Follow-through: good or bad?

[(PSN)Unstar]

Just to get everyone on the same page, there's a stat on melee weapons called "Follow-Through", and it acts as a multiplier for the damage done to every next enemy you hit with a single melee attack.  So if you have a follow-through of 0.5 and you hit 3 enemies with your weapon, the first enemy takes 100% damage, the second takes 50% damage, and the 3rd takes 25% damage.

A question I've been rolling around in my head for awhile is whether follow-through serves a valuable purpose or not.  For example, I've wondered if perhaps this stat acts as a check on range, where more range results in less follow-through and vice-versa.  Which would kind of make sense, since more range means you're more easily able to hit more enemies and thus multiply your damage, and thus follow-through curbs that by creating an upper-limit to that increase.

Although, then the question becomes: why have follow-through at all?  Why not just have follow-through be constant and have all weapons share this value to ensure that regardless of the weapon being used, that upper-limit exists?  Because as things stand, we've got weapons like the Innodem — a dagger with range that is among the highest Warframe offers — that also has the highest base value for follow-through the game offers, 0.9.  In cases like this, I definitely question whether follow-through is actually balancing anything, or whether it's just holding certain weapons back.

I really don't know.  I'm curious to hear how my fellow Tenno think about follow-through and how they engage with it in the game.

[L3512]

Follow-through is unnecessarily punitive to several weapon classes, it was zero functional reason to exist when neither punch through nor AOE suffer diminished damage per enemy hit. Sure melee use to have factors that somewhat balanced it such as staggering and high returns for building and maintaining combos however these have been nerfed while guns were buffed.

Fixed range and bad stances also form part of the issue, pretty much every melee hits out to five metres so why would anyone use a hammer over something like Venka Prime? When that hammer never had the alpha damage, stance multipliers, attack speed or IPS weighting to be worth considering in the first place and then follow through comes along and takes a further crap on it.

There is a reason why Glaive Prime is so used, there is access to 100% of it's damage at anytime with no maintenance, it hits multiple enemies and deals a desired forced proc on top of great damage.

Edited December 5, 2023 by L3512

[trst]

My only issue with the stat is that it's unmoddable. There ought to be mods like Quickening that add Follow Through + some other stat, new Corrupted mods that reduce it for some gain, or even the option to increase the value above 1.0 making the weapon deal more damage specifically to groups of enemies. Plus if we ever did get mods for the stat I wouldn't mind seeing it added to all guns as well.

 

Aside from that it does serve a balancing purpose with how strong melee still is as it does tend to align with the reach of a weapon. Also in the case of the Innodem Incarnons do exist as the exception to most things plus the increased range it gets while maintaining 0.9 FT is only temporary while it's default range is only average for a dagger.

Though it is worth questioning if the stat does have a purpose anymore (or ever even) as I doubt many players ever noticed they're doing reduced damage to enemies at the edge of their swings. But at the same time due to it being pretty much invisible gameplay wise there also doesn't seem to be much of a reason to remove it.

[(NSW)Greybones]

Seems like it’s a system to help punish just jumping into a group of enemies and swinging and expecting little risk. Getting close can be dangerous in the first place, where if an enemy doesn’t stagger or something you get a face full of (example) shotgun blast or they can strike back or you’re in the middle of the room being shot up from all directions

edit: Personally I haven’t had a problem with it, and think it can be used to further distinguish melee weapons

Edited December 5, 2023 by (NSW)Greybones

[taiiat]

Followthrough was a kneejerk 'Mechanic' specifically just to nerf Melee. it was applied very heavy handedly, and now it's just punishing Melee for no reason. it really doesn't need it in such an aggressively diminishing state, potentially at all.

Melee just doesn't hit 25 Meters through Walls anymore, so.....
it's definitely too strong thesedays, Melee doesn't need to have 'Falloff' that's so steep.

 

Melee doesn't even necessarily always hit every Enemy in front of you anymore either, justLOSthings

[(PSN)robotwars7]

considering that these melees are being swung by exceptionally strong warframes, as opposed to regular humans there's no in-universe reason for follow-through to exist either. I say scrap it.

my biggest melee bugbear though is why Daggers are the slowest weapon type, when if anything they should be among the fastest. why does DE think that a dagger weighs more than a Hammer or Greatsword? it's so dumb..

[(PSN)slightconfuzzled]

I'm not the biggest fan of it. I also feel like its more like addressing a symptom of some larger issues Warframe has when it comes to balance and power. I can get the idea around it... You don't necessarily want a long and fast (with those attributes boosted by modding) range weapon like a whip, that can go through walls, clearing entire rooms of enemies, in multiple rooms potentially, but you can address and prevent that, as they have. Alternatively as others have pointed out many many times, having these strong Warframe beings, swinging around massive great swords, but being diminished by follow through... ehhh. 

Granted, Warframe melee will never likely be what I'd want it to be, ideally, some sort of weight, force system would be nice. Like in combination with stances and combos, some types of movement and swings of some weapons, should gather enough momentum, that not only is their follow through not diminished, but their damage/follow through should be increased relatively. I know the combo system sort of does try to emulate it, but eh. Basically many melee weapons in Warframe, don't really behave either like I think they intuitively should, either from an un universe lore perspective, or general game perspective. 

It also isn't helped that I personally prefer enemy dense missions, like Steel Path, where you can see this happen. Its not really a power thing either. You build up enough combo, status, crit, the enemies will die, often very fast, especially if you have competent building, but their are a bunch of weapon types i feel are missing out on their potential, especially some of the heavier weapon types (a lot of lighter and faster melee types feel intuitive and great). 

Its not a huge detriment to my overall enjoyment of the game though, and I still think there are some cool designs and ideas even with some of the weapon types I think are negatively effected. 

[0_The_F00l]

I think it's an interesting mechanic and should be applied to more weapons that have an aoe component ,

It is or atleast could be a decent enough balancing mechanic for things that do damage to multiple enemies.

But I also feel it is lacking enough control and combinations to make it worthwhile.

For example , when you proc puncture you ignore the followthrough.

Or any enemy with corrosive receives lower followthrough penalties etc.

There is also no mods that let you modify it , but with the recent dorclave and it's unique passive I think DE might already be making some changes for the melee update.