Don't nerf AoE, instead

[(NSW)Greybones]

20 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Ordis:  Oh no!  You've been caught in your own blast radius, Tenno!

[roll 1d6...]

1.  You're staggered

2.  Your Warframe dies

3.  You lose any accumulated mastery in that weapon

4.  One random equipped weapon, arcane, or cosmetic is destroyed

5.  Three random equipped mods are destroyed

6.  The auto-install button is activated on your frame and all equipped weapons, and the Randomize button on all appearance tabs

 

Yes!

Though 6 actually does sound kind of fun 😅

All these death and self-damage and special enemy mechanics are being leveraged as potential deterrants for META AoE users, but they all fall flat because by that point, there’s little care for mechanics and gameplay in the first place.

Strike at the heart of the matter; hit their grind!

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

Special enemies getting damage reduction to AOE should be a good solution

[Numerikuu]

14 minutes ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

Special enemies getting damage reduction to AOE should be a good solution

With Eximus units having even more reduction.

(Only issue is this would hurt more than just your typical Ignis and Zarr etc user, because a LOT of weapons have aoe, just in far, far smaller radius...)

[mrEkli]

Give self-stagger a  chance to drop your gun like enemies that pull it off. *shrugs*

They already buffed Headshots with stuff like weapon arcanes.

[Leqesai]

44 minutes ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

Special enemies getting damage reduction to AOE should be a good solution

This is likely the direction DE goes. Based on what we've seen thus far they're pretty consistent regarding extra layers of arbitrary difficulty applied to the enemy factions (huge armor values, magic shields that don't actually function like other shields (treasurers), flat-out immunity to debuffs (deimos creatures) or caps on DPS). I would like to see them clean up the enemy factions and remove arbitrary nonsense while adding in some worthwhile AI sub-routines.

[Loza03]

1 hour ago, Soy77 said:

don't try to change warframe.

instead enjoy it for the horde shooter it is.

 

you want steak, don't go to a vegan restaurant.

Plenty of Horde Shooters still have kickass single-target weapons, successfully encourage co-op and maintain some level of stiff resistance as well as low-diffculty experiences. And Warframe's also a looter where the overwhelming majority of its loot is considered 'useless' and individual playstyles get swallowed up by the overwhelming power of low-effort farming builds unless you carefully curate your experience, never playing in pubs. This is in spite of drop-in play, co-op and individuality being as much a core part of the Warframe experience as the number of goons you fight. Hell, even Parkour is getting less and less focus, given how often you're expected to stand still in big empty maps with no reward (or even opportunity) for creative movement.

It's like going to a steakhouse only to find out that they only serve mince. It's still cow meat, sure, and it still tastes good, but it's hardly what you came for.

[(NSW)Greybones]

1 minute ago, Loza03 said:

Plenty of Horde Shooters still have kickass single-target weapons, successfully encourage co-op and maintain some level of stiff resistance as well as low-diffculty experiences. And Warframe's also a looter where the overwhelming majority of its loot is considered 'useless' and individual playstyles get swallowed up by the overwhelming power of low-effort farming builds unless you carefully curate your experience, never playing in pubs. This is in spite of drop-in play, co-op and individuality being as much a core part of the Warframe experience as the number of goons you fight. Hell, even Parkour is getting less and less focus, given how often you're expected to stand still in big empty maps with no reward (or even opportunity) for creative movement.

It's like going to a steakhouse only to find out that they only serve mince. It's still cow meat, sure, and it still tastes good, but it's hardly what you came for.

@Soy77’s definition of “Horde Shooter” may be a little different than the definition the game’s designed for

[Perfectly_Framed_Waifu]

Double or triple the amount of Punch-Through you get from mods, change the +Blast Radius mods to -Falloff. Bam, we now have some weapons that kill in an AoE and some that kill in a line. Remember when Catchmoon was the king of secondaries?

[(XBOX)FireX2K]

The reason aoe continue to reign supreme is because power that the players can reach already surpass what DE is willing to release.

Through testing by the community, players can already push certain frames/weps in the game cap of level SP 9999 yet the highest DE released content not counting SP is: 1)star chart: void at level 40-45, 2) Bounty: Narmer at lvl 50-70, or 3) Railjack at lvl 80-90 and that's in the 8-9 years this game has been out. In terms of difficulty progression, that is slow by a large margin especially with the fact the status effects were not properly fixed because this game heavily incentivize cheesing mechanics. 

 

If DE want to fix this properly, they either quickly release more content that is higher leveled which will push players away from aoe weps or nerf them to the ground. They also need to start catering more towards the endgame players because bloating starting/mid players will just continue to exacerbate the issue.

[trst]

Ok cool, so now single target weapons can deal 5x the EHP of an enemy while the meta AOE weapons are only dealing 2x their EHP.

Fantastic suggestion, 10/10. Completely addresses the problem in every conceivable way.

 

But no seriously the only way to incentivize aiming is to make AOE not a catch-all solution to every possible issue. Either by directly making AOE less effective or creating enemies that are immune to or make others immune to AOE.

[(PSN)Richtel79]

Use MR food and then let it gather dust in the inventory, at least for me! It was painful to need 5 extra forma for the kuva variants to get the max rank! Such a senseless way to waste forma! Personally, I hardly ever play these AOE weapons, why absolutely unnecessary with a short fun factor!

[CityOfTrees]

Not this thread again...

The issue isn't AoE. The issue is no content that incentivises other weapons.

How about minibosses with AoE resistance or enemies you can only kill with your operator? Or with your melee? We even already have enemies that demand accuracy like the aerolyst and nox. the design is there, it just needs some work.

People run AoE because it makes low level missions go fast, and counters both arbitration drones and horde swarming on steel path. Just give us something challenging that demands the single target focus.

Please realize that nerfing current AoE will only result in players taking other AoE weapons or coming up with new setups to compensate for the nerfs.

Please realize that buffing single target weapons will do nothing because power isn't why AoE is being run (if it was, people would be bringing snipers, chakhurr, nataruk, kuva hek, and so on). 

Just to drive my point home, Ignis Wraith is everyone's starter AoE weapon. It's worse damage-wise than a huge amount of weapons in the game. Despite this, people from early levels all the way to level 500 endgame run it. It's almost like actual power level isn't an issue.

[Quest]

Semi-unrelated question but would y'all consider stuff like the Kuva Nukor or Tenet Cycron to be AOE, and if so should they be nerfed?

[CityOfTrees]

1 minute ago, QuestWasTaken said:

Semi-unrelated question but would y'all consider stuff like the Kuva Nukor or Tenet Cycron to be AOE, and if so should they be nerfed?

Any beam that splits is AoE, but I don't think it needs nerfs, even in the worst case scenario of DE deciding to mess with meta weapons instead of actually fixing the meta, nerfing weapons that actually need you to aim (and not the zero effort ones) is a bad call imo.

[CR0ME]

With Inaros I have quite often the situation that I kill myself via Ogris rockets. This might be because something hit the rocket mid flight and the blast killed Inaros as there is no shield gate that protects me. Result is for me is that I no longer use Ogris with Inaros. The reason why I use him a lot and not Zephyr(I like that WF more) is because Zephyr tends to die in situations I have no clue why (and that irritates me).

What I want to say with this is to make nearly all explosive weapons with a projectile that can detonate mid flight or give it another risk you can calculate but make the rules clear for the player to avoid frustration. Maybe ad some debuffs or effects that stack. First explosion kills your shield, second stuns or confuses your WF(imagine your aim input gets mixed--> difficult to aim, blurry sight, deafening effect to simulate the shock effects), third one drops your weapon.

[0_The_F00l]

Not sure this will help , snipers already have innate multipliers of sorts and they are still only used in niche areas.

The advantage of AoE is it kill many enemies at once , not that it does the most damage (though it does also do a lot of damage) 

[----Legacy----]

29 minutes ago, CR0ME said:

With Inaros I have quite often the situation that I kill myself via Ogris rockets.

What? It's been almost 2 years since self damage is gone in warframe revised.

[PublikDomain]

1 hour ago, QuestWasTaken said:

Semi-unrelated question but would y'all consider stuff like the Kuva Nukor or Tenet Cycron to be AOE, and if so should they be nerfed?

Yes, they'd be AoE since they hit multiple enemies in an area (around the central target). Really the discussion is about single-target vs multi-target, that's much less ambiguous. Should they be nerfed? Well they make up, what, >30-40% combined player usage among the MRs where they're available? Catchmoon was nerfed for far less.

[ReddyDisco]

Aoe is just too convenient, like why would anyone eat a salad when mcdonalds is half the price or less.

Its a combination of factors that have compounded in this meta, removal of self damage, lack of aoe resistant enemies and primed sure footed

[ShogunGunshow]

Bring back self damage - and maybe significantly limit the amount of ammo launchers have on top of it.

You should strive to have some form of engagement with the game beyond pointing and clicking in the vague direction of the enemy. In most shooters, single target guns achieve this through coaxing you towards headshots for bonus damage. Launchers take a different tact. While AoE weapons tend to be more powerful, you are generally limited by ammo, and thus the placement of your shots tends to be more important, with a player trying to maximize splash while avoiding killing themselves. There is moment-to-moment engagement that goes into that gameplay, as much or more than head-clicking. 

In Warframe you have no ammo concerns and no self damage concerns, so yeah, it's not a shock at all that the meta is where it is. And it's a meta where the most optimal way to play is also the one that has the least engagement. That's, to put it mildly, really bad. 

[(XBOX)K1jker]

#SAVEAOE

[x_xGamerx_x]

hot take: leave AoE damage as is, but bring back self damage!

[nslay]

In addition to stagger, just temporarily make controlling your Warframe as annoying as hacking sentient consoles. Seriously, remember how annoying sentient consoles were in TNW? Make aiming and moving like that for 5-10 seconds if affected by self-AOE.

[RichardKam]

It's all about incentive.

Warframe is all about rewards. Loot from enemies, mission completion rewards, opening void relics, etc.

The reason why people use AoE is because AoE gives rewards fast. You shoot k. Bramma, people die, mission complete, you get the rewards, end of story.

Yes, my mighty seer can do the same, but slower. So there is no incentive for me to use seer. 

Bringing back self-damage does not solve the issue, unless the self-damage penalty is greater than the incentive (i.e. reward per time spent) of using AoE. Not to mention some frames outright ignore self-damage like Revenant 2, or simply shield-gating.

I have advocated the use of differential reward table based on player action. For example, separate reward tables for single target rifle, stealth, AoE spamming, alert triggered respectively. It may be as simple as rewarding radiant relic if you only use single target rifle, exceptional if you shoot less than 5 AoE weapons, and no relic at all if you use AoE more than 5 times. Something like that.

But at this moment, we can only go out of our usual way to build a rifle and enjoy that in solo.

[(PSN)xBlake360]

15 hours ago, -Krism- said:

You can buff headshots as much you want, aoe will still kill more enemies faster

 

Seriously, before posting, ask yourself the question, if aoe still one shots enemies, is there really a point to buff anything else?

Well, if Warframe wasn't afraid to throw level 1000 enemies at us, then AoE would be less oppressive and the buff for single target weapons would make sense. Its not surprising that AoE one shot enemies, when DE thinks level 40-100 is somewhat challenging. That being said, Im pretty sure that once you get on Steel Path and above lvl 500, the AoE weapons would start to fall off. In those situations, it would be perfect to reward players for aiming for the head with their single target weapons, but that would require a complex crit/vital/headshot system that would need new multipliers.