Is Melee Influence too powerful?

[UnstarPrime]

Melee Influence:

On Melee Electricity Status
20% chance for elemental Melee Status Effects to apply to enemies within 20m for 18s. Cannot refresh while active.

In my subjective opinion and experience, I've noticed that when I'm building a melee weapon lately, there's nothing that can come close to the efficacy of a Melee Influence build*.  As long as the weapon has decent status chance, there's just no other build that can handle groups more effectively.  And while this is a really fun new way to play melee, it has me wondering whether it's so powerful that it's drowning out alternative choices.  Does a weapon have great crit stats?  Doesn't matter, because blow-for-blow, crits can't give me the same amount of damage output that building for Melee Influence's status application can.  Other arcanes?  I haven't found a build for one that can match up to Melee Influence.  For me personally, it definitely feels like Melee Influence has no realistic competition.

But let's be holistic here, because Melee Influence builds aren't without their downsides.  They thrive on clusters of enemies: the more enemies, the more procs and damage it's dealing.  Which means that a single durable enemy without any friends won't be taking much damage, and thus in this situation Melee Influence is most definitely out-shined by other builds.  But that's a really rare and exceptional situation to find yourself in a horde shooter, making Melee Influence feel like the melee build for general play.

And the thing is, from a design standpoint, I like what Melee Influence is doing here: it's found a way to make pure status into an effective killing tool.  I remember back in the day when I would hear about "crit builds" and "status builds".  Nowadays, if you want your weapon to kill, it's rare to see something that's just a status build, because the better answer to "crit build" or "status build" is "both in the same weapon", since we now have more than enough tools to do that.  So at least in my experience, I'm not seeing much that is pure status outside of primers...until Melee Influence.  So it's cool to see Melee Influence give life to an alternative strategy!  I just wonder if it may have tilted the scales a bit too much in the other direction.

Anyway, all of that is based on my subjective experience killing level 100-200 Steel Path enemies.  What are your thoughts?  I'm genuinely curious to hear others' perspectives on this.

 

*Something along the lines of Primed Fury, Primed Reach, Primed Pressure Point, +60/+60 Viral, +90 Electricity, Weeping Wounds, (flex slot)

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

No, it's electricity....If someone is gonna fight high level, it'll be grineer because they're scared of resistance. 

[crimsonspartan1]

Melee influence requires you to mod for electric unless the weapon itself has a way to do electric procs without modding for it (the Korumm's special attack can do electric procs despite modding for Viral + Heat from my testing, but doing that specific attack to proc influence can be annoying).

I use my nami solo with a lot of range and a viral + electric build with weeping wounds but also add Carnis Mandible to the build so slash can proc more often and it is an absolute status monster, but that's because the nami solo can have a lot of status chance (55% base with one of it's last incarnon upgrades), can have a base range of 5.5 meters when in incarnon form and can attack pretty fast as well, so really Melee Influence benefits weapons that have a lot of status chance, a lot of range and high attack speed. Slow melees, shorter ranged melees and low status melees can't really make proper good use of Influence, plus you need crowds of enemies in order to absolutely massacre enemies (plus you'd probably want to use a weapon with high amounts of slash damage in order to absolutely murder everything, especially if you mod for viral).

Melee influence is definitely one of the better melee arcanes, if not one of the best, but you do have to intentionally mod for electric in order to make melee influence work (unless the weapon itself has innate electric, like the Lecta) so in a way it balances it out?

[UnstarPrime]

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

No, it's electricity....If someone is gonna fight high level, it'll be grineer because they're scared of resistance. 

Before I had tried Melee Influence myself, I'd have thought the same.  But it's melting sets of 20 level 170 Steel Path Corrupted Heavy Gunners (the highest I can spawn at my MR) in seconds, noticeably faster than melee builds that have built-in solutions for armor.

Part of that speed surely comes from the fact that it's stacking status in a 20 meter radius, meaning that it's attacking enemies well outside of the melee range of non-Melee Influence melee weapons, and without suffering from follow-through to boot.

[crimsonspartan1]

5 minutes ago, UnstarPrime said:

Before I had tried Melee Influence myself, I'd have thought the same.  But it's melting sets of 20 level 170 Steel Path Corrupted Heavy Gunners (the highest I can spawn at my MR) in seconds, noticeably faster than melee builds that have built-in solutions for armor.

Part of that speed surely comes from the fact that it's stacking status in a 20 meter radius, meaning that it's attacking enemies well outside of the melee range of non-Melee Influence melee weapons, and without suffering from follow-through to boot.

High status, slash heavy weapons definitely benefit most from Melee Influence. My nami solo melts enemies but that's mainly because i'm doing a ton of slash procs on enemies combined with viral as well so at the very least lv200+ steel path grineer enemies are going to be killed really easily. I'd assume impact focused weapons like the Fragor or weapons with zero slash wouldn't be able to melt enemies with melee influence as fast as weapons like the Nami Solo or Dual Ichor (which can also spread status via the gas clouds from melee kills with it's incarnon, and create gas clouds from enemies killed by status effects spread by melee influence) which are both fast, have high status (especially with their last incarnon upgrades that increases status chance) and are slash focused. 

[Berzerkules]

It works exceptionally well if you build specifically for it but that can be said for almost anything. 

[KitMeHarder]

33 minutes ago, UnstarPrime said:

But it's melting sets of 20 level 170 Steel Path Corrupted Heavy Gunners (the highest I can spawn at my MR) in seconds, noticeably faster than melee builds that have built-in solutions for armor.

• The simulacrum hyperinflates how good it is.
  • It does more damage the more enemies you have in within the 20m
  • It does more damage the more enemies you have within electric's 3m Telsa effect
  • It does more damage to more you have enemies with the same EHP values (because of the below bug and how telsa works)
• Hits that kill an enemies don't spread Melee Influence damage, massively gimping it's potential.

In solo SP survival, you can get decent milage. But without hyper-building for it, Influence often leaves a lot of half-dead stragglers CC'd 20+m away from you. Even if you do hyper build for it, by doing something like the perma 12x combo bugged Xoris corrosive build with 2 emerald shards, you still have to hit ~14 enemies with one throw for the build to kill in one throw usually.

Only weapons that have cascade effects really benefit from it, and that's only thanks to "death" by a thousands cuts. Even then, it struggles with armor. Influence was only broken when proc'd off of damage-immune enemies.

Edited January 28 by KitMeHarder

[quxier]

45 minutes ago, KitMeHarder said:

• The simulacrum hyperinflates how good it is.
  • It does more damage the more enemies you have in within the 20m
  • It does more damage the more enemies you have within electric's 3m Telsa effect

Is number of enemies really issue of simulacrum, when it comes to SP? I'm playing Circuit a lot recently and sometimes there are lot of enemies around me.

48 minutes ago, KitMeHarder said:

 

Only weapons that have cascade effects really benefit from it, and that's only thanks to "death" by a thousands cuts. Even then, it struggles with armor. Influence was only broken when proc'd off of damage-immune enemies.

I've seen some crazy saryn build but I guess that could be replicated with other weapons (e.g. Tenet exec' slams).

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

1 hour ago, UnstarPrime said:

Before I had tried Melee Influence myself, I'd have thought the same.  But it's melting sets of 20 level 170 Steel Path Corrupted Heavy Gunners (the highest I can spawn at my MR) in seconds, noticeably faster than melee builds that have built-in solutions for armor.

Part of that speed surely comes from the fact that it's stacking status in a 20 meter radius, meaning that it's attacking enemies well outside of the melee range of non-Melee Influence melee weapons, and without suffering from follow-through to boot.

The mecha set was doing this before this arcane even existed. 

New things make inexperienced players question things that were normal from the start. 

If you like it, use it, if you don't like it, don't use it.

[PrideB4TheFall]

It'll get nerfed. We all know it will.  It's just a matter of time before the AOE fanclub (wuclone) mains go ballistic.

[RobWasHere]

1 hour ago, crimsonspartan1 said:

Melee influence requires you to mod for electric unless the weapon itself has a way to do electric procs without modding for it (the Korumm's special attack can do electric procs despite modding for Viral + Heat from my testing, but doing that specific attack to proc influence can be annoying).

Before it get fixed, you can proc Influence having your Amp equipped with Virtuos Surge proc the electric status for you. It still recommended to have electricity on a weapon because its very clunky to constantly jump into kiddo mode just to shoot the amp few times.

[crimsonspartan1]

4 hours ago, crimsonspartan1 said:

High status, slash heavy weapons definitely benefit most from Melee Influence. My nami solo melts enemies but that's mainly because i'm doing a ton of slash procs on enemies combined with viral as well so at the very least lv200+ steel path grineer enemies are going to be killed really easily. I'd assume impact focused weapons like the Fragor or weapons with zero slash wouldn't be able to melt enemies with melee influence as fast as weapons like the Nami Solo or Dual Ichor (which can also spread status via the gas clouds from melee kills with it's incarnon, and create gas clouds from enemies killed by status effects spread by melee influence) which are both fast, have high status (especially with their last incarnon upgrades that increases status chance) and are slash focused. 

Ok well from looking at the warframe wiki, apparently melee influence doesn't spread Impact, Puncture or Slash, so that confuses me a little bit on why I could murder rooms with my Nami solo, but that's probably because of the massive amount of range I have on it, and the many slash procs from the weapon hits themselves. Plus having conditional overload on my build probably makes it way better as well. Can use influence to spread viral for enemy weakening and electricity for AOE stunning and then just do a bunch of slash procs with my Nami solo and kill everything. Don't even need to mod for crit, just slash + viral + electric with a lot of status chance, range, attack speed and weeping wounds. 

Even if it only procs elemental mods, Melee Influence is still a lot better than some of the other melee arcanes IMO. 

2 hours ago, RobWasHere said:

Before it get fixed, you can proc Influence having your Amp equipped with Virtuos Surge proc the electric status for you. It still recommended to have electricity on a weapon because its very clunky to constantly jump into kiddo mode just to shoot the amp few times.

Ye, it's generally easier to just build for electric. If I could do the Korumm's special "stick weapon in floor and shock enemies around it" attack more easily and if it did electric procs more reliably, then that would be the best weapon for Influence as you can still do electric procs with that specific attack while also modding for Viral + Heat, but that attack isn't the fastest and it doesn't proc electric all the time, nor would it trigger Influence all the time with it's 20% chance to activate. Think there's some other weapons that can also do forced electric procs, but nothing particularly comes to mind right away?

[Tiltskillet]

7 minutes ago, crimsonspartan1 said:

Think there's some other weapons that can also do forced electric procs, but nothing particularly comes to mind right away?

Falcor and Xoris explosions.  Tenet Agendus disk.  I don't have arcane adapters on these yet, so haven't tested  them.

I'm sure there's more, although some of the others are on slams/slides, like Ohma.

[Berzerkules]

1 minute ago, Tiltskillet said:

Falcor and Xoris explosions.  Tenet Agendus disk.  I don't have arcane adapters on these yet, so haven't tested  them.

I'm sure there's more, although some of the others are on slams/slides, like Ohma.

I'm a little salt about prisma ohma. We get it right before melee influence but it has lower status chance...

Oh well, I'm too deep into this RDD+argonak+influence kick to be too worried about other weapons atm

[crimsonspartan1]

28 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Falcor and Xoris explosions.  Tenet Agendus disk.  I don't have arcane adapters on these yet, so haven't tested  them.

I'm sure there's more, although some of the others are on slams/slides, like Ohma.

My corrosive + heat Tenet Agendus doesn't seem to do electric procs on disk attacks (unless i'm just getting really unlucky procc'ing it), but my corrosive + heat Prisma Ohma does electric on slams which I didn't know about originally, so good to know, and those slams can proc influence so that's definitely interesting. The Prova also seems to be able to do forced electric on slams.

Both weapons have electric on the weapon anyway so part of me leans towards just modding for viral + electric anyway, but with my Ohma I can mod for corrosive + heat instead and still proc influence which is interesting, AOE heat spreading is gonna be really interesting, just a shame I can't mod for Viral + Heat as the Ohma's base electric damage gets in the way. 

Edited January 29 by crimsonspartan1

[RichardKam]

Melee influence requires grouping and the damage potential scales with the number of enemies.

What other things can kill a group of enemies? Lex Prime Incarnon, and tons of other.

Without grouping and in low enemy density situation, melee influence does almost nothing.

The interaction is nothing new. People first discovered something like that with Garuda and exodia force. 

Also, melee influence currently has LOTS of unintended interaction, so DE will inevitably fix/nerf it.

Edited January 29 by RichardKam

[crimsonspartan1]

4 minutes ago, RichardKam said:

Melee influence requires grouping and the damage potential scales with the number of enemies.

What other things can kill a group of enemies? Lex Prime Incarnon, and tons of other.

Without grouping and in low enemy density situation, melee influence does almost nothing.

The interaction is nothing new. People first discovered something like that with Garuda and exodia force. 

Also, melee influence currently has LOTS of untended interaction, so DE will inevitably fix/nerf it.

The fact it can't spread slash procs (as well as puncture and impact) and requires you to mod for electric unless you use a weapon that can proc electric through other means like the Ohma / Prova slam attacks and Korumm special attack definitely balances it out quite a bit. It's still a very strong melee arcane (if not one of the best), but it could definitely be far more busted. I'm glad we at least avoided another Telos Boltace situation with AOE slash spamming, but at least Melee Influence is still very strong.

[ominumi]

The Range needs to be lowered to 10m instead of 20m. That should be enough nerf. Most warframe abilities can't even reach a 20m aoe.

[(XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA]

7 hours ago, UnstarPrime said:

Melee Influence:

On Melee Electricity Status
20% chance for elemental Melee Status Effects to apply to enemies within 20m for 18s. Cannot refresh while active.

In my subjective opinion and experience, I've noticed that when I'm building a melee weapon lately, there's nothing that can come close to the efficacy of a Melee Influence build*.  As long as the weapon has decent status chance, there's just no other build that can handle groups more effectively.  And while this is a really fun new way to play melee, it has me wondering whether it's so powerful that it's drowning out alternative choices.  Does a weapon have great crit stats?  Doesn't matter, because blow-for-blow, crits can't give me the same amount of damage output that building for Melee Influence's status application can.  Other arcanes?  I haven't found a build for one that can match up to Melee Influence.  For me personally, it definitely feels like Melee Influence has no realistic competition.

But let's be holistic here, because Melee Influence builds aren't without their downsides.  They thrive on clusters of enemies: the more enemies, the more procs and damage it's dealing.  Which means that a single durable enemy without any friends won't be taking much damage, and thus in this situation Melee Influence is most definitely out-shined by other builds.  But that's a really rare and exceptional situation to find yourself in a horde shooter, making Melee Influence feel like the melee build for general play.

And the thing is, from a design standpoint, I like what Melee Influence is doing here: it's found a way to make pure status into an effective killing tool.  I remember back in the day when I would hear about "crit builds" and "status builds".  Nowadays, if you want your weapon to kill, it's rare to see something that's just a status build, because the better answer to "crit build" or "status build" is "both in the same weapon", since we now have more than enough tools to do that.  So at least in my experience, I'm not seeing much that is pure status outside of primers...until Melee Influence.  So it's cool to see Melee Influence give life to an alternative strategy!  I just wonder if it may have tilted the scales a bit too much in the other direction.

Anyway, all of that is based on my subjective experience killing level 100-200 Steel Path enemies.  What are your thoughts?  I'm genuinely curious to hear others' perspectives on this.

 

*Something along the lines of Primed Fury, Primed Reach, Primed Pressure Point, +60/+60 Viral, +90 Electricity, Weeping Wounds, (flex slot)

It wouldnt surprise me if it gets nerfed.

And i think part of the issue is alot of the arcanes are just completely meh.

Like, 200 armor? Thats almost meaningless. 

More damage but only if you have a crap ton of shield? Meh. Like we dont already have enough sources of "damage". 

Crescendo? Feels irrelevant unless going for heavy attack builds and even that feels niche. 

Influence? Probably one of the better options but only affects yellows. 

Corrosive on cast? Probably one of the better ones.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

it's not powerful.. it's influential...

but if it's as powerful as people say, it'll get nerfed. can't wait to see all the inevitable complaints from people who have the foresight of a blind mole, despite having played the game for years and having seen multiple nerfs to overpowered tactics before..

[ReddyDisco]

10 hours ago, UnstarPrime said:

*Something along the lines of Primed Fury, Primed Reach, Primed Pressure Point, +60/+60 Viral, +90 Electricity, Weeping Wounds, (flex slot)

Curious, Is there a reason you use primed pressure point instead of condition overload?

[UnstarPrime]

4 hours ago, crimsonspartan1 said:

Ok well from looking at the warframe wiki, apparently melee influence doesn't spread Impact, Puncture or Slash, so that confuses me a little bit on why I could murder rooms with my Nami solo

It's the Electric Procs that are doing the killing, magnified by the Viral procs.  And each instance of the Electric procs that gets spread is hitting multiple enemies, which really balloons the damage, to the point where it's enough damage to carve through armored enemies at a speed that feels like you're cutting through with Slash procs.

 

4 hours ago, RichardKam said:

Melee influence requires grouping and the damage potential scales with the number of enemies.

What other things can kill a group of enemies? Lex Prime Incarnon, and tons of other.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "grouping", but when I think of grouping I think of Pull, of Cordon, of Vortex...you know, abilities that take enemies and compact them into a 5 meter area.  Your mention of the Lex makes it seem like this is what you mean.

And that's not what I'm talking about.  A 20 meter radius means that if enemies that are 40 meters apart will be part of the same group as long as there's an enemy between them; so just wading into any mid-sized room with multiple enemies works.  A Lex Prime Incarnon can indeed carve through enemies that are tightly packed, but it's not hitting everything in a 40 meter diameter sphere.

 

14 minutes ago, ReddyDisco said:

Curious, Is there a reason you use primed pressure point instead of condition overload?

Haha, mostly because it was just the first mod my brain thought of when I asked myself "what's an example damage mod".  My actual builds generally use Condition Overload for this, which I agree is going to be a better pick in many if not most scenarios. ^^

[Ace-Bounty-Hunter]

If it had the ability to spread slash procs it absolutely would have been busted. But it only spreads non physical damage types.

In addition, you have to intentionally build for electricity (if the weapon doesn't already provide it innately) which needs a high enough weighting to proc reliably in order to maintain the buff. Furthermore it is only really effective in missions with extremely high enemy density (Steel Path survival).

This makes it a pretty niche use case depending on the weapon and stance you have equipped. 

[Ace-Bounty-Hunter]

5 hours ago, (XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA said:

Like, 200 armor? Thats almost meaningless.

It's 200 armor per enemy killed with unlimited stacks and their own individual 10 second timers. In a mission with very high density you can consistently reach up to 5000 armor as long as you're killing enemies non stop.

[KitMeHarder]

10 hours ago, quxier said:

I'm playing Circuit a lot recently and sometimes there are lot of enemies around me.

You can have that many enemies within close range to one another. But even in solo SP endurance, rarely are there 20 enemies that closely packed together. Let alone every one of those enemies being within range of multiple tesla effects (and those tesla effects not falling off because of HP discrepancies)....

Unless of course you wait for enemies to group up like that. But then you've throttled your KPS so much that it's kinda pointless to call MI "too powerful".

And then what about non-endurance modes?

5 hours ago, ominumi said:

Most warframe abilities can't even reach a 20m aoe.

... Countless can. You only need a base range of 7.2m and that's assuming there's no double scaling.

6 hours ago, RichardKam said:

Also, melee influence currently has LOTS of unintended interaction

This is what will/should be fixed. Although I tried a couple the other day (Slight of Hand, Hound) and they didn't work. IDK if I messed up somewhere.

5 hours ago, (XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA said:

Like, 200 armor? Thats almost meaningless. 

It has unlimited stacks.

1 hour ago, UnstarPrime said:

to the point where it's enough damage to carve through armored enemies at a speed that feels like you're cutting through with Slash procs.

This is not my experience, nor does it seem to be most other's. Just to put it out there, you need an absurd (and I mean absurd) amount of electric damage to do anything to Alloy armor. Mind posting a video?

1 hour ago, UnstarPrime said:

A 20 meter radius means that if enemies that are 40 meters apart

Every area effect in WF is shown as a radius. Reiterating it as a diameter just comes off as fearmongering.