Is it time to bring back self damage on AOE weapons?

[(PSN)xBlake360]

30 minutes ago, --F--NerevarCM said:

Making single target weapons AoE is a no no. It defeats the entire purpose of a single target weapon.

The only real way is unique enemies that are resistant to AoE.

And some enemies that require precise shots like the Nox. However the weakpoint should never take damage from a AoE weapon. Or the AoE should deal reduced damage.

Its like a Raid in a MMORPG. We have the boss and the minions. AoE classes deal with the large amount of minions, the single target classes deal with the boss.

In Warframe we have only the weak enemies. No boss.

Here I agree. Destiny 2 deals with it quite well - AoE weapons are great against groups of enemies, but final bosses require much more dmg to deal and only some single target weapons can achieve that.

So the solution would be to bring much stronger enemies that require to hit their weakpoints for increased damage.

[Leqesai]

2 hours ago, (PSN)xBlake360 said:

Here I agree. Destiny 2 deals with it quite well - AoE weapons are great against groups of enemies, but final bosses require much more dmg to deal and only some single target weapons can achieve that.

So the solution would be to bring much stronger enemies that require to hit their weakpoints for increased damage.

Perhaps the easy solution is to just give heavy units AOE resistance. Bombards, nox, demolysts, ancients etc.

[p_silveira]

On 2021-08-16 at 1:11 PM, --F--NerevarCM said:

Look. DAMAGE IS NOT THE PROBLEM. THE PROBLEM IS CLEARING SPEED.

Absolutely this. What's the point of bringing a hard hitting assault rifle or pistol when a random with a Bramma will kill the same target I'm aiming at + 8 more in the same room in a split second?

Self damage removal was a huge mistake and hurts the weapon diversity of loadouts in public squads. I feel like in every pub squad I load into there will be at least one Bramma/Ogris/T. Tetra/T. Envoy. If not more than one. All the while there are now 156 primary weapons in the game (excluding kitguns, according to Wiki), AoE weapons are the absolute dominant meta on public squads.

[ShortCat]

6 hours ago, (PSN)xBlake360 said:

Show me a weapon that one shots a demolyst lvl 10000, Im eager to know.

Mk-1 Paris can do it in 3 shots.

 

[Leqesai]

22 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

Mk-1 Paris can do it in 3 shots.

 

Correction: MK1-Paris can do it with full armor strip, eclipse and overpowered CC abilities...

Using the youtube pleb's setup most weapons would/should be able to take out level 9999 armored targets without issue...

[TheLexiConArtist]

Self damage should have never been removed, it was never forced on the player unless they chose to risk it and only constituted a small percentage of the arsenal at best.

There are counterpoints to all the complaints available. There were solutions to address both the fatalism and the complaints with a shred of legitimacy such as ally collisions: that's self-killing as a symptomatic result of something that is a nuisance to every gun, self-damage is not the cause of the issue - they could have just disabled projectile collision on allies unless there was a valid use case for it.

Most of all, it's the entire loss of an archetype and playstyle that resulted in boring, homogenised, worse explosives. Even tossing the balance debate out of the window, that's still an objective reason why it had no business being removed: Warframe is a wide-design, not a tall-design. It's built on variety, and a lot of choice and variety was lost when explosives were retrofitted into baby-mode concussive cannons.

 

And to those of us who liked the risks and mastering not shooting our feet.. it's boring. There's no threat to knocking yourself down when in doing so you also obliterated the immediate vicinity, even if you don't simply immunise yourself. Staggering is exclusively an annoyance with zero lasting impact or reason not to trip over again 5 seconds later, but self-damage of a valid level was an imperative to not repeat those mistakes.

 

The real problem with self-damage is that our self-damage was linear with our output damage. But our health is not linear with the damage we're expected to output. Fatal self-damage is guaranteed to return as power creeps on, unless that's fixed.

But we offered many, many solutions. Each had their potential caveats and flaws. But they were there. I still have the evidence of my algorithmic approach that kept low-scale self damage at a sensible level, but through diminishing return could be kept from scaling up into fatality to even the beefiest of frames until immense levels of outgoing damage. After all, a paper Loki probably shouldn't be tanking his own explosives as easily as Sand Daddy (argument against 'self-damage limited to a percentage'), but even the mightiest should have a point where the risk is visceral and real.

 

On 2021-08-16 at 3:25 PM, Tyreaus said:

This is kind of an issue in either case, whether self-stagger or neutered / non-immediately-lethal self-damage. We have plenty of healing methods that can negate health damage on a whim and Augur mods to recharge shield gates. The same things that keep us immortal also keep us immune to self-damage unless that self-damage kills in an instant - and that was widely seen as overkill, even by people like the OP who want self-damage back.

There's still a big difference. One is to use mods/tools to allow recovery from a mistake, the other - current staggers and PSF - is having the 'recoverable mistake' be the baseline and the mod/tools completely remove the need to recover at all.

You don't need to do a Life Strike, or Protective Dash yourself, or use an ability for healing and/or shield gating, so on and so forth, with PSF versus self-stagger. It's just a passive circumvent.

On 2021-08-16 at 3:25 PM, Tyreaus said:

That said, I have a thought:

A lot of this discussion presumes a one-size-fits-all solution for AoE weapons. But maybe that assumption is wrong. While self-damage may fit the Bramma, it has infamous issues with Zhuge Prime (where one could stick an Osprey, be charged by that Osprey, and die instantly). Perhaps the better idea is some kind of tiered mix, where some weapons have self-stagger and others have self-damage. Perhaps some have a mix, or some use self-stagger that can (or can't) be modded out - we have multiple types of self-stagger, after all.

Consider, for another example, Glaives: self-damage on the explosive throws (when using Volatile mods) is likely to lead to a lot of unpredictable, uncontrollable deaths. But we can control the heavy attack explosions. Perhaps the former could use a self-stagger mechanic and the latter self-damage, so that players are encouraged to be careful but aren't disproportionately punished for something outside their control.

Two very accurate points of consideration here.

Nobody says that self-stagger couldn't be on some weapons. We already had differing levels of risk with self-damage, so a 'stagger' subcategory is just a very light 'risk' between "does nothing" and "self-damage with grace-mechanics". Balanced accordingly that the lesser the risk, the more limited the output in either individual or distributed damage, there could have been a place for all that variety.

There are Glaive explosions and various other radials that operate with less predictable danger zones, or in some cases, outright obligatory that the user is in close proximity to any payload - we all do remember the Amp firing modes that were practically unusable because their self-damage was negligible (due to operators having high innate void DR) but their self-staggers were almost entirely unavoidable, and aggravating.
These types of payloads and mechanics should have to be considered for gameplay purposes, yet with the big "Let's Ruin Everything" homogenisation, zero consideration was given to why some things rightfully did not have any self-impact, or negligibly so. They got given staggers anyway.. and the only thing more annoying than suffering repetitive control jank from a bad mechanic, is having it happen in a way you cannot fairly predict and avoid.

The Cedo's a good example of idiocy after the fact. Show of hands, who likes being staggered by the alt-fire because it simply decided to end up ricocheting to where you happen to be, more or less purely through RNG?

[Tyreaus]

6 hours ago, Leqesai said:

Perhaps the easy solution is to just give heavy units AOE resistance. Bombards, nox, demolysts, ancients etc.

Or the heavy faction.

The thing Warframe has kind of forgotten is that, in transitioning into a horde shooter, our focus isn't on individual units all that much. We can see that in our averaging out of health types when going into missions (rather than, say, having one weapon for Robotics and one for Corpus flesh). Having a single unit that's AoE resistant doesn't implore focusing on that unit with a single-target weapon; rather, it more likely means "just keep bombing it until it's dead and complain because it's so uncharacteristically rough". After all, the AoE's still going to nuke everything around that one chonky target, and we aren't really that trained in focusing on a single target.

Instead, maybe throw that on Grineer. Or, even better, lower the number of Grineer units per tile so that AoE is mechanically less effective, then feel free to add in AoE resistances. It encourages focusing on individual units (at least in some parts of the game), helps diversify factions. and has a better per-tile EHP balance so that the explosive EHP values of armour are at least a bit more counter-balanced. That and it just gives non-AoE weapons a real big niche. After all, the current problem isn't that single-target weapons have no niche - snipers and the like are still preferred for Eidolons - but that their niche is just too small.

[ShortCat]

10 hours ago, Leqesai said:

Correction: MK1-Paris can do it with full armor strip, eclipse and overpowered CC abilities...

I don't understand it; is it heresy to utilize the entire loadout now?

[Leqesai]

2 hours ago, ShortCat said:

I don't understand it; is it heresy to utilize the entire loadout now?

Of course not. 

[Voltage]

On 2021-08-15 at 3:45 PM, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

Nope. 

Hot take: The current AoE situation is more obnoxious than Synoid Simulor, Tonkor, Telos Boltace, Castanas Trinity, or Scoliac ever was.

DE used to address these pins one a time (unfortunately in their classic bandaid fashion), but they don't really do that anymore. The underlying problem with this game is that multiplicative damage is so out of control that all you care about is effective range and damage becomes an afterthought.