2021 Year In Review Stats

[60framespersecond]

23 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

The Skana becomes more popular as a starting melee weapon and Broken War becomes more of a staple for new players as they progress through the game's main quest.

The "other swords" category includes Nikanas, Sword & Shield, Machettes, and Rapiers. The only ones really used are the Nikanas. Around MR9 players get Skiajati and replace Broken War. The Tenet Agentus also peeks out for L1 players.

Polearms see less popularity as a starting weapon pick, and the Amphis dries up as a high-MR statstick.

Seen in the Top 10 comparisons, the Orthos Prime makes way for the Guandao Prime. The category as a whole loses popularity in the MR5-10 range and gains slightly in the MR12-30 range.

Dual Swords see general decline.

Martial dual-wielding weapons, like Tonfas, Warfans, and Nunchaku, are almost entirely unused except for the Kronen Prime, which saw a general usage increase likely due to the Zephyr Prime Unvailting in August. This is interesting in particular because we can see the <MR13 players who cannot obtain it without buying it direct from DE. Many likely bought the weapon and used it moving up the ranks to MR13 where F2P players gain access.

@Tiltskillet @(XBOX)TwitchingFool0

Whips and Blade & Whips remain generally unpopular.

Hand & Foot weapons (Claw, Fist, and Sparring) likewise remain about where they were.

And daggers/dual daggers are the same. High MR users of Karyst Prime got bored and move on, while the Ether Daggers remain a fairly popular choice for players in the MR6-8 range.

Hammers are also fairly unpopular. The Fragor remains a decent pick for MR4 players but saw some decline. The Kuva Shildeg also saw some decline.

Scythes are almost entirely unchanged, but the Tenet Grigori peeks out among the highest MR players. MR30-L1 players seem to be the main group obtaining Tenet melees, likely due to the high effort to acquire them.

Zaws of all types see pretty significant decline.

Heavy blades see general decline, but some increased use among L1 players starting to use the Tenet Livia and Tenet Exec - following that trend mentioned earlier.

So, where the heck is everyone going if everything is on the decline?

Glaives see major growth among all eligible MRs. The Xoris is immensely popular with early players, while the Glaive Prime has grown with high MR players. Gunblades remain mostly where they were, with popularity migrating from the Redeemer Prime to the Stropha.

Very interesting, but not really surprising in hindsight. I suppose there are multiple factors at play. The primary buffs and melee nerfs kinda maybe did the job they might've been supposed to do (like who knows what DE expected us to do, maybe start using Sybaris Prime...)?

The Galvanized Mods and Primed Firestorm made most AOE weapons very (maybe too much so) competitive. At the same time, the combo melee nerfs hit pretty hard. For example looking at the Dual Swords statistics, I'm really not surprised as their stances have lost a lot of power (due to way fewer forced slash proccs). Similar things happened to most other "good" stances. The Blood Rush and Condition Overload nerfs combined reduced damage by about 50% (aka cut it in half). Not saying that combo melee is weak right now, but people saying those were minor nerfs are talking complete BS out of their a**e. Curiously enough, these melee nerfs didn't really affect Stropha and Glaive Prime which are mostly built for heavy attacks. The latter, or rather the whole Glaive class did get a nerf to their wind up speed though.

Now these are the facts and my little speculation starts here. Glaive Prime or Stropha are more or less the only thing that people need/want right now from a melee. Both are fairly effortless hard hitters (pretty much no buildup needed) but different to their gun counterparts (say sniper rifles) actually AoE in some sense. Just run a primary meta AoE with Hunter Munitions and put one of those two in the melee slot and you don't need anything else. Blast trash enemies from the map with your primary, one-shot the Acolyte with your melee. Like, in casual gameplay (and I include SP star chart/Incursions here) combo melee just doesn't cut it anymore in comparison. Try following some sweaty a**e Thermal Sunder or Bramma/Zarr spammer in a Fissure or anywhere else with your awesome Kronen/Nikana Prime or whatever. You won't have much fun looking at your kill counter after the mission is over. The secondary slot to me is kinda weird. In all honesty, you don't need it right now, unless you want your Wukong clone to spam the Nukor (I suspect some correlations between those in usage) or --and I feel that's a big one-- you don't have Primed Surefooted and don't want to run a particular Warframe that has it builtin. My gut feeling tells me that if one day Baro brings PSF for everyone, we'll see another crazy jump in AoE usage.

BTW, I'm expecting some mild correlation between AoE usage, Warframe choice and MR due to Primed Surefooted being login gated (and I suppose login days strongly correlate with MR).

This has gotten a bit longer than I intended. I'm really interested in what DE makes of these numbers. As we've already seen in this thread, one can argue about causes and effects all day long.

[Josh486]

1 hour ago, ----Legacy---- said:

Are you serious? AFK gameplay being something bannable that shouldn't happen but players can get away with by using wukong is exactly what makes it an argument.

You're just falling back to the "it's bannable and shouldn't happen" part and handwaving the "players still get away with it" which is the actual issue.

So you're gonna dismiss all of the resources added with the Cambion Drift update, Railjack resources, Fortuna resources, PoE resources, event resources, etc.

Have you ever even taken a look at how many different resources are there available in the game? 

Oh hey! You agree to these being grindy, yet immediately toss a "but not needed and..." strawman.

Could you at least argue in good faith?

Never said it's destroying the game, it's just one of the many proofs of how DE increases the grind as we become able to farm more efficiently. Another strawman, i guess.

Another strawman! Now in the form of "it isn't grindy because you get other stuff while grinding for it".

Never said i'm being slapped in the face for not getting what i want, this is probably the dumbest point to make such claim since the focus here was the rewards being locked behind timed bounties, so there's a chance of going to do some bounties looking for a specific reward, but being unable to do it because the bounty isn't available.

I'm not, i'd like to request -once again- to argue in good faith and not make such claims on my behalf.

See? You even got your own examples of ridiculous farms

Me neither.

Are we playing the same game? Bullet jump and void dash are performed with the same controls and both offer a speed boost. The biggest difference being that void dash can be done as many times in a row, even mid air, as your energy allows you to, while bullet jump can be done just once, requires to be reset by either walking or wall hop/latch and isn't limited by some sort of stamina.

Cloud Walker, on the other hand, has a set duration (which can be modded),  offers free 3D movement using the same control scheme as archwing (crouch = down; jump = up; WSAD = Forward, Back, Left, Right, respectively).

You're free to go ahead and try them yourself.

Projecting much? You've only said nonsense but turns out that i am the one who doesn't know anything about the game i've been playing without breaks since 2013 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Gonna be honest, did get a bit pissed off cause I’m on edge from some personal stuff so that’s on me. I’ll be less personal about it, ahem.

 

The fact that AFK playing with macros is bannable is enough by itself to not blame frames like Wukong for this problem, even if it still occurs it shouldn’t happen, and even so other frames can play AFK better than he can with macros if this argument really matters, some examples being Khora with high strength just having to place a strangledome every 60 seconds and still getting more loot than Wukong, Octavia with high duration also does something similar, Nekros in group farming is literally just a loot stick that stands still and doesn’t do anything. If you condemn all of these that’s fine, but you can’t single out wukong for this when he’s not even the best at these AFK farming things.

This cannot possibly count, those are what, four systems of resources added over 10 years? What’s the alternative? We either kept only the pre existing resources and either had it so, A. Veterans have nothing to do as they have all the resources already. Or B, we make the costs so high that we include the Veterans who have a bunch of this stuff already, and screw over new players from getting this content for at least a year or so depending on how often they play. Neither of which are solutions I wouldn’t want, and I know DE definitely wouldn’t want to.

This isn’t a strawman, I get the argument can kind of be flipped on its head because “hey you don’t *need* anything really,” but the audience that DE markets too, the average warframe player, can get everything in the game that they’ll want with significantly less effort than those trying to minmax and unlock literally everything, so when I say there’s no grind I really mean there’s not too much *relevant* grind that’s needed for most players. 

Those ridiculous examples of farming from me come from, “hey I want to get literally all the things,” they’re outlier examples compared to everything else and don’t represent grinding overall

Fair, timegates in general are annoying as all hell especially if you have less time, I’ll give you that one.

Sevagoth farm I still think is fine, yeah if you’re specifically looking for him it kind of sucks but again, 18 void storms or about 2 hours on average if you’re doing it in average time. For being one of the worse examples of farming it’s really not as bad as you say. 
 

I’ve played with Void Dash for a long ass time, I do a lot of hunts, and Void Dashing has always felt more like Cloud Walking than bullet jumping, probably because it’s much easier to make turns and adjusts whereas bullet jumping locks you in a direction for the duration of the jump.

 

 

 

[PublikDomain]

40 minutes ago, 60framespersecond said:

Very interesting, but not really surprising in hindsight. I suppose there are multiple factors at play. The primary buffs and melee nerfs kinda maybe did the job they might've been supposed to do (like who knows what DE expected us to do, maybe start using Sybaris Prime...)?

The Galvanized Mods and Primed Firestorm made most AOE weapons very (maybe too much so) competitive. At the same time, the combo melee nerfs hit pretty hard. For example looking at the Dual Swords statistics, I'm really not surprised as their stances have lost a lot of power (due to way fewer forced slash proccs). Similar things happened to most other "good" stances. The Blood Rush and Condition Overload nerfs combined reduced damage by about 50% (aka cut it in half). Not saying that combo melee is weak right now, but people saying those were minor nerfs are talking complete BS out of their a**e. Curiously enough, these melee nerfs didn't really affect Stropha and Glaive Prime which are mostly built for heavy attacks. The latter, or rather the whole Glaive class did get a nerf to their wind up speed though.

Now these are the facts and my little speculation starts here. Glaive Prime or Stropha are more or less the only thing that people need/want right now from a melee. Both are fairly effortless hard hitters (pretty much no buildup needed) but different to their gun counterparts (say sniper rifles) actually AoE in some sense. Just run a primary meta AoE with Hunter Munitions and put one of those two in the melee slot and you don't need anything else. Blast trash enemies from the map with your primary, one-shot the Acolyte with your melee. Like, in casual gameplay (and I include SP star chart/Incursions here) combo melee just doesn't cut it anymore in comparison. Try following some sweaty a**e Thermal Sunder or Bramma/Zarr spammer in a Fissure or anywhere else with your awesome Kronen/Nikana Prime or whatever. You won't have much fun looking at your kill counter after the mission is over. The secondary slot to me is kinda weird. In all honesty, you don't need it right now, unless you want your Wukong clone to spam the Nukor (I suspect some correlations between those in usage) or --and I feel that's a big one-- you don't have Primed Surefooted and don't want to run a particular Warframe that has it builtin. My gut feeling tells me that if one day Baro brings PSF for everyone, we'll see another crazy jump in AoE usage.

BTW, I'm expecting some mild correlation between AoE usage, Warframe choice and MR due to Primed Surefooted being login gated (and I suppose login days strongly correlate with MR).

This has gotten a bit longer than I intended. I'm really interested in what DE makes of these numbers. As we've already seen in this thread, one can argue about causes and effects all day long.

Yeah, at the end of the day we're left with the facts:

• Explosive primaries have gotten more popular.
• Chaining beam secondaries like Kuva Nukor and AoE secondaries like Epitaph have gotten more popular.
• Glaive Prime specifically has gotten a lot more popular.
• And almost everything else has seen a decline.
• Frame usage has evened out overall with Wukong getting more popular.

I was hoping they'd talk numbers on the last devstream but they didn't make time for it. I can't really blame them, without looking at how the heatmap actually moves it looks very damning. Most of the biggest changes here are driven by a very small number of items.

[----Legacy----]

11 minutes ago, Josh486 said:

The fact that AFK playing with macros is bannable is enough by itself to not blame frames like Wukong for this problem, even if it still occurs it shouldn’t happen, and even so other frames can play AFK better than he can with macros if this argument really matters, some examples being Khora with high strength just having to place a strangledome every 60 seconds and still getting more loot than Wukong, Octavia with high duration also does something similar, Nekros in group farming is literally just a loot stick that stands still and doesn’t do anything. If you condemn all of these that’s fine, but you can’t single out wukong for this when he’s not even the best at these AFK farming things.

We're discussing what got wukong to such a high usage after his rework, claiming that other frames can do afk gameplay better than him, and asking if i condemn any of those too (which i think should be addressed as well) is entirely besides the point.

Another strawman to the pile.

11 minutes ago, Josh486 said:

This cannot possibly count, those are what, four systems of resources added over 10 years? What’s the alternative? We either kept only the pre existing resources and either had it so, A. Veterans have nothing to do as they have all the resources already. Or B, we make the costs so high that we include the Veterans who have a bunch of this stuff already, and screw over new players from getting this content for at least a year or so depending on how often they play. Neither of which are solutions I wouldn’t want, and I know DE definitely wouldn’t want to.

Just four systems? Once again, go to the game, open the foundry and coint how many crafting resources you can find. Let's totally omit resources added to the game on their own, usually as part of an event like Omega Isotopes, Cryptographic Alu, Thermia, Cryotic, Oxium, Nitain, Vitus and Steel Essences, Argon Crystal (this one even decays to prevent stacking!), etc.

The only thing i agree with is new resources being added to make all players, old and new alike, be put on a similar starting ground when it comes to specific new things, open worlds being the most notable examples followed by events.

11 minutes ago, Josh486 said:

This isn’t a strawman, I get the argument can kind of be flipped on its head because “hey you don’t *need* anything really,” but the audience that DE markets too, the average warframe player, can get everything in the game that they’ll want with significantly less effort than those trying to minmax and unlock literally everything, so when I say there’s no grind I really mean there’s not too much *relevant* grind that’s needed for most players. 

Oh hey! Time to move goalposts, or better said, move the strawman a bit further by drawing a line between "relevant" and "irrelevant" grinds to keep the strawman safe.

11 minutes ago, Josh486 said:

Those ridiculous examples of farming from me come from, “hey I want to get literally all the things,” they’re outlier examples compared to everything else and don’t represent grinding overall

I see, there's no reason for you to agree with yourself.

11 minutes ago, Josh486 said:

Fair, timegates in general are annoying as all hell especially if you have less time, I’ll give you that one.

Hype!

11 minutes ago, Josh486 said:

Sevagoth farm I still think is fine, yeah if you’re specifically looking for him it kind of sucks but again, 18 void storms or about 2 hours on average if you’re doing it in average time. For being one of the worse examples of farming it’s really not as bad as you say.

It's just one of the many examples in the game. If you want something actually grindy you can alway try to get Braton and Lato Vandal by yourself. The Protea farm is also annoying on its own way and more grinds may start coming to mind as this argument keeps going.

11 minutes ago, Josh486 said:

I’ve played with Void Dash for a long ass time, I do a lot of hunts, and Void Dashing has always felt more like Cloud Walking than bullet jumping, probably because it’s much easier to make turns and adjusts whereas bullet jumping locks you in a direction for the duration of the jump.

I've played with void dash, bullet jumps and even cloud walker as well, for a very long time and i see a lot more similarities between Void Dash and Bullet Jump than Void Dash and Cloud Walker. Some of the reasons for it are included in the post you just quoted.

[schilds]

People play Wukong because he's a Monke with style.

[RichardKam]

Nukor is a bit surprising because it was already the most skewed weapon in 2020. With the nerf in July, I thought the usage should went down at least by a little bit.

But, tbh it is still a very good weapon in low to mid level. I max my zenurik school in ESO with saryn/nukor combo so...

I dun think DE can further nerf this weapon. The only way to bring secondary skewness to melee range is to delete k. Nukor from the game. 

[RichardKam]

3小时前 , PublikDomain 说:

Yeah, at the end of the day we're left with the facts:

• Explosive primaries have gotten more popular.
• Chaining beam secondaries like Kuva Nukor and AoE secondaries like Epitaph have gotten more popular.
• Glaive Prime specifically has gotten a lot more popular.
• And almost everything else has seen a decline.
• Frame usage has evened out overall with Wukong getting more popular.

I was hoping they'd talk numbers on the last devstream but they didn't make time for it. I can't really blame them, without looking at how the heatmap actually moves it looks very damning. Most of the biggest changes here are driven by a very small number of items.

I suspect monke prime was most used in some niche missions, specifically when you are doing open world mining/fishing (body guard), sniper only sortie (aim bot), index (proxy fighter), spy, to name a few.

In other mission like exterminate, sabotage, lich/sister hunt etc, monke prime can speed things up a bit, but the advantage is not that much compare with other frames. The weapons you bring is more important.

[Tiltskillet]

3 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

I was hoping they'd talk numbers on the last devstream but they didn't make time for it.  I can't really blame them, without looking at how the heatmap actually moves it looks very damning.

I still think it's a miracle we got it at all.  Trying to look at it from their standpoint, it's easy to see reasons not to bother, and hard to see a benefit.  The only thing I can come up with is that they can use some of the data to shore up support for  controversial directions or balance changes already in the works. 

But that doesn't really hold up for me.  They don't need to show us the data behind changes, and they certain don't need to show all of that data.   Just keep it to a few specifics, if anything. 

Unless somebody can come up with a better rationale, I think it's just somebody's pet project.  If so, flarking cheers to you, anonymous data warrior, wherever you are.

 

 

Oh, and cheers to you as well, publik data warrior.

[Tiltskillet]

38 minutes ago, RichardKam said:

Nukor is a bit surprising because it was already the most skewed weapon in 2020. With the nerf in July, I thought the usage should went down at least by a little bit.

We can see its usage drop among the highest MR players.  If you mean, "why not more?", I've got some guesses. 

The data covers both pre- and post-nerf, so that's part of it.  And some of its competitors haven't been out the full year.  Or, like Sporelacer, only came out toward the end of 2020, not giving much time for content creators to hype them up. 

And I think there's a certain amount of inertia.  Knukor is still extremely good and fun, people had already invested a bunch into it, and probably, players just tend not care about secondaries as much.  Why bother optimizing a different sidearm if most of your time is spent Kzarring things to cinders?

 

[PublikDomain]

1 hour ago, RichardKam said:

Nukor is a bit surprising because it was already the most skewed weapon in 2020. With the nerf in July, I thought the usage should went down at least by a little bit.

But, tbh it is still a very good weapon in low to mid level. I max my zenurik school in ESO with saryn/nukor combo so...

I dun think DE can further nerf this weapon. The only way to bring secondary skewness to melee range is to delete k. Nukor from the game. 

There have been some suggestions that would be a good starting point. Removing the Microwave status effect or at least making sure it doesn't affect Condition Overload is a pretty obvious one, lowering its ammo economy, adjusting chaining, nerfing the base Status Chance, etc. Does a beam weapon that ticks damage 12x/sec really need 50% base Status Chance? What if chaining only happens after focusing on a target for a certain amount of time? You'd have to pick a target and keep on it to get a chain going as opposed to randomly sweeping across a crowd and priming the entire group. Or cutting the magazine size and giving it a longer reload? Beam weapons have 1/2 ammo usage last I checked, so the 77-round magazine is actually a lot larger than it seems. There are many good places to start. That said though I feel that focusing on individual weapons isn't the right first step, addressing systemic issues first and then tamping down the outliers is a better path to take.

[Lutesque]

LoL.... Wukong Prime not only Sky Rockets To The Top... But has Twice as Much Usage as the Warframe in 2nd Place... 👀

Kuva Nukor's Usage is 5 Times Higher than the Pyranna Prime in 2nd Place 👀...

 

[CephalonCarnage]

14 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

The Xoris is immensely popular with early players,

and I think, people spawning sisters. the popularity probably shows how much of a pain getting the tenet weapons are.

[(PSN)thowed]

23 hours ago, Krankbert said:

No. Just no. You just don't know the game well enough to understand why things are nerfed or used a lot. Things get nerfed because they are too strong. Things that are too strong also get used a lot, because of how strong they are.

Yeah and an infinite ammo bramma wukong blinding everyone isnt strong.  I know anything lol.  Been playing since release and can solo everything.  Im tired of the blind eye being turned to this clone.  Enjoy your boom boom.

[(PSN)thowed]

19 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

Not actually, frame usage around MR5 and MR30 seemed to have flattened out and diversified a bit. Usage was pinched at MR5-6 and MR29 in 2020, and that's eased in 2021. A lot of that seems to be Inaros, Khora, Nova, and Mesa losing some popularity to other frames in the highest MRs. Wukong gained some, which is to be expected, but otherwise players between those points seem to be playing a more diverse set of frames than before. Granted, the chart I'm looking at combines Prime/Standard frames so maybe this is driven by higher access to new Primes, bit could also be explained as a wider use of Helminth to "fix" bad frames.

Wukong is, like some others have said, not really that big of a problem. He's more of an ugly symptom. He's boring and lazy but he doesn't negatively impact anyone except the one using him. The merits of nerfing Wukong is less about him being an annoyance for other players and more about the kind of gameplay and attitude he brings. Should that level of convenience be allowed? Does it detract from the gameplay experience? Is that low-energy approach the right one to encourage? Just my 2c.

They're better, sure, but select-fire rifles see the same kind of super low usage. Automatic rifles and LMGs have low popularity, too. The only select-fire weapons that people actually seem to use are the ones where you can go from gun to AoE.

As for grouping I just followed my gut. Shooty guns like the Braton, Karak, and Dera are pretty easy to group, as are semi-auto-only rifles like the Latron and Veldt. Single-target snipers, too. Burst/select fire is where it starts getting weird, so I just threw them all together. They're somewhere in the middle and no one uses them anyways :/ Shotguns are shotguns, and while I considered splitting AoE and single-target shotguns but it didn't seem like a meaningful distinction. There were a few weird ones, like the Miter and Ferrox: mechanically they function like single-target bows (charge and release) so I put them there. Explosive was a catch-all for "things you shoot mainly for the big booms", with explosive multi-mode for the ones that you could argue aren't "really" AoE weapons like the Stahlta. It's AoE, but it's also got some single-target elements to it so maybe players react to that differently? (They do.) And while doing the groupings I found some beam-like weapons like the Gaze, Phage, and Ignis that were too AoE-oriented to be left with single-target beam weapons so those got a category too like they did for secondaries.

That's the plan, I'm going to go by their defined stance and then combine smaller stances into larger subgroups.

He kills just as much if not more as the old Ash except old Ash didnt blind me spamming bramma, napalm rounds and never running out of ammo.

[Krankbert]

vor 7 Minuten schrieb (PSN)thowed:

Yeah and an infinite ammo bramma wukong blinding everyone isnt strong.  I know anything lol. 

I never said he wasn't strong, and - more importantly - you never said that he was.

Am 30.1.2022 um 12:45 schrieb (PSN)thowed:

Everything else is nerfed from usage so its time to nerf Wukong. 

If you had argued that Wukong should be nerfed because he's too strong this conversation would have gone a different way, but you didn't. You argued that he should be nerfed because he's used a lot, like "everything else is nerfed from usage" (and that's a direct quote).

[PublikDomain]

3 hours ago, (PSN)thowed said:

He kills just as much if not more as the old Ash except old Ash didnt blind me spamming bramma, napalm rounds and never running out of ammo.

What I was saying is that I've never had a Wukong get in my way. I've had old Ash make my target invincible and kill everything before I had a chance, but not Wukong. He ought to be looked at, but imagine he gets nerfed. The people using him will just move to the next laziest thing. Addressing why people are drawn to a frame like Wukong in the first place would be more productive.

[SneakyErvin]

30 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

Addressing why people are drawn to a frame like Wukong in the first place would be more productive.

That is the easy part. 2 Bramma/Zarr at the ame time is better than 1, especially when 1 of the 2 auto targets everything that can die.

[Tiltskillet]

51 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

What I was saying is that I've never had a Wukong get in my way. I've had old Ash make my target invincible and kill everything before I had a chance, but not Wukong. He ought to be looked at, but imagine he gets nerfed. The people using him will just move to the next laziest thing. Addressing why people are drawn to a frame like Wukong in the first place would be more productive.

True, but one thing doesn't rule out the other.  And it doesn't seem likely at all that DE would ever address some of the larger issues, like by making maps much smaller.

The funny thing about Wukong is there are active elements in his kit, but they don't seem to have enough leverage. For instance, something that intrigues me about CT on paper is it's got an active play mechanic where one can select the clone's target and it gets a damage bonus.  One approach would be to nerf its damage when no target is selected and buff it even more when one is.

Cloudwalker I'd call fine, except it should be a channel.  It's crazy to me that it's got fantastic movespeed, invuln, heal, stun and still costs less than the standard 2. 

Defy could use a buff to its retaliation.  Staff needs a buff/purpose. 

The nerfs are just examples.  But take that general approach, and people have more payoff when playing him actively.  

[PublikDomain]

Our winners and losers brackets for Melee:

Most interesting to me is just how much movement is attributed to so few weapons. I'll do a requested comparison or two tomorrow and then probably do winners/losers for frames/primaries/secondaries now that I have a methodology figured out for these.

[(NSW)RATHURUE]

On 2022-01-29 at 3:00 AM, Monolake said:

So many bot users. And I cant blame them for how most of the missions are just boring wait but still its super unhealthy for the game. 

And how is using Wukong is 'unhealthy' for the game where you can deploy Specters, which pretty much does the same or Railjack crew that can delete Apostles in 1h SP survival in seconds using Acceltra?  

Using Wukong for soloing is the best thing you can have in game, especially on overworld bounty missions like Vallis or Plains. You won't trigger the extra difficulty (added mobs) but have a party member that aimbots at all the targets you don't even see in your screen, giving you almost 100% guarantee of clearing bonus bounty as long as you don't do something really, really stupid or encounter a god darned bug that has persisted for 4 years.

You can try and nerf Wukong by making his clone has duration, consume more energy, heck, even uses non-modded weapon like specters did, nerfing the cloud walk so it consume more energy, don't remove status effects or restore health, also remove the random revival buffs or the free 3 revives but it won't do anything to the popularity: because Wukong is an all-rounder built survivalst. You can still spam Defy and subsume his 4 for something like Gloom and you can sit in survival for hours as long as you don't get surrounded by Leech Eximi.

[Teridax68]

The somewhat reductive takeaway I'm getting from this year's stats is that underpoweredness tends to be a weapon class-wide problem, whereas overpoweredness tends to lie with specific outliers. I'm not surprised by the dominance of the Acceltra and Kuva explosive weapons, nor by the massively excessive presence of the Kuva Nukor. The data on the Nukor may not be fully reliable given that the weapon's received a nerf, but my suspicion is that, much like the Bramma nerfs, the KNukor nerfs did little to curb its dominance, given that its ridiculous chaining ability was but one of its many excesses.

The other assessment IMO is that while warframes each have generally okay play rates when one discounts non-primes and some outliers, namely Wukong Prime at the top and Nyx/Banshee/Oberon/Mag at the bottom, the dropoff rate for weapons is much more severe: there clearly is much more of a best-in-class phenomenon among weapons, where one dominant option tends to make all other comparable options less desirable.

Extrapolating from this, some observations off the top of my head:

Explosives

There is often an assessment that explosive weapons as a group are overpowered: as the stats show, this is not quite true, since despite the prevalence of several explosive weapons, the rest are unpopular. Notably, the near-totality of explosive secondaries are far behind in popularity relative to alternatives beyond even the Kuva Nukor, including single-target options like the Pyrana Prime. Thus, I think it would be wrong to apply some blanket nerf to explosive weapons, because this would harm weapons that are already not performing well. Rather, there is a clear need for nerfs to individual explosive weapons like the Kuva Bramma or Acceltra, much like there likely needs to be nerfs to the Kuva Nukor and possibly the Tenet Cycron rather than the entirety of beam weapons.

While the stats do not relate to the following, I also feel that there may be a design problem, rather than a balance problem, with certain weapon types: explosives are hard to balance because I think they're gauged on whether they can kill most enemies within less than a second of firing. If they can, then they're top-tier, and if they can't, they suck. This problem I think is compounded by frequently-imposed ammo limitations: if you have the raw damage per shot to kill enemies, you get to then harvest ammo from them and keep the cycle going. If you don't, then you run out of ammo and can't use your weapon anyway. This is part of a series of win-more/lose-more effects DE have inserted into the game, which includes Galvanized mods and gun arcanes.

Nyx

She is still the least-played frame in the game by far. Her rework did little to address her problems, and she needs proper attention, not just a few slapdash adjustments. Other frames are suffering too, including Atlas and Valkyr, but Nyx still remains at the bottom of the warframe barrel.

Weapon Diversity

This is something that likely ought to be verified by a more precise comparison, but at a glance it looks like weapon diversity has gotten worse in 2021 compared to 2020, and specifically among primaries and secondaries: the top-performing weapons are still at the top, but the gap between the best and the rest seems to have widened significantly. Meanwhile, the distribution of melee weapon popularity doesn't appear to have changed much.

The stats obviously don't show why this is, but given that this seems to affect guns rather than melee, my guess is that the weapon changes in the Sisters of Parvos update are to blame: the update somewhat nerfed melee weapons, and buffed primaries and secondaries by giving us Galvanized mods and primary/secondary arcanes, both of which offer stacking bonuses on-kill. This on-kill mechanic I suspect is what's widening the gap: the weapons that are already good at killing most enemies are made even stronger, whereas those that were struggling to kill enemies before can't consistently access these bonuses. There is therefore even less reason to pick middling weapons when the best-in-class guns perform far better than ever before.

And to conclude this wall of text, what I'd personally want for balance/design changes going forward:

• DE really needs to not be afraid to nerf, particularly when it comes to weapons that are clearly far too strong for their own good.
• There really, really needs to be a benchmark set for how much power a weapon should have, and that benchmark needs to be respected by balancing weapons around said benchmark, through both buffs and nerfs as needed. The fact that the Kuva Bramma and Kuva Nukor are still so strong after major nerfs, and that updates continue to drop weapons that differ vastly in power from each other, to me shows that whatever balance methodology is being applied to weapons, if any, is not working.
• The primary/secondary mods and arcanes introduced in Sisters of Parvos need to be either scrapped or reworked, as on-kill mechanics are a win-more/lose-more mechanic that I think have harmed weapon diversity by widening the gap in effectiveness between weapons. This also applies to the Berserker Fury mod, which has become awful to use after its own switch in the same update to an on-kill bonus.
• Nyx needs an update. A proper one, this time.
• When the Kuva Nukor inevitably gets nerfed again, I think DE needs to consider the idea of "status per second" as a stat to compare across weapons: even without its chain or crit stats, the Kuva Nukor remains a weapon that natively applies 5 status effects per second on average, which increases to a ridiculous 24 with a few mods (this is also not counting its innate Microwave status effect, which is counted as such by Condition Overload, Galvanized Shot, and other per-status type mods). I don't think it's ever going to be possible to balance our current system of status effects when one status weapon can inflict a very large multiple of the status effects of another status weapon in the same time window.
• While some explosive weapons need buffs and others need nerfs, I think explosive weapons in general need a change in design: currently, the only somewhat consistent balancing point is low ammo reserves and self-staggers. Not only are these limitations easy to bypass with an ammo mutation mod and Primed Sure Footed, I don't think they're actually good for gameplay: self-staggers, much like self-damage, gel poorly with environments that often get cramped and dump enemies right at our feet, whereas low ammo punishes weapons that take more ammo to kill enemies that they can gather, while leaving top performers largely unaffected in most missions. I'd rather balance explosive weapons around factors that don't widen existing power gaps as much, such as slow fire rates.
• This may not happen in a year, but DE needs to start defining stronger identities for both weapon classes and individual weapons. As the stats show, entire classes of weapons are left in the dust, and beyond the stats there are dozens upon dozens of individual weapons that just have nothing going for them, not even aesthetically. If weapon diversity is to reach a healthy state, this needs to change. 

[(NSW)RATHURUE]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

*snip*

Gonna disagree on several points here.

"1: DE really needs to not be afraid to nerf, particularly when it comes to weapons that are clearly far too strong for their own good."

See, the problem with Warframe wasn't a weapon that's 'too strong for their own good'. It's because DE doesn't KNOW what's making the weapon good.

Warframe originates from a run-and-gun playstyle that heavily focus on 1vs1 battles. Nowadays however, it has 'evolved', good or worse, into a horde shooter, of which obviously a pistol or semi-automatic rifles won't do any good: by the time you killed one enemy, 5 others gonna kill you since there's no stopping them firing during the time you gun down the first enemy. This 'problem' was solved by AoE weapons, which creates a new problem: now the players are killing the enemies more efficiently, so DE needs to buff the enemy by making them come in higher numbers or give each enemy higher HP.

Repeat this several times, and you get what's the current Warframe has problem with: AoE and Melee become kings due to both of them can affect several enemies at once with lower ammo cost compared to other guns.

As long as DE haven't realized the MOST BASIC problem of 'higher mission time does not equate with higher engagement nor satisfaction' we gonna be still swamped with META playstyle, which gives people most satisfaction. You may RP your playing by using Prisma Skana to clear Steel Path as you like, nobody gonna complain about that, but during that 10 minutes you take to clear one exterminate missions, how many times you can clear that same mission if you're just spamming Bramma projectiles like monkey on drugs? Warframe 'novelty' of a [space ninja warriors spamming special skills to kill enemies] gonna wear out sometime during your repeated 10 minutes runs, which causes players to burn out and leave the game; precisely because players DON'T want to burn out playing this game they choose to use the META tactics, is the point that DE needs to realize.

Secondly, there's also time investment side of these weapon debates. You can argue that a 8-forma Atomos could kill enemies in the same rate of a 4-forma Kuva Nukor, but that means you need not only twice the time to fully level that Corinth after forma-ing, you also need twice the time waiting for your formas to be cooked in the foundry. Now imagine again what would the players who invested 8 formas to these 'strong' weapons to have them nerfed. 'A little bit disappointed' won't even suffice to scratch the surface of the collective rage.

"2: There really, really needs to be a benchmark set for how much power a weapon should have, and that benchmark needs to be respected by balancing weapons around said benchmark, through both buffs and nerfs as needed. The fact that the Kuva Bramma and Kuva Nukor are still so strong after major nerfs, and that updates continue to drop weapons that differ vastly in power from each other, to me shows that whatever balance methodology is being applied to weapons, if any, is not working."

You're really asking for a benchmark in this game with inflated and weighted values? Really? REALLY? Because you just admitted that you don't know how Damage works.

Suppose you pick Paris MK1's status and apply them to Bramma, then Bramma would still do SEVERAL TIMES of damage compared to what MK1 Paris could ever hope to do. Same thing with if you pick Kunai MK1's status and apply them to Kuva Nukor.

People choose them not only for Damage abilities, but other things such as Crowd Control, Status Procs, Primers, and other things. You can argue that Epitaph or Secondary Sporelacer would be better in case of DPS against group of enemies after K.Nukor's nerf, but why people haven't switched to them? Or how Primary Vermisplicer can deal more DPS because it arcs to 5 maximum target compared to Ignis Wraith, but I don't even see it mentioned in the graph?

Again, we're back to the basic problem: META strategies are invented for people to 'play' so they don't get burned out while still maximizing the 'fun' they got from playing the game. As long as DE doesn't understand that 'time spent =/= fun' then even if they outright deleted Kuva Nukor and Kuva Bramma from the game, people just gonna switch to the next best AoE weapons in the META ladder. Even limiting how much status procs you can do per second or lowering the active time for each status procs would just change the meta into Slash-heavy meta, and make people abandon secondary for IgnisW/Acceltra.

3: "Each weapon class needs to have their own 'identity'"

They already did. And that's the reason why some of them failed, hard.

Back to point 1: this game has changed from 1vs1 run-and-gun to 1vs many horde slash/shooter, which causes weapons that can deal with high number of enemies being favored compared to ones which only did damage to single enemy. Whips can only damage in one straight line, which leaves you open to enemy attacks from other sides. Semiauto guns will break your trigger buttons before the enemy dies. Daggers has very low reach and bad combo moves. Hammers have slow combo and hard-to-aim small AoE hit area. Shotguns needs you to stand right in front of enemies to get maximum damage. Sniper Rifles are pretty damn useless in close quarters battle because they gain crit% while zooming in, and so on and so forth. The reason why some of them are left in the dust is again, because DE doesn't want that the 'trend' in their own creation has shifted, and still trying to make new weapons while ignoring all the band-aids they have applied to the game.  

Let's see a good example of this: From bow class we have Nataruk. It's a bow with unique charge mechanism and infinite body punch through. Compare that to Mutualist Cernos: A bow that fires arrows that tangles enemies and then explode.

The two looks different at the first look, but if you want to maximize their potential, you would pair them with a matching Warframe/weapon, for example, Vauban for Nataruk and Chroma with Stropha with M.Cernos. At the end both boil down to the same playstyle: gather enemies, then kill them at once.

Also, with the current modding system, establishing an 'identity/archetype' for weapon types would be truly impossible, since we have transformative mods and alternate abilities: a Split Flights Thunderbolt in any compartible bow is essentially a budget Kuva Bramma, for example. A Penta or Tonkor can be a mine-layer. Tenet Agendus heavy attack can fire Arca Plasmor projectile.  

 

Bottomline, this whole 'usage' thing can be surmised in 4 points.

1: People play games to have fun.

2: People will play games, with their own way, to have fun.

3: If you limit the ways to play the game, then people won't be having fun.

4: People who doesn't have fun playing a game will leave the game.

Until DE understand the implications of these 4 points, all things including changes, nerfs or whatever would be moot point.

[pnellesen]

On 2022-01-28 at 3:01 AM, TARINunit9 said:

Lex Prime just hits like a truck. Despite being one of the earlier Primes, it's managed to survive all the power creep fairly well

I love the way it sounds too. It sounds the way I expect a hand-cannon to sound :)

[pnellesen]

On 2022-01-29 at 3:40 AM, Daffan said:

nobody actually cares about wukong, they just use the mobility button

Guilty, lol.

Helminth Perspicacity onto him, and... yeah...

[Teridax68]

45 minutes ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

Repeat this several times, and you get what's the current Warframe has problem with: AoE and Melee become kings due to both of them can affect several enemies at once with lower ammo cost compared to other guns.

As per the very post you are replying to, and the stats this thread discusses, this is a false narrative, perpetuated more by echo chambers within these spaces than actual evidence. While it is true that AoE is highly prized in a game that has turned into a horde shooter, simply tacking AoE onto a weapon does not automatically make it top-tier or even viable, as noted by the very many middling and poorly-performing explosive weapons in the roster. One also mustn't forget that before shotguns received a rework, the dominant weapon was the Tigris Prime, prized for its burst damage rather than any innate AoE or punch-through. There are more problems besides purely AoE, and part of this includes weapons that are simply too strong.

45 minutes ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

Secondly, there's also time investment side of these weapon debates. You can argue that a 8-forma Atomos could kill enemies in the same rate of a 4-forma Kuva Nukor, but that means you need not only twice the time to fully level that Corinth after forma-ing, you also need twice the time waiting for your formas to be cooked in the foundry. Now imagine again what would the players who invested 8 formas to these 'strong' weapons to have them nerfed. 'A little bit disappointed' won't even suffice to scratch the surface of the collective rage.

Time investment does not justify a fundamental imbalance in weapons or even warframes. It's also not a very sound argument to make when more advanced variants of weapons, such as primes, come with extra polarities, and so require less forma to max out on top of having superior stats. The mere release of these direct upgrades, along with Prime frames, invalidates the investment put into their predecessors, yet the playerbase seems largely fine with this. Invoking this hypothetical rage is more a mix of scare tactics and projection than anything grounded in reality.

45 minutes ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

"2: There really, really needs to be a benchmark set for how much power a weapon should have, and that benchmark needs to be respected by balancing weapons around said benchmark, through both buffs and nerfs as needed. The fact that the Kuva Bramma and Kuva Nukor are still so strong after major nerfs, and that updates continue to drop weapons that differ vastly in power from each other, to me shows that whatever balance methodology is being applied to weapons, if any, is not working."

You're really asking for a benchmark in this game with inflated and weighted values? Really? REALLY? Because you just admitted that you don't know how Damage works.

Suppose you pick Paris MK1's status and apply them to Bramma, then Bramma would still do SEVERAL TIMES of damage compared to what MK1 Paris could ever hope to do. Same thing with if you pick Kunai MK1's status and apply them to Kuva Nukor.

People choose them not only for Damage abilities, but other things such as Crowd Control, Status Procs, Primers, and other things. You can argue that Epitaph or Secondary Sporelacer would be better in case of DPS against group of enemies after K.Nukor's nerf, but why people haven't switched to them? Or how Primary Vermisplicer can deal more DPS because it arcs to 5 maximum target compared to Ignis Wraith, but I don't even see it mentioned in the graph?

It is interesting that you accuse me of not knowing how damage works, while instantly conflating power, as I mentioned in my comment, with damage. You should perhaps read what you're replying to more thoroughly first before launching into accusations of ignorance.

More to the point, though: you are indeed right that damage alone is not the sole determining factor of a weapon's power, which is precisely why I pointed to the Kuva Nukor's ridiculous status chance (again, this is something you appear to have missed in my comment), and am suggesting DE set standards for power overall, not just damage. I think it is good for some weapons to deal more damage and others to apply more status or other utility, we just need some proper definition for what should be the upper limit for damage, status, etc., on a weapon, and how much of one a weapon needs to give up in order to access the other. Without this, we get the runaway power creep Warframe has experienced over its years of development, and balance nightmares like the Kuva Nukor.

45 minutes ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

3: "Each weapon class needs to have their own 'identity'"

They already did. And that's the reason why some of them failed, hard.

As once again pointed out in my post, they didn't. There is no coherent design methodology behind explosive weapons other than the fact that they deal AoE damage. Sniper rifles and bows are supposed to be single-target weapons, yet their damage is inferior to that of weapons easily capable of damaging multiple targets at once. Outside of a few exceptions like glaives and gunblades, melee weapons largely blend into one another by just being interchangeable stat bundles with an occasional gimmick thrown in. In a game that were even approximately balanced, one could point to a weapon of X type and unambiguously know that it's better than any weapon not of that type at the things X type does best. Not so in Warframe, where many AoE weapons outdamage single-target weapons in single-target damage.

45 minutes ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

Also, with the current modding system, establishing an 'identity/archetype' for weapon types would be truly impossible, since we have transformative mods and alternate abilities: a Split Flights Thunderbolt in any compartible bow is essentially a budget Kuva Bramma, for example. A Penta or Tonkor can be a mine-layer. Tenet Agendus heavy attack can fire Arca Plasmor projectile.  

While I do take issue with our modding system, customizability is the absolute least of its issues (it is, in fact, something I'd like more of). Once again, outside of Warframe, gameplay customization systems are designed to offer meaningful tradeoffs, so that even if you have the freedom to break free from type, you do so at some meaningful cost. As underlined in your own reply, a Split Flights Thunderbolt bow isn't going to be the next Kuva Bramma, because even without the latter's extreme power you're using up two mod slots to do what the Bramma does natively, mod slots that could be used on the Bramma to give it other significant benefits.

45 minutes ago, (NSW)RATHURUE said:

1: People play games to have fun.

2: People will play games, with their own way, to have fun.

3: If you limit the ways to play the game, then people won't be having fun.

4: People who doesn't have fun playing a game will leave the game.

Until DE understand the implications of these 4 points, all things including changes, nerfs or whatever would be moot point.

I may be mistaken, but it seems like you're basing yourself on the assumption that nerfs are inherently bad and limiting to gameplay, when in practice they often open up more viable ways of playing a game. As both this year's stats and its changes relative to last year show, when one or a handful of weapons dominate, this reduces the presence of all others in the same slot, reducing diversity of play as a result. Nerfing a weapon like the Kuva Bramma or the Kuva Nukor to a sensible power level wouldn't limit anyone if those weapons remained viable, but it would certainly make every other weapon much more viable by comparison. Furthermore, it would bring the overall game back to a more sensible state, where our arsenal wouldn't be quite as liable to trivialize most of our gameplay.