AoE weapon balance idea. (bring back self-damage with a twist)

[Sevenus.]

*****This post is just an opinion and by all means i do not intent to offend anyone who loves the current way AoE works.******

I think that a proper balance for AoE weapons  would be bringing back self-damage while potentially keeping self-stagger as well, removing headshots from AoE weaponry and increasing "ammo issues" doesn't really feel like a proper balance.

The players who would want to remove the self stagger effect could still use the same setups as of today (for example prime sure-footed, Unairu knockdown passive etc.) but not making AoE weapons absolutely safe to use, while having new ways to semi-deal with self damage (shield gating,  potentially new mods/arcanes).

I always felt quite fun having an actual risk in using explosive weapons because they could one-shot the user therefore requiring to aim carefully at enemies and keep a distance in order to not blow up.

I don't think that bringing back self damage would be a huge problem since unlike before the initial self damage removal now nearly all warframes  now have shield-gating mechanic which allows you to "cheat death" by becoming immune to damage when the shields go down, therefore you wont be one-shotted by an attack.                                                                                       **with the upcoming Archon shards warframes without shields could potentially gain shields by infusion a shield shard**

There will be a demand for a self damage reduction mods like the old cautious show (removes 90% or so of self damage), so I came up with a good idea for a new mod that could help the player avoid being blasted while still keeping you on alert and cautious while using explosives.

The mod's idea is getting an immunity to self damage - once hit every x amount of time (immunity is refreshed after 20-30 seconds for example).  What this essentially means that you will be immune one hit from self damage every X amount of time .      This could come in different variations as an exilus mod to farm or even an arcane variant for primary / secondary weapons that could also buff other aspects similarly to Primary/secondary Merciless/Deadhead/Dexterity

This way the player will gain a protection for self damage in the once-in-a-while case where a player would accidentally shoot himself, but not removing the threat completely.

 

***EDIT - another way to deal with self damage could be reducing self-damage the further the player is from the explosion(in the same vein as self-stagger works now)***

 

In Conclusion I feel that in order to properly deal with the current dominance of AoE weapons would be to bring self damage, as self stagger can be removed completely by a big verity of passives/mods, to make the player more careful with shooting as it could backfire. risk and reward :) 

 

[Uhkretor]

... Self-damage shouldn't have been removed, in the first place... They could've just fixed the AoE functionality like they did without touching the self-damage component, since the latter depended entirely on the former's functionality to actually work...

[Sevenus.]

2 minutes ago, Uhkretor said:

... Self-damage shouldn't have been removed, in the first place... They could've just fixed the AoE functionality like they did without touching the self-damage component, since the latter depended entirely on the former's functionality to actually work...

Aye. Perhaps reducing self-damage inflicted the further you are from the explosion?

 

[ZapQ]

Away the meta casuls, give us back our self damage!!

[tel__arin]

I agree with what Pablo said in the devstream, don't take the fun away. So no.

Though if explosion gave pvp damage would be funny. How many octavias i would have ridden from my survivals. 

[Tyreaus]

No.

Player damage versus player health is very out of whack. So no matter what you use, whether it's a Bramma or a Zhuge Prime, whether at the epicentre or the edge, whether it has a clear radial effect like the Lenz or it's fuzzy and hard to determine like many other AoEs, you get two-shot. Half those issues come up with self-stagger, too, so keeping that is an additional "no".

Make the self-damage based on a weapon's base damage, including fall-off, and you might have something more tenable. Maybe.

However, I would say the consequences of using a weapon - if we insist on using punitive balance measures - ought to stay with the weapon. Get hit with your own explosive, have a small upper-body stagger to denote what happened, and have the weapon temporarily disabled. Or literally throw the weapon to the far end of the room, as if it got blown out of the player's hands. Either duration or velocity can scale with proximity to explosion. Self-damage skews Warframe selection to things like Revenant, which isn't great if you're trying to avoid homogenization. Self-stagger got away with it purely because of Prime Sure Footed, and we'd have a similar problem if that didn't apply to self-stagger.

[BiancaRoughfin]

1 hour ago, Sevenus. said:

I think that a proper balance for AoE weapons  would be bringing back self-damage while potentially keeping self-stagger as well

Returning Self damage on its own would be enough, DE added Shield Gating which will save a lot of players from instantly blowing them self apart should they aim wrong or another teammate accidentally gets in the way.

1 hour ago, Sevenus. said:

removing headshots from AoE weaponry and increasing "ammo issues" doesn't really feel like a proper balance.

They only made the AoE no longer do Headshots, the projectile its self will still do Headshot damage. Perhaps DE could add bonus damage to headshots done by the base projectile to motivate players trying to actually try aiming with AoE weapons when dealing with tougher enemies.

[Uhkretor]

1 hour ago, Sevenus. said:

Aye. Perhaps reducing self-damage inflicted the further you are from the explosion?

Applying the damage falloff idea from the explosion epicenter as self-damage. This is something that was already implemented since 1990's Doom 1, so I don't really understand how DE failed to actually implement it, 30 years later, like this the first time.

Hell, DE implemented the AoE properly in all of their Unreal projects, so I don't understand how they failed it.

[Venus-Venera]

there are more than enough topics about it. why do you keep making new ones?
and self-damge has been discussed too often...

because then you can program team damage and allow kick vote. to make players even more frustrated!

self damage is embarrassing nonsense in a pvE game. and in warframe you can hardly avoid it. I can go into detail, but this is going to be old chewing gum.

[Vahenir]

How it would end up working by the looks of it. You shoot and you barely get touched by the explosion and take 5000 damage and a slash proc. The 5k damage nukes your shield and the shield gate saves you. One second later you die to the slash proc when it ticks for 10x your max hp.

[Sevenus.]

16 hours ago, Vahenir said:

How it would end up working by the looks of it. You shoot and you barely get touched by the explosion and take 5000 damage and a slash proc. The 5k damage nukes your shield and the shield gate saves you. One second later you die to the slash proc when it ticks for 10x your max hp.

What if the self damage will be in proportion to your max hp than 9,999,999 damage? Or not proc statuses on yourself.

[Tiltskillet]

A heavily modified self damage system could probably work great.  But there was no hint in the stream they were thinking about bringing anything like that back, despite Pablo clearly being unhappy about the lack of consequence for using explosive weapons carelessly. 

If they decide this still needs addressing after the update, they'll go with something like they floated: changing the self-stagger system to make it less easy to circumvent.   They seemed pretty fixated on PSF though.  If DE goes that route, I hope they take a broad approach and and not just nerf PSF and say "job well done".

[Vahenir]

3 hours ago, Sevenus. said:

What if the self damage will be in proportion to your max hp than 9,999,999 damage? Or not proc statuses on yourself.

If it doesn't one shot you then its basically irrelevant anyway given how extreme the healing is in this game. Hell, people survive to the level cap where the enemies can one shot a max hp/armor inaros. Sure removing the ability to proc statuses on yourself would be an improvement (and stop some potential griefing with self inflicted radiation) but it'd just reinforce the shield gate cheese meta even more. 

So having the self damage cap out at say 50% of your max hp would make it fairly easy to ignore it anyway. Just stick gloom onto the frame you are playing and its set. As long as you hit any enemy whatsoever you will instantly heal back to max with every shot. It'd be better than the original self damage however. 

A better option is just to make the self stagger not be removable with status/knockdown immunity. That people find it annoying just shows its working as intended, it is supposed to be annoying after all. Couple this with adding line of sight checks to large explosions and you can theoretically shoot and dodge into cover to avoid the stagger and potential self damage if that's re-added.

[Venus-Venera]

vor 6 Stunden schrieb Vahenir:

That people find it annoying just shows its working as intended, it is supposed to be annoying after all. .

is the game supposed to annoy you?

[selig_fay]

How about a guaranteed stagger that can't be avoided. Well, this is in addition to ammo rebalance. If you love aoe weapons, prove it)

[Drasiel]

The only issue I had with self damage was other players. You have no control of when a teammate suddenly decides to walk or bullet jump in front of you. The only change that self damage needed was for explosives to have no clip for teammates.

[Venus-Venera]

vor 3 Stunden schrieb selig_fay:

How about a guaranteed stagger that can't be avoided. Well, this is in addition to ammo rebalance. If you love aoe weapons, prove it)

how about warframe damage? and after self kill warframe can not be played for 24 hours?......................

[Vahenir]

5 hours ago, Venus-Venera said:

is the game supposed to annoy you?

With the case of self stagger, yes. Its a risk of using AoE weapons, or at least it should be. Its less annoying than randomly being vaporized by your own weapon because your kavat decided to jump through your frame from behind just when you pulled the trigger, which is how it used to be. 

Self damage should remain dead in my opinion since if its brought down to reasonable levels then it doesn't matter to properly geared players. While if its not brought down so it can actually one shot people it will kill most AoE weapons and everyone just swaps back to melee.

[MJ12]

On 2022-08-28 at 7:22 AM, Sevenus. said:

*****This post is just an opinion and by all means i do not intent to offend anyone who loves the current way AoE works.******

I think that a proper balance for AoE weapons  would be bringing back self-damage while potentially keeping self-stagger as well, removing headshots from AoE weaponry and increasing "ammo issues" doesn't really feel like a proper balance.

The players who would want to remove the self stagger effect could still use the same setups as of today (for example prime sure-footed, Unairu knockdown passive etc.) but not making AoE weapons absolutely safe to use, while having new ways to semi-deal with self damage (shield gating,  potentially new mods/arcanes).

I always felt quite fun having an actual risk in using explosive weapons because they could one-shot the user therefore requiring to aim carefully at enemies and keep a distance in order to not blow up.

I don't think that bringing back self damage would be a huge problem since unlike before the initial self damage removal now nearly all warframes  now have shield-gating mechanic which allows you to "cheat death" by becoming immune to damage when the shields go down, therefore you wont be one-shotted by an attack.                                                                                       **with the upcoming Archon shards warframes without shields could potentially gain shields by infusion a shield shard**

There will be a demand for a self damage reduction mods like the old cautious show (removes 90% or so of self damage), so I came up with a good idea for a new mod that could help the player avoid being blasted while still keeping you on alert and cautious while using explosives.

The mod's idea is getting an immunity to self damage - once hit every x amount of time (immunity is refreshed after 20-30 seconds for example).  What this essentially means that you will be immune one hit from self damage every X amount of time .      This could come in different variations as an exilus mod to farm or even an arcane variant for primary / secondary weapons that could also buff other aspects similarly to Primary/secondary Merciless/Deadhead/Dexterity

This way the player will gain a protection for self damage in the once-in-a-while case where a player would accidentally shoot himself, but not removing the threat completely.

 

***EDIT - another way to deal with self damage could be reducing self-damage the further the player is from the explosion(in the same vein as self-stagger works now)***

 

In Conclusion I feel that in order to properly deal with the current dominance of AoE weapons would be to bring self damage, as self stagger can be removed completely by a big verity of passives/mods, to make the player more careful with shooting as it could backfire. risk and reward :) 

 

"Risk and reward" is the biggest red flag. "Risk and reward" balancing exists for a specific purpose - it's if the risk is fun (or not taking the risk is unfun) so the game encourages you to purposely make the game harder so you have more fun by dangling the reward in front of you for doing so. Something like XCOM's Meld, or the parry system in Metal Gear Rising, or Royal Guard from Devil May Cry, all of these systems encourage you to do risky things. The specific idea is to incentivize players to play suboptimally because playing optimally is boring.

Returning self damage is the opposite of good risk-reward balancing. It rewards *avoiding* risk by camping on a crate or something, which doesn't meaningfully impact its usability outside of non-endless missions (because most endless missions permit or even encourage said crate camping). Notably, crate camping is a far less fun way of playing Warframe than using mobility, so you're rewarding people for making the game less fun.

And most "self damage" proposals involve this as an alternative to weapons AoE/damage/efficiency nerfs, which adds to the problems. You're basically encouraging players to play Warframe in the least fun style (standing there and shooting while face tanking return fire) by giving them OP weapons in return.

The reason Pablo is talking about how he doesn't want consequence free AoE weapons but also doesn't suggest reverting to self damage is probably this reason - he doesn't want to encourage crate/door camping but self damage would do exactly that by making using your mobility a death sentence for many players.

[selig_fay]

10 hours ago, Venus-Venera said:

how about warframe damage? and after self kill warframe can not be played for 24 hours?......................

What for? I prefer to have people killed by mobs while they are in a long selfstagger) 

[Delory]

To balance aoe weapons they should fix damage through walls (when with 1 shot you clear 3 floors). And to not reduce blast wave, it should spread between objects to reach the targets hiding behind the boxes in tiny room. How explosion actually work in real world.