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

[Vahenir]

10 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Yes, metas are discovered/determined, and gatekeeping is performed by, Players. This is true. Your note about Necromancers in Guild Wars being 15% below other optimum efficiency classes though, is exactly what reducing the exponential multiplications in modding and the game in general would help with. If DE balances things tightly enough that metas are determined to only be 5% more efficient than a super-broad swathe of non-meta things, then the severity of toxicity and gatekeeping would be far lower. I have a hard time seeing DE screwing up the metas of the game to be even MORE strong, or traded for STRONGER metas.

Indeed, but at least in that case the 15% was well within expected player variance from just mistakes with their rotation etc. Now that doesn't entirely apply here. Even if things were perfectly balanced then id still expect a weaker player to do like a tenth of that from a top player just due to skill, practice and knowledge of builds. Not sure where id place myself on that scale, but i know i'm absolutely crap at doing headshots, especially when things go faster. Thus i tend to prefer aoe or beam weapons along with melee to make up for that.

Warframe does have the ability to make pretty much anyone, regardless of skill level, feel like they're awesome. Its basically the "magic" behind the games success and is something that /must/ be preserved no matter what. Whatever changes are made need to preserve that feeling and how learning about modding and getting the mods the first time just rockets your build into the stratosphere. There will be bad weapons, there has to be, so that the good ones can be searched for and eventually found. There will be imbalance because if there isn't then there is nothing to learn or work towards. The game will inevitably get predictable since its limited and having played it for thousands of hours will just give you the experience to actually make it predictable. 

That isn't to say that some level of balance isn't necessary. A good build on a good weapon /definitely/ need to end up in the same ballpark as other builds on good weapons. This can be achieved through what has been discussed in this thread along with a full pass over every weapon and ability in the game. The primary goal should be to bring balance and especially structure without being overly disruptive to the game itself while keeping that feeling of being awesome at any cost. If that kind of balance update can't be done without removing that feeling, it shouldn't happen. Thus test server pl0x.

[Angwah]

On 2021-08-17 at 6:56 PM, Vahenir said:

If they do make the MR of the weapon matter more than it does now they /really/ need to put in some cutoff point of the stat increases. Otherwise it will just be the kuva and lich weapons everywhere. Nothing else will even be worth looking at if it ends up too aggressive. 

On 2021-08-17 at 7:20 PM, Grav_Starstrider said:

I agree with this. I'd be alright with a majority of the competitive weapons being say, above MR 3 or 5 or 8 or whatever arbitrary number, with only "MR fodder" below that, but if we actually explicitly make weapons' DPS scale based on the MR, rather than just assigning an MR requirement based on their relative DPS, we'd only see the Lich/Tenet weapons and a few others as the dominant meta. I'm okay with MR being mostly arbitrarily assigned values, we don't need another complication to figuring out DPS. MR is just an in-game block from you using something, doesn't guarantee that every higher-MR Warframe/Weapon/Feature will be better or more appreciable than any lower-MR ones.

Yes, I agree in essence. It's just a thing to keep in mind that a more linear damage scale offers a much narrower range of damage output. Level 1 to level 10k needs to fit between Braton Mk1 with flawed and fully tricked out top-end weapons. That is a lot of scaling!

On 2021-08-17 at 6:56 PM, Vahenir said:

If the damage of multishot is split then it becomes pretty useless unless you want to apply CC status effects or i guess viral/corrosive since damage status effects scale with the damage of the specific pellet that hits. In either case its not a part at least i see as a problem since its the same on pretty much every weapon in the game right now. So it can be easily balanced around without making it do practically nothing, burn more ammo, make guns into shotguns or whatever else has been brought up. Also only having +damage be what increases damage will be terribly boring when it comes to modding. Rather than making more options its just gonna be to stack all the +damage mods you can find onto everything, along with i guess crit mods on crit weapons. Even firerate will be useless if it lowers the per shot damage to keep it from being a multiplier. Why would you want to burn more ammo for effectively nothing other than more, but weaker, status procs? If it doesn't decrease time to kill or provide a /lot/ of CC then it might as well not exist when it comes to weapons. If its just about customizing how the weapon feels, what's the point of getting new weapons anymore? The whole reason why new weapons are even worth getting is either because they are straight up better, or have a different feel to them after all.

 

On 2021-08-17 at 7:20 PM, Grav_Starstrider said:

A bunch of the rest of the conversations have addressed why almost the ENTIRETY of the playerbase would riot if we outright removed some of the mod's abilities to add DPS to the weapon.  We've already addressed how Multishot could just scale off of the base damage of the weapon, rather than multiplying the +Damage and +ElementalDamage and Crit mods, and would be used as a means of adding a smaller amount of damage, and making procs/crits weaker, but making them happen more reliably via the additional "dice rolls" added by each pellet. And how Crit could scale only off of base damage as well. We've also talked about Fire Rate already having a Malus/downside in the form of decreased ammo efficiency, and that ammo-conversion mods shouldn't be Exilus mods. I feel like this comment kinda entirely ignores all of those points that were already brought up and responded to.

Ok, ok, again: a mod providing multishot or firerate can definitely increase dps. There is absolutely no problem with that! After all, it is what they do now, but without being explicit about it. If a mod increases your dps, why not clearly let it state by how much? What is the upside in being opaque or more importantly making it an automatic consequence of increasing multishot and the like

Because there are definitely more upsides to separating the fire/multishot increase and the damage increase besides transparency. Like opening a lot of design space! Multishot + status? Why not? Fire rate + ammo efficiency? Can be done! A whole new range of valuable modding options opens up if you decouple damage from the stuff which now automatically provides that, and I really see no reason why this should not be possible.

 

[Vahenir]

12 hours ago, Angwah said:

Ok, ok, again: a mod providing multishot or firerate can definitely increase dps. There is absolutely no problem with that! After all, it is what they do now, but without being explicit about it. If a mod increases your dps, why not clearly let it state by how much? What is the upside in being opaque or more importantly making it an automatic consequence of increasing multishot and the like

Well DPS is literally damage per second so a 60% increase in rate of fire is a 60% increase in DPS unless damage per shot is reduced. This can't be made additive with other damage bonuses without adding some funky math to divide damage per shot with rate of fire and then add the damage bonus to the total damage bonus, the same is true for multishot. Just seems overly complicated to me, especially as base damage mods get effectively weaker the more base damage you stack on. If you already have 200% increased damage through mods, then add another 200% the increase of real damage is actually 100% which is arguably less clear than how multishot and rate of fire works right now.

[Grav_Starstrider]

2 hours ago, Vahenir said:

Well DPS is literally damage per second so a 60% increase in rate of fire is a 60% increase in DPS

We keep throwing around the word DPS but it should be low-key assumed that we're talking about sustained DPS! Several corrupted mods increase sustained DPS without drastically affecting burst DPS, or by adversely affecting it. The inverse is also true, some increase burst but decrease sustained, or keep it about equivalent. And due to ammo limitations, fire rate is practically the same, as it increases burst DPS, but makes your sustained DPS stop cold when you run out of ammo!

15 hours ago, Angwah said:

Ok, ok, again: a mod providing multishot or firerate can definitely increase dps. There is absolutely no problem with that! After all, it is what they do now, but without being explicit about it. If a mod increases your dps, why not clearly let it state by how much? What is the upside in being opaque or more importantly making it an automatic consequence of increasing multishot and the like

??? Multishot on non-multishot weapons does just outright report the average damage per trigger pull. And in many-pelleted weapons it tells you the pellet count and what the stats are for each pellet. I'm really not understanding what's not opaque about the current system that you sound like you think it needs a change to. I just think that it's dumb for multishot to outright multiply damage already multiplied by other mods, instead of all of them just being additive based on the weapon's base damage.

15 hours ago, Angwah said:

Because there are definitely more upsides to separating the fire/multishot increase and the damage increase besides transparency. Like opening a lot of design space! Multishot + status? Why not? Fire rate + ammo efficiency? Can be done! A whole new range of valuable modding options opens up if you decouple damage from the stuff which now automatically provides that, and I really see no reason why this should not be possible.

.... Those are already valid and used mod combinations? Yeah, with deviation from the current per-bullet-dps meta being substantially less punishing than it is currently, people may find burst, sustained, or mod combinations for both, to be more attractive than they are now. I don't see a problem with that? I'm confused about what point you're making.

On 2021-08-17 at 2:01 PM, Vahenir said:

The primary goal should be to bring balance and especially structure without being overly disruptive to the game itself while keeping that feeling of being awesome at any cost. If that kind of balance update can't be done without removing that feeling, it shouldn't happen. Thus test server pl0x.

100%, don't want to ruin the power fantasy. If we need a little bit of "Numbers go BRRRR" that would be lost by making things additive(net-multiplicative) instead of the current multiplicative(net-exponential) model, DE could double the values added by the mods in question. That would actually help simplify multishot, allow it to split into enough pellets and add enough damage with the same number value, without being OP, and without having to specify "splits into x bullets with y added damage" or other wordy, complicated, multivalue descriptions in the mod.

I don't think decoupling (and doubling or tripling the values on all of the damage mods?) and reducing enemy EHP would innately ruin the power fantasy, but that's definitely what the PTS would be for. Verifying that the average player (who's invested and critical enough of the game to play on the PTS) finds the tweaks better for the game.

Ha, I just had the thought, DE could wait to spend effort balancing Warframe DPS abilities by just force-equipping us with a modified dragon key for -ability damage, so that abilities don't eclipse the focus/intent of the PTS' modding system update.

[Vahenir]

33 minutes ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

100%, don't want to ruin the power fantasy. If we need a little bit of "Numbers go BRRRR" that would be lost by making things additive(net-multiplicative) instead of the current multiplicative(net-exponential) model, DE could double the values added by the mods in question. That would actually help simplify multishot, allow it to split into enough pellets and add enough damage with the same number value, without being OP, and without having to specify "splits into x bullets with y added damage" or other wordy, complicated, multivalue descriptions in the mod.

I'm not sure a pure additive damage system will be all that interesting to play with in the long run. The multipliers pretty much exist so that players can't just stack all the damage mods with the biggest numbers and always get max damage on everything. While that would be very easy to work with and see what happens, it'd also just be the same builds everywhere. Like whatever damage mods has the biggest numbers, heavy caliber if the weapon supports it, crit chance and crit damage if its a crit weapon. Maybe using 60/60 mods if status can be leveraged to outdamage the same weapon with 90 mods. If rate of fire remains a multiplier to dps it will also be used on all weapons that can use it effectively, and those weapons will be the new meta as they would get like 60-120% more dps. If it doesn't, then rate of fire is reduced to being used on charge weapons only.

It'd be easier to just keep the current mulitpliers on the weapons themselves and just keep the multiplied damage from the weapon from being exponentially increased by outside multipliers, which is arguably where it gets completely nuts right now.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

3 hours ago, Vahenir said:

I'm not sure a pure additive damage system will be all that interesting to play with in the long run. The multipliers pretty much exist so that players can't just stack all the damage mods with the biggest numbers and always get max damage on everything. While that would be very easy to work with and see what happens, it'd also just be the same builds everywhere. Like whatever damage mods has the biggest numbers, heavy caliber if the weapon supports it, crit chance and crit damage if its a crit weapon. Maybe using 60/60 mods if status can be leveraged to outdamage the same weapon with 90 mods. If rate of fire remains a multiplier to dps it will also be used on all weapons that can use it effectively, and those weapons will be the new meta as they would get like 60-120% more dps. If it doesn't, then rate of fire is reduced to being used on charge weapons only.

It'd be easier to just keep the current mulitpliers on the weapons themselves and just keep the multiplied damage from the weapon from being exponentially increased by outside multipliers, which is arguably where it gets completely nuts right now.

Right now, we already cram as many multipliers we can onto a weapon for maximum damage. 

The multipliers provided to sustained DPS by reload speed and magazine size cannot compare to the multipliers provided by base damage, multishot, elements or Crit.

Unconditional multipliers are our mandatory mods by default.

The Exergis is an exception as it has no Crit stats to take advantage of, but derives huge benefits from Primed Tactical Pump or Ammo Stock.

DE could introduce weapons that can leverage lesser used stats.

Maybe a a Grakata variant with no Crit stats, but 1000 rnd mag with 200000 reserve, 1.0 reload speed to really leverage Fire rate and status.

A bow with a 10x headshot multiplier passive to take advantage of +zoom. Maybe scoring headshot causes the arrow to explode in AOE. A Bramma that requires aiming if you will.

[Vahenir]

1 hour ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

Right now, we already cram as many multipliers we can onto a weapon for maximum damage. 

Damage is the meta and will remain the meta as long as weapons need to kill enemies. So this wouldn't really change other than what the mandatory mods are no matter how they are calculated. Nobody is gonna waste a slot on +zoom since that same slot can be used to actually increase damage, especially as its almost detrimental to your aim anyway.

 

1 hour ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

The multipliers provided to sustained DPS by reload speed and magazine size cannot compare to the multipliers provided by base damage, multishot, elements or Crit.

Reload speed is pretty much worthless on most weapons imo, the amount of damage it actually adds is miniscule, especially when the synth mods exist. In either case there are only so many multipliers one can stack through mods, both due to limited slots and because mods only have, i believe, five possible multipliers. (Damage, multishot, crit, rate of fire, elemental mods.) I could see crit and elemental mods being changed to be additive with normal damage, though i would miss the impact crits have. Rate of fire and multishot should remain multipliers however due to otherwise needing to split damage and decrease per shot damage to keep dps the same, which is just needlessly convoluted. 

 

2 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

DE could introduce weapons that can leverage lesser used stats.

Maybe a a Grakata variant with no Crit stats, but 1000 rnd mag with 200000 reserve, 1.0 reload speed to really leverage Fire rate and status.

A bow with a 10x headshot multiplier passive to take advantage of +zoom. Maybe scoring headshot causes the arrow to explode in AOE. A Bramma that requires aiming if you will.

Sure, why not? Theres already a bunch of status focused weapons with pretty much no crit apart from the exergis. Even so, a headshot focused weapon will probably never be mainstream so to speak and +zoom doesn't help headshotting at all. You can already get absolutely crazy damage with the zymos through headshots and crits (its very weird how it works with crits despite its nonexistent crit chance), but almost nobody actually uses the thing. Same with other headshot focused weapons like the knell. As for the bow, it pretty much already exists as ivaras artemis bow with the focused shot augment if you want to test how it feels. Just good luck using it in group play when enemies are going all over the place and there's so much FX you can't even see the enemies heads.

Still there are lots of potential ways to go with gimmicky weapons and im sure we'll keep seeing them pop up every now and then. But most people will flock to the easier to use weapons no matter what.

[Grav_Starstrider]

On 2021-08-19 at 4:05 PM, Vahenir said:

Nobody is gonna waste a slot on +zoom since that same slot can be used to actually increase damage, especially as its almost detrimental to your aim anyway.

They might if the loss in potential DPS is brought down to less than 20% DPS loss, rather than it halving your DPS. Lowkey, I feel like anything with Zoom should also reduce spread by a small amount too, personally, and they could make similar adjustments/additions to other "useless" mods to make them more attractive options than currently.

On 2021-08-19 at 4:05 PM, Vahenir said:

Damage is the meta and will remain the meta as long as weapons need to kill enemies. So this wouldn't really change other than what the mandatory mods are no matter how they are calculated.

Making things not exponentially multiplicative will only aid the relative attractiveness of non-meta mods, and nerfing the collective DPS of meta mods from multiplicatively exponential down to additively multiplicative would mean that they could drop enemy EHP down from exponential scaling, to multiplicative scaling, further reducing the degree to which deviance from the meta hurts the player's TTK vs enemies. Nothing would change for those that do nothing but chase efficiency and meta, but everything would change for those looking to make unique, fun, and quirky builds.

On 2021-08-19 at 4:05 PM, Vahenir said:

Still there are lots of potential ways to go with gimmicky weapons and im sure we'll keep seeing them pop up every now and then. But most people will flock to the easier to use weapons no matter what.

The easiest weapons aren't the only weapons people flock to, it's also the ones that flat out do the most DPS. It's the intersection of these two, like Kuva Nukor/Bramma/Ayanga, with enemy chaining and AoE, that people flock to most. They don't as often go to easy-to-use or AoE weapons that have more pitiful DPS or feel ridiculously clunky to build without a DPS-reducing QoL build. Decreasing the distance between non-meta builds on non-meta weapons, and meta builds on meta weapons, by switching to a cumulatively multiplicative system, rather than staying on the exponential system, would help the not-easy-to-use, and not-meta-DPS-stat weapons, to shine more than they do currently.

Again, it wouldn't solve everything for everybody, and would take a lot of work, but i genuinely think that the exponential system is just unmanageable in the long run. Cuz again, an exponential system means it's absurdly, ludicrously easy to undershoot or overshoot with your own DPS, or with enemy EHP, relative to each other.

[(PSN)ThanatosSloth]

To be fair...the damage meta is not even really a fixable problem...its more like a season, one update the buff one over another, it shifts, people shift with it...biggest problem to me is warframe modding...specifically...survivability mods shouldn't be a thing(health, armor, and shields)...warframes should be able to scale to content depending on their level of completion defensively, similar to how the modifiers currently work for level 1 to 30, but it should be a passive boost based on the level of the content your doing...this would work for everything but endless missions..either a boost per 5 waves in defense or a boost per 5 mins in survival?...in terms of weapons, I feel there is way less congestion, since you will either kill things quick or slow, but with warframes, either the a majority of frames need complete overhauls, or they do passive scaleing...only way for the removal of mandatory mods on the warframe end...

[mycroft_]

 

On 2021-08-07 at 10:31 PM, Grav_Starstrider said:

I genuinely don't think DE has found, or ever will find themselves with, the time or bandwidth to sort out a system or set of guidelines

They could if they hire more 'core' staff, and actually hired some playtesters/bugtesters.
 

 

On 2021-08-12 at 11:26 AM, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

The Exilus Slot was a mistake.

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

You are correct that this is one of the problems with the AOE meta.

 

On 2021-08-14 at 3:24 AM, DeltaPangaea said:

Oh and apparently the damage attenuation on Acolytes is so furiously aggressive that increasing your dps can result in LOWERING it.

DE please.

When your answer to 'too much player damage' is to make increasing your damage lower your damage, you have a problem.

Warframe's numbers are getting more and more out of control, and your slapdash attempts at controlling it aren't working.

 

Cheers to that...

 

[Grav_Starstrider]

On 2022-06-20 at 2:46 PM, (PSN)ThanatosSloth said:

To be fair...the damage meta is not even really a fixable problem...its more like a season, one update the buff one over another, it shifts, people shift with it...

I feel like this isn't that accurate. If you have a well-implemented rock paper scissors sorta system figured out, like we're supposed to with enemy's damage vulnerabilities and resistances to different physicals and elements, then you would have people do what they're supposed to, which is to switch between different weapons depending on what mission types and enemies they'll be facing and prioritizing in each mission. DE has been doing an actually halfway decent job of reducing the overwhelming severity of metas. Every big shakeup they've done leaves you with more elements (or Multishot or Crit) doing more good jobs against more enemies in a more even and balanced manner compared to previously. The difference between "If you're not using Slash status builds you're stupid" and "using things other than viral/heat on a hybrid crit weapon is suboptimal" is actually pretty dang huge, imo. DE maybe just needs to continue looking into what builds are consistently meta, and keep trying to level things out so that they do different things more effectively than each other, but are overall balanced instead of one thing being universally more effective. They did a good job of making Slash less meta, but not a good enough job making Impact or Puncture relevant, imo. And imo they just need to nerf Heat and Viral just a smidge. They buffed Ember by making her element way (too) kickass (compared to other elements), instead of making it be her particular implementation be what was potent and compelling. Some of the other elements could potentially use a rework as well. For example, I really feel like the precedent that Mag sets with Magnetize, makes the miniature Magnetize that Void procs, make more sense as what Magnetic procs should apply to non-shielded enemies. Whereas what would make Operators worth consistently using, especially against explicit miniboss-like enemies like Nox, Eximi, Assassins, etc, would be if Void procs were more along the lines of Slag from borderlands, where they significantly multiply the damage applied to the enemy.

On 2022-06-20 at 2:46 PM, (PSN)ThanatosSloth said:

biggest problem to me is warframe modding...specifically...survivability mods shouldn't be a thing(health, armor, and shields).

I feel like.... This is the tradeoff the Warframes are supposed to (and do) have. With Warframes like Atlas, Inaros, Nidus, Lavos, Valkyr, Hildryn, Rhino, Revenant, etc, they have either the crazy raw stats, or crazy as heck abilities, that give them their tanking/sustain. You shouldn't have to worry about survivability with these frames hardly at all, or only for the MOST endgame of content, so you're allowed to go ham with their modding however you want, ignoring defensive components. The tradeoff is that in a number of ways, a number of their abilities are comparatively underwhelming compared to other Warframe's abilities. Other Warframes have stronger abilities, like how many Finishers an Ash can pump out, Saryn's Spores are ludicrous, as is Ember's Inferno, but these Warframes usually need better defensive modding in order to survive beyond what their few semi-defensive abilities are, which are usually more energy-hungry, comparatively. You're either supposed to embrace being a squishy sneaky damage-avoidant caster frame, or you have to mod them in order to tank things the way the tanky frames can do without mods.

SOME warframes though definitely don't feel like they have potent, useful, or cheap enough abilities to justify how squishy they are. But I feel like the above is basically DE's general design philosophy and the resultant gameplay "meta" of which Warframes demand more survivability modding towards the endgame.

There really isn't one unified whole in regards to Warframe build metas across the board, not nearly to the degree that Weapons have. Some Warframe's kits barely care about Strength, some kits barely care about Range, some kits barely care about Duration, and some Warframes barely care to have Survivability mods added to them, and even then, between different frames you might focus more on Armor, or more on Health, or more on Shields, or on using Adaptation to stretch both health and shields further.

On 2022-07-25 at 9:13 AM, mycroft_ said:

They could if they hire more 'core' staff, and actually hired some playtesters/bugtesters.

They don't even need to hire. They just need to use the Test Server more than once every 2 years :/ so that dedicated players can give them our input about things BEFORE they apply them to the game and then get screamed at by everyone who hated the change. What would also help would be actually baking small surveys into the game somehow, even if it was just like, a specific alert with the modified behaviors inside of that specific alert, which upon completion has you receive an inbox message with a link to a Google Form survey where they ask if you use and like X normally, and did you like X with Y change more or less than that, or expect to use X more or less than you did before if they applied Y change.

On 2022-07-25 at 9:13 AM, mycroft_ said:

You are correct that this is one of the problems with the AOE meta.

They do definitely need to balance the maximum ammo capacity and the per-ammo damage output of such weapons against the fact that Exilus slots and Ammo Mutation mods exist. Cuz Ammo Mutation (when a good few other ammo types exist) basically makes the Exilus slot into an actual main damage mod, effectively. It gives burst-ammo-pool weapons sustain, where you never needed sustain added on the majority of the rest of the weapons at all. Honestly that'd probably just be fixed by making Ammo Mutation into a non-exilus mod, and as a courtesy just bumping up the max ammo pool of most or all weapons by a few percent or a small fraction to compensate.

On 2022-07-25 at 9:13 AM, mycroft_ said:

Cheers to that...

Amen