The problem with damage autenuation on arcons and liches

[Silligoose]

19 hours ago, Apocalypse94 said:

First and foremost for everyone that doesn't know what damage autenuation is, its a damage reduction/armor that is applied to certain boss enemies like arcons and liches.

how it works in short is that it gives the enemie more DR the more damage you do.

For example: If your initial hit does 100k dmg the enemies gets 50% DR so you do 50k dmg. if your hit does 200k the enemie gets a 66% DR and you will do 80k damage(the numbers are not exact it is just an example)

The idea behind this is that it prevents advanced players from oneshotting it while at the same time allowing newer players to still be able to kill it.

here is my Issue: The DR only takes into concideration the initial damage from each hit and not total weapon attack. that is why everyone is running kuva hek, because it has insane multishot

and that way you can still oneshot it.

another thing is that melee is basically useless because the damage seems to be capped no matter how strong ur melee is.

I tested this with my melee heavy attack and no matter how much crit/combo/damage i give it it is always capped out at around 5k dmg(with is nothing)

how is it that my melee that has an intial hit of 2milion does 5k damage and each pellet from a kuva hek shot does like 20k(no riven btw)

this is just super boring and lazy design in my opinion.

no creativity everyone just uses multi shot now and thats it

Damage Attenuation is simply another band-aid that leads to confusion and frustration on the part of players. As with many of this game's band-aids, it doesn't even work properly.

It is a ridiculous mechanic aimed at trying to achieve a ridiculous vision. The vision is for players to be more equally effective against certain enemies, regardless of the massive difference in offensive power that may be available to said player due to time/money poured into the game, by nerfing said higher levels of power, showing little respect for the time and efforts put in by these players.

It shouldn't be in the game.

[(XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA]

8 hours ago, Silligoose said:

Damage Attenuation is simply another band-aid that leads to confusion and frustration on the part of players. As with many of this game's band-aids, it doesn't even work properly.

It is a ridiculous mechanic aimed at trying to achieve a ridiculous vision. The vision is for players to be more equally effective against certain enemies, regardless of the massive difference in offensive power that may be available to said player due to time/money poured into the game, by nerfing said higher levels of power, showing little respect for the time and efforts put in by these players.

It shouldn't be in the game.

And it would at least be defensible if it *worked*, but it doesnt. 

[Enexemander]

I go into new content without spoilers solo. So, I was surprised by the damage mitigation mechanic on archons. So I did the fight several times the way DE intended on different frames and weapon loadouts.

It's not good? You end up just unloading clip after clip into a health sponge. There's also the annoying "Die and you have to restart" mechanic that just meant I never took a frame in that didn't have survivability locked down. But that's minor. The eyerolling clip-after-clip-after-clip into the archons is annoying and silly. It was when I took Ivara (my main) and subsumed Mirage's Eclipse ability that I really started to hate the whole thing. You see, I quickly noticed when I used Eclipse that I was doing noticeably LESS DAMAGE than without it. 

So after that, I researched what was going on and started running it more along the lines of the meta. Overall my experience was so soured that I don't care much if I do the weekly or not anymore. 

[Voltage]

On 2023-07-10 at 8:46 AM, Drachnyn said:

If I dont deal enough damage with a particularly weak setup then I should be the one to fix that.

Except DE has conditioned players to expect most of their arsenal to be capable of all content due to heavy focus on accessibility and "no player left behind". DE added Damage Attenuation likely to reward bad builds in some capacity. If they didn't want you to one-shot the boss, it would be more designed like an Eidolon or Orb Mother, not Sargus Ruk with extra steps. Damage Attenuation or not, there is nothing during an Archon Hunt besides the Deacon intermission that adds anything to the mission or necessitates interesting build choices (like we see in Profit-Taker, 6x3 hunts, Disruption, and Void Cascade).

Edited July 11, 2023 by Voltage

[Drachnyn]

vor 2 Stunden schrieb Voltage:

Except DE has conditioned players to expect most of their arsenal to be capable of all content due to heavy focus on accessibility and "no player left behind". DE added Damage Attenuation likely to reward bad builds in some capacity. If they didn't want you to one-shot the boss, it would be more designed like an Eidolon or Orb Mother, not Sargus Ruk with extra steps. Damage Attenuation or not, there is nothing during an Archon Hunt besides the Deacon intermission that adds anything to the mission or necessitates interesting build choices (like we see in Profit-Taker, 6x3 hunts, Disruption, and Void Cascade).

Well no, it doesnt reward bad builds. If I go in with an unmodded braton, it's going to take forever. We havent reached anthem levels of idiocy. It just tries to bring down good builds down to that level. Fortunately it's failing when it comes to multishot because dear lord are the archons boring.

[FA22_RaptoR]

1 hour ago, Drachnyn said:

Well no, it doesnt reward bad builds. If I go in with an unmodded braton, it's going to take forever. We havent reached anthem levels of idiocy. It just tries to bring down good builds down to that level. Fortunately it's failing when it comes to multishot because dear lord are the archons boring.

I mean, most of the boss fights in this game are pretty mediocre compared to D2... I don't really know how to fix them, but IMHO bosses like Lech Krill and Sargus Ruk where you have "objetcives" to accomplish are better ways than giving a boss a giant health bar and just shooting at it.

There are some semblances of that in the sentient spawns and stuff like that, but it's not enough to really make the boss fights in this game fun or exhilarating. Even when I was a new player the boss fights were pretty much just "shoot thingy get Widget"...

[(NSW)Greybones]

16 hours ago, Enexemander said:

I go into new content without spoilers solo. So, I was surprised by the damage mitigation mechanic on archons. So I did the fight several times the way DE intended on different frames and weapon loadouts.

What’s the sweetspot where the weird mechanic of DA isn’t behaving inconsistently? I’ve tried a few times to get a feel for what DE are looking for for the fight, but I haven’t got the sense; it’s a lot easier to do for the rest of the game, but DA keeps feeling odd and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be avoiding enemy attacks to reduce the DA effect by being forced to space out my own attacks or whether my build is hitting too hard or not hard enough or whether there’s supposed to be 3 other players or what

Edited July 12, 2023 by (NSW)Greybones

[Voltage]

8 hours ago, Drachnyn said:

Well no, it doesnt reward bad builds. If I go in with an unmodded braton, it's going to take forever. We havent reached anthem levels of idiocy. It just tries to bring down good builds down to that level. Fortunately it's failing when it comes to multishot because dear lord are the archons boring.

A bad build doesn't mean the extreme like unmodded. I'm referring to the builds where people stack multiple base damage multipliers. It "rewards" those types of "I didn't really think about how damage works" builds by like you said, closing the gap where it should be wider.

In any case, damage attenuation just sucks and I think everyone can agree on that.

[Chronometria]

The way archon damage works is just bizarre. I kind of get the idea that its better to do single larger hits than multiple smaller ones, but i have never seemed to make that work personally. I have certainly seen it done though - last archon battle had a player who consistently smacked 20 percent off the archon's health bar, to the point where the rest of us actually stopped attacking it and just let him get on with it. We figured that our attacks and presence probably made whatever he was doing worse, so we just left him to it and tried to draw fire and be somewhat useful that way.

Made a nice change from the usual spammy endless bullet sponge thing, but it was pretty clear that nobody had any idea quite what that guys secret was.

[(NSW)Greybones]

3 hours ago, Voltage said:

A bad build doesn't mean the extreme like unmodded. I'm referring to the builds where people stack multiple base damage multipliers. It "rewards" those types of "I didn't really think about how damage works" builds by like you said, closing the gap where it should be wider.

In any case, damage attenuation just sucks and I think everyone can agree on that.

If that’s the trick to working within DA and some of the highest level content for the standard non-SP game is just expecting us to do something like stack damage which seems the more obvious thing to do, that makes more sense than an esoteric alternative. Will try something like that to see how it goes

[Apocalypse94]

he probably used kuva hek with a frame that gives u extra multi shot. it is not really a secret or anything. I have a 7/8 modded kuva hek with no riven and no buffs and it already does like 10%. with the right setup u can easely oneshot each phase(50%)

[Bibbleforp]

On 2023-07-10 at 11:44 AM, PublikDomain said:

The current Attenuation is kind of indefensible regardless of your take... If you don't like it and think it shouldn't exist, well then you don't like it and think it shouldn't exist. Understandable. But if you think that Attenuation does have value and should exist... then oversights like multishot and Phenmor bypass it so the current implementation doesn't even work.

This is absolutely my problem with it,

And when it DOES work, it's often ludicrously punishing to simple & non-meta builds in counter-intuitive ways. Chroma & Mirage have their damage bonuses punished to comical degrees, while Rhino's Roar still works great.

The result is instead of normalizing it toward reasonable damage rates, there's a tendency to force players to research what weapons and damage bonuses actually work, which shepherds everyone toward a narrow selection of super effective builds.

Edited July 16, 2023 by Bibbleforp

[DrivaMain]

What I dislike most about this dynamic DPS cap is that certain mechanics ignore it entirely. Here are some of them that I know : Multishot, Critical Multiplier, and Multiplicative Damage Bonus. One of the worst offenders of the multiplicative damage bonus is the incarnon Devouring Attrition evolution that multiplies final damage after being affected by Damage Attenuation by 20x. 

The current implementation of DA feels like double standards. why do you punish Voidrig's Arquebex so hard while letting these outliers do the same job the one thing you try to mitigate run free? If you want Damage Attenuation to work, make them work with these outliers.

[AntifreezeUnder0]

Dmg attenuations downside is that you artificaly nerf weapons performance, and kill in a way players effort.

Then again altrnative would be what? Make archon lvl 2k? his dmg output be same, tankiness similar, fun gone, and everyone not happy. And even then there be ways to cheese it... 

Good thing about archons are that after you get initial tau , and if have 1 go to frame. Its just side things to do when or if bored. 

I always tend to just melee it with hirudo, dmg not great, not bad. Dont die and other have more time to shoot it.( I use grendel that is)

[PublikDomain]

Small aside, since I'm not actually sure myself, is attenuation global or per player? Like if I dumptruck a billion DPS and my teammate plinks at 10k, does my teammate get their damage dropped too? It feels like it does but it's a really opaque mechanic so I can't tell for sure.

[Traumtulpe]

On 2023-07-17 at 6:34 AM, PublikDomain said:

Small aside, since I'm not actually sure myself, is attenuation global or per player? Like if I dumptruck a billion DPS and my teammate plinks at 10k, does my teammate get their damage dropped too? It feels like it does but it's a really opaque mechanic so I can't tell for sure.

There are many different damage attenuations in the game, with archon having 2 different layers, one of which is global and the other per player.

[Silligoose]

On 2023-07-17 at 6:34 AM, PublikDomain said:

Small aside, since I'm not actually sure myself, is attenuation global or per player? Like if I dumptruck a billion DPS and my teammate plinks at 10k, does my teammate get their damage dropped too? It feels like it does but it's a really opaque mechanic so I can't tell for sure.

It is per player.

Please do note I tested this years ago both solo and in squads. Unfortunately I do not have evidence to link as proof of my testing. My tests concluded that the formulas found on the Warframe Wiki pertaining to Damage Attenuation appeared to be accurate and applied to each player's individual weapons' average DPS as described in the linked page above.