Update 30.5: Melee & Primary Balance Changes Feedback Megathread (Read First Post!)

[Oorel]

• Primary & Secondary Weapon Arcanes
• Galvanized Mods

Some time has passed and I've been using this stuff for a decent amount of time now.

I think "On Kill" is the worst aspect of these weapon buffs. There are many previous arcanes with very generous activation conditions such as "On Critical Hit" that is able to be activated by ANY critical hit, or simply "On Hit" effects that feel so much better. "On Kill" has a real sustain problem, even for Merciless in my opinion. What I dislike the most is that "On Kill" is a relatively high bar in relation to arcanes as a whole, but then its also "On Kill" with a specific weapon, meaning you want to stay with it to keep up the effect, but along with a pretty stringent activation condition there is also a low uptime of 4sec per stack. its compounding costs in a way that is unpleasant were so many arcanes in the past have been very comfortable to use due to generous activation or a high uptime and sometimes both.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

So after getting arcane merciless and dexterity maxed out I’ve come to my conclusions on the changes.

4 seconds is too short for Merciless. A single elevator ride or moving from one point to another and enemies just decide not to spawn can basically take away almost half the damage Imce accumulated. It should be increased to 8 or 10 seconds.

The melee nerfs still feel far too heavy handed. I’d at the very least like Berserker to go back to triggering on critical hit. And for its duration to be returned to 24 seconds. As with Arcane Merciless there is now zero incentive to ever switch between gun and melee because the buff durations are so short simply killing 2 enemies with one weapon can take long enough for it to undo all the effort you put into building up your other weapon.

Basically the short durations of these buffs completely defeat the idea of wanting players to freely switch between gun and melee. And considering that I’m now finding guns significantly better than melee (outside of the very best melee weapons) right now I have zero incentive to use my melee weapon.

[kyori]

I tested Kompressa fully forma-ed with Secondary Merciless in stimulator lvl185 enemies. It seems the 4s buff is too short, most of the time before can finish reload, the timer already ran out and buff gone. Perhaps increasing to 6s or more will be nice. After all these arcane are meant to generously buff guns right?

[ShortCat]

14 hours ago, (XBOX)GearsMatrix301 said:

4 seconds is too short for Merciless. A single elevator ride or moving from one point to another and enemies just decide not to spawn can basically take away almost half the damage Imce accumulated.

It takes 48 seconds to lose al stacks; this is plenty of time to find & kill an enemy.

14 hours ago, (XBOX)GearsMatrix301 said:

Basically the short durations of these buffs completely defeat the idea of wanting players to freely switch between gun and melee.

In this case use Dexterity arcanes.

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

Just a friendly reminder that "on kill" condition is a bad trigger that promote meta weapons, and that AoE weapons are way stronger than single target in current warframe.

• meta AoE weapons have even higher DPS against single target than assault rifle (bramma...)
• spawnrate in Steelpath makes AoE weapons even more efficient
• keep in mind that even with buffs meta AoE ain't much better than melee.
• low ammo count ain't bad ammo economy as you pick a few ammo on the ground and you're good to go (whereas 70 ammo magazine / 540 max ammo require a lot of ammo pick-ups to refill)

--> If you compare for example the Kuva Karak and the Kuva Bramma, the Karak should do between x5 and x10 times it's current damage output to compete.

Also note that increase mag size, and reduced reload speed only affect sustain DPS and not burst, and often lead to a DPS increase lower than 20% (i.e. worse than 20% multishot), and therefore should be allowed as Exilus.

 

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

4 hours ago, ShortCat said:

It takes 48 seconds to lose al stacks; this is plenty of time to find & kill an enemy.

In this case use Dexterity arcanes.

My issue isn’t losing all the buff. It’s losing half the buff because the game is forcing me into a situation where there is nothing to kill.

I hate the idea of my weapons being dependent on each other in order to function. I prefer that they be able to stand on their own merits so I’m the one deciding when I want to switch the weapon I’m using. Not the game. And, while Dexterity lets melee boost guns. There’s nothing that lets guns boost melee. Ok well that’s not technically true. There’s Arcane blade charger. But it’s much harder to farm than the gun arcanes.

[addamrobin2]

all these "on kill" mods and arcanes are definitely the greatest thing ever

i definitely didn't struggle to find kills with my soma prime with 3 of my party members each having a bramma and 2 zarrs just now

i definitely am loving it

i definitely am not being sarcastic now

[Justin_Case001]

I know it's probably pointless for me to even ask, but please revert the changes to Berserker.  Or at least make it stackable with Fury again.  For me, the name of this game has always been to enjoy and savor things while you can before it gets nerfed and ruined, and that's just terrible.  Why it does have to perfectly balanced, anyway?  Melee was fun.  Now it's much less fun.  Please give us back our fun melee.

[(PSN)Boomstickman98]

On 2021-07-23 at 5:23 AM, DrivaMain said:

It would be nice if the primary and secondary arcanes gives bonus capacity depending on Rank. 

I wouldn't like that, purely on the merit that players without the Steel Path or just aren't strong enough to farm steel essence on their own would be unable to acquire the adapters to begin with, leaving them in the same problem we have currently.

[TheLexiConArtist]

2 hours ago, (PSN)Boomstickman98 said:

I wouldn't like that, purely on the merit that players without the Steel Path or just aren't strong enough to farm steel essence on their own would be unable to acquire the adapters to begin with, leaving them in the same problem we have currently.

Missions like Sabotage and Spy can be looked for in the Incursions to allow any player to acquire some Essences without needing to kill anything or rely on someone else doing that work for them. Honourable mentions also to Defection (you may hate it, but with some frame/operator healing and maybe CC, it's doable) and Hijack (just need some control so the objective's lack of increased health doesn't get it popped on the way out.) I won't count Interception as that's a hot mess with the absurd spawns, even with CC if you let one slip you'd be on the road to a fail if lacking kill potential.

Basically, same reason that the Galv mods could have lived in Teshin's store, no problem. Shifting them to Arbi was a huge step back.

[(PSN)Boomstickman98]

1 hour ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Missions like Sabotage and Spy can be looked for in the Incursions to allow any player to acquire some Essences without needing to kill anything or rely on someone else doing that work for them. Honourable mentions also to Defection (you may hate it, but with some frame/operator healing and maybe CC, it's doable) and Hijack (just need some control so the objective's lack of increased health doesn't get it popped on the way out.) I won't count Interception as that's a hot mess with the absurd spawns, even with CC if you let one slip you'd be on the road to a fail if lacking kill potential.

Basically, same reason that the Galv mods could have lived in Teshin's store, no problem. Shifting them to Arbi was a huge step back.

At that point though two issues arise that I can see. One: if they aren't strong enough to fight the mobs, how can they be strong enough to take the mobs? Secondly, what are the odds that Sabotage or Spy will consistently be in rotation? Answer is not likely. As for them having shifted Galv mods to Arbi, probably was only to actually give an actual reason to do arbitrations. heavens knows I barely do 'em.

[gibbydenver]

galvanized scope and pistol counterpart still lose all stacks at once. I hope this is a bug.

[Wyrmius_Prime]

Revert the melee attack speed nerf and Berserker mod nerf, please, and let us stack Berserker with (Primed) Fury again. Some melee weapon types are completely unplayable due to how extremely slow they are now. The biggest example are the 2-handed Nikanas, which have one of the S#&$tiest stances combined with unnecessarily slow attack animations. Slow attack speed has a larger negative impact on FUN over any other thing.

I was so excited about the new Tenet Livia, but turns out that it is total garbage.

[Azamagon]

1 hour ago, Wyrmius_Prime said:

Revert the melee attack speed nerf and Berserker mod nerf, please, and let us stack Berserker with (Primed) Fury again. Some melee weapon types are completely unplayable due to how extremely slow they are now. The biggest example are the 2-handed Nikanas, which have one of the S#&$tiest stances combined with unnecessarily slow attack animations. Slow attack speed has a larger negative impact on FUN over any other thing.

I was so excited about the new Tenet Livia, but turns out that it is total garbage.

You can still use Quickening and (Primed/Berserker) Fury, you know?

[Wyrmius_Prime]

2 hours ago, Azamagon said:

You can still use Quickening and (Primed/Berserker) Fury, you know?

It's still not enough to compensate the slowed down animations for some weapon types. With the nerfed damage mods that's also a big hit into total DPS to mod multiple speed mods.

[Yasha-7HS]

Secondary Deadhead does not work on Athodai. Why? 

Galvanized Status mods have the same bugs that condition overload has had multiple times with projectiles from melee, and the same issue that glaives currently have with it. How did this manage to go unseen and unmentioned by anyone? 

Weapons that were not significant by their own rite before the update have, quite literally, lost significance due to the need to build them up from an even weaker standing than they were before the update, since optimal builds won't be using things like Serration. Merciless is viable on fewer weapons, and simply gets worse and worse over time to the point where you get one kill, and the added damage bonus is not significant enough to get the second kill before the bonus wears off. At the very least, Merciless needs a time increase of 50%. 

Deadhead also scales poorly, as status will outpace regular damage, enemy hotboxes are innacurate despite your precision, and with the addition of annoying automatic radials like Synergized Proboscis(however you spell it) that knock down and throw enemies in Ragdolls in random directions, eventually you stop being able to activate this arcane either. 

Dexterity is pretty much the best one because melee gets it's scaling upfront, rather than being complete garbage until I've already killed six things, so I use melee to actually get things done, then *maybe* use my guns for variety. In reality, I just use melee and have dexterity to replace the usage of combo duration mods, sometimes even naramon. It would've been more interesting if it wasn't combo duration, but rather combo count chance or combo efficiency. I hate how you keep telling us you want to increase variety in the game, and give us the same bonuses over and over and over... How many combo duration mods do we have? Now how many combo efficiency mods do we have? How many power strength bonuses do we have? Now how many duration bonuses do we have? I digress. 

Melees feel sluggish and horrible solely because it's harder to stack attack speed. Not they perform worse, they FEEL worse. Thanks for that. They feel about as terrible as pressing F while your melee is out to instantly swap to the last gun you were using to then sslloowwllyy pull out your alternate weapon. Merciless holster speed doesn't stack between the two, so it doesn't feel fast enough to use it solely for that. They should simply be increased to 150% holster speed.

[60framespersecond]

On the matter of wishing for gameplay that involves frequent swapping between primary/secondary/melee, a start would be to drastically reduce default swap time for all weapons (i.e. no mods involved!) and also make (significantly) reloading while holstered the default for all guns (again no mods involved!).

[Dirichlet2904]

4 hours ago, 60framespersecond said:

On the matter of wishing for gameplay that involves frequent swapping between primary/secondary/melee, a start would be to drastically reduce default swap time for all weapons (i.e. no mods involved!) and also make (significantly) reloading while holstered the default for all guns (again no mods involved!).

I was thinking about something like this earlier. It's kind of funny how the Dexterity Arcanes have swap speed as a minor bonus. It's actually a cool bonus, because it's one of those "fun" stats that you couldn't necessarily afford to justify a slot for anywhere. So to get it as a "free" bonus is all good; I like that sort of thing. But what's funny is, I probably feel less incentive to swap weapons (between primary and secondary that is) than I ever have done. Why? Because if I'm using my primary, then I'm letting my galvanized stacks wear off on my secondary. Therefore, unless I want to juggle three sets of cooldowns and switch constantly, switching is going to be a dps loss as I have to ramp up again. I don't know about you guys, but I find juggling the cooldowns on melee and one gun to be pretty fun. Like I really like the rhythm of that. But when I try to add in the other gun, it's just too frustrating to deal with.

So I don't know how you guys feel about this, but I think it'd be cool if primary and secondary weapons (not melee) could activate one anothers galvanized effects. In other words, say you have a primary with Galvanized Chamber and a secondary with Galvanized Diffusion, then getting a kill with your primary should give/refresh a stack of both Galvanized Chamber and Galvanized Diffusion. There's not really any power creep to that beyond what we already have, it'd just let you switch weapons without having to ramp up again. You'd still have to ramp up your Arcanes if not using Dexterity and mixing in melee, but Dex was already suggested to be the intended choice for swappers.

I mean technically this could allow you to squeeze out a bit of extra dps by using two very bursty and self-reloading guns, but honestly that sounds cool as #*!% and therefore should probably be allowed.

As for the self-reloading effect, I would like to see more of it, but I don't think it should be baseline. Such weapons are the obvious choice for hybrid gun/melee builds along with Dexterity Arcanes (and with that in mind you can tweak how you mod, for instance Fire Rate mods become more effective on a build like this). I'd rather see this as a class of gun rather than a baseline effect. But if DE wants to give a subtle buff to a few underperforming weapons, why not give them a battery/self-reload? Lots of potential there.

One other thing... I've been thinking about this since the melee 3.0 rework, but why does the interface switch from melee to gun how it does? Given the interplay between guns and melee (now more than ever), why can't I see my combo meter while I'm holding my gun, and why can't I see my ammo situation while I'm holding my melee weapon? I want to see both (or all three? if we're going that far). Surely the graphical assets already exist, it's just moving and resizing a few boxes.

[motorfirebox]

The Galvanized mods and primary/secondary arcanes are pretty good, they make ranged weapons feel more worthwhile, but I think they also really highlight the huge gap between AOE and/or high-ROF weapons and weapons you actually need to aim. I mean there's Deadhead arcanes and Galvanized Scope/Crosshairs, yes, but you can slap those on an Ignis Wraith/Kuva Zarr/Acceltra/whatever and wave it around at headshot level to far greater effect than if you stuck it on a Daikyu.

I don't necessarily think this issue can be fixed by mods. Speaking as a player who vastly prefers precision weapons over AOE or spray-and-pray, what I would like to see is for precision weapons simply get a big boost to weak spot multipliers. Maybe a +3x multiplier for bows and single-shot rifles/pistols (Latron, Veldt, Pandero primary fire); +2x on faster-firing and burst fire weapons like the Burston, Stubba, etc.; and a +1x on autofire rifles/pistols. Those numbers are just for spitballing; I think you could go as high as +6x / +4x / + 2x and AOE weapons would still outdamage more precise weapons overall.

[Ceryk]

Having played Steel Path more since the Update now, I will add to my previous thoughts on the attempt to bridge the Arsenal Divide. I still firmly believe Galvanized mods need to not be On Kill. On Kill works great in Normal mode, but it's just not reasonable in Steel Path. It's just too inefficient and slow to ramp up power compared to the Melee mod equivalents. But in addition to that, there's absolutely zero reason to use anything but AoE and Multitarget weapons in Steel Path. Single Target weapons are utterly useless. Single Target weapons need to brought up to the level of AoE weapons. I've got like 30 enemies shooting at me at any one time in Steel Path, single target weapons aren't cutting it with such lack luster damage compared to doing the same, or likely far more, damage but against multiple enemies.

The Arcanes are iffy as well. Firstly, the whole point was to bridge the gap between Melee and Ranged, but there's an arcane that's about melee damage rather than strictly ranged. While that's cool and all, it doesn't feel like it serves the purpose of bridging the divide, it seems like it does more to solidify Melee's dominance to me. There should have been one for Status rather than or in addition do the Melee one. And as mentioned above, no reason to use single target guns in Steel Path, so Deadhead is pretty much useless. And the Merceliss mods? It's way too hard to ensure kills every 4 seconds because it doesn't feel like Galvanized mods are doing what they are supposed to do well. I still find it significantly faster to slap enemies around with Melee.

Everything feels more like a bandaid that's falling off than a fix to me. I really wish it was all scrapped and the Damage 3.0 rework was restarted to actually fix the problems properly and deliver on the promise of removing as many mandatory mods from the game as possible.

[Lakyus]

It has been a while since the update dropped, and I think I have better feedback than my pre-Tennocon post. However, many of the issues I mentioned in the original post stays.

These are my individual mods feedback and suggestions:

• Berserker's Fury: Make it scale with Combo instead of an on kill effect. Starts slow, get big over time, like Blood Rush and Weeping Wounds. Right now it's a pain to use, and only already strong and fast weapons can trigger it with ease. Otherwise it's way better to stick with Primed Fury instead, which is not accessible to everyone.
• Most Galvanized Mods are not options, they are mandatory. This makes old mods be obsolete.
• Galvanized Scope: As pointed out, Galvanized Scope is the only Galvanized mod that resets completely instead of losing 1 stack at a time. It should lose the stack at the same time. In addition, the condition to use it is pretty annoying. Both Galvanized Scope and Argon Scope should give Critical Chance when Aiming, without a Headshot prior to it. The condition for Galvanized Scope stacking Critical Chance should also be on precision headshot, not on headshot kill. Otherwise it's better to use Point Strike or Critical Delay.

And then there is a separate, but related extremist suggestion... A Combo System rework. The rest of this post is the explanation and suggestions for it.

 

A Global Combo System

Instead of being melee only, Combo becomes a global feature, for guns (and some skills?) as well. Think of Devil May Cry series. It's pretty fun and works good.

Why should it be a global system?

Because being a melee only feature forces you to focus on your melee to keep the combo up, so it makes you stay away from the rest of your Arsenal. It's an obvious issue recognized by the devs, or else they wouldn't try to make infinite Combo with Xoris or combo "pause" with the new Tenet melee weapons from Ergo Glast.

It also allows some weapons that already have a combo system such as Snipers to use the same number.

What mods should be affected?

Most stacking mods, including Galvanized Mods.

Why should Galvanized mods be tied to a global Combo system?

Because the intention of the Arsenal Divide "fix" was to make us use all of our arsenal. And it's doing the contrary. Individual stacks for guns and melee weapons force you to either use only a gun OR only the melee weapon at a given time.

Instead of having many different buffs shown on the UI, they could all be shown in the Combo UI on the bottom right corner. This would unify and simplify everything with a system that the game already has.

Combo Decay vs Combo Reset

All Galvanized Mods and Primary/Secondary Arcanes lose 1 stack instead of resetting it to 0, with the exception of Galvanized Scope (unintended?). This should be the norm for the Combo system. Power Spike in Naramon focus school already does it. Why not make it global?
 

That's all I have to say. Thank you for the great work!

[Azamagon]

10 hours ago, motorfirebox said:

The Galvanized mods and primary/secondary arcanes are pretty good, they make ranged weapons feel more worthwhile, but I think they also really highlight the huge gap between AOE and/or high-ROF weapons and weapons you actually need to aim. I mean there's Deadhead arcanes and Galvanized Scope/Crosshairs, yes, but you can slap those on an Ignis Wraith/Kuva Zarr/Acceltra/whatever and wave it around at headshot level to far greater effect than if you stuck it on a Daikyu.

I don't necessarily think this issue can be fixed by mods. Speaking as a player who vastly prefers precision weapons over AOE or spray-and-pray, what I would like to see is for precision weapons simply get a big boost to weak spot multipliers. Maybe a +3x multiplier for bows and single-shot rifles/pistols (Latron, Veldt, Pandero primary fire); +2x on faster-firing and burst fire weapons like the Burston, Stubba, etc.; and a +1x on autofire rifles/pistols. Those numbers are just for spitballing; I think you could go as high as +6x / +4x / + 2x and AOE weapons would still outdamage more precise weapons overall.

Yeah there's basicly just two different design paths for single-target weapons now:

1) Make singletarget weapons wortwhile, both by making their precision burst damage superior compared to any AoE-weapon + adding more enemies which are far easier to kill with precision attacks (Nox-ish targets, basicly).

2) Give all singletarget weapons options to deal AoE-damage in one form or another: First innate punchthrough on all non-AoE weapons, then also add mods which add homing ricochet (ala Lich Nukor/Cycron), and/or mods that add explosive ammunition (ala Thunderbolt/Concealed Explosives, but rather than flat AoE-damage, gives AoE-damage scaling with the gun).

 

[Jitsuryoku]

I'm not going to be original.

Warframe has a fundamental balancing issue (namely: Single target damage has no value outside of like 3 bosses) and few mod changes will only make people look for a new "good" AoE. If it's not combo melee it'll be heavy melee or Bramma or a nuke frame.

What gives non-AoE weapons like sniper rifles value?
In short: higher damage (compared to AoE) and having a use for that higher damage (elite enemies, that take too long to kill with reduced AoE damage), so that switching from AoE actually saves time.

[Operativ]

I'll be both honest and original by saying that I actually like these changes, keep going and working on further balancing of weapons all across the board, as well as individually.

[(PSN)PheonixFontaine]

In general, the Galvanized Mods have been decent, but not great IMO. They do the thing, but they don't do it well. They hinge on everything else being good and then amplify what's there already, but not in maybe the best way they could.

 

Galvanized Mods by design make you compete for kills with allies.

In order to keep your stacks up and going, you need to fulfill it's conditional. This usually means kills. If you don't kill, your damage falls off. Your allies also have to fulfill this conditional. I'm not sure a better application, but this has been my biggest issue with them; that their core design is counter-intuitive to the gameplay.

 

Conditionals are arbitrary and add a false sense of power.

Headshots when users don't know where heads of many units are. The Headshot conditionals add a layer of difficulty to casual gameplay which is not healthy. Everyone knows aiming is overrated, it's why AoE weapons often are meta. It simply does not work to take your time when faced with a large quantity of enemies and also then put that on a timer. Galvanized Headshot/Scope add too many steps to your basic combat reward pattern in the fast-paced combat scenario. "On Headshot", "when aiming", "On headshot kill", "for 12s". That's 4 conditionals to make a mod work. That's too many. In theory, it's strong. In practice, it's a false sense of power. The numbers look good, but aren't good with this many conditionals. Same goes for the Arcanes. It's only good when it's good and only okay when it's not.

 

We'll nerf the one thing to make the other thing compete

This is a redundant design pattern and what the changes translated to for many users. Melee gives users that direct approach to combat. Ultimately, weapons need to deal damage. These changes did not feel like they were well thought out. While the game should not be made too easy, the problem is in the core gameplay instead of the weapons here.  The Melee nerfs perhaps tackled a larger issue where melee might have excelled beyond expectations, but the sweeping changes don't feel great. If you tweaked one element of the formula down, it hits all of them. So to see all the elements simultaneously hit is not great from the outward. That said, I didn't have a great build myself, so I literally saw it go from "this is marginally working" to not completing the objective of killing enemies in quantities. I feel like this is part user-based issue, but also shines a light on the necessity of specific build patterns for some gameplay. Which ultimately detracts from any build diversity. All these mods and most of them are bad.

 

Basic combat design is the problem

To compete in harder difficulties, users try new combat patterns. They find a singular pattern that works and often times will not diversify. Much of the game's flow is based on killing many enemies at a time and/or rapidly. So anything that slows that pace is a bad pattern. This is just how basic combat works.  In Steel Path and harder modes like it, the enemies gain multiple levels of difficulty all at once.  Namely, they become more durable and show up in a larger quantity. In example, I've been using Corinth Prime. My damage is not an issue. It kills enemies quite easily. The problem is quantity. I cannot kill them fast enough in many mission types. It doesn't matter what I do, this shotgun does bare minimum in comparison to the objective. The worst part, when I'm looking at the post-mission statistics and seeing that I was the most successful team member. (Highest damage, kill count, etc)

It's not to say "redesign the core gameplay" though, but double-down on gameplay intent. No light-footing it. If that's the game, then go hard with that by making that the gameplay that players feel rewarded by engaging with. Players need that engagement that says "you're doing this right", but all too often get hit with "huh, that's not quite right, try 30 more times". It's a lot of back and forth, something will always be "meta" and that's just how design works unfortunately. So it's not easy to say there's a solution, there may very well not be, however there is a problem with intent of the gameplay not following through.

 

I don't feel like I engage well with the content

Personal observation of my own experience. When I'm playing, I don't feel like I'm on par for the content I try to participate in. When entering Steel Path, I lack durability or damage. I went through the entire starchart and am now MR 25... I did this all with minimal usage of Forma. I didn't build them. (Except that spree to build all the weapons, which I'm still not done with.) Now I have to use several... not to "make" a gun work, but simply to test if that pattern works. It often doesn't. I often lack the basic resources to make the tools I have work in a way that feels appropriate to the gameplay. I didn't and still haven't invested a lot of time into Rivens. For me, Rivens are just very unlikable. It's guesswork if you got a good one and testwork to see if you can make it work better. Ultimately, what is fun is not good and what is good is not fun. I lack a lot of specific mods that make whatever the meta is, actually work. I'm finding myself trying to backtrack into levels and then hoping RNG gives me the thing I'm missing, but the table setups mean spending excessive hours just to get a mod that "might" help.

 

Not sure what guns Galvanized Acceleration helps

I'm sure it's great for something. Probably.