What’s better; Invulnerability or Damage Attenuation?

[Tombsite]

It’s pretty clear that DE wants us to spend a bit of time fighting their bosses (The Sargent and Phorid notwithstanding).
Classically DE have done this by giving their bosses brief periods of vulnerability and long periods of them being invulnerable (i.e Sargas Ruk) but lately they’ve tried to do damage attenuation instead. And maybe it’s just because I’ve spent way too much time the last few weeks pouring damage into a stone slab but I think I might prefer the more classical method.

What about my fellow Tenno:
Invulnerability or Damage Attenuation?    

And no, DE has made it pretty clear that you can’t chose “neither” 😝

Edited January 8 by Tombsite

[Circle_of_Psi]

Most of the time the Invulnerability phase lasts for as long as you need to figure out what turns it off (Exp: Kill mobs protecting it or shoot this red glowy thing) and then the fight can continue and most bosses are wiped even BEFORE they get their chance at triggering the Invulnerability effect 

 

So my money is on Damage Attenuation since it stops such from happening and requires teamwork, as the new boss shows. People who complain about these type of bosses that have Damage Attenuation are just crying cuz they can't "Press 4 to win or AFK with their Wukong" 

[ShogunGunshow]

I'd like a way to do a mechanic in the fights with attenuation that temporarily loosens its bounds. Like a DPS phase. Not fully removed but allows you to do 2-3x more damage during the window. 

I'd also like it if they could unflatten the curve on attenuation slightly, just enough so that bringing damage-boosting frames doesn't feel anemic to the point of instead playing games with RoF and FPS being the ideal way to do damage.

[TeaHands]

6 minutes ago, ShogunGunshow said:

I'd like a way to do a mechanic in the fights with attenuation that temporarily loosens its bounds. Like a DPS phase. Not fully removed but allows you to do 2-3x more damage during the window. 

I'd also like it if they could unflatten the curve on attenuation slightly, just enough so that bringing damage-boosting frames doesn't feel anemic to the point of instead playing games with RoF and FPS being the ideal way to do damage.

Yeah, I wish Damage Attenuation was explained in the game and had some sort of strategy to reel it back. Like hitting it with abilities, using your Operator/Drifter, or even the Parazon/Finishers, that'd be metal.

[Tsukinoki]

2 hours ago, Tombsite said:

What about my fellow Tenno:
Invulnerability or Damage Attenuation?   

It depends on how it's handled.

For example, the new super bosses damage attenuation?  That is a complete fail IMHO.  Largely because it doesn't offer any counter play outside of "Have the host limit their FPS to 10 or below for a fast fight" (and this seriously does work as that bosses attenuation depends on the hosts framerate), so there isn't anything to engage with outside of "This boss is a massive bullet sponge!"

There are also examples of invulnerability just being a PITA, such as lech kril and having to rely on the AI doing the right move to continue the fight forward....which can be frustrating if the AI just doesn't want to cooperate.

 

Either of them can be good or bad, it depends purely on how it's actually implemented into the game.
IF they made damage attenuation where the boss didn't take 10+ minutes of shooting it, and was instead "Hey do x, y and z and you can speed up the fight by lower it's attenuation for a short time..." then it could be a really engaging type of battle.  Either you slog through it the slow and simple way, or you engage with a few mechanics and take it out much faster.

IF they made invulnerability phases where you had to do something to turn it off, and it wasn't just "This boss is now invulnerable for the next 30 seconds, twiddle your thumbs please" that could also be engaging.

 

So honestly it just depends on how DE actually implements the feature, as it's not necessarily the damage reduction methods themselves but the mechanics surrounding them and how interactive they are.

Anything would be boring if it was just "Here's a flat mechanic with zero ways to interact with it or impact it in any way....enjoy your bullet sponge!"

Edited January 8 by Tsukinoki

[Hexerin]

Damage attenuation is a trash mechanic that accomplishes nothing but punish the player for being good at the game.

[Tsukinoki]

11 minutes ago, Qriist said:

One hypothetical that comes to mind is doing some kind of perfect counter on TFO's nullifying move to keep your abilities while also clearing the boss' DR for 5 seconds.
 

Doesn't sound like much time but we can push a LOT of damage in 5 seconds.

There's a lot of options that can go into it to make the fight more engaging than shooting at a wall while bunny-hopping around non-stop.

They could make the wall lasers mess up the attenuation for a short duration after you lure it into shooting itself.

 

And it doesn't even need to be a complete removal of DR, just a decent lowering so that you can go "Oh, if I do this then the fight moves faster...."
And it should be a somewhat "risky" tactic.

Just give us some way to actually engage with the mechanic so that the fight isn't just 10 minutes of shooting the boss.

[SDGDen]

41 minutes ago, Hexerin said:

Damage attenuation is a trash mechanic that accomplishes nothing but punish the player for being good at the game.

damage attenuation is a trash mechanic that is neccesary to make bosses last more than one nanosecond due to rampant powercreep.

 

i've been warning people about this S#&$ for years, but nobody wants to listen. if we as the playerbase dont want significant nerfs to happen, the alternative is whatever this madness is. DPS checks being turned into "hit the per-second cap and then just watch an effective timer go down"

 

 

the bigger question is actually a trade offer:

you receive: no more damage attenuation ANYWHERE in the game, at all.

you lose: a lot of the powercreep in the game, massive nerfs will happen to basically every single item we have.

 

which one will it be? accept nerfs but no more DA, or keep DA but no nerfs? 

[Hexerin]

17 minutes ago, SDGDen said:

damage attenuation is a trash mechanic that is neccesary to make bosses last more than one nanosecond due to rampant powercreep.

 

i've been warning people about this S#&$ for years, but nobody wants to listen. if we as the playerbase dont want significant nerfs to happen, the alternative is whatever this madness is. DPS checks being turned into "hit the per-second cap and then just watch an effective timer go down"

 

 

the bigger question is actually a trade offer:

you receive: no more damage attenuation ANYWHERE in the game, at all.

you lose: a lot of the powercreep in the game, massive nerfs will happen to basically every single item we have.

 

which one will it be? accept nerfs but no more DA, or keep DA but no nerfs? 

Nerfs, zero question or hesitation. Well, technically this kind of thing would be a system rework/overhaul, not a simple nerf. But the point stands.

Unfortunately, 99.9% of people in this generation of gaming are weak minded and can't handle that, so instead we have damage attenuation.

Edited January 8 by Hexerin

[(PSN)Unstar]

Invulnerability is generally fine when you're not just waiting for invulnerability to turn off.  So if there are adds to kill first, or some interesting mechanic to do to progress the fight, etc.

Damage attenuation is fine when it doesn't turn the boss into an absolute bullet sponge; when it's just making the boss have a bit more durability so it isn't a near-instant kill, that's fine.

Neither of these things are innately bad, it's just that we have all experienced fights where they are used poorly.  When used poorly, both damage attenuation and invulnerability result in periods of time when the player is not engaged and just waiting for it to be over, and that's when things go wrong.  Vay Hek, Lech Kril, the initial tuning on Archons, etc.

[SDGDen]

1 hour ago, Hexerin said:

Nerfs, zero question or hesitation. Well, technically this kind of thing would be a system rework/overhaul, not a simple nerf. But the point stands.

Unfortunately, 99.9% of people in this generation of gaming are weak minded and can't handle that, so instead we have damage attenuation.

i wouldnt put the number that high especially generation-wide, but warframe specifically has a pretty decent and more importantly *vocal* chunk of players that oppose any kind of nerfing, believing that balance can be achieved purely through buffing underused gear.

dunno why exactly that is, just that they exist. 

[stormy505]

2 hours ago, SDGDen said:

which one will it be? accept nerfs but no more DA, or keep DA but no nerfs? 

I mean, the time commitment from the dev team to do it right would make it not worth it. You would literally be asking them to change the mechanics of every time in the game, IE, stopping the production of new content for, like, 6+ months, which doesn't make any financial sense.

[stormy505]

Damage attenuation is better than invuln phases cause at least I'm still doing something. I'd prefer if there were mechanics to remove damage attenuation or invuln phases for a short period of time to do a "dps phase." Something that allows for at least a tiny bit of skill expression to speed up content.

[SDGDen]

25 minutes ago, stormy505 said:

I mean, the time commitment from the dev team to do it right would make it not worth it. You would literally be asking them to change the mechanics of every time in the game, IE, stopping the production of new content for, like, 6+ months, which doesn't make any financial sense.

oh 100%

in all honesty me saying that is just a big fat "i told you so" when i was warning about this exact issue 6 years ago. 

 

i guess it's possible to dial the powercreep down by doing reworks of the overarching systems rather than all individual weapons and frames (for example, you can perform a sweeping nerf to survivability by simply not allowing damage reduction to stack, that's a change that wouldnt take that much time to do but would have a massive effect) but it'd be difficult to get a full rework out without resulting in too much of a delay in content. 

 

[Altitis]

1 hour ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

Invulnerability is generally fine when you're not just waiting for invulnerability to turn off.  So if there are adds to kill first, or some interesting mechanic to do to progress the fight, etc.

Damage attenuation is fine when it doesn't turn the boss into an absolute bullet sponge; when it's just making the boss have a bit more durability so it isn't a near-instant kill, that's fine.

Neither of these things are innately bad, it's just that we have all experienced fights where they are used poorly.  When used poorly, both damage attenuation and invulnerability result in periods of time when the player is not engaged and just waiting for it to be over, and that's when things go wrong.  Vay Hek, Lech Kril, the initial tuning on Archons, etc.

The corrupted jackal in Duviri is a decent example of the first. It's a reasonable implementation of the invuln phases with the kill adds>break leg>dodge>parazon flow to the fight (also helps that the dodge phase isn't very long). Legs do tend to just explode as soon as someone looks at them funny still, so maybe give them a little extra something so it gets one or two attacks off during that period.

The attenuation on the fragmented is just boring, since at least for the normal fights, even on SP, it's basically just standing there pouring bullets into it until it finally stops moving.

[CrownOfShadows]

The only time in the history of WF bosses where invulnerability was done well is the orowyrm fight -> when the orowrym is invulnerable you don't even notice it because you have other things to do and there's sick animation to cover it. Every other time it has totally sucked. So can it have a real place? Yes, but it should never be a boss mechanic, it should just naturally be a part of transitioning between boss phases like it is with the orowrym, that's my two cents.

They need to go back through and remove invulnerability phases from pretty much all the bosses, especially the starchart bosses, it absolutely sucks.

As for attenuation, I still maintain that it's bad. I understand its necessity, but it's still bad. It punishes investment into weapons. By forcing equality in a deeply unequal pool they erase merit. They'd be better off catering to the top tier of weapons and forcing a meta, because then they could rebalance weapons (and frames) around that meta, if they truly cared about weapon balance that is. If they want to use attenuation as a stop-gap measure while they spend the next 5 years rebalancing everything via incarnons and just general power creep additions, that'd be a fair use that I could support, but we all know DE doesn't plan that far in advance. And it may be that WF as a game just can never hope to have a balanced weapon and frame ecosystem, so maybe attenuation is the only hope available.

As it stands attenuation ends up feeling more like an artificial boss timer, which is why we end up wanting ways to get around it. If we have to have it, then I agree, creating more ways of engaging with it would be healthy, as long as they are actual designed engagements and not exploits.

[IggySnow]

They are both just game mechanics that DE implements awfully.

Sitting around and waiting for the boss to be vulnerable, is just as bad design as giving bosses damage attenuation that essentially just makes the entire boss fight a count down timer. 

DE just needs to recognize that no matter what boss they make or how long it took to design the fight, players will have it "solved" in less than a day. And just because they force players to shoot at a boss for 2 minuets rather than 20 seconds, doesn't mean the boss hasn't been solved, it just means they're wasting players time. So they might as well just focus on making the fight fun, and invincibility and attenuation aren't fun.

[0_The_F00l]

If done correctly either if them can be fine.

If done just for the sake of increasing busy work ... Either can be pretty terrible.

[makaloff95]

6 hours ago, Tombsite said:

It’s pretty clear that DE wants us to spend a bit of time fighting their bosses (The Sargent and Phorid notwithstanding).
Classically DE have done this by giving their bosses brief periods of vulnerability and long periods of them being invulnerable (i.e Sargas Ruk) but lately they’ve tried to do damage attenuation instead. And maybe it’s just because I’ve spent way too much time the last few weeks pouring damage into a stone slab but I think I might prefer the more classical method.

What about my fellow Tenno:
Invulnerability or Damage Attenuation?    

And no, DE has made it pretty clear that you can’t chose “neither” 😝

i can live with either as long as they stop throwing nullifier abilites, god it is so annoying getting your abilites and buffs stripped, especielly when bosses already are immune to pretty much all warframe abilities

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

I'm having a hard time understanding. How does this matter to anyone that actually knows how to play the game?

You shouldn't be able to one shot bosses. It's pretty simple. Try building a team for once.

[Crevab]

Either? DE has chosen both!

[Tombsite]

22 minutes ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

I'm having a hard time understanding. How does this matter to anyone that actually knows how to play the game?

You shouldn't be able to one shot bosses. It's pretty simple. Try building a team for once.

Um... what?

Like I seriously don't understand your point.

[Merkranire]

Knowledge of whether we’re actually built for the fight.

Bam, we’re now doing balanced amounts of damage and facing balanced amounts of threat, and attenuation and invincibility phases are simply another tool for a bossfight design to draw upon. Most players overbuild for a fight specifically to avoid engaging with it, so either show them whether they’re built for the fight, or force them to build for the fight

[Crevab]

48 minutes ago, Tombsite said:

Um... what?

Like I seriously don't understand your point.

Just trolls, don't worry about it

[Birdframe_Prime]

I want to cast a vote for a third option.

I want a rework to The Sargeant. Where he gets away despite everything we do to try and stop him.

Let me paint you a picture of this little ridiculous idea:

We arrive in the boss arena and get a tiny little cut scene of the boss seeing us and scrambling out the door, leaving his minions for us to nuke. We have to destroy a couple of targets to unlock the door, and progress to the next stage.

The next stage is the boss locking himself into a security chamber that launches out of the room as an escape pod. We have to disable more security and progress out into an Archwing section where we chase his pod and blow it up. It spirals out of control and smashes into the ship again, with him somehow surviving.

Arriving at the crash site we see another little cut scene of him scrambling free and jumping into one of the Corpus Coil Drives and powering off into the ship. We can choose to either chase him on a K-Drive or we can choose to parkour through some of the back tunnels in the ship to catch up to him, eventually blowing up the Coil Drive and launching him through a security door that shuts, saving him from us temporarily.

... And so on.

Basically we accomplish at least four procedurally generated events out of ten or fifteen possible ones where the boss tries to escape us and eventually manages to, by sheer luck and dumb panic, actually survive.

We destroy the entire ship in the end, escaping the explosion and getting picked up by the Lander, meanwhile a little cut-scene shows us that the Sargeant gets rescued by another ship and hailed as a hero for surviving the Tenno again.

The boss is neither invincible, nor does he have damage attenuation, he is a cockroach and we just can't hit him.