The truth about AoE...

[(XBOX)Lord ChibiVR]

Obviously, AoE has been a hot topic in the community, with people both against and for upcoming nerfs. 

However, many people against the nerf seem confused on DE's design for AoE, after all, why make it overpowered just to nerf it? 

The story starts way back when guns were going to be buffed. DE stated that "they would bring guns up to melee, and lower melee a little bit, so both could be on the same level."

Anyone who compares that quote to the current state of weapon meta could clearly see that this is not the case, as the minor melee nerfs combined with very powerful additions to the guns' arsenal made melee much less relevant compared to the now much stronger guns. 

So even from the very beginning, we can clearly see DE's original intentions for weapons: a perfectly balanced usage between guns and melee weapons, something entirely overshadowed by (as I'm sure you can guess), AoE primary weapons. 

"But but, they took two years to nerf AoE, how was their strength unintentional?" 

DE also took years to buff primaries and had to nerf melee twice, are you saying guns were supposed to stay bad forever? 

In the end, I'm hoping we will get the equilibrium that DE wanted, where both guns and melee can shine, without one outshining the other.

[Pakaku]

Part of the reason it takes "years" is because you need to see how new changes perform in order to gauge how effective it is, and that takes a lot of time, especially since issues don't usually immediately pop up. Designing new changes to balance out older designs also takes time, given all of the different variables in the game (and a lot don't even get caught until released publically.) If DE had all of the answers, Warframe would be "complete" instead of a beta in constant flux.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

I think it was more a reaction to people whining after watching a youtuber. 

DE feels obligated to placate people if the problem is big enough. 

[trst]

I'd argue that guns and melee do shine in their respected rolls already while both being strong enough to carry you through any and all content on their own. The only problem is how AOE weapons still overshadow both options.

But yeah, this stuff takes time and is at odds both with how DE needs to make content and with what a notable portion of the community wants from the game. DE needs to make new content to keep players returning to the game and having devs working on fixing old systems isn't going to bring in players like new content always does. And as seen from the (still ongoing) complaints about the negligible changes they did make plus the reactions just to hearing about how self damage might return you can see how a number of players don't even want these changes.

So they both can't focus on just reworking and rebalancing a core system while also needing to work it in a way that doesn't entirely alienate a group of players. But at the same time they also had the habit of leaving something half-finished like how they rarely followed up nerfs that just weren't enough. While the current team seems set on trying to solve the AOE issue before moving on.

[(XBOX)Lord ChibiVR]

3 minutes ago, trst said:

While the current team seems set on trying to solve the AOE issue before moving on.

Even if some people disagree with the changes, we all gotta admit that the new team's desire to actually fix long-standing problems with the game is quite enjoyable. 

 

Hopefully raids next year are good!

[Yamazuki]

Aoe weapons were already out performing melee, and had already been popular. DE didn't state the changes had anything to do with the masses, and it was a direct response to content creators whining about lack of variety in afkvival mission; you can even watch the stream where a content creator was directly answered. These forums were also spammed with the same content creator videos. Saying guns were bad for actual intended gameplay is just a massive meme. The increased 'power' isn't even applicable in most content when ever you're using burst weapons as before the changes you were already killing most enemies in a single shot. The only benefit from the increased power was in the passive provided by the arcanes.

DE only changes things based on one of two things, complaint spam or usage statistics, which has nothing at all to do with balance. If they cared at all about balance, damage types and their numbers and enemy durability would need to be reworked. Then DE would need to properly give a power budget per tier of weapons. One of the reasons some single target weapons are 'bad' is because they end up in situations where they reload more often than they are dealing damage, compared to K-Bramma with brief delay between shots for its downtime. It wouldn't take a genius to see why it didn't take long for it to dominate before DE released more explosive options.

For another example of how DE doesn't care about balance, see the introduction of shield-gate as a response to later level enemies, not endurance runs, being able to one shot Warframes. The logical thing would be to increase the base durability of Warframes and adjust enemy weapon damage based on their weapon type and role in addition to threatening attacks having better visibility. Instead, we just grant immortality in most situations while not even solving the problem given Toxin bypasses shields and some of them are still instant kills regardless.

[L3512]

12 minutes ago, Yamazuki said:

Aoe weapons were already out performing melee, and had already been popular.

Aye, melee always balanced most of it's power with the combo counter which people conveniently gloss over, BR didn't start a mission providing 660% CC. Even before Primed Firestorm people were moving to AOE use, before the gun buffs K Bramma was still strong enough to use comfortably for an hour or two SP survival.

 

12 minutes ago, Yamazuki said:

One of the reasons some single target weapons are 'bad' is because they end up in situations where they reload more often than they are dealing damage, compared to K-Bramma with brief delay between shots for its downtime. It wouldn't take a genius to see why it didn't take long for it to dominate before DE released more explosive options.

Something I don't understand about DE is even at the hight of AOE complaints they release something like the Felarx, an auto shotgun with a 6 round magazine and 3.7 second reload, the build flexibility you could get from not needing CC and CD mods is replaced by new mandatory mods to make the weapon usable.