Toxic Damage, Bullet Jumping, and other Suggestions

[Frankenbitz]

I started this game only a few months ago but have already put 400+ hours. I really enjoy this game and the hard work that has been put into it. Here are my suggestions to issues that I have noticed or mechanics that don't quite make sense.

Toxin Damage -- It seems like toxin damage is the only damage type where the damage itself has a unique property like bypassing shields instead of the unique properties being tied to the status effect. There are two reasons I think this should be changed. 1) This limits the design space as the damage scales with level and ignores half of the frames Effective Health Pool (EHP) making it very dangerous at every level of play. 2) It ignores the reasoning of shield gating. The idea is to prevent the ability to die from one shot but toxin still allows it to happen. Outside of only a few frames/abilities being able to prevent toxin damage like Mesmer Skin or Hildryn's passive, there isn't a way to protect yourself. Arcane Resistance only resists the status proc but not the damage. My suggestion would be to either limit the amount of damage it can do to 75% of max health or remove the ability for the damage itself to bypass shields. This could be one sided (only against tenno) if DE doesn't want some weapon builds to suddenly drop in effectiveness like the torrid against corpus.

Bullet Jumping -- Currently it seems like bullet jumping only cares about two instances to occur; crouching and jumping. The issue being that crouching can be forced and jumping can take precedence in certain situations. If the character is wedged in a space where they cannot stand at full height, they are forced into a crouched position. This can also happen if they are crouching during a sequence that takes control away from the player such as a "Stay or Leave" option on defense missions. Trying to jump in these forced crouch positions leads to a bullet jump and is annoying at times since it was not the intention. Also, in certain situations like wall clinging, the jump takes precedence and doesn't allow for a bullet jump. This can be really annoying for tight vertical areas like the column leading to one of the data vaults on Rosalind, Uranus, where a single bullet jump doesn't have enough height to reach the top. My suggestion would be to tie bullet jumps to needing the crouch button and the jump button to both be pressed. This would give more control back to the player and allow ease for consecutive bullet jumps as holding crouch and jumping will only do one bullet jump.

Strong Early Game Weapon -- One of the biggest issues I had when starting out was the lack of damage any of the early game weapons had. I didn't feel like I could kill anything reliably until I got the Broken War. I effectively only used it until I was MR 8 and bought the Cedo with platinum. Only then could I branch out and try other weapons since I had either the Broken War or the Cedo to fall back on. There are some early weapons that can be decent but they are buried in the marketplace. My suggestion would be to give new players a primary weapon within the first few story missions that can scale to the end of star chart and to the start of Steel Path. The feeling of uselessness early game is not just isolated to my experience but to some of my friends that also started recently.

Mission Progression -- I would love tags on the quests that label them either as Story Quests or Side Quests. Starting out I would go from prereq to prereq from a mission I knew was a Story mission to find out what I needed to do next.

Past Steel Path -- The game doesn't feel like it really starts until once steel path has been unlocked. Only then can you get galvanized mods and most incarnon genesis's. I would love to see a continuation once the star chart is completed on steel path mode. Right now it seems like it is only for MR experience. The continuation could be a game mode or boss battle that is unlocked that would require strong frames and good weapons with a team to complete.

Thank you for reading my complaints and suggestions. This is only my take on what could be improved on and may not be the general consensus.

[taiiat]

hmm, that's the first time i've seen someone have a reasonable suggestion for Toxin. limiting instances of Toxin Damage and Status to 50% of your Health could cover what People are looking for without removing Toxin as the only thing that provides a threat to Health to make the Player ever consider their Health rather than just making their Shields (and thesedays Gating) more effective.

[Tiltskillet]

28 minutes ago, Frankenbitz said:

Toxin Damage -- It seems like toxin damage is the only damage type where the damage itself has a unique property like bypassing shields instead of the unique properties being tied to the status effect. There are two reasons I think this should be changed. 1) This limits the design space as the damage scales with level and ignores half of the frames Effective Health Pool (EHP) making it very dangerous at every level of play. 2) It ignores the reasoning of shield gating. The idea is to prevent the ability to die from one shot but toxin still allows it to happen. Outside of only a few frames/abilities being able to prevent toxin damage like Mesmer Skin or Hildryn's passive, there isn't a way to protect yourself. Arcane Resistance only resists the status proc but not the damage. My suggestion would be to either limit the amount of damage it can do to 75% of max health or remove the ability for the damage itself to bypass shields. This could be one sided (only against tenno) if DE doesn't want some weapon builds to suddenly drop in effectiveness like the torrid against corpus.

I'd like Toxin damage to stop bypassing shields, Tenno or enemy.  Toxin procs would keep this property.   There would need to be other balance changes around this though, to avoid things like newer players having too much trouble killing Corpus, Infested becoming too weak, and shield builds becoming even more powerful.

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

1 hour ago, Frankenbitz said:

-snip-

1: I like this idea. Toxin being the only damage type with a unique effect at 0% status chance is a bit odd.

2: This is something I've never had an issue with, but I can see how some might have the issue, and fixing it shouldn't affect normal bullet jumping.

3: This has been largely fixed. New players are now given access to the regular Bo and Paris instead of the MK1 versions, and these weapons are very good for the early game. Unfortunately, if you instead choose the Skana and Braton, you will have a much worse time as a new player, so I would love to see DE fix this in some way (such as renaming the current skana as the "MK1 Skana" and adding a stronger "normal" version that is similar in power to the Bo, or buffing the normal Braton slightly)

4: DE has said they are working on this

5: I would love to see a Raid or something similar unlocked by completing the SP star chart. Right now the only challenging boss is the SP Effervo 60 eyes challenge, adding another would be great

[Pakaku]

1 hour ago, Frankenbitz said:

Strong Early Game Weapon -- One of the biggest issues I had when starting out was the lack of damage any of the early game weapons had. I didn't feel like I could kill anything reliably until I got the Broken War. I effectively only used it until I was MR 8 and bought the Cedo with platinum. Only then could I branch out and try other weapons since I had either the Broken War or the Cedo to fall back on. There are some early weapons that can be decent but they are buried in the marketplace. My suggestion would be to give new players a primary weapon within the first few story missions that can scale to the end of star chart and to the start of Steel Path. The feeling of uselessness early game is not just isolated to my experience but to some of my friends that also started recently.

You should be able to earn better stuff later in the game, that's known as progression. Just like the MR path and unlocking more weapons. You reached MR8, found a good weapon, and that is perfectly fine.

I'd say lack of decent mods are the thing holding back early-game players. Older weapons may not be as comparable to late-game weapons, but they can still be built to be capable. I don't do extreme long-term level-cap missions, but I can still build older weapons to perform just fine in a Steel-Path level mission, because I've collected mods that aren't going to be available until around the later part of the game.

There's also knowing how to mod well in order to do well, and the game still has a hard time explaining to new players, for example, the different ways of how to build well for dealing with armoured enemies

[BroDutt]

2 hours ago, Frankenbitz said:

Toxin Damage -- It seems like toxin damage is the only damage type where the damage itself has a unique property like bypassing shields instead of the unique properties being tied to the status effect. There are two reasons I think this should be changed. 1) This limits the design space as the damage scales with level and ignores half of the frames Effective Health Pool (EHP) making it very dangerous at every level of play. 2) It ignores the reasoning of shield gating. The idea is to prevent the ability to die from one shot but toxin still allows it to happen. Outside of only a few frames/abilities being able to prevent toxin damage like Mesmer Skin or Hildryn's passive, there isn't a way to protect yourself. Arcane Resistance only resists the status proc but not the damage. My suggestion would be to either limit the amount of damage it can do to 75% of max health or remove the ability for the damage itself to bypass shields. This could be one sided (only against tenno) if DE doesn't want some weapon builds to suddenly drop in effectiveness like the torrid against corpus.

Agree with this. Toxin should be able to bypass shield if it's proc. Also to make it more exciting, Robotic enemy shouldn't effect by it/resist toxin and viral proc like infested. We had Radiation Mod now so building Radiation Toxin isn't difficult/waste more slot. Gas & electric should be able to bypass (reduce damage resistance) to ferrite armor. Alloy can still resist gas & electric.