Veilbreaker: Launch & Hot Topics

[PeelsRepeek]

Rebecca, you are doing everything right, you are great!

[shut]

52 minutes ago, Wheelhouser said:

What I see from your post (and the OP from Reb) is that edge cases due to certain weapons and skills interacting with each other cause fights like this so those edge cases don't one shot the boss. 

The video wasn't really showcasing an edge case, but it was mostly showing how easy it would be to trivialize a boss if it didn't have any form of damage attenuation.

I do see your point, though, and I totally agree. There are a whole bunch of edge cases that don't interact with the damage attenuation formulas as intended, whether for or against the player's benefit. (This might've changed since U32, but Phenmor's 20x damage evolution is completely unaccounted for by liches, so it just shreds them within a tiny fraction of a second. Meanwhile, liches are practically immune to something like charged Velocitus shots, since charged-shot DPS is calculated using fire rate without accounting for charge time or stagger duration. I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but you see my point.)

 

52 minutes ago, Wheelhouser said:

But the obvious solution, and while simple in concept is surely not simple in execution, is to balance the game.  Something that many players have been asking for for years.  But something that hasn't ever really been attempted (at least well) ever.  If it's 5% of skills and 5% of weapons, or whatever, temporarily disable them while they get reworked so we don't get incredibly tedious/boring/unfun boss fights.  All very common descriptions of many WF bosses, especially including Boreal, and generally all complaints center around nerfing strong players/builds with Attenuation, immunities and drawn out immunity phases (like waiting for the spawns in the Equinox boss fight).  All seemingly based on the idea that the fight should take X amount of time no matter how geared someone is, so here's an uninteresting wall to stall you.

I know it's never going to happen, but the situation DE is in is completely DE's fault for never really paying attention to balance in any meaningful way.  Just look at frame balance, and how certain frames are clearly OP for so many situations, and yet new frames that come out, that are weaker in pretty much every instance, still get nerfed shortly afterwards (I'm think Gyre here, but there are others).  And yet the OP frames don't get touched.  Weapons are the same.

Eh, I wouldn't say that DE's never attempted to balance the game. They've made loads of balance changes and overhauls over the years, including a comparatively mild one two days ago.

The problem is that power creep is inevitable in PVE games like this (especially because of sales of new weapons/characters), and over the years, DE hasn't taken enough steps to properly address that by nerfing things. And understandably so, mind you-- It seems to be partly because they don't want to nerf the fun "power fantasy" aspect of the game, and partly out of fear of backlash from the flocks of players who throw childish tantrums at the slightest hint of the word "nerf".

Case in point:

Backlash from an overwhelming portion of loud, immature players seems to be a big reason that DE is kinda apprehensive about making the balance changes that are necessary for Warframe's long-term health. A fundamental damage + scaling rework was actually planned a few years back (which IIRC Steve or Scott described as being a "nuclear bomb" in scale), but it was completely scrapped because of this.

The other issue is, as you said, the sheer difficulty of fundamentally revamping every aspect of damage formulae + modding + enemy scaling + etc in the game. All of which needs to be done at once, mind you-- otherwise the incompatibilities would be disastrous; akin to changing a nation's right-handed traffic system to a left-handed one, starting with buses and semitrucks before moving on to smaller vehicles.

Until DE is able to pour the resources into such a revamp without immature players burning the game's reputation to the ground in protest... enemies with damage attenuation are unfortunately the best we've got. All that DE can do right now is to try and iron out the "edge cases", one by one.

[0bsi]

10 hours ago, LillyRaccune said:

In the vunerable phase everyone in squad attacks as best they can, all the damage information is collected > but not applied. Then you use the invulnerability phase to calculate and reach average damage potential for the squad.

Players would just know not to deal much damage in the first phase, so that their damage score would be lower, to make the next phase easier.
"Use your slingshots everyone, and save the rocket launchers for the next part"


Personally, I like the suggestions people have made for having bosses build their immunity/Mission-lengthening phase into a split health bar with an interactive game mechanic (that gives some reason/meaning to it) - rather than it be just a case of you continuing to offload clip after clip into the enemy, not knowing if/when your shots are actually going to do something.

[0_The_F00l]

Thanks for the insights ,

And i am glad you are not rolling back things just because of complaints and will be making changes based on your own in game observations.

But i do have a gripe with the whole damage attenuation piece. The main reason you used this is because the damage output difference between bad , good and great weapons is not even in a liner chart , one loadout can do damage in the hundred , next thousand and then millions. 

Would it not be accurate to say that this is a consequence of poor (by which i mean many) damage multiplier choices available to players ? Instead of adding increasingly more complex mechanics , would it not be more effective in the long term to fix things at the source , rather than the destination ? 

Like limit damage multipliers to base (serration, shooting gallery)  , addon (MS , elemental) and final (Crit , faction, roar , sniper combo)

Accordingly you could limit the debuffs on enemies similarly , like base (viral , magnetic , corrosive ) , addon (don't think there is an equivalent debuff to MS) , final (elemental weakness, sonar) 

Buffs that fall into a category are added and then multiplied with those of other categories.. This way you have reason to still optimize but the diminishing returns will not make you stack the dozen or so multipliers together. Leading to more diversity as well.

So Total damage = (base damage mods + additive buffs + viral ) * (elemental + MS )* (faction damage + crit damage + weakspot bonus )

I am sure you have already evaluated it , but i think now is a good time to experiment with it.

[android3162]

11 hours ago, Deekkru said:

You've only recently been promoted and you're already delving into some of the more complex issues Warframe (and other similar games) face; I don't envy you the challenge of being in the spotlight during this sort of change, but I appreciate the way you're handling it so far. Thank you for the communication and simple honesty!

Pretty sure she's always done this, given the way her small talk during the devstreams used to get pretty detailed. I'm sure the entire team has always been discussing stuff like this practically the entire time. 

 

The difference now is that Reb has much more power to decide and much more experience and ability in presenting the discussion to the community. 

[shut]

22 minutes ago, 0_The_F00l said:

Thanks for the insights ,

And i am glad you are not rolling back things just because of complaints and will be making changes based on your own in game observations.

But i do have a gripe with the whole damage attenuation piece. The main reason you used this is because the damage output difference between bad , good and great weapons is not even in a liner chart , one loadout can do damage in the hundred , next thousand and then millions. 

Would it not be accurate to say that this is a consequence of poor (by which i mean many) damage multiplier choices available to players ? Instead of adding increasingly more complex mechanics , would it not be more effective in the long term to fix things at the source , rather than the destination ? 

Like limit damage multipliers to base (serration, shooting gallery)  , addon (MS , elemental) and final (Crit , faction, roar , sniper combo)

Accordingly you could limit the debuffs on enemies similarly , like base (viral , magnetic , corrosive ) , addon (don't think there is an equivalent debuff to MS) , final (elemental weakness, sonar) 

I am sure you have already evaluated it , but i think now is a good time to experiment with it.

Amen.

The sheer number of multiplicatively-scaling final damage multipliers is how players can get their damage to explode straight to integer overflow. I understand that doing this is risky, given how the average WF player gets about the slightest decrease in their damage, but I still hope it is addressed sooner than later.

[PhoenixWolf0416]

引用

- Is something too dominant (am I ‘playing wrong’ for not using it)

So... if we can one shot Archon

When will we see the nerf to felarx or the nerf of must people suggest with laetum. lamo

 

[JaMoricharXi]

Archon hunt is way too difficult for solo players for now. 

[TheOctavius]

We are continuing to review under the structure of:
- Is something too dominant (am I ‘playing wrong’ for not using it)?

-> yes, There is a very rare chance of encountering a Tenno who uses numerous machetes. In addition, many discarded weapons - many single-shot/burst-fire rifles and pistols that were stolen after giving them upgrades/buffed - are nowhere to be seen.

- Is something allowing truly automated play?

-> Almost all Chinese Tenno are abusing - hiding / aggro scattering / passing - through the 'wukong + explosive weapon' combination, and every time they report this, a strange answer - threats - comes. Are you watching this, [DE]Yun?

-> It should be noted that some Chinese still do their jobs. It's just that the Wukong + range-type weapon combination causes several problems. Absolutely not all Chinese are like this, so please don't misunderstand.

- Is something disrupting others from playing in their playstyle?

-> DE is trying to ignore the fact that Tenno around the world are suffering because of users who abuse it through Wukong's passive and ability 1. This is having a very adverse effect on the Tenno who are playing normally, and I think they need a quick fix as they have a lot of restrictions.

[Petroklos]

11 hours ago, (XBOX)Cruiser Abukuma said:

Basically, it isn't broken, rather it's an endgame build that someone put a decent amount of time into building.

ah yes, "endgame" builds should trivialize "endgame" bosses, perfect design

[(PSN)c1234567890alvi]

First, thank you for addressing so much feedback in such a short amount of time, in that regard, here is a little more :P

Regarding Wukong: I know you want automation to be gone, but ammo steal isn't the way. We have a few useless abilities in the game (and with Hydroid a complete frame at that DX), but Wukongs clone is actually harmful to the player and thats kinda a first. Let him have his very own limited ammo pool or let him only use the exalted staff, but a player shouldn't DREAD to use an ability.

Regarding AoE: I see that the line between "having pretty much no ammo" and "being able to spam AoE" is paper thin, but I feel like I can use the Kuva Bramma or Zarr for half an exterminate mission and after that I have a useless Primary slot and thats not the goal I think for a shooter. Especially because we wanted to get away from a melee meta. Btw talking about that.

Regarding non-AoE: Due to the ammo changes I already see somewhat of a return to the 2020 melee meta. But this time slower, because melee has been nerfed since then and with less CC due to Eximus being a pest. But what I don't see coming at all is someone actually using Pandero, Sybaris, Tiberon etc. Single Targets need a buff. I really don't mind if its more on the QoL side of things (Punch Through, enemy or mechanic design) or if you just massively bump up the damage (probably not a good idea, because building up damage is kind of the players job as far as I see it, but hey, anything that helps), but please just buff them.

Regarding Archons: I don't feel like their bulk is the issue, my main gripe with the battle is, that there is somewhat of a timer and when I don't do enough DPS in a short time, those annoying sentient enemies return, which unnecessarily extends the fight. I would rather see more mechanics connected to the remaining health rather than time. 
Aside from that, knowing how to build for doing proper damage and surviving is kind of the players job and by the point they reach archon hunts players should know how to do that. This is our endgame content, its allowed to make us sweat. 
But it would certainly help, if we had a better early game tutorial that properly explains to players how to do damage. I literally needed months when I started out to understand how to kill higher level Grineer. And I think a well crafted hand-on tutorial would do a really long way (those five pages of text in the codex is not well-crafted btw), because many player not understanding damage seems to be the main gripe with the boss from the struggling players side.

Regarding Companions: Not really part of this conversation, but companions certainly need more survivability. Also, they should be usable in a more active way.

Thank you for your service as always :D

[fo3nixz]

lol chroma glaive vex bug.

[(PSN)LazeyKwon]

I'm going to give my pretty lengthy thoughts about boss design, hopefully they are helpful and constructive. I'm not trying to be negative. 

So to me there seems to be a design philosophy issue that DE have, that I'm guessing came about as a way to deal with balance. The issue is that you create artificial difficulty by adding these immunity buffs and ability nullifiers on these boss enemies. Like it's not actually difficult it just means the fight takes way longer because you've been handicapped. For e.g Necramechs, acolytes and now the archon. The issue is not as pronounced on something like Violence as they only show up every now and then and aren't a key mechanic themselves. They're part of the larger system of many acolytes and incursions you get steel essence from, so when he shows up and I'm xaku, I know I'm dead. But it doesn't really matter, because he's not the sole method of earning resources that he drops. The problem is when you apply this to something like the Necramechs that you have to farm and they are just painful. I tried so many different weapons and frames to try to figure out what was most effective against mechs, but I didn't really get anywhere. I just ended up using a weapon that I liked using because nothing I did really improved or changed my results to any notable degree.

One thing I want to emphasize that is very important is fun. We play games for fun, and these systems are actively making what could be fun, frustrating and tedious. The design and lore of the mechs is so cool and has so much potential, but are they fun? Not for me. It's just something you have to grit your teeth and do until you've farmed it enough that you never have to engage with it again. And that's unfortunate. These boss fights should be fun, challenging and rewarding, because otherwise what's the point? Without all 3 they just become another wall you have to climb over. Like the mechs, was it balanced well? Yes because no matter what I used my results didn't vary much, that's technically balanced. Was it fun? No. I personally feel that those 3 things should come first. Fun, challenging and rewarding. Then balance is at number 4. I feel it's a lot easier to achieve this in a pve game as well, as having broken busted op weapons is ok! People love that, and warframes had it's fair share of it. Finding out cool synergies between abilities and weapons that can be super powerful. That's rewarding, engaging, fun gameplay. I'm not saying you should add op weapons or whatever to the game by the way. But if they happen to exist, then balancing them should not be prioritised over the fun as having some overpowered interactions between things doesn't break the game (usually). A great example of this is the recent wukong changes. He still plays the same but now his clone is less powerful, which doesn't affect the fun of using him. In summary; fun before balance, because if players aren't having fun then they won't play the game. 

I personally feel that the ability nullifier is worse than the attenuation but they both feel bad to engage with.

So ability nullifiers. If I could ask you guys one question, it would be - why do people play warframe? I think most people's answer would be the title of the game. The warframes. So my follow up question to that is, do you think adding things to the game that essentially remove players ability to interact with and use their warframes is a good idea? To me the answer is clearly no. Simplified like this it's an easy answer to give, but I know game design is everything but simple or easy, but the point remains. Spending dozens, hundreds, thousands of hours earning, grinding all your gear, all your mods all your cool frames, perfecting your build its all great!.... And then you get all your abilities removed during a fight. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Also just having to stand and shoot for minutes on end because the enemy has attenuation and skill null so you literally can't do anything else is just really boring. It completely removes the point of the warframes and is a jarring contrast to what normal warframe gameplay is. 

I don't think the way that these 2 systems are implemented currently are good for the game. I don't mean to come off as rude but it seems like lazy game design. Regardless of whether it is or not, it's an issue that it is perceived that way, and the more these systems get added to future content, the bigger the issue becomes. I don't expect changes to happen to the mechs or anything but now that this issue has been brought up with the archon fight I thought it was a good idea to give feedback, so hopefully it can be addressed moving forward to ideally improve the game. 

Thank you for coming to my tedtalk whoever actually read this lol. Final thoughts, I have a couple ideas of how you could still have these systems, but just implimented differently. I think the key is to make it possible for players to interact or overcome them. Player agency as they say. So for example the ability nullifier. Instead of being a blanket permanent effect, it could be in certain zones or aoe attacks that disable you. Maybe only while you're in the zone, or for a time period when hit like 10 or 20 seconds. That way it feels fair, you're punished for messing up and you can learn the boss mechanics and improve. Rewarding gameplay, instead of punishing you immediately out the gate for no apparent reason. Could also be like halfway through the fight, goes to stage 2 and there's an unavoidable skill null that puts you on the back foot during its second phase or something? Use it to ramp the difficulty between phases. Then with the attenuation my basic idea would be a way to remove it or weaken its affect. So you could still brute force it if you want, but you could interact with some boss mechanic that would reward you by making the boss easier to kill. Could do some parkour puzzles or something would be cool, then you get essentially like a 50 or 100% dps increase. Anyway those are my thoughts, if anyone from DE is reading thanks for taking the time and keep up the great work! 

 

. 

[33Nikola33]

No point of waiting whole week for "Sortie", it's not endgame then. Why isn't it farmable or daily, make shards combinable for full effect or something.

[GojuSuzi]

I do have concerns with Damage Attenuation here, as someone who's probably more on the "should benefit" side (still relatively new, don't have half the mods I'd like to, zero Kuva stuff). I've not killed Boreal yet, but it feels like I've not learned anything from the attempts because of the variances. Am I doing better this time or worse? Who knows, because more progress could be due to 'bad' modding, or vice versa. Everything I've looked into has incredibly complex maths, and the simplification is always only "use this loadout" or "take breaks between shots" (I have no idea if these are right or wrong, but, again, it's that or running some massive algorithm against my own loadout manually and still applying guesstimates). So I feel pressured to find a cookie-cutter 'situational meta', farm out what I'm missing, and use that, rather than smash my face against it because trying and getting better may actually work against me, and trick me into thinking I need to get more damage, not less: trial and error learning is compromised because the data I'm getting is corrupt. 

Gated/segmented health bars, and/or outright capped damage taken, would allow for a "max efficiency rate" where the boss cannot be killed quicker than a certain speed, but still encourage players to build up to that speed and not penalise or confuse them if they happen to pass it (they just don't see any benefit from it). Not sure what's the best alternative overall, but punishing progress in a relatively opaque manner like this disincentivises learning and improvement rather than providing a balance between catch-up mechanic and capping. Any system like this should be readable by the player either in the arsenal screen or in the boss' health bar and/or actions. 

[Ledess]

Please passing from 30 to 5 ammos on Zarr Kuva is a massive nerf, 5 ammos is super frustrating I don't want to play with secondary weapons...

[Wonteddead2]

Day #5 of being stuck in the new war campaign due to bugs, no fix in sight......

[(XBOX)BARLEYDAWG]

Given the upper levels of damage that players can deal, I feel that changes to how much damage players deal (such as the headshots stuff in this update) with weapons won't have much of an impact on evening out weapon usages. Something that I considered that may help semi-auto/charge single target weapons feel viable for the majority of the game would be to add increased loot drop chance on headshot kill with any weapon with any warframe (intentionally excluding radial damage which can easily get extra drops in a similar time frame by getting more kills at once). For stats I was thinking around +100% to +200% loot chance with a 1 or 2 second cooldown and being additive with 'on kill' looting abilities (to avoid rendering those abilities pointless). Since this would affect ammo as well it would alleviate the ammo issues that people have been mentioning while still awarding skill. Another option would be adding more ways to hit multiple enemies with a single shot that doesn't already have an AoE or before AoE effects activate (such as ricochet type mods/effects with a limited number of bounces per shot) which would help slower single target weapons be viable options for most content.

[Traumtulpe]

16 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

If we increase their health so Glaives don't one-shot them

This seems quite disingenious - first of all, you DO know that Chroma's Vex Armor is bugged to apply multiplicative to glaives, right? If you just fixed that bug you would deal at most 10% of the damage shown, which, considering you ALSO used the shortlived 1000% buff from Madurai seems totally appropriate.

[Numerounius]

On 2022-09-09 at 11:22 AM, [DE]Rebecca said:

Between damage attenuation, certain exploits, or bugs causing instant damage, and more, we will be prioritizing our gameplay and feedback review to make this boss fight experience better. There is a chasm between people who find them too easy and those who find them impossible, and trying to balance this divide will inform parts of our plans. We want to make the bosses we want to fight. We are all on the same page on the quest for the right balance. 

 

Damage attenuation needs to also be fixed for liches and sisters,

I should NOT be dealing even less damage with a fully modded loadout that I have specifically min-maxed to deal damage.

If I shouldn't be exploiting for dealing even more damage than intended then the return also needs to happen, my damage loadout should not be exploited to deal even less damage thus forcing me onto a different gamestyle frame than one I like playing. 

Oh I am not even exploiting just merely using a build of my own design that is intended rather than stacking damage unintended that was overlooked during playtesting like sonar damage stacking.

God it is so depressing having to only play Banshee against liches cause my preferred playstyle is actively being punished to be worse than no mods.

Also fix the Lepthanis boss-fight's damage attenuation, it now being a regular boss-fight instead of a orokin derelict one means that it sticks out like a sore thumb with its damage attenuation. Plaque star can still have its version but the boss version needs to not have it.

 

This feedback was given to you almost universally by the community upon sisters launch yet you chose to ignore it why? People were showing how a amp deals even more damage that a proper end-game loadout against sisters. Why are we having to do this again instead of having it be done right the first time?

[TheOlright]

17 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

- Is something too dominant (am I ‘playing wrong’ for not using it)?
- Is something allowing truly automated play?
- Is something disrupting others from playing in their playstyle?

Why the heck you got so stuck to these rules?

There is no such thing as "playing it wrong" as long, as you having fun. Yeah, sometimes there are some events happening, when I grew tired of warframe, so I just pick fatframe + kuva zarr so I could play the game brainless, but most of the time I just pick whichever weapon I like + some fun frame and enjoy the game. One of my favorites is Grendel - I just can't describe, how much fun is it to me to devour bunch of enemies, turn into flash cannon ball and roll around the rooms killing and ragdolling enemies. Do I have the least result in kills in the end of the mission? Yes. Am I mostly useless in steelpath? Yes (though, he is ok vs corpus and infested, but who isn't?). Do I care about it? No. Besides, if you are new to the game, and you were randomly assigned to party with experienced player - you will always feel underpowerd, just because you don't have the most powerful stuff yet, and it's ok, because progress is really important part of the game

And also, there were always "weak" and "strong" weapons in this game. And you can trust me - I was here from the very first day of open beta test, and I believe, you were here even earlier. I remember good ol' days, when having boltor+30% puncture mod were a mandatory, if you wanted to kill something faster than 5-10 seconds of nonstop fire. I remember that day, when me and my best friend finally archived Hyena nod on the starchart and how surprised we were, that despite our best efforts we wasn't able to kill it. We tried different combos, but the result was always the same, no matter, what. And yes, we though, that we were doing "something wrong", but not because boss were too strong - we were too weak. So I went and checked forums (or reddit), and found out about boltor and 30% puncture card. So we farmed some recourses for a few days, crafted it and bam, Hyena died on the first try. And we were freaking happy about it - we put some effort into aquiring something, and it payed off many times. So, quest to get fully modded 60% kuva zarr is not a few-hour deal, we all put effort into getting it - why can't we just enjoy it? Besides, there are weapons SO weak in the game - you can mod them however you like - they will not be viable on the steel path, BUT there is one solution - riven mods. So, if you want your favorite weak weapon to become strong and viable - you have, well again, put some effort into making it good, so you can enjoy it. Can you see the parallel?

Also, we all have to do some sacrifices. I, for example, really dislike to play with random players - most of the times they annoy me to the bone, so mostly I'm playing with my best friend, just two of us. But, there is no way just two of us can make 4 items pool for choice in void fissure missions, so, I have to play with random people over and over again. And people, who don't like aoe spammers can sacrifice some time and find a group they will be comfortable to play - it's not that hard in our time. And all this runt above is just about aoe weapons - I both hands for removing hardly automated play, and mostly don't care about wukong nerfs - I like him for his 3rd as it makes short missions even faster to accomplish.

So, basically, now you are offering this - let's imagine, we have a horde of 15 enemies. Without fully stucked arcane currently most of the times zarr is not able to kill a horde in SP. So, you will need to spend all you ammo (approximatley), to stuck your arcane, to kill that horde, but in the end you will loose all your stacks, while you will be seeking for ammo to replenish, so you can shoot zarr for 10 seconds again and stuck it from 0. Or, you can pick single-target rifle, that takes, like 2 seconds of headshots to kill single target, but have way more stable ammo income, and it will take ~30-35 seconds to kill the whole horde. So now choise is either kill enemies fast and run with one useless weapon for a while seeking for ammo, or kill them constantly, but way, way slower, with a risk of being oneshotted by eximus, becuse they are immune to crowd control

Thb, both choices sucks. Now I'm running with buboniko, because while still pretty powerful, it can kill hordes pretty fast (not as fast as zarr, but still), have small ammo pool, which regens itself in return, so I don't have to run around looking for ammo. I think, formula to balance it all is pretty simple:

Make hordes 10x smaller

Make enemies 10x tougher

Make headshots x10 stronger

Make slash procs x10 weaker

Remove overguard from the game, so you will not be oneshotted, while you stun crowd with your favorite glasscannon frame (it's been half a year since new eximuses were implemented, still hate them and sure it will not go ever, just like nullifiers)

And viola! People will play the game the way you want - aoe weapons will be useful only to remove packs of weakest enemies, and ppl will still have to equip some sniperish weapons into their second slot to deal with the toughest enemies. Nox is a good example, that formula like this will work - before nerfs, while equipping zarr I also quipped that sevagoth sniper hand gun to deal with toughest enemies, and we also had argument with my friends, if it was reasonable, and we tested it, and I proved my point. One of my favorite memories about early warframe how me and my friend crafted lexx in addition to boltor, and grinded some bosses - at first we stayed at the very entrance of the arena, headshotting all the enemies in the room, without triggering the boss, so fight with boss itself would become way easier. It was times, when amount of enemies mattered, and every enemy was a threat, and I'm not against returning that times, you just need to do it right, and, please, stop making game harder in a bad way - most of the latest changes only annoy me (and, I'm pretty sure, a lot of other players), and make me want to play this game less and less, and, also, narrows selection of frames and weapons too hard

 

 

[Azamagon]

17 hours ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

If we increase their health so Glaives don't one-shot them, they become near unkillable with other weapons. It'll be a tough problem to solve, but for perspective, this is what we don't want either.

I understand the dilemma you are facing, but it's technically pretty easy to see what the issues are:

We have waaay too many + too powerful ways of improving our damage or ignoring enemy defenses.

Mods, powers and actions all have huge numerical boosters, and they all multiply with each other: Base damage, crits, multishot, elemental mods, headshots, Sonar (in particular), faction mods... all this multiply for ENORMOUS boosts.

Add to that being able to remove the insanely powerfully scaling armor from enemies - armorstripping and armor-ignoring effects (i.e. slash-procs, along with Viral-procs boosting that) skyrocket in value and are extremely meta due to that.

If you wanna fix that, it's honestly quite simple:

1. Greatly reduce the numbers on our mods and powers.
2. Reduce (or even remove) the scaling of enemy armor (but make them have much stronger resistances so they are still notable and wortwhile to strip/ignore), but also reduce enemy health/shields scaling from levels.
3. Potentially, limit how much we can mod for damage so we can't have so many multipliers at once.
4. Make all damagetypes valuable and more generally useful: Puncture, Impact, Cold, Blast, Magnetic are all generally utter garbage in their effects, while Viral and Slash are far too potent.

TL;DR: Extreme numerical values, which this game has everywhere, makes the game extremely difficult to balance.

[60framespersecond]

6 hours ago, 0_The_F00l said:

Thanks for the insights ,

And i am glad you are not rolling back things just because of complaints and will be making changes based on your own in game observations.

But i do have a gripe with the whole damage attenuation piece. The main reason you used this is because the damage output difference between bad , good and great weapons is not even in a liner chart , one loadout can do damage in the hundred , next thousand and then millions. 

Would it not be accurate to say that this is a consequence of poor (by which i mean many) damage multiplier choices available to players ? Instead of adding increasingly more complex mechanics , would it not be more effective in the long term to fix things at the source , rather than the destination ? 

Like limit damage multipliers to base (serration, shooting gallery)  , addon (MS , elemental) and final (Crit , faction, roar , sniper combo)

Accordingly you could limit the debuffs on enemies similarly , like base (viral , magnetic , corrosive ) , addon (don't think there is an equivalent debuff to MS) , final (elemental weakness, sonar) 

Buffs that fall into a category are added and then multiplied with those of other categories.. This way you have reason to still optimize but the diminishing returns will not make you stack the dozen or so multipliers together. Leading to more diversity as well.

So Total damage = (base damage mods + additive buffs + viral ) * (elemental + MS )* (faction damage + crit damage + weakspot bonus )

I am sure you have already evaluated it , but i think now is a good time to experiment with it.

As much as I hate damage attenuation with a passion, this here is a real and serious issue. Not sure if what you describe is the perfect solution, but it is just not feasible to ever balance enemy health around the scale of damage output we have going in the game right now.

To people saying "yeah sure, go in prepared, this is endgame", this is not about bringing the Stug or something: even within the high to top-tier weapons, there are gigantic gaps in damage output. Not even speaking of all the other things that affect damage output like buffs and debuffs.

Speaking of buffs, let's assume no attenuation and all our weapons do the same dps. We balance damage phases around that number, maybe 2-3 minutes seems like a good time with some dodging and stuff involved. Then comes the person putting 2x roar in the squad, another brings Saryn with Venom Dose, add a Mirage with the 3 Augment. Suddenly you're looking at some 10 times (or even more) increased damage output, cutting that phase down to a couple of seconds meaning most additional mechanics can probably be ignored (look at Eidolon fights, where it's possible to just skip a lot of junk when you one-shot everything).

What do you balance around? De-/Buff-based damage increase of 6x? And then comes the random person that can jam in another multiplying buff for 12x damage. And then we add back the non-level playing field in the weapon department...

I'm not even talking about "no prep" and "good prep". I'm talking about the difference between good prep and hyper specialized prep being the difference of a 20 minutes fight to a fight lasting 5 minutes (very naive calculation of adding another multiplying 2x buff and 2x debuff, 4 times damage means a quarter of the time spent dps'ing).

To be honest, I don't have a solution without touching the very foundation of the damage system (as your post suggests) either. And IMO that immediately requires revisiting the impact of the constant arms-race to the bottom between more and more efficient and optimized farming and harder and longer grinds with less and less means to affect anything.

[ABlindGuyPlays]

7 hours ago, shut said:

seems to be partly because they don't want to nerf the fun "power fantasy" aspect of the game, and partly out of fear of backlash from the flocks of players who throw childish tantrums at the slightest hint of the word "nerf".

that 'tantrum' as you love to dismiss it as (though I agree it is pretty silly) is because historically DE does not really listen unless it's a unified 'Hekk Off' from the playerbase, and i do mean UNIFIED. See also Prime Resurgence where they said changes were impossible but they MAY look into it, then magically after 'BESt DAY EVAH' it gets changed to essentially what most of us were asking for to begin with (but nono it wans't doen FOR us they did it Because They Felt Like It.)

Then there's vacuum within, a few other situations, and so forth where there was clear and Unified backlash.

Compare that to the Hema situation that is STILL a batty slog but 'we want to Honor the players that managed the slog while we were on break' or the 'universal' medallions getting changed because of one mid-rank conclave player on twitter sobbing to the devs verses a majority of the rest of the community.

[Cerikus]

Thank you!

I am personally super happy about how the update turned out.

- Quest was amazing, Khal gameplay is great (can't wait for that next week) and the new shard system seems like it will add a lot of complexity for modding and allow for more interesting builds. All the QoL aditions and changes are marvelous - SP fissures are terrific. Relic packs from mining NPCs is a perfect addition. I love syndicate pledge system.

- I never really joined the AOE meta, but after some testing I feel like the ammo rework is perfect. It doesn't affect me in any way, if I play the way that I already did - activelly with interesting playstyles. 

- I 100% support the intent to stick to your philosophy. Please don't succumb to the salt. There is definitelly a room for impovements and balance, but don't revert stuff that objectively makes the game better. People usually don't like stuff that's good for them, when it makes stuff less effortless. 

On the question of Archons I have posted this in the feedback subforum:

 Thanks again Reb, keep up the great work!