Cannonade mods versus Rate of Fire increases

[(PSN)Unstar]

From what I saw of Pablo discussing what would later become the Cannonade mods on the Devstream, I really liked the goal of creating mods that make a slower rate of fire a viable play style.  However, based on my experiences trying to add these mods to builds, I don't think they've met this goal, and I have some ideas about why that is that I hope at least serve as food for thought.

The benefits of Rate of Fire increases (+RoF) are:

• Multiplicatively increasing damage per second.
• Multiplicatively increasing procs per second (which often are creating further multipliers to damage via debuffs like Corrosive, Viral, etc).

By using Cannonade mods, you sacrifice those benefits and instead get a slightly better Hornet Strike that comes with another buff that may not meaningfully benefit your build.*  In most cases, this is not a good trade-off.  Informed Warframe players know that the most effective way to increase their damage output is to incorporate as many multipliers as possible into their weapon builds; choosing not to use one of them leaves you at a disadvantage that is difficult — if not impossible — to recover from.

And that's before we take into account that many builds aren't using mods to get their base damage increase, because they're using Arcanes.  If you're already getting your base damage increase from something like Primary Deadhead or Cascadia Flare, the Cannonade mods aren't even powerful enough to compete with these Arcanes as a replacement for a weapon's base damage multipliers, and that's before taking into account the additional downside of removing the +RoF multiplier from your damage formula.

In my opinion, the Cannonade mods in their current form cannot solve this issue because they ask players to discard too much of their potential.  If DE wants players to use a slower-paced, more deliberate play-style (which I very much support!), then it needs to be able to compete with the alternative.  And that means it needs multipliers.

So let's blue sky for a second.  To be clear, this is not a proposed solution, this is just an exercise to get us closer to what a solution might look like:

If we wanted to solve this problem in the most direct, efficient, and uninteresting way, we could convert all +RoF into a new category of multiplier.  Instead of increasing fire rate, anything that would normally be a +RoF buff is instead converted into this new multiplier.  This new multiplier multiplies against both the pre-existing base damage multiplier and status chance, thus roughly maintaining both the damage per second and procs per second that the weapon would have done with +RoF, but while having it's base rate of fire.

So if your weapon with Hornet Strike and Sure Shot would normally do 100 damage per hit with a 10% status chance, and you have +60% Rate of Fire increase, this would remove the increase to Rate of Fire and your weapon would do 160 damage per hit with a 16% status chance.

And by doing that, we almost maintain the damage per second.  While weapons that only have non-damaging procs would have the exact same DPS, any weapons with procs that deal damage would end up with increased DPS, since the same amount of procs per second with increased base damage means an increase to the DPS of the procs specifically.  So perhaps the numbers need to be massaged a bit, so that +RoF converts into this new modifier at a rate of 90% or something.  Of course, then weapons that apply non-damaging procs end up getting a worse deal, so that's not perfect either.  But at least we can see that with something like this, we're much closer to maintaining the efficacy of weapons despite missing out on the multiplicative benefits of increased Rate of Fire.**

Is the above the perfect solution?  Probably not.  But I think it's a helpful exercise, because whatever the actual proposed solution for this issue is, we can compare it to the efficacy of the above solution to get a better idea of whether it's in the ballpark of being a viable alternative.

I hope this feedback is helpful in any way, because I would genuinely love to play a version of Warframe where slower-paced, more deliberate, more powerful weapons feel as viable as weapons that are modded to attack as fast as possible.  Thanks for the effort you're putting into it, and thanks for taking the time to read and consider my feedback!

 

*And with AoE weapons, Semi-Rifle Cannonade's punch-through can actually hinder builds, since projectiles only unleash their AoE when they finish traveling.  Though maybe that's intended to discourage AoE weapons from using this mod?  I can't tell.

**There's also potentially the issue that this would improve the ammo economy of weapons, but broadly speaking, I think that's a non-issue; most weapons aren't running out of ammo, at least not in my experience.  But maybe your analytics tell a different story?  So take my subjective experience with a grain of salt.

Edited June 23 by (PSN)Unstar
improved some unclear phrasing

[Malurth]

agreed. when I saw the Cannonade mods my only thought was "that's it?? never gonna be viable"