Mercy Kills won't ever be used without a fundamental rework to the system.

[Alphas]

With the latest Devstream mentioning Eximus units receiving a health rebalance I think it's time to open up the conversation to the larger issue of Mercy Kill viability.  With the current suite of mods and the current animations for Mercy Kills I don't think anyone will ever start to go out of their way to do them. 

1) They're too slow.  When they actually work, Mercy Kills are painfully slow.  The animations, while cool looking, really break the flow of combat by making you stand still and watch a little cutscene where you can't control the camera (trust me, having played Ash for many years I can tell you how boring it is to sit and watch uncontrollable cutscenes like these).  It's like hitting a brick wall when you're running through a mission and it really makes Kuva Lich hunting quite slow.  When they don't work they're painfully slow.  You run up, initiate the kill and nothing happens until you walk away a certain distance where it then plays a generic animation.  When it bugs out it's both slow AND unsatisfying.

2) They're unrewarding.  There are 9 Parazon mods based around getting Mercy Kills.  Blood for Ammo, Energy, and Life are arguably the most useful out of all of them, but that isn't saying much when there are already plenty of sources for energy, health, and reloads in the game.  Swift Mercy is a "good" mod, but only because it speeds up the animation and means you spend less time not playing the game.  It solves a problem that Mercy Kills created.  Hit And Run is a good enough mod to slot in since it gives you a decent boost of speed that more than makes up for the time loss from doing a Mercy Kill, but its short duration makes it a little lackluster.  Sometimes you don't even get a chance to notice its effect before the timer runs out.  All of the others: Hard Reset, Malicious Code, Out of Sight, and Power Drain aren't worth slotting.  Sentinels and Companions don't die that often in missions to warrant having a revive method like Hard Reset, and you're kidding yourself if you can get 3 Mercy Kills in 40 seconds.  Malicious Code is pointless since it's a short-range CC that doesn't last very long and you're just going to run away from the enemies anyways.  Out of Sight is just a worse version of Malicious Code because now it lasts for a shorter duration and the enemies cover their faces which makes headshots harder to get.  Power Drain is really weird and extremely situational with no controllable method to reliably build around it.  Alternatively there are 7 other Parazon mods for hacking that are almost all better to slot in place of Mercy Kill mods.  Auto Breach being the single best of the bunch.  Untraceable and Running Time are the next best options, and combined with the only good Mercy Kill mods there's at least a compelling choice of what ones you leave out.  The others: Failsafe, Firewall, Intruder, Live Wire, and Master Key are all worthless.  Firewall and Live Wire could be okay, but are hardly even worth considering outside of new players getting them and having nothing better to slot in.

3) They're too rare.  The biggest and most glaring problem with Mercy Kills is how rare they are.  Even with the Eximus changes they're still going to be rare.  The issue with Eximus units isn't the amount of health they have, but the Overguard.  Eximus Overguard is so strong, but the health they have underneath is pitifully weak no matter how much you buff it.  Even with the threshold being moved to 80% I have a feeling that we're still not going to see hardly anyone performing Mercy Kills simply because even with the threshold that high it will still be easy to shred through the rest of the health without a second thought.  This is because Eximus playstyles often involve gathering buffs and then obliterating the Eximus unit.  In the Steel Path if you are faced with a group of enemies and you don't have Merciless built up you almost always go for the weakest link and build up a bit before challenging the Eximus simply due to how strong the Overguard is against unbuffed damage.  Once you're built up enough to comfortably deal with the Overguard you will be doing so much damage that the health underneath might as well not even exist.  It begs the question whether you want to go for the Mercy Kill, when available, and get a mediocre reward at the cost of slowing your gameplay down, or would you rather just kill the enemy outright and not slow your pace?

 

There are two solutions to this problem.  The harder solution would be to rebalance the reward structure for Mercy Kills to make those Parazon mods more valuable.  That would be way too much work and it's too hard to tell if it would make any sort of meaningful difference for the system.  The other, much simpler solution would be to have a two-pronged fix.  The animations need to be much more fluid.  The one where you roll over the enemy's back as you kill them is the first that comes to mind.  I think having a set of very short animations that don't break the momentum you have would be the correct way to go with it.  Mercy Kills should not stop the player from moving in any direction and can't rip away camera control.  The second approach for this would be to make them more controllable.  Every enemy should be opened to Mercy Kills when at a certain health threshold of around 20-35%  Arguments can be made for higher-health targets like Eximus and specialized units like a Nox.  Mercy Kills should also open up to enemies that are affected by enough DOT statuses that they will die from them.  Think of the Expedited Suffering ability available from Helminth.  You convert the remaining damage left on the DOT and deal it as a lump sum.  Mercy Kills will open when an enemy has enough status DOTs that they will kill said enemy (which is more befitting of the name, Mercy Kill).  These two fixes would make Mercy Kills much more valuable to pull off since you don't kill your momentum and speed while doing it, and they're completely controllable and scale extremely well into high levels like in the Steel Path where it's very easy to just dump statuses on an enemy and walk away as it dies.  Even if the general rewards from Mercy Kill mods aren't that great, they would be made better by having Mercy Kills become more frequent through a controlled method.  Hard Reset would be more viable since you would be able to freely control the pace in which you get Mercy Kills.  Hit And Run becomes extremely valuable as you have a controllable and, more importantly, a repeatable way of boosting your speed.  Power Drain becomes a more predictable mod that you can actually build around since you would be able to set up whatever sequence of abilities you want to cast similar to how Protea's passive works where you line up an enemy to be Mercy Killed, and then benefit from the added 50% Ability Strength whenever you want simply by engaging with the system.

 

Mercy Kills are a really cool and interesting concept, but they really don't have any use in the current sandbox of the game, and their current implementation doesn't leave any reason to do them as the rewards are too mediocre for the cost of time and momentum as well as their relative infrequency in missions.  Making them preserve player momentum while also making them more controllable would do wonders for making the system more widely used.

[taiiat]

27 minutes ago, Alphas said:

When they don't work they're painfully slow.  You run up, initiate the kill and nothing happens until you walk away a certain distance where it then plays a generic animation.  When it bugs out it's both slow AND unsatisfying.

i still try to cause the game to do this as often as possible, because it's faster and interrupts the game less, and less jarring. still better than the alternative!

[Alphas]

43 minutes ago, taiiat said:

i still try to cause the game to do this as often as possible, because it's faster and interrupts the game less, and less jarring. still better than the alternative!

I found it to be the opposite.  I don't know if you found a better way to trigger it, but for me it always seems like it takes 4-5 seconds before I actually start the animation in its bugged state.

[taiiat]

6 minutes ago, Alphas said:

I found it to be the opposite.  I don't know if you found a better way to trigger it, but for me it always seems like it takes 4-5 seconds before I actually start the animation in its bugged state.

well yeah, there's a delay. but i keep playing during those Seconds, until it does the short poke.
like, especially for things like Thralls - i just continue on with my Mission, continue Killing stuff or advancing the level, or whatever.

to me, that's less intrusive than otherwise. i spend less time in the actual flowbreaking Animation.

[Xaero]

In a horde shooter game where a single enemy almost never poses a threat, there will never be a need to deal with this enemy individually, unless you want to waste your time.

Mercy kills would have a place if the game was rebalanced from the ground up. Balanced EHP/damage, less enemies that are tougher and smarter. The game would feel more like TNW Acts 1 and 2.

[Drasiel]

I have a suspicion you are basing the value of mercy kills on group play. Solo I use them quite often and especially if you proc impact status you can kill strong enemies when they still have like 75% of their health and on steal path even with the animation it's faster than just shooting them a lot of the time.

They're not perfect though. The animations feel at a good speed with the parazon mod that speeds up the animation, that should be the base finisher speed. The delay before the "default mercy animation" when the proper one won't play is too long and should be shortened. Most of the parazon mods for mercy kills are very situational or just not very good we either need more options or better activation criteria. Thralls and Hounds absolutely need to be affected by the parazon mod that speeds up the animation, currently they are not and it grinds my gears.

[Sylonus]

On 2022-11-30 at 12:11 AM, Alphas said:

I found it to be the opposite.  I don't know if you found a better way to trigger it, but for me it always seems like it takes 4-5 seconds before I actually start the animation in its bugged state.

It's not generally that long, more like 2 seconds, and you can basically guarantee the bugged version by rolling AWAY from the enemy just as you press your mercy button. For a long time the Power Drain mod didn't give it's bonus UNLESS you got the bugged animation so I got pretty good at it. Power Drain on very specific Warframes that can maintain an ability for a long time are the ONLY reason I ever use mercy. (Titania Razorwing/Wisp Motes/Valkyr Warcry)