Fixing Metas - Slash/Heat/Viral Comparatively OP

[Vahenir]

9 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Previously, Slash was excessively the meta, because it bypassed not only Armor, but also Shields. It's supposed to be the anti-health/flesh damage type. DE nerfed it to match that premise by making it no longer bypass Shields, rather it only does damage to the shields if they're present.

It actually wasn't. Back before the status rework then id argue that corrosive was king. Viral only let you deal effectively double damage if you managed to kill the target during the window when their HP was halved. As far as i recall it couldn't be stacked or refreshed once applied either.

10 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

There wouldn't be a singular meta for AoE vs Single-Target vs Bullet Hoses, except against specific types of enemies. AoE Frames can double down on targeting light enemies with both gun and abilities, leaving their single-enemy-targeting allies to kill the heavies. Or players can diversify and cover their weaknesses, using a single-enemy-targeting Warframe to kill heavies, and using AoE guns for light enemies.

Most people play solo or in public groups where you can't count on anyone bringing anything useful. Instead id say people would just bring a melee for AoE damage and a single target primary/secondary, or the other way around. Either that or guns with both AoE and single target like the stahlta and bubonico will become the meta since they work in all situations.

It isn't going to suddenly make a crappy gun worth using however. Even after a stat squish the ambassador will still be a weaker and far harder to obtain stahlta for example. Both have about equivalent dps on their primary fire, the stahlta has better crit chance but also crappier crit multiplier. The secondary fire is just outright better on the stahlta in every single way that matters, it uses less ammo, has more crit chance, bigger crit multiplier, larger AoE and more damage while still having the same status chance. The ambassador wins in one field and that's charge time, but its slow reload makes that mostly worthless. Oh and the ambassador has to slowly switch between the fire modes while the stahlta can just fire off its secondary whenever.
No amount of status or stats reworks are going to fix that. If you want to make off meta options more competitive start with balancing the weapons themselves.

When it comes to the status effects themselves i could see a nerf on viral. Slash is mostly fine along with heat. Almost everything else needs a buff or rework however.

Impact needs a useful status effect, literally anything is better than mercy opener and stagger. That stagger just makes spamming headshots harder.
Puncture needs a useful status effect, reduced damage is not worth it on a weapon since you're already shooting them when you can apply it. Which means they are about to die. If it could effectively spread the effect around so that the enemies around you get reduced damage it'd be better, but it doesn't so its crap.
Slash is good because its a damage over time proc that bypasses armor. That's basically it.
Corrosive needs to strip more armor. Up to 99% or 100% of the targets armor should be removed at max stacks due to how armor works. Right now its effectiveness falls off hard when enemies have a lot of armor.
Gas needs to scale with elemental mods properly and not have a stack limit so it can actually deal good damage, currently electric is just outright better. 
Blast could use its old knockdown effect back since -accuracy sucks for the same reason -damage sucks on puncture. It also sucks since its resisted by pretty much everything you ever shoot other than like grineer thumpers and rollers.
Magnetic is niche, but useful in that niche. More so with the sisters of parvos. No real changes needed as it already disables the shield gate on corpus so they die a lot easier.
Radiation is fine as well, it only needs one status proc to CC enemies so applying it all over the place is relatively easy. Its also good as a damage type since it gets bonus damage to some of the toughest enemies in the game.
Viral is viral, its extremely good right now. Not only is it neutral or strong against most enemies, but its proc is to make everything do more damage against everything but shields.
Cold has niche uses since it can slow otherwise immune enemies such as demolysts. So id say its mostly fine. Main reason people don't use it is likely because its part of viral.
Heat is good both as a damage status and since it strips a bit of armor. It does pair well with viral since you cant use corrosive with viral apart from on a few weapons. The damage type itself is good since its useful against most unarmored enemies. 
Toxin is decent since it bypasses shields and is another dot. Mostly not used since its part of both viral and corrosive.
Electricity is also decent since its an AoE dot with some niche uses. Rarely used because its AoE effect ends when the target dies, leaving it somewhat weak. Would be a lot better if the arcing continued past the targets death.

[Grav_Starstrider]

14 hours ago, Andele3025 said:

And im saying no, it should go back even to just be the actual anti-hp proc that directly damages hp.

Also slash wasnt meta on its own

Well, I'm not going to argue with you further, because imo that completely flies in the face of game balance. Yeah, Heat's better now because of its infinite stackability, doesn't mean Slash isn't the meta OUT OF THE IPS DAMAGE TYPES.

I'd personally like it if they buffed the baseline Slash proc damage, but made it not bypass shields and armor, and divorced it (and all other status procs if they currently do so) from Crit so that Hybrid or HM metas were less of a thing.

4 hours ago, Vahenir said:

It actually wasn't. Back before the status rework then id argue that corrosive was king. Viral only let you deal effectively double damage if you managed to kill the target during the window when their HP was halved. As far as i recall it couldn't be stacked or refreshed once applied either.

There were previously threads upon threads upon threads about Slash being the meta out of IPS elements, and it's always done true armor-and-shield-ignoring damage as far as I was aware. It's why Hunter Munitions and such were made, to give otherwise lackluster-damage-weighted weapons with pitiful status chance a way of reliably dealing armor-bypassing damage. And yeah, Viral made it moreso (or enabled it), and it only needed to be proc'ed once every 6 seconds because Viral had zero stacking mechanics. Let's be real, even if it WASN'T at some point or currently meta, we all know that players think Impact and Puncture's status procs are garbage by comparison to more-damage.

Yeah, Corrosive was the universal king because it had good damage against most things, lasted permanently, and stacked well against the tankiest things in the game: armored targets.

Your list of observations on procs is a good perspective. I personally think that just for game balancing, Slash should still be nerfed to not bypass armor, but buffed to do more base damage. Then, adding DPS-improving components to the other IPS procs, especially ones that make them more effective against armored/shielded targets, would help make them each balanced and slightly specialized/efficient against their given faction in particular. 
Corrosive buffing would be less necessary if they do my other-thread-proposed damage crunch, but I do agree that that Corrosive falls off a bit doing 80%.... However there are various armor-stripping abilities in the game, and Corrosive stacks multiplicatively with them. Heat halves the remaining armor down to 10%. Sub-250% power strength Frost Avalanches don't strip 100% of enemy armor, but if you're at the 95% armor-strip mark, paired with Corrosive you may as well be!
Agreed, Electric is outright better than Gas right now, considering it does damage and CC's enemies. Gas having an accuracy debuff, and/or doing more damage outright, and/or having better AoE coverage, all good options, imo.
Agreed with Blast knockdown and/or ragdoll'ing, -accuracy is lame and weak AF.
I'd prefer that Magnetic be made marginally more useful against other non-Corpus/non-shielded enemies, such as briefly jamming their guns, or bunching them up together, or doing a bullet attractor effect, or that it be made even more effective against Corpus/Shielded targets if its exclusive niche is to be anti-shield.
Radiation is more notably useful on AoE weapons since it functions as a universal Hallowed-Ground or Chaos, for the reasons you mentioned about only needing one proc. I'd personally like it if it self-perpetuated on it's own by having something like a 5-25% chance (1-proc up to X# of procs range) of re-proc'ing it against other enemies. AoE weapons would benefit from it too, but it'd be slightly redundant as the proc would/should cap out quickly due to it's contagious nature, in this case.
Viral and Heat both are standouts, and probably need a nerf, imo.
I'd still like it if Cold was more innately useful for DPS, or scaled better for CC (escalating to Frost-level full-freezing of enemies), it feels underwhelming as an elemental proc when compared to Electric's stun and Impact's stun-locking.

At the end of the day, if we agree or disagree on specifics, or on what's meta vs what's not, it's still gonna be up to DE to make the decision to update things. Hope they do so, it's annoying to have theoretically equally viable options that just... Aren't actually good options compared to their peers. Impact/Puncture should be comparable to Slash, and Viral/Heat are A) too OP compared to other elements, and B) combo too well together considering they're already comparatively OP. Other elements need to be comparable to those two, whether it's via nerfs to Viral and Heat (and their synergy), or buffs to everything else.

[Andele3025]

14 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

 doesn't mean Slash isn't the meta OUT OF THE IPS DAMAGE TYPES.

Thats just a problem with puncture proc having effectively no place and impact recently being soft nerfed instead of the parazon option being universal and 10 stacks guaranteeing the lich/thrall invul down bleedout time.

[Grav_Starstrider]

9 hours ago, Andele3025 said:

Thats just a problem with puncture proc having effectively no place and impact recently being soft nerfed

Doesn't make Slash not the meta out of the 3 IPS physical damage procs.

I still very strongly feel like DE needs to lean further into the rock-paper-scissors design that it was intended to be from the outset. Slash should be best against unarmored, unshielded health, impact should be best against shields, and puncture should be good against armor. It was silly for Slash to be the best proc against all 3, DE already nerfed it to no longer be the best anti-shield/shield-bypass proc in the game, they just have to take that step further to make it not be the best physical damage option against armored targets. Then buff all 3 of them to be better against their designated targets.

Slash, by virtue of dealing raw damage, will still be universally good, even if not the best option in specific circumstances.
Impact would be universally good as a CC or Melee-complementing proc if it's adjusted to finisher-blind enemies.
Puncture would be universally good against any armored enemies, of which there are a few in all 3 main factions.

Or at least close to it. Each has it's place, none are universally the best.

[Andele3025]

6 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Doesn't make Slash not the meta out of the 3 IPS physical damage procs.

I still very strongly feel like DE needs to lean further into the rock-paper-scissors design that it was intended to be from the outset.

Except RPS doesnt work when all 3 are active base parts of the vast majority of weapons.
They arent tools you extra slot in vs something, its the baseline that should show how a weapon is used.
Puncture should likely make a enemy lose body length for the sake of PT/FT and generate a weakspot that counts for headshots.
Impact should unlock parazon on everyone and at 10 guarantee the bleed states.

That way you have the dot, the direct kill/cleave and the utility/resource type. Also why Slash should go back to being anti health by dealing directly health damage instead of energy shields preventing bloodloss.

[Grav_Starstrider]

1 hour ago, Andele3025 said:

Except RPS doesnt work when all 3 are active base parts of the vast majority of weapons.
They arent tools you extra slot in vs something, its the baseline that should show how a weapon is used.

That's.... An argument in favor of making the IPS procs more diverse in how the affect enemies, not less. If the "vast majority of weapons" have all 3 IPS, then making each proc do more substantial faction-specific damage/bonuses/debuffs wouldn't negatively impact or significantly change how they're used.

Right now, Slash is the best out of IPS, it's the only IPS people usually care to proc, hence the popularity of HM and Hemorrhage, and the lack of equivalent "conversion" mods to transform/convert any damage or procs to Impact or Puncture procs.

Right now, the unfortunate fact is that you use Slash against everything. That's not really dictating how a weapon is used, rather it's actually just dictating whether a weapon is used. Nerfing Slash, and buffing Impact and Puncture, wouldn't be a net nerf to the "vast majority of weapons" are composed of all three IPS elements. It would increase how effective Impact is against Corpus (and in general), making Impact-focused weapons viable, where they aren't currently (without Hemorrhage). It would increase how effective Puncture is against Grineer (and in general), making Puncture-focused weapons viable. Yes, Slash would become more specialized to dealing damage Infested with my suggestions, that doesn't mean Slash or all weapons would outright universally be worse by implementing some of our suggestions. 

1 hour ago, Andele3025 said:

Impact should unlock parazon on everyone and at 10 guarantee the bleed states.

1 hour ago, Andele3025 said:

That way you have the dot, the direct kill/cleave and the utility/resource type. Also why Slash should go back to being anti health by dealing directly health damage instead of energy shields preventing bloodloss.

What I don't get is why you're so obsessed with increasing the Slash meta by making Slash the most reliable means of IPS damage, and just making Impact into a weaker version of Slash, instead of making each IPS type unique and effective without being a universal meta.

I'd rather see balanced IPS stats becoming part of marginally less efficient, but more universally effective, rainbow builds or vs-Corrupted-specific builds, while weapons with specific weight/bias towards one or two of the IPS damage types would be a more specialized option to utilize against the specific intended faction.

2 hours ago, Andele3025 said:

Puncture should likely make a enemy lose body length for the sake of PT/FT and generate a weakspot that counts for headshots.

I do agree, that ideally a Puncture Proc's Punchthrough/Follow-Through effect should definitely be a guaranteed complete pass-through for the initially proc'ed enemy, guaranteeing that it hits another object, enemy, or wall through that enemy at full power. Making Puncture procs create a Banshee-like "Weak Point" that has reduced resistances, or increased damage susceptibility, are definitely good ideas, I've seen them before but nobody remembered to bring them up as an option before you (unless I missed/forgot one).

Speaking of weakspots counting as headshots.... Some enemies have non-head weak-spots (Moa "Fanny Packs" for example), and they receive damage multipliers, but don't count as Headshots for the various headshot-dependent Arcanes, mods, special features, etc. I'd be alright with DE reworking Puncture to be the "precision-rewarding" IPS damage type, and reworking headshot-exclusive mechanics to also benefit from Puncture-generated or normal non-headshot weak spots. Then you're rewarded for precision and consistency with Puncture procs and subsequent damage to the same location (or with bullet-hoses, luck). Maybe that's a whole other thread suggestion, though.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

3 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

Speaking of weakspots counting as headshots.... Some enemies have non-head weak-spots (Moa "Fanny Packs" for example), and they receive damage multipliers, but don't count as Headshots for the various headshot-dependent Arcanes, mods, special features, etc. I'd be alright with DE reworking Puncture to be the "precision-rewarding" IPS damage type, and reworking headshot-exclusive mechanics to also benefit from Puncture-generated or normal non-headshot weak spots. Then you're rewarded for precision and consistency with Puncture procs and subsequent damage to the same location (or with bullet-hoses, luck). Maybe that's a whole other thread suggestion, though.

There were past suggestions for Puncture to buff damage type vulnerabilities to make Corrosive more relevant.

The status effect of Puncture damage is Weakened. The victim gains +15% weakness to all damage types for 6 seconds. Subsequent procs add +1% weakness up to +24% in total after 10 stacks, with each proc refreshing the duration of all previous procs. Affected enemies will have a yellow aura.

This change will make Puncture a weaker more niche variant of Viral that is especially synergistic with Corrosive and Radiation as armor class modifiers apply twice. A % boost and % armor mitigation. Note that health modifiers still apply to armored units as armor only provides damage reduction.

Both Corrosive and Radiation have +75% against different armor types.

No Puncture proc: +75% against armor, 1.75x Damage and 75% Armor Mitigation

First Puncture proc: +90% against armor, 1.9x Damage and 90% Armor Mitigation plus +15% against health, 1.15x

10th Puncture proc: +99%, 1.99x Damage and 99% Armor Mitigation plus +24% against health, 1.24x

Example, against 6000 Alloy armor (95% DR), 100 Radiation will deal:

No Puncture proc: 29.1 Damage

First Puncture proc: 72.8 Damage, +150% Increase from No proc, 

10th Puncture proc: 205.6 Damage, +606.5% Increase from No proc

Bonuses are less pronounced when Corrosive and Radiation are against neutral targets.

For unarmored enemies, neutral damage types simply gain +15% on first proc and +24% on 10th.

For armored enemies, neutral damage types gain bonuses against armor and health, so against 6000 armor, first proc grants +44.9% and 10th grants +52.5%.

[Uhkretor]

@Grav_Starstrider

 

... On your opening post, you mentioned that slash is anti-flesh... That's pretty spot on... But what you're referring to, the part that ignores armor, isn't slash. Slash itself isn't ignoring armor... Its the bleeding DoT proc... And bleeding does ignore armor.

 

... Here's the thing... Comparing with reality, as you did by saying that slash is anti-flesh and not anti-armor (which is actually correct), armors never were 100% impenetrable. If a blade managed to actually penetrate the armor, be it on the armor junctions or simply in places where the presence of armor was impossible to actually be there, there was an extremely high chance (if not certain to happen) of the armor wearer to bleed from the strike, if not outright incapacitate him/her (because at that time even women would fight if they had no other choice) and bleed out right on the spot, or worse.

The idea, and this is probably what the devs considered towards the gameplay aspect of it, is that even if their bodies are armored on the outside, taking the Grineer units as a practical example, they still have (although severely decayed) organics beneath it... And organics need to be fueled with "sustenance" (Oxygen, for example) in order to maintain their biological functions... And to maintain those biological functions, they need fluids to allow the severely decayed cells to work with by exchanging toxins for new "sustenance"...

... Grineer units are not robots. They simply have armor plates on top of an endokeleton that's keeping their frail bodies in place while also offering protection..

 

Actually, calling bleeding DoT proc as "slash" proc is supposed to be simple but causes more confusion on the kind I'm seeing here... It became really clear to me when I stopped waving "slash" around as if the entire slash process is the same thing when its not... As, like reality, bleeding is a byproduct of a slash... And the mods that DE released for Impact to cause Bleeding also follows the same rule. The presence of a chance, I suspect, is to actually give the same idea as an impact would behave in real life, concerning the Bleeding proc...

 

... Just wanted to drop this here... Might be helpful to shed some light on slash and its byproduct...

[Grav_Starstrider]

11 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

There were past suggestions for Puncture to buff damage type vulnerabilities to make Corrosive more relevant.

I like it. Better than what we have currently.

10 hours ago, Uhkretor said:

... On your opening post, you mentioned that slash is anti-flesh... That's pretty spot on... But what you're referring to, the part that ignores armor, isn't slash. Slash itself isn't ignoring armor... Its the bleeding DoT proc... And bleeding does ignore armor.

True enough, but as this is a game, we're able to cherry pick and choose what realism we apply to the game, and how. I'm not suggesting slash procs and bleed be exclusively effective against unarmored health, I just think unarmored health is what it should be best at doing damage to. It barely makes sense for slash procs to be useful against shields, but I'm happy for them to continue taking DoT as that maintains Slash's purpose across various enemy types. I just think that armor should mitigate slash/bleed DoT since that's the comparable game equivalent to armor preventing the slash procs more often in the first place.

I'd be unoffended by DE potentially separating/differentiating slash from bleed, having them do different things or have separate behaviors. Slash procs could have a chance at proc'ing Bleed, as HM and hemorrhage would.

I just kinda fundamentally hate how ubiquitously meta Slash proc is by comparison to impact (without hemorrhage) and puncture (without HM). I want Slash to be marginally less universally useful, and for Impact and Puncture to be somewhere between universally useful, and their current universally nearly uselessness. Exact tweaks to all three are completely up for debate or for DE to cherry pick from.

[Grav_Starstrider]

So are most of us at least in agreement that Impact and Puncture need buffs, as do probably/approximately all Elements besides Heat and Viral? Cuz if it's "power creep" across literally every Damage type in the game except the currently-meta/OP ones, it's actually just "balancing", haha.

Just curious if we can stack a huge chunk of votes on this one thing for DE to recognize the amount of us that agree on the premise, even if we can't agree on every detail of the implementation.

[Aldain]

6 hours ago, Grav_Starstrider said:

So are most of us at least in agreement that Impact and Puncture need buffs, as do probably/approximately all Elements besides Heat and Viral? Cuz if it's "power creep" across literally every Damage type in the game except the currently-meta/OP ones, it's actually just "balancing", haha.

Just curious if we can stack a huge chunk of votes on this one thing for DE to recognize the amount of us that agree on the premise, even if we can't agree on every detail of the implementation.

One other thing they need to do is have a look at the multipliers on each health/armor/shield type, Blast in particular is only good against one of the most niche health types in the game (Machinery, which only appears on a handful of Grineer units) while being actively worse against the most common armor, which makes it redundant because anything made out of Machinery also takes almost as much damage from Electric damage which is far more beneficial as a status effect compared to blast.

Really several elements have issues like that, Cold is bad against 2 out of 4 of the Infested health types, and the one it is good against only really shows up on Deimos, Electric damage is only bad against Alloy Armor and mostly neutral otherwise, Heat is good against 3 things and only bad against Proto Shields which are only on a handful of Corpus heavy units and some bosses, same issue with Corrosive which is good to neutral and only bad against that same small Proto Shield niche.

Gas is flat out bad against the two most common health types of 2 of the factions on top of the status effect being awful now, and even against the Infested it is gross overkill at best (and Heat on its own does almost the same amount of damage anyway with a better status effect), Magnetic damage is ONLY good against shields and Toxin already ignores them in 90% of situations. Radiation has the same problem as Cold, bad against 2 out of 4 of the Infested types while only good against one niche type making using it pointless since other types are neutral or have more reliable status effects.

Meanwhile Viral is ONLY bad against Machinery (again, a niche health type) and Infested health, which doesn't matter much since most Infested are made of paper anyway. Slash is supposed to be bad against Armor but the status effect bypasses it entirely on top of being naturally good against all health types, Impact on the other hand is actively WORSE against 2 out of 3 of the common health types and only good against both Shield types and Machinery (noticing a trend with Machinery?) and Puncture, which is neutral against health but good against armor is outclassed by Slash status procs.

We have too many niche health types being vaunted as benefits to some of the damage types, when in reality they just have too many drawbacks to be wanted at all, Impact and Blast in particular being outclassed by other damage types and actively working against others.

[VoidArkhangel]

En 14/8/2021 a las 3:42, Grav_Starstrider dijo:

Make Slash anti-flesh (not anti-armor)

Lore-wise and in reality too Slash/Bleed is OP since if a bullet manages to cut one vein lets say the armor becomes irrelevant since it doesnt matter how much armor you can put on your body, its quality or if you can put even more after the bullet went through, it wont stop the bleeding since the armor doesnt reinforce the insides it reinforces the outside.

Gameplay-wise slash doesnt bypass armor but bleed does and it should stay that way.

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

slash viral and heat being more powerful than other elements is a moot point now

because regardless of power I'm going to cram as many different elements as I can into a build to take advantage of Gun Condition Overload

for some lower rof weapons I've even been putting reduced level toxin/cold in, so to even out the proportion of viral vs IPS and other elements. Better to ensure I get an instance of each type to proc instead of just repeats of viral.

 

don't have time to wait for a bleed proc to tick down, can just kill with raw damage stacking now