seconds waiting for your procs to kill an enemy. When you proc damage statuses on an enemy, you typically don't ever require over six seconds to kill them. Adding duration to damage procs means to get any effect out of this bonus, you must now have your procs actually damaging an enemy for more than six seconds, which is not something you want in a fast paced shooter. Hit-zones are a great mechanic that add further engagement and reward to skillful play. There are some issues they have when it comes to status procs though, and that is that all damage procs except for Electricity can not count as weak-point hits. This means enemies you kill with slash procs, or almost all other damage procs, will not be able to trigger many on hit effects. If you let an enemy's health tick down from a slash proc, and they die, even if the hit that procced the slash was a headshot, the slash ticks and kill will not count as one. This leads to damage proc builds being punished when it comes to proccing conditional effects and on hits, as opposed to direct damage builds.TLDR: Outdated & Obsolete Procs impact, puncture, cold, blast, etc are useless Damage vs Debuff Proc Effectiveness debuff procs differ in power depending on weapon fire-rate, not just status chance Proc and Damage Priority / Order damage applies before procs so even if you proc, it won't do anything if they die in one hit Status Duration useless for damage procs unless 6 seconds pass Hit-zones and Status Procs almost all damage procs can not trigger weak-point effects Suggested Core Changes; Soft Proc Cap / Status Decay all procs are now un-capped, meaning they can stack infinitely debuff procs are affected by diminishing returns beyond 10 stacks for each proc beyond ten, the bonus from each consecutive proc of that type gets continually weaker Per Proc Tweaks individual tweaks to every single status proc that exists Status Efficacy procs are split into two types, buff & debuff procs, or damage procs fire-rate affects how powerful your debuff procs are Proc Application Order status procs apply in a specific order, damage procs -> hit damage -> debuff procs damaging procs apply before the direct hit damage of any attack is calculated. this means in situations where you are building for aoe damage procs, like electricity, one-shotting the enemy with raw damage will no longer prevent the proc from dealing area damage as the proc will deal this form of damage first Status Duration & Mods "status duration" stat changed to now be multi-stat, "+ proc damage, + debuff duration" of equivalent values this ensures that regardless of which type of procs you have, if your status duration is buffed in some way it always benefits your build Damage Over Time procs can Trigger Headshot Kills if you proc a damage over time effect on an enemy's head and they die to it, it will count as a headshot kill for the purposes of stacking buffs Soft Proc Cap / Status Decay Spoiler With this rework the design goal was to never have anything wasted, as with current status debuff procs are capped at 10 stacks. Debuff procs having caps as opposed to how damage procs don't means you're punished for getting more procs than you need to upkeep 10 stacks of a debuff. As I said, my goal is to never have anything wasted, so in favour of this I opted to entirely remove hard caps from debuff procs. Considering this, high status proc weapons would be incredibly overpowered, being able to stack 100 viral procs very quickly and having 2,500% extra damage to health. With this I shifted to a soft cap for procs, meaning they will never be wasted, but each proc beyond the soft cap of 10 will be reduced by an amount. The formula and some quick math for how this scales and affects procs is as follows. Status Decay Formula proc power = [1 - 0.1]ⁿ-10 (n = proc count) proc power refers to the effect of a debuff proc 10% reduction in effectiveness for each proc past the soft cap the minimum cap the decay goes to is 5% effectiveness this means once a proc reaches the point where it is only doing 5% of it's normal effect, the decay stops, and it is now consistent to infinity it takes exactly 38 debuff procs to reach this "minimum cap", after this point every proc will be 5% of it's normal effect after the first 38 status procs, decay will stop, and it will take 20 procs to have the power of 1 (proc power * 0.05 / 5%) by the time you reach the minimum cap, you will have dealt a total of 18.5 status procs worth of it's effect this would mean with 38 viral procs you have ~600% bonus damage to health Per Proc Tweaks: Spoiler Note: the damage values seen in these reworked procs is a slight buff to the current damage over time procs, just split up into four ticks per second. The combined elements also currently do not scale with elemental modifiers at all and should, so some of them also had this small part added so they would be in-line with the other procs and scale similarly. Impact: Crowd Control, Mercy Finishers DE's recent rework of the mercy finisher system was a positive change for impact procs as a whole. There are still some other benefits that match it's theme that would make it much more prevalent of a proc for single target crowd control. Currently all it does is stagger, unless the enemy is a "heavy" unit, and able to have a Mercy Finisher used on them. The stagger from impact may be regarded as useless by most, but it does it's job of preventing enemies from doing things while they are stumbling around for a short bit. Something DE doesn't seem to grasp however, is that crowd control exists outside of staggers. There are plenty of other forms of crowd control that this proc could dish out, depending on the area you shot on the enemy. My idea is to adjust the proc to have a different type of crowd control effect applied depending on the enemy body part that it procs on, as well as keeping the mercy finisher bonus for all heavy units. Stacking mercy bonus, non-stacking crowd control. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc increases the enemy's Mercy Finisher threshold. threshold +(2 * [1 + impact modifier] * n)% of maximum health (n = proc count) this can once again affect all units, not just heavies this value is additive to the base threshold required on heavy units this means with 10 procs you will be able to perform a mercy finisher on any enemy below a minimum of 20% max health Every proc has a disabling effect depending on the body part it was triggered on. head-shot: blinded potential to grant you finishers or stealth damage bonus torso: stumble back, staggering any other enemies contacted during the stumble potential for group stun if falling into other enemies airborne enemies will be knocked to ground briefly instead of staggered legs: trips the enemy/knocks them over potential to entirely lock enemies in place if you impact proc their legs/feet ... slash and puncture are similar but unique in that one ignores all damage type modifiers with it's procs, and the other increases your modifier values when attacking said target, both effective for dealing with armoured units just with different approaches Puncture: Resistance Ignore / Punch Through As the name would imply, is meant to puncture armour. Currently for some reason it reduces the target's damage output, this can seem convenient but in actual practice does not find much use. In an attempt to bring this more in-tune with how puncture should feel (as in, it punctures), I opted to make it reduce the targets damage type modifiers. I originally thought of allowing the damage to bypass armour in some way, but I feel that bypassing shields and armour is an unhealthy mechanic if added to a specific proc. Lowering the resistance values will allow you to greatly increase your direct hit damage against armoured units, and due to the way this works as well as all of the previously explained armour changes, this is just as effective for breaking through armour at level 9,999 as level 100 so long as you have the damage output to back it up. Stacking, no cap. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc creates a small visual marker around the point of impact called a "tear". tears have a radius of 0.25 meters tears can overlap/stack, and are affected by energy colour no cap on how many tears there can be on an enemy Targeting a tear grants bonus effects to your attack. attacks will have punch through when targeting tears (for that enemy only) this punch through does not apply to explosive weapons melee is instead granted 1.00 follow through for that hit, as opposed to punch through damage has a +(3 * [1 + puncture modifier] * n)% bonus to all damage type modifiers (n = proc count) this means your procs change the damage type modifiers such as the -50% thatpuncture suffers against proto shields, and the -75% electricity suffers against alloy Slash: "True" Damage over Time With the aforementioned changes to armour and how it works, slash is going to be changed a fair amount. Slash is typically regarded as overpowered, this is only due to the severe amount of effective health the armour damage reduction can grant at higher levels. Since armour will no longer have a scaling damage reduction, slash will no longer be the only proc type you really need. However since each damage proc needs to have a unique component, I believe slash should in some form keep it's armour bypass. It will ignore all damage type modifiers for the damage over time procs it inflicts, allowing it to be a sort of universal damage over time effect that doesn't excel in any particular area. No stacking. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc triggers a damage over time effect called "bleed". 25.0% base damage * (1 + slash modifier) 4 ticks per second proc damage ignores damage type modifiers this means your proc damage is not affected by damage type modifiers such as the -50% that slash suffers against alloy ... up next is the base elements, void is technically one as well but also unique in that it can't be added via any normal means and can't be combined, for this reason i excluded void from having a damaging component to it's procs, however to keep it standardized, all base elements, aside from void as i just explained, will have a damage component to them Heat: Debuff / Damage over Time Completely revamped this proc. It's niche effect currently relies on stripping armour, which is effectively entirely removed with this rebalance, for a healthier design. With this in mind I felt since heat was the infinite duration proc before, we could play off of that by making the damage increase for each subsequent tick of the damage dealt to enemies. The longer you can keep heat ticking on an enemy the more it's damage will scale up, with no cap on this, however it's linear to make for more balanced output. No stacking. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Procs no longer stuns enemies. Every proc triggers a damage over time effect called "burn". 25.0% base damage * (1 + heat modifier) 4 ticks per second all incoming heat damage is affected by "heat build-up" heat damage dealt = (1 + [bU / 32]) bU = heat build-up bU = 3.125% per tick, 12.5% increase per second each tick increases build-up by 1, until the enemy is entirely cleansed of heat procs Cold: Crowd Control / Damage Cold status procs are quite unique in their nature of crowd control, however they are incredibly underpowered and need lots to be considered good and sit among the rest. The slow should to be changed to a 10% slow to enemies, this of course can stack up to 10 times. Once the enemy reaches 10 stacks they will be encased in an ice pillar, while they are at 10 stacks they receive increased damage and apply cold to all nearby enemies. Cold will work to slow enemies, and finally debuff them to incoming damage and make your damage much more powerful once finally frozen. It has single target damage, but a sort of "spreading" aoe slow/debuff effect, and it would be a fantastic debuff to keep in your arsenal. Stacking, no cap. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc adds a stack of the "frost" debuff to the target. enemies are slowed by (10 * n)% (n = proc count) these stacks fall off one at a time instead of all at once at 10 stacks enemies are encased in ice and afflicted with "permafrost" Enemies afflicted by permafrost turn into a solid pillar of ice, receiving increase damage, and applying cold to nearby enemies. all damage instances to affect an enemy afflicted by permafrost will have the following formula applied and then dealt as a separate instance of cold damage with 0% status chance. cold damage instance = damage taken * (0.5 * [1 + cold modifier]) this bonus cold damage scales with procs beyond 10, each proc after 10 will increase this multiplier by +10% damage formula for this scaling is as follow: (1 + [0.1 * {n - 10}]) * (0.5 * [1 + cold modifier]) (n = proc count) this bonus damage per proc is affected by status decay as you already have 10 procs ice pillars emit an aura of frost that over time afflicts nearby enemies with cold build-up frost zones have a radius of 2.5 meters frost zones add 0.25 cold procs to enemies for each quarter of a second they stand in them (1.0 cold per second) enemies that die while under the effects of permafrost have the ice pillar stay in place for the remainder of it's duration Electricity: Area of Effect Damage Electricity is already quite a solid proc type, being an area of effect as well as having an electricity multiplier scaling component. All damage status procs should have a unique component to them, except electricity's isn't the only area of effect damage proc. In it's current iteration electricity procs just deal damage in a radius around the target, while this is nice, it's quite bland and could stand to have some more flare added, it also functions exactly like gas does in this way. Similar to how in real life electricity is known for arcing between things, I believe instead of essentially just dealing damage in a circle, it should be changed to sort of form tethers/arcs between enemies that can damage any enemies caught in them. This would make it more reliable with it's area effect since it arcs between enemies instead of just being stuck to the main target, and I have also shifted it to not be a damage over time effect, simply an instant damage proc. No stacking. Procs have no duration. Procs no longer stun enemies. Every proc triggers an effect called "shock". deals 100.0% base damage * (1 + electricity modifier) every proc creates an arc of electricity that chains to 4 random enemies within 8.0 meters arc beam has a radius of 0.2 meters any targets caught in the arc between targets will be inflicted the full damage Toxin: Debuff / Damage over Time With the removal of toxin bypassing shields, there is lots to be changed and added. Toxins only affect organic beings, so I was very interested in giving a sort of health debuff to it. After lots of pondering and brainstorming, I realized a few things. First off, it would make sense for some enemy types, and mainly the infested faction, to have some form of strong health regen niche. Enemies across the board should be given passive health regeneration, with infested being the big health gang with lots of buffs supporting and healing. With this design idea fit into the game, there is a very nice unique passive for toxin that would fit exactly the role I wanted to give it. So I opted to keep the damage over time effect of toxin, and added a healing/regeneration debuff passive to it. No stacking. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc triggers a damage over time effect called "poison". 25.0% base damage * (1 + toxin modifier) 4 ticks per second Enemies afflicted by "poison" have all health regeneration and healing effects reduced by 80%. ... there are sort of "subsections" to the damage types, next up we have the 3 main pool type debuffers with their niche regeneration effects Viral: Debuff / Self Buff Viral is currently the be all end all in the meta. Despite having the same scaling as magnetic procs do for increasing damage, magnetic procs only apply to shields, which only a small chunk of the enemies in the game even have. Every enemy has health, but few have shields, this makes viral much more prevalent for use, and is the main reason it's so incredibly popular. Along with magnetic, the scaling of this proc should be adjusted to be linear, giving the same damage bonus for each consecutive proc, up to it's cap of 10. This would be done, like above, by lowering the single proc damage bonus from 100% to 25%, shifting to 10 stack bonus to 250% and bringing this status more in-line with the rest in terms of balance. Even with the numbers changed, however, there is still one glaring issue with this status proc, it can't stack beyond 10. I believe it should have the cap removed entirely allowing viral procs to not be capped in their effectiveness, while also making it much more balanced with the rest of the damage system. Stacking, no cap. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc applies one stack of the "illness" debuff. increases all incoming damage to the target's health by (20 * n)% (n = proc count) Every proc grants the Tenno the "resilient" buff. regenerate (3.0 + (4 * toxin modifier) + 1% of max health per second for 4 + (2 * cold modifier) seconds. this buff cannot stack, subsequent procs will refresh the duration Corrosive: Debuff / Self Buff Much like some of the other statuses, due to the depth of changes to the core balance system, corrosive essentially needs a complete re-write. This will be a simple one though, basically bringing it in line with some of the other generic debuff statuses, just this one works for armour! Stacking, no cap. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc applies one stack of the "corrode" debuff. increases all incoming damage to the target's armour by (20 * n)% (n = proc count) Every proc grants the Tenno the "mending" buff. regenerate 3.0 + (4 * toxin modifier) + 1% of max armour per second for 4 + (2 * electricity modifier) seconds. this buff cannot stack, subsequent procs will refresh the duration Magnetic: Debuff / Self Buff Magnetic is an incredibly strong status for shielded enemies, it's issues come from the fact that it does absolutely nothing if an enemy has no shields. Now, thinking on how magnetic procs affect us, the Tenno, they drain our energy. Since enemies don't work off of energy, draining their energy isn't really an option, but granting us energy is definitely a possibility. I think with a sort of energy regeneration effect from magnetic, this would allow it to have a niche roll in loadouts as well as maintain it's already good strength against shields. This as well as making the procs scale linearly as opposed to 100% from the first proc and 25% from each subsequent proc, with consideration of the earlier mentioned enemy design changes, magnetic should be relevant and actually see use in much content, especially corpus. Stacking, no cap. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc applies one stack of the "static" debuff. increases all incoming damage to the targets shields by (20 * n)% (n = proc count) Every proc grants the Tenno the "leech" buff. regenerate 1.5 + (2 * electricity modifier) energy per second for 4 + (2 * cold modifier) seconds. this buff cannot stack, subsequent procs will refresh the duration ... and now we have the damage procs, one of which is also a form of debuff and crowd control Gas: Area of Effect / Damage over Time Gas needs to have have it's damage output buffed, as it is it's just too weak. Some other issues with it are how the radius of the gas clouds scales, and the fact that they follow around the enemy that it's procced on. As it's a combined element, this does open it up to the potential of having both toxin scaling and heat scaling, which allows for many neat things to be done. The radius of the gas could be reliant on the heat mod scaling, while the damage of the procs would have the toxin scaling added back in like gas had before. This would increase the damage output of the status, bringing it in-line with the other damage procs, making it much more useful, as it's current version is vastly out damaged by every other proc in the game. If gas had the damage component scaling with elemental mods again, then it would be a fantastic status already. The proc radius scaling with stacks is not great, it punishes you on weapons that only apply a single high damage proc. This should be removed in favour of the radius scaling off of your heat mods, adding an interesting new component to this combined element. The lingering gas clouds should also be set in place where they are spawned, as opposed to following the enemy around. Then as enemies step into or out of clouds their UI will reflect how many clouds are currently damaging them. No stacking. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc triggers a gas cloud that follows the affected enemy dealing damage over time, and doesn't expire upon death. 25.0% base damage * (1 + toxin modifier) 4 ticks per second clouds have a radius of (4 + heat modifier) meters Blast: Crowd Control / Area of Effect / Damage Blast procs should trigger an immediate damage instance in a radius from the hit position. Now if we are to compare it to the damage over time elements, with total damage per proc of 3.0x your weapons modded base damage, contrasting their damage over time nature this would be an instantaneous damage instance, so the numbers should definitely be lower to make up for that as you don't have to wait. In addition to this, blast would be made to scale with elemental mods of both heat and cold, heat would affect the radius of the explosion, and cold would increase the damage scaling. No stacking. Every proc deals immediate damage in the area surrounding the target. deals 100.0% of base damage * (1 + cold modifier) blast radius of 4 * (1 + heat modifier) meters Procs ragdoll/knock down all enemies caught in the blast. Radiation: Crowd Control / Area of Effect / Damage over Time The first issue I would address with radiation, is making the damage bonus scaling for enemies linear, this would reduce it from 550% to a 500% damage increase total, which is still a very large damage buff, especially considering all the armour and scaling changes. For this reason I believe it should also be lowered to 25% per stack, and should effectively force aggro for nearby enemies. Moving on from that, radiation is a strong element, has a fun and unique effect, but it's capped by 10 stacks, as some others are. I believe to address this, the radiation procs could serve as a form of damage. To do this radiation procs would be made to create a damaging aura around the afflicted enemy, this aura would absorb all damage the enemy has taken while affected and projects this outward. The aura radius could scale with the heat modifier, and the damage multiplier to the aura would be affected by electricity. Stacking, no cap. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc applies one stack of the "confusion" debuff. confusion makes the target faction neutral, they can receive damage from and deal damage to anything forces the nearest unit(s) to attack the target taunt affects the nearest 1 + (n / 3) units within 20.0 meters (n = proc count) taunt also affects main target itself, it will be forced to attack the nearest unit Irradiated enemies absorb incoming damage and project it outward in a damaging aura. while an enemy is irradiated, all incoming damage is stored aura deals 100% * [1+ electricity modifier] of stored damage per second damage divided into 4 ticks per second all damage dealt to target is stored, this includes critical hits as well as damage from status procs aura has a radius of (2 + heat modifier) meters Void: Debuffer / Utility Void is honestly a very interesting one. It's neat and has a unique mechanic, essentially making mini Mag bubbles. I love this effect and think it definitely deserves to stay, but Void lacks something else that makes it special, and the procs don't scale beyond one, which is slightly frustrating. Despite not being able to get void damage from almost any sources, it still deserves to be a properly balanced effect. I believe the part of the void and how it decays things is quite neat, such as it's effects on Sentients and those described from the horrors among the Zariman Ten Zero. Much like how there are now sort of status sub-sections, there's the base elements all being damage with a unique component, and then corrosive magnetic viral for the three respective pool types, I wanted to mimic the effects of old viral but for all pool types, as Void is a neutral/all rounder element. You may say that the reducing it by a percentage and increasing damage output (void vs viral/cor/magnetic) are effectively similar, but they do have unique interactions with things such as percentage health damage, as well as being able to synergize well together. Stacking, no cap. Procs have a duration of 4 seconds. Every proc triggers a bullet attractor around the impacted area. bullet attractor absorbs all bullet that enter Every proc adds a stack of "void decay". decay reduces the enemy's current and max health, armour and shields by 3.5% per stack enemy current health, armour & shields = current * (1 - [0.035 * {1 + void modifier}]) by 10 procs when decay kicks in the target will have 30.0% reduced total health, armour, and shields n = number of void procs affecting target Status Efficacy: Spoiler The Issue: All weapons of an equal status chance benefit the same amount from building for damage procs, however they do not benefit the same from debuffs. Damage procs give an effective DPS increase based on your base status chance, but no other stats. This means if you take any two weapons with equal status chances, but differing stats elsewhere, they will always both get the same effective DPS increase from building for damage procs. As mentioned above, this is not true for debuff procs. Debuff procs scale off of not just your status chance for their effective DPS increase, but also the rate you are able to proc them at. Since fire-rate affects the effective DPS increase from debuff procs, this means weapons that are faster firing and can proc quicker, will get a larger effective DPS boost from stacking debuffs. This creates a divide in weapon building that most players are not aware of, where building a weapon for debuff procs will either be stronger or weaker than the DPS boost damage procs would grant. That may have been confusing, and you may not understand what I meant, so I will use math and real world comparisons below to elaborate.The purpose of status efficacy is to close this divide, and make it so there are no stats aside from the status chance value itself affecting what procs are most powerful on your weapon, you will simply be building procs around the enemy weakness, or even personal preferences. Viral: 1 stack: +100% incoming damage to health first proc grants 100% extra damage to health 2 stacks: +125% incoming damage to health second proc and all subsequent procs up to the cap only grant 25% damage to health, four times less effective than the initial proc 3 stacks: +150% incoming damage to health DE implemented this non-linear per proc scaling as an attempt to balance the slow and high fire-rate debuff power discrepancy, this shows they are aware of this issue and wish to fix it, they just didn't implement a proper fix. Now, since the first proc is more powerful, and high fire-rate weapons apply their debuffs in shorter intervals, they benefit from this first proc bonus more easily than slow firing weapons do. It was an attempt to fix the clear debuff proc power divide but fell short and did not solve the issue in the slightest. So now that I've gotten all the issues out of the way, allow me to introduce you to status efficacy, Warframe's solution to the debuff proc imbalance.Beware, math and comparisons! Spoiler Opticor Vandal (slow firing): 651 DPS Burston Prime (fast firing): 306 DPS Now we add a simple max rank Infected Clip (+90% toxin), and calculate the DPS while including the DPS of the toxin procs. Opticor Vandal: 3035 DPS Burston Prime (fast firing): 1428 DPS Opticor Vandal (slow firing): 3035 / 651 = 4.66x dps increase Burston Prime (fast firing): 1428 / 306 = 4.67x dps increaseAs explained above, despite their status chances being the only similar values, they get the same effective DPS increase from building for damage procs. These two values denoting effective DPS increase are ~0.28% apart, this would be due to very minor rounding. Now, we take those same two weapons, base DPS. Once again we simply add a few mods, rank 2 Infected Clip (+45% toxin) + rank 2 Cryo Rounds (+45% cold), so you get the same 90% elemental increase Infected Clip would grant, just as viral instead. We then account for the DPS boost of the viral procs this time, and calculate effective increase. Opticor Vandal (slow firing): 1824 DPS Burston Prime (fast firing): 3265 DPS Opticor Vandal (slow firing): 1824 / 651 = 2.80x dps increase Burston Prime (fast firing): 3265 / 306 = 10.67x dps increaseAs shown above, despite their status chances being the exact same, they still have drastically different effective DPS increases from debuff procs due to their differing fire-rates.Building for Toxin (a damage proc) on Opticor Vandal is 2.03x more effective for increasing your DPS as opposed to how effective building for viral, a debuff proc, would be. Despite having a solid status chance of 30%, being more than viable for any status builds, it is rewarded much more for building for damage procs as opposed to debuff procs (even when comparing the damage proc to viral, a super over-tuned debuff proc that drastically needs a nerf).Building for Viral (a debuff) on Burston Prime is 2.64x more effective for a DPS increase than building for Toxin, a damage proc, would be. Much like the above, it's a weapon with 30% status chance, perfectly viable for any status builds. Due to it's high rate of fire, it's now rewarded a significant deal more for building with a debuff proc in mind, than it would be for building directly for damage status procs.(a status build does not mean exclusively status, just that it incorporates status procs in some way, hybrids fit this as well, which Opticor Vandal is) Among all status types, the only stat that dictates their effective increase from damage procs is the status chance stat. This means the effective dps increase from damaging status procs is equal for all weapons, so long as they have an equal status chance. For debuff procs however, this also hinges on a weapon's firerate, which means debuff procs and damage procs have different scalars. This discrepancy between the scaling of the two types of procs creates a massive gap in how different proc types would buff your weapon's damage per second. Slower firing weapons benefit more from damage procs than they would from debuff procs, and the opposite is true for debuff procs. To me this seems to be a glaring imbalance in the status system, that simply swapping out the type of proc you're built for on your weapon can drastically alter how it will perform.The Fix: As you can see by the graph above, the more frequently a weapon is able to shoot/attack, the lower it's status efficacy will be. Status efficacy will be a modifier to the application of all debuff procs. It will be tied to each weapon, and based off of their base true fire-rate or attack speed. It needs to be the base value so that adding fire-rate or removing it doesn't mess with your status efficacy value, it needs to be static. Since it will be a multiplier, this means you will not always be applying exactly 1 stack of a status per proc. There will be times where it is not an integer, and you will be applying "partial procs". I give examples of both partial procs, and status efficacy in a real world implementation by comparing different weapons and their efficacy.Partial Procs and their Application: 1 proc: affected by 1 stack of debuff proc 1.7 procs: affected by 1 stack of debuff proc 2 procs: affected by 2 stacks of debuff proc 2.5 procs: affected by 2 stacks of debuff proc With Efficacy: Using Boltor Prime (base fire-rate of 10.0), Exergis (base fire-rate of 3.33), Opticor Vandal (base charge-rate of 0.6s, fire-rate of 2.0), Rakta Cernos (base charge-rate of 0.25s, fire-rate of 1.0)For my comparisons I am assuming all weapons have 100% status chance, as comparing weapons of different status chances completely invalidates the comparison. The reasoning for me choosing the weapons I did was simple, I wanted to demonstrate that this still functions properly for charged weapons, and for Boltor Prime it was because a flat 10.0 fire-rate makes for clean math. Boltor Prime: 10.0 fire-rate = 0.5x efficacy ~0.50x status efficacy 50% decreased debuff proc effectiveness applies 0.5 debuff procs per proc (two procs to apply a single debuff stack) 0.1s per shot, 0.5 stacks per procs, 5 stacks per second. 20 procs to cap a debuff status. 2.0s to fully stack viral. Exergis: 3.33 fire-rate = 1.5x efficacy ~1.50x status efficacy 50% increased debuff proc effectiveness applies 1.5 debuff procs per proc (two procs to apply three debuff stacks) ~0.30s per shot, 1.5 stacks per procs, 5 stacks per second. 7 procs to cap a debuff status. ~2.1s to fully stack viral (ignoring multishot), 0.7s to fully stack viral after accounting for multishot. this would be equal to boltor at 2.0s exactly to cap a debuff but due to the fact of the fire-rate not being perfectly divisible it takes a fraction longer Opticor Vandal: effective fire-rate = (2 / [0.6 * 2 + 1])~0.909 fire-rate = ~5.5x efficacy ~5.5x status efficacy for charged weapons the charge completion is multiplied by efficacy for every shot 450% increased debuff proc effectiveness at full charge applies 5.5 procs per proc (one proc to apply 5 debuff stacks) a half charged shot would have it's efficacy multiplied by 0.5 (50% charged) resulting in a 2.75x efficacy multiplier 1.1s per shot, 5.5 stacks per proc, 5 stacks per second. Two procs to cap a debuff status. 2.2s to fully stack viral (ignoring the explosion), accounting for the explosion and it's chance to proc another status, it would take 1.1s to fully stack viral. this would be equal to boltor at 2.0s even to cap a debuff but due to the fact it takes longer than a full second to fire a shot it will in practice take a fraction longer Rakta Cernos: effective fire-rate = (1 / [0.25 * 1 + 1])~0.80 fire-rate = ~6.25x efficacy ~6.25x status efficacy for charged weapons the charge completion is multiplied by efficacy for every shot 525% increased debuff proc effectiveness at full charge applies 6.25 procs per proc (one proc to apply 6 debuff stacks) a half charged shot would have it's efficacy multiplied by 0.5 (50% charged) resulting in a 3.125x efficacy multiplier 1.25s per shot, 6.25 stacks per proc, 5 stacks per second. Two procs to cap a debuff status. 2.5s to fully stack viral. this would be equal to boltor at 2.0s even to cap a debuff but due to the fact it takes longer than a full second to fire a shot it will in practice take a fraction longer Since this change directly addresses the non-linear per proc scaling of debuff procs, with the implementation of status efficacy DE would change all debuff procs to scale linearly. Every viral proc would be 20.0% bonus, not 100% for the first proc and less for the rest. These changes mean weapons like snipers and bows are no longer left behind when it comes to using debuff status procs and benefitting from them. As it is right now, charged weapons and weapons with low fire-rate fail to keep up to weapons like beams, shotguns, and some other status monsters. This is due to their low status procs per second, even when comparing two weapons with equal status chances and differing fire-rates. This status efficacy mechanic directly accounts for this weakness, without actually changing the base status of a weapon, since it relies entirely on base fire-rate and only increases how powerful procs are when you get them, but doesn't increase your frequency of said procs. Final Tweaks and Changes Spoiler With the extensive changes contained in this rebalance, many mods and warframe abilities needed slight tweaks to function correctly. In this section I go over all of those outliers and edge-cases that need small tweaks to function in the new systems. Mod Changes: Spoiler Parazon Mods (New!) Nimble Execution (Parazon): +15.0m range to parazon gapclose finishers(New!) Airborne Acrobatics (Parazon): +20.0m range to parazon void-grappleResistance Mods (New!) Deflective Shielding (Warframe): +40% shield resistances to all damage types(New!) Shield Surge (Companion): +40% shield resistances to all damage types(New!) Heavy Shielding (Mech): +40% shield resistances to all damage types(New!) Shield Overflow (Archwing): +40% shield resistances to all damage types(New!) Void Shielding (Railjack): +40% shield resistances to all damage types(New!) Kinetic Void-plating (Warframe): +35% armour resistances to all damage typesDiamond Skin (Warframe): +45% Radiation Resistance -> +30% Radiation ResistanceAntitoxin (Warframe): +45% Toxin Resistance -> +30% Toxin ResistanceFlame Repellent (Warframe): +60% Heat Resistance -> +30% Heat ResistanceInsulation (Warframe): +60% Cold Resistance -> +30% Cold ResistanceLightning Rod (Warframe): +60% Cold Resistance -> +30% Electricity ResistanceArmour ModsAll +armour mods now grant more armour to your armour bar/pool, as opposed to granting resistances. +Resistances is the new way to get damage reduction for health, armour, and shields.Hallowed Reckoning (Oberon): Reckoning Augment: enemies affected by Reckoning spawn zones that increase ally armour by 250 and deal 150 damage to enemies over 10s -> enemies affected by Reckoning spawn zones that increase all resistances to ally armour and health by 5% and deals 150 damage to enemies for 10 secondsIronclad Charge (Rhino): Rhino Charge Augment: each enemy hit increases armour by +50% for 10s -> each enemy hit grants +5% armour resistances to all damage types for 10sHealth Conversion (Warframe): health orbs grant +450 armour, stacking up to 3x, taking damage consumes a stack after 3s -> health orbs grant +12.5% armour resistances to all damage types, stacking up to 3x, taking damage consumes a stack after 3sSynth Fiber (Companion): health orbs increase companion armour by 100% for 12s -> health orbs increase companion armour resistances by 30% to all damage types for 12sIndomitable Matrix (Railjack): -12% breach chance, +15% shield regen during breach, +30% armour when below 36% hull -> -12% breach chance, +15% shield regen during breach, +30% armour resistances to all damage types when below 35% hullArmour Reductions / StripAbating Link (Trinity): Link Augment: reduces enemy armour by 45% on enemies targeted by Link -> increases damage to armour by 45% on enemies targeted by LinkSeeking Shuriken (Ash): Shuriken Augment: enemies hit have armour reduced by 70% for 8s -> enemies hit take +70% bonus damage to armour for 8sSonic Fracture (Banshee): Sonic Boom Augment: all enemies hit have armour reduced by 70% for 8s -> all enemies hit take +70% bonus damage to armour for 8sFracturing Crush (Mag): Crush Augment: all enemies affected by crush have armour reduced by 50% and are immobilized for 7 seconds -> all enemies affected by crush take +50% bonus damage to armour and are immobilized for 7 secondsCorrosive Projection (Aura): -18% armour to all enemies -> +20% damage to enemy armourSharpened Claws (Kavat): kavat attacks dealing 300% damage and reducing armour by 120% -> kavat attacks dealing 300% damage, damage is doubled against armourAmalgam Argonak Metal Auger (Argonak): damage from daggers reduces armour by 6 -> 15% of damage dealt from daggers bypasses armour and damages healthShattering Impact (Melee): impact damage reduces enemy armour by 6 -> impact damage ignores armour resistances Arcane Changes Spoiler Arcane Barrier: On Shield Damaged: 6% chance to instantly restore all shields, 6s cooldown -> 15% chance for +25% resistances to shields for 15sArcane Guardian: On Damaged: 15% chance for +900 armour for 20s -> 15% chance for +15% resistances to armour and health for 20sArcane Ultimatum: On Finisher Kill: +1200 armour for 45s -> +20% resistances to armour and health for 45sArcane Tanker: On Archgun Equipped: +1200 armour for 60s -> +20% resistances to armour and health for 60s Warframe Changes Spoiler Atlas: Rubble: instead of granting armour when health is full, it now instead adds resistances to your armour and health each piece of rubble grants 1 stack, cap of 30 stacks (45% resistances) each stack of rubble grants 1.5% damage resistances to health and armour pools as well as replenishes 3% of your total armour bar/pool rubble decays at a rate of 1 rubble per 4 seconds picking up rubble resets and pauses the decay timer for 8 seconds Chroma: Elemental Ward (Cold): instead of granting 150% bonus armour, it now grants 15% resistances to health Vex Armor: the damage bonus will charge from damage to health and armour instead of just health, and the armour bonus will be changed to grant up to +35% resistances to armour Grendel: Passive: no longer gains armour per enemy held in his stomach, now gains +3% resistances to armour and health for each enemy contained within Hildryn: Passive: 1000ms bonus to base shield-gate duration, overshields have their own mini shield-gate as well Inaros: Scarab Swarm: charging this ability no longer grants passive bonus armour, it now converts health to armour and health reductions instead of 29 health -> +1 armour conversion, it is now 100 health -> +1% resistances to armour and health this is now capped at 40 stacks as opposed to 100. Oberon: Renewal: instead of granting armour it now grants +5% resistances to armour and health Octavia: Metronome: no longer grants armour to all allies within the aura, it now grants +3.5% resistances instead Rhino: Rhino Charge: works the exact same, except now for each enemy hit you replenish 5% of your total armour bar/pool, scales with power strength. Iron Skin: the scaling formula for this had to be changed to account for the new armour system Iron Skin EHP = (([iron skin base health + (2.5 * current armour)] * armour resistance) * (1 + ability strength) + absorbed damage) * armour resistances iron skin base health is dependent on the ability level current armour is the amount of armour you have at the time of casting the ability ability strength = 100 - ability strength from mods absorbed damage is all damage absorbed from enemy attacks during the invulnerability period armour resistance is the effective health multiplier your resistances grant, it is based off of the value your armour has to all damage types, this only counts full resistance buffs, not singular damage type resistance buffs if you have 95% resistance to all damage types on your armour, this is an effective health multiplier of 20.0x, meaning your iron skin gets a 20.0x multiplier to it's health value Valkyr: Warcry: no longer grants bonus armour, now grants +5% resistances to armour Wukong: Defy: no longer grants armour based on damage absorbed, instead grants up to 25% resistances to armour for both wukong and his clone Focus Changes Spoiler Enduring Tides: +200% health and armour for operatorThe resistance scales with ranks 50/100/150/200.Stone Skin: +40% resistances to armour and health for operatorThe resistance scales with ranks 10/20/30/40. Conclusion: Well, that was a lot to take in. I have spent plenty of time doing math, pondering, and coming up with ideas for all of this. I've taken feedback from many people, and this is what I was able to churn out. There may be some slight issues with this balancing but those can of course be tweaked once implemented and tested, I am not a dev from DE so I am not able to implement and test these numbers and tweaks on my own. I don't really know what to put here, brain is kinda dead, took a bit to write. Hope y'all enjoyed reading, looking forward to any and all feedback. Thanks to anyone who made it to the end, you taking the time to read this means a lot to me! Feedback is very appreciated, I love this game and want to see it thrive. Seeing these changes implemented in any form (especially the main offenders like armour and enemy scaling) would be absolutely fantastic.Want to support me in my journey to improve Warframe? Feel free to head on over to one of the following links to view another one of my balance threads! Spoiler Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F2O. Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 FIRST Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThatDogGirl Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 Super great, I hope DE sees this Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VoidArkhangel Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 hace 45 minutos, Maggy dijo: Every proc creates a small visual marker around the point of impact called a "puncture". So puncture's effect is puncture? what about something like "breaking point". Im not so sure about the magnetic but overall Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bnuy Posted April 7, 2021 Author Share Posted April 7, 2021 3 minutes ago, VoidArkhangel said: So puncture's effect is puncture? what about something like "breaking point". I didn't put too much thought into the names haha, I like that though! Status names were just what was in my head at the time of getting this all down on paper, gonna update that real quick cuz that's much much better than puncture. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(XBOX)Rylor Threev Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 A very interesting post, I'll admit I didn't read every single word, but I did get the whole core game mechanics rebalance idea. The thing is: I don't think I've ever seen a developer changing these things based on what a forum post says, they might take some concept ideas from the forums but I think that's where they stop. Before Inaros, there was this "Beast" frame with no shields and lots of health created by a forum user that was even earned a spot during a Prime Time, there was also another forum user that claimed he created Grendel, and back when DE was asking for ideas for a new community created warframe, the one we know as Xaku, I suggested a warframe that had cooldowns for the abilities instead of energy, and now we have Lavos (not that I'm saying Lavos was my idea) Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see some (much needed) changes to warframe, but as I mentioned before, don't think it will happen anytime soon. Edit: I think the no stack cap part is a bit too much, we are already very overpowered Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ReddyDisco Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BandanaCat Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 Everything sounds very good, just needs a little bit of tweeking. <3 Now ... lets talk about the IMPACT ! As of now, how mercy kill / finisher works is, that it is a perfect execute, killing any anymy that has 5% or lower hp (be it 100hp or 100 milion hp). And since the proc would cap at 10 stacks and be X% to open them to a mercy kill, you in theory just roll the X% over and over again with impact procs untill you "get the right roll". This would be a huge problem, since : a) You in theory can kill even level cap enemies since the mercy kill ignores the amount of hp the enemy has. b) Since its a proc, you can refresh it as many time and as fast as you want (this needs to be changed a little, like "further procs only refresh the duration and do not refresh the chance on opening enemies to a mercy kill / finisher). Solution to the problem would be a) Changing the impact proc effect b) Changing how mercy kill / finisher works alongside with parazon modding Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(PSN)Madurai-Prime Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 No thank you, the whole point of having different factions is to build for them. If you don't like armor then strip it or make them more susceptible to damage via the 1000 ways we have via frames and elements. Element damage like blast and impact and puncture could use a tweak or a rework, sure, but I disagree with game wide stat changes just because someone doesn't like dealing with armor. If people can solo Steel path Mot there's literally no issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BandanaCat Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 4 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said: No thank you, the whole point of having different factions is to build for them. If you don't like armor then strip it or make them more susceptible to damage via the 1000 ways we have via frames and elements. Element damage like blast and impact and puncture could use a tweak or a rework, sure, but I disagree with game wide stat changes just because someone doesn't like dealing with armor. If people can solo Steel path Mot there's literally no issue. This was meant to bring diversity to the game, so that ppl dont have to use the 10 or so frames for every long run mission. Also diversity to modding, bcs ... well lets be honest everything is just viral slash .... As of now, this is just an idea, everything can be still tweeked / changed. The fact that you dont like it, doesnt meant that its bad, I also dont like some parts from the original post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gremlin Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 9 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said: No thank you, the whole point of having different factions is to build for them. If you don't like armor then strip it or make them more susceptible to damage via the 1000 ways we have via frames and elements. Hey guess what, there's a meta build for most guns/melees, and the one of the only things you should swap around on it is the bane for which you're fighting against. There's also the fact that you never have to swap out your bane of grineer, as the other factions are bent completely over even without actually swapping the bane slot out. Why not change effectiveness to other elements like OP suggested to have more build variety that actually matters? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lorelei Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 1 hour ago, Maggy said: Cold: Yes yes yes a thousand times yes, please. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Voltage Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 Separating Critical hits from Status is not something I will get behind as that will just not feel good to use in practice. I really don't see the problem where gear progresses from weapons with: Neither good Crit nor Status Having alright Crit or Status Having both Crit and Status Separating Crit and Status will actually cripple many weapons, and really shoehorn builds the same way the current system does, especially if efficacy is added. Weapons like the Synapse or Amprex will suffer immensely here compared to the Convectrix or Phantasma more than they do now. The proposed changes really just appear to make the power ceiling problem in this game even more apparent as well, and enemies are already weak since Warframe Revised. The problem Warframe's combat has fallen into is that the power limit in the arsenal lacks meaning or use. The Steel Path was a slight crack at this, but that offers little depth once the starchart is completed. The other unavoidable problem is that there are too many damage types. Making "everything viable" is the approach that led Melee into the poor state it is in now where they are almost all too powerful with many dealing primarily Slash damage. On the part about changing enemy scaling, I am of the opinion Armored enemies are too weak, and Health + Shield and Health based enemies need to be massively scaled up to compete with armored targets. Having some factions harder to deal with than others makes perfect sense to me, and that is only natural. If you make every faction feel similar in eHP, then they are mostly just a bunch of skinned enemies with few variance aside from enemies like Ancients and Sentients. Enemy diversity should be a huge priority as well to combat the power ceiling. I really enjoyed reading this, and lots of good thought was put here, but I am doubtful this would have any practical impact on the way the game is played. One week after these hypothetical changes are out, math will solve the question of what kind of build is optimal, and you are back to square one with weak enemies and insanely powerful weapons with a lack of meaning or engagement with enemies. There are just way too many changes here that disrupt the investment of hundreds of thousands of hours across the playerbase. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LillyRaccune Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 5 hours ago, Maggy said: a very unique mechanic Sorry, you can't use the adverb very with the absolute adjective unique. "Hail, Webster!" (just kidding) Joking aside, I want to read this post, I want to understand it. Well researched, nicely prepared, and smartly formatted. However my A.D.D. won't allow me to concentrate enough to read the whole post. I hope your efforts will bring balance to the Force. May the Force be with you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bnuy Posted April 8, 2021 Author Share Posted April 8, 2021 6 hours ago, (XBOX)Rylor Threev said: A very interesting post, I'll admit I didn't read every single word, but I did get the whole core game mechanics rebalance idea. The thing is: I don't think I've ever seen a developer changing these things based on what a forum post says, they might take some concept ideas from the forums but I think that's where they stop. Before Inaros, there was this "Beast" frame with no shields and lots of health created by a forum user that was even earned a spot during a Prime Time, there was also another forum user that claimed he created Grendel, and back when DE was asking for ideas for a new community created warframe, the one we know as Xaku, I suggested a warframe that had cooldowns for the abilities instead of energy, and now we have Lavos (not that I'm saying Lavos was my idea) Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see some (much needed) changes to warframe, but as I mentioned before, don't think it will happen anytime soon. Edit: I think the no stack cap part is a bit too much, we are already very overpowered As much as I agree having no cap will make us almost too strong, I think this is alleviated by the fact that you get more extra dps from proccing more damage procs than stacking hundreds of debuff procs. I see the "well DE won't implement any of this" argument lots, and while I agree it's unlikely they will see this or take input from it, I am very hopeful for the potential of that to happen. 5 hours ago, XGDbvyg6 said: Everything sounds very good, just needs a little bit of tweeking. <3 Now ... lets talk about the IMPACT ! As of now, how mercy kill / finisher works is, that it is a perfect execute, killing any anymy that has 5% or lower hp (be it 100hp or 100 milion hp). And since the proc would cap at 10 stacks and be X% to open them to a mercy kill, you in theory just roll the X% over and over again with impact procs untill you "get the right roll". This would be a huge problem, since : a) You in theory can kill even level cap enemies since the mercy kill ignores the amount of hp the enemy has. b) Since its a proc, you can refresh it as many time and as fast as you want (this needs to be changed a little, like "further procs only refresh the duration and do not refresh the chance on opening enemies to a mercy kill / finisher). Solution to the problem would be a) Changing the impact proc effect b) Changing how mercy kill / finisher works alongside with parazon modding There may still be some issues with the impact status, that's less of a result of the direct procs and more a result of how Mercy Finishers function. I'm sure some changes could be made to help this work better and not be abusable at higher levels, but at the moment I don't have any ideas. 5 hours ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said: No thank you, the whole point of having different factions is to build for them. If you don't like armor then strip it or make them more susceptible to damage via the 1000 ways we have via frames and elements. Element damage like blast and impact and puncture could use a tweak or a rework, sure, but I disagree with game wide stat changes just because someone doesn't like dealing with armor. If people can solo Steel path Mot there's literally no issue. This would still have you building for factions specifically with damage types, this just reduces the power gap between armour enemies and non-armoured. This power gap is a huge issue with the game as it currently is, the only reason slash is considered strong is because you can entirely bypass it, essentially bypasses the power gap. This however does not address the issue of bringing armoured enemies more in-line with standard units. Armoured units are of course meant to be strong, they are armoured, but this armour is hundreds of times more effective than shields. That combined with the fact that it scales non-linearly in an extra way, that shields don't, mean it's impossible to have a proper balance curve that works at all levels of content. The scaling difference is too drastic. 3 hours ago, Voltage said: Separating Critical hits from Status is not something I will get behind as that will just not feel good to use in practice. I really don't see the problem where gear progresses from weapons with: Neither good Crit nor Status Having alright Crit or Status Having both Crit and Status Separating Crit and Status will actually cripple many weapons, and really shoehorn builds the same way the current system does, especially if efficacy is added. Weapons like the Synapse or Amprex will suffer immensely here compared to the Convectrix or Phantasma more than they do now. The proposed changes really just appear to make the power ceiling problem in this game even more apparent as well, and enemies are already weak since Warframe Revised. The problem Warframe's combat has fallen into is that the power limit in the arsenal lacks meaning or use. The Steel Path was a slight crack at this, but that offers little depth once the starchart is completed. The other unavoidable problem is that there are too many damage types. Making "everything viable" is the approach that led Melee into the poor state it is in now where they are almost all too powerful with many dealing primarily Slash damage. On the part about changing enemy scaling, I am of the opinion Armored enemies are too weak, and Health + Shield and Health based enemies need to be massively scaled up to compete with armored targets. Having some factions harder to deal with than others makes perfect sense to me, and that is only natural. If you make every faction feel similar in eHP, then they are mostly just a bunch of skinned enemies with few variance aside from enemies like Ancients and Sentients. Enemy diversity should be a huge priority as well to combat the power ceiling. I really enjoyed reading this, and lots of good thought was put here, but I am doubtful this would have any practical impact on the way the game is played. One week after these hypothetical changes are out, math will solve the question of what kind of build is optimal, and you are back to square one with weak enemies and insanely powerful weapons with a lack of meaning or engagement with enemies. There are just way too many changes here that disrupt the investment of hundreds of thousands of hours across the playerbase. The separating status proc damage from critical hits is to reduce the power difference between the standard "hybrid" weapons and guns that are pure status, typically regarded as fodder in Warframe right now (there are some good pure status weapons but they are few and far between). On the issue of enemy scaling being too weak, you can read my above reply to someone about how armour scaling is just incompatible with shield scaling or other forms of scaling. As it is, enemies with armour will always be tankier than units with shields or just raw health. Scaling will need to be looked at as a result from this, but having all of the scaling function similarly means it's actually possible to balance for all types of resistances (health, armour, shields). As it is now, the effective health increase from armour scaling just makes too big of a divide in balancing between factions and types. This rebalance also addresses the issue of weapons that rely solely on raw damage, with poor critical and status stats, being entirely outclassed in any content that isn't status immune bosses like Eidolons. tldr; enemy scaling will be getting a massive buff to make them feel properly tanky, but armour scaling is brought in-line with shields to fix power discrepancy There are still issues with enemy engagement, this really is only addressable by adding more interesting and unique enemies, such as the new Deimos enemies like the Saxum and Jugulus. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bnuy Posted April 8, 2021 Author Share Posted April 8, 2021 1 hour ago, LillyRaccune said: Sorry, you can't use the adverb very with the absolute adjective unique. "Hail, Webster!" (just kidding) Joking aside, I want to read this post, I want to understand it. Well researched, nicely prepared, and smartly formatted. However my A.D.D. won't allow me to concentrate enough to read the whole post. I hope your efforts will bring balance to the Force. May the Force be with you. I fixed the grammatical error, am usually baked out of my mind while working on things like these so I tend to make lots of those. Hopefully your A.D.D. will give you a break eventually if you actually do want to read this post, but regardless I appreciate the support. 🧡 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThatDogGirl Posted April 8, 2021 Share Posted April 8, 2021 Now the next part is to rebalance all mods, add specific slots for rivens, utility mods like reload and magazine, and an extra exilus slot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bnuy Posted April 8, 2021 Author Share Posted April 8, 2021 3 minutes ago, ByteCruncher. said: Now the next part is to rebalance all mods, add specific slots for rivens, utility mods like reload and magazine, and an extra exilus slot Get DE to hire me first then I'll start working on that. 🤣 On a serious note though I'd absolutely love to go more in depth on other issues with Warframe, and the modding system definitely has lots that could be tweaked, but summoning the motivation to make massive posts like this doesn't happen often, so that most likely won't ever be a thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThatDogGirl Posted April 8, 2021 Share Posted April 8, 2021 Get DE to hire me and Ill get on adding this XD Gotta get my game design co-op this summer anyway so might as well apply to work at de Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
f0ba Posted April 8, 2021 Share Posted April 8, 2021 Thank you for making such an in depth post on this topic. Your suggestion about an extra armor bar, reminds me of the Division health model going from HP with armor damage reduction in Div1, to flat armor plates that gates damage to health in Div2. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bnuy Posted April 8, 2021 Author Share Posted April 8, 2021 16 minutes ago, f0ba said: Thank you for making such an in depth post on this topic. Your suggestion about an extra armor bar, reminds me of the Division health model going from HP with armor damage reduction in Div1, to flat armor plates that gates damage to health in Div2. Yeah! I've seen lots of games with this form of armour recently, that's obviously not the reason I chose to go this route. I just spend tons of time sitting and thinking and like, with the way that the armour damage reduction applies to health means armoured enemies were just always stronger than healthy and shielded enemies. It also means that enemies with out some form of scaling damage reduction to match, will always eventually somewhere in the level curve fall behind in tankiness when compared to armour. They do add an interesting "adaptive" damage reduction to some enemies now, such as the new tankier Corpus railjack goons, or the new big Deimos units. This adaptive reduction gives a percentage damage reduction to incoming damage that is based essentially on your on-paper dps. However even if they attempted to balance non-armoured units with armoured by giving this to more non-armoured enemies, it would not fix the issue, as this reduction scales with the players damage per second, not the enemy's level/armour. There really is no way to balance armour in it's current form with health and shields Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DealerOfAbsolutes Posted April 8, 2021 Share Posted April 8, 2021 17 minutes ago, Maggy said: Yeah! I've seen lots of games with this form of armour recently, that's obviously not the reason I chose to go this route. I just spend tons of time sitting and thinking and like, with the way that the armour damage reduction applies to health means armoured enemies were just always stronger than healthy and shielded enemies. It also means that enemies with out some form of scaling damage reduction to match, will always eventually somewhere in the level curve fall behind in tankiness when compared to armour. They do add an interesting "adaptive" damage reduction to some enemies now, such as the new tankier Corpus railjack goons, or the new big Deimos units. This adaptive reduction gives a percentage damage reduction to incoming damage that is based essentially on your on-paper dps. However even if they attempted to balance non-armoured units with armoured by giving this to more non-armoured enemies, it would not fix the issue, as this reduction scales with the players damage per second, not the enemy's level/armour. There really is no way to balance armour in it's current form with health and shields Easiest way without having to rework any of our current mods would to have armor not scale period, but then our damage multipliers to be reigned in by making more components additive. That was my suggestion anyways. 1. Armor doesn't scale. 2. Critical Damage and Viral bonuses additive with Serration. Utility mods can't compete with mods that give an entire new damage multiplier, but if those mods were additive, then we would get the Primed Reach Vs Primed Pressure Point scenario when we already have Condition Overload. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bnuy Posted April 8, 2021 Author Share Posted April 8, 2021 2 minutes ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said: Easiest way without having to rework any of our current mods would to have armor not scale period, but then our damage multipliers to be reigned in by making more components additive. That was my suggestion anyways. 1. Armor doesn't scale. 2. Critical Damage and Viral bonuses additive with Serration. Utility mods can't compete with mods that give an entire new damage multiplier, but if those mods were additive, then we would get the Primed Reach Vs Primed Pressure Point scenario when we already have Condition Overload. To me this seems like you're trying to squash the viral slash meta, which I agree with. Then you go and say it should be additive to serration, as should critical damage. To me this seems poorly thought out, are you trying to address the "core mods" issue in builds? For me changing the modding system to some degree would fix this without directly ruining an entire portion of the damage system. They could add separate mod tabs, similar to how we have in the Plexus, and expand the Exilus mods to include more of the quality of life ones and augments and call it a day. I do not see how changing viral and critical damage bonuses to being additive with base damage addresses these issues without creating many more of it's own. I do absolutely agree with what you seem to be trying to accomplish though! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Voltage Posted April 8, 2021 Share Posted April 8, 2021 1 hour ago, ByteCruncher. said: Now the next part is to rebalance all mods, add specific slots for rivens, utility mods like reload and magazine, and an extra exilus slot Reload Speed is not utility, Riven Mods don't need their own slot, and a single Exilus is enough. You're still bound to 60 capacity (80 for Kuva weapons). Rebalancing Mods would be a good idea, except that DE needs to understand ahead of time that the ceiling will be brought down, but player choice will likely be unchanged. There will always be efficiency and optimization, no mod changes will change that. Some mods are outliers, but even then there is still a massive core issue that even this thread doesn't address. AOE is strictly better than single target with no exception and has been the case for years. It's an inevitable fate for this game that everyone gravitates towards AOE damage sources. No status or damage rework will make the grinlok comparable to a Tonkor in terms of practicality. You also need to be careful with respecting the amount of investment the playerbase has put into gear as a whole before throwing random changes into the mix. Again, I've read all the posts and replies here, but I still fail to see how these ideas are going to change the game in a positive direction more than a negative one. You're still going to have all the same core problems at play. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DealerOfAbsolutes Posted April 8, 2021 Share Posted April 8, 2021 8 minutes ago, Maggy said: To me this seems like you're trying to squash the viral slash meta, which I agree with. Then you go and say it should be additive to serration, as should critical damage. To me this seems poorly thought out, are you trying to address the "core mods" issue in builds? For me changing the modding system to some degree would fix this without directly ruining an entire portion of the damage system. They could add separate mod tabs, similar to how we have in the Plexus, and expand the Exilus mods to include more of the quality of life ones and augments and call it a day. I do not see how changing viral and critical damage bonuses to being additive with base damage addresses these issues without creating many more of it's own. I do absolutely agree with what you seem to be trying to accomplish though! Armored enemies are the only enemies that can withstand our cocktail of damage multipliers if not shrug them off with their own bloated eHP multiplier, which requires us to use things like Bleed or armor strip abilities, while Corpus and Infested are so squishy, that any damage will do. The issue of core mods is that no utility mods will never see the light of day if the opportunity cost is losing out an entire layer of damage multipliers. By making Base Damage, Critical Damage and Viral Bonuses additive, it would bring down Hybrid weapons which could exploit both Crit Multipliers and Status Multipliers to be closer in line with other weapons that are Purely Crit, Purely Status or Purely Damage. IMO Critical Damage and Viral Bonuses aren't really engaging parts of the damage system. They're just free damage multipliers if your gun has the stats to support them. I already feel like Exilus slots are a band-aid to the opportunity cost issue for modding. The core issue with Warframe's damage system as I see it is that we are in a multipliers arms race with armored enemies. Below a multiplier and the enemy feels like a wall. Above a multiplier and the enemy is paper. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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