Slash status effect should no longer deal true damage

[Uhkretor]

5 minutes ago, scam said:

you're casually doing 1,200,000 radiation damage per hit to an alloy armoured unit you are not going to be one-shotting them. Or in your case two shotting, so supposedly you're hitting for at least 600,000 radiation damage per hit.

... Which, I am.

... Thanks in advance for stating the obvious.

 

... Bye now.

[bnuy]

Just now, Uhkretor said:

... Which, I am.

... Thanks in advance for stating the obvious.

 

... Bye now.

What method are you using to achieve these numbers? I am curious.

[Uhkretor]

11 minutes ago, scam said:

What method are you using to achieve these numbers? I am curious.

... A MR30 player with only 133 more ingame playtime than me should already know.

 

Lets try to keep it on-topic, ok? Unless you think there's nothing on-topic to discuss any further.

[bnuy]

Just now, Uhkretor said:

... A MR30 player with only 133 more ingame playtime than me should already know.

 

Lets try to keep it on-topic, ok? Unless you think there's nothing on-topic to discuss any further.

sigh
I'm not disputing it's possible, I am very well aware that it is. As I mentioned earlier I can kill level 9,999 enemies without issue, I'm just wondering what method you're using to achieve this, because it's not typically dealt in one damage instance, like with Mag I can nuke to level cap, but that's not like oh one bullet killed that enemy, it's a synergy between weapons and her abilities etc. So I ask again, what method are you using?

[Uhkretor]

Just now, scam said:

it's not typically dealt in one damage instance

Don't worry, you ended up answering it. The only weapon able to deal that kind of damage in a single shot is Arquebex... And we all know that a Warframe can't take that anywhere... yet.

Now, its open to interpretation whether "1-shot" is dealing it with a single hit, or firing once. My interpretation? Firing once. Anyone else's interpretation? its their interpretation.

[bnuy]

1 minute ago, Uhkretor said:

Don't worry, you ended up answering it. The only weapon able to deal that kind of damage in a single shot is Arquebex... And we all know that a Warframe can't take that anywhere... yet.

Now, its open to interpretation whether "1-shot" is dealing it with a single hit, or firing once. My interpretation? Firing once. Anyone else's interpretation? its their interpretation.

I see. Thank you for elaborating. still curious about your specific method though, also i find it weird you'd be building for that amount of radiation damage to deal with armour when radiation is bad against ferrite and slash is more effective than both radiation against alloy and corrosive against ferrite

[taiiat]

3 hours ago, Uhkretor said:

I'll just let them keep talking while I watch in the sidelines and eating popcorn...

it's for the best, we don't need to help someone dig a hole, they have their own Shovel.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

11 hours ago, Uhkretor said:

... I'm just going to throw it out there that using Corrosive against Alloy Armor was never a thing...

  Hide contents

... Know thy enemy...

It was a thing when Corrosive could fully strip armor. 11:23. Armor scaling is the problem DE always sidesteps and band-aids from Warframe's inception.

 

[TheArmchairThinker]

On 2021-05-13 at 8:51 AM, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

It was a thing when Corrosive could fully strip armor. 11:23. Armor scaling is the problem DE always sidesteps and band-aids from Warframe's inception.

This is the thing though, how do you think armor scaling should work to make things not skewed?

[bnuy]

17 minutes ago, TheArmchairThinker said:

This is the thing though, how do you think armor scaling should work to make things not skewed?

Every enemy has a base armour value, that does not scale with level. Their base stats can be re-balanced if necessary but the target eHP values for all enemies seem to be roughly even at their base level, so it wouldn't pose a massive issue even if they didn't adjust them.
 

Or, they can change armour from a scaling reduction to a separate life pool, change corrosive to be "viral of armour", and now viral no longer applies to armoured enemies, so it's distinctly different and won't pose an issue with viral being stronger against armoured units than corrosive or radiation themselves.

 

[AlexMercer]

Instead of nerfing slash buff the other types.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2021-05-13 at 4:51 AM, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

It was a thing when Corrosive could fully strip armor. 11:23. Armor scaling is the problem DE always sidesteps and band-aids from Warframe's inception.

To be fair, so is enemy design. The fact that two different armour types exist, distributed among the Grineer quite literally at random, and weak to different damage types is just absurd. Is it any wonder that everyone just defaults to Viral - the one damage type that works against both armour types equally well by targeting the health underneath? I'm of the opinion that the game should ditch this needlessly complex series of weaknesses and resistance, but assuming we want to keep it... Just standardise weaknesses across a faction and vary them by severity. This song-and-danc of swapping weapons every other enemy is silly. It was silly against the Profit-Take, it's silly here.

On topic, though - I'm in full agreement that no damage type should be bypassing core mitigation systems. That includes Slash procs dealing True damage AND Toxin damage bypassing shields. Warframe has a serious and rampant issue of balancing the game by NOT balancing it but throwing out more and more workarounds. If armour is a balance issue (which it is), then address armour. Creating workarounds only railroads people into using those workarounds. It's a way to force a meta, to be sure, but it's not particularly fun.

[bnuy]

6 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

To be fair, so is enemy design. The fact that two different armour types exist, distributed among the Grineer quite literally at random, and weak to different damage types is just absurd. Is it any wonder that everyone just defaults to Viral - the one damage type that works against both armour types equally well by targeting the health underneath? I'm of the opinion that the game should ditch this needlessly complex series of weaknesses and resistance, but assuming we want to keep it... Just standardise weaknesses across a faction and vary them by severity. This song-and-danc of swapping weapons every other enemy is silly. It was silly against the Profit-Take, it's silly here.

I am glad you at least are aware of this issue, but you get the opposite take that I do. Having to utilize more of your load-out to maximize your effectiveness against a specific faction to me is good design. Why give us an entire load-out if we're meant to use a single weapon the entire mission? It makes sense to have to account for all the weaknesses of the enemies that may show up in a specific mission or from a specific faction before going in to fight, as long as the difference between the absolute best, and absolute worst builds isn't more than ~5x the effectiveness, and is linear so it doesn't change based on the enemy level range, then that's great design. This would reward build diversity, and using your individual weapons in your loadout without intrinsically tying them together with methods like pet-link mods and stat-sticks.

[Steel_Rook]

13 hours ago, scam said:

Having to utilize more of your load-out to maximize your effectiveness against a specific faction to me is good design. Why give us an entire load-out if we're meant to use a single weapon the entire mission?

Colour-matching damage to enemy health is hardly a worthwhile use of multiple weapon slots, especially when all colours of enemies show up mixed together all of the time. Being able to do the same amount of damage to all enemies with all weapons means that I get to bring two weapons with different functions with me. Just because my LMG does the same damage to everybody doesn't mean I'm not going to also want a sniper rifle for long-range marksmanship, or a grenade launcher for AoE. Maybe I'll bring a close-range shotgun and a long-range pistol. Maybe I'll bring a high-damage sniper rifle and a flamethrower pistol. Weapons already have distinctly different mechanical uses which we could be building for.

Instead, right now the game encourages me to take pretty much two copies of the same weapon, one of which does green damage to hit people with green health and one which does purple damage to hit people with purple health. The type of weapon doesn't matter because the "correct" damage colour allows me to do SO much more damage it displaces literally any other concern. Besides, I can mod all of my weapons for all of the damage types, so again - weapon type doesn't matter. Warframe's combat system has a substantial amount of complexity in it, but systems like this serve to render most of it irrelevant.

As to loadouts: how is having multiple identical loadouts for the same weapon but with different damage types a good thing? Nothing about the weapon changes, other than it now damages different things more. At that point, you may as well turn all damage mods into faction-specific bane mods. These sorts of systems exist in tabletop games because they lack the ability to model real-time player-controlled combat mechanics, so complexity gets back-filled elsewhere. Warframe has a perfectly functional combat system featuring enemies with diverse designs and ability sets that players can learn and adapt to. But none of it matters because the solution is never to "be smart." It's to "bring numbers." Bring enough of the right colour damage and that's all you care about.

If players are going to be switching weapons, it should be because different weapons are good at different activities, not because each enemy is artificially tagged to only take meaningful damage from some weapons in the back-end. Look at shield-gating Corpus. You generally don't want to use slow-firing, hard-hitting weapons against them because their shield gate will negate the bulk of your damage unless you're very precise. Rapid-firing weapons can afford to lose the bulk of a single shot's damage without dropping performance much, making them much better at dealing with shield gates. All of this without any internal tags or colour-matching. THAT makes sense. It should be the norm, not a rare accidental exception.

[bnuy]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

snip

There's lots of subtext not seen in my post. I do believe it should be balanced this way, but an optimal properly modded weapon should only be ~5x more effective at any point in the game when compared to a non-optimized fully modded weapon. You wouldn't be forced into changing weapons, you could make weapons that are universally good against plenty of enemy types, just that you would be rewarded for using more of your loadout. When a slash build becomes more effective as levels scale this is an issue, the optimal build against any specific enemy unit should stay constant at all levels. Corrosive would be ideal against Ferrite, but it would be very effective against Alloy as well, just a bit weaker than a Radiation build against Alloy. So you can just bring a Corrosive/X/Y weapon that can deal with all armoured enemies, but not due to simply having slash, but due to having a combination of elements that allows it to effectively deal with any armour types.

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, scam said:

There's lots of subtext not seen in my post. I do believe it should be balanced this way, but an optimal properly modded weapon should only be ~5x more effective at any point in the game when compared to a non-optimized fully modded weapon. You wouldn't be forced into changing weapons, you could make weapons that are universally good against plenty of enemy types, just that you would be rewarded for using more of your loadout. When a slash build becomes more effective as levels scale this is an issue, the optimal build against any specific enemy unit should stay constant at all levels. Corrosive would be ideal against Ferrite, but it would be very effective against Alloy as well, just a bit weaker than a Radiation build against Alloy. So you can just bring a Corrosive/X/Y weapon that can deal with all armoured enemies, but not due to simply having slash, but due to having a combination of elements that allows it to effectively deal with any armour types.

No, I understand. I saw your other thread. But again, my central question is - why have this in the first place? What's the benefit to arbitrarily making some weapons more powerful against some weapons and less powerful against others? The context you're referring to doesn't address this issue. It merely minimises to impact to a threshold where it can be mostly ignored, which brings us right back around to the same question. Why is it there in the first place if the best way to handle it is to ignore it entirely? Why not get rid of it at that point?

To put it another way: Why should a shotgun I've built for Corrosive be any better against Heavy Gunners than the exact same shotgun I built for Radiation? This creates a situation where I can potentially bring two identical builds for the exact same gun but with a different major elemental damage component into mission and still need to switch between them in order to deal optimal damage. To me this is pretty awful but let's assume it's good for a moment. Why not simply let me switch my damage type on the fly, then? The core gameplay element of this is simple colour-matching, like what you had in that DMC: Devil May Cry game. Hold a button to switch weapon colour in order to damage enemies of that colour. If that were our goal, then simply let players freely choose the "colour" of their weapon and simply task them with keeping up with what colour the enemy they're shooting at is. It would eliminate weapon swap delay - an irritating issue which introduces significant "clunk" to the combat system otherwise (and an issue already solved for melee) and it still allows us to pick our weapons for their mechanics, rather than the colour of their damage.

Is that really a good idea, though? I understand wanting to encourage players to plan their weapon selection and adapt their weapon choice to the current situation. However, I'm of the opinion that it should be gameplay that dictates this, not stats. I brought up shield gating for a reason. That's a gameplay mechanic which naturally encourages the use of rapid-firing weapons without actually making that a requirement. The Plains of Eidolon, similarly, encourage players to bring an accurate weapon with a fast projectile speed, as Dargyns are difficult to hit otherwise. Grineer armour could be made to resist weapon base damage by a flat amount, encouraging the use of weapons with a high damage per shot - which typically means slow-firing sniper/cannon weapons. Certain tilesets can be designed with foxholes where a sniping weapon can help pop enemies behind cover at long range. Weapons with penetration, too. Infested enemies naturally clump up around the player, encouraging the use of melee and AoE weapons already. Nullifier bubbles could be made to take separate instances of damage per pellet from multishot, encouraging the use of shotguns for that one specific enemy.

There are a lot of ways to encourage players to pick weapons based on their firing characteristics - accuracy, recoil, range, penetration, etc. Using stats to arbitrarily link a random weapon with a random enemy and say "Use THIS against THAT!" is an unnecessary railroad in modern games. It's a leftover from older games with less refined combat simulations, like I said. Other than being grandfathered into this one, I really don't see how that system has a place in the modern state of Warframe. To me, it's about as obsolete as rolling to-hit on shots we land. MMO shooters back in the day used to do that: you line up a headshot, pull the trigger, nail him right in the head and... *MISS* You hit, but your character rolled 98 on a 95-or-under to-hit check, so you missed. I see separate damage types and separate health types in the exact same context as that - a deprecated system which keeps being revived in modern video games for the sole reason that it was in older video games and absolutely nothing else beyond that.

I've lost my patience for half-measures at this point. Warframe is in the sorry state we see it in precisely because we've consistently settled for stopgap solutions to make legacy systems work rather than doing it better.

[bnuy]

35 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

snip

Pick what you like, mod it to be viable for the content you're doing. That's how I see it. If I'm up against X enemies I can pick Y weapon that has a slight natural advantage, but through the modding system I can also make Z weapon viable for said content without being punished for it. I don't personally understand how you can see that sort of thing as bad design, not meaning to insult you with that, just I've always enjoyed accounting for enemies and building appropriately, in Warframe and elsewhere. I play some other games that balance around elemental/damage type weaknesses and have always found it to be a pleasant and engaging design. I see you clearly feel the opposite.

Shield-gating does not encourage high fire-rate weaponry, as you can bypass it by aiming for weak-points.

The projectile argument for open worlds makes sense but most weapons are hit-scan so eh.

Infested it makes sense to use AoE tuned weaponry, either explosives or weapons that proc tons of area status effects. You're still in these cases rewarded for building for weaknesses, so I dunno.

[Zeddypanda]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

There are a lot of ways to encourage players to pick weapons based on their firing characteristics - accuracy, recoil, range, penetration, etc.

I'm reminded of Earth Defense Force, which I try not to bring up too much. It is a game with hundreds of weapons, yet no damage types, no crits, no statuses, and no armour. Or, well, it has two damage types. "Explosive", which can destroy buildings, and "Not explosive", which can't. Hit stun on some enemies acts differently between these two types, but they always do the same damage either way.

Giant ants advance upon you in tight clusters, so a penetrating shotgun can clear your line of sight from them on flat ground, but if you're in a tight corridor an explosive might be better to catch them as they scurry along walls and ceilings. Giant spiders hop around loosely and explosives make them tumble, so landing a grenade with a big area of effect in their midst is effective, or you could avoid explosives and leave buildings standing to slow their advance and scatter them.

Bipedal aliens have enormous heads you can snipe, while the more advanced kind have smaller heads with a heavy helmet that has more health than the rest of their body, yet give extra rewards if you snipe their head in spite of this. Both types are equally susceptible to having their legs shot off, which many weapons can accomplish. Just make sure it accomplishes it quickly, as bipedals are incredibly deadly and whatever attack you make needs to come out fast and surprise them. Direct, extended confrontation will surely spell your doom.

Flying enemies are good targets for sniping one at a time, but if there's a lot of them you might prefer missiles and catch multiple with area of effect despite their lower damage, or lure them into alleys where you can shotgun them in which case you specifically don't want missiles as that'll take out buildings you so vitally need for cover. Perhaps the mission will also have carriers, heavily armoured, flying high, where you can only hurt it by hitting its small weak spot in which case maybe its better to just go for that sniper after all.

Flamethrowers manage to stand out with wide hitboxes, penetration, lingering in the air for a bit, hitting every frame, and curving along terrain, which allows you to persistently stunlock enemies without anything like an "on fire"  status having to get involved.

If a weapon says 1200 damage, it means it'll do 1200 damage every time you fire it, regardless of enemy, yet for any of the dozens of different weapon types you can find a good, distinct use case that depends on terrain and the particular combination of enemies coming from particular places you'll be up against. It is with good reason every mission boots you back to the loadout menu, with many quick chat options for coordinating loadouts with teammates.

[Steel_Rook]

5 hours ago, scam said:

Pick what you like, mod it to be viable for the content you're doing. That's how I see it. If I'm up against X enemies I can pick Y weapon that has a slight natural advantage, but through the modding system I can also make Z weapon viable for said content without being punished for it. I don't personally understand how you can see that sort of thing as bad design, not meaning to insult you with that, just I've always enjoyed accounting for enemies and building appropriately, in Warframe and elsewhere. I play some other games that balance around elemental/damage type weaknesses and have always found it to be a pleasant and engaging design. I see you clearly feel the opposite.

Mostly because it's entirely artificial and not exposed to the player in a practical way. Also because there's no gameplay component to it - it's pure stats. There's a reason I call it "colour-matching." This enemy has a set of meaningless arbitrary tags. If you bring a weapon with similar tags, your numbers get bigger. If you bring a weapon with different tags, your numbers get smaller. It's the exact same gameplay experience, just sometimes the damage pop-ups change. I consider that "bad design" because it has no place in an action game which can implement this through gameplay.

I know this is not a good example because it's PvP, but take Titanfall 2 for a second. I absolutely LOVE the Archer guided missile launcher in that game, but it kept getting me killed. Enemies get a loud warning and it takes some time for the launcher to lock on. I'm announcing my position. Eventually, I swapped to the Thunderbolt electric launcher. That fires a slow-moving ball with a massive AoE. I could fire this NLOS around corners and deal decent damage to enemies who couldn't even tell where I was. It was less damage, to be sure, but it didn't get me killed nearly as much. I didn't just trade the Yellow Launcher for the Blue Launcher which works exactly the same but does +75% bonus damage to Blue Players.

If you want players to use a variety of tools, you need a more compelling reason than "bigger numbers."

 

5 hours ago, scam said:

Shield-gating does not encourage high fire-rate weaponry, as you can bypass it by aiming for weak-points.

The projectile argument for open worlds makes sense but most weapons are hit-scan so eh.

Infested it makes sense to use AoE tuned weaponry, either explosives or weapons that proc tons of area status effects. You're still in these cases rewarded for building for weaknesses, so I dunno.

You can bypass shield-gating via headshots (not weak point hits, just headshots), yes. That's not easy to do, especially with slow-firing weapons like sniper rifles. By contrast, rapid-firing weapons don't have that weakness. Sure, you CAN still use slow-firing weapons against the Corpus, but you're at a disadvantage.

I don't know that "most" weapons are hitscan. Many are, but a great many aren't. Plenty of bows, launchers, bolt weapons and so on. Not to mention that even some hitscan weapons have trouble hitting Dargyns. Sniper Rifles, for instance, make it harder to hit fast-moving targets. YOU might be an excellent shot enough to where it doesn't matter, but I'm not :)

You're obviously encouraged to build for weaknesses as long as weaknesses exist. They give you bigger numbers - why not? It's not NEEDED is my point. People would use melee and flamethrowers on Infested even if damage types weren't a thing because those types of weapons are overall more effective when dealing with crowds. Melee weapons and short-range AoE weapons suffer at long range, but this doesn't matter with the Infested because they don't engage at long range (outside of Deimos, but that's a separate issue).

I'll give you another "other game" example. Vermintide has no real damage types. You hit things with sticks. And yet it still makes sense to bring one melee weapon to deal with Common enemies and one decent long-range weapon to deal with Specials casting spells from across the map. When on a team, one or two people with long-range weapons is usually sufficient, so the rest can bring close-range scatterguns or explosives, instead. Plenty of diversity, no damage types needed.

 

3 hours ago, Zeddypanda said:

If a weapon says 1200 damage, it means it'll do 1200 damage every time you fire it, regardless of enemy, yet for any of the dozens of different weapon types you can find a good, distinct use case that depends on terrain and the particular combination of enemies coming from particular places you'll be up against. It is with good reason every mission boots you back to the loadout menu, with many quick chat options for coordinating loadouts with teammates.

This reminds me of an argument I had with a friend of mine about Railjack Armaments. I use an Apoc as my nose gun because I find it to have a decent mix of range, rate of fire and projectile flight speed. It's certainly not the most powerful weapon, but I'm not a great shot so that covers for my weakness. My friend vastly prefers the Glazio because it hits substantially harder in terms of raw DPS and he has a much easier time landing shots with it. Neither of us actually care what damage type each weapon does - we pick the weapon we can use. Hell, I used to have a Carcinox on the side guns, reasoning that rate of fire was more important for gunners who don't also control the ship. I replaced it with a Taylin because that's pinpoint-accurate and also hitscan. It does less theoretical maximum damage, but I find that it ends up doing more damage than most other weapons in practice because it's easier to hit with.

Similar to your EDF example, look at autoaim weapons. In most games, those are typically some of the weakest weapons in the game, but they're also easiest to use against small, fast-moving targets. The AVP Smartgun is a great example of this. Not that effective against Predators and Human vs. Human offers far better choices, but it rips aliens to shreds, negates their mobility advantage and - as a bonus - the gun will see in the dark even if you can't :) Weapon style and weapon mechanics are more than sufficient to encourage varied weapon use.

And yes - Warframe has close to 1000 weapons. Obviously not all of them can have a unique role. Not all of them need to. They can easily be broken down into general classes with most similar guns having similar roles. Gorgon, Soma, Tenora, Trumna - these all have similar uses. Not identical, but similar enough.

[Tyreaus]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Mostly because it's entirely artificial and not exposed to the player in a practical way. Also because there's no gameplay component to it - it's pure stats. There's a reason I call it "colour-matching." This enemy has a set of meaningless arbitrary tags. If you bring a weapon with similar tags, your numbers get bigger. If you bring a weapon with different tags, your numbers get smaller. It's the exact same gameplay experience, just sometimes the damage pop-ups change. I consider that "bad design" because it has no place in an action game which can implement this through gameplay.

I know this is not a good example because it's PvP, but take Titanfall 2 for a second. I absolutely LOVE the Archer guided missile launcher in that game, but it kept getting me killed. Enemies get a loud warning and it takes some time for the launcher to lock on. I'm announcing my position. Eventually, I swapped to the Thunderbolt electric launcher. That fires a slow-moving ball with a massive AoE. I could fire this NLOS around corners and deal decent damage to enemies who couldn't even tell where I was. It was less damage, to be sure, but it didn't get me killed nearly as much. I didn't just trade the Yellow Launcher for the Blue Launcher which works exactly the same but does +75% bonus damage to Blue Players.

If you want players to use a variety of tools, you need a more compelling reason than "bigger numbers."

I think this could be well-summarized with a question:

When you mod a weapon for a particular faction, what difference do you feel?

The current modding system is...well, I wouldn't say bad, but rudimentary...in that the difference is solely in TTK (in absolute values and in rhythms, i.e. DoT kills vs one-shots). Nothing in the weapon changes: fire rate, recoil, area-of-effect, punch-through, etc. all remain the same whether you're optimizing for Grineer or Infested or Corpus.

(As a slight aside: I'd say the elemental system could have a place as a "crutch" for when players may want to use a sub-optimal weapon for a given faction, just to give that weapon a fighting chance. Say, a sniper against a faction that's weaker to high-RoF weapons. But, like a real-world crutch, it doesn't often stand too well on its own.)

_{That's just my two pennies, anyway.}

[Steel_Rook]

8 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

The current modding system is...well, I wouldn't say bad, but rudimentary...in that the difference is solely in TTK (in absolute values and in rhythms, i.e. DoT kills vs one-shots). Nothing in the weapon changes: fire rate, recoil, area-of-effect, punch-through, etc. all remain the same whether you're optimizing for Grineer or Infested or Corpus.

That's pretty much where I stand, yes. Modding my weapons "correctly" against a faction changes TTK and nothing else. The weapon plays the same, I use it the same, enemies just die in fewer hits and less time. In practice, this is indistinguishable from simply fighting lower-level enemies. Or rather, it's the opposite. Because DE balance enemies relative to weapon power, using the "correct" weapon feels baseline. Using the "wrong" weapon feels like I'm fighting enemies well above my level, that I probably shouldn't be fighting without better gear. That's why I find it so uncompelling. Building weapons "right" doesn't actually alter the way the game plays. It simply determines whether I'm tall enough to ride - whether I pass the gear check.

An argument could, potentially, be made for using different weapons against different enemy types within the same faction/mission, swapping weapons as enemy composition changes. This sounds good on paper, but the game fails to actually capitalise on it in practice - and not just because weapon swap speed is SLOOOW. Enemy health types are distributed with no rhyme or reason, leading players to having to memorise each individual enemy and each individual enemy variant. Take the Grineer. You'd think "light" units would be Ferrite and "heavy" units Alloy. But nope! Elite Lancers are Alloy despite being light units while Heavy Gunners are Ferrite despite being one of the game's heaviest humanoid units. Or take the Corpus - what are their proxies armoured with? Sometimes Ferrite, sometimes Robotic. Who has Shields and who has Proto Shields? I quite literally don't know. I'd need to go check the Wiki. I THINK it's mostly bosses that have Proto, but some regular units have it, and I THINK it's more prevalent in the Terra Corpus? Which Infested has which of the four damage types they have? Not a clue - I stopped trying to figure it out long ago.

It honestly might actually be BETTER to colour-code enemies since then at least I'll know to use the "green" damage type on the "green" enemy rather than struggling to remember who's what colour. But if we're going to be colour-matching anyway, why not let us swap colour at will? Why tie it to our weapons and fix it for the entire duration of the mission? If there's gameplay to be had in picking the right damage type against the right enemy, why not turn that into a gameplay element, as opposed to an "Arsenal" element?

I personally want to move as much of our performance OUT of the Arsenal and INTO moment-to-moment gameplay. Obviously there's room for character builds, but I'd rather make decisions in real time as I play, rather than sit in a full-screen menu crunching numbers from the wiki for the express purpose of negating game mechanics entirely. The Warframe of today relies on stats far, FAR too heavily to the point of damaging its actual core gameplay loop.

 

[bnuy]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

snip

I do see your point about having more moment to moment impact in missions, that would be nice design. However you do realize it's an mmorpg? Regardless of whether the type of moment to moment balancing you wish for exists, there will still be gear checks. Gear checks exist because you're meant to develop your gear as you play and become more powerful over time, allowing you to challenge enemies more easily and increase your potential power cap, regardless of whether skill comes into play. These can both co-exist, and having gameplay that is solely reliant on skill undermines the progression and the point of playing to become more powerful as you develop your gear.

[George_PPS]

If you do not like slash, I recommend to use weapons and abilities that lack any slash procs. Problem solved. 

[George_PPS]

On 2021-05-06 at 9:50 PM, Animalon29 said:

insted just buff impact and puncture... stop nerfing things this is a pve game.
 

This is what's truly needed in this game. If something is too strong, buff weak ones. Nerfing mentality is the worst thing in this game. It's like cancer killing the vitality of the game silently, sucking its energy dry. 

[CephalonCarnage]

2 minutes ago, George_PPS said:

If something is too strong, buff weak ones

and then everytthing is too strong and there's no challenge and DE has to buff the enemies... and then we end up with slash procs and armpour scaling and invulnerability stages and weakpoints and all the other things that are driving this. Its aalled power creep and it repeats constantly - making the game worse every time.. There should never be a call to buff things, but to balance instead.