Warframe needs a mathematics consistency pass - establishing a baseline.

[Loza03]

To preface, this is not a 'Warframe too easy' or 'Warframe too hard' post. It's not even a 'power creep' post, even though I'm discussing why X doing a ton more damage than Y is a bad thing. So if you're going to come in and say 'I like Warframe being an easy power fantasy' or 'Power creep good', or 'just don't use Z OP item if you think it's too powerful' or indeed the inverse to any of these common rebuttles, I ask you to please read through this with an open mind.

 

Warframe, I think, can trace a lot of it's problems simply back down to one thing - there is no 'baseline' for anything in the game. I think that people who want more challenge don't get a satisfying result because of this. I think that people who want a casual experience where they just blow stuff up with their favourite gun have their options restricted. Even people who want to hyper-optimise, to min-max this game until it breaks aren't getting the most out of this process. Even some of the problem's with the game's recent storytelling can be attributed to this.

What I mean by a 'baseline' could be described as this - how much damage is 'normal'? How much is expected, and at any given level? For example, how much damage is somebody who's just installed the game expected to do, as compared to someone who's beaten the War Within and unlocked Sorties, or just completed the New War and has at least got access to all the content across the game? Likewise, how much damage is an enemy expected to deal, how much damage are they expected to take, and how long should players in each of the above categories last against them? At level 1 vs level 100, vs steel path 100?

Well, let's examine the damage a Warframe can dish out as one example. As the player first gets into the game, Excalibur can deal 100 damage with slash dash to an enemy. By the time the player has beaten the War Within, they can reasonably be expected to have a fully-levelled Excal, and probably has a fully-ranked ability strength mod. So, their 1st ability should be looking at 325 damage by now. By the New War, they'll have upgraded to Excalibur Umbra, and it's not unreasonable to suggest they're running triple-Umbral mods, so about 425 damage. Ok. So, how much damage are enemies at this level expected to take? Well a regular level 1 lancer has an EHP of 133, so the player starts off two-shotting enemies with their fresh install powers. By the end of the War Within, they have sorties, so talking level 100 enemies who have... 136,913 effective hit points. So a player starts by two-shotting basic enemies to needing to hit the target 421 times. Unless, of course, they're fighting Corpus. A Corpus basic enemy they only have to it 42 times. 

Of course, this isn't actually true. Players will have used their weapons, and are going to be easily dealing with these enemies, because weapons by then are going to comfortably be able to deal 2-3 thousand damage per second or per shot, without taking into account the benefit of critical hits, bleed procs, headshot multipliers and so forth.

 

The problem is not that a player has access to all these things that makes them so much more powerful than where they started. The problem is that only part of their arsenal does, and that only some of their enemies are equipped to face them. After all, the Corpus Elite Crewman at level 100 is about 1/10th the amount of health that the Grineer Elite Lancer is, despite them being units in the same role. Though even within the individual elements this problem exists. Weapons, after all, get different mods which grant them different rates of scaling. Melee weapons, for example, get to scale based on enemy status effects indefinitely and scale their crit chance up much higher than any gun. Any AoE weapon gets to multiply all its damage by how many enemies it hits. And a level 1 Railjack crewman is about six times stronger than a level 1 regular crewman, and keeps that amount of extra power when scaling up (and don't get me started on the degree to which armour benefits from this).

This applies all over the game, in so many different ways. Player health, companion survivability, the different amounts of damage Archguns and Operators do. None of these things have the same baseline in terms of their 'weakest' state, and none of them scale the same way. Even player EHP vs enemy EHP is down the drain, cutting out half the possible interactions from being anything more than a gimmick (PvP and EvE. I know very few people care about the former, but the latter makes up several mechanics and Warframe powers. Moreover, self-damage was a form of PvP, with the main case being that both players were the same person)

 

The problem this creates are many, many fold. The most direct, obviously, is a stale and restricted meta. There's much less drive to innovate and push the game forwards when the answer is always obvious (what either has the most ways to scale damage up, and/or has the highest starting point?) But players seeking out a challenge in Warframe will inevitably find themselves disappointed, because all the game's 'challenging' content is designed based on complete guesswork of what a 'fair' challenge is for different parts of the game. What's a 'fair' amount of damage, or a 'fair' increase to enemy survivability? I mean, a Grineer is going to benefit way more than a Corpus from any survivability buff. So players seeking challenge are always either way too high or way too low. Even players just wanting to goof off with their favourite toys, well, half those toys aren't built for the game they're in. I mean, I personally would really like to play as a caster Warframe, slinging lightning bolts at my enemies with Shock subsumed into a frame. But I can't, because Shock deals 200 damage at base, and only gets a 3.5X boost to its damage if I dedicate 80% of my entire build to it, and 700 damage isn't able to do anything.

 

In conclusion, Warframe needs a baseline that everything sticks to. What that baseline is, I don't know. I don't even think it necessarily even matters, since the problem is entirely context-based. I mean, if the baseline was around single digits, and Operators were the only way players could do thousands of damage, they would be the problem! The baseline can also still curve to provide a satisfying increase in power over time, just so long as everything is designed with that baseline in mind.

And to be clear, because I know this rebuttle's going to come up, no, this does not mean 'everything has to be the same'. Things can and should deviate away from the baseline. What a baseline does is make choices around those deviations informed. This item does more damage than this item, because this item is acquired later. This item deals more damage, because it has less ammo. This item deals less, because it also stuns its targets.

[DarkSkysz]

2 hours ago, Loza03 said:

Corpus Elite Crewman at level 100 is about 1/10th the amount of health that the Grineer Elite Lancer

The game never will have a good balance between armor and shield xD

Simple because shields doesnt scale well.

[DoomFruit]

13 hours ago, DarkSkysz said:

The game never will have a good balance between armor and shield xD

Simple because shields doesnt scale well.

Or the other direction. Armour scales. It shouldn't. If you want to fix survivability discrepancy between Corpus and Grineer, make armour a static value. Their health already scales so there's no need to double-dip.

[Steel_Rook]

I try not to dev-bash as much as I can, but this really is an issue of DE's own making. Their general approach to game development seems to be "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead." Content unfinished? Release it anyway, fix it later. Fix content? Nah, that can wait. Release the new content. New content unfinished? Release it anyway, fix it later. Etc., etc., etc. You end up with a stack over overlapping pieces of content, all of them half-finished or unfinished, but all of them serving as crucial foundation for later content. This tangled mess then becomes unmanageable because it's interconnected. You can't finish old content without breaking new content. You can't fix old balance issues without creating new ones. So screw it, just release more guns and more swords and keep ploughing ahead. As long as it works, don't mess with it.

DE consistently tell us that they have these massive plans spanning years ahead, but their content releases don't reflect this. Railjack and Liches came out half-baked with no real plan on what to DO with them. It's three years later and we still don't really have much of a "point" to Railjack beyond its own isolated content island. The promise of Duviri never happened, and now likely never will because they cannibalised that storyline as bits in the New War. There was a plan to refactor the game's damage system using Railjack as a testbed. That was quietly dropped as part of a larger patch and never brought up again.

This is what happens when you design ad-hoc, addressing issues as they crop up and never instituting fundamental, structural change. Yes, I fully agree that Warframe needs mathematical and mechanical consistency. It needs systems which operate within their intended parameters across the board of content without breaking or drastically altering balance. It needs performance baselines and more linear scaling stats. I'm not going to go through the full list of systems yet again, but there are several core game systems which need significant changes which DE simply don't have an appetite for changing. Why rock the boat and potentially trigger an exodus of players when the game sorta' works as it is. Just release new content and keep your head down.

 

4 hours ago, DoomFruit said:

Or the other direction. Armour scales. It shouldn't. If you want to fix survivability discrepancy between Corpus and Grineer, make armour a static value. Their health already scales so there's no need to double-dip.

That's a good way of handling it, yeah, and I've suggested as much in the past. Pick some decent armour percentage for various Grineer and just don't scale it with level. Say, Common enemies would be 300, Specials (Bombard, Heavy Gunner, etc.) would be 600 and minibosses (Nox) would be 900. You can scale their health to compensate. Right now, Grineer armour and health scale multiplicatively, while Corpus shield and health scale additively. Grineer end up being DRASTICALLY more durable as a result. And because Warframe operates so far outside normal values for everything in high levels, that difference is colossal.

Ever since the introduction of Shield Gating to the Corpus, though, I've been a fan of a different take on armour mechanics. Rather than percentage damage resistance, I feel armour would work better if it applied flat damage reduction to base weapon damage. Let's say a Grineer has 10 armour. That would reduce the base damage of a weapon by 10 when used against them. Mods and damage buffs would then affect this new reduced damage. This way, Grineer armour would be particularly effective against low-damage automatic weapons (and possibly shotguns, depending on if damage per tick is collated as it is against Nullifier bubbles), but ineffective against high-damage "spike" weapons like the Opticor or various sniper rifles. Them you can get around this the same way the Corpus damage gate does, bu allowing for headshots and weakpoint hits to entirely circumvent the armour damage reduction so some weapons aren't flatout useless.

 

Point being, I think DE are long overdue for major structural changes to the core combat system. The longer they wait, the more systems they attach to the broken underlying mechanics, the harder this will be to fix or improve.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

7 hours ago, DoomFruit said:

Or the other direction. Armour scales. It shouldn't. If you want to fix survivability discrepancy between Corpus and Grineer, make armour a static value. Their health already scales so there's no need to double-dip.

I feel like endless Armor Scaling was DE's crutch to justify the existence of new power creep weapons. S-curve scaling was a concession DE made to players who complained about scaling, but that lead to the issue of our arsenal being tuned for much tankier enemies which lead to the introduction of the Steel Path.

The levels of power creep we have access to is so gross that some weapons can just brute force non-endurance Grineer Steel Path missions with the wrong damage type. The gap between different weapon builds is so comically big that DE decided that Damage Attenuation was a good idea.

The reason why Magnetic and Gas are memes to players is because our raw damage scaling outpaces the scaling unarmored enemies so hard that they don't matter.

DE can't tackle the issue of Armor Scaling being Multiplicative with Health Scaling until they tackle the soup of Multipliers that is Player Damage Scaling.

Armored enemies outpacing unarmored enemies is the same issue of Weapons outpacing a lot of older Warframe powers.

For proper numerical balance, DE has to scrap a lot of multiplicative interactions on all fronts which would require a huge rebalancing effort across the whole game and set bench marks, but that's way more constructive than continuing to work on Damage Attenuation that just gets more opaque to the players with every patch.

DE could set concrete layers to the Damage Multiplication in place of the loose soup they have now.

Currently:

• Headshot Multiplier.
• Viral, Magnetic Multiplier
• Faction/Roar Multiplier
• Base Damage/ Arcane/ Vex Armor Multiplier
• Stealth Multiplier
• Critical Multiplier
• Multi-shot Multiplier
• Element Multiplier
• Resistance Multiplier
• Armor Strip Multiplier

Consolidate the lot of them into clearly defined categories. All future bonuses are consolidated into these:

• CRITICAL: Critical, Stealth, Headshot, Viral, Magnetic, Faction/Roar, Multiplier
• BASE: Base Damage/ Arcane/ Vex Armor/ Multi-shot
• BONUS: Elemental Mods, Elemental Infusions, IPS mods
• Resistance Multiplier
• Armor Strip Multiplier

Stealth and Headshots rolled into Flat +100% Critical Chance Bonuses. Viral, Magnetic, Roar, Faction Damage changed into conditional Critical Damage bonuses, numbers changed accordingly. Multi-shot scales off of unmodded Base Damage and is used more for extra proc chances.

[Steel_Rook]

On 2022-03-20 at 7:52 PM, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

Consolidate the lot of them into clearly defined categories. All future bonuses are consolidated into these:

• CRITICAL: Critical, Stealth, Headshot, Viral, Magnetic, Faction/Roar, Multiplier
• BASE: Base Damage/ Arcane/ Vex Armor/ Multi-shot
• BONUS: Elemental Mods, Elemental Infusions, IPS mods
• Resistance Multiplier
• Armor Strip Multiplier

Stealth and Headshots rolled into Flat +100% Critical Chance Bonuses. Viral, Magnetic, Roar, Faction Damage changed into conditional Critical Damage bonuses, numbers changed accordingly. Multi-shot scales off of unmodded Base Damage and is used more for extra proc chances.

I mentioned this before, but it's worth asking: Why not just roll them all into a single multiplier. You've certainly reduced them in number, but I'm not entirely convinced that there's reason to keep any number of multiplicatively stacking multipliers greater than just a single one. Yes, rolling critical damage into the same additive "pool" as everything else will massively dilute its effect, but isn't that a GOOD thing? The "meta" right now is either some roundabout version of armour-ignoring procs or just lots of critical damage. It seems to me like reducing the "weight" of critical damage would go a long way towards bringing crit-heavy weapons in-line with everything else and potentially allow non-crit-heavy weapons to actually compete for damage outside of niche Status builds. The best part about this is that anyone who isn't trolling enemies with massive red crits will feel a much smaller change, as they aren't overly-reliant on critical hits in the first place.

I would love to go into my usual rant of removing critical hits entirely (even though they have no place in action game) and instead assert that "criticals" should never constitute the majority of our damage across a plurality of our arsenal. A version of Warframe where the majority of our damage comes from base damage and static mods is a version I would prefer. I AM going to advocate for the complete and comprehensive removal of multishot from the game altogether, though - and I mean as a concept. MAYBE let shotguns with native multishot use multishot mods for the sake of status and such, but get it off of rifles, pistols, snipers and the like. It's just "more damage" and "more lag," depending on the weapon. We don't need eleventy billion different systems which amount to "deal X% more damage" in practice.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I mentioned this before, but it's worth asking: Why not just roll them all into a single multiplier. You've certainly reduced them in number, but I'm not entirely convinced that there's reason to keep any number of multiplicatively stacking multipliers greater than just a single one. Yes, rolling critical damage into the same additive "pool" as everything else will massively dilute its effect, but isn't that a GOOD thing? The "meta" right now is either some roundabout version of armour-ignoring procs or just lots of critical damage. It seems to me like reducing the "weight" of critical damage would go a long way towards bringing crit-heavy weapons in-line with everything else and potentially allow non-crit-heavy weapons to actually compete for damage outside of niche Status builds. The best part about this is that anyone who isn't trolling enemies with massive red crits will feel a much smaller change, as they aren't overly-reliant on critical hits in the first place.

I would love to go into my usual rant of removing critical hits entirely (even though they have no place in action game) and instead assert that "criticals" should never constitute the majority of our damage across a plurality of our arsenal. A version of Warframe where the majority of our damage comes from base damage and static mods is a version I would prefer. I AM going to advocate for the complete and comprehensive removal of multishot from the game altogether, though - and I mean as a concept. MAYBE let shotguns with native multishot use multishot mods for the sake of status and such, but get it off of rifles, pistols, snipers and the like. It's just "more damage" and "more lag," depending on the weapon. We don't need eleventy billion different systems which amount to "deal X% more damage" in practice.

Instead of a separate Headshot multiplier, there is only the Critical Multiplier. Headshots simply have a +100% Flat Critical Chance Bonus, so even weapons with terrible Crit stats can benefit off Crit Multipliers. In fact, non-Crit weapons benefit more from headshots than actual Crit weapons as Crit is additive to itself, while non-Crit weapons usually sport higher Base Damage than their Crit variants to work from and can forego Critical Chance.

Crit Tier Multiplier = 1+ Crit Tier (Modded Crit Multi -1)

With modded 4.4x Crit Multiplier:

1. Non-Crit = 1x
2. Yellow Crit = 4.4x, +340% relative to previous tier
3. Orange Crit= 7.8x, +77% relative to previous tier
4. Red crit = 11.2x, +43% relative to previous tier

A Crit weapon with guaranteed Orange Crit on Headshot would only have +77% Damage over a weapon that doesn't, while that other weapon can forego the Critical Chance mod for something else to close the gap while probably sporting a higher Base Damage for having low base Critical Chance in the first place.

The issue with making every damage bonus homogenously additive is that there is no reason for there to be a distinction in the first place. Just get rid of all the redundant +% damage mods and just have one +% damage mod. Why bother with Crit stats in the first place?

Other games reward players with damage multipliers for juggling different mechanics in tandem like headshots, debuffs, buffs. Making use of damage multipliers is something the player actively has to do. The issue with multipliers in Warframe isn't with multipliers themselves, but how Warframe makes the distinction meaningless by allowing them to stack passively.

[Steel_Rook]

15 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

Other games reward players with damage multipliers for juggling different mechanics in tandem like headshots, debuffs, buffs. Making use of damage multipliers is something the player actively has to do. The issue with multipliers in Warframe isn't with multipliers themselves, but how Warframe makes the distinction meaningless by allowing them to stack passively.

The thing with that line of design is that the "other games" in question are old-school "click-n-kill" Tab Target MMOs which fundamentally lack combat mechanics and so make up for it with stats complexity. I'd cite City of Heroes just to show my age, but even newer stuff like Final Fantasy 14 and the like do this for the same reason older RPGs do - to give players something to do so as to keep combat from being static. Warframe is a full-on action game on the level of... let's say Remnant: From the Ashes just to avoid to common examples. Tons of additional stats and mechanics to track aren't really necessary as basic gameplay has enough complexity in it to carry most of the combat system. Look at something like Destiny 2. No random crit procs at all - headshot for crit damage, aim your guns. It does have a bit of complexity here and there, usually with Exotic weapons and their unique mechanics, but there's a fairly small amount of stat-juggling to worry about.

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that Warframe would work just fine without damage types, health types or critical hits whatsoever - numbers balance notwithstanding. All those serve to do is add more busywork in the Arsenal, without really having an impact on moment-to-moment gameplay... and I'm not really sure how they even could. Status Effects are about the only aspect of the combat system that I could see having a tangible real-time effect, but we almost never get to switch those on the fly anyway.

 

15 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

The issue with making every damage bonus homogenously additive is that there is no reason for there to be a distinction in the first place. Just get rid of all the redundant +% damage mods and just have one +% damage mod. Why bother with Crit stats in the first place?

"Why bother with crits in the first place" is a question I've asked quite often - usually to myself, because people tend to get angry when I ask it publicly. Unfortunately, I still don't have an answer to that. Why DOES Warframe have random crit procs? What possible purpose could this serve, other than as just another redundant vector for improving DPS? This game doesn't even go as far as Vermintide 2, where skills such as "Guaranteed crit every 10 seconds" or "Guaranteed crits for 4 seconds after coming out of stealth, etc." And I'd argue that even those could be replaced with a guaranteed damage buff and maximum armour penetration.

As I said - Warframe is an action game. If I want to hit my enemies in their critical weak spots, I can aim my guns for their critical weak spots. I can't aim my melee weapons (which I really should be able to do, if Vermintide can do it), but that's the one exception. Random dice roll procs exist in RPGs and other games with limited interactivity as a way to emulate combat complexity that the player can't really interact with. Warframe gives us all the tools necessary to interact with this kind of complexity, so there's no point in emulating it. Merely simulate the mechanics and let us control our performance.

I am ABSOLUTELY in favour of unilaterally dumping critical hits from the game in their entirety, as a concept. I'd also be perfectly happy to merge all the various sources of damage buff into a single mod category and be done with that, as well. 6-7 of our 8 slots per gun are usually some flavour of "does more damage" anyway. Not much in the way of build variety to be had in the first place.