combat discipline change

[HermlT]

combat discipline is most commonly used to trigger self damaging effects. however, the heal from others has an anti synergy with the core use, if equipped on more than one frame.

this makes the mod a gamble to take in public squads, as you don't know if a core mechanic of your build would work, or you would have to rely on scarce burst dmg from enemies that might not come, or instakill you in other cases.

i suggest to either make the heal and damage instances separate (take 10, applying self damage rules and then gain 20 from each ally) or make it so that combat discipline users do not gain the heal portion of the aura from any player.

lets say Player A,B have combat discipline equipped, and C doesn't. then this becomes:

A kills an enemy -> A takes 10 damage

B kills an enemy -> B takes 10 damage

C kills an enemy -> C heals 40 health

its possible to argue that the heal portion would be nerfed. however this aura is only taken by builds which already are prepared to take damage and heal it by themselves, if played solo. this change would not affect the use cases of the mod, and only increase the reliability of it.

[K4RN4]

I don't think that the self damage aspect is super intended. So I would think that DE wouldn't wanna change things to improve the functionality.

[Voltage]

2 hours ago, K4RN4 said:

I don't think that the self damage aspect is super intended. So I would think that DE wouldn't wanna change things to improve the functionality.

The only appeal the mod has is self damage though, as outlined in OP. The only time it was used for healing was on Necramechs for Orphix, which got nerfed.

[Birdframe_Prime]

The original idea of the Aura, as said by DE, is that a two-stack or higher version of this mod means you have constant heals to everyone on the squad. Or, if you're a solo self-sustain or support frame that isn't contributing to the kills, you are still helping your squad with those constant heal-on-kill effects.

However, the self-damage being able to trigger certain other buffs is a combo that's been in the general circulation for a while and allows any Warframe with consistent self-sustain to activate those. DE are aware of it, but not too happy with it, especially as they have removed other self-damage options in the game before, particularly on frames like Chroma.

I feel that the healing part countering the damage part, when stacked with other squad instances of the aura, is deliberate and designed so that things like multiple Chroma's can't stack the aura to have feedback loops of Vex Armour both being buffed to max by the mod and also buffing allies with the same amount to get that permanent four-stack of shared Vex buffs. I know it's possible to do it anyway, but it's impossible to do if even one other player also has Combat Discipline.

There may be other buffs in the game that this healing prevents from stacking together, too... but that's the one that springs to mind.

I think it's deliberate, and that the request to change it won't go anywhere.

[HermlT]

2 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

The original idea of the Aura, as said by DE, is that a two-stack or higher version of this mod means you have constant heals to everyone on the squad. Or, if you're a solo self-sustain or support frame that isn't contributing to the kills, you are still helping your squad with those constant heal-on-kill effects.

However, the self-damage being able to trigger certain other buffs is a combo that's been in the general circulation for a while and allows any Warframe with consistent self-sustain to activate those. DE are aware of it, but not too happy with it, especially as they have removed other self-damage options in the game before, particularly on frames like Chroma.

I feel that the healing part countering the damage part, when stacked with other squad instances of the aura, is deliberate and designed so that things like multiple Chroma's can't stack the aura to have feedback loops of Vex Armour both being buffed to max by the mod and also buffing allies with the same amount to get that permanent four-stack of shared Vex buffs. I know it's possible to do it anyway, but it's impossible to do if even one other player also has Combat Discipline.

There may be other buffs in the game that this healing prevents from stacking together, too... but that's the one that springs to mind.

I think it's deliberate, and that the request to change it won't go anywhere.

the thing is, the healing portion is very outdated compared to the healing methods we have in game right now, with wisp and the abundance of health orbs from multiple sources.

the original intent might have been to offer support options, but it also deliberately works with on dmg effects, and not on rage/hunter adrenaline. to me this marks this as intentional, as it would have been fixed otherwise in the same pass rage has. remove that synergy and the mod would see no use.

combat discipline is a good way to introduce controlled self damage, as it doesnt depend on modding or choice of weapons (which used to cause accidental oneshots, limited build diversity, and in general had unintuitive gameplay), and on kill effects are a common way to power ramp players at this point in the meta with gun arcanes and many on kill effects.

the chroma point seems odd to me, because the hurt/heal only affect the player that killed the enemy, so i dont see how you would cause a feedback loop. aside from that you can already get fully stacked chromas on long missions anyways, and it has significant diminishing returns (if it works at all, which doesnt seem correct, but i might be wrong) compared to using varied buffs like roar and eclipse, and even molecular prime and other susceptibility to damage abilities.

right now its a bit of a half hearted attempt at self dmg, as it works but pretty randomly. a chroma and an avenger + grace mesa could go into a mission and both be frustrated that neither build works as intended and they both wasted multiple mod / arcane slots and their aura relying on it. people will use it anyways for self damage, but its finnicky for no good reasons and causes public missions to be a gamble using it.

 

EDIT: from what i recall, before the equilibrium pickup changes this used to be the way to pick up health orbs when you were maxed for circuit (without synth fiber), but since then, this mod became irrelevant for that as well, as this functions innately.

 

Edited January 22 by HermlT

[Birdframe_Prime]

30 minutes ago, HermlT said:

the thing is, the healing portion is very outdated compared to the healing methods we have in game right now, with wisp and the abundance of health orbs from multiple sources.

Yeah... You're not wrong...

But... Counterpoint?

DE don't care.

This is a fairly consistent answer to most of the questions about making things like Arcanes more powerful or make something we use outside of their original design play even more into that outside usage.

It may take DE a while to get into fixing that thing they don't like. Look at Shield Gating with the Dragon Key as an example; it took years, but as soon as they figured out how to make that happen without removing the mechanic entirely from people that want to use it, so that they could return the Dragon Key to being a self-nerf instead of a self-buff? They did that.

So I'm going to put a little pin in the thought here, come back to it later; The Combat Discipline self damage being able to trigger other functions, like Arcane Avenger, or the 'on damaged' buffs from frames, may just get straight up nerfed. They could change the mechanic to simply mean that you lose 10 Health, and not count as 'taking damage' at all.

To be clear, the assumption is this:

Since DE said at the start that they intend this to be an Aura that helps the team, primarily, but runs the risk of causing spontaneous self-destruction if you run it solo, and since DE have a history of removing the easy access to the self damage we can use to trigger effects that they originally intended us to trigger from enemies... the changes asked for are not going to happen, and asking for them may actually have the opposite effect.

Bringing attention to the topic has the highest chance of DE simply doing nothing. The next highest chance is that they nerf the Aura's effects on activating buffs using the self damage.

There is a universe somewhere where DE does change it this way... but that's Eternalism and you shouldn't ever believe it works.

[HermlT]

If that's the approach for balance then why have a feedback board? you are implying that people should just shut up and keep their bugs secret while the game stays incoherent, which isn't really sustainable. it might get nerfed, but exposing the fact that it fills a gameplay void that currently is lacking without it is useful feedback.

looking at the dragon key example, people gave feedback for a while and it was reworked to accommodate the core mechanic that shield gating was band-aiding. now shields function better and dragon keys aren't as necessary, or at least better encoded in normal modding as catalyzing shields and recharge delay reduction buffs being more available. this is an example of things being done right, as it addresses the root causes of the emergent behavior.

if the underlying reason for the usage is resolved, then the specifics of combat discipline wouldn't matter. but if they wont redesign a few frames and arcanes/ enemy AI/ nuke frames damage scaling / environmental damage sources availability, then giving us options to willingly take damage under some gameplay restricted but consistent way and sacrifice survivability for effects is a viable solution.

currently it's implemented but punishes players for using it in uncoordinated squads with no options to circumvent it via gameplay in the mission - unlike a revenant/ styanax giving you overguard and moving away to get damaged enough, just being in the squad with another CD player makes the build not function.

a possible change to the aura could be to alter the effect to increase/ decrease the max hp for a 5 second duration stack, triggering dmg/heal effects on activation. killing too fast couldn't be circumvented with healing, and you have to exercise some discipline in your combat (which i think was the original intention behind the functionality anyways). users would always lose health on kill, and wouldnt be able to get away with just overhealing it back, rather pace their kills according to danger.

[Birdframe_Prime]

10 hours ago, HermlT said:

If that's the approach for balance then why have a feedback board? you are implying that people should just shut up and keep their bugs secret while the game stays incoherent, which isn't really sustainable.

That's entirely not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is this:

DE have had 10 years of basically only ever responding to feedback after they ask for it. Not before.

If it's a legitimate bug, then it gets fixed, if it's something like 'this would be cooler if it did this', they might get to it if the topic comes up internally as part of their usual process.

The key thing to consider is that there are patterns to this, and people that recognise them will often point out when something is likely to fit in with what DE wants and when it isn't likely. There are often ways of asking for what you want, in a broader sense, by backing off the original point and instead asking for a change that equates to the same thing.

For example the endless threads asking for a dedicated Augment slot, despite DE having said 'no' multiple times, and repeating it again as recently as October last year on formerly-known-as-Twitter. People keep asking, and it just makes DE dig their heels in and not give them that. However, what DE instead did was introduce the Archon Shard system for a secondary layer of modding that they can expand on, meaning that players can slot on an Augment and then top up the stats they're missing out on by using Shards to compensate.

Other things that DE have done have flown directly in the face of what the community was asking for, by changing something significantly despite players wanting to keep it. Like the original self damage removal that initially took away the advantages for self-buffing.

As for the whole mess about being able to take self damage, that's already in the works, and I'm surprised you aren't aware of it. DE have been making noises and showing demonstrations of the return of self damage for about a year now, ever since they were trying to nerf the AoE AFK meta (they threatened to bring back a very cursed version that did percent damage to yourself through shields and couldn't be negated). Even the return of self damage as a system may not activate these buffs as you would want. This is because the pattern of DE's changes over time have been to more thoroughly enforce that they want you to take enemy damage to activate the buffs, not use self damage to activate them.

This is where what you see as an underlying problem of not being able to consistently activate buffs is not the problem DE are seeing with their game. The problem, as DE have seen it, is players using self damage instead of taking enemy damage as intended. Everything from Arcanes to Chroma, it may seem bizarre to you, but they want you to take damage from the enemies, not from yourself. They even said as much when discussing the original self-damage removal from the game's AoE weapons, specifically noting that Chroma couldn't do what he could before, and saying 'but that's okay, that's what enemy damage is for' during the live stream.

That's why I suggested not drawing attention to this.

If more people complain about this not working the way you want this to work, then it may easily not work at all, as DE get reminded that they were trying to remove the self-damage-to-activate-buffs function a few years ago.

Still.

To the point of something like Combat Discipline and the problem with uncoordinated squads... And any potential changes you want to make to try and 'standardise' the Aura...

You're just going to look into the face of a smiling Dev, like Rebecca, who'll say to you 'It's a squad buff that you stack to heal the squad consistently, the self-damage part is to encourage players to play in a squad with others, and not use it solo at all. It's working as intended.'

And that's it. That's all you'll get. You'll be disappointed. And they won't care, because what you want for the game isn't what they want.

To put the final point on the matter; I'm saying this to you as somebody who as fought these lost causes before. They don't go anywhere. The Devs don't really care. They're going to make their game their way, and are on record saying so about six different ways.

Don't give up on feedback.

Just be aware of potential dead horses.

[Nekomian]

On 2024-01-21 at 1:17 PM, HermlT said:

i suggest to either make the heal and damage instances separate (take 10, applying self damage rules and then gain 20 from each ally) or make it so that combat discipline users do not gain the heal portion of the aura from any player.

While I understand the intent behind this, reducing the performance of a sub-routine intentionally by a factor of up to 4 is not ideal. It calculates them together already, and having it "calculate A, apply A, calculate B, apply B, etc" for the sole sake of having an "on damage" buff, on a per player basis, would cause too many issues / be a pain (keeping in mind it has to calculate this x4 in sequence for every player now too, instead of just once for all players).

4 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

You're just going to look into the face of a smiling Dev, like Rebecca, who'll say to you 'It's a squad buff that you stack to heal the squad consistently, the self-damage part is to encourage players to play in a squad with others, and not use it solo at all. It's working as intended.'

And that's it. That's all you'll get. You'll be disappointed. And they won't care, because what you want for the game isn't what they want.

This basically, exactly what birdframe says ^. Ultimately it's up to the intent of the devs what mechanics stay or don't, or how they function - this aura specifically was meant to encourage healing in squad situations where it stacks, but has found other uses - just as the dragon keys did for shield gating.

Player feedback on things like this is nice (and important), but ultimately it's whatever the intent of the devs is that wins out - it's their game and they create it and craft it how they best see fit, often from multiple perspectives (and lots of feedback) and not just a singular player as well.