Jade Shadows - Dev Workshop: Enemy Resistances and Status Rework (LIVE!)

[Drake6401]

I do like the ideas for these changes, mostly Grineer. Viral+Slash builds are too often deemed the only way to play as we certainly have a DoT crutch going on in the game's meta right now. I do agree that Steel Path enemies at least could stand to get stronger faster.  Warframe has experienced a lot of power creep since Steel Path was introduced.

My more controversial opinion is that major overhauls will need to happen to both enemy scaling and player damage and survivability. Right now, it's possible to reach level cap and survive. For Warframe to truly create scaling challenges for players without applying additional conditions, this must be made impossible. There must be a level that we just can't survive or kill. That way you create a limit that you can use scale content as a means to make it harder even for the most seasoned players.

To do this however, is a massive undertaking and one I don't even know if truly possible at this point. Youtuber MHBlacky had made a video regarding this topic in great detail as well.

[ShogunGunshow]

I've been begging for an EHP nerf to enemies and for armor to cap for forever. Now we can FINALLY balance some of these statuses so that they're not absolutely mandatory. 

[(PSN)S_Payer]

People forgot that you can actually run magnetic and toxin at the same time 🤦🏻‍♂️

[ShogunGunshow]

4 minutes ago, (PSN)S_Payer said:

People forgot that you can actually run magnetic and toxin at the same time 🤦🏻‍♂️

... why would you? 

If you're running toxin, the entire point is to BYPASS shields. 

[Genitive]

This looks like a good opportunity to also change the void status to something more interesting. Amplifying other status effects perhaps? Anything would be better than the bullet attractor.

[Famecans]

Gas.

I don't care about the gas clouds preventing me from seeing the enemy if the gas status leaves the enemies completely blind.

Edited April 26 by Famecans

[ArcusVeles]

I hope this elemental pass also comes with better control as to how elements do and do not fuse.  I'm tired of modding my weapons one way only to have ally or duviri buffs tell me otherwise.  Make modded elements and buff-based elements not mix, and maybe even allow us to keep modded simple elements instead of automatically combining, under certain circumstances (like with current and future innately complex elemental mods, or with base weapon elements/progenitor bonuses).

[GreifOfUs]

So, I have seen a lot of comments about magnetic just being beaten out by toxin. I believe an additional effect that could make magnetic useful against all factions would be beneficial.
Magnetic change:
I suggest adding a low power radial pull effect on magnetized foes grouping them together. (7-10 m pull range max with line of sight check, and WEAK pull) I would make the pull happen every tic (since this is a non damaging status) and possibly increase the strength of the pull OR the radius of the effect upon enemies.
This would allow players to consider modding for gas magnetic since the two statuses would be synergistic and benefit from each other.

Blast change:
I have always been disappointed that blast in itself doesn't make weapons "explosive" in nature.
I saw someone in the thread earlier mention blast storing damage to then deal in an AOE.
I would recommend doing something similar to Dagath's Curse, where it stores up all damage and only sends out a % of it (I reccomend 50% with fall-off of 50%). Additionally make the range of this "delayed blast" scale like gas. This would allow the blast element to feel "explosive" and many explosive weapons already have blast so this would be a nice addition for the blast weighted ones. And it would open up build variety using single target weapons to deal HUGE damage to a single target and deal a range of 25-50% (look at previously mentioned numbers) of that damage in a radius.

Notably these changes would create three AOE statuses that could be modded for on any weapon potentially bringing status variation for the weapons, which if we combine these along side the buff of partial armor strip could make all of these very beneficial to any weapon set up.

[Mr_Stach]

5 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

Weapons and Warframes that deal Cold will be updated to reflect this new behaviour. 

 

It would be real cool if we could also update Frost's Passive to just be the Biting Frost Augment during this pass. Let the Ice Man benefit most from frozen enemies innately 🙏

[Spicy_DX]

Please don't remove the robotic/machinery electric weakness,

I'm glad you're moving in the direction of making the damage resistances simpler, but I worry this system goes too far in that direction. There's a lot of good flavor and fantasy I liked about the old system, with electricity damage being strong against robotic enemies commonly across all factions being the prime example.

I think there's a way to get the best of both worlds here. Maybe make robotics a separate "sub-faction" that exists across corpus grineer and murmur.

[Somnia]

[Bane/Expel/Cleanse/Smite] mods should probably be touched on with this rework, too. They're just faction rock-paper-scissors without the flavor/thematics of the elemental damage types.
 

Edited April 26 by Somnia

[BETAOPTICS]

1 hour ago, --Impulse-- said:

Status mods should work like this: Mods next to each other should combine effects, IE: Heat + elec makes Rad, Cold + elec makes magnetic but if one of those types is being combined then > use uncombined if mods are adjacent. 
Top row and bottom row would separate mod combinations so you can have Cold > Slash mod (buffer) Tox + elec(Corr) and the two wouldn't combine, and for weapons with innate status types, if they don't have that type IE tox in the build then it would remain with their unchanged 27 toxin as a raw status type which would only calculate for 1.5% chance to proc on a status build with 120% with Slash Heat being the main source.

I actually like this idea quite a bit. Otherwise I don't see how your post resolves some of the core issues with damage elements in the game. Maybe that was not your goal either or I am just blind (probably). But at least for me Blast isn't just bad because Viral is better and you can't usually have both. It's bad even if I could have both, because the effect of Blast is bad. This topic distantly reminds of back in the day why Corrosive was the meta, because it had the best elemental effect back then and it was the only reliable armor strip. So obviously some changes to the system have been a long time coming. Back in 2013 we did not have this problem with rainbows because the system worked way differently back then and with Damage 2.0 everything changed, the game got clear metas that have been more or less the same since then: Some elments are used in every occassion and some never. That can't change unless the game is willing to evolve it's system and yes, that also includes the material system.

Look I get what you are saying and I am not claiming I wholeheartedly disagree with you either there. At the same time though the current system is not healthy for long term design either and I don't really see a way out that wouldn't just be to turning every element similar to Viral+Heat+Slash, at which point why have elements anyway? Yes there needs to be elements that are more effective against certain enemy types than others but I think the differences shouldn't be as drastic to the point where currently certain things are mandatory leaving little or no room for variety.

Just my 5 cents. Feel free to disagree or prove me a fool even if you feel so inclined.

[TheTundraTerror]

So, armor finally getting capped after 11 years is nice... I just wish it didn't come at the cost of dumpstering all my Emerald shards.

[RAWKLAWBSTAR]

15 minutes ago, (PSN)S_Payer said:

People forgot that you can actually run magnetic and toxin at the same time 🤦🏻‍♂️

You can but you're better off trying to cram as much Toxin into a weapon as possible then boost things that help you deliver that. The two slots you need to get magnetic are wasted in comparison.

 

Not that it matters terribly much. Even high level corpus are rather frail. Modding to deal with them specifically just cuts the time  down from maybe a second to barely a fraction of that.

 

And might as well share more thoughts:

• Impact and/or Cold should interact with Melee Follow Through.
• It'd be nice if upon killing an enemy with a pile of Electric procs on them, a fraction of the remaining damage on them would discharge immediately. If not as an innate feature of Electricity then as a mod.
• Were Toxin to be nerfed to make its damage not immediately bypass shields, it should get something to make up for that, which is another good spot to slap an accuracy debuff.
• The Infested need a defense mechanic of their own. I had though regeneration could been such a thing but with shields leaning into that more heavily, I'd go with my other one. Death delay. Infested simply do not die immediately when you kill them without it being massive overkill levels of damage, they keep fighting for a little bit before keeling over. Toxin or another status proc could interact with that, reducing or eliminating it.

 

[BARLEYDAWG]

 

With the proposed enemy health types rework it seems like a number of damage types won't get any damage bonuses towards any enemy health types which I hope isn't the case. Other than that, the idea of condensing the health types seems fine to me since similar heath types get treated the same most of time anyways, cases of status immunity being the exception to when similar health types get treated the same.

I like the idea of cold status freezing enemies at max stacks, though I would like it to have the additional effect of pausing the timers of other status procs (similar to how Xaku's fourth ability will pause the timers for their other abilities, but the fourth ability itself is still on an active timer) to give cold procs more synergy with other status effects. Giving us a way to increase the stack cap for cold procs would be desirable for certain enemies that would normally be unable to frozen due to status stack caps (similar to green archon shards increasing corrosive proc stack cap allowing full armor strip) which would also increase the viability of the secondary shiver arcane. This is assuming that the freeze threshold doesn't increase with the increased stack cap and that enemies are immune to being frozen while invulnerable so that they can't be trapped in an invulnerable state.

Removing the stack cap for gas (in terms of damage, not range) would probably help it be used more than increasing its visibility since it currently suffers against armored enemies. Having it function similar to heat status (one damage tic per second per enemy hit for multiple procs) would probably be the least likely way to cause performance issues.

Like others have said, magnetic would probably still be passed up for straight toxin damage with the proposed changes. Even if enemies could get to the point of instantly regenerating their full shields after being damaged, magnetic would be less viable than toxin since in that situation you would have to keep at least one magnetic proc on the enemy to kill it while with toxin you don't even need the occasional status proc. This differs from the corrosive or slash versus armor situation in that slash still requires a status proc in order to be viable against armor. Removing the innate shield bypass effect of straight toxin damage, but not of toxin status, seems like a reasonable nerf to toxin to increase the viability of magnetic versus shields since it would bring toxin more in line with slash versus armor and it would also help players survive against sources of toxin damage.

[KaitouGir]

Magnetic will be bad as the anti shield element as long as toxic exists. I’d like if it applied grouping with other enemies with magnetic and stacks increase the range. That would make gas+magnetic an actually good combo.

[migoq_aki]

2 hours ago, French said:

Dear DE,
The game  is at a point where you can take any weapon to level cap and you decide to nerf the enemies again. I was really hyped after seeing the enemies scaling rework expecting a buff.
First of all the cap to armor isnt THAT bad. it's so easiely stripped now that you dont really care about armor anymore. But you need to buff the HP by a lot, way more than you think. 
The recharge delay on shield isnt bad. Exept Toxin damage exist, it will ignore the shield and ignore this buff.
Also encouraging people to use Impact and magnetic when is a bad idea. You go in a Corpus map you use Toxin, you go in a grineer map you use slash, you go in an infested map you use viral. Thats it. it's a problem with the status  in general. But this is encouraging people to play worse loadout when you put that in the game.

if you think what you said matters in any significant degree you have no idea how game design works

cough cough surely everybody is breezing through archimedia because stug with specifically made setup, buffs and/or rivens and circumstances can kill level 9999

dented

do level cap survival with every weapon lol

Edited April 26 by migoq_aki

[RAWKLAWBSTAR]

3 minutes ago, BARLEYDAWG said:

I like the idea of cold status freezing enemies at max stacks, though I would like it to have the additional effect of pausing the timers of other status procs (similar to how Xaku's fourth ability will pause the timers for their other abilities, but the fourth ability itself is still on an active timer) to give cold procs more synergy with other status effects.

Just adding +Status Duration would be a better approach than just freezing them. Stopping the timers entirely seems more appropriate for a Warframe power.

[DTaina]

19 minutes ago, Mr_Stach said:

It would be real cool if we could also update Frost's Passive to just be the Biting Frost Augment during this pass. Let the Ice Man benefit most from frozen enemies innately 🙏

This would be great for him.  Anything but that extremely low chance to freeze enemies when they melee you.  

[(PSN)rexis12]

Squashing the damage resistance so that Armor EHP doesn't majorly DWARF the rest is going to help your game in the long run.

The issue is that, due to how your EHP already works, what people consider to be reasonable, is instead actually butt#*!% insane. 

And people will think it's making things easier, instead of making the status have weight again. 

My view is this. 

1. Armor is just Armor. No Ferrite, Alloy, Carapace, or what other variations you have. It's just one type of Armor with it having the same Resistance and Weakness across the faction board.

2. Armor should either have a fixed value or stop scaling at the point where enemy can get 80-90 DR. So that when it's reduced through Corrosive or other abilities, it actually means something instead of having to full strip for it to matter.

This makes it so that you have Regular Units and Heavy Units, instead of every Armor Enemy being a Heavy Unit eventually. Again, I want to remind people that a Steel Path Heavy Gunner, which is a basic Heavy Unit has TWICE the EHP than an Acolyte, before DA. Imagine an uncommon Infected in L4D having the same or more than twice the amount of health than a Tank. 

This let's you actually tailor enemy difficulty to a point where you k ow it doesn't get exponentially harder, which means you can actually Nerf things because you can actually gauge where it min and max potential damage lie and see what is actually overstepping their bounds. Because a Knell with a Tier 5 Red Crit and a Crit Damage Multiplier of 5.6x barely tickles these enemies with how much the DR of their Armor stack, while a Phantasma that deals a fraction of a fraction of the damage but can slap like 100 slash procs can insta gib them. 

 

Also in regards to Enemy Shields. 

Just three things. 

1. Stop making Shields with special exceptions. All Shields should have the same properties, that means either Toxic goes through Shields or they don't. Don't make a mechanic that then gets ignored for stronger units, which makes us ignore that mechankc entirely due to it being not worth it on the chance we fight those units. 

2. If they already have Shields, no Armor. The reason is that chances are after this there's going to be a change in what method of enemy is EHP is going to be the best, and slapping on two of them will just have us use what's only effective on one, like how people just bring Rad or Viral-Slash to deal with Corpus Armor units, not giving a S#&$e about Shields entirely. Make it as effect as possible, but make it just have one type of Damage Reduction. 

 

Finally. 

No status immunities. 

No Orb Vallis being immune to Magnetic/Cold/Viral. No Deimos being immune to Viral. No Acolytes not beeing immune to Viral. No Infested Demolished being immune to Viral.

I want mechanics to work on light and heavy units, so that when a heavy unit or big unit shows up, me usingn the knowledge of enemy weakness actually means something. 

Because I will always say, that the Orbs, the Kyra especially, enemies being immune to #*!%ing Magnetic Procs, is the worst thing you could because of how that could have been the time to actually reward Status Diversity, but you fumbled. So people just go even harder with the DPS that's already meta. 

Which is Viral. 

See how many things are just immune to Viral, because that's just how much the current EHP system has pigeonhole people into having Viral. Maybe not now, but as you do, because having mechanics just fail you because it's the best thing to counter the BS enemy EHP isn't a good feeling. 

It also just screams you being insecure about your own game mechanics if you have to block it every where you go. 

 

And that's it from me. 

[VohuManah]

People commenting on no buffs to Gas are probably forgetting that Stealth Gas happened a long time ago, and more recently Gas was also buffed ferociously by oversight and they nerfed it back into dust. Gas is (aside from the pointlessness of Puncture and Impact) the most problematic damage type in the game. They're very wary of buffing Gas and it'll probably remain a niche, quasi-irrelevant thing forever.

Now, this is more addressed to DE, it baffles me you want to rework and balance damage types, but every new weapon and Warframe is just a slash machine (see: Dante and Noctua, Dagath and Dorrclave etc...). Will you consider retroactively changing certain weapons' (and even certain abilities') damage spreads to fit the reworked damage? As it stands, if non-meta elements become more necessary, then those damage types will be pretty scarce in arsenals (in both weapons and Warframes). For weapons it'd be as simple as redistributing damage to different status or adding new base elements thematically. For Warframes, a handful of underused frames could see the light of day with minor tweaks such as Equinox's Maim aura dealing adaptive damage according to factions, without the need to fully rework them. 

Also please merge the Bane/Smite/... Rock-Paper-Scissors (as one previous comment called them) faction mods into one. Just give everyone a nice endo refund or something, literally no one will miss having to cycle between the existing 5 (?) faction mods. Yes the investment into Primed mods will leave people who maxed them out with a bad taste in their mouths, but it's hardly a hill anyone will die over. Either make the different faction mods have different effects (that could even be indirectly useful against the "wrong" faction), or merge them into one for each weapon class.

Lastly, I beg you: do not nerf the current effective builds and tactics to make the buffs look better. Buff what's weak and leave what's strong alone. Otherwise, we'll see a workshop on buffing Slash and Viral in 2 years time. Consider truly leveling the playing field, Elec/Cold/Magnetic/Radiation/Blast/Gas/Impact/Puncture all need love but leave the rest where they're currently at.

Looking forward to hearing further about this.

[EchoEagle]

Hmm.  If I were to change blast, there are a few options I could think.

First would be blast status creates a chance to Ragdoll enemies, not 'send them flying' but more like they were hit kinda hard.  This would be fitting for Blast and grants some CC features.

Second option I can think of is adding some 'new' feature, like causing enemy weapons to stop working, instead of just causing them to 'be less accurate'.  The current system means if they can already do lots of damage, you can only kinda avoid the damage.

Third Option would be to open the enemy to being hit with a finisher.  Not Parazon Mercy kills, but straight up melee finishers.  Allowing you to use blast to open enemies to melee kills.

[Ste-rakris_Ve-rakra]

Magnetic's main issue is it only effects shields, even buffing it to 1 shot shields every time would still make it useless. The reason it's in the bottom is because that's the only thing it's good for. It's mainly used in 1 faction. It's the same logic as to why the other statuses are so dominant, they are universally the better ootion in most cases.

The status proc is the thing making Magnetic useless because it's pupose built for 1 faction that can just be poisoned.

On top of that alloy armor having 50% reduction to magnetic after breaking the shield and gotta use rad for that. But no, people would rather just grab toxin and still delete them at level 200.

If Magnetic had the Void bubble effect then it would probably get some uses.

RIght now it's only good in 1 faction out of 6 total.

[BlueDawn826]

Since you want to status to be more important and prominent, can we have an option with kuva/tenet weapons that if we valence fuse a weapon with another with diferent status let us change throught the status unlocked whenever we want?

Like if i fuse a cold chakkur with a heat chakkur, having a button to select what status of the ones fused i want to have active (or have none active even)

[lihimsidhe]

7 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

So, let’s simplify the system: Health, Armor, and Shields. All Flesh types become Health, Alloy or Ferrite becomes just Armor, and the difference between Protoshields fold into Shields.

Instead of 13 Enemy Health types to juggle, we can work with 3 to better develop Faction Resistances and Weaknesses and create a more approachable system.

+

7 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

ultimately resulting in the one-stop-shop of Viral/Slash.

You're definitely heading in the right direction.  We have 13 damage types and all these health, armor, and shield types for it all to boil down to Viral + Slash + Armor Strip.  So streamlining everything into just Health, Armor, and Shields per faction is DEFINITELY the right move.  This makes it easier for everyone, players & designers, to work with.  With that said let me offer some two cents on the damage types.

The Primaries
 

• Void.  For how important the void is to the lore, this damage type and status feels completely underwhelming and uncreative.  Plus its status is basically treading into magnetic's territory.
• Impact. Staggering is fine but it seems Impact if taken to its logical extreme occupies the same conceptual space as Blast.  Not sure what to do here.
• Puncture. Mogamu already gave you a suggestion on how to handle this years ago; have it create Banshee like weak spots.  Reducing damage from mobs who more often than not evaporate in seconds isn't meaningful and doesn't really make sense from an in universe standpoint (well anymore than any other dmg type).
• Slash.  Just too overpowered and ubiquitous.  With that said here is a crazy idea; statuses shouldn't affect Health in any way until either the armor or shields are completely removed or their effectiveness is reduced in proportion to how much shields/armor are present on the mob in question.

The Core Elementals

• Heat.  It seems weird to have two armor stripping statuses in the game: the good one and the bad one.  I think the panic status is good enough.  Let armor strip be the purview of Corrosive only.
• Electric.  Just needs to do damage that's worth a damn outside of Melee Influence.
• Toxin.  Perhaps Corpus are EXTREMELY resistant to Slash but Toxin does to Corpus what Slash does to the Grineer.
• Cold.  Love what you all put forth.  Keep going in that direction!

Composite Elementals

• Magnetic.  The changes that were put forth here seem great.  You only need to do one thing to make this all work; make Shields as difficult to deal with as Armor is.  Because if you don't we will still be in the Viral + Slash + Armor Strip meta and it's just so tired at this point.  Also there's plenty of places in game where magnetic focus seems to vortex mobs.  But it's completely missing from the dmg type and status.  Please reconcile this.  Also for the love of GOD... give Mag's abilities the ability to proc magnetic status!  Imagine Ember not procing fire, Saryn not procing toxin/corrosive, Frost not proccing cold... this is decade+ oversight!
• Blast.  When Blast knocked enemies down this was great!  Again reducing enemy accuracy is pretty underwhelming.  And even if they did knocked down mobs have their accuracy reduced by 100% (as do dead mobs)
• Radiation.  Useful as is but I will say Warframe's damage system will finally be in a GREAT place when enemy vs enemy damage actually matters.
• Corrosive. Useful as is.  Perhaps give it some 'acid dripping/splashing' visuals.
• Gas.  Weaker stacks of gas should not replace stronger ones.
• Viral.  Other than it being weird that mobs 'catch a cold' for just a few seconds, this is fine as is.

That's all I got!  Thanks for reading!

Edited April 26 by lihimsidhe