How would you (if you were a designer) handle AOE weapons?

[Hypernaut1]

Greater falloff damage reduction and enemies that require more precision. 

[BiancaRoughfin]

My current grudge with Explosive AoE weapons in the game is the brain-dead culture created with the removal of Self Damage where players just spam shots everywhere or run a mission targetting their feet. AoE weapons are suppost to be stronger at the cost of being a risk to the player that uses it but that went completely away. Fun is not an excuse for the changes made as these weapons became non-engaging compared to what they used to be.

1 hour ago, (XBOX)Tucker D Dawg said:

• Bring back self damage? (which sucked because you'd get killed everytime your teammate jumped in front of you, or your pet, or some ai, or the projectile would clip a wall, or the AOE was so big on any indoor map you were cooked)

I would bring Self damage back, it wouldnt suck because shield gating is a thing these days. As for players hitting their Teammates, thats on them, if you are using a AoE weapon you are taking the risk, you have to know your bearings relative to your teammates, obstacles and enemies at all times.

1 hour ago, (XBOX)Tucker D Dawg said:

• remove iron skin/prime sure footed/etc  from saving you? (They would only prevent ENEMY/Environmental knockdowns?

I would remove knockback/knockdown resistance/immunity to self inflicted effects completely. AoE weapons have to be a Gain/Risk matter.

[RLanzinger]

18 minutes ago, (PSN)GEN-Son_17 said:

I like the knock back mechanic and the fact that a valuable slot has to be used to offset it via a very capacity-hungry mod.

I did get a bit deceived when DE switch for selfdamage to stagger BUT The knockback mechanic was DE answers to give better "Quality of Play" and I personnaly think it should be kept and ever more accentuated :

• The radius of knockback should be the double of AOE Radius.
• The knockback should also disturbe you Vision and Audio (Like some electrical / radiation effect in RJ on HUD) and being stackable.
• The AOE should leave some environnement effects like poison/fire/electrical problems seens in Corpus gas city / RJ (which could hurt enemies and Warframe alike).

Personnaly anyone can know that "I love using the Penta", I'm bad at shooting (worst K/D ever) and I have follow WF dev since long (U7); I'd love to find a more realistic way to play with AOE weapons. I don't ask for a nerf because in warframe a most nerfed create more powerfull thing...

[Joezone619]

Severly reduce range, and damage of the explosion, while increasing the damage of the projectile.

The AoE is secondary, the projectile that makes it comes first. AoE has been far too strong and far too large for too long.

[ShortCat]

I would suggest a combination of following changes:

• AoE weapons should have reduced utility. Bramma, a rocket launcher, has a charge time of 0.4 seconds, while Daikyu is at 1 second. This is wrong. This change would incentivise to spend slots on utility mods and not stack damage as usual.
• Rework ammo regeneration/economy mechanics for all weapons. AoE weapons are too eficient in their ammo economy, while weapons like Dex Furis only have 300 shot or 3 clips of ammo.
  Maybe even a loadout rework, since Heavy Weapons are not worth their name, their special slot and could be easely integrated into already exsisting weapon categories. I also would reward loadouts when not all slots are used with a bonus like "light load" if primary slot is not occupied; or something along those line, I hope the intention is clear.
• PSF should not protect from self stuggers; that said the stagger itself should be reworked and become less cartoony. Some weapons should not cause a stagger at all, like Zakti or Opticor.
• Reduce enemy density & repopulate higher lvls with mechanically nuanced units. If there are less enemies on the screen, performace gap between singel target and AoE automatically shrinks. Furthermore, certain units resist mindless AoE spam better than others, one Bursa/Hyena/Rachnoid are more dangerous than 10 Techs, yet those units never appear in regular missions. Warframe already has a collection of dangerous units, yet those are hardly utilized outside of highly specific conctent. Use all you assets game!

[quxier]

Why not change enemies? I've once posted about our gear (primary, secondary, melee and maybe few others) having different role while being ok for all roles - they can kill all enemies just little slower.

For example 2 enemy/weapon types:

- single (or very low quantity) & strong enemies that take a lot of damage; you use some high damage but slow fire rate, like Kuva Chackhurr or Hammers

- many, weak enemies that you need some AOE weapon or very fast; for example use Tonkor or Atterax

For example, you have group of 10 Weak & 2 Strong. You can shoot every enemies with Chackhurr but it would take 12 shots. You can use Atterax but it would take for example 8 melee attacks (1 swing kills 5 Weak, 2 swings required; 1 Strong requires 3 swings = 6 swings total).

[Keiyadan]

vor 22 Minuten schrieb 0_The_F00l:

Rubbish , if it happens it's a bug or it's a radiation sortie.

That's how radiation sorties work.

of course that are bugs but to my knowlege bugs are very common in warframe
and no radiations sortie syndicate missions are not a thing or normal starchart mission well if you dont count jupiter that is

vor 18 Minuten schrieb FoxLove:

Nerfs will cause outcry.

like the outcry we have i the last few months about aoe weapons are so bad for the game if you lookin for something to have an outcry about you will find something
remember me of the time i got accused of stealing someones exp

[(PSN)Pablogamer585]

Very interesting and controversial topic this one is.

Explosive weapons in most videogames are special and have low ammo/few uses. Their ammounition also happens to be pretty uncommon and they are mainly used to kill heavy units/vehicles with ease, or hit specifical weakspots on bosses to then shoot them with your main gun, but in Warframe they are as common your daily used rifle.

The removal of self-damage was, good. I would hate booping myself out of existance because of some grunt that popped out of a corner right in front of me, and self-stagger so far seems fine, but we can cheese it with Prime Sure Footed, or other mods.

We cannot simply remove explosive weapons from Warframe, as they are part of it since years.
We cannot simply nerf them to Simulor levels because it would make nosense, but, perhaps we could try to limitate the way they are used?
Of course this would involve tons of complains from players who love explosive weapons, whereas others would train-clap for they finally got touched for the worst.

I personally think explosive weapons deserve to be as strong as they are, but at the same time the overusage of them can get annoying for some (as I can see here).
If only explosive weapons were specially effective for certain bossfights/enemy types/things instead of being all-rounders, people would reconsider using them less or more ocassionally instead of continuously.

In conclusion; I think it is logical they can nuke low tier enemies as easily as they do now, or in the case of stronger launchers obliterate anything in Steel Path, but perhaps the right nerf would be making them slower so they are approached as a tactical choice for certain situations instead of a braindead meta you can spam? A change to their own category with their own mods would also be very interesting.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

I'd leave it as it is. If people want to spam aoe they should have to use certain abilities, frames, or show some dedication and login for 400 days (including formaing that into frames).

Either way the game gives you more than enough options. It's not like you have 2 choices, you can use one ability on all frames and 4 or 5 frames have immunity.

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

22 minutes ago, Hypernaut1 said:

Greater falloff damage reduction and enemies that require more precision. 

Most AoE weapons are already bugged to have much higher falloff than listed, so that clearly doesn’t work.

[_junguler]

make more of them as they've been the must fun i've ever had on warframe ...

[Caliboom]

2 hours ago, (XBOX)Tucker D Dawg said:

It is completely out of control - like it was back in the miragulator/tonkor spam days years ago, now just replaced with bramma/ogris spam.

• Bring back self damage? (which sucked because you'd get killed everytime your teammate jumped in front of you, or your pet, or some ai, or the projectile would clip a wall, or the AOE was so big on any indoor map you were cooked)
• remove iron skin/prime sure footed/etc  from saving you? (They would only prevent ENEMY/Environmental knockdowns?
• Remove AOE weapons from the game entirely?
• nerf them like was done to the simulor/sonicor/staticor so they are little more than MR fodder?
• Leave them as is?
• Reduce (increase?) all their max fire rates to 3+seconds regardless of mods?
• Other?
   

I hate them in the game, yet pretty much only use them - because they are simply the fastest way to completely trivialize the farm right up through level 150 enemies.  Of course I don't actually really need to hardcore farm anything anyway so a reduction in efficiency FOR ME wouldn't have me getting all salty.  If you don't use them, if you play on public you're just playing janitor cleaning up a few stragglers, or you are deliberately handicapping yourself.

I personally lean towards just yank them all from the game as they can't seem to find any way to balance them but i'm not very creative.

 

Add self-damage (equal to a percentage to your health, which depends on the weapon), and make the projectiles go through allies so there are no accidents.

[herflik]

It is balance problem to begin with, currently weapon types don't hold any resonable differentation with pros and cons. Even melee weps are nonsense currently, I can have higher 1 hander dps than 2 hander after the reworks.

[KitMeHarder]

3 hours ago, (XBOX)Tucker D Dawg said:

I hate them in the game, yet pretty much only use them - because they are simply the fastest way to completely trivialize the farm right up through level 150 enemies.  Of course I don't actually really need to

Sounds like you're perpetuating your own problem. Follow your own advise and don't use them if you don't like them, and maybe if others did the same it'd be less prevalent. I still easily out kill and out DPS players with AoE weapons all the time, with a magnitude of frames. But if you're comparing AoE to Tiberons and Rubicos and Cedos and etc..., you're just setting yourself up to be disappointed. Just like every other player like you in every meta in the past, be it melee, abilities, different AoE, etc...

3 hours ago, (XBOX)Tucker D Dawg said:

If you don't use them, if you play on public you're just playing janitor cleaning up a few stragglers, or you are deliberately handicapping yourself.

Maybe if you're a Rhino trying to Hek everything in the face, but ~20 or so of the current frames can be competitive with or surpass AoE weapons.

3 hours ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

Make some enemies take reduced damage from AoE, bombard, Heavy gunner, corpus tech, Comba, just the special units cause fodder should die quickly to AoE just like in other games.

This works for me, but only if they're new enemies. Making it retroactive for enemies that really aren't all that uncommon isn't the right approach IMO. (New corpus ship especially is basically only Techs.)

3 hours ago, Loza03 said:

with the additional elements of making them their own weapon class, similar to shotguns, complete with their own mods and ammo type.

Please God no. DE doesn't have the attention span to keep the mod pool up to date. Look at even Shotguns, they still don't have stuff like Internal Bleeding or Fulmination, and even look at how long it took for them to get recoil reduction, a silencer, etc... Then there's archguns... *shivers*

No. If anything all non-unique shotgun mods should be removed and we should just have 'primary' mods.

3 hours ago, Loza03 said:

This is because the big limiting factor of most AoE weapons is typically that their ammo is either rare, highly limited in terms of how much you can carry, or both.

Except that is for other games. Games where you can't jump 2 stories into the air, or go intangible on demand. Warframe has no need for (or the ability to support) mechanics of PvP and linear story games.

2 hours ago, 0_The_F00l said:

Create a flash bang like effect in addition to knockdown

I feel most players don't know how damaging an unexpected bright white light is for your eyes in real life, especially in a dark room. (I know you brought up a blackout latter.)

2 hours ago, 0_The_F00l said:

3) Add punchthrough up to blast radius such that enemy bodies can obstruct damage to those behind them. 

4) Create enemy units that can redirect explosives

Neither fit a game where you can (and are at times expected to) kill 100+ enemies a minute.

3 hours ago, Lutesque said:

What I would do however... Is lower the need for So much killing in most of the content in this game and change how Affinity Works.... Everything would be More Objective Oriented instead of KILL KILL KILL !!!....

We have plenty of those, it just turns the game in Cloudwalker, Worm Hole, Razorwing, etc... spam. Or it's just people afking as Limbo and the like. Killing is always more fun and engaging. The way you fix this is by making the player not care about "kills per sec" (but still focus on killing), like with disruption. And if you don't like disruption, then do you have a mockup mode that wouldn't just consist of the boring stuff stated said above?

 

[(PSN)GEN-Son_17]

1 hour ago, quxier said:

Why not change enemies? I've once posted about our gear (primary, secondary, melee and maybe few others) having different role while being ok for all roles - they can kill all enemies just little slower.

For example 2 enemy/weapon types:

- single (or very low quantity) & strong enemies that take a lot of damage; you use some high damage but slow fire rate, like Kuva Chackhurr or Hammers

- many, weak enemies that you need some AOE weapon or very fast; for example use Tonkor or Atterax

For example, you have group of 10 Weak & 2 Strong. You can shoot every enemies with Chackhurr but it would take 12 shots. You can use Atterax but it would take for example 8 melee attacks (1 swing kills 5 Weak, 2 swings required; 1 Strong requires 3 swings = 6 swings total).

The issue with this is it completely has to change the horde system, which means DE has to rework (calibrate, test, deal with opposition, deal with strategic whining, redo to shut them up, then receive counter counter feedback, redo that, etc). Also, what values would you use to apply the attack strength? As of right now, a non elemental weakness strike to kill a heavy enemy takes quite a few blows already. I think we'd have to be careful to not upswt the flow of the game for the sake of tankier enemies.

[SplineDrive]

• reduce max ammo
• reduce ammo drops
• longer ready time
• self damage & unavoidable stagger

(like most other games)

[KitMeHarder]

2 hours ago, BiancaRoughfin said:

As for players hitting their Teammates, thats on them, if you are using a AoE weapon you are taking the risk, you have to know your bearings relative to your teammates, obstacles and enemies at all times.

Yes, that Nova that literally just instantaneously appeared in front me, or my dog with broken AI is definitely something I can keep track of.... I can almost guarantee you don't have the response times for just normal players bullet jumping in front of you, let alone these upper echelon scenarios. Your thought process would fit for something like a MOBA/hero shooter, but almost no other multiplayer game (self damage doesn't exist, or is linearly balanced in those games).

2 hours ago, ShortCat said:

repopulate higher lvls with mechanically nuanced units.

Good luck, honestly. No scaling RPG I've played has ever achieved this in their endgames.

-----------------

 

I will admit, AoE weapons are slightly out of wack at the moment, but I don't really want DE to touch them. I don't have faith that they'll move the game in the right direction, based on their past, as well as the melee nerfs that came alongside the buffs that make AoE guns prevalent now. (But before hand they obviously seemed to have done something right with Glaives, as they were powerful and I loved using them, but I relatively never saw them.)

[(PSN)GEN-Son_17]

2 hours ago, RLanzinger said:

I did get a bit deceived when DE switch for selfdamage to stagger BUT The knockback mechanic was DE answers to give better "Quality of Play" and I personnaly think it should be kept and ever more accentuated :

• The radius of knockback should be the double of AOE Radius.
• The knockback should also disturbe you Vision and Audio (Like some electrical / radiation effect in RJ on HUD) and being stackable.
• The AOE should leave some environnement effects like poison/fire/electrical problems seens in Corpus gas city / RJ (which could hurt enemies and Warframe alike).

Personnaly anyone can know that "I love using the Penta", I'm bad at shooting (worst K/D ever) and I have follow WF dev since long (U7); I'd love to find a more realistic way to play with AOE weapons. I don't ask for a nerf because in warframe a most nerfed create more powerfull thing...

The flow would be effected too much with these restrictions though. 

[Berzerkules]

No fun allowed crowd showed up in force. 

[Megalomaniakaal]

4 hours ago, Loza03 said:

this weapon class doesn't get an Ammo Mutation, Ammo Scavengers, and is ineligible for other things like Carrier's ammo mutation

But muh vigilante set bonus.

[DebrisFlow]

4 hours ago, (XBOX)Tucker D Dawg said:

remove iron skin/prime sure footed/etc  from saving you? (They would only prevent ENEMY/Environmental knockdowns?

This

[Megalomaniakaal]

3 hours ago, Keiyadan said:

7 maybe remove change the Primed Firestorm / Primed Fulmination and let the players use the normal ones so it would decrease the range of the weapons while maintainig the single target dmg

Sure I'll just return to the meta of nuking everything with a frame then. The issue isn't the weapons but the nature of the game, it's a horde shooter so one way or anther we will be favoring AOE anyways. Making AOE(of any kind) less effective against eximus and other special units while leaving the grunts still act as cannon fodder is the most obvious solution here.

[Lutesque]

57 minutes ago, KitMeHarder said:

We have plenty of those, 

No we don't....

 

58 minutes ago, KitMeHarder said:

it just turns the game in Cloudwalker, Worm Hole, Razorwing, etc... spam

And that's a Bad thing ? I thought movement was everybody's favourite part of Warframe ? 🤔

59 minutes ago, KitMeHarder said:

Killing is always more fun and engaging.

I think you've got some psychological Issues Tenno 🤨...

1 hour ago, KitMeHarder said:

like with disruption. And if you don't like disruption, then do you have a mockup mode that wouldn't just consist of the boring stuff stated said above?

Don't need one... spy and Sabotage are perfectly fine.... 😁

[(NSW)Greybones]

🤔 Personally I don’t have a problem with them. If I want to use an AoE, I do so. It’s like the option to overtune my equipment for a mission; I can do that if I want, or I could not. The drawbacks of AoE are a little more apparent when they and my Warframe are not overtuned for the mission.

Hm. Maybe there could be a reduced Affinity modifier on AoE weapons/attacks? You’d have to kill a huge group of enemies with an AoE attack to equal one enemy’s affinity killed via single-target, and a lot of objectives aren’t so much kill-based to progress (like Mobile Defense or whatever).

Obviously people are going to ruin the game for themselves because it’s the smart thing to do, but if the inclination to gravitate towards AoE for farming purposes can be reduced, the usage of AoE might be reduced as well unless someone just really likes blowing things up

[KitMeHarder]

19 minutes ago, Lutesque said:

No we don't....

Assault, Capture, Defection, Hijack, Interception, Mobile Defense, Rescue, Sabotage, Spy, etc... and any bounty/event that mimics them.

19 minutes ago, Lutesque said:

And that's a Bad thing ? I thought movement was everybody's favourite part of Warframe ?

The parkour system is, and it is when it's used to elevate and enhance the killing. Do stuff like sorties, SP incursions, and Aya farming efficiently, it's very different. Or when you redid the star chart on steel path... that much is too much.

19 minutes ago, Lutesque said:

I think you've got some psychological Issues Tenno

Same as you then. Otherwise what are you doing in a game like this?

19 minutes ago, Lutesque said:

Don't need one... spy and Sabotage are perfectly fine

For you, maybe. But probably not for most endgame players, and those missions don't meet the specifications I asked for.