Exalted weapons are outdated

[Zekkii]

Between rivens, arcanes, incarnon upgrades, unequipable mods, and general power creep, Exalted weapons feel worthless.  It sucks to build strength, forma, time, and energy to build one only to have it be a huge downgrade.  

Does anyone else feel the same?

[(PSN)robotwars7]

depends; not all exalted melees are equal: Baruuk's Desert Wind is pretty powerful even in Steel Path circuit, while Valkyr's Hysteria is... not great. 

what we need is an exalted weapon pass, or maybe just allowing Exalteds to bypass armor etc. I'd be ok with them taking a hit in terms of energy efficiency, if it meant they could reliably steamroll any enemies even at high level. to me, Exalteds are something you're supposed to only pull out when things get serious, like being surrounded by Eximus units, or an Acolyte shows up, rather than using them as a primary weapon.

[trst]

That's definitely not the case with all of them. Though regarding changes to them in general the first needs to be to removing stat stick dependency. Either having their own innate melee weapon to mod (like Garuda's Talons). Or just removing weapon mod scaling altogether by making them pure abilities then at that point they can just be given proper base stats and have them just scale off frame mods.

[Raarsi]

Thinking about it, I can't remember a single exalted weapon other than Baruuk's and maybe Sevagoth's Shadow that isn't incredibly underwhelming (his claws are still kinda meh), and even then, both of them need their augments for them to be practical on any level.

[fo3nixz]

Like Artemis  bow. It needs a revisit

[SDGDen]

man i love this thread. 

"power creep has caused older exalted weapons to be left behind, what's the solution? buff the S#&$ out of them of course!"

 

or maybe fix the insane amounts of powercreep.

 

[(XBOX)Lord ChibiVR]

12 minutes ago, SDGDen said:

man i love this thread. 

"power creep has caused older exalted weapons to be left behind, what's the solution? buff the S#&$ out of them of course!"

 

or maybe fix the insane amounts of powercreep.

 

You can't do that when de releases incarnons that turn melee weapons into modded exalted weapons.

13 hours ago, Raarsi said:

Thinking about it, I can't remember a single exalted weapon other than Baruuk's and maybe Sevagoth's Shadow that isn't incredibly underwhelming (his claws are still kinda meh), and even then, both of them need their augments for them to be practical on any level.

Garuda's (prime) talons are really good still, with really high cc and status combined with high slash (on top of garuda's guaranteed slash procs). 

And Mesa's peacemakers and Titania's dex pixia are also exalted weapons as well, and they're also perfectly fine.

Edited October 29, 2023 by (XBOX)Upl0rdYT

[Hexerin]

13 hours ago, fo3nixz said:

Like Artemis  bow. It needs a revisit

I'd argue that Artemis Bow isn't even an exalted weapon. The sheer quantity of restrictions/limitations that are imposed on it for no apparent reason...

Edited October 29, 2023 by Hexerin

[Birdframe_Prime]

I feel the problem with Ability Weapons in general, both the pseudo and the regular, is that DE cannot figure out how to actually do them as powerful Abilities without making them modded like Weapons.

There are legitimate damage scaling functions that can be built into abilities for using them actively, from internal multipliers for hits, combos with other abilities, armour/defense stripping, additional elemental damage from self-buffs and so on.

But no. DE went with what was, at the time, the easy and obvious route. This has become the hard one because they introduced new mods and had to make rulings on whether or not the Ability weapons could use them.

And it's even worse with the pseudo versions, like Whipclaw and Avalanche, which are abilities on their own, but benefit from the equipped Melee to the point where Incarnon Magistar and Incarnon Ceramic Dagger add buffs so powerful that players appear to consider them de-facto stat-sticks rather than the powerful weapons they were meant to be.

It's just snowballed over time with updates to elemental Status and damage, and to Warframes, including their Helminth options.

DE really needs to take a step back and look at the Ability weapons as Abilities again.

I don't believe taking away the Modded factor of Exalted Blade would be really so bad if DE gave it a decent spread of basic stats to make it, at base, a strong melee, and then added in conditional scaling for it that could be balanced and capped to prevent newer players from just blitzing the entire star chart, but allow advanced players to add aspects to take it even further. With the Augment that, instead of changing the damage type, instead added an elemental type on top of the base damage, along with the Status boost, this ability could then get scaling from other aspects. Attacking Blinded enemies with the waves would scale the combo counter, damaging enemies with Javelin first would apply a multiplier, and Slash Dash would have an additional multiplier on top of the other two that would mean pressing 3, 2, 1 while having your 4 active would be a legitimate ability combo.

The same with Valkyr's Claws not only having the melee combo counter, but functions that play off it like the conditional mods we have, while the animation set is worked over for ease-of-use. Desert Wind getting added functions based on enemies being marked by his 2 and 3. Artemis Bow gaining functions for doing things like standing on a Dash Wire, or in a Stealth Bubble, or a massive boost for Noise Arrow distracting enemies and then shooting them, or Navigator being able to grab all projectiles from Artemis bow at once to go in formation for massive damage.

All of these weapons need to be looked at as Abilities again, with their unique functions and potential combos with the frame's other abilities all brought forward.

We don't need, and never have needed, to mod these abilities as weapons. They should be good Abilities.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

Mine are just fine. Some arcanes and things like helminth, or even teammate buffs also enhance exalted weapons.

[(XBOX)zThulsaDoomz]

17 hours ago, (PSN)robotwars7 said:

depends; not all exalted melees are equal: Baruuk's Desert Wind is pretty powerful even in Steel Path circuit, while Valkyr's Hysteria is... not great. 

 

Meanwhile,  Valkyr Hysteria slide attack is one shotting everything in SP....

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

16 minutes ago, (XBOX)zThulsaDoomz said:

Meanwhile,  Valkyr Hysteria slide attack is one shotting everything in SP....

I like it too and the claws are definitely not weak but if the only notable thing is the slide attack then there's something wrong with it

[Tiltskillet]

22 minutes ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

I like it too and the claws are definitely not weak but if the only notable thing is the slide attack then there's something wrong with it

The ground finisher is really nice too.  But I think "...if the only notable things are the slide attack and ground finisher then there's something wrong with it" is just as valid an observation.

 

 

[Hexerin]

1 hour ago, (XBOX)zThulsaDoomz said:

Meanwhile,  Valkyr Hysteria slide attack is one shotting everything in SP....

For the Corpus and Infested, sure. Grineer, not so much. It'll kill all the basic Grinner grunts in a single slide attack, but the heavier units (Gunners, Napalms, etc) require multiple slide attacks. Additionally, all faction Eximus units (except for the weakest Infested, and certain squishy Corpus/Grineer drones) require many slide attacks. You actually technically kill these heavier units faster by using neutral block combo and then hitting the mercy when it comes up.

[(PSN)FirmBizkit]

8 hours ago, SDGDen said:

man i love this thread. 

"power creep has caused older exalted weapons to be left behind, what's the solution? buff the S#&$ out of them of course!"

 

or maybe fix the insane amounts of powercreep.

 

Nah. Nerfs are never good and nerfing hundreds of weapons to scale them towards a handful of exalted weapons would be incredibly stupid and time consuming. The simplest and best solution is to buff outliers.

Edited October 29, 2023 by (PSN)FirmBizkit

[(XBOX)Cram Duahcim]

Mesa Prime:

[SDGDen]

3 hours ago, (PSN)FirmBizkit said:

Nah. Nerfs are never good and nerfing hundreds of weapons to scale them towards a handful of exalted weapons would be incredibly stupid and time consuming. The simplest and best solution is to buff outliers.

nerf outliers on the top end, buff outliers on the bottom end, that's how you do balance.

exhalted weapons are still better than 95% of weapons, so they're nowhere NEAR the bottom end. as a conclusion, they're being pushed out by outliers on the top end that need a nerf. 

 

[(PSN)FirmBizkit]

16 minutes ago, SDGDen said:

nerf outliers on the top end, buff outliers on the bottom end, that's how you do balance.

exhalted weapons are still better than 95% of weapons, so they're nowhere NEAR the bottom end. as a conclusion, they're being pushed out by outliers on the top end that need a nerf. 

 

Wouldn’t it be better to bring them up rather than bring others down? Your proposed solution is a zero sum game. Buffing the exalted weapons at the lower end makes everyone happy whereas with nerfs somebody has to lose.

[--Leyenda-yight6]

hace 10 minutos, (PSN)FirmBizkit dijo:

Wouldn’t it be better to bring them up rather than bring others down? Your proposed solution is a zero sum game. Buffing the exalted weapons at the lower end makes everyone happy whereas with nerfs somebody has to lose.

That's called balance, not everything is buffs.

It's true that some exalted weapons are quite weak, but I think they should receive buffs not in pure damage, but in utility and synergy with their other abilities.

[VibingCat]

On 2023-10-29 at 12:38 AM, fo3nixz said:

Like Artemis  bow. It needs a revisit

Sorry, what? It's one of the strongest weapons in the game even at steel path survival level cap with AOE, slash and immense base damage, I suggest you to revisit your mods and abilities. Hint: concentrated arrow, internal bleeding.

[SDGDen]

59 minutes ago, (PSN)FirmBizkit said:

Wouldn’t it be better to bring them up rather than bring others down? Your proposed solution is a zero sum game. Buffing the exalted weapons at the lower end makes everyone happy whereas with nerfs somebody has to lose.

alright so, time to talk about some game design theory.

 

when it comes to balance, the first thing you need to realize is that balance is relative. if we have a hypothetical game, and all i tell you about the game is "you have a gun that fires at 240 RPM and deals 100 damage per bullet", you can make no judgement on whether that is balanced because there is nothing to balance it against. 

then, there's the purpose of balance. *why* is balance a thing? why does it matter? the reason why it matters is actually pretty simple: a more balanced game allows the developers to more accurately set the level of challenge they'd like to present to the player. almost every game is built around presenting the player with some kind of challenge, this challenge can be big (for example elden ring) or very small (think of many of those games designed for kids) and that challenge can come in many different forms, but it is an important aspect of how we experience games including games in the power fantasy genre that warframe falls under.

now lets look at a slightly more complex setting: we have a hypothetical game with a singular enemy, this enemy has a thousand health. 

we then have three different guns: A, B and C, each of them has the same fire-rate, range and accuracy.
gun A deals 90 damage per shot and thus will kill the enemy in 11 seconds
gun B deals 100 damage per shot and thus will kill the enemy in 10 seconds
gun C deals 120 damage per shot and thus will kill the enemy in 8 seconds

the developers wish to have a certain level of challenge, that's the whole point of balance. for this game, they've decided that gun B best represents the amount of challenge that they want this game to have. this means gun A is underpowered and gun C is overpowered. 

lets say they each fire at a firerate of 60 RPM or 1 round per second, to balance these guns without making them the same, the developers are going to tweak the RPM of these weapons.

gun A will fire at 67 RPM now
gun B will continue to fire at 60 RPM
gun C will fire at 50RPM now.

they have brought the power of gun C down and gun B up, and as a result the balance of the game has increased. but you're right, players are unhappy with gun C being nerfed. it was their favourite gun. after all, it performed the best.

so lets instead go with the following: we're doing exactly what the players want and only buffing, which means we're buffing guns A and B since they perform significantly worse than gun C. 

gun A will now fire at 83 RPM
gun B will now fire at 75 RPM
gun C will continue to fire at 60RPM

once again, the guns are balanced against eachother, but now each gun kills the enemy in 8 seconds rather than 10 as established before, the game has gotten less challenging.

lets say, gun D is now released. gun D fires at 60 RPM and deals a whopping 200 damage per shot. in the first scenario, this would be considered overpowered and the gun would be nerfed, taking a single change of making this gun fire at 30RPM instead. 

in the second scenario where we can only buff, gun D now results in guns A, B and C all needing to be brought up to spec, and the game gets less challenging again.

 

in scenario 1, the challenge of the game stays the same once gun D is fixed. in scenario 2, the challenge has dropped severely and now the devs need to fix it. because they can't do a blanket nerf (since in scenario 2, we can't nerf) we will have to buff the enemy (ahum, steel path. sound familiar? introducing stronger enemies to combat the ever-rising performance of weapons and characters)

currently, gun D can kill the enemy in 5 seconds. we are going to increase the health of the enemy to 2K.

we are now back to all guns taking 10 seconds to kill the enemy, except in scenario 1, we had to nerf two guns and buff one where in scenario 2, we had to buff 2 guns, then buff 3 guns, then buff an enemy. and when another stronger item is added everything will need buffing again. the only noticable difference between scenario 1 and 2 is that the numbers for scenario 2 are significantly higher because of power creep.

 

this is why it is important to consider buffs and nerfs as equal tools in balancing, especially when you're looking at a bigger game like warframe where you will likely have a "relatively balanced" majority of weapons with a few outliers on either end of the scale.

imagine for a second that you could place every kuva and tenet weapon on an imaginary line of power, where the most powerful weapon is the most to the right side and the least powerful weapon is the most to the left. in the center of the line is a little marker, a "balance needle" that indicates where "totally balanced" sits. the first scenario of the previous thought experiment is akin to taking that line and squishing it together so both ends of the spectrum are closer to that balance needle, the second scenario is more akin to moving the balance needle and then pushing on the left side of the line. 

 

now to get back to warframe. warframe is a bit more complex than the described thought experiments, with over seven hundred items to use that are NOT INTENDED to all be balanced against eachother because of warframe's progression through the game.

so instead, what you can do is split the game up into "tiers of play", based on how far through the game someone is and what they're doing.

>early star chart tier, up to jupiter. this is where the MK1 weapons, as well as things like the hind, karak and burston all belong. 
>mid-game star chart tier, jupiter to neptune, this is where you'll get weapons like the fragor, soma, and other "first big upgrade" staples as well as some of the easier primes
>end-game star chart tier, starting after the second dream and continuing through to sedna, this is where you'll start getting some chunkier weapons like the baza, tonkor, many slightly harder prime weapons as well as the broken war and broken scepter.
>world boss tier, eidolons, sentient and orb mothers. this is where you'll find the highest tier prime weapons as well as most other high-tier "normal" weapons
>nemesis tier, when you'll fight kuva liches, sisters of parvos and angels. the incarnon weapons as well as kuva and tenet weapons all belong here.
>archon tier, there's no real weapons for this tier yet but the "gameplay tier" is here. many weapon builds end up here once you start adding archon shards and steel path arcanes to your builds.

and what you do is, you balance within each tier with a margin. for example: 25%. any weapon within a given tier can be up to 25% stronger or weaker than whatever is considered "balanced" for that tier. if it is beyond that margin, it is subject to a buff or rework if too weak OR a nerf if too strong. 

 

this is also where it gets a bit tricky, because unlike weapons, warframes and warframe abilities don't have tiers of play. each warframe is supposed to be viable in all tiers of play and as a result all warframes need to be balanced against eachother. one big pool. 

but exhalted weapons are competing with your weapons, not just with other frame abilities. this isn't completely unique to exhalteds since technically many abilities compete with weapons (for example, why would you use volt's shock when you can use kuva bramma?) but exhalteds are very obviously weapons so it makes a lot more sense. 

but then... which play tier do these exhalted weapons belong in? the highest one right? but then wouldn't that result in frames with exhalted weapons becoming much more powerful than other frames earlier into the game? and this is where another factor in balance rears it's head: investment. 

in the early and mid-game tiers, you don't really have the items to build an exhalted weapon up to the maximum power it has, especially since both the weapon AND the frame need to be decked out for that. since exhalted weapons can scale much harder than other weapons (scaling both with their own mods AND with power strength), they end up being more akin to abilities that are "balanced" for early tier by requiring investment. 

 

if they are to be balanced as abilities, we have to look at them compared not to weapons, but to *other* abilities. is hysteria stronger than danse macabre? is exhalted blade significantly weaker than sol gate? and those have to be taken in the context of the rest of the warframe's kit. is valkyr significantly weaker than the "average" warframe? is excalibur significantly weaker? for the sake of keeping it not annoyingly complex, lets ignore the helminth system in this equasion. 

but then the question remains: should a fully kitted out warframe ability be worse than an end-game weapon? 

this question is answered by looking at the type of playstyle warframe is supposed to have. is it an ability-first shooter or a weapons-first shooter? 

the answer is quite easy: if you consider how easy it is to generate tons of energy late-game to SPAM your abilities with, to the point where guns are optional, warframe is an abilities-first shooter. this means abilities whose focus is dealing damage should be better than guns that focus on dealing damage. 

 

so we got to the conclusion of "warframe abilities need to be comparatively stronger than end-game weapons such as the kuva, tenet and incarnon gear.". key word: comparatively. 

so now, we are inserting these end-game weapons into the same balance group as fully kitted out warframes, lets say we want them to end up with a margin going from +5% to -35% (so on average they are slightly worse) compared to that needle of balance.

are we moving the needle? or are we pulling the weapons that are more than 5% above that needle down? moving the needle is the bigger investment in terms of how much time and effort has to be spent re-adjusting balance, but if we want to pull weapons down we have to tell our players their weapons are going to be less good!

 

the proper solution would be to pull the few weapons that overperform down, there's a decent chance they're overperforming in their own weapon category as well and by making the strongest weapons the new normal you resign yourself to an endless loop of buffing the weaker items almost like laying all of them out in a line, taking the left-most one and simply moving it to the right. the line is still equally long but now it has shifted a bit to the right and a new item has taken the left-most spot. 

but the solution that appeases the fans most is to improve weaker items, even if nerfing the overpowered items will result in weaker items being comparatively less weak, they haven't changed and thus players still view them as weak. 

in the end, it's a debate between the practical solution (buffs and nerfs in equal measures, pulling the strongest items down and the weakest ones up) and the emotionally satisfying solution (only buffing weak items while leaving strong items intact, turning them into the new normal)

 

 

hope you enjoyed the VERY long and ranty post about game balance. i may or may not have typed the entire thing up while stoned at 3 in the morning (dont do drugs, kids) so i have NO idea of how coherent it is. 

[Zekkii]

I'm a little bit surprised to hear so many people defending them.  Not only are exalted weapons competing with the rise of more powerful weaponry, but also the ever expanding arsenal of gun-platform frames like Dagath or Hydroid after his rework.  I know some will find this an unfair comparison, but I think using an ability to make an exalted weapon should be just as powerful as using an ability to buff a gun.

[Aruquae]

On 2023-10-28 at 6:28 PM, Raarsi said:

Thinking about it, I can't remember a single exalted weapon other than Baruuk's and maybe Sevagoth's Shadow that isn't incredibly underwhelming

Garuda Talons

Because those things somehow count as an exalted weapon 

[PollexMessier]

Balefire chargers, Iron staff, and Hysteria are all pretty abysmal.
It's always bothered the hell out of me that Exalted meles in particular don't get access to all mods and don't get mod capacity from their stances. It's like DE wanted them to fail.

And whoever wrote the stats for Balefire should consider looking at other employment opportunities. Far away from game design.

[Thorham]

My reasonably basic Exalted Umbra Blade build rips straight through Steel Path. No worries there (probably not very useful for endurance runs, though).