Glaives - Balanced by Bugs

[Traumtulpe]

Glaives are the most powerful weapons in the game, and at the same time the most bugged weapons in the game. One has to wonder whether there is a purpose behind this madness.

As for power, you can probably oneshot level 10000 enemies without viral procs, using a glaive. But they are a pain to use because of the endless bugs that plagued glaives since the very beginning:

• Mods don't work on glaives. The specifics vary with time, but I don't believe there was ever a point where all mods worked at once. As a current example, Condition Overload does not effect a glaive when thrown. That you are unable to fix this in literal years beggars belief.
• Re-throw after catching is bugged and unreliable. It get's mostly reliable when you start holding the attack button before causing the glaive to return via heavy attack. Really annoying though, holding the attack button and nothing happens.
• Auto block seems to sometimes prevent throwing the glaive. This should probably be the other way around, right? REALLY annoying.
• Unpromted glaive throws when using normal melee. Normal melee sucks anyway compared to throwing, so whatever. Quite annoying nonetheless.
• Combo mods disable seemingly at random, forcing you to reset combo manually and rebuild, while dealing about 2% damage... Incredibly annyoing.

In summary, there isn't much that's not bugged on glaives. Why bother reworking them, and then just have them utterly bugged, forever?

Have a short clip of the damage I'm talking about, please note that this is the Steel Path, and that the weapon would in theory cause slash procs, if it didn't oneshot everything:

 

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

It's one-shotting because Vex Armor and various other +damage frame buffs get applied twice. Surprise surprise, when you have a 73.8x damage buff you nuke everything pretty hard.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

Glaives seem to be much more complex to work with, probably because they keep having to travel in between the two states of being held and being thrown. when held, they need to be able to melee, block and be thrown, and when thrown they have to be able to damage things, seek targets and return properly. I'm no expert but there must be a lot more coding that goes into Glaives than most other weapons.

in an ideal world, all the mods like Power Throw, Rebound etc would all work as intended, and Glaives would also have improved seeking. for me the best Glaive is still Cedo's Alt fire lol: maybe it doesn't have the damage of a true Glaive but it basically never misses, it does the job damage wise, and I can still bring a different melee. 

 

[Traumtulpe]

3 minutes ago, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

It's one-shotting because Vex Armor and various other +damage frame buffs get applied twice. Surprise surprise, when you have a 73.8x damage buff you nuke everything pretty hard.

You should report that bug, if you haven't already. Average waiting time to have your bug fixed is >7 years.

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

3 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

You should report that bug, if you haven't already. Average waiting time to have your bug fixed is >7 years.

It's already been reported. This was back in Febuary

 

[TheSixOfDiamonds]

39 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

Unpromted glaive throws when using normal melee.

Funny, I posted that bug at one point and got blasted by people insisting it was everything except the game. Ah, the forums.

40 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

Normal melee sucks anyway compared to throwing, so whatever.

I politely disagree with that statement, I love doing normal melee with Astral Twilight, very satisfying, imo.

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

I like using one hand secondary with thrown glaive. Problem is I can't even shoot the gun at times because of animation lock while throwing. Get a rideculous low attack speed, throw the melee, then spam the fire button. Nothing comes out till the frame is in neutral position.

[nslay]

You can't one shot level 350 Auditor or Raptor in Index with Cerata... and I'm sure Glaive Prime can't either (since it's very slightly worse than Cerata at Index)!

So how do you manage to one shot level 10000 enemies? Are they Infested Chargers or something?

EDIT: With a Chroma that does 20 million damage to level 200 Steel Path Corpus... he cannot one-shot level 200 Steel Path Demolishers. Heck, he can't even one shot level 100 Steel Path Demolishers! Well... the humanoid Machinist Demolisher being the exception (easy to one shot!). It does not work out well for the Bursa Demolisher!

[Traumtulpe]

4 hours ago, nslay said:

So how do you manage to one shot level 10000 enemies?

Nobody cares about Corpus, and most of Grineer scaling comes from their armor - slash bypasses that entirely. I don't actually have any interest in spending 3 hours in an extremely repetetive mission for a pittance of steel essence at the moment. so it's just a guess to begin with.

[nslay]

48 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

Nobody cares about Corpus, and most of Grineer scaling comes from their armor - slash bypasses that entirely. I don't actually have any interest in spending 3 hours in an extremely repetetive mission for a pittance of steel essence at the moment. so it's just a guess to begin with.

Ah, but Corpus are easier than Grineer and you can't one-shot some of them with any Glaive at significantly lower levels.

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

1 hour ago, nslay said:

Ah, but Corpus are easier than Grineer and you can't one-shot some of them with any Glaive at significantly lower levels.

Say what. Cerata will oneshot SP Corpus Techs all the way to lvl ~690 with no outside help. Add in Arcane Fury and you jump to level ~1900.
If you can be bothered to wait 2 seconds for 2 tics of the guaranteed toxin proc, you'll "oneshot" all the way to lvl 9999 on SP Techs with no help at all.

[nslay]

15 minutes ago, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

Say what. Cerata will oneshot SP Corpus Techs all the way to lvl ~690 with no outside help. Add in Arcane Fury and you jump to level ~1900.
If you can be bothered to wait 2 seconds for 2 tics of the guaranteed toxin proc, you'll "oneshot" all the way to lvl 9999 on SP Techs with no help at all.

I love Cerata, but this doesn't work out for mere normal (let alone SP) level 350 Auditors or Raptors in Index... and Glaive Prime wouldn't either.

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

12 minutes ago, nslay said:

I love Cerata, but this doesn't work out for mere normal (let alone SP) level 350 Auditors or Raptors in Index... and Glaive Prime wouldn't either.

Surprise, enemies with innate 40% DR, health types biased against toxin, massive health pool, and armor are hard to oneshot. They're not exactly part of your normal Corpus line-up either.
However, Cerata can still oneshot. 3 ticks should suffice to bring down level 350's (or just prime a bit with viral and wait for 1 tick). Maybe less depending on how many points are being held.
Remove that pesky armor (thank god for Helminth) and we're back to only needing 2 ticks to do lvl9999 with a bit of help from Arcane Fury (or prime with viral and kill in 0 ticks with no Arcane Fury).

Add in some frame buffs and it'll be even smoother sailing.

[nslay]

2 hours ago, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

Surprise, enemies with innate 40% DR, health types biased against toxin, massive health pool, and armor are hard to oneshot. They're not exactly part of your normal Corpus line-up either.
However, Cerata can still oneshot. 3 ticks should suffice to bring down level 350's (or just prime a bit with viral and wait for 1 tick). Maybe less depending on how many points are being held.
Remove that pesky armor (thank god for Helminth) and we're back to only needing 2 ticks to do lvl9999 with a bit of help from Arcane Fury (or prime with viral and kill in 0 ticks with no Arcane Fury).

Add in some frame buffs and it'll be even smoother sailing.

It doesn't work out this way for even lower level machine-based Corpus Demolishers in Steel Path (say level 200?)... even with Chroma, faction mods and Arcane Avenger on top of that.

And no, Cerata cannot one shot (in 3 ticks) even level 250 Auditors and Raptors. And that's with a lot of help from faction mods, Arcane Fury, Condition Overload, Kuva Nukor and heat-based armor stripping. It just doesn't work out as nicely as you think it does for these particular enemies. Would you like to see a video of how slow Cerata can actually be at such low levels with all of these buffs? How you actually need multiple throws (and certainly more than 3 tics of damage) to down these particular enemies?

Sure, these are not your ordinary Corpus... but having experienced Cerata slowness (non one-shot kills, multiple throws needed) on enemies at significantly lower levels than 10000... let's just say: I don't believe you one bit (especially not for level 10000 Bursas which are normal Corpus units).

EDIT:

Here you go... one of my John Prodman attempts where I thought he was glitched (because he glitches sometimes). I left 2 minutes too early.

Spoiler

 

So, you can see the normal level 266 Auditor and Raptor are not dying exactly in one throw... much less 3 tics. This is still practical though! And having done this run numerous time... on the better/smaller Index map, I had level ~350 enemies and it's even slower to kill them. And it only gets slower...

It really doesn't instill any confidence that Cerata will scale well for Steel Path level 10000 enemies... especially for enemies like Bursas or Ospreys... or even Comba/Scrambus (because they start to die slowly too in the 300s). Auditor and Raptor become so slow to kill with Toxin procs that you're better off just parallelizing the Toxin procs. Put the Toxin procs on Auditor/Raptor and then walk away and do something else... come back, re-apply, etc...

Now I'm actually crazy enough to try a John Prodman run in Steel Path Index (maybe this weekend!). And I'm going to try Unairu's Sundering Dash to strip more armor to try to speed up killing Auditor and Raptor with Cerata. But I gotta say... I'm using Enthrall+Reave for them if I have the Energy (Reave is an actual one-shot skill).

But otherwise, yes, I absolutely love Cerata! I doubt it will one-shot, much less kill all level 10000 Corpus in 3-6 tics of Toxin damage. There's nothing wrong with throwing it more than once though!

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

2 hours ago, nslay said:

It doesn't work out this way for even lower level machine-based Corpus Demolishers in Steel Path (say level 200?)... even with Chroma, faction mods and Arcane Avenger on top of that.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[nslay]

16 minutes ago, (XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom said:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

12 hours ago, nslay said:

Well... the humanoid Machinist Demolisher being the exception (easy to one shot!).

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

EDIT: I guess you also did Hyena so I will humbly stand corrected there (though I think it would be interesting to see the other 2 Demolisher types).

I am still pretty sure your damage isn't going to scale to level 10000 enemies to the point that you can just easily one shot every single type of Corpus enemy or even have them die in 3 tics like you described. You can already see the damage reduction on those Demolishers... 635k for example on that Hyena. Now imagine level 10000 level of armor and health for something like a Bursa or one of those Oxium Ospreys. Even considering the newer armor scaling...

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

On 2021-05-26 at 3:01 PM, Traumtulpe said:

• Mods don't work on glaives. The specifics vary with time, but I don't believe there was ever a point where all mods worked at once. As a current example, Condition Overload does not effect a glaive when thrown. That you are unable to fix this in literal years beggars belief.

 

 

Wait what??

Is this real?

Can someone confirm?

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

5 minutes ago, (PSN)haphazardlynamed said:

 

Wait what??

Is this real?

Can someone confirm?

 

EDIT: I found it:

 

Says it was Fixed in that update.

[Traumtulpe]

8 minutes ago, (PSN)haphazardlynamed said:

Says it was Fixed in that update.

Test it yourself. Throw an unmodded glaive at a target in the simulacrum, then add CO and a status effect that does not effect damage by itself, repeat. I get the same numbers.

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

8 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

Test it yourself. Throw an unmodded glaive at a target in the simulacrum, then add CO and a status effect that does not effect damage by itself, repeat. I get the same numbers.

I don't like using Simulacrum

it bugs out and doing mod swaps in there doesn't always take effect, so I can't really trust the numbers.

not without doing 3 loading screens per check to apply the changes from orbiter, but that's a PITA.

 

Plus there's the issue of actually reading the damage numbers; they flash too fast and overlap with stuff so I have a tough time with that.

[nslay]

If that's still true about Condition Overload, then I guess I'll be using Catabolyst instead of Kuva Nukor on my Steel Path John Prodman attempt...

[Tiltskillet]

5 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

Test it yourself. Throw an unmodded glaive at a target in the simulacrum, then add CO and a status effect that does not effect damage by itself, repeat. I get the same numbers.

I did a similar test and I am getting increased damage numbers with cold-rad-puncture priming on regular throws.  That's the good news.  The increase is not large though.  If someone better at math than me could look at these numbers and see if they make any sense that'd be great.  And then there's some other weirdness, more on that later.  Anyway...

Glaive Prime:  172.1 melee damage bonus (riven), 979.5 charged throw damage according to the Arsenal versus L170 Corrupted Heavy Gunner.  (I tested direct damage and bleeds separately, so those are not the same samples.)  And I used two preconfigs of the Glaive, so all mod changing was done in the orbiter.

Unprimed Direct Damage:

201 x 4 instances

202 x 1

Unprimed Bleeds

419 x 1 instance (why?)

2113 x 4

... versus ...

Primed cold/rad/puncture Direct Damage:

207 x 5

Primed Bleeds:

2176 x 4

4352 x 1

Crits are very weird.  I had Sacrificial Steel on their, so 83.2% charged throw crit chance, but only one crit out of 20 samples?  And I have crit damage on the riven, so my total charged throw crit multiplier is x5 according to the Arsenal.  And the one crit is exactly 2x?  lol

And then there's that one extremely low unprimed bleed that makes no sense at all.

 

[Tiltskillet]

6 hours ago, (PSN)haphazardlynamed said:

I don't like using Simulacrum

it bugs out and doing mod swaps in there doesn't always take effect, so I can't really trust the numbers.

not without doing 3 loading screens per check to apply the changes from orbiter, but that's a PITA.

 

Plus there's the issue of actually reading the damage numbers; they flash too fast and overlap with stuff so I have a tough time with that.

I sympathize.  I reduce some of the Sim weirdness by setting up different test configurations in the Arsenal.  And where it makes sense, I look at tick damage, especially with melee weapons, since there's more time to see those numbers.   Recording is even better, obviously. 

There's still weird inconsistencies sometimes that I can't explain, but it's manageable if I do those things.  And I'm not confident that testing in live missions doesn't have the same or its own bugs, besides being a much less controlled environment.

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

14 hours ago, nslay said:

And no, Cerata cannot one shot (in 3 ticks) even level 250 Auditors and Raptors. And that's with a lot of help from faction mods, Arcane Fury, Condition Overload, Kuva Nukor and heat-based armor stripping. It just doesn't work out as nicely as you think it does for these particular enemies. Would you like to see a video of how slow Cerata can actually be at such low levels with all of these buffs? How you actually need multiple throws (and certainly more than 3 tics of damage) to down these particular enemies?

I will concede this point as my figures where based on the (logical) assumption that Index Brokers follow the same scaling as the rest of the game.
However, they still use the pre-U27.2 scaling, so they have massively more EHP than expected. Your level 350 Brokers have 1,828,015 raw health and 7095 armor, for an EHP of 45,060,569, about 34x what it "should" be.

[nslay]

So here's what a Steel Path John Prodman run looks like with Cerata and Catabolyst! I dropped Condition Overload for Primed Pressure Point owing to many reports of Condition Overload not working correctly for Glaives still (despite patch notes indicating otherwise). The Catabolyst strips armor and procs Viral... it's otherwise extremely annoying to use (no automatic reload!). You might just use Phage instead (and you can use Lock and Load maybe?):

Spoiler

 

Glaives may be bugged and silly... but, despite the massive armor stripping and Viral procs from Catabolyst, I'm not getting any kind of good sense that the Cerata will one-shot level 10000 Steel Path Corpus enemies. Can it one shot some kinds of level 10000 Steel Path Corpus enemies? Probably... Will it one-shot level 10000 Steel Path Bursas or even something like Oxium Ospreys? Probably not... Apparently not even if you strip 90% of the armor! Though 10% of inflated values of armor is not insignificant... maybe if you strip all the armor with an ability or Shattering Impact (though apparently Shattering Impact reportedly doesn't work with Glaive throws despite many Glaives guaranteeing an Impact proc).

But yeah... these are just level 300 Steel Path enemies... not even close to level 10000 and they're kind of sluggish to kill with Cerata after armor stripping (particularly Auditor and Raptor). And yes, while they are specialty boss-like enemies, I think they're still a good indicator of what you might expect from something like a level 10000 Steel Path Bursa! Not good things with Cerata apparently...

I still love my Cerata though!

EDIT: As much as it pains me to say so... Catabolyst is better than Phage at Index owing to the paltry ammo pickups for shotguns (10 per case).

I hate Catabolyst's reload mechanic. It's awful!