Ability damage scaling needs a fundamental change

[Koekr]

A lot of warframe abilities are categorically worse by virtue of being intended for damage, with notable exceptions.

For the majority, they'll be clearing rooms at lower levels, then progressively one-shot fewer and fewer enemies as the level number climbs, ending in high level missions where the 100-energy room-clearer is barely scratching the enemy, while the 25-energy utility that makes your pew pew slightly more effective gets a sumptuous buffet.

The notable exceptions are abilities that a) scale their damage off of enemy stats, and/or b) scale up as high as you want with enough attention. Honourable mention goes to exalted weapon abilities, and the less honourable mention goes to abilities that scale off of equipped normal weapon stats.

Often, the less useful damage abilities are given utility as a fix, such as armour strip or damage vulnerability, but isn't that kind of monotonous? Do we want a game where all the 'nuke abilities' tickle the enemy but apply a 300% damage vulnerability effect?

[Dreddeth]

You raise a fair point. Addressing the issue would be a little tricky, though. We don't want every nuke caster becoming Saryn or Octavia, but just pumping the raw numbers higher is an... inadequate response. Some "nuke" frames have found a more fulfilling niche thanks to the unique properties of their specific nukes, which is a valid design choice, but we don't want to turn so many frames into Nova either.

[Koekr]

Oh I definitely don't think that simply increasing ability damage is a viable solution. In fact, it just postpones the level at which the ability damage becomes useless.

It's not necessarily good for most abilities to one-shot enemies except at very low levels, I think.

Edited April 19 by Koekr

[Traumtulpe]

You could simply make abilities deal "X times ability strength plus 20% of max health" or something similar.

Or better yet, give them a "minimum damage threshhold" - they'll always deal at least 34% health in damage regardless of Viral procs or armor.

Edited April 19 by Traumtulpe

[WindShadow970]

59 minutes ago, Koekr said:

For the majority, they'll be clearing rooms at lower levels, then progressively one-shot fewer and fewer enemies as the level number climbs, ending in high level missions where the 100-energy room-clearer is barely scratching the enemy

Sounds like Oberon.

You can track eras in Warframe via these damage values, kinda funny that Dagath's 1 or Dante's 3 do more damage than old 100 energy damage abilities. I agree that simply bumping up numbers isn't good enough, that's what happened with Oberon and his damage aged like milk. (Saryn's spores are in a similar boat, they used to scale with weapon toxin output...to this day I'm salty they changed that, ^Pablo) The way in which the frame deals damage overall needs re-imagining, get it right and you end up with evergreen abilities like Breach Surge or Seeking Talons, get it wrong and you end up with...Balefire.

[cephalon_slay]

Justice for Gara's 1 

Let my girl build combo + status + crit chance PLEASE 

[quxier]

3 hours ago, Koekr said:

A lot of warframe abilities are categorically worse by virtue of being intended for damage, with notable exceptions.

For the majority, they'll be clearing rooms at lower levels, then progressively one-shot fewer and fewer enemies as the level number climbs, ending in high level missions where the 100-energy room-clearer is barely scratching the enemy, while the 25-energy utility that makes your pew pew slightly more effective gets a sumptuous buffet.

The notable exceptions are abilities that a) scale their damage off of enemy stats, and/or b) scale up as high as you want with enough attention. Honourable mention goes to exalted weapon abilities, and the less honourable mention goes to abilities that scale off of equipped normal weapon stats.

I've mentioned this about Deep archimedea but it can be applied in general cases:

3 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

 

Or better yet, give them a "minimum damage threshhold" - they'll always deal at least 34% health in damage regardless of Viral procs or armor.

I see we are like-minded. Above topic is about this "minimal damage".

4 hours ago, Koekr said:

Often, the less useful damage abilities are given utility as a fix, such as armour strip or damage vulnerability, but isn't that kind of monotonous? Do we want a game where all the 'nuke abilities' tickle the enemy but apply a 300% damage vulnerability effect?

That's why I don't like Dagath. You get 1+2, maybe 4th => enemies dies. You don't do final 4th, enemies still have lot of hp (with viral proc so ~3x damage). Why I cannot armor strip e.g. using 2nd?

That's why I haven't been playing Dagat for so long time. It's just 1, 2, 4, 1,2,4...

And if it's like "not the best damage but armor strip" in one ability like Grendel's Pulverize then it's fine/ok.

IMHO such effects (armor/shield strip, damage vulnerability etc) should be usable all the time. Take Xaku with Styanax' armor/shield stripper. I can go do void status/damage, grab guns, shoot etc while putting 'armor/shield' strip in between. So for example: shot > strip > grab guns > strip> roll and get auto damage > armor strip. It's good that Grendel's Pulverize can at least cast his own abilities. Look at Styanax, 1,2,4 - same old Dagath! It getting monotonous. It used to be fun (casting other abilities during 4th).

[Fred_Avant_2019]

Yeah it's not ridiculous to say that, especially in a game that's been powercrept by guns, far beyond what abilities can do. In modern day Warframe, as long as you have decent guns, you can keep your energy to yourself and spend it only on abilities that will enhance your gun damage or give you some sort of tanking potential.

 

There aren't that many caster style frames that can actually manage to go to level cap with their kit's damage.

• Ash can but that's because Bladestorm is in a broken state and it forces slash procs.
• Atlas' kit is super lacking, his pseudo exalt is too, but he's carried by the buggy state of incarnon perks carrying over to pseudo exalts, which doesn't sound like an intended feature at all.
• Banshee's unable to do any sort of significant damage without weapons.
• Caliban is in an unusable state by default because Sentient Wrath's vulnerability only applies to lifted targets and is removed once they land, while Razor Gyre is basically the single worst ability in the game as of now.
• Dagath is an odd one, it's tough to tell, she's usable for sure, but the casting speeds and delays make her weird to use.
• Dante's fine on his own.
• Ember would be fine if Immolation wasn't such a piece of trash.
• Equinox's nuke can only be charged through kills, but she can't kill with anything but guns by herself. Still no clue why her 2 in day form doesn't inflict any sort of damage.
• Excalibur's Exalted Blade feel mostly useless until you've invested 2 green shards and abuse chromatic blade and a corrosive build, Radial Javelin is the single weakest nuke spell.
• Frost's kit doesn't really deal damage that scales, unless you wanna talk true damage snowglobe pushes, but that's a bit idiotic.
• Gara's infinitely scaling damage is basically useless when you factor in armor, and how you only get the increased damage in the aura around you, not your other abilities.
• Garuda is fine.
• Gauss is fine.
• Grendel is fine.
• Gyre is mostly fine, but struggles with armor, though Pillage is an easy slap on for her, she's only stopped by armor.
• Hildryn's 4 doesn't accomplish a damn thing, it's bad at everything : bad mobility, bad cc and bad damage, restricts your access to Pillage and has a huge drain that ramps up with every enemy you affect.
• Hydroid is fine.
• Inaros is fine, a little gimmicky and will probably require two green shards and a good melee for Elemental Sandstorm, but he can finally do something so let's give him that.
• Khora is fine, but people need to learn to whip their goddamn cage instead of afking in defenses.
• Lavos would've been fine, but he's held back by his cooldown gimmick, so you can never truly play him as a caster frame, and his 4's hit detection is a complete joke.
• Limbo is a caster frame, but he's got no dps abilities outside Cataclysm which does abysmal blast damage and ridiculous impact damage upon sending enemies into the rift that doesn't even scale with enemy level. It wouldn't even be broken if it did 10% current health as true damage, but instead it does like 300 fixed Impact damage.
• Mag is great but Polarize sucks once stuff don't have armor to remove : it'll simply not do anything, it won't even generate shards.
• Mesa's kit is laughable but her Peacemakers save her.
• Mirage is fine, will have couple issues without armor stripping but she'll definitely whoop some butt with Prism.
• Nezha's spears are saved by the augment, but the augment requires status procs to be worth a damn, which you're not really gonna get a whole lot of without abusing weapons that are good in that department.
• Nidus' ultimate needs a touch up, it doesn't benefit him nearly as much as the rest of his kit.
• Nova is an oddball, in her nuke's her 2, you can definitely do insane damage with her abilities but you're gonna need to shoot the ball first.
• Oberon is unsalvageable, too many constraints to make him work. His entire kit costs too much energy to function.
• Protea's 4 is a joke.
• Qorvex is a little weird but works somehow.
• Revenant is overtuned.
• Rhino's 4 should be dealing more significant damage.
• Saryn is in a favorable state but mainly because she's excellent at using guns.
• Sevagoth is in a weird place, his 1 (with augment) and 3 are very powerful but his 2 and 4 are a big letdown.
• Styanax works thanks to an unreasonable amount of slash procs to your face.
• Titania's whole kit is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is her access to Dex Pixia. Lantern has so much nuke potential but it's wasted outside of aggro control.
• Valkyr is a less relevant Excalibur with access to attack speed increase and potential immortality.
• Vauban's nuke is his 3, not his 4, but his 4 enables his nuke by removing armor, just make sure you actually build for high strength and efficiency instead of range and duration.
• Volt's nuke is irrelevant outside of ESO, armor scaling completely neuters electric damage, though I guess you could also just slap on Terrify to sort that out. Still very cringe it doesn't actually apply electric procs.
• Voruna will oneshot level cap steel path thrax units granted you used her 1 and you have a fully stacked 4 and the target is primed by her 2.
• Wisp's laser is irrelevant and is always subsumed off for a good reason. Qorvex does it better, nuclear fission > nuclear fusion confirmed (jk, but that's how it seems to work in Warframe).
• Wukong's stick is disappointing, usable, but disappointing still.
• Xaku's Deny can do some pretty idiotic damage, granted you know how to get the most out of it.
• Yareli's 4 is more of a grouping tool to abuse her 3, boosted by her 1. Or you can armor strip with Tharros Strike to nuke stuff inside of it.

 

Other frames are too "gun oriented" / cc oriented for me to list them, kinda cringe for Chroma, but hey, maybe he'll be reworked *copium*. Abilities doing good damage will never replace gunplay in content where dps checks matter. Dagath's insane nuke damage with cavalry deal only as much damage as a single tick of a Torid Incarnon, so when you put things in perspective, you realise half an ammo of a 170 charge weapon you can reload in a single shot of the normal form deals more damage than a fully strength modded ability. Only it does so several times per second. And you can do even stupider damage comparisons with even more idiotic weapons.

Out of my whole list, the frames I'm definitely not worried about are Gauss Grendel and Garuda, the G-squad are without a doubt the easiest scaling nukes in the game if you actually know how they work. Then there's Nyx who has a nuke 4 but it basically does nothing at all even with absorbed damage against enemies she fully stripped. She didn't even make it into the list because of the state she's in.

[Koekr]

10 hours ago, Fred_Avant_2019 said:

Then there's Nyx who has a nuke 4 but it basically does nothing at all even with absorbed damage against enemies she fully stripped. She didn't even make it into the list because of the state she's in.

That explains the circuit run I did as Nyx, where I thought I was simply mis-positioning and not attracting enough fire because her 4 did a suspiciously low amount of damage.

16 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

You could simply make abilities deal "X times ability strength plus 20% of max health" or something similar.

Or better yet, give them a "minimum damage threshhold" - they'll always deal at least 34% health in damage regardless of Viral procs or armor.

Scaling with enemy health directly like this can cause even more problems if applied to all abilities baseline.
If the percentage doesn't scale with ability strength, then it doesn't matter how low your ability strength is if it at least deals 25% of max health.
If the percentage does scale with ability strength, then there better be something to prevent abilities from dealing 100% of max health as damage while still letting these abilities one-shot relatively weak enemies.
If an enemy has low health and high shields, does it use shields for scaling or not? What happens if the shields get stripped?
If the damage ignores armour AND viral procs, then the damage is just bypassing a mechanic AND not benefitting from a mechanic that benefit guns.

If you look at pre-existing abilities that use enemy health as damage to some degree, you'll notice that they tend to use an accumulation mechanic, and the resultant damage never scales with the enemy getting hit with it. Garuda's 1st ability eats up a percentage of max health, but the projectile doesn't care about the max health of whatever it's hitting.

However, some abilities would definitely work well with direct health scaling. It's just not a one-size-fits-all solution.

[Traumtulpe]

38 minutes ago, Koekr said:

If you look at pre-existing abilities that use enemy health as damage to some degree

Trinity's Energy Vampire, oneshots level 9k Eximus units. Much more powerful than what I suggested, still not an issue.

Revenant's Reave, oneshots level 9k non-Eximus in an AoE, still not an issue.

Garuda's Blood Orb, oneshots level 9k in an AoE, also not an issue,

An ability that deals 35% of any enemies health is never going to be a problem, because weapons are 1000x stronger, faster, and cost no energy.

[Fred_Avant_2019]

Il y a 3 heures, Koekr a dit :

That explains the circuit run I did as Nyx, where I thought I was simply mis-positioning and not attracting enough fire because her 4 did a suspiciously low amount of damage.

The problem with Nyx isn't so much the concept of her 4 as the math behind it and the damage type it uses for the released damage wave.

Nyx's 4 damage is basically :

1500 minimum magnetic damage (multiplied by strength) to which you add 200 magnetic damage (multiplied by strength) for every second the ability is active, on top of which you add whatever damage received in its exact composition (so if it's 99.9% impact you've been hit by, it's 99.9% impact you'll release).

In short, if enemies are at a level where they can't even kill themselves, Absorb is entierly useless. By the point Absorb would do any significant damage, a single hit from any enemy would drain your entire energy bar. Guess what allows enemies to kill themselves better than Absorb? Chaos. With Chaos Sphere in play, Absorb is just a redundant more unreliable more costly ability that will basically never accomplish its goal.

But hey, at least you can get up to a cap of 400% base weapon damage if you reached at least 64k stacked Absorb. Tragic.

Nyx isn't even bad in Circuit, far from it actually, thanks to Chaos being so good especially with the augment, but Absorb isn't something you should ever rely on, unless you want to protect Excavators with your bubble, which probably does work, but other than that, you're better off with any sort of subsume over it, even just Pillage is a better option than Absorb, as it'll help enemies kill each other under the effects of Chaos, without the jankyness and limitations of Psychic Bolts.

[Tiltskillet]

15 hours ago, Fred_Avant_2019 said:

Caliban is in an unusable state by default because Sentient Wrath's vulnerability only applies to lifted targets and is removed once they land . . .

Caliban's got 99 problems but luckily that ain't one.  The vuln continues to apply to targets even when the lift has ended prematurely.  And works on Eximus, Acolytes, and at least some others immune entirely to the lift.

[Fred_Avant_2019]

il y a 1 minute, Tiltskillet a dit :

Caliban's got 99 problems but luckily that ain't one.  The vuln continues to apply to targets even when the lift has ended prematurely.  And works on Eximus, Acolytes, and at least some others immune entirely to the lift.

Well I guess we learn something new everyday. Thanks for the tip. UNFORTUNATELY... he'll still be plagued by you know which ability. Which is very damn sad, because I really like his 4's strip lingering zone. Amogusframe needs some love.

[Koekr]

2 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

An ability that deals 35% of any enemies health is never going to be a problem, because weapons are 1000x stronger, faster, and cost no energy.

Yes, that's why this thread exists, abilities are generally much weaker than guns. My point is that making abilities deal damage directly proportional to the max health of the target causes wonky scaling problems if you just apply it to everything.

Your examples of one-shot abilities are worth dissecting, as they're examples of when and when not to use direct max health scaling.
Trinity's Energy Vampire, according to its ability description, has some very notable balancing decisions. While it can deal a lot of damage very fast, this is with a high-strength low-duration build, an interesting tradeoff. It is also single-target, and its damage is based on a portion of current health, with a minimum of just 5 damage. I wouldn't call this a particularly well-designed ability either though.
Revenant's Reave requires some setup and a high-strength build to achieve its one-shot condition, with the extra caveat that the enemy must be enthrallable, which excludes some strong enemies.
Garuda's Blood Orb also requires setup to one-shot, but it's a more gratifying process than if it just dealt 25-65% of max health to any enemy it struck.

I balk against your suggestion because the 'percentage of maximum health' idea is an obvious solution with unobvious problems. The devs had already thought of it, and we know they did because they've already implemented a couple of abilities with that feature. How many times have we seen that feature on abilities since then?

[Traumtulpe]

48 minutes ago, Koekr said:

Trinity's Energy Vampire, according to its ability description, has some very notable balancing decisions. While it can deal a lot of damage very fast, this is with a high-strength low-duration build, an interesting tradeoff. It is also single-target, and its damage is based on a portion of current health, with a minimum of just 5 damage. I wouldn't call this a particularly well-designed ability either though.
Revenant's Reave requires some setup and a high-strength build to achieve its one-shot condition, with the extra caveat that the enemy must be enthrallable, which excludes some strong enemies.
Garuda's Blood Orb also requires setup to one-shot, but it's a more gratifying process than if it just dealt 25-65% of max health to any enemy it struck.

Marked for Death makes Energy Vampire an AoE instant kill. Reave oneshots at 199% strength if you use Roar (or Archon Shards), no enthralling needed.

Edited April 20 by Traumtulpe

[WindShadow970]

On 2024-04-20 at 1:54 AM, Fred_Avant_2019 said:

It wouldn't even be broken if it did 10% current health

Oh the flashbacks to when Cataclysm was nuking planets for fun when his rework released, it was rightfully nerfed it was absurd.

[Fred_Avant_2019]

Il y a 1 heure, WindShadow970 a dit :

Oh the flashbacks to when Cataclysm was nuking planets for fun when his rework released, it was rightfully nerfed it was absurd.

But that's also in a game where powercreep hadn't yet happened to the level we know today. With no steel path or anything. Old Cataclysm in modern Warframe would be irrelevant.

[WindShadow970]

24 minutes ago, Fred_Avant_2019 said:

But that's also in a game where powercreep hadn't yet happened to the level we know today. With no steel path or anything. Old Cataclysm in modern Warframe would be irrelevant.

In a time where map wide armor strip is easily accessed, enemy density has increased and heavy enemies are actually weaker than they've ever been and light units are a bit bulkier, pre-nerf Cataclysm would be stronger than before.

Pre-nerf Cataclysm scaled off the total health and shields of all rift bound enemies. There are more enemies on the map than ever before and you have things like Pillage and Terrify to strip away armor in areas similar to a max range Cataclysm, Limbo wouldn't care much for energy because he would regen energy for every enemy killed by Cataclysm all while being untouchable in the rift. He'd be able to nuke rooms forever and scale forever; no weapon, no Octavia, no Revenant could hope to compete with that, it would be busted beyond belief today.

[Fred_Avant_2019]

il y a 14 minutes, WindShadow970 a dit :

In a time where map wide armor strip is easily accessed, enemy density has increased and heavy enemies are actually weaker than they've ever been and light units are a bit bulkier, pre-nerf Cataclysm would be stronger than before.

Pre-nerf Cataclysm scaled off the total health and shields of all rift bound enemies. There are more enemies on the map than ever before and you have things like Pillage and Terrify to strip away armor in areas similar to a max range Cataclysm, Limbo wouldn't care much for energy because he would regen energy for every enemy killed by Cataclysm all while being untouchable in the rift. He'd be able to nuke rooms forever and scale forever; no weapon, no Octavia, no Revenant could hope to compete with that, it would be busted beyond belief today.

Fair enough. Limbo could still get some sort of damage in his kit though, dedicating an ability for it feels out of place, but tweaking the numbers on the one that's applied to enemies that enter or leave the rift make the most sense to me, because that's what his kit revolves around : sending enemies to the rift and making them leave it. 300 Impact damage doesn't make any sort of ... impact (sorry), it's not like he has to become a top dps caster either, but being only a CC frame and making enemies innaccessible to his team do not do him justice.

[Koekr]

I personally want to see an attempt at ability damage sort of scaling with the level of whatever it's hitting, with the intention that it approaches the EHP curve without completely matching it. You should still have to build your warframe properly if you expect competitive effectiveness against higher level enemies, after all.

Some earlier warframes' damage numbers were tuned for what is now lower level content and barely scratch higher level enemies, while newer warframes' damage numbers tend to be tuned for higher level content, and thus utterly obliterate lower level content. The compromise between these two is allowing damage numbers to re-tune based on enemy level.

I want to see this tested with Banshee, as she's not particularly popular right now and her abilities are definitely undertuned for current content.

[WindShadow970]

2 hours ago, Koekr said:

I personally want to see an attempt at ability damage sort of scaling with the level of whatever it's hitting

It was already attempted between ~2015-2019, that's the era Octavia, Revenant, Garuda, Gauss, Grendel, old Hydroid and current Oberon came from, even old Inaros' Devour had %hp damage. The issue with level scaling damage in a PvE setting is there is no way for the enemy to push back against scaling damage, leading to complete trivialisation of whatever content you come up with unless you make it impossible for enemies to be hit with those abilities e.g Eidolons. Trying to balance it is a near impossible task because you have no real wiggle room to work with, it's either very good like Octavia's Mallet or release Limbo Cataclysm or poo like old Hydroid's Undertow and Oberon's Smite, when I came back to the game I wasn't surprised no recent Warframes have %hp or level scaling damage instead we've had the other problem: flat damage creep.

Edited April 23 by WindShadow970

[Koekr]

2 minutes ago, WindShadow970 said:

It was already attempted between ~2015-2019, that's the era Octavia, Revenant, Garuda, Gauss, old Hydroid and current Oberon came from, even old Inaros' Devour had %hp damage. The issue with level scaling damage in a PvE setting is there is no way for the enemy to push back against scaling damage, leading to complete trivialisation of whatever content you come up with unless you make it impossible for enemies to be hit with those abilities e.g Eidolons. Trying to balance it is a near impossible task because you have no real wiggle room to work with, it's either very good like Octavia's Mallet or release Limbo Cataclysm or poo like old Hydroid's Undertow and Oberon's Smite, when I came back to the game I wasn't surprised no recent Warframes have %hp or level scaling damage instead we've had the other problem: flat damage creep.

It's important to understand the details of these attempts at ability damage scaling, as these are instructive on any future iterations.

If the level scaling damage closely matched the EHP curve, then the trivialization problem would occur without a doubt, and it has already occurred as you described. This is generally the pitfall with ability damage directly scaling with enemy health too.
If the level scaling damage only slightly scaled with level in a way that barely matched the EHP curve, then we have a very slightly lessened version of the same problem we do now.

You are correct in that trying to balance this is difficult.
Inventing and implementing an alternate better solution will also be difficult.
But I think some warframes do achieve a good-feeling form of scaling, so I think it's possible to achieve on a broader scale.

[Mr.Holyroller]

The issue isn't ability damage scaling, its armor scaling.

Even older Warframe abilities still melt enemies without armor 

Edited April 23 by Mr.Holyroller

[Koekr]

11 minutes ago, Mr.Holyroller said:

The issue isn't ability damage scaling, its armor scaling.

Even older Warframe abilities still melt enemies without armor 

That's true to a great extent, ability damage probably needs to bypass armour to some degree.

Although, I think it would be weird to entirely ignore armour, and there's the issue of how abilities should treat shields if they're going to treat armour differently.