With the power creep of mobs, operator damage might need a buff.

[VENDOMINUS]

  I've noticed for quite some time, that operator damage is very low for any school that isn't madurai. It used to be enough to deal with enemies that are weak to (Angels and Thrax) it, but as levels get higher, playing anything other that Madurai seems pointless, since it can take you multiple energy bars to take down 1 enemy if you're not hitting the head (for angels even hitting the head isn't enough). In the recent conjunction survival omni fissures thrax seem be hard to kill even with madurai, which is showing the system getting to a breaking point, since you have to kill those fast in order not to fail the mission.

  With the last updates the thrax specters seem to have become immune to zenuriks slow, making them a lot harder to catch and kill, while they still don't count for the damage buff from narumon, desppite technically being lifted ( they also ignore it's 1 ability, making it impossible to get the damage buff, if no unOG mobs are present).

  It also seems to me that too much of the amps power is tied to crit. A normal hit can deal as little as 2k, while a Tier 2 crit can deal upwards of 27k with the same base damage on the same mod.

  As of late everyone seems to be buying the meta Zariman arcanes to combat, them simply being unable to deal with the mobs. I'm not against making more plat of new people who don't have access to the arcanes yet, but it seems to me, that it's unhealthy for the game in general.

I would make the following suggestions to combat said issues.

1.Consider buffing base damage of amps, at the cost of the crit multiplier. Some amps that don't really crit seem almost completely useless at the moment.

2.Consider adding a %max hp damage to mobs that are weak to amp damage (% should be tied to fire rate,Higher fire rate, lower % max hp damage), so that scaling doesn't make mobs effectively immortal to anyone that isn't running Madurai.

3.Consider increasing the damage of other schools, or having their effects be useable on the enemies that they're currently not affecting. Before I used to slow Thrax with the zenurik slow, but that no longer works, for example

4.Consider adding a new mechanic in the game in which we'll be able to further improve our amps and operator damage.

 

Any one of the suggestions would move the balance in the right direction at relatively low cost. I don't like seeing new players feel like they must buy the arcanes ASAP to be able to do SP content.

 

 

[Aruquae]

Seems fair, but worth noting they made operators more geared towards utility and less towards damage

They should definitely buff the amp so I can actually use it for what it was made for (dealing with overguard)

[pwnSacrifice]

Unairu is by far the school most able to deal with high levels. The armor strip/ shield stip let's pretty much any amp kill high levels. Give it a try sometime.

Amps are largely fine, although it'd be nice to get some new arcanes to help facilitate deleting overguard, 

It would also be great if we could get the arcanes that change your amp damage from void into puncture/ heat, to be amp arcanes rather than operator arcanes (and maybe a few more damage types)

[ShogunGunshow]

Operator needs some form of scaling, like a fully moddable amp or something. They became very powerful with the Angels of the Zariman update, but in only two years they've fallen behind - again.

Either that, or they need another couple of nodes on their tree and a third ability.

Or both.

[SabreWalrus]

Operators/Amps deal with two very constraining issues you've touched upon, being that Madurai's damage buffs massively outclass the other schools, and some Amp parts are objectively better than others. This is because outside of focus school buffs, the only ways Amp damage can be increased is with Viral procs on the target, Magus Melt, Eternal Eradicate, crits (where Eternal Onslaught becomes mandatory), and headshots. So Amp parts that have the highest crit chance and highest crit damage shine very far above others. And accurate prisms that can headshot, like Raplak, Rahn, and Cantic, shine very far above scaffolds like Shraksun or Propa that can't, or are very hard to, headshot with.

Magus Melt has never worked on Spectral Thrax, and since February they now fully cleanse status so they no longer inherit Viral procs from the Corporeal form. This Viral inheritance used to go a very long way in buffing Amp damage and making Amp choices more flexible. You also cannot apply Viral to the Spectral form directly by taking Virtuos Trojan on the Amp, as they are vulnerable to Amp Void damage only (same reason Melt doesn't work) and are status immune (you can't even proc void bubbles on them from the Amp's natural Void damage). So equipping any Virtuos Arcanes only reduces your Amp damage output against them as you convert damage away from Void. Without Viral, the focus schools own damage buffs become more important. Madurai is fine, Unairu and Naramon can cope with Unairu Wisp and Amp Spike, but Zenurik losing access to its damage buff with Spectrals now ignoring Temporal Drag since the Dante update is absolutely awful and guts it.

Against all enemies other than Spectral Thrax, most things in the Amp arsenal work as expected/intended, but the constraint of Amp parts still remains. Unairu, with its shield strip and armour strip and own damage buff from Unairu Wisp, can let a player self-rez with Last Gasp all the way up to level cap, and it's especially effective with the Phahd scaffold. Phahd being so effective is for two reasons: it bounces, so one shot already leads to multiple instances of damage, and it can get caught in a void bubble, so it can bounce repeatedly on one target and absolutely shred them. It also has good crit chance and good crit damage. The shield & armour strip is far more important than the damage buffs, as Madurai can self-rez against Corpus with Void Strike and Contamination Wave, but it doesn't have much luck against Grineer without strip or the luck of low-armoured targets like Butchers being immediately available.

So we're in a weird position where the "correct" Amp setup, which is basically 147, 547, or 747 (Raplak/Cantic/Klamora, Phahd, Certus) with Eternal Eradicate and Eternal Onslaught, can actually do massive amounts of reliable damage. Accurate prism critical headshots on Spectral Thrax do massive damage, and Phahd blenders do massive damage against any Grineer/Corpus/Infested you come across (where you can also use Melt to buff your damage further, and during Last Gasp if your WF has a secondary primer you can make sure to spray enemies with Viral before going into Operator to get the kills). So with these sorts of setups in mind, I would say that Operator/Amp damage output is absolutely fine as it is and doesn't need any sort of buff, though the Temporal Drag/Temporal Shot issue with Zenurik really needs to be reverted, or tweaked in some way, so that it can still access its headshot damage buff even if the Spectral Thrax ignore the slow of the ability (and apply the same workaround to Eximus, as Zenurik's Last Gasp rez method through skillfully killing an Eximus unit through headshots is now pretty much gone too). I talked about it here: 

 

This issue, of the "best" setup being so much more potent than a slightly less optimised setup, is a problem across all of Warframe though. I think it's something that would have to involve a larger overhaul of Amp parts and Operator Arcanes. Since Amps can already kill level cap enemies as they currently stand, I would not want crit damage reduced at all, as I think that would end up being an enormous nerf. However, buffing the base damage of the Amp parts that have naturally lower crit chance/crit damage would hopefully help them to feel like viable options against their crit-focused variants. A 643 (Lega, Phahd, Lohrin) Amp right now is absolutely fantastic as a trash clearer and Last Gasp reviver, as it has high status chance with its prism, and high damage with its scaffold, with bonus status chance and crit chance on its brace. But it's not a good choice against things like Eidolons, high level Spectral Thrax, or high level Void Angels, where crits and headshots become pretty much mandatory.

[RyllusPurple]

Drifter could contribute his own set of way bounds to the mix, boosting amp crit and status chance, among other things. Perhaps the next duviri expansion will empower the duo more?

[_Anise_]

I have my fortuna amp, it was meta at one point? idk if its good still? (certus brace, shwaak prism, shakasun scaffold) I can't kill crap with it in operator/last grasp, I mostly use last grasp to take flack from nearly enemies while my sentinel revives me.

[ShogunGunshow]

Alternately they also could just let the Drifter use f***ing weapons because they keep being able to do so in Duviri (melees) and quests (nataruk). 

[Void2258]

I actually agree with this. I am kind of sick of feeling like I have to use Madurai at all times outside of base starmap or I am leeching in any content where I need to do damage with the amp. There are a ton of missions where I would like to use other schools for various reasons but feel I can't because then the lack of amp damage will cripple the mission in other ways (so I ed up changing my frame builds instead just to cover the school ability I can't take).

I also agree that the viral inheritance was in part covering for this issue.

[VENDOMINUS]

I think SabreWalrus missed the point a bit. Like other mentioned the problem here is that our operator void damage doesn't scale well against the targets that only they work against and also the extremely limited choices we have if we want to do anything well. While the meta amps work even at levelcap,, don't you think it would be good if you actually had a choice in what your ran? 

Also, would you agree that having to actually get headshots to kill something that runs away, with it's head barely visible to you, is actually enjoyable? If so, then our viewpoints are polar opposites

Actually after writing this. another change that may help is having another weakpoint added to enemies on their back (to thrax and angels), Since a low of the lack of damage problems also come from having a hard time finding the head, when they're not facing you. That won't solve the problem with scaling, or the overwhelming power of madurai, but it will help in the short term.

I personally like my own suggestion of having a Max hp % damage added to amps against the target's they're supposed to counter. That way you wouldn't get a major buff in low levels, but would still be able to kill thrax and angels at higher levels no matter the school, while not breaking normal mobs more than they do now. Also when you convert your void damage to something else currently, your amp becomes 98% useless again those same targets, they're supposed to counter, which also limits you in what you can use and where you can use it.. That would also give some purpose to efficiency for amp. On paper the stat looks good, but in practice it's bad, when compared to onslaught and eradicate.

It doesn't look like DE ever plans to have amp only enemies be killable via normal weapons, so it's a good idea to have some rebalancing, with the new Modes and their base levels taken into account.

Like I said, I just don't like that newer players are almost forced into buying arcanes and using the same amp, or just wonder why they can't do their missions solo.

 

On 2024-04-11 at 6:02 PM, ShogunGunshow said:

Alternately they also could just let the Drifter use f***ing weapons because they keep being able to do so in Duviri (melees) and quests (nataruk). 

You may have noticed, that the drifter in duviri does a low less damage with the weapons compared to when you use them with your warframe (since he's not a superpowered killing machine), so that probably won't translate well, when it comes to killing stuff that need amps to kill. On the other hand I really like the idea, and it has been repeated on some dev streams, so if the community really wants it and if vocal about it, it's not something the devs wouldn't consider.

From my perspective the whole operator system seems a bit separate from all other systems when it comes to it's fundamental codding, so that may take a long while to do, especially considering that they have to go over a ton of weapons like they are trying to do for operator skins, being wearable by drifter.

[SabreWalrus]

On 2024-04-12 at 5:57 PM, VENDOMINUS said:

Also, would you agree that having to actually get headshots to kill something that runs away, with it's head barely visible to you, is actually enjoyable? If so, then our viewpoints are polar opposites

I think that needing to land headshots on a target in order to kill it at level cap, is a completely acceptable requirement for the tiniest bit of skill expression in an otherwise very easy game, yes. Void Angels are not at all hard to headshot, and Spectral Thrax are not very hard to headshot either as you get the entire Spectral animation to position yourself and prepare (and you know they will be facing the same way the Physical form was facing when it "died"). If a Spectral Thrax moves away from you, it's because it's seeking out an enemy to absorb, and we get another massive damage buff against them while they're in the middle of absorbing a Grineer/Corpus unit, which makes a kill basically guaranteed even with body shots. You just get to kill them faster and in a more satisfying and clean way if you land a headshot or two as they finish the Spectral animation

I agree that a balancing pass over Amp parts would be nice, but there is also an argument to be made for niche content requiring specialised and niche builds. Nobody needs Eradicate and Onslaught for Void Angels or Spectral Thrax in base SP, and any crafted Amp works just fine (even Sirocco is fine). But if someone wants to go to level cap in Void Cascade, then yes, I would expect someone to have to spend more time acquiring, preparing, and taking the appropriate gear

[0_The_F00l]

How's about we reign in the power creep and balance the game instead ?

No ?

I guess I will just step out then.