Warframe Rebalance // Armour/Health/Shields, Enemy Scaling, Status 3.0

[Cloud]

this is not topic for general discussion, ask a moderator to move it in feedback where proper attention and answers can be gathered.

[bnuy]

25 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

eHP is a misleading stat and is not suited as a general baseline to compare different unit's durability. I mean, you yourself state a few sentences later, that true damage easely deals with armored units. Either units are hard to kill or they are not.

I shot with my Braton P at a lvl 180 Gunners as well as Techs with appropriate builds; Techs died on avarage after 35 bullets, Gunners died after 40. The huge numerical difference in eHP you use as main argument has little practical meaning.

Can get behind mostly everything in this section.

First of all - very convoluted, even for such a complicated topic.
Status Efficacy is not intuitive and makes mundane things unnecessary complicated. Your idea to decide efficacy via status application rate (or fire rate) is a generally bad approach. The difference between Opticor and Boltor is that Opticor is a OHKO weapon, thus by design not suited for buff/debuff status procs, because you do not want to it shoot a second time; Boltor on the other hand will wear targets with many weaker damage instances, thus benefits more from buff/debuff status effects.
What I am trying to say is: weapon archetypes like slow & heavy or light & fast already indicate which procs would work best. There is no need to invent another stat to gauge status.

Furthermore, your Status Efficacy concept directly clashes with your status rework. Since you capped some status effects at 10 stacks, weapons like your suggested Boltor with 0.6 efficacy would not reach maximum status effect. This seems really counterproductive. Bad even.

Next issue "status damage". This stat has no place in Warframe, due to how damaging status procs work. Right now I can either increase my base damage or use more elemental damage and not only boost my damaging status procs, but also every single damage instance my weapon does. Additionally, since status effects stack, I can just increase status chance and inflict more procs, which then deal more damage. Lastly, there is the option of more fire rate.

There are still 14 damage types with practical overlap & redundance. Viral/Magnetic/Corrosive being the same status with different FX doesn't sound particularly captivating.

EHP is not misleading. The armour scales so high, that to balance around the damage reduction they have to give armoured units significantly lower health values. This means when translating the amounts of damage required to kill a specific target, accounting for true damage since it's what people use for armour, the actual effective health in practice is much much lower for armoured units.

Status efficacy is intuitive, it simply means when applying procs they are scaled up or down by a certain amount depending on the base fire-rate of said weapon. This is not preventing you from capping statuses, you just stack them up slower. A Boltor would be applying 0.6 viral per proc instead of a full 1 stack, so it takes more than one proc to build a stack of viral for Boltor. Conversely this means if you're using Opticor you would be getting 4.5 viral stacks from a single proc, allowing you much more effectiveness with your status procs because they are so much harder to get due to the low fire-rate.

Status damage already has a place in Warframe, and it's a fantastic stat that should be used more. We already have an aura mod that grants status damage on heavy attacks. With crits being untied to status, this makes status damage much more prevalent, and opens up builds to being able to be built a much wider variety of ways.

It's not about viral magnetic and corrosive being the same with different FX, they are all meant for specific things. Magnetic is what you want to bring for heavily shielded factions and enemies, but also has a niche of granting energy regeneration so it can be fit into builds for that. Then there's viral and corrosive which are meant to deal with health and armour, as well as having their niches of being able to replenish their respective resource. This is deconvoluting the statuses by making them effectively similar but for different situations.

[bnuy]

14 minutes ago, Cloud said:

this is not topic for general discussion, ask a moderator to move it in feedback where proper attention and answers can be gathered.

I am quite dumb, apologies and thanks for the heads up. 🙏

[Teridax68]

On 2021-04-07 at 7:35 PM, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

No thank you, the whole point of having different factions is to build for them.

This is in fact the very thing the OP tries to bring about, by reworking armor in such a way that one has more of an incentive to build against shields sometimes, instead of building against armor almost all the time. I don't even agree with most of what they're proposing and even I can see that.

[bnuy]

36 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

This is in fact the very thing the OP tries to bring about, by reworking armor in such a way that one has more of an incentive to build against shields sometimes, instead of building against armor almost all the time. I don't even agree with most of what they're proposing and even I can see that.

I appreciate you taking the time to read through the post, out of curiosity, which parts do you agree or disagree with and for what reasons? Feedback is very valuable. 🙏

[Teridax68]

7 minutes ago, Maggy said:

I appreciate you taking the time to read through the post, out of curiosity, which parts do you agree or disagree with and for what reasons? Feedback is very valuable. 🙏

An absolute pleasure, thank you as well for taking the time to write it! Even if I don't agree with much of it, I think it's nonetheless clear you put a lot of time, effort, and thought into making this thread, and I wish more people put at least some amount of care when responding to it, instead of making knee-jerk reactions based on what sometimes seems to have been only a brief reading of the title.

As for my opinion on the topics of your thread, here are my thoughts:

• I completely agree with the criticism of armor and the need to change the current situation, because as long as armor remains a health multiplier, our damage meta will continue to be defined almost exclusively by the need to deal with armored enemies.
• The rework to armor I think would be an improvement from the current situation. I do think, however, that there may need to be more fleshing out of the "feel" of this new component to the health bar, so that it's more distinct from health. Regaining armor from finishers or abilities could be interesting, though that may not be enough given that health can also be restored in similar ways via some frames, weapons, mods, etc.
• I feel the changes to shields and shield gating are likely to be too complex to represent intuitively (you'd likely need markers or something on the shield part of the HP bar), and also potentially such a serious buff to shields that it may make shielded Tenno too difficult to kill, even with the reduced shield gate duration (the hard cap to damage per shield gate is incredibly strong in and of itself). I can easily see Trinity becoming effectively immortal with this kind of change, and I wonder how much Hildryn would need to change as well, as with none she could easily have over a dozen shield gates.
• I agree that the prevalence of Condition Overload is one of the contributing factors to the power of melee over guns. I wouldn't, however, want to make Condition Overload innate to every weapon, as I don't think stacking status effects is really what Warframe is about (so it likely oughtn't be a core feature), and I don't think we need that kind of power or additional global mechanic.
• Similarly, while I agree that slow-RoF weapons often do struggle to make as much use of status as high-RoF weapons, I feel adding a whole new stat to compensate may be needlessly complex compared to simply buffing the base status chance of slow-RoF weapons across the board. For example: if weapon A fires five times a second with a 100% status chance, and weapon B fires once per second with a 500% status chance, the two would apply status at the same rate, even if one would have a much higher rate of fire than the other.
• Status proc change grab bag:
  • I like the change to Impact, it looks like it could make the status effect much better at enabling finishers on really durable targets.
  • I think punch-through makes perfect sense for Puncture, as does ignoring enemy resistances.
  • The update to Slash looks fine.
  • Heat looks fine, though I'd preferably make every DoT follow the same rules.
  • Cold freezing enemies at 10 stacks would be a nice buff, though I feel the shatter effect may be a bit complex for a status effect and may risk causing the entire thing to tread a bit too much on Frost's toes.
  • Electricity looks fine.
  • Reducing a target's max+current health and increasing damage dealt to their health is the same thing in practice, hence why Viral got changed from one to the other in Damage 3.0. I can understand giving Toxin some other sort of utility, but current/max health reduction would be redundant relative to Viral status.
  • The same criticism for Toxin I think can be applied to Void, this time with respect to armor and shield reduction.
  • Gas looks fine, and I think making each component elemental modifier affect different stats on every composite element's status effect is a very interesting idea, as it would allow for much more build variation, and make us consider our modding a bit more when modding for status.
  • Magnetic's Energy regeneration actually really intrigues me; I like the idea of status effects applying self-buffs rather than debuffs, and I do think it'd be nice to have a status effect restore Energy. It'd definitely make the status effect more desirable than it is now, and could potentially give us more room to equip a Focus school other than Zenurik while still meeting our Energy needs.
  • Same praise for Magnetic I think applies for Corrosive and its armor regeneration.
  • Same praise also applies to Viral and its health regeneration.
  • Blast status being an explosion I think makes perfect sense, certainly much more than its current accuracy debuff.
  • I would perhaps reconsider the wording to the confusion debuff on Radiation status, as putting a confused enemy into a "neutral faction" could technically mean Rad-procced enemies wouldn't target one another (as they'd be of the same faction). While I assume both the damage modifiers and aura don't harm players, I think it would still be worth making that very explicit here.

As an addendum, I also have some personal preferences that I think are at odds with the OP's suggestions:

• I personally don't actually see that much value to shields, armor, or even damage type modifiers, and don't feel like they really contribute much to the depth of our combat. I'd be keen to see how the game would look if armor and shields were to be removed, and our damage reworked and rebalanced around an environment where we wouldn't need gates to avoid being one-shot.
• I have a bone to pick with Warframe's damage system as a whole, as I feel it's convoluted and doomed to poor balance, and wrote a thread suggesting essentially a complete overhaul, among several others criticizing the many components of our damage system, e.g. crit, status, weapon modding, etc. While I like many of the ideas presented in your thread's proposed reworks to status effects, I feel like the end result would still be a system that would inevitably reduce itself to a strict meta.
• I'm generally severely averse to adding more systemic complexity to Warframe, or any other game, unless there's very good reason for that to happen, and have a tendency to want to instead simplify things as much as possible, possibly to an excessive degree. Because of this, I'm likely being very critical of some of the new features you're proposing even if they'd make a positive contribution (status efficacy certainly could help low-RoF weapons, even if I feel the stat may be redundant compared to simply buffing some weapons' status chance).

So effectively, given the same topic, my take on how to change things would almost certainly be very, very different, though even so, I think there are quite a few ideas you put forth that I think are worth trying out, and several more that, while perhaps not ideal in my opinion, would almost certainly be a step up from what we have now.

[bnuy]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

An absolute pleasure, thank you as well for taking the time to write it! Even if I don't agree with much of it, I think it's nonetheless clear you put a lot of time, effort, and thought into making this thread, and I wish more people put at least some amount of care when responding to it, instead of making knee-jerk reactions based on what sometimes seems to have been only a brief reading of the title.

As for my opinion on the topics of your thread, here are my thoughts:

• I completely agree with the criticism of armor and the need to change the current situation, because as long as armor remains a health multiplier, our damage meta will continue to be defined almost exclusively by the need to deal with armored enemies.
• The rework to armor I think would be an improvement from the current situation. I do think, however, that there may need to be more fleshing out of the "feel" of this new component to the health bar, so that it's more distinct from health. Regaining armor from finishers or abilities could be interesting, though that may not be enough given that health can also be restored in similar ways via some frames, weapons, mods, etc.
• I feel the changes to shields and shield gating are likely to be too complex to represent intuitively (you'd likely need markers or something on the shield part of the HP bar), and also potentially such a serious buff to shields that it may make shielded Tenno too difficult to kill, even with the reduced shield gate duration (the hard cap to damage per shield gate is incredibly strong in and of itself). I can easily see Trinity becoming effectively immortal with this kind of change, and I wonder how much Hildryn would need to change as well, as with none she could easily have over a dozen shield gates.
• I agree that the prevalence of Condition Overload is one of the contributing factors to the power of melee over guns. I wouldn't, however, want to make Condition Overload innate to every weapon, as I don't think stacking status effects is really what Warframe is about (so it likely oughtn't be a core feature), and I don't think we need that kind of power or additional global mechanic.
• Similarly, while I agree that slow-RoF weapons often do struggle to make as much use of status as high-RoF weapons, I feel adding a whole new stat to compensate may be needlessly complex compared to simply buffing the base status chance of slow-RoF weapons across the board. For example: if weapon A fires five times a second with a 100% status chance, and weapon B fires once per second with a 500% status chance, the two would apply status at the same rate, even if one would have a much higher rate of fire than the other.
• Status proc change grab bag:
  • I like the change to Impact, it looks like it could make the status effect much better at enabling finishers on really durable targets.
  • I think punch-through makes perfect sense for Puncture, as does ignoring enemy resistances.
  • The update to Slash looks fine.
  • Heat looks fine, though I'd preferably make every DoT follow the same rules.
  • Cold freezing enemies at 10 stacks would be a nice buff, though I feel the shatter effect may be a bit complex for a status effect and may risk causing the entire thing to tread a bit too much on Frost's toes.
  • Electricity looks fine.
  • Reducing a target's max+current health and increasing damage dealt to their health is the same thing in practice, hence why Viral got changed from one to the other in Damage 3.0. I can understand giving Toxin some other sort of utility, but current/max health reduction would be redundant relative to Viral status.
  • The same criticism for Toxin I think can be applied to Void, this time with respect to armor and shield reduction.
  • Gas looks fine, and I think making each component elemental modifier affect different stats on every composite element's status effect is a very interesting idea, as it would allow for much more build variation, and make us consider our modding a bit more when modding for status.
  • Magnetic's Energy regeneration actually really intrigues me; I like the idea of status effects applying self-buffs rather than debuffs, and I do think it'd be nice to have a status effect restore Energy. It'd definitely make the status effect more desirable than it is now, and could potentially give us more room to equip a Focus school other than Zenurik while still meeting our Energy needs.
  • Same praise for Magnetic I think applies for Corrosive and its armor regeneration.
  • Same praise also applies to Viral and its health regeneration.
  • Blast status being an explosion I think makes perfect sense, certainly much more than its current accuracy debuff.
  • I would perhaps reconsider the wording to the confusion debuff on Radiation status, as putting a confused enemy into a "neutral faction" could technically mean Rad-procced enemies wouldn't target one another (as they'd be of the same faction). While I assume both the damage modifiers and aura don't harm players, I think it would still be worth making that very explicit here.

As an addendum, I also have some personal preferences that I think are at odds with the OP's suggestions:

• I personally don't actually see that much value to shields, armor, or even damage type modifiers, and don't feel like they really contribute much to the depth of our combat. I'd be keen to see how the game would look if armor and shields were to be removed, and our damage reworked and rebalanced around an environment where we wouldn't need gates to avoid being one-shot.
• I have a bone to pick with Warframe's damage system as a whole, as I feel it's convoluted and doomed to poor balance, and wrote a thread suggesting essentially a complete overhaul, among several others criticizing the many components of our damage system, e.g. crit, status, weapon modding, etc. While I like many of the ideas presented in your thread's proposed reworks to status effects, I feel like the end result would still be a system that would inevitably reduce itself to a strict meta.
• I'm generally severely averse to adding more systemic complexity to Warframe, or any other game, unless there's very good reason for that to happen, and have a tendency to want to instead simplify things as much as possible, possibly to an excessive degree. Because of this, I'm likely being very critical of some of the new features you're proposing even if they'd make a positive contribution (status efficacy certainly could help low-RoF weapons, even if I feel the stat may be redundant compared to simply buffing some weapons' status chance).

So effectively, given the same topic, my take on how to change things would almost certainly be very, very different, though even so, I think there are quite a few ideas you put forth that I think are worth trying out, and several more that, while perhaps not ideal in my opinion, would almost certainly be a step up from what we have now.

Woogh, there's a lot to reply to here so I'll probably do it in chunks as I have motivation (quite tired at the moment, also note i just updated the thread a ton incase you wanted to give it a quick looksie again, but it's really long so i doubt you'd wanna re-read it all).

There definitely would be more fleshing out needing to be done on ways to replenish armour on our end, those were just some half-baked random ideas. The shield-gate changes would absolutely make shields useful, but my intent with this is to have armour as a beefy tool to shrug off damage, and shields a more situational sort of "panic button" for squishier frames. 

Condition Overload needs to be changed, no doubt about it. I'm not absolutely dead-set on that being added as a general mechanic, it could just be changed in some way to only affect status damage not direct damage. With these changes I'm suggesting it leaves open raw damage and raw crit builds (even without hunter munitions and forced status procs) because armour is now linear, and if you account for resistance types you can absolutely still melt in the same way. This means just like raw damage builds would be viable, so would more status base builds that rely less on up-front damage and more on stacking stats like status damage to buff that instead.

Now for efficacy, so, I absolutely see your point and it's something I considered a lot while coming up with this. The way statuses are currently balanced is side effect of the game not currently having a system like this in place, for example viral damage. In viral's current form, the first proc increases damage by 100%, subsequent procs are all 25% up to the cap. With these changes and statuses all being made with linear scaling as my suggestions have, this means two weapons with the same status chance should apply status at about the same rate, even with vastly differing firing rates. Currently viral and procs need to be made to have higher initial proc bonuses that subsequent, because otherwise weapons with lower fire-rates would be so incredibly weak. Imagine if viral was only 25% on the first proc and you were using that on a Hunter Munitions Opticor... I hope you can see my point now.

For heat procs, do you mean they should all refresh the duration like heat does or just add their damage to the current proc? Also, on the topic of how void and toxin are sort of inverse to viral, it is like that and was absolutely my intent. Maybe there is another unique component that could be added for toxin, but first I got to thinking that toxins only affect organic beings of course, and then that took me to the topic of health. Of course bypassing armour and shields entirely I find to be an unhealthy mechanic, it negates the uniqueness of factions and actively works against the design. So I didn't want to keep it how it is, but then I thought what if it was able to synergize with viral, for healthy factions like infested? To me having these synergies between statuses would bring more life to the system, but also that I feel all base elements should have a damage component, and then a unique component. For heat the unique part is the endless scaling, for toxin it's the way it effectively buffs it's own damage against health.

I agree, in current Warframe the armour and shields don't present any uniqueness to factions, as you're able to just entirely bypass them and make enemies much too weak to your damage. Enemy base stats need to be brought up a significant amount, but with armour being unique from health, and you having to actually build to deal with armour and shields rather than ignore them would make them much more relevant to the gameplay over-all. I like parts of the damage system and don't like some parts, this basically addresses most of my issues with it as it stands, but then of course the modding system is a whole 'nother rodeo. Although the modding system and enemy scaling can't be properly balanced until core issues like the armour discrepancy and such is addressed.

[ShortCat]

15 hours ago, Maggy said:

EHP is not misleading. The armour scales so high, that to balance around the damage reduction they have to give armoured units significantly lower health values. This means when translating the amounts of damage required to kill a specific target, accounting for true damage since it's what people use for armour, the actual effective health in practice is much much lower for armoured units.

You said it yourself, you do not fight mountains of stats on armored units. Even without true damage, just one Corrosive proc can still remove millions of eHP. There is no armor problem, and eHP is only smoke & mirrors.

15 hours ago, Maggy said:

Status efficacy is intuitive, it simply means when applying procs they are scaled up or down by a certain amount depending on the base fire-rate of said weapon. This is not preventing you from capping statuses, you just stack them up slower. A Boltor would be applying 0.6 viral per proc instead of a full 1 stack, so it takes more than one proc to build a stack of viral for Boltor. Conversely this means if you're using Opticor you would be getting 4.5 viral stacks from a single proc, allowing you much more effectiveness with your status procs because they are so much harder to get due to the low fire-rate.

I lost the part in the OP where you descripe efficacy stacking, my bad. However, if I did not miss it (again), you did not remove basic status chance. In that case, efficacy just works as a second status chance layer. If you want to gauge the ammount of procs a weapon can inflict, reduce or increase status chance. If you want your Optikor to inflict 4 Viral procs in one shot, give it 400% status chance.

On 2021-04-07 at 6:57 PM, Maggy said:

Mainly these issues are how status procs are not stronger for slower firing weapons, meaning they can't keep up with faster proccing weapons.

Slow weapons usualy compensate for their low fire rate with higher damage. Such weapons are not ment to apply a ton of procs in the first place, because they are ment to OHKO whatever happens to be in crosshair. I do not want my Opticor to freeze a dude in 3 shots; I want that dude dead in 1 shot. And in case my Opticor causes a DoT status, its damage will be significantly higher. Boltor on the other hand, does not OHKO enemies, but shoots many bullets and thus can proc more buff/debuff procs to help bring down the target.
> Slow firing weapon archetypes are not ment for high status application, as they usually compensate for their lower bullets per second with higher damage to kill an enemy in one shot.

15 hours ago, Maggy said:

Status damage already has a place in Warframe, and it's a fantastic stat that should be used more. We already have an aura mod that grants status damage on heavy attacks. With crits being untied to status, this makes status damage much more prevalent, and opens up builds to being able to be built a much wider variety of ways.

There already are several ways to boost status damage even without crits or a status damage stat. Furthermore as I already mentioned, status damage is not needed, because everything it does can be achieved with status chance or damage mods. Let's say a weapon can cause 25dmg fire proc and there is a mod that increases status damage by 100%, said proc would deal 50dmg. Or you put an elemental mod that increases fire damage by 100% and get the same 50dmg proc (however, the weapon would also deal more damage on regular hits). Or you put 100% more status chance mod and proc heat for 25dmg twice for a total of 50dmg.
Empowered Blades works the way Bane mods do, just more restrictive and without extra damage on non status hits.

16 hours ago, Maggy said:

It's not about viral magnetic and corrosive being the same with different FX, they are all meant for specific things. Magnetic is what you want to bring for heavily shielded factions and enemies, but also has a niche of granting energy regeneration so it can be fit into builds for that. Then there's viral and corrosive which are meant to deal with health and armour, as well as having their niches of being able to replenish their respective resource. This is deconvoluting the statuses by making them effectively similar but for different situations.

Not the main point of my criticism. I am an advocate for the idea that different damage types should excel against different health types (=factions). However, not if FX is the sole difference.

[Teridax68]

10 hours ago, Maggy said:

Now for efficacy, so, I absolutely see your point and it's something I considered a lot while coming up with this. The way statuses are currently balanced is side effect of the game not currently having a system like this in place, for example viral damage. In viral's current form, the first proc increases damage by 100%, subsequent procs are all 25% up to the cap. With these changes and statuses all being made with linear scaling as my suggestions have, this means two weapons with the same status chance should apply status at about the same rate, even with vastly differing firing rates. Currently viral and procs need to be made to have higher initial proc bonuses that subsequent, because otherwise weapons with lower fire-rates would be so incredibly weak. Imagine if viral was only 25% on the first proc and you were using that on a Hunter Munitions Opticor... I hope you can see my point now.

I do see your point, but then again, I still think mine stands: at the end of the day, if the issue with low-RoF weapons is that they don't apply enough status procs per hit, I'd say the most direct solution would be to just increase their status chance so they can apply many more status procs per hit. The example I brought up, for example, shows two weapons with vastly different rates of fire applying the same amount of status per second. Effectively, even the current system lets us make low-RoF weapons apply status at the same rate as high-RoF ones, we just need to buff their status chance accordingly, as DE was far too timid when they changed the status chance of slow-firing weapons.

10 hours ago, Maggy said:

For heat procs, do you mean they should all refresh the duration like heat does or just add their damage to the current proc?

You have two options: either you can make Heat procs stack individually like every other DoT, or you can make every other DoT stack in the same way as Heat. I understand there's an intent to make the stacking Heat's "thing", but having its DoT stack differently I think is a bit too technical to be a core differentiator.

10 hours ago, Maggy said:

Also, on the topic of how void and toxin are sort of inverse to viral, it is like that and was absolutely my intent. Maybe there is another unique component that could be added for toxin, but first I got to thinking that toxins only affect organic beings of course, and then that took me to the topic of health. Of course bypassing armour and shields entirely I find to be an unhealthy mechanic, it negates the uniqueness of factions and actively works against the design. So I didn't want to keep it how it is, but then I thought what if it was able to synergize with viral, for healthy factions like infested? To me having these synergies between statuses would bring more life to the system, but also that I feel all base elements should have a damage component, and then a unique component. 

Sure, but my point is that Void and Toxin aren't "inverse" to Viral, Magnetic, or Corrosive, they're he same debuff: reducing a target's current and max health by 50% is the same as increasing all damage to their health by 100%. You are effectively proposing to implement the same debuff twice across your status effects. It may be better in this respect to make one status effect increase damage against armor/health/shields, and the other provide a armor/Energy/health regen bonus.

10 hours ago, Maggy said:

I like parts of the damage system and don't like some parts, this basically addresses most of my issues with it as it stands, but then of course the modding system is a whole 'nother rodeo. Although the modding system and enemy scaling can't be properly balanced until core issues like the armour discrepancy and such is addressed.

This is fair enough, and I agree that modding and scaling are topics that should likely be addressed after we fix some of the more overarching problems to Warframe, namely the current brokenness of armor scaling on enemies.

[bnuy]

5 hours ago, ShortCat said:

snip

You do have a point about the toxin and void, however they do still have some unique parts to them. Damage increase is more a tool for percentage damage to abuse, increase your scaling by an amount, whereas percentage reduction to their total pool would benefit flat damage values more.

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

snip

Something you both seem to misinterpret or misunderstand... Status and efficacy seem similar but are very different. Status chance is the rate at which you apply procs, efficacy is your direct power of the procs you apply. Currently with Warframe, there are no procs that are actually good enough on slow weapon's such as snipers to warrant every properly building them for status unless it's specifically something like Sporothrix with a ridiculous status chance and decent fire-rate. So here's an example...

• Boltor Prime: 10.0 fire-rate, 34.0% status chance
  • Status procs have a final efficacy multiplier of 0.6x
  • 3.40 status procs per second on average before efficacy
  • 2.04 status procs per second on average after efficacy
     
• Opticor: 2.0s charge-rate, 20.0% status chance, now for this example
  we'll pretend Opticor has 34.0% status chance to match Boltor
  • Status procs have a final efficacy multiplier of 4.5x
  • 0.17 status procs per second on average before efficacy
    • this shows that even with a comparable status chance, since it's attacks are applied
      at a much slower rate, that despite it's high status chance it still has an incredibly slow
      application for status effects
  • 0.77 status procs per second on average after efficacy

As you can see the numbers are still not perfect, but this is absolutely a step in the right direction. Weapons of differing fire-rate, even with the same status chance, apply status procs at an incredibly varied rate, this will bring differing types of weapons much more in-line and open them all up to being used much more with status in mind.

[bnuy]

5 hours ago, ShortCat said:

You said it yourself, you do not fight mountains of stats on armored units. Even without true damage, just one Corrosive proc can still remove millions of eHP. There is no armor problem, and eHP is only smoke & mirrors.

Also, this. Entirely incorrect, even when stripping armour up to 90% (i use 90% as a general example because this is the highest amount you can get via weapon's alone with corrosive + heat, without extra abilities or armour strip functions) as explained in my post, you still need to deal 3x the raw damage to kill a heavy gunner compared to true damage, this is a massive issue that only becomes more drastic as levels scale. Level 200 this amount is increased to 4x, and so on.

[Teridax68]

29 minutes ago, Maggy said:

You do have a point about the toxin and void, however they do still have some unique parts to them. Damage increase is more a tool for percentage damage to abuse, increase your scaling by an amount, whereas percentage reduction to their total pool would benefit flat damage values more.

That is far too specific a point of contention to warrant copying the same mechanic on multiple status effects, given the tiny number of sources of percentage-based damage in the game.

Quote

Something you both seem to misinterpret or misunderstand... Status and efficacy seem similar but are very different. Status chance is the rate at which you apply procs, efficacy is your direct power of the procs you apply. Currently with Warframe, there are no procs that are actually good enough on slow weapon's such as snipers to warrant every properly building them for status unless it's specifically something like Sporothrix with a ridiculous status chance and decent fire-rate.

I'm not misunderstanding anything here, you're just ignoring what I've said. I am well aware that efficacy is meant to affect the power of procs, so that you can have your system where low-RoF weapons apply fewer but stronger procs compared to the faster but weaker procs of high-RoF weapons; my point is that you don't need an extra stat to achieve this. As you likely already know, status chance was reworked not long ago to allow for weapons to apply multiple status effects per hit if the chance went over 100%, which means it is entirely feasible for low-RoF weapons to have their status chance drastically buffed so that they can apply many status effects per second, thus making status builds viable. To once again take the example I made in an earlier reply:

• Weapon A deals 5 hits per second, and has a 100% status chance.
• Weapon B deals 1 hit per second, and has a 500% status chance.
• Both weapons apply 5 status effects per second on average, despite their drastic differences in fire rate.

Thus, status efficacy is an unnecessary stat to get the results you want, when you could simply increase status chance.

[bnuy]

25 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

That is far too specific a point of contention to warrant copying the same mechanic on multiple status effects, given the tiny number of sources of percentage-based damage in the game.

I'm not misunderstanding anything here, you're just ignoring what I've said. I am well aware that efficacy is meant to affect the power of procs, so that you can have your system where low-RoF weapons apply fewer but stronger procs compared to the faster but weaker procs of high-RoF weapons; my point is that you don't need an extra stat to achieve this. As you likely already know, status chance was reworked not long ago to allow for weapons to apply multiple status effects per hit if the chance went over 100%, which means it is entirely feasible for low-RoF weapons to have their status chance drastically buffed so that they can apply many status effects per second, thus making status builds viable. To once again take the example I made in an earlier reply:

• Weapon A deals 5 hits per second, and has a 100% status chance.
• Weapon B deals 1 hit per second, and has a 500% status chance.
• Both weapons apply 5 status effects per second on average, despite their drastic differences in fire rate.

Thus, status efficacy is an unnecessary stat to get the results you want, when you could simply increase status chance.

In your example, buffing status chance increases the frequency of procs. This is directly negating the entire point of status to be a chance, doing this to every single slow firing weapon just to make them able to achieve the same results is completely invalidating what status chance at a stat is.

[Teridax68]

7 minutes ago, Maggy said:

In your example, buffing status chance increases the frequency of procs. This is directly negating the entire point of status to be a chance, doing this to every single slow firing weapon just to make them able to achieve the same results is completely invalidating what status chance at a stat is.

That ship has sailed a long time ago. Status chance has stopped being about random chance for a while, and even before then it's always been a question of frequency. To deny this not only fails to acknowledge the state of status in Warframe right now, but also fundamentally misunderstands how statistical chances turn into fairly reliable frequencies when applied to large sets of tries, in this case status chance per hit applied to all the hits we land in any mission.

[bnuy]

48 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

not only fails to acknowledge the state of status in Warframe right now, but also fundamentally misunderstands how statistical chances turn into fairly reliable frequencies when applied to large sets of tries

The state of status right now is this, slash is the most useful proc because it bypasses armour and entirely negates the absolutely ridiculous ehp differences between enemy types. Viral furthers this by applying to health which is all that armour applies to. Debuff procs scale non-linearly due to the fact that slow weapons, regardless of status chance, can not apply them effectively, so the first proc needs to be greatly increased in effectiveness in contrast to the rest of the scaling. Since this first proc effectiveness also applies to faster firing weapons this exaggerates the power gap even more because they're getting that first proc bonus much quicker as well as the subsequent stack bonuses. I know how chances work over time, this is something I did absolutely account for in this rework, if anything the efficacy numbers are just off.

This entire rework basically pushes towards two things, making procs less convoluted across the board, and ensuring that two weapons of differing fire-rates, but with an equal status chance, will have differing frequencies of application, but effectively similar results over time.

[Teridax68]

4 minutes ago, Maggy said:

The state of status right now is this, slash is the most useful proc because it bypasses armour and entirely negates the absolutely ridiculous ehp differences between enemy types. Viral furthers this by applying to health which is all that armour applies to.

This would still be the case even if low-RoF weapons were buffed.

4 minutes ago, Maggy said:

Debuff procs scale non-linearly due to the fact that slow weapons, regardless of status chance, can not apply them effectively, so the first proc needs to be greatly increased in effectiveness in contrast to the rest of the scaling.

Cannot apply them effectively... why? Because if the answer is "their status chance is too low"... just buff their status chance.

4 minutes ago, Maggy said:

This entire rework basically pushes towards two things, making procs less convoluted across the board, and ensuring that two weapons of differing fire-rates, but with an equal status chance, will have differing frequencies of application, but effectively similar results over time.

There's a contradiction between your goals, then, since your way of making low-RoF weapons apply status comparably to fast-firing ones makes the game more convoluted, not less. There really is no need for an extra stat when raising status chances on some weapons would achieve that same goal.

[bnuy]

1 minute ago, Teridax68 said:

This would still be the case even if low-RoF weapons were buffed.

You didn't read the rest of my post then. I'm suggesting everything in it, but as I state armour is the core issue, without changing armour statuses will never be balanced.

3 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Cannot apply them effectively... why? Because if the answer is "their status chance is too low"... just buff their status chance.

No, not because their status chance is too low. It's because they are rolling their chances for their status procs less often, therefore over time even with the same status chance it gets less rolls at procs. This isn't about giving it more of those roll opportunities (changing fire-rate), or buffing it's chance per roll to get a proc(status chance), it's about making two weapon's that proc the same amount of an element with differing fire-rates have the same total effectiveness of said proc. This is to make it so that two weapon's with (example) 100% status chance of forced cold procs, a weapon with a higher fire-rate gets more effectiveness out of it because it's applying it more rapidly. This invalidates status builds on slower weapons like snipers and such unless their status chance is high enough that you can nearly guarantee a proc every shot.

7 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

There's a contradiction between your goals, then, since your way of making low-RoF weapons apply status comparably to fast-firing ones makes the game more convoluted, not less. There really is no need for an extra stat when raising status chances on some weapons would achieve that same goal.

If you read my entire post, I am making everything much less convoluted. Armour no longer scales and now armour reduction is effectively replaced with damage type modifiers, a feature already in the game that doesn't see enough use, while eliminating a problem feature that adds unnecessary bloat (armour scaling), of course I also go on to separate health and armour entirely. This serves to make individual procs shine more in specific areas, of course efficacy will serve as an extra layer of "complication", but it's really not complicated. Each weapon just has an efficacy number as a multiplier to it's procs, this would of course be shown in the arsenal UI for every weapon, and does not change at all via modding, so it doesn't complicate that at all. Over-all, even with efficacy's supposed "confusing nature" the rework cuts out lots of useless bloat and redundant features in the game that currently make balance nearly impossible.

[Joezone619]

I think its about time the devs crack down and take a good look at stuff like this. Unfortunately, they're too busy constantly making new updates, not testing them, and fixing what isn't broken to do any of it. aparently the current direction and state of warframe is the envisioned and correct version of the game according to the devs. And personally? I am not ok with that. If this is the "correct" version of the game and how things should be.... count me out, i don't want a game where every enemy, normal or boss is the same difficulty.

[Teridax68]

1 minute ago, Maggy said:

You didn't read the rest of my post then. I'm suggesting everything in it, but as I state armour is the core issue, without changing armour statuses will never be balanced.

I don't see how you can say this when I clearly did read the rest of your post. I am merely pointing out that the issues with individual status effects like Slash or Viral have nothing to do with weapon rates of fire. There is no need to get defensive over this.

1 minute ago, Maggy said:

No, not because their status chance is too low. It's because they are rolling their chances for their status procs less often, therefore over time even with the same status chance it gets less rolls at procs. This isn't about giving it more of those roll opportunities (changing fire-rate), or buffing it's chance per roll to get a proc(status chance), it's about making two weapon's that proc the same amount of an element with differing fire-rates have the same total effectiveness of said proc. This is to make it so that two weapon's with (example) 100% status chance of forced cold procs, a weapon with a higher fire-rate gets more effectiveness out of it because it's applying it more rapidly. This invalidates status builds on slower weapons like snipers and such unless their status chance is high enough that you can nearly guarantee a proc every shot.

I'm not sure how much more often I can restate this, but buffing status chance would solve your problem. If a weapon fires five times as slowly, but applies five times as many status procs per hit, it will apply equal amounts of those procs as the alternative. Your example here is flawed because you are making the default assumption that both the high-RoF weapon and the low-RoF weapon would have the same status chance, an assumption that has no reason to be made. You have done math on your thread OP more complicated than this, so I'm not sure what's not clicking here.

1 minute ago, Maggy said:

If you read my entire post, I am making everything much less convoluted. 

Not status effects, which are being made more convoluted not simply with the addition of a new stat, but also with reworks to the individual effects that make pretty much all of them far more complex than their current versions. I'm starting to think it was a mistake to respond to your request for elaboration, because it's feeling to me like you're more concerned with defending your ideas than listening to feedback.

[bnuy]

17 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I don't see how you can say this when I clearly did read the rest of your post. I am merely pointing out that the issues with individual status effects like Slash or Viral have nothing to do with weapon rates of fire. There is no need to get defensive over this.

I did not mean to sound defensive, but the point of this post is an update as a whole. I do understand and I believe state in my post that without armour changes (as I have stated many times) slash would still be king, and there would also be no reason to use anything aside from toxin for shielded units as long as that bypasses shields as slash does for armour. I do understand that viral and slash would still very much be king, which is why I made this post in it's entirety. There are many issues being addressed, efficacy, armour scaling, and then just the mess that is the status procs as a whole.

17 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I'm not sure how much more often I can restate this, but buffing status chance would solve your problem. If a weapon fires five times as slowly, but applies five times as many status procs per hit, it will apply equal amounts of those procs as the alternative. Your example here is flawed because you are making the default assumption that both the high-RoF weapon and the low-RoF weapon would have the same status chance, an assumption that has no reason to be made. You have done math on your thread OP more complicated than this, so I'm not sure what's not clicking here.

Buffing every low weapon's status chance now means there are no slower firing "status weapons" or "crit weapons". This is because if you're trying to equalize the discrepancy by buffing status chance by a large amount, even at 4.5x efficacy Opticor would be sitting around 450% status chance. Now, Opticor, a non-status weapon, procs multiple statuses every shot. If you're directly replacing efficacy with buffing the status chance by that amount, it still runs into the same issue for slow weapons with status chances that end up below 100% after, and if you buff status to be equal to whatever the efficacy would be well that creates the additional issue of now every slow firing weapon is a massive status weapon. With the suggestions of my rework there would be viability in raw damage weapons, critical weapons, status weapons, and hybrids. They could each be similar in effectiveness to each other, with the build versatility being left open.

[Teridax68]

13 minutes ago, Maggy said:

I did not mean to sound defensive, but the point of this post is an update as a whole. 

I fully understand this, but that is not my point. My point is that you brought up Slash and Viral status in a discussion around weapons' rates of fire as an explanation for why high-RoF weapons dominate, when those are two separate topics that don't have all that much to do with one another. I am not telling you to only focus on one component of the comprehensive update you're proposing, I'm telling you there are other ways of broaching one of the problems your update tackles.

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Buffing every low weapon's status chance now means there are no slower firing "status weapons" or "crit weapons".

Why not? As your example shows, an Opticor with a massive status chance would apply multiple status effects per shot, which I'd say would absolutely make it a status weapon.

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 If you're directly replacing efficacy with buffing the status chance by that amount, it still runs into the same issue for slow weapons with status chances that end up below 100% after, as well as creating the additional issue of now every slow firing weapon is a massive status weapons.

I don't quite understand the point here: are you saying that if we underbuff the status chance of low-RoF weapons, their status chance would remain underwhelming? That if we were to buff a slow-firing weapon's status chance to become viable at dealing status, it would have a massive status chance? Aren't these all just tautologies?

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With the suggestions of my rework there would be viability in raw damage weapons, critical weapons, status weapons, and hybrids. They could each be similar in effectiveness to each other, with the build versatility being left open.

With the same overarching rework, minus status efficacy, plus status chance buffs to whichever low-RoF weapons you want to be good at status, you'd have exactly all of that in simpler form.

[bnuy]

25 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I fully understand this, but that is not my point. My point is that you brought up Slash and Viral status in a discussion around weapons' rates of fire as an explanation for why high-RoF weapons dominate, when those are two separate topics that don't have all that much to do with one another. I am not telling you to only focus on one component of the comprehensive update you're proposing, I'm telling you there are other ways of broaching one of the problems your update tackles.

If I used viral slash as an explanation for efficacy that was definitely my bad, viral slash is entirely due to armour scaling. Efficacy is very much a separate topic addressing an entirely different issue.

25 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

Why not? As your example shows, an Opticor with a massive status chance would apply multiple status effects per shot, which I'd say would absolutely make it a status weapon.

I mean, personally I don't see Opticor as a status weapon, although that may just be due to the fact that I've gotten used to how poorly procs currently work with slow firing weapons outside of forced cases like Hunter Munitions. (blegh, delete hunter munitions and the new band-aid impact to slash mods pls and actually balance the game)

25 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

I don't quite understand the point here: are you saying that if we underbuff the status chance of low-RoF weapons, their status chance would remain underwhelming? That if we buff a slow-firing status weapon to become viable at dealing status it would have a massive status chance? Aren't these all just tautologies?

I worded that incredibly poorly, not entirely sober and trying to play missions while formulating a response never works well.
Let me re-phrase it, if we are using the values for how efficacy would work, so about 4.5x (450%) and buffing their base statuses by that, then every slow firing weapon would be a status weapon. (this was with the assumption you meant do it to every one, basing the increase on fire-rate, not just specific weapons)
This essentially removes slower firing weapons from having the potential to be designed and balanced around being entirely status based, I realize now Opticor is a poor example for comparison because it's a hybrid weapon. Sporothrix is probably best for an example, as it's an actual slow firing status weapon, one of few in the game. My idea is to balance the hybrid/crit/status classes of weapon's around their current values. Only balancing some of the weapons by increasing their status chance still leaves the core issue present, just masks it for some specific weapons. It seems we just have differing opinions though.

25 minutes ago, Teridax68 said:

With the same overarching rework, minus status efficacy, plus status chance buffs to whichever low-RoF weapons you want to be good at status, you'd have exactly all of that in simpler form.

Yeah, it would be simpler, but in my opinion buffing the chances does not negate the issue at hand, this also serves to further isolate weapon type cross comparisons of effectiveness due to slower weapons now having a much inflated status value to reach the same result, which can be very misleading.

[Teridax68]

4 minutes ago, Maggy said:

I mean, personally I don't see Opticor as a status weapon, although that may just be due to the fact that I've gotten used to how poorly procs currently work with slow firing weapons outside of forced cases like Hunter Munitions.

I don't see the Opticor as a status weapon either, that was just the weapon you cited. Any similarly slow-firing weapon could work as an example for how they could deal meaningful amounts of status with big enough buffs to their status chance.

4 minutes ago, Maggy said:

(blegh, delete hunter munitions and the new band-aid impact to slash mods pls and actually balance the game)

Agreed 100%, I particularly dislike how the most recent mods basically try to make Impact useful by substituting its procs for Slash. It's an admission that IPS really is just all about Slash and nothing else.

4 minutes ago, Maggy said:

Let me re-phrase it, if we are using the values for how efficacy would work, so about 4.5x (450%) and buffing their base statuses by that, then every slow firing weapon would be a status weapon. (this was with the assumption you meant do it to every one, basing the increase on fire-rate, not just specific weapons)

I disagree with this, because unless the weapon applies status at the same average rate as high-RoF status weapons, it's not going to be great at status. Even a slow-firing weapon that can be modded to 100% status isn't going to compete with a Kuva Nukor, for example. Really, the number to look at here isn't status chance or rate of fire individually, but the average number of status effects applied per second, i.e. status chance per hit times fire rate (and times number of projectiles if those are a thing on the weapon).

4 minutes ago, Maggy said:

My idea is to balance the hybrid/crit/status classes of weapon's around their current values. Only balancing some of the weapons by increasing their status chance still leaves the core issue present, just masks it for some specific weapons. It seems we just have differing opinions though.

It does seem so, but I do think there can be some objective discussion around this: there isn't some invisible RoF threshold below which a weapon becomes useless for status, because at the end of the day, you can make any weapon apply any number of status effects per second just by changing their status chance: this wouldn't be masking the issue, this would be balancing the status output of low-RoF in accordance to their fire rate without restricting oneself to the same base status chances as high-RoF weapons. Beyond that, the same mechanics of modding for status and the like would remain unchanged.

4 minutes ago, Maggy said:

Yeah, it would be simpler, but in my opinion buffing the chances does not negate the issue at hand, this also serves to further isolate weapon type cross comparisons of effectiveness due to slower weapons now having a much inflated status value to reach the same result, which can be very misleading.

I don't see how that would isolate weapon types or be misleading, besides perhaps certain players modding some slow-firing weapons for status just because they only saw its status chance and not its fire rate. If anything, I think the current state of status on weapons is misleading, because most weapons are given base status chances all within a very limited range irrespective of their rate of fire, which is why slow-firing weapons suffer.

[FlashExe]

I've read through the original post and a lot of the responses, and I've got a couple things I want to comment on:

 

Status Efficacy:

I think this is a really good idea and this is what I like about it:

1)  This system makes status effects reliable/consistent.  All of your attacks are guaranteed to contribute towards status effects.  (I think this is a major point of contention between Maggy and Teridax68.)

2)  Having a weapon more fully charged increases the status efficacy.

3)  The efficacy diagram and associated formulas being used as a balancing pass to bring slow and fast firing weapons in line with each other, as well as the separation of status from crits.  (By making status independent from critical hits, status can now be viable on everything without compounding to extreme values via crits.)

I've seen the back and forth here, and yeah, DE could just buff the status chances of slow firing weapons.  There's a bit of QOL here that would be left out if they simply did that though.

 

Void/Toxin VS. Viral/Magnetic/Corrosive:

I'm honestly okay with the suggested status procs for these damage types for a couple of reasons:

1)  While these status effects scale linearly when used independently, they scale multiplicatively when used in conjunction with each other.  (You may want to buff the multipliers for toxin and void if you want this though.  This effect is nominal at best.)

2)  Void and toxin are slightly more offensively oriented (on top of the health/armor/shield reductions toxin has bonus flat damage while void makes your shots more likely to hit [and has an especially unique potential if combo-ing with puncture guarantees successive hits on a breaking point]), where as viral, magnetic, and corrosive are slightly more defensively oriented due to the regeneration effects they grant.

 

Is armor and its current implementation still a problem:

I'm inclined to say yes, sort of, I think?  Below is my basic view on the main issue that's still behind it:

I feel that the main, underlying problem with armor and its current implementation isn't the fact that players are highly encouraged to use a couple of particular status effects to deal with it, but rather the fact that players aren't really encouraged to use anything else.  The new S-shaped curves for health/armor/shields, the latest versions of status effects, and shield gating have all helped with this, but it's still kinda there...

 

 

Anyway, all in all I think this is a pretty good post OP.

[bnuy]

37 minutes ago, FlashExe said:

Void/Toxin VS. Viral/Magnetic/Corrosive:

I'm honestly okay with the suggested status procs for these damage types for a couple of reasons:

1)  While these status effects scale linearly when used independently, they scale multiplicatively when used in conjunction with each other.  (You may want to buff the multipliers for toxin and void if you want this though.  This effect is nominal at best.)

I was actually looking into that probably as you were typing this post haha, just updated to a 4%, this reflects a 33% total pool reduction at 10 procs, and ~56% at 20, as opposed to 3% which would be ~27.5 and ~46 respectively.

37 minutes ago, FlashExe said:

Is armor and its current implementation still a problem:

I'm inclined to say yes, sort of, I think?  Below is my basic view on the main issue that's still behind it:

I feel that the main, underlying problem with armor and its current implementation isn't the fact that players are highly encouraged to use a couple of particular status effects to deal with it, but rather the fact that players aren't really encouraged to use anything else.  The new S-shaped curves for health/armor/shields, the latest versions of status effects, and shield gating have all helped with this, but it's still kinda there...

I see what you're gettin' at, and I do definitely agree. Armour scaling is a huge issue, but enemies are also just designed poorly right now, if they were to rework armour like my post suggests I'd expect to see Grineer units with ~80% of their total health pools as armour, meaning you're really rewarded for building to the weaknesses of it. The enemy design would not just be a factor of how much health or damage reduction they have, but also their breakdown of pool types. Some special Grineer units can be given smaller shields, while Corpus units can be given smaller chunks of armour on some rarer units. This really opens up a lot of possibility for making enemies designed with like X health type + X armour type + X shield type, and encourages the player to build around this.
Some examples.

• Heavy Gunner: 500 cloned flesh, 700 ferrite armour
• Bombard: 100 cloned flesh, 1100 alloy armour
• Lancer: 200 cloned flesh, 200 ferrite armour
• Butcher: 100 cloned flesh, 25 ferrite armour
• Scorpion: 25 cloned flesh, 25 ferrite armour, 25 shields
• Some new Grineer unit: 100 cloned flesh, 100 alloy armour, 100 shields

They can play with design like this to greatly increase the diversity of what you're rewarded for building for.

also i just redid the formulas and stuff for the efficacy graph, was looking at it and the numbers were really really strange i dunno how the hell i came up with the formulas to begin with but now they're much more proper, if you're curious take a peek