Drasiel Posted August 17, 2023 Share Posted August 17, 2023 TL;DR This is going to be long. It is a post with both girth and heft. If you’ve come here expecting a short read, abort now. If you wish to only know my results and not the process to get to them, skip ahead to “Suggestions” at the end of each section. You can argue the merit of my suggestions as much as you like, but I will not be defending them. The suggestions are simply things I thought might correct the issues I see, but the goal of this essay wasn’t to “solve” the issues with Status but to bring the information that Status cannot be fixed if we only adjust the statuses themselves into the discussion. You may also view this post as a Google Document for easier reading: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PaBtP4bCwyeAwXTSm-SUVXlKv1r1emrkF3Jv4sSs2X0/edit?usp=sharing Introduction For many years, I’ve watched various threads pop up with suggestions to try to fix the “bad” status effects we have. The more I read through them, the more I started to consider that the status effects weren’t just bad because of inferior behaviours, but were also reliant on the performance of the base damage type. When you start looking at damage types, that leads you directly to enemy defences. So, in this essay, we’ll start at the root and head for the canopy of what makes a status “bad”. Exclusions You may notice that the Orokin, Sentient, and Narmer factions are not included in this essay. This is intentional as they are combinations of the other factions, or in the case of Sentients, use the same types of defences seen in the other factions. While they have their own niches for effective modding strategies and suffer from the same issues presented further on, I do not think they need to be addressed independently because their mix-and-match factions and Defences exist to create more difficult encounters and scenarios. Damage, Defence, Status Overview I am using the same +/- formatting as the in-game codex to display weaknesses and resistances. Each + or - represents 25% (i.e., one + is a 25% damage bonus 3 +’s are 75%). Negatives follow the same behaviour but represent damage resistance, which will reduce the incoming damage by that value. Damage, Defence, Status Overview Table Defence Overview All of our modding choices are chosen to best overcome our enemy's defences, this is the root that all of the other systems grow from. Below is an Overview of all non-repeated enemy defences in Warframe. Defence Overview Table Defence Overview Points of Interest (POI) I will be using the following terms to classify the defences: Primary Defence Type: Marked by a (P) next to the faction. This is the type of defence used by nearly all units in a faction (e.g., Shields for Corpus units). Secondary Defence Type: Marked by an (S) next to the faction. These are Defence types that are not shared by nearly all units in a faction. (e.g., Armour for Infested Units). Just from organizing the defences into this kind of view, we can learn several things right off the bat that I will expand on in the “Consequences” section: 1. Each faction has a Primary Defence type that is used by nearly all of its units. 2. Some of the weaknesses and resistances do not have values that fit into the codex’s formatting style, thus the codex lies to us. You can see this in the image below, where Cold and Puncture both show one + despite Puncture only dealing 15% additional damage and not 25% like Cold. 3. It appears that every faction is intended to have at least 2 nearly opposing Health types to encourage damage-type diversity. 4. It appears that every faction is intended to have at least 2 nearly opposing Primary Defence types to encourage damage-type diversity. 5. For some reason, the Infested have 3 Health types. 6. Every faction uses Armour again. Giving the 3 factions unique defences was one of the primary changes of Damage 2.0, in Damage 1.0 every faction used armour and armour became the only Defence type worth modding for. Consequences 1. Every faction has one of three primary defences: the Grineer have Armour, the Corpus have Shields, and the Infested have Health. In theory, this means we should have very different mod setups for each faction. In practice, this is very rarely the case, so what causes this break between intent and result? a. One major factor contributing to this outcome appears to be that we can bypass or surpass at least two of the factions’ Primary Defences. Shields can be bypassed by Toxin except for the secret special ones that cannot, and Viral is so incredibly effective against every Health type that isn’t outright immune to its status effect that there is essentially no reason to mod Damage types against individual Health types. 10 stacks of viral grant +325% damage against health, which is vastly superior to every other option. E.g., If you take a weapon that does 100 Gas damage and damage a target with the Infested Health type which has a -75% weakness to that damage type you will deal 175 damage: 100 Gas damage +(1 initial damage count * 0.75 weakness bonus) = 175 If you use a weapon that deals 100 Viral damage and damage a target with 10 stacks of Virus and the Infested Health type which has a -50% resistance to that damage type, you will deal 212 damage: 100 Viral damage * 0.5 negative resistance = 50 50 + (1 initial damage count * 3.25 Virus Health damage bonus) = 212.5 i. Magnetic Status has the same damage boost against Shields that Viral has against Health, so why don’t I list Magnetic as a problem? 2 reasons: 1. Unless something is immune to Toxin Status, there is no reason to use Magnetic 2. Magnetic status only applies to a single Primary Defence type, not every single Primary Defence type across the board, the way Viral does with Health Types. b. This brings us to the “secret” immunity to toxin status effects and viral damage and/or its status effect by specific units. Players hate this immunity, but without it, the boss and mini-boss units would be no more challenging than every other unit of their faction; they would be fodder, and thus, within the confines of the current system, this immunity has to exist. We can make this mechanic better and much clearer to players, which I will discuss in the “Suggestions” section below. c. If bypassing a defence type leads to players not modding for that defence type, why does this not occur with Armour? The truth is that it does, but to a much lesser extent. Fire reducing armour is a relatively new change and not everyone has caught on to that and its other benefits; corrosive is both effective against armour and reduces it, even if it does not fully bypass it; and slash is the dominant modding choice for steel path because its Status is true damage, which bypasses/ignores armour. Cold, Radiation, and Puncture do not bypass armour but are all effective against certain Armour types. How often have you seen people mod for those Damage types though? 2. The game’s codex only shows weaknesses and resistances in increments of 25%. This is not accurate to the actual values and misleads players to think a damage type is more (or less) effective than it is. For example, in-game, Alloy Armour has a weakness to Puncture and Cold, displayed by a single “+”. That plus means that you will receive 25% bonus damage with those damage types, which is wrong. Puncture only receives a 15% bonus against Alloy Armour while Cold receives 25%, making Puncture less effective than Cold. Players who know this will not choose Puncture over Cold damage when given the option due to Puncture being the weaker choice. Players who do not know this will be modding their weapons less effectively because the game has lied to them about how effective their Damage Types are. 3. Why have 2 types of Health per faction? This seems to have been put in place as a method to encourage modding diversity. There are 2 Health types, and we have 3 weapons which enable us to mod for both Health types between our weapons. While this works for the Corpus and Infested factions it, unfortunately, does not work for the Grineer faction. Grineer units with the Machinery Health type are rare, mission-specific, or acceptable to ignore. Grineer with the Health type Machinery. The 19 units with that health type are as follows: Normal Mission (6) Carabus Orbital Strike Drone Latcher Propaganda Drone Roller (Sensor) Regulator Railjack (6) Cutter (Elite) Flak (Elite) Gokstad Crewship Outrider (Elite) Skold Crewship Taktis (Elite) Sharkwing (1) Sikula Open world (6) Eidolon Lure Tusk Bolkor Tusk Firbolg Tusk Thumper Tusk Thumper Bull Tusk Thumper Doma Nearly one-third of the enemies that have the machinery health type are Railjack exclusive and as they are ships, they do not interact with our standard loadout. Another third of them are only found on the Plains of Eidolon and can be ignored when not playing there. One unit is unique to underwater Grineer combat, which is only found on Uranus. Of the 6 remaining normal enemies, latchers and sensor regulators (the non-buffing ones) can be ignored, orbital strike and propaganda drones only spawn during one boss fight, and Carabus only show up when the Grustrag 3 spawn, or you play Rathuum. That leaves only 2 units with Machinery Health out of 25 total Grineer unit types you will regularly come into contact with in normal play. There are not enough units to make modding for Machinery useful. 4. The same kind of Primary defence types have different weaknesses and resistances for the same reason as Health does: encouraging modding diversity. This at face value does exactly as was intended, however, it rapidly falls apart due to the previously mentioned option to mod damage that bypasses/surpasses defences. Units with Secondary Defences require additional damage types, and this creates excessive variables beyond the 4 variables we already are supposed to be modding for. 5. Why do the infested have 3 different kinds of health? An additional health type was likely added to the infested because they were intended to be the health tank faction, thus instead of needing to consider a Primary Defence’s modding requirements in addition to Health we instead have an additional Health type to encourage more diverse modding. However, this creates problems with the infested because they had armour added back into the faction as a Secondary Defence. Viral Status also prevents the need to mod for different Health types, making the 3 different kinds of health essentially a moot point. 6. Every faction has Armour at least as a Secondary Defence. Again. During Damage 1.0 all 3 factions used armour on their heavy units, this resulted in modding for armour being the only effective end-game strategy because on endurance runs heavies were the majority of enemies that spawned. This relegated any weapon that didn’t use one of the Armour-ignoring Damage Types into nothing more than mastery fodder because their damage was neutered so severely by Armour. One of the primary changes implemented by Damage 2.0 was to remove Armour from the Corpus and Infested Factions to fix that issue and to diversify Damage modding for each faction. It has taken us a while, but we seem to have fallen back into the same problem: You mod for armour because every faction, specifically their heavier units or mini-bosses, all have armour. Armour appears to be treated as the go-to solution to improve enemy survivability, regardless of how it negatively affects modding diversity. a. It should be mentioned that while there are many Warframe powers that strip armour that could replace the need to mod for armour on your weapons, this isn’t normally a viable option. Many armour strips are instantaneous, low range, or have small areas of effect. Warframe’s enemy density and spawn speed, especially on the steel path, make any instantaneous or small armour strip abilities prohibitively expensive as you need to recast them almost constantly to maintain the same effectiveness you can get by using weapon mods. Suggestions 1. Fix Corpus and Infested faction Primary Defence types by making one Shield type, and at least one Infested faction Health type, immune to Toxin and Viral status respectively. Include this in the Codex information for enemies; this will make it much easier for players to understand and recognize the mechanic without needing to stumble upon it in the Warframe Wiki, or through time-heavy independent testing. Armour does not have as simple a fix due to there being 1 method to bypass/ignore; and 2 methods to reduce it. I do not have a suggestion for “fixing” Armour defences, but as with the Primary Defences for the other factions, one of the Armour types should probably be made immune to Slash Status. I would recommend Alloy. 2. Increase every weakness and resistance value up (or down for negatives) to 25% at minimum. 3. Use Machinery Health in more Grineer units and other Grineer objects. For example, ramparts, blunts, sensors, and other destroyable objects could all become Machinery. This would be an improvement as they are things we can destroy already, but no one will mod weapons to destroy them efficiently at high levels (i.e., non-kuva ramparts) because it would be insane to mod to kill objects. Other Health types are functioning as intended. 4. Correcting the Defence type bypasses/surpasses and removing Secondary Defences will correct the majority of current issues, with the intended purpose of having 2 Primary Defence Types per faction. 5. If the Infested faction is going to retain Armour it should become a Primary Defence, and the Infested Health & Infested Primary Defence Health types should be combined, or have one of them removed from the game. If the Infested faction is not going to retain Armour, they should have Infested Sinew changed into a 4th Health type to bring them into parity with the other Primary Defences. They would potentially need 2 Health types with immunity from Viral due to Health being their Primary Defence type, and thus completely at the mercy of Viral Damage. This would prevent Viral Damage from being the best option for 3 of the Infested Health types, regardless of weaknesses and resistances. 6. Remove the Armour Secondary Defence from the Corpus and, potentially, Infested factions. It might be reasonable to leave their bosses with Armour, however, I believe a better choice would be to give bosses the bypass/surpass immune Shield and Health types suggested in point 1 of this section, and just crank up the values until their time-to-kill reaches parity with the Armoured bosses in the game. Damage Overview We choose our damage types as the best methods to overcome the defences we face. The bonuses and negatives spread across the various damage types paint a very different picture than what is dominant in the game. While status effects play a heavy role here, there are more factors than just status that affect the appeal of certain damage types. Damage Overview Table Damage Overview POI We’re going to start with general observations from the “Damage Effectiveness” section of the chart before getting into the nitty-gritty of the actual effectiveness of the Damage Types. It is important to note that we will be discussing both the in-action effectiveness of these damage types as well as their performance assumed from the values alone. This allows us to highlight where the game misleads players and highlight the disconnects between the Damage Types’ stats and their actual in-game performance. In the section of the chart labelled “Totals,” I have included the total amount of bonuses and negatives each Damage type has. I have used green text for any values above the average amount of bonuses and below the average amount of negatives for all Damage Types. I have used red text for any values below the average amount of bonuses and above the average amount of negatives for all Damage Types. Throughout this section, there are 3 factors that I touch on with more specificity in individual areas, but it is important to keep in mind these 3 factors when considering anything about the Damage system: Physical Damage types cannot be added where there are none and do not scale off of non-Physical and non-Base damage, making them less desirable from a damage standpoint. You can only have one Elemental Damage Type on a given weapon. Combination Elements costing 2 slots makes them less efficient for mod space and thus less desirable than a comparable single Element. Damage Effectiveness: 1. At face value, the Physical Damage Types should be just as effective, if not more so, than the Elemental and Combination Elemental Damage Types. In practice, this is not actually the case due to the unique maths used by Physical Damage Mods which massively decreases their damage potential compared to Elemental and Combination Elemental Damage Types. They are also hampered by the inability to add any of the Physical Damage types to a weapon via mods that do not natively have it. This means if a weapon doesn’t have one of the 3 Physical Damage Types it has to use an Element or Combination Element to provide a similar bonus. 2. At face value, the Elemental damage types appear to be only slightly less effective than Combination Elements but their usage in-game is far less common than their on-paper effectiveness suggests should be the case. This is due to a hidden opportunity cost for using Elemental Damage that prevents the use of certain Combination Elements and lower total damage modding potential. 3. The Infested have a lot of damage types that are effective against them, but in-game you almost only see Heat, Slash, and Viral used. The reason for this is partially caused by status effects invalidating or surpassing their defences, Gas being an extremely niche damage type with a very weak status, and Radiation being bad vs Infested Health Types and only good against one of their Armour Types. 4. At face value, many of the damage types' effectiveness does not line up with their effectiveness in-game. a. Physical i. Impact is very good against Shield Types and should be the second-best choice for dealing with Shields, but that title actually falls to Magnetic Damage, with Toxin Damage’s status effect (which bypasses Shields) being the best element for “dealing” with Shields (“dealing” being a euphemism, as toxic status simply bypasses shields). ii. Puncture should be a strong contender for dealing with Armour but instead, that title is held by Slash, Corrosive, and Heat Damage. Puncture is less effective against Alloy Armour than every other Damage type that has a bonus to Alloy Armour (Puncture’s bonus is 15% instead of the normal minimum of 25%), does not have a status effect that reduces or ignores Armour like Slash, Corrosive, and Heat Damage, and due to the maths with modding Physical Damage has much lower damage potential than Corrosive and Heat Damage. iii. Slash should be hyper-effective against Health Types and Ineffective against Armour, however, due to its status effect’s true damage, it’s one of the best options for both Health and Armour. While Slash also suffers from the maths used for modding physical damage types, its bonuses against most Health Types and its Status’ ability to bypass Armour more than makeup for the lowered potential damage. b. Elemental i. Cold should be an adequate choice for Armour and Shields, but due to Toxin status bypassing Shields, Heat and Corrosive Bypassing Armour, and modding Cold Damage preventing you from using Viral Damage, it becomes a very poor choice for many builds. ii. Electricity looks like it should be an okay choice, but it’s most effective against Machinery Health, which too few units use to make that valuable, and Robotic Health, which like every other Health Type grants much bigger bonuses if you use Viral status. Outside of Electricity’s Chaining Status, which can help spread your damage, you aren’t going to mod for Electricity when only considering its type effectiveness. iii. Heat is far more effective than it appears on paper due to being effective against the most common Health types of 2 Factions and its status effect both reducing armour and supplying a powerful damage over time effect. iv. Toxin on paper looks like it shouldn’t be highly effective against the entire corpus faction, however, its status effect bypassing most Shields makes it one of the go-to choices when modding against corpus. You massively decrease the time-to-kill against corpus when you don’t have to deplete their shields first. c. Combination Elemental i. Blast looks like it should at least be a consideration for modding, but it isn’t. Blast is the worst damage type in the game, it’s weak against Armour, and very strong against the rarest Health type in the game. Blast’s only saving grace is that it has a minor bonus against Fossilized Health, but Corrosive damage being effective against both Fossilized Health and Armour as well as decreasing total Armour puts it miles ahead of Blast. As Fossilized is a Health type, that also means that Viral’s status effect makes it far superior to any bonus Blast could offer, and as modding for Blast prevents you from modding for Viral it is the worst damage type you could choose. ii. Corrosive is better than it appears on paper due to its status effect reducing all Armour. While ferrite armour becomes less prevalent at higher levels, the ability to reduce the Armour values makes it on par or superior to Radiation even versus Alloy Armour. Its only negative is that you cannot mod for both Corrosive Damage and Viral, which makes Fire more appealing as an Armour solution. iii. Gas should be a good choice against Infested as it’s effective against 2 of their Health Types, but due to Viral’s status effect, Viral will always be the superior option. If you mod for Gas you cannot mod for Viral, making Gas a much less effective and far less appealing option. Gas is only saved from being the worst Damage Type by both of its bonuses being to the very common Infested Health types. iv. Magnetic on paper is only good against shields and this lines up well with how effective it is in-game, although Magnetic’s status effect does make it perform even better than its on-paper stats attest. Magnetic’s status effect is nearly the same as Viral except it affects Shields instead of Health, it also has one additional bonus: it prevents shield regen for the duration of the status effect. This makes Magnetic the best Damage Type to use against enemies with non-bypassable Shields and the second-best Damage Type against all Shields. Unfortunately, bypassing Shields with Toxin Damage’s status effect will always lower your time-to-kill far more than using Magnetic Damage. v. Radiation should also be a strong contender for dealing with Armour but once more, that title is held by Slash, Corrosive, and Heat Damage. Using Radiation prevents you from using Corrosive or Heat. Radiation is very effective against Alloy Armour and Infested sinew but is only neutral against Ferrite Armour, Corrosive Damage is very good against Ferrite Armour, and it decreases the values of all Armour Defence Types. Heat is often chosen over both of those options because Heat also reduces armour while still allowing you to mod for Viral Damage, something prevented if you use Corrosive, and because you cannot mod both Heat and Radiation at the same time, the Damage type that reduces all armour is more effective than the one that only provides a bonus. vi. Viral looks like it should only be slightly better than Gas and Blast, the two worst Damage Types. Viral’s status is what, for the most part, drags it from the bottom tier up to the best option, in nearly every single situation. Viral’s status effect grants the biggest bonus to every Health Type, even if it’s a Health type that is strong against Viral such as the Infested Health type. Viral’s damage bonus against Grineer and Corpus health types helps it become even more ridiculously effective, especially in the Grineer’s case which due to nearly every unit being bolstered by armour causes Viral paired with Slash’s status effect to be disgustingly effective as you are only targeting their health. Bonus and Negative Totals 1. When looking at the total bonuses of a Damage vs their total negatives, the Physical Damage types appear to be the superior choice in most cases, while the division of bonuses and negatives among Elemental and Combination Elemental Damage types appears generally equal with fewer bonuses overall. Unfortunately, bonuses and negatives don’t tell the whole story if you take status effects into account the effective bonuses and negatives can change drastically. This is one of the most confusing issues when learning the Warframe Damage system: status effects and methods of overcoming Defenses effectively change or nullify the underlying effectiveness of Damage types, regardless of their actual bonuses and negatives. a. Physicals i. Impact has the fewest bonuses and the second-lowest amount of negatives of the Physical Damage types. Unfortunately, One of its bonuses is against machinery, a Health type which is so rare its bonus may as well be non-existent for the majority of the game. Leaving it with 2 bonuses against Shield Defence types. As mentioned previously there are already 2 superior options for dealing with shields and this leaves Impact as one of the worst damage types outside two niches: triggering parazon finishers, and as an extra element for Condition overload or other +Damage per Status effect mods. ii. Puncture comes in strong with 4 bonuses, 3 of which are good against Armour, the most prevalent defence type. Unfortunately, it has the lowest bonus against Alloy armour which is more common to encounter at higher level play. It also suffers from the problem that a Damage bonus is inferior in effectiveness to Armour stripping/removal. iii. Slash even on paper is head and shoulders above the other Physicals. It has more bonuses than any other Damage type before you take into account status. If you take its status into effect, it gains 3 more bonuses against Armour types and loses 2 of its negatives, leaving it with 8 bonuses and 1 negative, making it arguably the best damage type in the game. b. Elementals A general issue with the Elemental Damage types is that they interfere with each other to create the Combination Elementals. This means that you can only use 1 at a time and places all the Elementals in immediate competition for which one provides the most benefit over the rest as you can only use 1 single Elemental Damage Type in a build at any time. The best single Elements are Heat followed by Toxin. Other Elements are rarely seen outside of an Element inherent to the weapon, or the single Element Damage Type is being chosen to combine with an inherent Element on the weapon to make a more desired Combination Element. i. Cold looks like one of the stronger Elementals with bonuses against Armour and Shields, but in both cases bypassing or removing those defences are the superior option to just a damage bonus. While Cold can be used in tandem with Corrosive, Corrosive’s armour removal provides enough of a benefit to slot an alternative mod for greater benefit versus a different Defence type or boosting a different stat. In the case of shields, if you use Cold you lose access to Viral and Magnetic which are both vastly superior in overcoming Health and Shields respectively. There is no situation where Cold damage’s bonus is greater than the alternatives. ii. Electricity at face value is a fairly neutral damage type with only 2 bonuses and 1 negative, all at the 50% mark. However, one of its bonuses is for Machinery Health and as such, is ineffective for the majority of the game. Its bonus against Robotic health is restricted to the Corpus faction and, like all Damage bonuses to Health, is inferior to Viral status. That leaves us with its weakness to Alloy Armour, which applies to every faction. Effectively, Electricity is a mostly neutral damage type that is bad against Armour when all factions have Armour. iii. Heat already looks like a strong contender on paper, with 3 bonuses and only 1 negative. Heat is effective against Grineer and both infested Health types. Heat is secretly good against all armour due to its status effect that reduces Armour. This combination makes Heat one of the best options for both the Grineer and Infested factions. Due to Corpus having armour, Heat is still a solid choice against the Corpus faction, despite being weak against Proto Shields. iv. Toxin appears to be one of the worst-performing elements, with only 2 bonuses and 3 negatives. However, its bonuses and negatives don’t matter. You do not pick Toxin for its damage type, you pick Toxin for its Status effect that bypasses the majority of Shields, you don’t need to care about bonuses when you can invalidate almost an entire Defence type. The Damage Bonus versus Flesh does make Toxin even more effective against the human Corpus enemies. c. Combination Elementals i. Blast looks like a completely average Combination Element, but it’s the hands-down worst Damage type in the game. It’s most effective against Machinery Health, which as detailed previously is too rare of a bonus to be useful, and its negatives are both for Armour types. There is no reason to ever use this element unless it already exists on a weapon. ii. Corrosive at face value appears to be only effective against the Armour found at lower enemy levels. This is false, as Corrosive’s Status effect makes it the 3rd most effective option against Armour types. While Corrosive is often replaced against Grineer with Slash or Heat, it is still the single most effective damage type against specifically the Deimos Infested due to the prevalence of Fossilized Health, Ferrite Armour, and Infested Sinew Armour on the majority of Deimos Infested. While Corrosive doesn’t offer a bonus against Sinew Armour, its Armour stripping Status effect makes Corrosive incredibly desirable as a one-stop solution to the Deimos infested. iii. Gas at 2 bonuses and 2 negatives looks to be as effective as Blast and unfortunately, it is, both on paper and in practice. Its bonuses to the Infested and Infested Flesh health types are rendered less valuable due to both Heat and Slash providing the same bonus versus Infested Flesh on top of their other benefits. Also of note is that only 3 of the enemies with Infested Health have enough Health (Juggernaut, Leaping Thrasher, and Deimos Therid) to warrant considering a Health bonus modifier. Those specific enemies also happen to be immune to Viral making this the rare case where Viral can’t be the better option. Unfortunately, if you build for Gas you can’t use Heat. Heat also has bonuses against Infested and Infested Flesh Health types and even though the bonuses are lower, using heat is more cost-effective in terms of modding space and utility as Heat’s status reduces Armour, which is a large factor on Deimos where those 3 enemy types are most common. iv. Magnetic is completely accurate. It’s good against shields and that’s it, even the 75% bonus damage against both Shield types exemplifies its total focus on obliterating shields. Its only real downsides are that you cannot build for Viral or Corrosive if you build for Magnetic. Viral is the larger loss, as you can still build for Heat with Magnetic, and depending on the weapon Slash is also a possibility. v. Radiation at face value looks like a very good option for dealing with Armour, especially at higher levels where Alloy Armour becomes more common. Unfortunately, stripping armour is just the far more effective strategy. Why would you choose a single damage type that is better at damaging Armour when you could pick a damage type that makes everything better at killing the Armoured enemy? Radiation also prevents building for Corrosive damage and using Heat, which are the superior options for dealing with Armour. vi. Viral looks like it should be as effective as Gas and Blast but it ends up being one of the very best damage types in the game due to its status effect. When you have a damage type that makes an enemy take 325% more damage from every source rather than only viral, as other Damage type’s bonuses versus Health function. There is no other Damage bonus against Health that can match it, let alone surpass it. Its extremely high bonus against the Cloned Health type makes it incredibly effective against the Grineer Faction, and with the ability to pair it with both Slash and Heat to deal with Grineer Armour, you end up with one build that is superior to nearly every other option possible against that faction. Due to Virals Status’ effect, its negatives are barely noticeable, as even with those reductions Viral is still better than all other Health type damage bonuses. The only enemies where Viral isn’t one of, if not the best supporting Damage type, are the Viral immune enemies found on Deimos. Damage Performance As an addendum to the Damage Overview, I have included a chart that shows each Damage type’s performance versus each faction and damage type. There are 5 key sections explained below. Damage Performance Table 1. Faction Performance Assumed from values alone - which show which faction the damage type should be best and worst against according to their bonuses and weaknesses. 2. Faction Performance in Practice - which is based on the effectiveness of those damage types in-game against the enemy factions. 3. Defence Performance Assumed from values alone - which show which defence type the damage type should be best and worst against according to their bonuses and weaknesses. 4. Defence Performance in Practice - which is based on the effectiveness of those damage types in-game against each defence type. 5. Total Best/Worst Performance - which gives the total number of damage types that are best and worst for each faction and defence type, in each of the previously listed sections. A green number signifies an above-average number for Best values and a below-average number for Worst values. A red number signifies a below-average value for Best values and an above-average number for Worst values. Damage Performance POI Looking at the Faction Performance sections, it is very easy to see that the most dominant damage types either are very effective against all three factions or very effective against 2 with no downside for the 3rd. The only outlier here is Magnetic, which while only effective against one faction, is so effective in its role it is still viable in non-bypassable shield situations. Looking at the Defence Performance sections, it should be noted that health having double the amount of effective options compared to the other defences is not an outlier due to there simply being far more health options in the game. Looking at the Defence Performance sections, it should be noted that in practice there has been a big increase in the damages that are effective versus armour. This is a natural consequence of the faction-wide usage of armour and the need for more methods to counterplay that armour. Suggestions These suggestions are made without consideration of the previous suggestions from the Defence section, as I am writing this about the function of the system as it currently is. While many changes could work in tandem with the previous suggestions, others here would need to be adjusted to function effectively with the previous suggestions. 1. Damage Bonuses against very rare enemy types or enemies without the ability to survive when even a damage type they are resistant to is used against them make several damage bonuses effectively non-existent in terms of usability and desirability. That information should be factored into the Damage type bonuses and not considered against the total bonuses ascribed to that Damage type. 2. If one wants to achieve parity between Armour-focused damage types, then they all need to play by the same rules or have equivalent effectiveness. The option here would be to grant all Armour bonuses the ability to reduce it or If only some options remove or bypass Armour, then the Damage types with only a bonus against the Armour should have a bonus close to equivalent with the effective performance of the Armour reducing options. 3. Toxin damage will always be the best option for Shields where applicable because ignoring a defence type is always superior to having to contend with it. I don’t have a good solution here aside from changing toxins status effect or relying on changes suggested to shields in the previous “Suggestions” section. Potentially you could lower the percentage of damage transferred directly to health from the status effect, but that may be incredibly difficult to fine-tune to both an acceptable level of usefulness while still not completely overshadowing the other damage types with bonuses against shields. Toxin’s underperformance outside of its status effect should also be considered, if the status effect is changed or weakened it might benefit from an additional effect 4. No Damage type that provides a bonus against Health types can achieve the same effectiveness and ease of use of viral. Instead of picking and choosing between 8 different Damage types for each kind of Health, you can just use viral and be more effective than any one, or more, of the other options. a. One adjustment would be changing Viral from a damage bonus to any damage to a damage bonus for only viral damage. This keeps the bonus high but brings it at least nominally back in line with how other bonuses against Defences function. b. The second adjustment would be to increase the Health damage bonuses for all Health-type-specific Damage bonuses to grant them closer parity, or even superiority to Viral’s Status effect. The specific case, as it is more niche should be a stronger option. 5. As Magnetic functions the same way Viral does but for Shields, it would not be unreasonable for the same adjustments stated above to be made to both Magnetic and the Damage types with bonuses against Shields. It should, however, be taken into consideration that there are only 3 Damage types with Shield bonuses, which is far less than ones with Health and Armour bonuses, and with one of the three being a Physical damage type that cannot be modded onto a weapon that does not already have it, there is very little mod diversity when targeting Shield Defences. a. Blast would be a good candidate for another Damage type with a bonus against Shields. It could be described in the lore as being a strong enough concussive force to overload the Shield matrix. Status Overview So finally, we come to it, the original topic that launched this threadnaught: the Damage type Status effects. Throughout this analysis, I have come to believe that there are very few “Bad” status effects; the issues plaguing status seem to come down to the Meta options being overwhelmingly the best options with our current Defence and Damage systems’ behaviours. We are going to break the conventional formatting here and start by organizing the Status effects into the following categories: Meta - The best choices in the game as it stands today. Things considered Meta or top tier for status choices Conditional - A status effect that can be extremely useful but only in specific situations Okay - A status effect that is useful but not particularly desirable compared to the Meta category Ineffective - A status effect that provides very little benefit and is actively avoided when modding I do not expect every single person to agree with my categorizations, but I believe it to be accurate for the average player and will explain the reasoning behind placing the Status effects in each category. This section will only be looking at the status effects themselves, the section “Putting everything together” will cover how enemy Defences and the Damage types contribute to a status being considered good or bad. Meta 1. Slash - Bleed a. Bleed dealing damage-over time as True damage allows Slash to ignore armour. Making it one of the best elements for dealing with armoured enemies, where the end-game enemies are all armoured. b. Damage-over-time effects are also very effective for depleting shields. 2. Heat - Ignite a. Ignite has nearly the same advantages as Slash. Instead of ignoring armour, it reduces armour but can be continually refreshed to maintain the reduction. b. It has a very high 50% of its damage as a damage-over-time effect, which helps deplete shields. c. It also has a mild CC effect on humanoid enemies while they are burning, causing them to stand still and wave their arms around. 3. Toxin - Poison a. Poison bypasses most shields in the game, invalidating that defence b. Poison has a very high damage over time effect at 50% of its damage. 3. Corrosive - Corrosion a. Corrosive can reduce all armour, granting a more comprehensive benefit against multiple factions than any other damage type that only grants a bonus against a specific type of armour. 4. Viral - Virus a. The long and the short of it is that Virus makes everything else more effective. It amplifies all health damage on targets afflicted with Virus, which also increases the performance of damage types with bonuses against armour because Health with Armour is still Health at the end of the day. Situational 1. Impact - Stagger a. If Stagger’s effect was only its original one which causes the enemy unit to stagger, it would be regarded as completely ineffective. Staggering an enemy is disruptive to gameplay with how the unit ends up jerking around, making precision shots much more difficult, which is a very sad state of affairs when many of the high-precision weapons have a heavy bias to impact. b. The secondary effect of Stagger is what elevates the status to situational use. While many users malign using parazon finishers due to the horde nature of the combat, they are exceptionally useful against Eximus, which have a much lower spawn cap and more substantial defences. Even against some of the heavier units it can be useful, as an execution kill at 75% health can be very useful. 2. Cold - Freeze a. Freeze is a slow that works on nearly all enemies, even some that are immune to other slowing effects (albeit at lower effectiveness than cold procs on other enemies). Freeze ends up situational because its target count is dependent on the target count of the weapon. Spraying down enemies with a cold primer is deemed as wasted time that could be spent just killing the enemy instead. b. Compounding the previous negative, Cold is one of the component elements for viral and in nearly every situation Viral is the more dependable and beneficial option, leaving cold situational at best. 3. Magnetic - Disruption a. Disruption is the equivalent of Virus for shields. Due to there being enemies with shields that cannot be bypassed by Poison, Magnetic still finds a niche. Magnetic is a combination of Electric and Cold, which means unless your weapon has Magnetic damage as one of its base damage types, you have to give up both Viral and Corrosive as elemental options. In the majority of cases, those two will be the better option. Okay 1. Electricity - Tesla Chain a. Tesla chain has a high 50% of damage dealt as damage over time effect. b. A much more valuable component of Tesla Chain is its ability to chain to other enemies, effectively creating an AOE weapon. With the bias towards AOE present in the game today one might expect this effect to raise Electricity’s position to at least situational, but its 3-meter range makes it a very small AOE and, as it cannot be increased, less appealing overall. 2. Radiation - Confusion a. Confusion can be a very useful effect but is seen as disruptive by some players and a waste of time by others. Confusion causes enemies to attack each other, and it can disrupt the flow of enemies from spawn locations to the players' location, as they will instead target each other and cease movement toward the players. On missions where killing enemies is required, this can be quite frustrating. b. Much like Freeze, Confusion provides crowd control, however, just like Freeze crowd control is considered inferior to killing the units faster. Ineffective 3. Puncture - Weakened a. Reducing damage from an enemy by 75% no longer matters by the time a reduction in incoming damage would truly be helpful. At high levels, enemies can do hundreds of thousands of damage and even with a 75% reduction, there is still more than enough damage being produced to one-shot the player several times over. 4. Blast - Inaccuracy a. Similarly to Weakened, Inaccuracy decreases enemy accuracy by up to 75% percent. At the levels where more missed shots should theoretically equate to more survival, reality simply doesn’t meet expectations. When the Incoming damage gets high enough, even the remaining 25% of the shots are more than enough to kill you. This status effect does not affect melee units 5. Gas - Gas Cloud a. Gas cloud creates a 3-meter at base, 6-meter at max area-of-effect Gas-Damage-field. b. While it has the same high 50% damage over time as other elements, it’s ultimately hamstrung by its damage type and specifically how its damage is calculated. c. Unlike the other Elemental Damage over time effects, Gas does not take any elemental mods into account when calculating its damage. While Ignite, Poison, and Tesla Coil include Heat, Toxin, and Electrical damage respectively in their calculations, Gas Cloud instead uses the same equation as a physical damage type. Using that equation creates a problem when applied to an Elemental or Combination Elemental Damage type. Base damage is only made up of the 3 Physical Damage types, which means that your gas damage doesn’t contribute to the damage-over-time effects damage, nor does Toxin or Heat damage. Observations: General Over time, there has been a shift from the dominance of crowd control to time to kill as a gameplay focus. This can be observed not just in Warframe selection but in the prioritization of Damage types and the Meta Status effects. All 5 of the status effects in the Meta category are very effective at increasing kill speed: ignoring or stripping armour lowers time to kill, massive damage bonuses versus health lowers time to kill, skipping shields; preventing their regeneration; or massive damage bonuses versus shields lowers time to kill. The Situational and Okay categories are dominated by what used to be the Meta options when crowd control was king. While crowd control is still useful against the average enemy, VIPs being almost immune to it in many cases and with how placing crowd control in direct competition with dead enemies, always results in dead enemies being the better option, it’s not hard to see why those effects have suffered such a fall from grace. Unless there is an advantage to keeping enemies alive, it is currently faster and easier to just kill enemies outright. I can only think of 2 situations where keeping enemies locked down but alive was the best option for players. The first was in the Law of Retribution raid. In that specific case, it was better to lock down the infinite spawns with CC than have to keep devoting resources to kill them, as they spawned almost as quickly as they were annihilated. The Law of Retribution is no longer available as a mission. The second is hijack missions, where if you can hit the spawn cap and keep the majority of units locked down, the missions become much easier. The status effects found in the Ineffective category neither provide crowd control nor assist effectively in time to kill. Blast and Puncture could be considered Defensive Status effects, however, they are equally ineffective at providing reliable protection. The Cost/Benefit Analysis This was touched on in the Damage section, but status effects are where we see the full effect of the hidden costs of using certain elements. While Slash is completely unaffected by this due to being a Physical Damage type and either just existing or not, all Elemental and Combination Elemental Status effects have to be taken into account with what you give up to get them. We will do a quick breakdown of the Hidden costs of the Meta status effects as these are the most obvious options and when inverted show why other options end up with lower priority or viability among players. Slash Not applicable Heat You cannot mod any other single Element You cannot mod Blast You cannot mod Gas You cannot mod Radiation Toxin You cannot mod any other single Element You cannot mod Corrosive You cannot mod Gas You cannot mod Viral Corrosive You cannot mod Toxin You cannot mod Electricity You cannot mod Gas You cannot mod Magnetic You cannot mod Radiation You cannot mod Viral Viral You cannot mod Toxin You cannot mod Cold You cannot mod Blast You cannot mod Corrosive You cannot mod Gas You cannot mod Magnetic In the list above you can see that several of the Meta Status effects conflict with each other, however, unlike the options in the other categories they supply something that is deemed equivalent or close enough to the effect they would replace to be a viable choice. For every status effect not found in the Meta category, it has to be worth losing the effect of the Meta Option to consider modding for it at all. While you can circumnavigate this issue somewhat with weapons that have certain inherent Damage types, status effects outside of the Physical damage types are in constant competition with each other and this substantially affects how the Meta shakes out. Suggestions: In all honesty, there aren’t a lot of suggestions that will “fix” bad status by only adjusting the status effects themselves. Still, there are some obvious sore spots where improvements could be made. Blast’s Inaccuracy simply isn’t effective as a defensive measure, as a damage or status effect that kills the unit means they deal zero damage rather than a miss chance that can still kill us a quarter of the time. Inaccuracy offers no improvements in time to kill or crowd control, thus when brought into competition with status effects that provide either of those elements it will always lose. An alternative status effect could be a weapon jam. While it wouldn’t lower the time to kill, it would provide a quite strong bit of CC where affected enemies would be unable to deal damage to you at all. Melee units could be staggered (or stunned, see Impact’s Stagger suggestion below) or knocked down without a ragdoll effect to avoid the issues of the original blast. Puncture’s Weakened suffers from the same issues as Blast. It fails defensively as the percentage of damage it allows through will still kill you while also not offering anything to decrease time to kill or grant crowd control. I do not have a suggestion for this but in the Dev workshop that was released on July 24th, 2023 the proposed changes to Weakened in the next update is an additive critical chance bonus applied after mods with a maximum of a 25% bonus. Gas’ Gas Cloud should just be changed to apply heat, toxin, or gas Damage types to its area of effect Damage. The damage calculation limitation imposed on it from when it changed from an Area of Effect Poison, which had it completely overshadowing Toxin, to its current Gas Cloud mechanic was an unnecessary nerf after it lost the ability to be applied directly to health. All crowd control options are overshadowed by effects that decrease the time to kill. A large component of this is that it takes the exact same time and effort to apply the status effects as it would to mod for Meta options and just kill them. Honestly, I think the only way to counterbalance the advantages of a dead enemy would be to allow a greater proliferation of the status effects that provide crowd control, Electricity’s Tesla Coil is a good example of this where it at the very least retains some usefulness due to its area of effect affecting more than one unit at a time. When a unit is affected by Freeze or Confusion, they would act as a locus to trigger the same effect in enemies that are within a certain range of them. If an enemy steps too closely to a frozen unit, they slowly accrue freeze up to the maximum currently on the frozen unit, with the stacks depleting as normal in accordance with their own onset timer. Radiation would work similarly to Freeze with nearby units accruing Confusion when near enemies afflicted by that status effect. Irradiated people, places, and things do sicken those that encounter them, after all. Radiation’s Confusion’s disruption to enemy flow is one of its bigger negatives, if the enemy could continue to move towards the player while attacking others on the way it should resolve that, you could have the behaviour switch back towards focusing greater aggression on previously friendly units once within a certain distance of the player. This would not be a perfect solution and likely would lead to its own pathing oddities, but would hopefully mitigate enemies needing to be hunted down by players because they were too focused on killing their own. Essentially, this behaviour could be repurposed from the behaviour of enemies at the end of exterminate missions, where the units will run away from the player but still shoot at them while running. In our case, they would shoot at things as they instead move toward the players' position. Impact’s Stagger detrimental stagger effect is a far greater handicap than its niche but strong early Parazon trigger effect. Rather than causing stagger, I would suggest replacing it with a stun animation that could reuse the sleeping animations. This would cause the stagger effect to no longer be a detriment, but an actual boon for high-accuracy weapons, opening enemies up to easier shots at their weak points. If you wanted to grant this improved crowd control effect proliferation, you could have enemies that run by the unit within a certain distance of them stop and check the afflicted unit before moving on. Putting Everything Together Thus far we have outlined the problems of each component of the Defence, Damage, and Status systems and proposed solutions that apply to each individual category. If you’ve made it this far or skimmed and found yourself here, then I have to admit that I lied. This is the “Secret Bonus Too Long Didn’t Read” section, where I simply outline the combination of factors that have spurred me onto writing this monstrous breakdown. While many people will be able to extrapolate the current situation from the data here, I felt it was important to actually go through the breakdown of each component in these interlocking systems so those less familiar with them can also understand the reasoning behind my essay. Defences All factions have armour again, which was one of the key factors for the change from damage 1.0 to damage 2.0 that we experience today. Most importantly, with all factions, and especially their tougher units using armour, armour has to be one of the main considerations for modding even against the “non-armoured” Factions. While Warframe powers can be considered here, there are few and far between that provide as cost-effective or sustainable armour removal as status effects do. Energy is simply not as plentiful, nor as easily acquired as bullets. With the majority of shields being bypassed by Toxin, Shields can never be as effective a Defence as Armour and will always be considered as an afterthought when modding except with the rare enemies that are immune to Poison bypassing their shields. Damages With the proliferation of Armour among all factions, damage focus shifts to dealing with that armour and increasing damage to armoured Health as much as possible if outright removal isn’t an option. In order to maximize performance with that goal in mind, Damage types that do not provide an advantage against armour quickly fall by the wayside Due to any Armour that remains on a unit still providing that Damage type’s bonus damage against armour to its remaining Health, enemies with armoured Health that the player cannot fully strip the armour from often get a greater effective bonus from the Damage bonus against Armour than the one from the Damage bonuses against Health types. Due to this, it further encourages modding towards overcoming Armour. Status The Meta options almost all contain a method of reducing or ignoring Armour. The one case where they do not is Toxin’s Poison, which bypasses the majority of shields. Viral’s Virus grants a larger bonus than every other bonus against Health types in the game. At the same time, Armour modifying Health means Virus also grants increased damage against health from the Damage types with a bonus against Armour. As it takes the same effort to apply crowd control effects to enemies as to kill them, status modding has shifted towards effects that decrease time to kill over effects that grant crowd control All Together Now This ultimately means that the entire mix of Defences, Damages, and Status all funnel down into very narrow build goals: Deal with armour. Biggest bonuses to kill faster. If it doesn’t decrease the time to kill, it’s useless. And this is where we hit on every reason the current Status effects that are Meta are leading the pack They deal with armour They drastically decrease the time to kill. They offer the biggest bonuses at the least cost. This explanation is not easily summed up, but between the limitations of mod slots and the cumbersome nature of swapping weapon configs a single build that is effective against every faction is much more valuable than bespoke ones that are 3 menus deep and require changing between factions. Heat, Viral, and Slash is effective against all enemies, except for the Deimos infested at which point you swap out Viral for Corrosive, one of the other Meta options. This combination also tends to utilize slash-focused weaponry so that no additional slash mods are needed to bias the Status types produced towards slash and only requires 3 elemental mods leaving more room for other damage-modifying options like critical and galvanized mods. As a consequence of these build goals, there is a marked decrease in modding diversity once you leave the early levels of play. For veteran players, it also leads to the homogenization of builds and turns mechanics that can and should have depth into something very shallow. So if you made it all the way down here, thanks for taking the time to read this. If you skipped down here instead, hi, if these summations don’t make sense, might I recommend visiting the prior sections? 14 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(NSW)Greybones Posted August 17, 2023 Share Posted August 17, 2023 (edited) I skimmed to see just how long it was. Is there something about balancing around the Meta first and foremost, working from the top down instead of the bottom up? Edited August 17, 2023 by (NSW)Greybones Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drasiel Posted August 18, 2023 Author Share Posted August 18, 2023 1 hour ago, (NSW)Greybones said: I skimmed to see just how long it was. Is there something about balancing around the Meta first and foremost, working from the top down instead of the bottom up? It's not really about balancing around the meta, all of the discussion around the best and worst status options only look at status and what can be changed about status to fix it. However, the reason why people decide which status is best is based on how enemy defences and our damage bonuses work, you can't "fix" status without considering those aspects. So this entire thing is a breakdown of the design and gradual updates and changes to enemy defences, damage types, and status that have caused the current meta to become dominant and led to the homogenization of builds. Or to put it more succinctly this is more a Diagnosis of the problems rather than a treatment plan. We can't crowdsource better solutions if we solve a symptom and not the actual source of the problem. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(NSW)Greybones Posted August 18, 2023 Share Posted August 18, 2023 44 minutes ago, Drasiel said: It's not really about balancing around the meta, all of the discussion around the best and worst status options only look at status and what can be changed about status to fix it. However, the reason why people decide which status is best is based on how enemy defences and our damage bonuses work, you can't "fix" status without considering those aspects. So this entire thing is a breakdown of the design and gradual updates and changes to enemy defences, damage types, and status that have caused the current meta to become dominant and led to the homogenization of builds. Or to put it more succinctly this is more a Diagnosis of the problems rather than a treatment plan. We can't crowdsource better solutions if we solve a symptom and not the actual source of the problem. Alright. I did skim through at least a bit of the start and saw things like Viral’s just so much better than everything else, which from a variety perspective raised an eyebrow. Like, if I got an Amprex and am doing content that needs all of one damage mod (freeing up the rest of the slots for whatever else), I’m not really… going to run Viral, right? That’s two modslots being used instead of one. Or from the modless baseline something slow-firing low-status isn’t necessarily going to benefit from equipping just Viral as much as something that’s innately designed to spread as much status. Plus most of the discussion around Viral/Slash happens around unbalanced Steel Path, mainly because the armour scaling kind of doesn’t allow the sort of viability of direct elemental damage to armour that the more-balanced non-SP part of the game does. Most discussions around this stuff seems to work from a top-down perspective of trying to adjust according to the most powerful, cheesiest, most esoteric incarnations we can muster and then the rest of the game will just sort of settle into place, which always struck me as odd. I’ll have a look through the rest of your post while keeping an eye out for alternative ways of thinking that are based on ground-up approaches that influence every build/loadout we can make and every mission and enemy type we can combine with our creations Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drasiel Posted August 18, 2023 Author Share Posted August 18, 2023 5 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said: Alright. I did skim through at least a bit of the start and saw things like Viral’s just so much better than everything else, which from a variety perspective raised an eyebrow. Like, if I got an Amprex and am doing content that needs all of one damage mod (freeing up the rest of the slots for whatever else), I’m not really… going to run Viral, right? That’s two modslots being used instead of one. Or from the modless baseline something slow-firing low-status isn’t necessarily going to benefit from equipping just Viral as much as something that’s innately designed to spread as much status. Plus most of the discussion around Viral/Slash happens around unbalanced Steel Path, mainly because the armour scaling kind of doesn’t allow the sort of viability of direct elemental damage to armour that the more-balanced non-SP part of the game does. Most discussions around this stuff seems to work from a top-down perspective of trying to adjust according to the most powerful, cheesiest, most esoteric incarnations we can muster and then the rest of the game will just sort of settle into place, which always struck me as odd. I’ll have a look through the rest of your post while keeping an eye out for alternative ways of thinking that are based on ground-up approaches that influence every build/loadout we can make and every mission and enemy type we can combine with our creations To touch specifically on the points you mention, The amount of bonus damage gained from viral status combined with the nature of how that bonus is applied is what makes it a very alluring choice in the first place. Virus (the name of the status effect) is a bonus to damage on Health so you can directly compare it to every damage type that gives bonus damage on health. All other damage-based health bonuses only reach up to 75% additional damage while Viral's bonus can reach 325%. The other damage-based bonuses to health only apply their bonus damage to specifically the damage type with that bonus (ie., Slash's bonus against clone health only increases Slash's damage) while viral is bonus damage on every damage type that hits an enemy under the effects virus. So instead of picking and choosing between 8 different options for health bonuses that are much weaker and require you to change builds between factions, you spend 2 slots to get viral, get bonus damage to all health, get a much larger bonus than any other health bonus, and never have to change your loadout (except on deimos). To get around the low-firing, low-status weapons, people have started using "status painters" Fast-firing weapons with high status they can shoot at enemies to get their status effects "painted" across the group and then easily take them out with their bigger slower weapon. The Panzer Vulpaphyla is also often used here as the companion is immortal and its ability is a set of viral quills that works as a viral status painter. Steel Path exacerbates and highlights the focus of the meta, but the build focus towards viral and slash predates its addition. With, the addition of the Zarimon and Duviri to the starchart this only encourages more meta-consideration at the Startchart level. Duviri's circuit especially, because you face the corrupted which means damage bonuses to health outside Bane of Corrupted are less efficient and just won't work as well, so viral is the better choice there to guarantee consistent health bonuses. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
taiiat Posted August 18, 2023 Share Posted August 18, 2023 hmm, it's true that tying Status Effects to Damage output does technically put things at a crossroads. in order for a Status Effect to be good it can't just be good, you also have to be able to get enough of it to apply it frequently enough, or it has to be an effect that applying it just once in a while fulfills its use. since we weigh Status Effects from Damage, that does create a double stacked scenario that some Status Effects are kinda doomed to always be mediocre at best because you just cannot get enough of that Damage to actually apply that Status Effect with enough frequency. the obvious answer to that is decoupling Status Effects from Damage output, but then we need a new way to determine how to pick Status Effects and i don't have an idea for that atm. also i get the impression that you're.... outlining how the game currently works, plus adjustments you'd like - and as a result that makes the Post 2-3x longer than it needs to be, and makes it confusing to Read because i have to decipher whether what i'm Reading is something new or isn't. (and so yes, i didn't Read most of this) 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(NSW)Greybones Posted August 18, 2023 Share Posted August 18, 2023 22 minutes ago, Drasiel said: To touch specifically on the points you mention, The amount of bonus damage gained from viral status combined with the nature of how that bonus is applied is what makes it a very alluring choice in the first place. Virus (the name of the status effect) is a bonus to damage on Health so you can directly compare it to every damage type that gives bonus damage on health. All other damage-based health bonuses only reach up to 75% additional damage while Viral's bonus can reach 325%. The other damage-based bonuses to health only apply their bonus damage to specifically the damage type with that bonus (ie., Slash's bonus against clone health only increases Slash's damage) while viral is bonus damage on every damage type that hits an enemy under the effects virus. So instead of picking and choosing between 8 different options for health bonuses that are much weaker and require you to change builds between factions, you spend 2 slots to get viral, get bonus damage to all health, get a much larger bonus than any other health bonus, and never have to change your loadout (except on deimos). To get around the low-firing, low-status weapons, people have started using "status painters" Fast-firing weapons with high status they can shoot at enemies to get their status effects "painted" across the group and then easily take them out with their bigger slower weapon. The Panzer Vulpaphyla is also often used here as the companion is immortal and its ability is a set of viral quills that works as a viral status painter. Steel Path exacerbates and highlights the focus of the meta, but the build focus towards viral and slash predates its addition. With, the addition of the Zarimon and Duviri to the starchart this only encourages more meta-consideration at the Startchart level. Duviri's circuit especially, because you face the corrupted which means damage bonuses to health outside Bane of Corrupted are less efficient and just won't work as well, so viral is the better choice there to guarantee consistent health bonuses. I have to admit there’s some… oddnesses with this take. Like, again, not every weapon will benefit from viral as effectively from a “The goal is more variety of gameplay and build from things like extra slots, not necessarily overkill” perspective. Changing elements isn’t really a problem and lets us design for roles for our equipment to fulfill to enable gameplay that requires switching between weapons according to the situation, but I’ve done things like made a Kraken build for level 60 content that was designed around the gun fulfilling a role without overstepping it, and it just did more damage with Corrosive against Corrosive-weak enemies for fewer mods than trying to get it to proc Viral. And a status painter sounds exactly like the thing I’d sometimes want a gun to do..? When the changes dropped I was like “I’m gonna make a gun that’s meant to debuff the enemy without hogging all the kills and giving the debuff a chance to be effective in the first place”, and some weapons leant into the concept better than others from the baseline, which I thought was great. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds like Viral could do with a slight nerf; sometimes I’d make a build that I’d expect to benefit more from non-Viral than Viral and it was slightly beaten out by Viral in unexpected ways (though I also may have misinterpreted the idea behind the weapon and it actually makes sense; dunno, would need to do more extensive testing), but from experience it’s not as over-dominating a choice for gameplay as it’s often made out to be. Blast though. That needs a look at. Not a lot of enemies weak to it and its status effect, like Puncture, could maybe do with something a little flashier Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drasiel Posted August 18, 2023 Author Share Posted August 18, 2023 6 minutes ago, taiiat said: hmm, it's true that tying Status Effects to Damage output does technically put things at a crossroads. in order for a Status Effect to be good it can't just be good, you also have to be able to get enough of it to apply it frequently enough, or it has to be an effect that applying it just once in a while fulfills its use. since we weigh Status Effects from Damage, that does create a double stacked scenario that some Status Effects are kinda doomed to always be mediocre at best because you just cannot get enough of that Damage to actually apply that Status Effect with enough frequency. the obvious answer to that is decoupling Status Effects from Damage output, but then we need a new way to determine how to pick Status Effects and i don't have an idea for that atm. also i get the impression that you're.... outlining how the game currently works, plus adjustments you'd like - and as a result that makes the Post 2-3x longer than it needs to be, and makes it confusing to Read because i have to decipher whether what i'm Reading is something new or isn't. (and so yes, i didn't Read most of this) Yeah unfortunately since it's on the forums the only way to have a constructive conversation is to make sure everyone is on the same page. While many players are going to be aware of why things work the way they do and how we got here so many just don't either because they don't personally dig deep into mechanics, they only have passing knowledge on one of the necessary topics, or they are just newer players and don't have the same context available because they haven't been here for 10 years. People also won't respond if they don't think there is something to argue about most of the time. I could have completely skipped the suggestions since my focus is actually raising awareness on the interlocking issues that create "good" and "bad" status but when I've done that before I get told my posts aren't feedback because I'm not trying to solve the problem, and thus, every section gets a suggestions sub-section so I can meet the not-actually-required-standard for "feedback" and not deal with "this isn't feedback tho" comments 12 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said: I have to admit there’s some… oddnesses with this take. Like, again, not every weapon will benefit from viral as effectively from a “The goal is more variety of gameplay and build from things like extra slots, not necessarily overkill” perspective. Changing elements isn’t really a problem and lets us design for roles for our equipment to fulfill to enable gameplay that requires switching between weapons according to the situation, but I’ve done things like made a Kraken build for level 60 content that was designed around the gun fulfilling a role without overstepping it, and it just did more damage with Corrosive against Corrosive-weak enemies for fewer mods than trying to get it to proc Viral. And a status painter sounds exactly like the thing I’d sometimes want a gun to do..? When the changes dropped I was like “I’m gonna make a gun that’s meant to debuff the enemy without hogging all the kills and giving the debuff a chance to be effective in the first place”, and some weapons leant into the concept better than others from the baseline, which I thought was great. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds like Viral could do with a slight nerf; sometimes I’d make a build that I’d expect to benefit more from non-Viral than Viral and it was slightly beaten out by Viral in unexpected ways (though I also may have misinterpreted the idea behind the weapon and it actually makes sense; dunno, would need to do more extensive testing), but from experience it’s not as over-dominating a choice for gameplay as it’s often made out to be. Blast though. That needs a look at. Not a lot of enemies weak to it and its status effect, like Puncture, could maybe do with something a little flashier In order to just change the active config on a weapon you have to go through 4 menus. I've tried doing that for faction-specific builds and it sucks, teammates don't want to wait for you, and it's tedious and annoying to manage when you just want to go play a Corpus mission after dealing with Grineer. Your only faster option is making full load-outs to swap to but unless you are hyper-vigilant about keeping every loadout up to date you're gonna end up in the mission with the wrong equipment. Viral damage isn't what makes Viral good, Viral damage on its own is nearly as terrible as Gas and Blast. The status effect: Virus, is what makes viral good. Every single weapon benefits from hitting something under the effect of Virus. Okay, let's throw some math at this. You have a gun say it does: 10 impact 10 puncture 10 slash, 10 viral, and 10 radiation for 50 total damage. For the purposes of keeping the math simple, We are going to say that it is a health type that only has a 75% weakness to slash damage (ergo slash gets a 75% bonus against it). So we take our 10 slash damage and apply that bonus 10 slash damage + (10 slash damage * 0.75 damage bonus) = 17.5 slash damage Now we add the other damage to that total 10 impact damage + 10 puncture damage + 17.5 slash damage + 10 radiation = 57.5 This is what happens when that same gun is used on an enemy under the effects of 10 stacks of Virus: All damage, including any already present bonus damage, is multiplied so you get (10 impact damage + 10 puncture damage + 17.5 slash damage + 10 radiation) * (2 + (0.25 * (10-1))) This is the formula for calculating the viral bonus = 244.8 Viral's benefit isn't that Viral damage is strong, it's that it makes literally everything stronger across the board than the bonuses that specifically apply to certain health types or only certain damage types. This is compounded when you add in armour as armoured health is still health and now all your damage types with bonuses against armour are amplified too because the damage is striking the unit's health. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(NSW)Greybones Posted August 18, 2023 Share Posted August 18, 2023 56 minutes ago, Drasiel said: In order to just change the active config on a weapon you have to go through 4 menus. I've tried doing that for faction-specific builds and it sucks, teammates don't want to wait for you, and it's tedious and annoying to manage when you just want to go play a Corpus mission after dealing with Grineer. Your only faster option is making full load-outs to swap to but unless you are hyper-vigilant about keeping every loadout up to date you're gonna end up in the mission with the wrong equipment. Viral damage isn't what makes Viral good, Viral damage on its own is nearly as terrible as Gas and Blast. The status effect: Virus, is what makes viral good. Every single weapon benefits from hitting something under the effect of Virus. Okay, let's throw some math at this. You have a gun say it does: 10 impact 10 puncture 10 slash, 10 viral, and 10 radiation for 50 total damage. For the purposes of keeping the math simple, We are going to say that it is a health type that only has a 75% weakness to slash damage (ergo slash gets a 75% bonus against it). So we take our 10 slash damage and apply that bonus 10 slash damage + (10 slash damage * 0.75 damage bonus) = 17.5 slash damage Now we add the other damage to that total 10 impact damage + 10 puncture damage + 17.5 slash damage + 10 radiation = 57.5 This is what happens when that same gun is used on an enemy under the effects of 10 stacks of Virus: All damage, including any already present bonus damage, is multiplied so you get (10 impact damage + 10 puncture damage + 17.5 slash damage + 10 radiation) * (2 + (0.25 * (10-1))) This is the formula for calculating the viral bonus = 244.8 Viral's benefit isn't that Viral damage is strong, it's that it makes literally everything stronger across the board than the bonuses that specifically apply to certain health types or only certain damage types. This is compounded when you add in armour as armoured health is still health and now all your damage types with bonuses against armour are amplified too because the damage is striking the unit's health. It’s a build-crafting game, crafting builds according to how we want to play and what we want our equipment to perform like is what we’ve been doing since the moment we got our first weapon, slotted our first mod, and jumped into our first mission with the result. It’s not difficult to look at some gear and decide “I want to play in a certain way for this mission/across this range of content/using this loadout” and then just equip the things that let that happen, but I get that sometimes someone just wants to jump into a mission and switch off their brain; I sometimes take a build meant for higher-level content into lower-level content because of that or shift my loadout using things like Dragon Keys. Asking that the game be designed and balanced around not making alternative builds though is weird. I know what Virus is, and I’m saying that it’s still of questionable value according to how someone builds and what they want. Yes it can be powerful, but you gotta do things like apply the status in the first place, keep the damage focused on the enemies afflicted with it while bouncing around staying alive, and consume the slots just to apply a debuff when those slots could be better used for something else. So far across the entire game I have rarely felt that Virus is so overwhelmingly a good option compared to what I want to play like/what slots and capacity it takes to use when I want to use those slots and capacity for something else. Usually it’s unbalanced Steel Path and its nonsense armour scaling that makes me more-strongly consider it (which isn’t necessarily a problem because I want an unbalanced place to take my most unbalanced builds), but across the rest of the game just hitting hard enough to fulfill the gameplay goal I’m building for using matching damage types has been sufficient That’s not to say I wouldn’t mind seeing how a debuff would play out, though I wouldn’t want it to be nerfed out of its purpose either Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(NSW)Greybones Posted August 18, 2023 Share Posted August 18, 2023 (edited) 2 hours ago, Drasiel said: In order to just change the active config on a weapon you have to go through 4 menus. Wait, what menus are you referring to? I do it so often it’s second nature, but I thought it was just going into the Arsenal and Upgrade edit: Also the 15% Puncture damage thing is weird and I think should be clarified or Puncture damage adjusted, though I’m not sure why it’s 15% in the first place Edited August 18, 2023 by (NSW)Greybones Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drasiel Posted August 18, 2023 Author Share Posted August 18, 2023 (edited) 1 hour ago, (NSW)Greybones said: It’s a build-crafting game, crafting builds according to how we want to play and what we want our equipment to perform like is what we’ve been doing since the moment we got our first weapon, slotted our first mod, and jumped into our first mission with the result. It’s not difficult to look at some gear and decide “I want to play in a certain way for this mission/across this range of content/using this loadout” and then just equip the things that let that happen, but I get that sometimes someone just wants to jump into a mission and switch off their brain; I sometimes take a build meant for higher-level content into lower-level content because of that or shift my loadout using things like Dragon Keys. Asking that the game be designed and balanced around not making alternative builds though is weird. I know what Virus is, and I’m saying that it’s still of questionable value according to how someone builds and what they want. Yes it can be powerful, but you gotta do things like apply the status in the first place, keep the damage focused on the enemies afflicted with it while bouncing around staying alive, and consume the slots just to apply a debuff when those slots could be better used for something else. So far across the entire game I have rarely felt that Virus is so overwhelmingly a good option compared to what I want to play like/what slots and capacity it takes to use when I want to use those slots and capacity for something else. Usually it’s unbalanced Steel Path and its nonsense armour scaling that makes me more-strongly consider it (which isn’t necessarily a problem because I want an unbalanced place to take my most unbalanced builds), but across the rest of the game just hitting hard enough to fulfill the gameplay goal I’m building for using matching damage types has been sufficient That’s not to say I wouldn’t mind seeing how a debuff would play out, though I wouldn’t want it to be nerfed out of its purpose either I don't want the game balanced around not making alternate builds but the methods we have to equip and manage those are cumbersome and need to be improved to make it more fluid and enjoyable to do so. That's beyond the scope of this topic though even if it does get touched on briefly. The swapping of configs and maintenance of loadouts contributes to the appeal of a one-build-fits-all option and the current meta allows for it. If you have a frame you like that's 3 full loadouts right there: Corpus, Grineer, and Deimos Infested; 4 loadouts if you really like running fissures. If you want to use different primaries or other weapons with that frame? All a full loadout that needs to be made and kept updated. I like swapping items I have dozens of things I can choose between because I have everything in the game except the last few updates items, but I want to spend the time playing the game, not dig through multiple menus just to change a config slot. Before I got sick of it in a 2-hour play session I spent 30 minutes of it messing around equipping things and changing configs. Not making new builds, not adding forma or refining builds, just equipping, unequipping, or changing configs. I'm really not sure what you are building or what your goals are that such a large increase in damage against all health types and armour types is of questionable value. It multiplies everything, weapon damage, crit damage, status overload damage, bane damage, and even warframe ability damage. It's really not difficult to apply even while moving, you just attack them as normal and keep attacking them and they die, there is no increased difficulty to use, you can just play as you normally would. You don't even have to restrict yourself to super-specific weapons, most higher-mastery weapons have enough status to pump out at least a few stacks of viral. While 10 stacks exemplify the disparity even 5 stacks which can be achieved in less than seconds (naturally gun dependent but most can do it in seconds anyway) more than doubles your damage. So I gotta know, what are you using that you consider to be a better option? 1 hour ago, (NSW)Greybones said: Wait, what menus are you referring to? I do it so often it’s second nature, but I thought it was just going into the Arsenal and Upgrade Esc Menu Equipment menu Arsenal Upgrade Change config. walking isn't any faster and takes just as many clicks. I've never understood why there isn't just an arsenal button on the navigation. We begged for it for years and all we got was the loadouts button that requires even more arsenal management to get set up and keep maintained. Edited August 18, 2023 by Drasiel formatting errror 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(NSW)Greybones Posted August 18, 2023 Share Posted August 18, 2023 34 minutes ago, Drasiel said: I don't want the game balanced around not making alternate builds but the methods we have to equip and manage those are cumbersome and need to be improved to make it more fluid and enjoyable to do so. That's beyond the scope of this topic though even if it does get touched on briefly. The swapping of configs and maintenance of loadouts contributes to the appeal of a one-build-fits-all option and the current meta allows for it. If you have a frame you like that's 3 full loadouts right there: Corpus, Grineer, and Deimos Infested; 4 loadouts if you really like running fissures. If you want to use different primaries or other weapons with that frame? All a full loadout that needs to be made and kept updated. I like swapping items I have dozens of things I can choose between because I have everything in the game except the last few updates items, but I want to spend the time playing the game, not dig through multiple menus just to change a config slot. Before I got sick of it in a 2-hour play session I spent 30 minutes of it messing around equipping things and changing configs. Not making new builds, not adding forma or refining builds, just equipping, unequipping, or changing configs. I'm really not sure what you are building or what your goals are that such a large increase in damage against all health types and armour types is of questionable value. It multiplies everything, weapon damage, crit damage, status overload damage, bane damage, and even warframe ability damage. It's really not difficult to apply even while moving, you just attack them as normal and keep attacking them and they die, there is no increased difficulty to use, you can just play as you normally would. You don't even have to restrict yourself to super-specific weapons, most higher-mastery weapons have enough status to pump out at least a few stacks of viral. While 10 stacks exemplify the disparity even 5 stacks which can be achieved in less than seconds (naturally gun dependent but most can do it in seconds anyway) more than doubles your damage. So I gotta know, what are you using that you consider to be a better option? Esc Menu Equipment menu Arsenal Upgrade Change config. walking isn't any faster and takes just as many clicks. I've never understood why there isn't just an arsenal button on the navigation. We begged for it for years and all we got was the loadouts button that requires even more arsenal management to get set up and keep maintained. …Bwuh? Surely the appeal of a one-size-fits-all build is due to players looking for easy and consistent grind with a minimum of engagement as they specifically look for the means to shut their brains off and just grind. A lot of this is… really raising some questions regarding how you build and what you’re looking for. If I have a frame that I like, all the config slots possible won’t cover the various ways I’ll build it, and keeping track of them ended up being way more hassle than just spending half a minute or so swapping a few mods around my entire loadout depending on how far a level distance I was crossing or if I was really shifting my loadout or playstyle (typically I’d keep to a few tried-and-tested options if I was doing multiplayer to even further reduce whatever time it took to make changes, though typically multiplayer is full of a bunch of farmers who were specifically built to not need my help anyways so I didn’t stress to much over making changes). Nowadays Configs have a new lease due to the Helminth and Duviri, but before that they were used for some seriously favourite builds until I found that it was really hard to settle on just one. I don’t get this insistence on Viral on everything; I’m already loaded up on the mods that facilitate the playstyle I want for the mission I’m doing and damage is covered, so even if I had slots left over I’d be considering things like QoL mods or whatever before I consider Viral. Its value is just… not high for a lot of the game. It loses out to things like Zoom or Punchthrough unless I specifically wanted to work with the debuff of Viral, and again not everything takes to spreading it super well, especially when I just want to shoot the thing and they die instead of building to proc status effects unless I’m building to proc status effects, and even then stuff like Radiation’s confusion or my favourite Electricity’s zapping will often be considered before Viral Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BroDutt Posted August 18, 2023 Share Posted August 18, 2023 (edited) Sorry, did you miss the update of Puncture status effect gave 5% up to 25% crit chance and Cold Status Effect also gave 10% Crit Chance max 50%? Edited August 18, 2023 by BroDutt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CatboyPrincess Posted August 18, 2023 Share Posted August 18, 2023 (edited) 11 hours ago, BroDutt said: Sorry, did you miss the update of Puncture status effect gave 5% up to 25% crit chance and Cold Status Effect also gave 10% Crit Chance max 50%? It looks like the post was drafted prior to the patch. @Drasiel I have pretty mixed feelings on the essay. Grouping enemies resulting in quadratic damage scaling with Electric and Gas were not addressed. Combination elements competing with their Primary element components was addressed, which I think is one of the biggest issues presently. This is doubly true for Blast. (Personally, I think the easy fix here is to tag Blast with a multiplicative 25% slow cap, or stun animation as you suggested.) Gas's damage formulation was touched on, which is good. Viral is strong specifically because of its totally overshadowing status effect multiplier cap of 3.25x. Nerfing it to 2.5x or less would bring it far more in line. And yet, at the same time, I feel like Viral's importance is overemphasized. It's important solely for the 3.25x unique multiplier, but there are multiple ways to achieve that. And I think this is where your view has awry: it seems like your perspective is almost exclusively considering "Meta" to be defined as "what is damage and status type that is most applicable to the most statistically common situation to be in." The "Meta" situation basically doesn't exist though, because there are very few missions wherein you'll find priority targets that are especially weak to "Meta" damage and status types. Like, easy counterexamples apart from Deimos Infested are Eidolons (Radiation and Cold are meta), Demolishers and Demolysts (Corrosive, Viral, Radiation, Cold, and Gas vary between worthless and imperative), Acolytes (Corrosive very important, Viral diminished), Index (Radiation is very helpful) and Liches and Sisters (variable in general). In missions in which these enemies spawn numerously and are priority targets necessary for progression, I basically don't care that Radiation and Cold and Blast aren't meta, or that Viral is meta, because they each provide very useful properties. Ex. in Disruption, I like having wide area Radiation, Cold, and Blast application because I don't want to be annoyed by trash mobs. Hello Epitaph status primer! Viral's usefulness comes almost exclusively from its status effect on the Demolisher, while Cold itself is very useful as it serves the same purpose as hard CC like Ensnare, which means I can basically free up an ability Helminth on my build. And, if I drop Viral entirely, it might not be a big deal if I'm running Heat (which arguably is meta) + Sickening Pulse, whose damage factor scales so much faster than a constant 3.25x that 3.25x is basically invisible. As well, Corrosive's status effect is often pointless because Unairu can supplant it but so can various Helminths or even certain weapon and mod combos (like Shattering Impact on Gunblades or Arum Spinosa, or Amalgam Argonak Metal Augur + Argonak + Dagger with Gas). Basically I don't like this top-down, statistical overview approach you're using. Calling your essay "holistic" is a major misnomer when you ignore contextual variables like mission type, loadout slots, Warframe abilities, and Helminth abilities. e: A way bigger part of this picture is that there isn't enough damage type diversity in each of the weapon laodout slots. Innate Gas is VERY rare, innate Cold is rare, and we've more than enough weapons in general that it's weird not to have more innate Magnetic, Radiation, and Corrosive weapons. For better and worse, innate Viral weapons are actually fairly prevalent. Edited August 18, 2023 by CatboyPrincess 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StellarPhenoma Posted August 19, 2023 Share Posted August 19, 2023 The way that I see this issue/debate comes less from a hard numbers point of view, and more from the point of view of generalized game design philosophy. A recurring theme with this essay and discussion is the lack of need to vary our builds based on the game mode, gameplay, and enemy type we are facing in the game. For instance, I have a generalized approach to builds in the game for weapons based on their status and/or critical damage capabilities, and I end up applying a set of rules for each build that make the weapon more than capable for endgame content, regardless of changing damage types per encounter. Really, there is not much variation in each weapon build I have, and everything has begun to blend together in my mind from a gameplay perspective. — Is this a self-inflicted issue? Yes. — Is it still a problem from a game design perspective that I can do this at all? Absolutely. — Is it solvable? 100%. The simple fact of the matter is that we do not have very many good reasons to modify our builds and utilize different elements, damage types, or gameplay approaches. If we can build weapons and frames, so they essentially work as a one-size-fits-all kind of tool, then we have homogenization of the gameplay flow, which is never a good thing and leads to stale gameplay, and even staler “progression”, as the fundamental way we progress and grow in a game is hindered by simplification. This is what I think the crux of the issue comes down to entirely: homogenization and simplification. Warframe's Damage 2.0 was designed to be a solution to this issue as a whole, and over time, DE has fallen into the same traps that brought about the necessity for a Damage 2.0. Armor was stripped from certain units and factions for gameplay design purposes, now it has been brought back as a universal factor. Shields as well, in a way, can be seen through this lens as well. Faction based weaknesses and approaches went from being unique and per-encounter based, to generalized. We now have to factor in everything as a potential threat vector, from armor, to shields, to health, to variations in health design at an almost arbitrary level with some units. Do they have the special health that was supposed to be for one specific faction, or are they simply using the base health states? Is there additional armor on these units, or are they relying on shields. The answer to these either, or question is yes. Which is the problem. We have to mod for everything at all times. If I want to vary up my gameplay, it is through no actual need, and moreso from a desire to experience something differently than usual. There is no reason to take advantage of different approaches, no motivation to do so. Again, this is what the crux of the issue is. There is no reason to vary builds or designs anymore, because everything has become a mess of the same “everything” approach to game design. Warframe is a systems driven game at its core. It is a game driven by intrinsic progression and variation of gameplay based on those systems, with a side-helping of story and lore. When those systems have lost their ability to vary the way we need to approach the game, it becomes a problem. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drasiel Posted August 19, 2023 Author Share Posted August 19, 2023 17 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said: …Bwuh? Surely the appeal of a one-size-fits-all build is due to players looking for easy and consistent grind with a minimum of engagement as they specifically look for the means to shut their brains off and just grind. A lot of this is… really raising some questions regarding how you build and what you’re looking for. If I have a frame that I like, all the config slots possible won’t cover the various ways I’ll build it, and keeping track of them ended up being way more hassle than just spending half a minute or so swapping a few mods around my entire loadout depending on how far a level distance I was crossing or if I was really shifting my loadout or playstyle (typically I’d keep to a few tried-and-tested options if I was doing multiplayer to even further reduce whatever time it took to make changes, though typically multiplayer is full of a bunch of farmers who were specifically built to not need my help anyways so I didn’t stress to much over making changes). Nowadays Configs have a new lease due to the Helminth and Duviri, but before that they were used for some seriously favourite builds until I found that it was really hard to settle on just one. I don’t get this insistence on Viral on everything; I’m already loaded up on the mods that facilitate the playstyle I want for the mission I’m doing and damage is covered, so even if I had slots left over I’d be considering things like QoL mods or whatever before I consider Viral. Its value is just… not high for a lot of the game. It loses out to things like Zoom or Punchthrough unless I specifically wanted to work with the debuff of Viral, and again not everything takes to spreading it super well, especially when I just want to shoot the thing and they die instead of building to proc status effects unless I’m building to proc status effects, and even then stuff like Radiation’s confusion or my favourite Electricity’s zapping will often be considered before Viral There are several things that make a one-size-fits-all build appealing to players: ease of use, as you mentioned. ease of maintenance. dislike of the modding system but love of the gameplay. Simpler grind, as you mentioned. easier mods to farm. You just follow meta-build guides. If you have questions about what I look for when modding you can just ask. People's builds and their goals for them are going to be different but they aren't incomprehensible if you share your reasons. For warframes I like to focus on tanking damage and buffs for myself or other players, I like to use my powers sparingly and prefer to kill via my weapons. I have and do play casting-focused frames but try to avoid the glass cannons as my health conditions make playing them well a dubious proposition. On bad days tanky warframes let me play the game when I would otherwise be unable to play at all due to the negative impact on my processing speed and reaction time. For weapons, I prefer slow, heavy-hitting weapons that benefit from headshots or high accuracy, although I have to use a macro with them due to previously mentioned health issues. I don't shy away from using full-auto weapons for fun even though I tend to have poor trigger discipline between targets, and I've a big fan of beam weapons. Shotguns I can take or leave and I've never been a fan of the spooled weapons. My builds for weapons lean toward status, although that's more out of habit than anything as it's so easy to build crit chance now it's no longer less reliable than bonus damage from status. I like to take advantage of -recoil and reload while holstered mods for a smoother and more comfortable experience, and I think punchthrough mods are criminally underrated by other players. Rather than constantly adjusting and tweaking my builds on warframes and weapons I like to build them to specific purposes and make them as good at that one thing as possible. Unfortunately, this normally means that I can't fit another build in a separate config without building a new frame and in some cases a new weapon because Forma applies to all config slots. The only case where I've really built multiple copies of frames didn't even involve different builds at all it was the same build for 5 different saryns for focus farming (this predated the addition of more diverse focus-gaining options when we only had stealth experience bonus focus farming, eidolons, and elite sanctuary onslaught, RIP my need for 5 saryns). I did however build two different tenet Cycrons, one with magnetic damage for Sisters and the other with impact for general use and parazon shenanigans. The purpose can be just silly things too, I built a steel path viable excalibur prime, braton prime, lato vandal, and skana prime just to spite people saying that starter equipment and starter equipment variants/upgrades weren't capable of performing on the steel path. I named the build Flexcalibur Prime. I think the issue we're having is that we are talking about Viral from completely different starting points. I'm coming from the mechanical performance and player psychology end while you are speaking from a preference and necessity standpoint. Viral not being necessary, or undesired by someone doesn't change the objective information about how powerful it is mechanically. If you don't need the extra damage, or where you play the scaling doesn't require it, or you just deem QOL mods to be a better choice for you that affects how you build and what you are going to prioritize but it doesn't change the fact that Viral is the absolute best bonus to health damage in the entire game. Due to viral being the best bonus to health damage and not reliant on usage against a specific faction, it becomes a FOO strategy for the average players of video games. It works at all levels, it's got easy-to-attain mods, it gives back immediate positive feedback with lowered TTK; making you feel more powerful, you only need base 20% status to make it viable (15% if you are slapping on statusmental mods), and the majority of build guides, YouTubers, and even players in the ingame chats recommend it so you get to feel like you are part of the "in-group" which human brains enjoy to a detrimental level. 16 hours ago, BroDutt said: Sorry, did you miss the update of Puncture status effect gave 5% up to 25% crit chance and Cold Status Effect also gave 10% Crit Chance max 50%? This took a couple of months to write and you seem to have missed where I mentioned that there was a community workshop for the puncture status effect at the time. 5 hours ago, CatboyPrincess said: It looks like the post was drafted prior to the patch. @Drasiel I have pretty mixed feelings on the essay. Grouping enemies resulting in quadratic damage scaling with Electric and Gas were not addressed. Combination elements competing with their Primary element components was addressed, which I think is one of the biggest issues presently. This is doubly true for Blast. (Personally, I think the easy fix here is to tag Blast with a multiplicative 25% slow cap, or stun animation as you suggested.) Gas's damage formulation was touched on, which is good. Viral is strong specifically because of its totally overshadowing status effect multiplier cap of 3.25x. Nerfing it to 2.5x or less would bring it far more in line. And yet, at the same time, I feel like Viral's importance is overemphasized. It's important solely for the 3.25x unique multiplier, but there are multiple ways to achieve that. And I think this is where your view has awry: it seems like your perspective is almost exclusively considering "Meta" to be defined as "what is damage and status type that is most applicable to the most statistically common situation to be in." The "Meta" situation basically doesn't exist though, because there are very few missions wherein you'll find priority targets that are especially weak to "Meta" damage and status types. Like, easy counterexamples apart from Deimos Infested are Eidolons (Radiation and Cold are meta), Demolishers and Demolysts (Corrosive, Viral, Radiation, Cold, and Gas vary between worthless and imperative), Acolytes (Corrosive very important, Viral diminished), Index (Radiation is very helpful) and Liches and Sisters (variable in general). In missions in which these enemies spawn numerously and are priority targets necessary for progression, I basically don't care that Radiation and Cold and Blast aren't meta, or that Viral is meta, because they each provide very useful properties. Ex. in Disruption, I like having wide area Radiation, Cold, and Blast application because I don't want to be annoyed by trash mobs. Hello Epitaph status primer! Viral's usefulness comes almost exclusively from its status effect on the Demolisher, while Cold itself is very useful as it serves the same purpose as hard CC like Ensnare, which means I can basically free up an ability Helminth on my build. And, if I drop Viral entirely, it might not be a big deal if I'm running Heat (which arguably is meta) + Sickening Pulse, whose damage factor scales so much faster than a constant 3.25x that 3.25x is basically invisible. As well, Corrosive's status effect is often pointless because Unairu can supplant it but so can various Helminths or even certain weapon and mod combos (like Shattering Impact on Gunblades or Arum Spinosa, or Amalgam Argonak Metal Augur + Argonak + Dagger with Gas). Basically I don't like this top-down, statistical overview approach you're using. Calling your essay "holistic" is a major misnomer when you ignore contextual variables like mission type, loadout slots, Warframe abilities, and Helminth abilities. e: A way bigger part of this picture is that there isn't enough damage type diversity in each of the weapon laodout slots. Innate Gas is VERY rare, innate Cold is rare, and we've more than enough weapons in general that it's weird not to have more innate Magnetic, Radiation, and Corrosive weapons. For better and worse, innate Viral weapons are actually fairly prevalent. Sir, Ma'am, both or neither, I am only human and while I appreciate that you seem to hold me in very high esteem judging from the standard you are holding my essay to unless you wanted to read through another 26 pages of information at minimum there just isn't a way to cover absolutely everything that even slightly touches on Status's performance. Holistic in this case is used for systems with interdependence rather than comprehensively absolutely everything. The focus is also on general usage and not the more niche use cases. Niche use cases have niche solutions that do not reflect on what the general population is considering the Meta solutions nor what the general population considers the situation where that meta needs to be applied. Right now the general populous considers the current Meta options to be a solution to Steel path scaling and any modes that employ steel path scaling levels of difficulty. As for gas and electric with grouped enemies, that's really not quadratic. It's not squaring every instance of damage it's overlapping AOE's with less bullets needed to produce damgae. You're using grouping and two AOE effects to essentially create a localized multishot effect. You could achieve the same kind of damage stacking via a gather and punchthrough or any AOE weapon with only electricity and a far better-performing status type than gas. While the gather, gas, and shock combo have the potential for high damage due to the stacking, it is hampered by the very nature of electricity and gas as mentioned in the essay, their performance is gutted by armour and gas's unique damage maths makes its status effect grossly underperform in the damage department compared to everything, including the physical damage types. Viral isn't just important due to its 3.25 multiplier. It's important because it is without question the best bonus to all health damage in the game, the way it functions removes the need to mod for individual health types because the viral bonus is magnitudes better, It is equally effective against all of the common starchart factions, It is cheap and easy to build, and unlike other weapon bonuses, it applies to every source of damage that inflicts health damage: every physical, elemental, combination elemental, bane, and ability damage has that virus multiplier applied while something like slash's bonus to Grineer health only applies to your slash damage. Viral is an obscenely effective foo strategy and it isn't healthy for the game for it to be that much more effective than every other health damage bonus. Let me preface this by saying that I am not saying these enemies are not important or that their encounters are not legitimate considerations, but Disruption and its special units, Eidolons, liches/sisters, and acolytes are all special cases that react uniquely to viral or all status effects and are outliers for the consideration of the performance of status effects in general. Those units are also not found in the majority of the game aside from the Acolytes, which can spawn on the entire steel path. Eidolons don't take any status effects they are pointless for considerations on the status of status because you are only getting damage bonuses. All Demolishers/Demolysts are either immune to viral status or flat-out immune to viral damage. The Fact they have this immunity speaks volumes about the over effectiveness of Virus. it should be noted that the unique behaviour of demolishers where their goal is not to kill you but rush to the console changes how players need to engage with them, slowing them down because they script kill the objective is a more vital behaviour than just killing them faster so they don't kill you. The Demolishers/Demolysts don't need to engage with the player to win, they just need to move fast enough. This is similar to how in archwing pursuit you build for speed because it doesn't matter what you kill along the way, or how close you get to dying, because if you simply do not get to the last tile in time you lose. You wouldn't build your archwing that way for the rest of archwing content though ,so a build for archwing rush is not a good example of general use. Liches, sisters, and Accolytes are still affected by viral but only 4 stacks which still doubles all of your damage on their health and is a bigger bonus than all other bonus health damage. The only time it isn't a net benefit to mod for viral is when you happen to spawn one who is immune because even with a 50% resistance to viral the virus bonus is still greater than all the other health bonuses. I'm not seeing any unique behaviours with Index and Rathuum enemies aside from unique stats and Rathuum enemies having a weakness to melee attacks. They appear to take status and damage the same as normal enemies. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong there. Would you mind explaining why you think the essay is top-down? My overview starts with enemy defences, and everything further on in the essay is predicated on what modding choices those defences force us into to best overcome them, the limitations of how we are able to mod for damage and how the cost/benefit of certain elemental combinations make what would be appealing options less appealing because of the damage types that choice would invalidate, and then where and why status effects invalidate the damage bonuses of elements we could choose that could be effective but are less effective than the advantages the status effects offer. More diversity in innate damage types would create more weapons that didn't have to make the same cost/benefit analysis for damage and status types but it still won't solve the issues with enemy defences or status effects overshadowing damage bonuses to far too great of an extent. I would still absolutely love to have more diversity in damage types even if nothing else is addressed. I think that your evaluation of elemental and combination elemental damage weapon counts is skewed though. There are 3 weapons that deal gas damage: Zakti zakti prime cyanax's AOE. There are 8 weapons that deal corrosive damage: Catabolyst Caustacyst Kuva Seer AOE Scourge Scourge Prime stug synapse Tysis There are 38 weapons that deal Radiation damage: All tenet weapons All Kuva weapons Arca Plasmor Larkspur Prime Ocucor Phantasma Phantasma Prime Tatsu Prime There are 41 weapons that deal Magnetic damage: All tenet weapons All kuva weapons Battacor Gammacor Synoid Gammacor Simulor Synoid Simulor Velocitus (heavy weapon) Opticor AOE Opticor Vandal AOE There are 36 weapons that deal cold damage: All Tenet weapons All kuva Weapons Glaxion Glaxion Vandal Sibear There are 9 weapons that deal viral damage: Hema Komorex Compressa Pathocyst Phage Plague Keewar Plague Kripath Pupacyst Sporothix You are correct that Gas damage is exceedingly rare, but corrosive and viral weapons are very close to the same rarity. The Nemesis weapons skew Radiation, Magnetic, and Cold bearing weapons into very common territory. If you don't take Nemesis weapons into consideration Radiation and Magnetic are still around the same rarity as corrosive and viral (there are 33 nemesis weapons and two of them have inherent radiation before their progenitor bonus damage is added leaving 7 Radiation weapons) with cold being tied for rarity with gas. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(NSW)Greybones Posted August 19, 2023 Share Posted August 19, 2023 1 hour ago, Drasiel said: There are several things that make a one-size-fits-all build appealing to players: ease of use, as you mentioned. ease of maintenance. dislike of the modding system but love of the gameplay. Simpler grind, as you mentioned. easier mods to farm. You just follow meta-build guides. If you have questions about what I look for when modding you can just ask. People's builds and their goals for them are going to be different but they aren't incomprehensible if you share your reasons. For warframes I like to focus on tanking damage and buffs for myself or other players, I like to use my powers sparingly and prefer to kill via my weapons. I have and do play casting-focused frames but try to avoid the glass cannons as my health conditions make playing them well a dubious proposition. On bad days tanky warframes let me play the game when I would otherwise be unable to play at all due to the negative impact on my processing speed and reaction time. For weapons, I prefer slow, heavy-hitting weapons that benefit from headshots or high accuracy, although I have to use a macro with them due to previously mentioned health issues. I don't shy away from using full-auto weapons for fun even though I tend to have poor trigger discipline between targets, and I've a big fan of beam weapons. Shotguns I can take or leave and I've never been a fan of the spooled weapons. My builds for weapons lean toward status, although that's more out of habit than anything as it's so easy to build crit chance now it's no longer less reliable than bonus damage from status. I like to take advantage of -recoil and reload while holstered mods for a smoother and more comfortable experience, and I think punchthrough mods are criminally underrated by other players. Rather than constantly adjusting and tweaking my builds on warframes and weapons I like to build them to specific purposes and make them as good at that one thing as possible. Unfortunately, this normally means that I can't fit another build in a separate config without building a new frame and in some cases a new weapon because Forma applies to all config slots. The only case where I've really built multiple copies of frames didn't even involve different builds at all it was the same build for 5 different saryns for focus farming (this predated the addition of more diverse focus-gaining options when we only had stealth experience bonus focus farming, eidolons, and elite sanctuary onslaught, RIP my need for 5 saryns). I did however build two different tenet Cycrons, one with magnetic damage for Sisters and the other with impact for general use and parazon shenanigans. The purpose can be just silly things too, I built a steel path viable excalibur prime, braton prime, lato vandal, and skana prime just to spite people saying that starter equipment and starter equipment variants/upgrades weren't capable of performing on the steel path. I named the build Flexcalibur Prime. I think the issue we're having is that we are talking about Viral from completely different starting points. I'm coming from the mechanical performance and player psychology end while you are speaking from a preference and necessity standpoint. Viral not being necessary, or undesired by someone doesn't change the objective information about how powerful it is mechanically. If you don't need the extra damage, or where you play the scaling doesn't require it, or you just deem QOL mods to be a better choice for you that affects how you build and what you are going to prioritize but it doesn't change the fact that Viral is the absolute best bonus to health damage in the entire game. Due to viral being the best bonus to health damage and not reliant on usage against a specific faction, it becomes a FOO strategy for the average players of video games. It works at all levels, it's got easy-to-attain mods, it gives back immediate positive feedback with lowered TTK; making you feel more powerful, you only need base 20% status to make it viable (15% if you are slapping on statusmental mods), and the majority of build guides, YouTubers, and even players in the ingame chats recommend it so you get to feel like you are part of the "in-group" which human brains enjoy to a detrimental level. Alright, so you make your builds according to your goals and don’t like making alternative builds because it’s too much hassle according to you (which… it’s just so easy to change things, but nevermind) and I guess you seem to think it a problem that you… have to break a build up for alternative builds. Or something. Like it’s an unexpected thing. There’s some conflict going on here with things like what you’re even grinding for when you’re not using it because you’re pressured by things like players who are also only interested in… making a thing perform way beyond reasonable expectation. From what I’m seeing, you’re coming from some perspective where you aren’t… interested in doing things other than what you’re doing right now, nevermind dealing with the build-crafting system, and you want changes made to fundamental systems that I’m using too (even if I use Viral sparingly, I still use it for alternative builds and for reasons that exist right now based on how it works right now in the game), but instead of considering it from a ground-up perspective, you seem to be coming from a top-down perspective where players are… using a few builds because they… either want to use those few builds exactly because of how easy they are to use and maintain and how they don’t have to make other builds, or are succumbing to peer pressure from… other players who aren’t interested in alternative ways to build. You’re saying you’re coming from a mechanical and psychological perspective, but you’re wanting to apply a top-down limited-build-mentality influence of mechanics that I’m already fine with and am using right now, and have a confusing psychology going on. It seems like you want changes made for your sake while thinking that it won’t influence others; that’s like me asking for the game to force you to make a different build every time you want to change a mission. But weirder because I don’t have such a problem making a change for the sake of a mission, while you seem to have a problem with being able to attain your goals? I also don’t know what a FOO strategy is, but I don’t feel like this is a community that’s worth sacrificing the greater more in-depth game for in order to fit in with simplifying gameplay; it can be a fun every-so-often thing, but it can get stale sticking to only a few options all the time Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drasiel Posted August 19, 2023 Author Share Posted August 19, 2023 1 hour ago, (NSW)Greybones said: Alright, so you make your builds according to your goals and don’t like making alternative builds because it’s too much hassle according to you (which… it’s just so easy to change things, but nevermind) and I guess you seem to think it a problem that you… have to break a build up for alternative builds. Or something. Like it’s an unexpected thing. There’s some conflict going on here with things like what you’re even grinding for when you’re not using it because you’re pressured by things like players who are also only interested in… making a thing perform way beyond reasonable expectation. From what I’m seeing, you’re coming from some perspective where you aren’t… interested in doing things other than what you’re doing right now, nevermind dealing with the build-crafting system, and you want changes made to fundamental systems that I’m using too (even if I use Viral sparingly, I still use it for alternative builds and for reasons that exist right now based on how it works right now in the game), but instead of considering it from a ground-up perspective, you seem to be coming from a top-down perspective where players are… using a few builds because they… either want to use those few builds exactly because of how easy they are to use and maintain and how they don’t have to make other builds, or are succumbing to peer pressure from… other players who aren’t interested in alternative ways to build. You’re saying you’re coming from a mechanical and psychological perspective, but you’re wanting to apply a top-down limited-build-mentality influence of mechanics that I’m already fine with and am using right now, and have a confusing psychology going on. It seems like you want changes made for your sake while thinking that it won’t influence others; that’s like me asking for the game to force you to make a different build every time you want to change a mission. But weirder because I don’t have such a problem making a change for the sake of a mission, while you seem to have a problem with being able to attain your goals? I also don’t know what a FOO strategy is, but I don’t feel like this is a community that’s worth sacrificing the greater more in-depth game for in order to fit in with simplifying gameplay; it can be a fun every-so-often thing, but it can get stale sticking to only a few options all the time Okay, I feel like either you're projecting onto me what you've already decided I'm like instead of entering into this discussion in good faith or there is a complete disconnect in our methods of communication. I like making builds for specific purposes, those purposes can range from: "I want to be able to revive my entire team at once if they go down in arbitrations. 15 revive tokens carried and need to stay alive" "I want a build that isn't reliant on energy and doesn't get knocked over while toroid farming" "I wonder if I can make a build using atmospheric archguns, the archgun wielded by necramechs, Voidrig's arquebex, and the 3 weapons a warframe carries to have one of every single element so I can shoot at every phase of profit taker? good for solo, groups, and the lols" "I want to prove that weapons the community considers 'low tier' are still steel path viable if you want to put in the effort and are willing to modify your play style a little bit" "Can I build the Tombfinger Primary into a viable weapon by using the forced impact proc on its physical grenade and not its charged explosion through the use of the internal bleeding mod?" (spoiler: it's a silly, but okay build with a little more versatility in single and multiple targets but ultimately equipping the battery arcane is more effective if you just want consistent damage) "is Gas really just that awful even against infested? What could I do to try to amplify its performance instead of falling back on slash, corrosive, and heat for Deimos enemies" "This gun is neat, what can I do to maximize its inherent qualities so I can slot it into my regular rotation of usage because I'm mostly playing steel path and steel path adjacent content nowadays" "This gun has some really cool mechanics but its overall effectiveness just isn't enough for me to comfortably use everywhere, what mid-tier activity could I gear its build towards in such a way as to make it shine" I make "alternative" builds all the time, I just like to have a specific goal to build towards. It's the difference between having macaroni and glitter thrown at you and being told to do art and instead having macaroni, glitter, and project outline thrown at you and told to make a specific kind of art. It's both art, I just like to have more structure to create a build around. The desire or ability to make different builds doesn't change the fact that changing builds between missions is a cumbersome procedure unless you are changing full loadouts (which have their own issues) I don't often want to change the entire loadout, mostly I just want to use a different a primary, or a different melee, or maybe just a different frame but that's going to be 1. esc> 2. equipment> 3. Arsenal> 4. warframe/weapon menu> 5. select warframe/weapon> 6. esc to exit arsenal> 7. esc> 8. navigation> 9. Play mission. It could be as easy as: 1. Navigation> 2. Arsenal> 3. Select warframe/weapon> 4. Escape to exit arsenal> 5. Play mission. But it's not because it was decided it was more important to have to walk around the ship in real time than fluid loadout management. Add to this the fact that loadouts don't actually include all our "weapons" that can be used on the "ground" and you have to micromanage your necramech, operator, and vehicle builds separately from the main arsenal. the system is clunky, and I pray every day that the arsenal rework they said they were working on 3 years or more ago now finally shows up so maybe it can be a nice easy experience to swap equipment. Okay, look, you're taking statements I'm making about the objective facts of how certain mechanics work and interact with others (you can argue "value" from a personal perspective but math is math) and very well-documented psychological behaviours people fall into especially pertaining to games and making the assumption those are my personal beliefs and the way I play the game when I keep refuting that. The way enemy defences, damage bonuses, and status are interacting right now are not healthy for the game, they pigeonhole less experimentally-minded players into effective but homogenous builds, they make damage bonuses and status effects that should be desirable in far more areas than extremely niche situations, into things considered useless by the community at large. If you've never come across any "how to fix status" threads they all, without fail, boil down to "just make everything like slash, corrosive, fire, or viral" or as the community often calls them: "the good statuses". 'The main point of Damage 2.0 was to un-homogenize the builds from a single build for all factions using as many damage mods as possible that all focused on overcoming armour and inflated EHP due to armour's DR. It's why the corpus only had shields, grineer only had armour, and the infested had so many health types at beginning of Damage 2.0. As time went on and powercreep kept creeping, and ramifications of the brand new "status" system resulted in clear outliers due to certain interactions, armour started cropping up in the corpus and infested factions again, heavy units almost all ended up with armour again, the focus shifted from different builds for all 3 factions into focusing on that armour since all 3 factions had it and chewing through the inflated EHP, with the defences other than armour becoming secondary considerations, again. So now instead of what we had at the end of Damage 1.0 we now have: Single builds for all factions using specific damage mods to weight towards certain statuses, all focused on overcoming armour and the inflated EHP due to armour's DR, and spicing it up by occasionally needing to remember to have some fast firing mid-range damage weapons to get around the Damage Attenuation on Bosses that invalidate the use of slow firing high alpha damage weaponry. Does every player build that way? No, of course not, even during damage 1.0 not everyone built the way described but when enough players ignore entire systems because there are outliers that are so much more effective than the next best option it will just keep picking up steam in the community until it snowballs into a self-fulfilling prophecy. We're already reaching the point in discourse about status effects that the solutions people offer are not even attempting to look at what makes those statuses so desirable but only how we could make everything more like the "good statuses". I don't even care if any of my suggestions happen, I didn't even want to include them but the community really gets on your case about how detailing an issue without providing a solution isn't real feedback, so I made some suggestions because I'm sick of hearing that complaint. What exactly do you mean by Top-down-limited-build-mentality, I'm not sure how I could dig further into the god-forsaken bedrock than by looking at the shifts in enemy defences, the effects that has on damage selection, how damage bonuses that would otherwise be valuable are invalidated by far superior options achieved via status effects, and that I think we need to consider all of these things when we talk about "fixing" status instead of just making everything slash and calling it a day. You don't seem to be hearing what I'm saying so I'm going to try shouting: I WANT TO BE ABLE TO EASILY CHANGE MY LOADOUTS BETWEEN MISSIONS. I OWN NEARLY EVERY ITEM IN THE GAME I DON'T JUST DO THAT FOR A SENSE OF PRIDE AND ACCOMPLISHMENT. I LIKE TO USE A LARGE VARIETY OF ITEMS AND MAKE MULTIPLE BUILDS FOR DIFFERENT ITEMS FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES EVEN IF THE PURPOSE IS JUST "THIS BUILD IS FOR TUESDAYS". THE CURRENT SYSTEM FOR CHANGING EQUIPMENT IS NEEDLESSLY CUMBERSOME AND HEAVILY IMPACTS MY DESIRE TO CHANGE BUILDS BECAUSE IT CONSUMES 1/4 OF A 2-HOUR PLAY SESSION FOR ME. THOSE ARE SEPARATE ISSUES FROM THE ONES I AM TRYING TO BRING TO PEOPLE'S ATTENTION ABOUT ENEMY DEFENSES, DAMAGE TYPES, DAMAGE BONUSES, AND THEIR STATUS EFFECTS. Just because the interface frustrates me and that's why changing builds isn't enjoyable doesn't change the fact other players will choose builds that are effective against all factions because it's the path of least resistance. It's not good for the game when the path of least resistance is also one of the most effective builds for the majority of the game. I don't want to simplify the game, I want to open its complexity back up for everyone. For christ's sake, I just wanted to talk about the mechanics that are the root triggers for the existence of the current Meta obsession with bypassing armour and dealing with massive EHP. I didn't write the essay as a masturbatory excuse to enforce my will on the entire community, I'm not channelling the spirit of Ballas through my forum posts. I wrote the essay because it's a complicated subject involving multiple overlapping systems and years worth of big and small changes layered on top of each other that have made a paved tower to hell one brick at a time if you'll excuse the aggressively mixed metaphor. A FOO strategy is a First Order Optimal Solution to a problem. It can be an item, class, specific mechanic, build, or behaviour that is easily acquired, easy to use, and results in success. FOO strategies on their own are not a bad thing they can be used to level the playing field between high-rank and low-rank players in pvp so that new players don't just give up or to help teach players the basic mechanics early on in games. However, when a FOO strategy is so effective players never need to invest effort into gaining knowledge or skill, a key aspect of player progression, in order to achieve success as they progress through the game, it's detrimental to the health of the game and ultimately the experience of the player. If you prefer a more thorough explanation in video format here's a video from extra credits before they went off the rails time-stamped at where they explain what a Foo strategy is and its positives and negatives. If the time stamp failed it starts around 3:01 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(NSW)Greybones Posted August 19, 2023 Share Posted August 19, 2023 1 hour ago, Drasiel said: Okay, I feel like either you're projecting onto me what you've already decided I'm like instead of entering into this discussion in good faith or there is a complete disconnect in our methods of communication. Alright, so breaking down your response into manageable chunks, aware that there’s some similarities but also some severe differences and starting with how you approach concepts like build variety in the first place; You like making a few builds with goals. I do too. You make a few builds using the config and loadout menus, I’ve eschewed those after identifying that every single build and loadout combination will not fit in those storage methods. Is that correct? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CatboyPrincess Posted August 19, 2023 Share Posted August 19, 2023 (edited) 6 hours ago, Drasiel said: I wrote the essay because it's a complicated subject involving multiple overlapping systems and years worth of big and small changes layered on top of each other that have made a paved tower to hell one brick at a time if you'll excuse the aggressively mixed metaphor. u wrote ur essay cuz ur a nerd, baka 26+ pages about something im passionate over? where do i sign i forgor abt nemesis weapons. There's still way more of them than corrosive, viral, and magnetic tho (almost doubling combined value). Basmu and Shedu two fun weapons they also present an interesting case of having two primary elements. Without disrupting either of them, you can choose Viral. Interestingly, they came soon after Damage 2.0 iirc. I remember feeling at the time like DE was trying to push Viral as a result. More dual-primary element mods would be cool. When i referred to quadratic damage scaling with Gas and Electric, i was referring to area weapons that can apply its damage to every unit in an area and then cross-link every enemy with every other enemy for more damage. The total damage output would be a function of the number of units hit times the number of units there are (that are cross-linking to one another). Or, from each unit's perspective, they are taking the direct area damage of the weapon plus the area damage of the weapon times the number of units around itself. So, Dmg taken by 1 unit: = area dmg * N units in area + area dmg Total damage dealt: = N units in area * Dmg taken by 1 unit = N units in area * (area dmg * N units in area + area dmg) = N² units in area * area dmg + N units in area * area dmg As for the video: 1. u forgot to blip out your name in the bottom left (chat) 2. going back to what i meant by holistic (warframe abilities specifically), because Viral and armour strip are so prevalent, you can essentially factor them out and look only at the raw damage dealt of elements. I.e. the was no need for you to demonstrate that viral+elec is better than gas+elec. The point is that you can essentially apply armour strip and viral at will (abilities + primers). Refusing to do so is mostly an arbitrary, suboptimal choice. That leads me into... That was why i thought of your essay as top-down: because you focused on common player behaviour as a result of psychological path of least resistance to the exclusion of the maximally performant case that leads to the actual gameplay path of least resistance. That said, i agree, Viral is way too intense, to the point that it is *always* required to achieve max performance. (also, i realized that it is in fact a 4.25x multiplier (not 3.25x), which can be construed as reducing TTK down to a little less than a quarter. This is busted given that full on universal damage amps from Warframe abilities rarely (never?) exceed 2x at base, so less than half its effectiveness.) I thought an elegant fix would be to prevent Viral from benefit from its own multiplier, but this would grossly negatively affect innate Viral weapons (probably?). So actually I think Viral should simply have a completely different effect. pure dps increases are always easily simplified into a single cost-benefit calculation, and their worth is typically a very clear binary wise result comes from just crunching the numbers. You're also right about armour being way too prevalent; since it is *always* a part of the maximally performant context, it should be factored out and removed from the equation entirely. Sadly, shields are in a similar position. The problem with what Damage 2.0 has become is all of the decisions DE has made. They keep adding in things that are easily factored out as a way to increase difficulty. Naturally, what this actually means is that anyone not running defense strip and some form of viral primer is choosing a less optimal solution, to the detriment of diversity of gameplay. It means nearly every solution that doesn't include the steps of "strip defenses" and "prime with Viral" is suboptimal to nonviable. (This is also why anyone who thinks Caliban is a poor frame is a buffoon: because he has his 4, a total permanent defense strip with almost no exceptions without needing helminth; his 2, a UNIQUE universal damage multiplier; the flexibility of Helminth, which can provide factional damage multiplier thru Roar, or a universal damage multiplier thru Eclipse; his 3, which provides shield gating, one of the strongest survival methods; he has weapon slots or a pet to reliably prime enemies with Viral) anyway yeah i mostly agree e: thx ofr respecting my gender ambiguity/mysteriousness 😊 Edited August 19, 2023 by CatboyPrincess Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drasiel Posted September 1, 2023 Author Share Posted September 1, 2023 I am back home from tennocon and recovered enough to think properly again. Sorry, for the lag in responses. On 2023-08-19 at 4:19 AM, (NSW)Greybones said: Alright, so breaking down your response into manageable chunks, aware that there’s some similarities but also some severe differences and starting with how you approach concepts like build variety in the first place; You like making a few builds with goals. I do too. You make a few builds using the config and loadout menus, I’ve eschewed those after identifying that every single build and loadout combination will not fit in those storage methods. Is that correct? I would qualify that I like making more than just a few builds with goals but overall that is correct. I make... a lot. Spoiler I also agree that every combination will not fit. I add to that, that while loadouts do work effectively as full loadout quick swaps, they fail to include archwing, necramechs, and vehicles (which causes problems in areas that can utilize those in addition to our normal loadouts) and individual item configs are very cumbersome to change between missions. On 2023-08-19 at 9:14 AM, CatboyPrincess said: u wrote ur essay cuz ur a nerd, baka 26+ pages about something im passionate over? where do i sign i forgor abt nemesis weapons. There's still way more of them than corrosive, viral, and magnetic tho (almost doubling combined value). Basmu and Shedu two fun weapons they also present an interesting case of having two primary elements. Without disrupting either of them, you can choose Viral. Interestingly, they came soon after Damage 2.0 iirc. I remember feeling at the time like DE was trying to push Viral as a result. More dual-primary element mods would be cool. When i referred to quadratic damage scaling with Gas and Electric, i was referring to area weapons that can apply its damage to every unit in an area and then cross-link every enemy with every other enemy for more damage. The total damage output would be a function of the number of units hit times the number of units there are (that are cross-linking to one another). Or, from each unit's perspective, they are taking the direct area damage of the weapon plus the area damage of the weapon times the number of units around itself. So, Dmg taken by 1 unit: = area dmg * N units in area + area dmg Total damage dealt: = N units in area * Dmg taken by 1 unit = N units in area * (area dmg * N units in area + area dmg) = N² units in area * area dmg + N units in area * area dmg As for the video: 1. u forgot to blip out your name in the bottom left (chat) 2. going back to what i meant by holistic (warframe abilities specifically), because Viral and armour strip are so prevalent, you can essentially factor them out and look only at the raw damage dealt of elements. I.e. the was no need for you to demonstrate that viral+elec is better than gas+elec. The point is that you can essentially apply armour strip and viral at will (abilities + primers). Refusing to do so is mostly an arbitrary, suboptimal choice. That leads me into... That was why i thought of your essay as top-down: because you focused on common player behaviour as a result of psychological path of least resistance to the exclusion of the maximally performant case that leads to the actual gameplay path of least resistance. That said, i agree, Viral is way too intense, to the point that it is *always* required to achieve max performance. (also, i realized that it is in fact a 4.25x multiplier (not 3.25x), which can be construed as reducing TTK down to a little less than a quarter. This is busted given that full on universal damage amps from Warframe abilities rarely (never?) exceed 2x at base, so less than half its effectiveness.) I thought an elegant fix would be to prevent Viral from benefit from its own multiplier, but this would grossly negatively affect innate Viral weapons (probably?). So actually I think Viral should simply have a completely different effect. pure dps increases are always easily simplified into a single cost-benefit calculation, and their worth is typically a very clear binary wise result comes from just crunching the numbers. You're also right about armour being way too prevalent; since it is *always* a part of the maximally performant context, it should be factored out and removed from the equation entirely. Sadly, shields are in a similar position. The problem with what Damage 2.0 has become is all of the decisions DE has made. They keep adding in things that are easily factored out as a way to increase difficulty. Naturally, what this actually means is that anyone not running defense strip and some form of viral primer is choosing a less optimal solution, to the detriment of diversity of gameplay. It means nearly every solution that doesn't include the steps of "strip defenses" and "prime with Viral" is suboptimal to nonviable. (This is also why anyone who thinks Caliban is a poor frame is a buffoon: because he has his 4, a total permanent defense strip with almost no exceptions without needing helminth; his 2, a UNIQUE universal damage multiplier; the flexibility of Helminth, which can provide factional damage multiplier thru Roar, or a universal damage multiplier thru Eclipse; his 3, which provides shield gating, one of the strongest survival methods; he has weapon slots or a pet to reliably prime enemies with Viral) anyway yeah i mostly agree e: thx ofr respecting my gender ambiguity/mysteriousness 😊 I can't really argue with that, I am in fact a giant nerd. If I added another 26+ pages we'd have been looking at at least another 3 months of compiling it, and knowing warframe they'd have changed something fundamental by then that throws the entire essay out the window. They already snuck in changes to puncture and cold (twice) while I finished the editing after all. Yes by comparison there are a lot more of the other elemental and elemental combination damage-type weapons, but I don't think that the amount we have is too low (except for gas), I am always open to more of them though, either through more nemesis weapons or more unique new weaponry. I love it when a weapon has an inherent dual element because you can add any of the base elements to it and they won't combine. They are the only weapons where you can have something like both radiation and heat damage or cold and viral etc. I understand the mechanics offered by that combination but thank you for breaking it down. I wasn't actually trying to blip out my name, there's not much point when the username in-game is the same as on the forums, the black bar is to hide plat values since the community often has interesting opinions on your personal morality and critical thinking based on the amount of plat you have. I wish I hadn't needed to use viral there but because of the weapon I chose and keeping electricity, my only two options were viral and blast. Since blast is the only combination element that is objectively terrible at everything, especially in a situation with armoured enemies, I did not feel it would provide as good of an example. Ah, okay that makes sense about why you thought it was so top-down but funnily enough in this explanation you've hit on exactly the thing I wanted to highlight as an issue: That viral and armour strip are so prevalent that they become an assumed given in optimal builds. This was why I only dove into the actual status effects at the end of the essay and started with defences and damage types because the reason why they are so ubiquitous is what's going to be the foundational issue. I do feel the need to point out that armour strip from abilities has only become a viable strategy fairly recently. Newer armour strip powers have a tendency to cost less energy, strip more armour at once, and hit more targets, which is a necessity for the increasing hordes of enemies we face. A lot of the older armour strips are still based on older spawn rates and enemy density and are simply not cost-effective due to target limitations. Yes, it is 4.25 multiplier because the attack's initial damage is added to the 3.25 the community doesn't seem to agree on if we should write the total damage multiplier including the base damage for 4.25 or if it's expected that players already know to add the initial damage to the 3.25 multiplied value. I normally write 3.25 because honestly, it's still a big enough difference to get the point across. I think Viral could keep its bonus to health damage but it needs to follow the rule of "the specific should always be more powerful than the general". Right now specific health type bonuses max out at 1.75 and Viral's all-health bonus is 4.25 That's insanely unbalanced and makes it a complete joke to choose the specific bonuses over the general. Now you wouldn't necessarily need to nerf Viral's bonus into the ground, it would need a minor nerf at least but the damage-type bonuses need a big boost across the board. Enemy EHP has skyrocketed and damage-type bonuses have been stagnant the entire time. The game they were relevant in, for all intents and purposes, doesn't even exist anymore. I don't disagree that this is definitely a bed that DE made and now has to lie in, but I do feel sympathy for them in that it's easy to see the logic train that led us here one change and update at a time. Sadly a lot of it stems from making bad status effects better rather than looking at the root causes of what made those status effects into such bad choices to begin with. Which is what spurred me to write this essay, the community was also making the exact same kind of suggestions and the consequences of repeating those mistakes could be even more disastrous. Caliban is an interesting case, he's not a bad frame by any means, he's just an incredibly clunky frame. His 3 providing shield gating does have one terrible flaw though, if he's zeroed out on shields he loses the bonus regen until he regains some of his shields on his own. You can get around this with auger mods or other restores but that ability really should give some shields when it's recast like other shield-based frames with shield restoring abilities. There are some issues with his other abilities too but this isn't really the right thread to digress further into that at the moment, even if it would be fun. :D You are welcome, your gender expression will be what it is regardless of my knowledge of it. You do you, and I'll just cover all of my bases. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(NSW)Free_Aetharus Posted September 2, 2023 Share Posted September 2, 2023 So, to make a long essay short... Viral status multiplies every OTHER status. Slash > Crap. Cold > Crap Corrosive > Mega crap Viral > Hot Viral + Slash > This ignores all armor while making ALL slash damage, including guaranteed slash one-shot procs from a Glaive Prime, 3-4x better than Slash on its own. Ignoring armor? Shoot. Viral + Cold? You can proc this combo > 3x damage AND crit consistency? You don't need crits-- Cold is 3x better and you're probably still proccing slash, which is a bloody HOOT. Viral-primed and Slash > Because it's easy to proc a max-stack viral, it's easy to also use a condition-overload melee-ranged to kill everything. And even if you don't use a glaive, anything to procs slash is enough to trivialize everything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drasiel Posted September 2, 2023 Author Share Posted September 2, 2023 1 hour ago, (NSW)Free_Aetharus said: So, to make a long essay short... Viral status multiplies every OTHER status. Slash > Crap. Cold > Crap Corrosive > Mega crap Viral > Hot Viral + Slash > This ignores all armor while making ALL slash damage, including guaranteed slash one-shot procs from a Glaive Prime, 3-4x better than Slash on its own. Ignoring armor? Shoot. Viral + Cold? You can proc this combo > 3x damage AND crit consistency? You don't need crits-- Cold is 3x better and you're probably still proccing slash, which is a bloody HOOT. Viral-primed and Slash > Because it's easy to proc a max-stack viral, it's easy to also use a condition-overload melee-ranged to kill everything. And even if you don't use a glaive, anything to procs slash is enough to trivialize everything. Mostly yes. Although some important cliff notes: Viral doesn't just multiply other status, it multiplies everything except damage done to shields. Slash is still good without Viral, it's just better with it. The majority of the essay is explaining why this is the case and the mechanics that led to it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheLexiConArtist Posted September 3, 2023 Share Posted September 3, 2023 (edited) While I haven't dug through all this content there's one thing I just have to correct. Slash procs do not deal True Damage (any more). They deal Finisher Damage. The icons for the two are identical (courtesy of Inaros' abilities which feature both), but the function is still distinct. True damage bypasses Armour and Shields - an example being Trinity's EV damage. Finisher just ignores Armour and must still deplete a shield. Edited September 3, 2023 by TheLexiConArtist Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drasiel Posted September 3, 2023 Author Share Posted September 3, 2023 4 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said: While I haven't dug through all this content there's one thing I just have to correct. Slash procs do not deal True Damage (any more). They deal Finisher Damage. The icons for the two are identical (courtesy of Inaros' abilities which feature both), but the function is still distinct. True damage bypasses Armour and Shields - an example being Trinity's EV damage. Finisher just ignores Armour and must still deplete a shield. So digging into that a little more, it's actually a bit more complicated than that and we're both incorrect but it's Warframe's fault. "Finisher damage" doesn't technically exist as a damage type at all, it's an attack type that modifies your damage, as I'm sure you are aware. Ground finishers have a damage multiplier depending on weapon class, stealth attacks apply a multiplier (which has different calculations for elemental damage for some reason) as well as converting the damage to "True Damage", and front/back finishers each have their own multipliers respectively and also convert the damage to "True Damage". In the code apparently, Bleed's damage is called Cinematic Damage. While there is a different name under the hood, it does appear that Cinematic Damage functions exactly the same as the "True Damage" from a finisher attack. Warframe powers that deal "True damage" for the most part do deal damage directly to health, but it's not consistent: Frost's Snowglobe push - ignores shields. Hydroid's Tentacle Swarm - ignores shields. Inaros': Passive - does not. Desiccation - ignores shields. Devour - does not. Mag's Polarize - does not (even on an enemy with both shields and armour). Revenant's Reave - ignores shields. Sevagoth's sow - Ignores shields. Trinity's Energy Vampire - ignores shields. The community has taken to calling the X-with-a-roof on its head "True Damage" and the variant with the same symbol that doesn't bypass shields "Finisher Damage" because it's confusing to have two damage types that have different behaviours called the same name. This type of damage was at one time called "Finishing Damage" which led to confusion with finisher attacks but I don't know if that is still the internal name for the damage type or not. This actually makes me wonder if finisher attacks are using the "Cinematic Damage" type. What's interesting about this is that the information on "True Damage" doesn't actually state that it should ignore shields, just that it only applies to health and overgaurd and bypasses armour's damage reduction. Oh and to add to the confusion, the Basmu's "True Damage" also ignores shields because of course the weapon-based sources aren't consistent either. Anyway, at the end of the day, the name doesn't really matter as long as we understand each other. We don't have an official name for X-with-a-roof on its head damage type and none of the supporting documentation has picked up the community nomenclature to validate it (unlike say damage attenuation or the other terms commonly used to refer to that mechanic) but, if it's easier going forward, we can call it "Finisher Damage" (although I'm rather partial to the name Thomas). 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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