The Real Fix to Mandatory Modding, Modding Metas, and Non-Scaling Content/Abilities/Mods/Weapons

[PublikDomain]

10 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

but you've missed the parts where I've been saying that all of the mods would add damage only scaling off of the base damage of the weapon. So 100% multishot only adds an additional 100% of the weapon's base damage (and then will split the total weapon's damage apart into smaller and weaker pellets), as Elemental 90%'s only add 90% of the weapon's base damage, so after 8 meta damage mods you'd still only end up with something like a weapon that does a total of 900% damage (100% base + 8 x base).

What I'm missing is the actual math, which seems to be far more complicated than you think. Saying "just scale it off base damage" doesn't show how the math would actually need to work.

Say I want to add 5 mods with +100% Damage, +100% Multishot, +100% Toxin, +100% Cold, and +100% Fire Rate to a weapon with 20 base damage and 5 Fire Rate (100 DPS). Just for nice round numbers. It'd need to deal 600 DPS. How would these mods produce this number?

Unless the Fire Rate and Multishot completely lie to the player and don't actually add the Fire Rate and Multishot they say they do, then they'll need to apply some sort of penalty to damage. For the gun to deal 600 DPS with 10 Fire Rate and 2 Multishot to keep those two stats doing what they say they do, it'd need to deal 30 damage per pellet. But how do you get from 20 to 30 by adding +300%? And what happens when you add Crits and procs and typed damage into the mix? This isn't a straight-forward process...

 

[Vahenir]

If they actually do this i suspect that nothing would really change anyway. You'd have a new meta pop up on the same day and nobody will be using ammo belt etc regardless. Crit weapons will be utterly dead and i suspect beam shotguns like the phantasma will reign supreme.

If they do go through with this and balance the game around the new peak performance, you still cant bring your non meta stuff as it will still suck. Its like bringing a stug vs a bramma, even if you remove mods completely that stug remains complete and utter trash. Would it be a new meta, sure, but at the end it'd be a /huge/ amount of work for practically nothing. The reason that non meta stuff works at all currently is because you can go into the stratosphere with the multiplicative buffs and actually make the bad weapons work, without that we are all more limited than before. It doesn't matter if you kill an enemy with 5 damage of 5 billion damage, it just needs to die and whatever will make that happen to the most enemies in any given time is what becomes the meta. Currently that means high crit aoe weapons. With your changes it probably means high status and high rate of fire aoe weapons to stack damaging status effects, at least without massively reworking all the mods and arcanes. Rather than build for crit it'd be easy to just stack damage enough to make crit not be worth it and since status weapons tend to have more base damage they would be straight up better.

 

The cost of actually changing this is reworking literally everything. Every frame ability, every weapon, every mod and arcane needs to be rebalanced from the ground up. It all needs to be done at the same time and then dropped in a single update. There would be /massive/ drama, probably a huge amount of people leaving the game outright due to the changes, never to return. Whatever form the changes took would determine the new meta which would end up just as prevalent as what we have now after a few weeks or months at best, though probably a lot more based around the weapons themselves than the modding setup. Which would suck.

I do wonder what kind of off meta and "fun" builds you have in mind if this went live. Or even what kind of encounters you expect this to actually bring.

[DarknessNightshade]

Having skimmed through the thread, the scale and systems of a rework would essentially be changimg the entire core of warframe, a decision I don't think DE would ever make given its current state.

Damage mods being changed to be additive would mean effectively most of the mods based around increasing your damage would be totally outclassed and we'd see a new meta for base damage%.

Also, people have probably spent quite a bit of actual money on Rivens and other such mods in the free market for specific stats that some people are suggesting be outright removed...which is an idea verging on ridiculous, why would DE willingly shoot themselves in the foot with such a change? How would they compensate those who invested time and money into these systems?

Also, the comment on Galv mods being tacked on as a last minute thought....what?

There was whole workshop meant to bring melee and gunplay back into line (even though there's still a massive difference with Blood Rush/Gladiator/Sac Steel being a thing), with many changes and suggestions taken into account that probably wasn't read.

While I agree that the multiple different forms of damage can be confusing at times, I feel like it's purely outliers that aren't explained properly, with mandatory mods being a huge issue, would base damage mods then not become the new mandatory mods?

Overall, beyond my initial reaction, I really don't think such a drastic change is a good idea, and wouldn't change much in the grand scheme of things, at its heart, warframe is a power fantasy space ninja game, bringing realistic damage models into it I feel would piss a lot of people off, turn people away from the game, and have a very real chance of killing what is otherwise a huge hit.

Therefore I feel there's not much justification.

[Grav_Starstrider]

On 2021-08-10 at 7:38 PM, PublikDomain said:

What I'm missing is the actual math, which seems to be far more complicated than you think. Saying "just scale it off base damage" doesn't show how the math would actually need to work.

Say I want to add 5 mods with +100% Damage, +100% Multishot, +100% Toxin, +100% Cold, and +100% Fire Rate to a weapon with 20 base damage and 5 Fire Rate (100 DPS). Just for nice round numbers. It'd need to deal 600 DPS. How would these mods produce this number?

Unless the Fire Rate and Multishot completely lie to the player and don't actually add the Fire Rate and Multishot they say they do, then they'll need to apply some sort of penalty to damage. For the gun to deal 600 DPS with 10 Fire Rate and 2 Multishot to keep those two stats doing what they say they do, it'd need to deal 30 damage per pellet. But how do you get from 20 to 30 by adding +300%? And what happens when you add Crits and procs and typed damage into the mix? This isn't a straight-forward process...

 

I'm not that concerned with the specific math, aside from the example breakdown I posted before. If any of the numbers need to change, then they'll need to change.
Neither fire rate nor multishot need to lie to the player, due to the following explanations:
Fire rate has built in malus in the form of ammo inefficiency, it's about endurance/sustain vs burst-damage/bullet-hoses. It literally doesn't need to change one bit cuz it already has tradeoffs, so we don't have to incorporate it into the math right now, but if exact numbers need to change, then DE can change them, we don't have to theorycraft the exact values they'd need to be adjusted to in order to avoid a new overwhelming meta.
Multishot would be fixed to be less overall potent by simply adding a quantity scaling off of base damage, and then split the overall, final damage into the appropriate number of pellets (as opposed to directly multiplying total damage by number of pellets added). Example: a 100 base damage per bullet gun, that's been partially modded up to do 300 damage per bullet, could have a multishot mod (they'd probably have to specify damage addition separately from pellet count, so let's say the new reworked multishot was something like)(+150% Damage / +300% Pellets). The 150% would be based on that original 100 base damage, simply adding 150 damage to the total, resulting in 450 total damage, which you then simply split/divide out into 4 pellets, 112.5 damage per pellet.
Crit addressed next-

2 hours ago, Vahenir said:

If they actually do this i suspect that nothing would really change anyway. You'd have a new meta pop up on the same day and nobody will be using ammo belt etc regardless. Crit weapons will be utterly dead and i suspect beam shotguns like the phantasma will reign supreme.

If they do go through with this and balance the game around the new peak performance, you still cant bring your non meta stuff as it will still suck. Its like bringing a stug vs a bramma, even if you remove mods completely that stug remains complete and utter trash. Would it be a new meta, sure, but at the end it'd be a /huge/ amount of work for practically nothing. The reason that non meta stuff works at all currently is because you can go into the stratosphere with the multiplicative buffs and actually make the bad weapons work, without that we are all more limited than before. It doesn't matter if you kill an enemy with 5 damage of 5 billion damage, it just needs to die and whatever will make that happen to the most enemies in any given time is what becomes the meta. Currently that means high crit aoe weapons. With your changes it probably means high status and high rate of fire aoe weapons to stack damaging status effects, at least without massively reworking all the mods and arcanes. Rather than build for crit it'd be easy to just stack damage enough to make crit not be worth it and since status weapons tend to have more base damage they would be straight up better.

 

The cost of actually changing this is reworking literally everything. Every frame ability, every weapon, every mod and arcane needs to be rebalanced from the ground up. It all needs to be done at the same time and then dropped in a single update. There would be /massive/ drama, probably a huge amount of people leaving the game outright due to the changes, never to return. Whatever form the changes took would determine the new meta which would end up just as prevalent as what we have now after a few weeks or months at best, though probably a lot more based around the weapons themselves than the modding setup. Which would suck.

I do wonder what kind of off meta and "fun" builds you have in mind if this went live. Or even what kind of encounters you expect this to actually bring.

If crit weapons would be "dead" entirely by just decoupling, as I've said earlier, the numbers could be changed. Maybe all of the crit chance and damage mods would need to be straight up doubled in potency, in order for them to still be worth using on hybrid and crit-focused weaponry. It'd be easier to see and feel out how all of these changes affect the relative potency of certain modding combinations, or on an individual basis for certain unique mods.

Either way, your declarations of a new meta rising out of the ashes is nothing new across the forums. Please read the previous comments, about how decoupling the various mods, preventing them from multiplying off of each other exponentially, would make deviating from even the new "meta" substantially less devastating and punishing. Instead of downgrading from a meta mod to a less-than-meta mod, or a QoL mod, and seeing a loss of 1/2 of your DPS, you'd only see a drop of 1/8th, give or take, depending on the specific mods in question.

Regarding making non-meta weapons work better..... I'm pretty sure you're just flat out wrong? 200% more crit chance and damage is still next to worthless on something with sub-5% crit chance, or with only a 1.3x crit multiplier. Same with low Status chance. Nothing that improves non-critical or non-status weaponry fails to improve status or crit weaponry. The weapons that currently exceed as a meta right now are the ones that are AoE, or have "viable" amounts of crit and/or status chance, since crit and status chance are where all of the juicy DPS is at. Show me a 5 weapons that aren't inconvenient or niche-playstyle or special-gimmick as heck, that rely purely or close to purely on base damage, that beat the most meta-for-DPS Status and/or Crit weapons in the game, more often than in niche circumstances. Crit Damage and Chance, or the ability to ignore ludicrous armor/shield via statuses, benefit exponentially from additional exponential multiplication of their base damage. Taking the exponential synergies out of the equation levels the playing field by a lot.

Again, we could boost the numbers of crit to remain relevant on crit weaponry even after this "nerf", as compared to just stacking raw damage, multishot, or elemental damage onto them or a status-y equivalent weapon. Numbers will definitely have to be tweaked. But no, this would not completely flip to a status meta, since the actual baseline DPS of the status weaponry is also being hit, as the dual-stat elemental mods or primed elemental damage mods would only be scaling off of the base weapon damage itself, rather than also exponentially benefiting from multishot and crit damage and modded "base" damage.

SEVERAL of the changes could probably be done bit by bit, increment by increment. Actually, I can't think of a significant reason why each piece couldn't be addressed in it's own update? As previously mentioned, I can barely see a reason why Multishot couldn't be updated on it's own, with DE simply reducing the enemy per-level health/armor/shield scaling by an appropriate factor, which I hope/imagine is an easy numerical tweak of only a few numbers on their end. It's really only mostly the status and crit mods that would have to be addressed in the same update.

Most Warframe's abilities SUCK at scaling into the late game, so actually a lot of abilities would probably not even need to be touched. And on the contrary, DE did a massive across-the-board re-balancing of all primaries recently, along with changes to melee combo systems, with the outright removal of channeling, and they updated Focus, and they've fundamentally restructured Railjack, and also updated Intrinsic behaviors. None of these changes have substantially earthshatteringly changed the game, and we still saw record numbers of simultaneous players and Tennocon-stream watchers. You exaggerate the degree to which this would actually change the feel of the game for the worse. We're just lowering the numbers and making them more consistent. You can still mod the same way, or similarly, and get decently big numbers that pop Grineer, Corpus, and Infested heads like grapes. An additive-oriented system (cumulatively multiplicative, base + base X #ofDPSmods), rather than a multiplicative system (cumulatively exponential, base X ~2^#ofDPSmods), which will make it far easier to balance things so that Warframe abilities and a wider variety of weapons and mods feel more useful across the majority of the content, rather than a (arguable) majority of abilities only being useful/effective in the early star chart.

As I've reiterated a number of times in this thread, and earlier in this response, it's obvious that making DPS modding additive will make it less punishing to deviate from the DPS meta (whether it ends up paralleling the current meta, or if a new one emerges). This would especially help with flat-number mods/abilities without scaling mechanics that are currently massively under-performing. Ideally the numbers are worked tightly enough that there barely is a meta, and that modding is more about choice of gameplay and gun-feel, than about just chasing higher and higher and exponentially higher numbers. It's difficult for DE to balance Warframe abilities, in particular, against the range of Earth level enemies, through Steel Path level enemies. An exponential-based system makes it nearly impossible to find and strike a balance where a given Warframe and their weaponry, their survivability and DPS, makes enemies feel like a fair challenge. Exponential numbers means it's stupidly easy to undershoot, and be way below the enemies, for either survivability or DPS or both, or to massively overshoot. It's. Just. Bad. For. Balancing.

This will be like ripping off the mother of a mountain of bandaids, but I think we need to rebuild the foundation of Warframe's damage, and reduce the numerical bloat, to prevent it from collapsing under the weight of it's own mountain of inconsistent balancing.

3 hours ago, DarknessNightshade said:

Having skimmed through the thread, the scale and systems of a rework would essentially be changimg the entire core of warframe, a decision I don't think DE would ever make given its current state.

Damage mods being changed to be additive would mean effectively most of the mods based around increasing your damage would be totally outclassed and we'd see a new meta for base damage%.

Also, people have probably spent quite a bit of actual money on Rivens and other such mods in the free market for specific stats that some people are suggesting be outright removed...which is an idea verging on ridiculous, why would DE willingly shoot themselves in the foot with such a change? How would they compensate those who invested time and money into these systems?

Also, the comment on Galv mods being tacked on as a last minute thought....what?

There was whole workshop meant to bring melee and gunplay back into line (even though there's still a massive difference with Blood Rush/Gladiator/Sac Steel being a thing), with many changes and suggestions taken into account that probably wasn't read.

While I agree that the multiple different forms of damage can be confusing at times, I feel like it's purely outliers that aren't explained properly, with mandatory mods being a huge issue, would base damage mods then not become the new mandatory mods?

Overall, beyond my initial reaction, I really don't think such a drastic change is a good idea, and wouldn't change much in the grand scheme of things, at its heart, warframe is a power fantasy space ninja game, bringing realistic damage models into it I feel would piss a lot of people off, turn people away from the game, and have a very real chance of killing what is otherwise a huge hit.

Therefore I feel there's not much justification.

Right now, non-meta weapons don't hold a candle to the meta weapons, especially after Galvanized mods released (which furthered the gap between meta and non-meta, as MANY people have observed personally, logically, and mathematically). The intent isn't to reverse the meta so that crit and status weapons are useless or niche. It's to overall level the playing field so that you aren't outright crippling yourself by choosing base damage, or status, or crit, or some hybrid of any or all of these options. Numbers can be tweaked, please don't exaggerate and pretend that DE would completely sleep on balance if they went through the trouble of doing half of these recommendations, in for a penny, in for a pound, you know?

I've (taken back or) not been in favor of outright removing hardly anything. We re-conceived that Multishot could still provide an additive dps bonus, as nearly everything else would, rather than being a flat multiplier to total damage. Crit would be reigned in just a smidge, with it scaling off of base damage rather than synergizing with other DPS options (see a previous comments and portions of this specific response on this), reducing the total-weapon's crit damage per non-base damage added to the weapon, so that multishot, base damage, and elemental damage didn't get boosted by crit, but the overall weapon crit per pellet is still better than nothing, and even worth modding for, and remains easily parse-able.

The meta may change slightly, but the Rivens would still do what they already do. If the meta changes (like DE already changed by changing IPS, some of the Elements, and by adding new mods to the game), then it only truly snubs the people that wasted a truly horrendous amount of plat/kuva on meta god-rolls. You shouldn't worship and ridiculously hyper-specialize in an "in beta", constantly changing game like Warframe. Again, the Rivens would continue to do what they do. If it's no longer the overwhelming meta, but rather becomes just one of the more viable builds, then again, it only punishes the people who threw plat around like it was just a handful of pennies anyways. Nobody likes or cares about the Riven Mafia except for the Riven Mafia. DE could give out a small sum of kuva per riven owned, somewhat scaling by roll count as well, up to a cap, along with Forma per forma'd weapons up to a cap, to keep people from feeling like their builds were ruined without compensation.

I don't know about you, but I don't feel a power fantasy when removing the least effective DPS mod on my weapon in exchange for a more QoL-oriented mod halves my damage. Or when 2 or 3 Warframes overshadow the entire rest of the roster by a landslide for DPS because of how their damage scales and nobody else's does, where entire Warframe abilities are useless at DPS at higher levels and no longer worth burning any energy on, because they're things like Damage Reflection abilities, or "enemies hurt themselves", or "enemies hurt each other" abilities that are close to useless at higher levels. I don't feel a power fantasy when my Operator's gameplay approaches and DPS are barely modifiable beyond crafting a different weapon, equipping different arcanes, and equipping a specific school, and then seeing half of their abilities fail to scale at higher levels at all.

Power fantasy is dependent on having enemies that you can slaughter with ease, as well as having reasonable challenges that you can still best with decent gameplay. Numbers go exponential like BRRRRR and then having the enemy meet and then exceed that amount is not a successful power fantasy. imo. Up to you if you really think there's "not much justification" when it'd reduce the severity of Warframe, Weapon, and Modding metas (and reduce/move their relative uselessness in a lot of cases).

[Vahenir]

2 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Power fantasy is dependent on having enemies that you can slaughter with ease, as well as having reasonable challenges that you can still best with decent gameplay. Numbers go exponential like BRRRRR and then having the enemy meet and then exceed that amount is not a successful power fantasy. imo. Up to you if you really think there's "not much justification" when it'd reduce the severity of Warframe, Weapon, and Modding metas (and reduce/move their relative uselessness in a lot of cases).

I would argue that's more of a problem with the abilities themselves. You mentioned banshees first ability earlier and unless enemies are nerfed so hard that they have like 300 total ehp that will remain worthless for damage. It has 50 impact damage so even with a 300% power strength build it would take two casts to kill an enemy with 300hp at best. Which would remain bad even if weapon mods were entirely removed from the game.

One of the main reasons that learning modding the first time around in this game is so satisfying (at least it was to me) is because the end results are nothing short of spectacular. At first you struggle with taking down lowbie enemies, but when you've gathered the mods and put together a proper build they are now easy. Or when you go into steel path and run into a wall since you can't beat the earth grineer, only to return later with the proper setup and go through them just fine. That is even if the setup isn't "meta". Seriously, I've been doing steel path stuff with weaker frames like Yareli and even with her i have several options to make it work.

I do agree that the armor scaling needs to be looked at since that's what basically drives the whole viral/slash meta. Even if corrosive could remove all enemy armor again it would become a viable option at the very high level side as it used to be, even with no changes to armor scaling. And that would give more options for builds.

Where the current multiplicative scaling becomes a problem is pretty much against bosses but against normal enemies its fairly irrelevant. Like for example if you have two guns, say a sniper and a rocket launcher. The sniper does a million damage per shot while the rocket launcher does 100. The enemies you're fighting have 50 hp, which makes the rocket launcher better even with its far lower damage. Do a stat squish and now the sniper is down to 500 damage and the rocket launcher to 50, the end result is the same and at least the rocket launcher gets no additional build options as it needs every bit of damage to one shot enemies. The sniper had additional options even in the initial scenario. Maybe bring the HP of the enemies up to try and make the sniper more competitive?

So they now have 500 HP, the sniper still one shots them but the rocket launcher is completely useless in comparison. But against a group of 10 enemies they technically take the same time to kill them, assuming both weapons have the same rate of fire. The sniper is still the superior option since it kills enemies and thus removes damage being thrown at you while the rocket launcher does not.

This would of course be the same with the current scaling, if not even more prevalent. But the point is that if you do a million or 500 damage doesn't matter, as long as the enemies die in one shot. The time to kill will remain the same. The only place its a major problem is against bosses that are supposed to stick around and take a while to beat. That's when you get adaptive damage attenuation, RNG invulnerability phases etc. To actually fix that you need to go back and rebalance everything so that everything can reach the same general area when it comes to damage output, once that is done then it doesn't matter if the multiplicative system in use now, or an additive one is used. Or they fix the adaptive damage attenuation so it squishes the damage in a better way than now, apply it to bosses, and skip the trouble of rebalancing everything.

[Nira]

I'm all for steamlining how damage is calculated in this game.

Let's face it, it's such a spaghetti-like mess at present, we've got like four different types of melee finisher damage, because...?

 

9 hours ago, Vahenir said:

...and i suspect beam shotguns like the phantasma will reign supreme.

 

It's already pretty high up there :D

[Vahenir]

52 minutes ago, Dualice said:

I'm all for steamlining how damage is calculated in this game.

Let's face it, it's such a spaghetti-like mess at present, we've got like four different types of melee finisher damage, because...?

Yep, it could definitely use a "de-spaghettification" and rebalance of weapons to make it more consistent. But at least i think that pretty much reworking it from scratch to an additive system is complete overkill.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

4 hours ago, Vahenir said:

Yep, it could definitely use a "de-spaghettification" and rebalance of weapons to make it more consistent. But at least i think that pretty much reworking it from scratch to an additive system is complete overkill.

I'm in favor of at least making Crit and Viral procs additive with Base Damage to narrow the gap hybrid weapons have with everything else.

For some weapons it seems DE balanced low crit-weapons with higher base damage, but it feels random. Some weapons got higher base damage on top of crit. The balance between kit guns is nonsensical.

Exergis didn't get squat when DE buffed the corrupted Crit chance mod.

[Aldain]

51 minutes ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

For some weapons it seems DE balanced low crit-weapons with higher base damage

And then you've got things like the Ambassador, you'd think "Oh it has a high crit multiplier to make up for having the same base damage per bullet as a Braton, that means it is a crit weapon like the Soma Prime." but nope, DE just goes LOL and gives it a 14% base crit chance to go with the 2.8x multiplier, because it totally will be able to make use of that multiplier when it tops out at 42% with a corrupted mod...

There's plenty of things like that floating around, hek, DE still hasn't made Blunderbuss a non-joke mod despite making Critical Deceleration more than twice as good. and even then a fair number of shotguns have 15% or less as a base crit chance anyway.

...Not sure this is related to the topic, I just needed to vent about how modding is so comically reliant on base stats that it is physically painful.

[PublikDomain]

12 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Fire rate has built in malus in the form of ammo inefficiency, it's about endurance/sustain vs burst-damage/bullet-hoses. It literally doesn't need to change one bit cuz it already has tradeoffs, so we don't have to incorporate it into the math right now, but if exact numbers need to change, then DE can change them, we don't have to theorycraft the exact values they'd need to be adjusted to in order to avoid a new overwhelming meta.

Well the one tradeoff it has can be solved with an Ammo Mutation mod in your Exilus, so if Fire Rate is skipped by these damage changes it's just gonna become mandatory. Fire Rate is a multiplier to your damage output, and if it's left alone as a multiplier it's gonna keep multiplying. For example, say you've got your eight +1x damage mods that gives you a 9x overall damage multiplier. Replacing just one of them with Vile Acceleration multiplies your damage 1.66x, from 9x overall to 14.9x. Stacking even more Fire Rate only bumps that multiplier higher; replacing two more +1x damage mods for Speed Trigger and P. Shred gives you a 17.84x multiplier, right about double what you'd get with just damage. Your ammo consumption is higher, yeah, but Carrier and/or Ammo Mutation makes that a non-issue. For Fire Rate to not produce this, it'd need to either A) be heavily nerfed, which would make the rate increase unnoticeable or B) reduce your damage by some unknown amount, which is counterintuitive. So the specific math is kinda important to understand...

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

38 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Well the one tradeoff it has can be solved with an Ammo Mutation mod in your Exilus, so if Fire Rate is skipped by these damage changes it's just gonna become mandatory. Fire Rate is a multiplier to your damage output, and if it's left alone as a multiplier it's gonna keep multiplying. For example, say you've got your eight +1x damage mods that gives you a 9x overall damage multiplier. Replacing just one of them with Vile Acceleration multiplies your damage 1.66x, from 9x overall to 14.9x. Stacking even more Fire Rate only bumps that multiplier higher; replacing two more +1x damage mods for Speed Trigger and P. Shred gives you a 17.84x multiplier, right about double what you'd get with just damage. Your ammo consumption is higher, yeah, but Carrier and/or Ammo Mutation makes that a non-issue. For Fire Rate to not produce this, it'd need to either A) be heavily nerfed, which would make the rate increase unnoticeable or B) reduce your damage by some unknown amount, which is counterintuitive. So the specific math is kinda important to understand...

The Exilus Slot was a mistake.

Ammo Mutation fits in there giving AOE weapons with low ammo pools sustained DPS.

Weapons with good ammo economy can't fit Punch-through into the Exilus slot.

Holster reload mods fit in the Exilus, but reload speed mods don't. 

All weapon mods have an effect on DPS, directly or indirectly. Making it easier to land shots, boosting sustained DPS by decreasing downtime. 

The issue is that their are a saturation of damage multipliers that have no negative effect on handling characteristics at all.

Base Damage, Crit, Multi-shot, elemental damage are no brainers.

Fire Rate and reload speed have mixed results from weapon to weapon.

Another direction it can go is to boost the numbers on "QoL" mods until they provide competitive DPS multiplication to Crits, Base Damage and Multi-shot inspite of their drawbacks.

+500% reload speed decreases downtime by 80%.

Automatic Exergis build.

+Zoom mods could also provide bonuses to headshot multiplier

Or, introduce more power creeped guns with such poor handling characteristics that QoL mods would seem mandatory for optimal DPS.

[Vahenir]

4 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

I'm in favor of at least making Crit and Viral procs additive with Base Damage to narrow the gap hybrid weapons have with everything else.

For some weapons it seems DE balanced low crit-weapons with higher base damage, but it feels random. Some weapons got higher base damage on top of crit. The balance between kit guns is nonsensical.

Exergis didn't get squat when DE buffed the corrupted Crit chance mod.

I don't disagree that weapons need a balance pass overall since they are currently all over the place. In either case there are some status weapons that keep up with crit and hybrid ones just through the sheer amount of status effects they can put out. Good examples being the phantasma and kuva nukor. Even the exergis is /really/ good and can happily tear through the steel path using a corrosive build. It did get massively buffed by the galvanized mods after all.

Viral could be toned down slightly, but as far as i know its basically on par with corrosive up until the enemies get 4500 armor or something like that. That's when the nerfed corrosive starts to fall off and no longer remove enough armor and the innate armor bypass and damage increase against ferrite armor get overshadowed by viral. Corrosive also tends to be better on slow by heavy weapons as those can't spit out enough status procs for viral to be better. Further looking at armor scaling, or removal there of, would change what elements can be used. But i don't really expect many others than viral, corrosive, heat, toxin and possibly magnetic for sister hunting to be used regardless. That is because this whole game is built on killing stuff as quickly as possible and a bad CC status like blast will never be used over stuff that kills faster, because death is the best CC. Gas is another one that is just bad, not only is its scaling with mods terrible but its also weak against most enemies other than basic infested units. Those will die to literally anything anyway.

Also if crit was made additive then you could just stack damage from arcanes and whatnot and make any non 100% crit chance weapon better by just throwing on more elemental and status stuff. Between galvanized aptitude, the gun arcanes and the damage arcanes on the frame you can relatively easily stack at least 900% damage in game, right now, with one single mod on the weapon and without warframe buffs. Assuming an 8x multiplier on the same weapon you would get the equivalent of a 1.9x or so crit multiplier in game right now, which would be an /insane/ nerf to crit. Weapons with enough crit chance could skip the damage mods completely and get more elemental and status stuff as the damage mods would be dead weight. If you have 800% damage from the crits, why bother to increase that a tiny amount with serration? The old mandatory mods are already pretty obsolete with the new galvanized mods and weapon arcanes taking their place.

If the elemental mods become "conversion" type mods that don't increase damage and every mod gets a tradeoff, well you now have a 4 mod meta. Said mods being crit chance, crit damage (if applicable) and galvanized aptitude or equivalent. Arcanes will be either merciless or dexterity on the weapon and then the appropriate damage arcane on the frame. If the weapon has a big enough magazine you /will/ mod it for fire rate as that will still be a multiplicative damage increase. After that no more mods are necessary if they don't actually make the weapon kill faster. Without the huge armor on the grineer it will no longer matter much what damage types are used, just bring whatever and it will brute force all factions. If the elemental mods still increase damage, you're gonna run 4 of them to increase your damage and status chance.

With viral being additive it would add like less than 90% real damage to most half competent builds at max stacks, making it pretty bad as a single stack of viral adds more damage right now. With an additive crit setup on top of that it would be even worse. Something like 40-50% real damage assuming no other damage mods than the critical multiplier and 100% crit chance. You get more damage than that using corrosive, assuming ferrite armor, and thats even without stacking anything.

[PublikDomain]

2 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

The Exilus Slot was a mistake.

I think it's actually a model, lol. IMO Exilus slots need to be flipped on its head: instead of one slot for QoL with all of the other slots for raw, boring damage, it ought to be a few slots for raw, boring damage and all of the other slots for QoL.

[Grav_Starstrider]

11 hours ago, Vahenir said:

Like for example if you have two guns, say a sniper and a rocket launcher

You wouldn't use these against the same type of enemy :V you'd use the sniper rifle for Noxes, and the rocket to clear out a swarm of Hyeka Kavats or the Kubrows, or a charge of any other light enemies. Bad comparison, outright, sorry :/ the rocket launchers should be bad at single target DPS, but good against groups, such as to CC them or prime them for CO.

 

10 hours ago, Dualice said:

I'm all for steamlining how damage is calculated in this game.

Let's face it, it's such a spaghetti-like mess at present, we've got like four different types of melee finisher damage, because...?

It's such a small gripe, but I feel it. Too many completely unexpected random divergences from base gameplay and damage types, that feel more like tacked on content islands or rule breakers than something that actually meshes with the base gameplay design. I'm thinking of Mercy, are you thinking of something else? Like True Damage, or stealth multipliers?

9 hours ago, Vahenir said:

Yep, it could definitely use a "de-spaghettification" and rebalance of weapons to make it more consistent. But at least i think that pretty much reworking it from scratch to an additive system is complete overkill.

I feel like additive approach is the only real way you can fix the sheer number bloat and make damage output by frames and weapons more consistent. We might have to agree to disagree on whether it'd be better or worse (or logistically feasible).

3 hours ago, Aldain said:

Not sure this is related to the topic, I just needed to vent about how modding is so comically reliant on base stats that it is physically painful.

Pretty sure this is exactly what switching to additive and then tweaking numbers as necessary would fix, as it'd swing towards leveling the playing field. I declare it relevant 😉

2 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

Well the one tradeoff it has can be solved with an Ammo Mutation mod in your Exilus, so if Fire Rate is skipped by these damage changes it's just gonna become mandatory.

 

2 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

The Exilus Slot was a mistake.

Ammo Mutation fits in there giving AOE weapons with low ammo pools sustained DPS.

Sounds like Exilus slots aren't to blame here, nor would fire rate need added malus/downsides. Just reclassify ammo mutation as not-an-exilus mod. The point of Exilus slots is to give you a primarily QoL modification to the gun, that affects feel more than it affects. A bottomless ammo pool is obv a straight up buff to sustained DPS, to a degree that practically no other Exilus weapon mod bestows. Increased projectile flight speed, added or reduced accuracy, they are more about having the gun handle the way you want it to, meshing to your desired play style, even if they marginally improve DPS as a minor side effect.

Aside from infinite ammo, what other Exilus mods affect weapons' sustained DPS output to the degree that multishot, crit, and elemental damage currently lends? I imagine only a few would compete even after this proposed decoupling, but they can get reclassified as non-Exilus as well, and this hypothetical argument and the nerfs leveled at the main meta DPS mods with this proposal will make choosing the promoted-out-of-exilus mods viable picks as main mods, reducing your damage output, like I've outlined in this thread before, by around or less than 1/8th of your meta DPS, instead of how they'd currently lose you half of your DPS.

 

I SOOOO wish for DE to seriously consider this, and make a PTS to test these changes, or at least one or a few of them at a time, as I believe it'd be so much better for them to be able to balance things moving forward, balance CC and stealth viability vs DPS, allow a more clear distinction and effective niche with tactical frames, single target DPS, and wide-range light-mob clearing, they could slowly make way more Warframes viable for the game again, and make new, more compelling and challenging content that allows us to use different solutions to achieve the same end. "Meme build mission completion" cred would take a hit, but I'd be excited for some of the more niche mods and modsets to shine, or for the ones that do, to shine more consistently instead of exponentially more so only under a specific build.

[PublikDomain]

1 minute ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Just reclassify ammo mutation as not-an-exilus mod.

Carrier still exists so idk if it'd really make a difference.

[Aldain]

49 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Carrier still exists so idk if it'd really make a difference.

Carrier can be broken at least...and because lol-sentinel durability likely will be at some point.

[Vahenir]

4 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

You wouldn't use these against the same type of enemy :V you'd use the sniper rifle for Noxes, and the rocket to clear out a swarm of Hyeka Kavats or the Kubrows, or a charge of any other light enemies. Bad comparison, outright, sorry :/ the rocket launchers should be bad at single target DPS, but good against groups, such as to CC them or prime them for CO.

Of course, thats why i had it at one fifth of the damage of the sniper. But you only have three weapon slots and most of the time youre up against huge hordes of weak enemies where the sniper would be pretty bad. The point i was trying to make was the opposite, that if aoe weapons are nerfed too much so they end up killing trash at the same rate as a powerful single target gun they will become completely obsolete.

 

12 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

I feel like additive approach is the only real way you can fix the sheer number bloat and make damage output by frames and weapons more consistent. We might have to agree to disagree on whether it'd be better or worse (or logistically feasible).

The problem isn't with it being multiplicative. The problem is that its all over the place in terms of base damage which additive damage scaling wouldn't really solve. A high base damage weapon will still be far better. On top of this is how each individual weapon handles, which makes it even more messy. There are weapons in the game that would be bad even if they were buffed to do infinite damage after all.

You can't save a gun that does 10 dps at base with squishing stats when there's a gun that does 1000 dps at base. You cant really make a frame ability that does 50 damage per cast useful when another frame has an equal cost ability that does 5k damage. The difference between both will just get bigger when mods are added and this isn't even considering the various mechanics of the weapons and abilities.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter if weapons put out 1k dps or 1 billion dps, as long as its consistent between different weapons so it can be balanced around. If this then leads to "challenging" stuff being added in either scenario the metas will become increasingly strict rather than more open, regardless if the system is additive or not. Especially if people can screw up and fail a mission for others by being poorly equipped. 

No matter which approach is used, all weapons, frames and abilities would need to be rebalanced so that an optimized build ends up in the same ballpark in terms of actual damage output. I don't think its going to happen at this point, I'm not sure it even should.

So i just hope they figure out their damage attenuation formula as that has the potential of solving this whole problem without having to rebalance everything. It just has to be applied carefully, in the right places and not make a fully modded and fitted weapon worse than a half leveled one. Mechanics can also be used for a challenging fight, if applied properly. Id love to have a really mechanics heavy boss fight myself, something akin to a proper dungeon boss in an MMO. One without hordes of enemies pouring in constantly, with clear telegraphs and structure.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

44 minutes ago, Vahenir said:

Of course, thats why i had it at one fifth of the damage of the sniper. But you only have three weapon slots and most of the time youre up against huge hordes of weak enemies where the sniper would be pretty bad. The point i was trying to make was the opposite, that if aoe weapons are nerfed too much so they end up killing trash at the same rate as a powerful single target gun they will become completely obsolete.

 

The problem isn't with it being multiplicative. The problem is that its all over the place in terms of base damage which additive damage scaling wouldn't really solve. A high base damage weapon will still be far better. On top of this is how each individual weapon handles, which makes it even more messy. There are weapons in the game that would be bad even if they were buffed to do infinite damage after all.

You can't save a gun that does 10 dps at base with squishing stats when there's a gun that does 1000 dps at base. You cant really make a frame ability that does 50 damage per cast useful when another frame has an equal cost ability that does 5k damage. The difference between both will just get bigger when mods are added and this isn't even considering the various mechanics of the weapons and abilities.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter if weapons put out 1k dps or 1 billion dps, as long as its consistent between different weapons so it can be balanced around. If this then leads to "challenging" stuff being added in either scenario the metas will become increasingly strict rather than more open, regardless if the system is additive or not. Especially if people can screw up and fail a mission for others by being poorly equipped. 

No matter which approach is used, all weapons, frames and abilities would need to be rebalanced so that an optimized build ends up in the same ballpark in terms of actual damage output. I don't think its going to happen at this point, I'm not sure it even should.

So i just hope they figure out their damage attenuation formula as that has the potential of solving this whole problem without having to rebalance everything. It just has to be applied carefully, in the right places and not make a fully modded and fitted weapon worse than a half leveled one. Mechanics can also be used for a challenging fight, if applied properly. Id love to have a really mechanics heavy boss fight myself, something akin to a proper dungeon boss in an MMO. One without hordes of enemies pouring in constantly, with clear telegraphs and structure.

Damage attenuation is the root of why a stat squish sounds promising. 

When playing a game, it would be nice if rules stayed consistent. Without consistency, there is no strategizing, just guessing. 

In the multiplier spaghetti, DE missed Banshee for their damage attenuation formula.

DE literally tacked on too many kinds of multipliers into the game that they couldn't catch them all.

[Vahenir]

4 minutes ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

Damage attenuation is the root of why a stat squish sounds promising. 

When playing a game, it would be nice if rules stayed consistent. Without consistency, there is no strategizing, just guessing. 

In the multiplier spaghetti, DE missed Banshee for their damage attenuation formula.

DE literally tacked on too many kinds of multipliers into the game that they couldn't catch them all.

In general the rules are already fairly consistent when it comes to modding. The special cases and various outliers are what needs to be fixed and brought in line, like banshees sonar. Stat squish or not, these things need to be dealt with for the game to be balanced to such a point that damage attenuation is no longer necessary.

It would also need a more structured approach to base stats on weapons, clear power budgets and stuff. I have no idea if it would actually end up being fun in the long run or if it would just make everything feel the same, where choices don't really matter anymore. One of the more satisfying things about warframe is how absolutely nuts it can get with builds and stuff, at least in my opinion. So having damage attenuation enhanced and fixed, then applied where it actually matters, does let both sides have their cake and eat it too. Though in its current implementation its bad, at least when its turned up to 11.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

16 minutes ago, Vahenir said:

In general the rules are already fairly consistent when it comes to modding. The special cases and various outliers are what needs to be fixed and brought in line, like banshees sonar. Stat squish or not, these things need to be dealt with for the game to be balanced to such a point that damage attenuation is no longer necessary.

It would also need a more structured approach to base stats on weapons, clear power budgets and stuff. I have no idea if it would actually end up being fun in the long run or if it would just make everything feel the same, where choices don't really matter anymore. One of the more satisfying things about warframe is how absolutely nuts it can get with builds and stuff, at least in my opinion. So having damage attenuation enhanced and fixed, then applied where it actually matters, does let both sides have their cake and eat it too. Though in its current implementation its bad, at least when its turned up to 11.

The precedent solution to those outliers is usually to make them additive with one of the more common multipliers found on weapon builds.

That's exactly what happened to Chroma and Condition Overload, being made additive with Base Damage.

Rhino's Roar is kept balanced by being additive with Faction Damage. Maybe DE could let Sonar work on more things if they followed the same principle. 

Not everything needs to be additive with each other, but there needs to be a clear basis of multipliers to work from.

Instead of stealth multipliers, finisher multipliers, headshot multipliers........all these external multipliers could have all been rolled into Flat +X00% Critical Chance.

Maybe with the introduction of Base Damage Arcanes, the notion of making Crit additive with Base Damage seems wrong. I proposed such an idea back in April before the Arcanes dropped.

 

 

[PublikDomain]

36 minutes ago, Vahenir said:

It would also need a more structured approach to base stats on weapons, clear power budgets and stuff. I have no idea if it would actually end up being fun in the long run or if it would just make everything feel the same, where choices don't really matter anymore.

With the recent discussions brought up by the Josh Strife Hayes videos I decided to start working through a new account, and if the early-game content I'm playing is any indication it would be a lot more engaging in the long run. I don't want to call it more fun, because that's subjective and depends on the person, but so far early-game Warframe without all the creep is unarguably a more complex and engaging experience than late-game Warframe. There are more mechanics in play and your choices about how you engage with those mechanics matter more. For me that means more fun, and I'm enjoying myself far more than in my regular log-in-maybe-Nightwave-log-out gameplay as an L1, but some players don't really want to be engaged the same way. Luckily, a stat-squish if done right doesn't mean making the game any harder, it just means setting up spaces where the game can be something other than easy.

And I'd argue that your choice doesn't really matter right now in late-game Warframe, and that everything already feels the same. There's no reason to explore anything but the strongest content or content you've already invested in, so you end up settling on a smaller segment of the game's content and sticking with just that. Why go out and spend the time and resources on a new gun if it's going to be built the same way but perform worse than the guns you already have? Which is - ironically - the same argument I keep seeing made against balance.

[Grav_Starstrider]

3 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

Carrier still exists so idk if it'd really make a difference.

Choosing to use Carrier means you're not choosing other companion options or DPS options, it's using up a non-Exilus mod slot, wouldn't make Carrier overtly broken. imo

2 hours ago, Vahenir said:

No matter which approach is used, all weapons, frames and abilities would need to be rebalanced so that an optimized build ends up in the same ballpark in terms of actual damage output. I don't think its going to happen at this point, I'm not sure it even should.

Yeah.... And balancing everything so that they land in the same ballpark would be easier if modding didn't result in inconsistently exponential outcomes, by making damage more additive/multiplicative, instead of multiplicative/exponential. And making it so that base damage (relative to enemy EHP) is more significant, since it's not getting exponentially improved, will make it that much harder for people to screw other people up by failing the gear-check. See again, if every Meta DPS mod approximately doubles damage at the moment, then you're looking at a theoretical range all the way up to something like doing 200x the base damage or more after modding. Decoupling things would mean that you only do something like 8 or 16x the base damage after modding. That means you can screw yourself and your teammates over waaaaay less with meme builds and such.

2 hours ago, Vahenir said:

But you only have three weapon slots and most of the time youre up against huge hordes of weak enemies where the sniper would be pretty bad. The point i was trying to make was the opposite, that if aoe weapons are nerfed too much so they end up killing trash at the same rate as a powerful single target gun they will become completely obsolete.

In an ideal world, imo, DE leans harder into the same direction they went with introducing the Nox, so that there's very clear minibosses and heavies (including Eximi) that are worthy of a Sniper or a well-used Dagger (which should be way better at consistent single-target damage besides finisher-damage), and that light enemies remain clear-able via more AoE-effective weaponry like rocket launchers and whips. Without single-target weapons being significantly more efficient at dispatching single targets back to back, there's no reason to choose non-AoE weaponry, really.

54 minutes ago, Vahenir said:

In general the rules are already fairly consistent when it comes to modding. The special cases and various outliers are what needs to be fixed and brought in line, like banshees sonar. Stat squish or not, these things need to be dealt with for the game to be balanced to such a point that damage attenuation is no longer necessary.

It would also need a more structured approach to base stats on weapons, clear power budgets and stuff. I have no idea if it would actually end up being fun in the long run or if it would just make everything feel the same, where choices don't really matter anymore. One of the more satisfying things about warframe is how absolutely nuts it can get with builds and stuff, at least in my opinion. So having damage attenuation enhanced and fixed, then applied where it actually matters, does let both sides have their cake and eat it too. Though in its current implementation its bad, at least when its turned up to 11.

I feel like you/we could only say that because we've been elbows-deep in the modding for a while, and are used to it. The average new player won't know that the near-universal means of getting STUPID amounts of damage is to use Damage, Multishot, Elemental Damage, and Bane mods, because of how exponentially they affect each other. And it's not obvious that compared to those mods (and crit mods if applicable), that anything with a flat number value is going to be comparatively outright bad as soon as you get to the second half of the star-chart or so. Because who cares about 1 armor point at a time with shattering impact, or doing 50-200 extra damage on X condition, when you can just do an elemental proc and halve or shave quarters of armor away instantly, or stack those meta DPS mods instead to get 10s of thousands more damage per second? That's not consistent outcome, and it's definitely not consistent between the IPS and Elemental mod's multiplicative damage.

I'm all for leaving DPS mods individually potent enough to be worth using in order to be the stronk genocidal war machines, and for it being stronger than meme builds. But again, just compressing damage, so that values can just be manually tweaked, rather than using damage attenuation everywhere, would just allow for more reliable/expectable outcomes when players mod for things. I'll repeat it every comment, it's kinda stupid to lose out on half of your damage for every meta-DPS mod you swap out for a non-Meta DPS mod, or non-DPS mod entirely. 100% though, Attenuation needs to not reward charging in with an unmodded mk1-braton by arbitrarily punishing the most OP weapons the worst. If the OP weapons are just too OP, then they honestly need a nerf :V or a stat compression or decoupling of mods from exponentially stacking would work to, render arbitrary damage attenuation (which I don't think we have any way of knowing about in-game?) unneeded, or reserved for very unique cases that should be highlighted by Ordis or Lotus or whomever.

35 minutes ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

Not everything needs to be additive with each other, but there needs to be a clear basis of multipliers to work from.

100% my thought. We need VERY clear, very consistent baselines to work from, with the vast majority of modding having similar behaviors and outcomes on DPS. As few things should be multiplicative as possible, because as soon as you have more than one layer of multiplication, you are very strongly encouraged to take advantage of those multiple multiplications, because otherwise you're missing out on ridiculously crazy exponential amounts of damage. Warframe abilities and gameplay, imo, could continue having multiplicative outcomes, but they should be additive to each other, not multiplicative to each other, like you advocate for with making things into flat critical chance, that can stack together with normal critical chance and/or damage.

Though I'm not personally a big fan of this concept though (if I've understood it correctly), where critical damage is exclusively delivered to weak points. This would make any non-precision critical weapon (all melee? shotguns? recoil-heavy-bullet hoses?) close to useless against a number of enemies with fiddly weak points, or if players are unaware of weak point locations. It'd also make crit weapons and builds arbitrarily way better than status ones, being used against weakpoints. THAT's more fundamental-gameplay-shaking than I'd want to go for. I'm all for a discussion of changing how weakpoints work, but think that crits should remain the way they are. They're a massive fixture in the game. Maybe that sounds ironic coming from me after all my suggestions, but oh well 🤷‍♂️

[Vahenir]

8 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

I feel like you/we could only say that because we've been elbows-deep in the modding for a while, and are used to it. The average new player won't know that the near-universal means of getting STUPID amounts of damage is to use Damage, Multishot, Elemental Damage, and Bane mods, because of how exponentially they affect each other. And it's not obvious that compared to those mods (and crit mods if applicable), that anything with a flat number value is going to be comparatively outright bad as soon as you get to the second half of the star-chart or so. Because who cares about 1 armor point at a time with shattering impact, or doing 50-200 extra damage on X condition, when you can just do an elemental proc and halve or shave quarters of armor away instantly, or stack those meta DPS mods instead to get 10s of thousands more damage per second? That's not consistent outcome, and it's definitely not consistent between the IPS and Elemental mod's multiplicative damage.

 

Well, new players will eventually be veteran players if they stick around and nobody will just instantly know how stuff works.

As for how damage actually works... Well, if it worked like you'd expect then it wouldn't be so bad. But there are hidden mechanics, stacked on top of invisible multipliers and double dipping application of mods. On some weapons you're going to get /way/ more damage if you have no, or low, elemental damage. Even if the numbers in the arsenal are a lot lower. Mainly due to slash and proc weighting in this case along with the fact that slash scales with normal damage (not elemental), crits, bane mods and damage increasing effects on the target such as viral or some of sevagoths abilities etc.

Warframe abilities also apply damage boosts completely differently, like rhinos roar is additive with bane mods. Saryns toxic lash and xatas whisper instead apply the bonus damage as a separate damage entity. I think chroma is additive with normal damage mods and i cant remember how mirage works. Banshee can stack insane damage multipliers, but i don't really know the exact mechanics of it. I think those things can still overlap to add an exponentially scaling multiplicative damage boost to anything since it multiplies its own multiplied damage.

All this gets further complicated when some enemies have stack caps on status applications (like liches) which just completely invalidate high volume status application weapons. The whole currently messy damage attenuation system, or hidden damage resistance mechanics in general. Not to mention combo stuff on both snipers and melee.

I'm definitely missing a lot here. The root problem isn't so much mods working like they appear to do in my opinion, its more how wildly inconsistent things are in reality and how /nothing/ is properly explained. Like why does ips damage mods only take that damage type into account while an elemental mod works on the total damage of the weapon? Both should work the same way right? Why does bane mods secretly apply another damage multiplier, twice, on status effect damage? Why are there so many different formulae and systems for bonus damage from warframe abilities?

That whole mess is really the first thing that needs to be addressed. Make things work consistently. Something like a warframe damage buff can be multiplicative to the final damage of a weapon so a 60% damage boost is actually a 60% damage boost. If its additive with "normal" damage buffs you can have like a 600% damage boost, but it only really increases damage by 200% in reality due to the weapon already having 320% damage from an arcane or similar. Aka it needs to be de-spaghettified.

As for how i would fix it: 
Id split everything up so that weapon damage can only come from stuff on the weapon, specifically mods and arcanes along with whatever passive the gun may have. I'd make bane mods additive with the normal damage mods and make IPS mods work exactly like the elemental mods do now. Multishot, crit etc, would remain as it is more or less. Id tone down crit stacking so it isn't anywhere near as much of an insane damage boost as now when you get to orange and red crits. Add more weapon arcanes so they can cover different mods and the mandatory mods are no longer as mandatory, which can free up slots for other stuff.

Outside damage buffs will then be multiplying damage, but be additive with each other. So if you have a 60% damage buff and a 30% damage buff you get a 90% buff in the end. Everything external would be included here, so damage buffs from arcanes, warframe buffs and whatnot. 

As for debuffs on the enemies such as viral, id just add that into the damage buff when you shoot at said enemy. So like an enemy primed by novas antimatter would have +100% damage applied through that buff multiplier. Basically just to reduce the number of different systems being stacked and multiplying each other.

Naturally a massive rebalance of, especially, outside buffs would be required to keep this from going completely nuts.

[Nira]

13 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

It's such a small gripe, but I feel it. Too many completely unexpected random divergences from base gameplay and damage types, that feel more like tacked on content islands or rule breakers than something that actually meshes with the base gameplay design. I'm thinking of Mercy, are you thinking of something else? Like True Damage, or stealth multipliers?

Ah I think it was the types of finisher I was thinking of, like front/back/ground, as well as yeah the somewhat confusing variety of stealth multipliers!

[Grav_Starstrider]

5 hours ago, Vahenir said:

Well, if it worked like you'd expect then it wouldn't be so bad. But there are hidden mechanics, stacked on top of invisible multipliers and double dipping application of mods

Definitely why I think everything needs to get reworked to work off of base damage.

5 hours ago, Vahenir said:

On some weapons you're going to get /way/ more damage if you have no, or low, elemental damage. Even if the numbers in the arsenal are a lot lower. Mainly due to slash and proc weighting in this case along with the fact that slash scales with normal damage (not elemental), crits, bane mods and damage increasing effects on the target such as viral or some of sevagoths abilities etc

That just tells me we need to continue reworking impact, puncture, and other elements besides heat and viral, to all be competitive to each other. It's only a modding issue because we can mod for a dominant meta.

5 hours ago, Vahenir said:

Warframe abilities also apply damage boosts completely differently

Snip

With a few exceptions, this would be an argument for more of the abilities to stack additively, or multiplicatively by much smaller amounts after decoupling other things so that they're not exponentially multiplicative.

6 hours ago, Vahenir said:

Snip of your second half

Yeah I really feel you about the secret unspoken mechanics in game such as enemy resistances, mods that double dip, and some elements/ips being so bad that adding certain mods is a downgrade or sidegrade instead of an upgrade. Needs despaghettification. Imo this is most easily/simply done on the front end by making anti-OP status caps and damage attenuation no longer needed, by compressing the range of damage by making as few things multiplicative as possible, and making the vast majority of things pull from base weapon damage.

I might be missing the nuance as to how your suggestion is substantially different or superior to my decoupling and non-multiplying idea, or if you're just saying you mostly agree in a roundabout manner. Cuz it nearly sounds the same. "Fewer areas that can flat out multiply everything and then be multiplied again", instead making any multiplications add to each other.

5 hours ago, Dualice said:

Ah I think it was the types of finisher I was thinking of, like front/back/ground, as well as yeah the somewhat confusing variety of stealth multipliers!

Ah, I can see how I missed that. You're right though, it's a bit weird to have sleeping-only frontal finishers, when they should be doable if the enemy is unalerted and hasn't seen you. And ground finishers only being doable when enemies have been knocked down... but Idk, they all do basically the same thing, and can just be done in specific circumstances. Stealth multipliers are just stealth multipliers?

Not quite sure which bit is the particularly confusing bit, but per all of the other conversations, I think a lot of us would prefer numbers to be compressed and have fewer exponentially multiplicative outcomes, and more additive outcomes (stealth bonus instead of multiplier), so that they were more consistent or have their differences capable of being deciphered by simple observation. Having more thoroughly informative tutorials and codex systems would help as well. New player experience where?

 

At the end of the day, making almost everything additive instead of multiplicative (with the few multiplicative options only stacking additively together) will allow us to drastically more easily reward/incentivize certain behaviors by a specific amount, without that reward becoming abusable via stacking exponentially with other things. Linear instead of exponentially growth, as you opt into certain types of weapons and gameplay approaches and mods and Warframes and companions, etc. Would also be good for the looting metas with smeeta and nekros/hydroid/etc, where you're exponentially rewarded for opting into more and more looter solutions. Additive solves these metas. It makes them linearly attractive rather than exponentially so.