Dev Workshop: The Arsenal Divide

[Seorel]

The level of salt in this thread is insane. Y'all need to chill. The game changes and we adapt, its boring if everything stays the same for too long. I, for one, am excited to try out the changes and see how they feel in game!

Thanks for the info DE. 

[Voltage]

1 minute ago, Seorel said:

The level of salt in this thread is insane. Y'all need to chill. The game changes and we adapt, its boring if everything stays the same for too long. I, for one, am excited to try out the changes and see how they feel in game!

Thanks for the info DE. 

Telling people to chill when DE makes the player pay in time and resources for their poor balance decisions is laughable.

It's equally boring when the developers carve away the core game into a shell of its former self over time with balance choices like these, Warframe Revised, or the addition of Warframe Riven Mods Helminth Invigorations.

[Jarriaga]

I just went through all of my melees to remove Berserker and replace it with Primed Fury. I never used both, but these changes have killed Berserker for me due to the activation condition and uptime because it can't be sustained against sentients, bosses, or Demolishers/Demolysts in Disruption .

Switching it to PF also allows me to get used to the changes so it's not as jarring when they go live.

[(PSN)Shane_G_G_85]

They halfed  the damage on all the glaives, but they didn't buff the damage on any of the primaries or the secondaries in fact they nerfed one of the best secondaries in the game. People are not going to be using the Java lock they're going to put the good mods in the good arcanes on the good weapons this did nothing to change any meta. No one's going to use banshee because you invigorated her with useless buffs only thing that makes her playable is a rework something that they're clearly getting to lazy to do. I'm just praying that the sisters of parvos update has actual content. This was a melee Nerf disguised as a primary and secondary buff.

[Kraethius]

I hope aoe tops dogs won't be able to equip the galvanized mods. That or they take a few hits from the nerf bat.

[trst]

If it takes you more than 6-24 seconds to kill an enemy then the problem is either in your loadout or the weapon itself. Plus not every weapon should be viable in absurd "endgame" level content to begin with.

But of course all of it would just make meta weapons stronger as there is no distinction for the mods to determine if a weapon is meta or not. And as this community is apt to do even though it'll also buff the non-meta weapons people will dismiss that because they're still not the "strongest".

[The_Gray_Lady]

Guns aren't spurned because of lack of damage...it's because of their single-target nature!!  The fact that guns like Kuva Nukor and anything with an AOE explosion are still popular just proves this.  Why would you use something that kills enemies one at a time and has to spend time reloading...when you can use a stick that can hit/stunlock/kill 15 enemies at once?? Answer: you don't. 

You can already put damage mods in all the mod slots on guns, so where would you fit in these new ones?  The current builds are already good enough for hour long missions damage-wise.

[pantophage]

5 hours ago, Teksorbkyva said:

Why are gun arcanes the only kind of arcane slot we have to unlock when arcane slots for warframes, zaws, kitguns, operators, and amps have been open since their introduction? If you really wanted to close the gap between melee and ranged, you wouldn't put an additional obstacle in the way of these new mods and arcanes.

gotta stretch that new 'content' as much as possible. 

if they really thought gun stats were in a good place the arcanes wouldn't just be a +360% damage buff at max stacks. DE really said, 'have a melee nerf so that you will want to use guns more, but don't worry we are buffing guns to make up for it' and now we have to work in game to get the buff.

 

there's nothing wrong with having to grind for new upgrades. hell, the galvanized mods are actual content, you can easily get 1/day with the SP alerts. but the arcanes are just a poor excuse to get players to grind for the gun buff. not only is that a massive wall of RNG, but we also have unlock the slot as well? if there was variance in the main benefit of each arcane then the story would be different, but this point blank reads as 'guns are too weak, and we don't want to manually balance the stats, but giving a flat buff across the board would look lazy, so we will sneak out on and hide it behind a grind wall' 

 

also this will only exacerbate problems between low and high Mr players where low Mr players feel useless. especially since they can't even just go get the arcanes, they still need to unlock the slot. I've had several friends quit playing because they don't feel like they can ever catch/contribute with damage on pub squads. someone tell me how any of this fixes that? anyone who has ever ran with a super low Mr player will attest that as soon as the going gets tough, they switch to melee. none of these changes affect how the game will play for a low Mr player. their guns remain weak, their melee remains the same since they likely are not running CO/berserker/BR, and none of the new mods/arcanes for guns are even remotely accessible.

 

 

[ShogunGunshow]

The nerf to Kestrel just makes me want to cry.

Like why you gotta do this. It wasn't even good. 

[Paranoicon]

Everyone is lampooning the potential effects that Galvanized mods will have on gameplay already, so I'll focus on something else I think it's more egregious.

Given that the intent of these changes, and the introduction of these mods, is to encourange people to utilize their full arsenal, as stated in:

8 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Our goal is to encourage you to use your entire Arsenal in-mission.

I don't quite get why exactly the Galvanized mods are being positioned as Steel Path rewards. If anything, they should come from other modes. Arbitrations, for example. As-is right now, the solution to the problem is being placed behind the problem. And, depending on the mods' Steel Essence costs, it might end up making things a tad worse. After all, if someone is already dealing enough damage with their melee, why exactly would they bother to farm for the Steel Essence necessary to make their primaries do what their melee weapon already does?

Now, my next concern is compounded with the previous one. And that is the high cost for Galvanized mods, and the added Arcane Unlocker for Primaries and Secondaries. And the best way I can express this concern is as follows:

But why, tho?

I, with no sarcasm whatsoever, am incapable of understanding why the things being introduced to fix a problem, not only require people to be part of the problem, but also to do so repeatedly.

Much like I mentioned before, as-is, with drains like those, a player is going to have to forma their primaries, farm affinity to max rank them, farm for the Steel Essence to acquire the Galvanized Mods, farm for the resources required to max rank them, farm for the Arcanes multiple times to max rank those, and farm for the Steel Essence required to acquire the Arcane Unlocker.
Meanwhile, Melee is already good.
Meanwhile, a Melee build that will perform well in Steel Path does not require even a fraction of that time investment.

So, once again, the question becomes: Why would a player spend all that time farming for Steel Essence, aquiring the mods, levelling up the mods, Forma'ing the weapons, max ranking those weapons, acquiring the arcane unlocker, acquiring the arcanes, and maxing out the arcanes, when they can already just use melee?

Personally, I feel like there's a lot of stuff that genuinely NEEDS to be addressed here. Because a lot of this, I don't understand the rationale. Not only is it a massive timesink that does not compare to what it takes to build a "Steel Path Ready" Melee weapon; it's also inconsistent with the systems that have been presented up until now. Arcanes have not required an Arcane Unlocker in any situation since they were introduced. So why now? And why only Primaries and Secondaries? Why not give them a free Arcane slot instead? More to it, does this mean now other pieces of equipment that utilize Arcanes are going to require Arcane Unlockers too?

TL;DR: The effort and materials required to bring a Primary or Secondary weapon up to par with a Melee weapon is not commensurate with the time it takes to make a single Melee weapon viable. The arcane unlocker should be removed, or its effect should be added to that of a Forma. Additionally, the drain of the Galvanized mods should be lowered, and they should be given outside of Steel Path.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

2 minutes ago, The_Gray_Lady said:

This post just seems to accentuate how little the devs ACTUALLY play the game.  Guns aren't spurned because of lack of damage...it's because of their single-target nature!!  The fact that guns like Kuva Nukor and anything with an AOE explosion are still popular just proves this.  Why would you use something that kills enemies one at a time and has to spend time reloading...when you can use a stick that can hit/stunlock/kill 15 enemies at once?? Answer: you don't. 

You can already put damage mods in all the mod slots on guns, so where would you fit in these new ones?  The current builds are already good enough for hour long missions damage-wise.

Reload can be manipulated in a number of ways. And all this stuff is just options...it's not "here's a super new efficient meta". You're supposed to have some fun playing around.

[MLGbrine]

46 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

It really doesn't do that much to the damage. This isn't a game where 'double crits' exponentiate the multiplier, so entire breakpoints after the first are just diminishing less-than-doubles. Not losing an entire 100% breakpoint, but just a portion of the probability of reds, cuts down the difference even more.

Weapons that can no longer perfectly yellow crit are harmed far more, since that's eating into a difference proportion of the entire crit damage multiplier.

I agree, but the point was to illustrate that there would be a consolidation to weapons that can actually easily red crit, not only cause they deal what I still think is significantly more damage when dealing with very high level enemies, but also because seeing those red numbers is a big part of the fun, and since this is a PVE game, I don't see the point in removing that.(going from orange to yellow sucks too)
Also, tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there are many weapons that can barely yellow crit that are used by many people.

[The_Gray_Lady]

Just now, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

Reload can be manipulated in a number of ways. And all this stuff is just options...it's not "here's a super new efficient meta". You're supposed to have some fun playing around.

The whole point of this dev workshop is to get more people to use guns over melee.... but the devs have to first understand WHY people don't in the first place.

[Covenanthunter]

Honestly I’m not feeling great about these changes. On kill effects don’t help much if you can’t kill your enemies. Melee scales with every hit, so you benefit from every attack even against tough enemies. The multi shot boosts will be nice if you have tons of chaff around, but otherwise it really does nothing to help with high armor strong enemies. Assuming all the damage bonuses are additive too which will be effectively useless for primaries and secondaries.

Also, I hate the melee changes. Melee is strong, but there is a fine line between too much attack speed and the weapons base animations feeling awful. I think limiting to one attack speed mod is fine but “on kill” bonuses are not a good solution to berserker. It would be nice if we didn’t need attack speed mods at all to have melee weapons feel good but attack speed is an absolute must just to have bearable melee gameplay.

I hope someday we get some scaling systems that hold up to armor. That goes for guns, melee and abilities. Snowball effects and relying on slash procs doesn’t feel good anymore.

[taiiat]

yeah. i mean, Guns really aren't as weak as the plebs say they are. far from even, if you really know what you're doing Guns should be able to deal with snooze path Enemies not significantly slower than on the Solar Map.

however. if they're having trouble Killing Enemies, giving them Mods/Arcanes that are based on Killing Enemies isn't likely to help them much.

[DrivaMain]

This still does not address the Single Target vs AoE imbalance. So the rebalance is still a failure. A Gun that can deal a million damage to a level 1 500 HP target still loses to a gun that deals 1000 damage to 5 level 1 500 HP enemies in an area.

Regarding the weapon arcanes, can you also let Warframe Arcanes that affected weapons like Arcane Tempo, Arcane Rage, Arcane Precision, Arcane Acceleration, and Arcane Velocitu, etc to be slottable on those arcane slots?

But hey, forcing players to do Steel Path shows everyone how bad the game mode is leading to DE actually make it in line with the rest of the high level content. 

[kyori]

8 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

When choosing weapons for a mission, the Tenno have a lot to consider...

Nope, just use bramma, kuva nukor, kronen prime, glaive prime for everything. hahaha

 

8 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

PRIMARY MERCILESS

oh no, with kuva nukor, kronen prime and glaive prime nerfed.... but luckily bramma has been hugely buffed with this! Now we will see more players spamming their bramma! lol

 

8 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Galvanized Mods

Did you mentioned if we are able to stack these with the vanilla mods? I take it as no eh

"Equip all Galvanized Mods on a single loadout and see your warframe transformed into Galvatron! Galvatron Prime will need the primed version of the galvanized mods to unlock." XD

8 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

Acolytes on The Steel Path have a 100% chance to drop 1 of the 6 new Arcanes. 

So meaning they will also drop Steel Essence or riven Sliver at the same time, right? 

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

2 minutes ago, The_Gray_Lady said:

The whole point of this dev workshop is to get more people to use guns over melee.... but the devs have to first understand WHY people don't in the first place.

The people themselves should also understand as well. Any 4 man team composition should be able to buff and debuff enough to already kill stuff with guns. Octavia, chroma etc I'm not gonna name every single weapon buffer and enemy debuffer....

But it's up to the player to have some imagination and figure out ways to take these enemies down. It's really not hard to kill stuff in the game. 

[thats_rudiculous_07]

First of all kuva nukor shouldn't only went down to 3 not 2 when it was 4 chaining enemies .  At least don't make weapons in playable like all the other weapons your nerf. The new prime weapons are a joke. 

Second  blood rush cost 14 capacity if your gonna nerf you also have to justify it capacity which you havent you already nerfed blood rush before .

Third hardly anyone runs two attack speed mods that's literally a meme if anything. Changing berserker way to proc and shorting the time is a huge nerf . Either do one or the other . So it would be reasonable because it might become a un-use mod.

You should learn to gradually nerf not make huge nerf your priority.

[Valthryn]

This is cool and all, but there is a better solution to balancing the arsenal:

Add a stamina system for melee.

Currently, melee is the best class because it can be pumped with insane power and speed, but has no consequence for its use, unlike ranged weapons, which use ammunition or have to be charged before they are shot. Modding melee weapons in the meta is like adding every damage and fire rate mod to your twin grakatas and also buffing them so that they don't use any ammo and have zero recoil, and it will be the same after this update, but the power potential will be decreased. Overall, there is still going to be one class of weapons that is clearly better than the other classes in every loadout since melee weapons lack a niche. Since you don't have to sacrifice any resource to use melee weapons, their effectiveness is always at 100% or within a few seconds of reaching it, meaning that to "balance" melee using the current system, it is necessary to use blanket nerfs so that melee is less favorable compared to primary and secondary weapons. Using a regenerating stamina system for melee attacks (think Dark Souls but with a larger pool and slower recovery) solves the problem of melee power quite easily, and could even be implemented without modifying any existing mods or stances, apart from adding a stamina reduction value to each move. The presence of stamina would destroy the speed meta, which is the real source of overpowered melee spam, by forcing players to weigh attack speed and DPS against their stamina pool and recovery rate, allowing melee weapons to be modded for sustained DPS with shorter recovery, or a burst damage niche with long recovery times.

 

This sort of reminds me of the universal Vacuum controversy, where Scott initially proposed a very complex and convoluted solution in a Devstream regarding splitting vacuum into several parts, when the best, and eventually the chosen solution was much simpler and more effective: letting all sentinels use the existing Vacuum mod.

[Covenanthunter]

2 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

The people themselves should also understand as well. Any 4 man team composition should be able to buff and debuff enough to already kill stuff with guns. Octavia, chroma etc I'm not gonna name every single weapon buffer and enemy debuffer....

But it's up to the player to have some imagination and figure out ways to take these enemies down. It's really not hard to kill stuff in the game. 

I can take just about any melee weapon in the game with any warframe to steel path and get good results. That is not true for guns. I don’t think combinations of broken warframe abilities with  weapons is the point.

[Danny99s]

Can we get 12 slot mods  now for weapons? If those galvanized mods are additive values and cannot be stacked with their normal counterparts, then how are those better than Stacking Seration+Heavy Calibre. Do we know is the new mods are additive/multiplicative and can be used with their normal counterparts, that makes the difference. Weapons used so many mods with high capacity(14-16) and even with 8 formas they are quite bad in damage department because those modes do not scale.

[kyori]

2 minutes ago, Valthryn said:

Add a stamina system for melee.

Already suggested many months ago but seems they thought it's a joke.

[The_Gray_Lady]

1 minute ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

The people themselves should also understand as well. Any 4 man team composition should be able to buff and debuff enough to already kill stuff with guns. Octavia, chroma etc I'm not gonna name every single weapon buffer and enemy debuffer....

But it's up to the player to have some imagination and figure out ways to take these enemies down. It's really not hard to kill stuff in the game. 

I  already said "The current builds are already good enough for hour long missions damage-wise."  This means that damage is not the reason people aren't using guns.  You don't need to run missions with specific team comps because normal missions are easy enough as it it.

Just because you CAN use guns to kill stuff, doesn't mean that you would want to.  Because again, why settle for killing one guy with a gun, when you can use ANY melee and kill 15 at once?  The most popular guns all have some kind of AOE damage source...those are the guns not being ignored by the majority of the player base.

All guns are viable with the right build, rivens were a good addition for this reason, but it's just a matter of efficiency.

[Valthryn]

Just now, kyori said:

Already suggested many months ago but seems they thought it's a joke.

rip 🤪