DPS from primarily damaging abilities is too low late game

[Kaiberium]

Ability damage needs to scale better into late game. Even with multiple mods improving damage output for abilities, my melee heavy slam or primary weapon shot regularly hits 100x the damage output of many of my Warframe's ability damage output. 

[Zakkhar]

Which abilities you mean? Give examples.

Also damage numbers do not matter. What matters is dead target. Several stuff offers bigger numbers due to overkill values and other dont (your damage is capped by EHP of the enemy). Comparing those numbers is pointless.

There is an enemy who has 100 EHP. You hit it with two things. One (X) does 500 max damage and other (Y) does 550 max damage.  However X is not capped by enemy EHP whiile Y is. You hit the enemy: X does 500dmg, Y does 100. Which mechanics does more damage?

Edited September 4 by Zakkhar

[TKDancer]

9 hours ago, Zakkhar said:

Which abilities you mean? Give examples.

idk if this you being facetious but like, so many? too many?

ash's shuriken, atlas's rumblers and his wall roll mode, , banshee's everything, chroma's spectral scream and the effigy version, ember's fireball, frost's whole situation, grendel's awful scaling calculations(and the lack of it for pulverize), inaro's stuff(you can push it with absurd hyper dedicated builds but base values suck even after rework, specially for scarab swarm), nekro's minions can't do jack for damage, nyx's laughable absorb dmg redirection from absorb, volt's godawful discharge mechanics and awful dmg that doesnt scale and his shock being basically useless by itself, so on and so forth

some of these got augments to give them utility but it doesnt change the fact that they were primarily designed as damaging abilities and unless said augments are made base kit they all need to be tweaked so they can scale with content

9 hours ago, Zakkhar said:

Also damage numbers do not matter. What matters is dead target.

stupid thing to say, damage numbers do matter, DPS is important, and a lot of abilities have awful damage numbers leading to awful DPS leading to awful kill rates compared to weapons or other actually good abilities

even if many weapons reach absurd levels of overkill for certain content overkill is considerably better to have than not killing at all

your silly hypothetical is incredibly odd cause it simply is not indicative of whats actually in the game at all

enemies will haves tens to hundreds of thousands of eHP, weapons can do anywhere from similar numbers in dmg to absurd numbers into the millions or billions while some abilities are stuck to doing like a few hundred to a couple thousand in dmg numbers despite being basically all about doing damage

Edited September 5 by TKDancer

[Zakkhar]

8 hours ago, TKDancer said:

ash's shuriken, atlas's rumblers and his wall roll mode, , banshee's everything, chroma's spectral scream and the effigy version, ember's fireball, frost's whole situation, grendel's awful scaling calculations(and the lack of it for pulverize), inaro's stuff(you can push it with absurd hyper dedicated builds but base values suck even after rework, specially for scarab swarm), nekro's minions can't do jack for damage, nyx's laughable absorb dmg redirection from absorb, volt's godawful discharge mechanics and awful dmg that doesnt scale and his shock being basically useless by itself, so on and so forth

Excelent, you picked zero nuking abilities/frames.

[vixenpixel]

Also alot of the examples are quite strong. What do you mean Banshee's everything? Sonar lets you hit dmg cap with literally any weapon. Only her 4th is terrible and sure yeah it's a terrible nuke in spite of trying to be a nuke. 

I agree that alot of stuff is improperly balanced but not every frame has to have nuking capabilities. I love frost. You think he should also nuke stuff ontop of freezing, shredding and gating on one ability? Just put breach surge on.

[insanitybit]

Some of those are utility skills with damage as a bonus. For example, Volt's 4 does little damage but it also provides shields + CC, so it's unclear if it *should* do scaling damage.

I think if you're going to make this claim you need to do a much better job of justifying these.

Edited September 5 by insanitybit

[TKDancer]

3 hours ago, vixenpixel said:

 What do you mean Banshee's everything? Sonar lets you hit dmg cap with literally any weapon. Only her 4th is terrible and sure yeah it's a terrible nuke in spite of trying to be a nuke.

sonar is a debuff not a damage ability

sonic boom and soundquake are both damaging abilities that fail at doing damage

 

1 hour ago, insanitybit said:

 For example, Volt's 4 does little damage but it also provides shields + CC

it requires an augment to provide shields and also it is not even good CC in a game where CC is less and less relevant

i dont think you people understand that a lot of DAMAGING abilities have been relegated to CC or utility due to DE being incredibly lax with making abilities, specially for older frames, scale with content

also like, yes ability damage should probably always scale in some way or another if a player puts in the work

3 hours ago, vixenpixel said:

I agree that alot of stuff is improperly balanced but not every frame has to have nuking capabilities.

i dont think you people understand that there can be a middle ground between "damaging abilities should actually do damage that matters" vs "i think every damaging ability should be a nuke"

i dont think shock should be insta killing every enemy it hits but it should be doing visible relevant damage numbers rather than a very weak electric proc that a diriga can do non-stop passively

3 hours ago, Zakkhar said:

Excelent, you picked zero nuking abilities/frames.

i didnt pick nuking frames/abilities? what? i dont want to be rude but are you just being stupid/dense on purpose?

is ember not a nuking frame? is fireball not an ability entirely about doing damage? what utility does shuriken have without its augment cause im pretty sure that by default its all about damage, are grendels offensive abilities not all about doing damage? am i missing something here

[insanitybit]

I think your point would be best served by restating things much more precisely - that is, picking some abilities, explaining how they scale, why they should scale differently, and how they should scale differently. It would be worth explaining, for example, why "it requires an augment" matters - new players won't have the augment, but scaling damage doesn't matter to them, and higher level players will have the augment so the scaling damage *may* not matter to them.

Right now I don't think there's a productive conversation to be had because it's not clear what is being advocated for.

[TKDancer]

1 minute ago, insanitybit said:

I think your point would be best served by restating things much more precisely - that is, picking some abilities, explaining how they scale, why they should scale differently, and how they should scale differently.

that would take way the hell too long to go through every frame's kit and analyze their abilities to come up with a specific explanation for the flaws of each and how to fix them

i gave a bunch of examples i could think of from just looking at the wiki's frame list at like 2am before bed cause i was simply dumbfounded by  zakkhar seemingly acting like this isnt a longstanding issue people have been discussing for like a decade

[ChaoticOrderly]

I do think this is an important topic since ability casters have been falling off unless they have a gimmick (Dante expedite on Tragedy, Sevagoth's HP scaling on 1 + 2, Mirage 4 augment being affected by bullet attractors) or are just insanely powerful to begin with (Khora Whipclaw, Atlas Landslide, Mesa Peacemaker). Right now, I've been using Loki of all frames recently since I can just stay alive very easily, put a buff on his 4 + Pintensify, and force some weapons to work with new blast and Elementalist or Melee Influence.

[AsffluffyZ]

6 hours ago, TKDancer said:

sonar is a debuff not a damage ability

sonic boom and soundquake are both damaging abilities that fail at doing damage

 

it requires an augment to provide shields and also it is not even good CC in a game where CC is less and less relevant

i dont think you people understand that a lot of DAMAGING abilities have been relegated to CC or utility due to DE being incredibly lax with making abilities, specially for older frames, scale with content

also like, yes ability damage should probably always scale in some way or another if a player puts in the work

i dont think you people understand that there can be a middle ground between "damaging abilities should actually do damage that matters" vs "i think every damaging ability should be a nuke"

i dont think shock should be insta killing every enemy it hits but it should be doing visible relevant damage numbers rather than a very weak electric proc that a diriga can do non-stop passively

i didnt pick nuking frames/abilities? what? i dont want to be rude but are you just being stupid/dense on purpose?

is ember not a nuking frame? is fireball not an ability entirely about doing damage? what utility does shuriken have without its augment cause im pretty sure that by default its all about damage, are grendels offensive abilities not all about doing damage? am i missing something here

Please define relevant damage. 

 

As a side note there is no healthy way to scale all the damage abilities in the game. (I can elaborate if anyone would like, just quote this so I can explain)

[TKDancer]

50 minutes ago, AsffluffyZ said:

Please define relevant damage.

damage that actually wounds enemies at the very least which the degree of said wounds and it's reach varying between each ability rather than doing a flat amount that goes from doing pretty alright at early levels(and their lower enemy density) to struggling by middle of star chart to becoming essentially irrelevant vs eHP of enemies by the end of star chart/SP

 

52 minutes ago, AsffluffyZ said:

As a side note there is no healthy way to scale all the damage abilities in the game.

there is no easy singular solution that can be applied to everything equally and suddenly fix all the game's woes, no

people have thought of many ideas to address this throughout the game's lifetime but usually when DE gives frames strong damaging abilities its usually just either really high flat values that endure into early SP well enough when combined with the other things we can do(debuffs, buffs, and so on)  or dmg numbers that scale with enemy health(sevagoth for example) or enemy level(xaku for example)

[AsffluffyZ]

1 hour ago, TKDancer said:

damage that actually wounds enemies at the very least which the degree of said wounds and it's reach varying between each ability rather than doing a flat amount that goes from doing pretty alright at early levels(and their lower enemy density) to struggling by middle of star chart to becoming essentially irrelevant vs eHP of enemies by the end of star chart/SP

 

there is no easy singular solution that can be applied to everything equally and suddenly fix all the game's woes, no

people have thought of many ideas to address this throughout the game's lifetime but usually when DE gives frames strong damaging abilities its usually just either really high flat values that endure into early SP well enough when combined with the other things we can do(debuffs, buffs, and so on)  or dmg numbers that scale with enemy health(sevagoth for example) or enemy level(xaku for example)

When it comes to giving abilities a high flat damage it creates the dilemma of the ability functionally being overkill at lower levels, yet it will still fall off pretty fast. As for giving health percentage based damage results in the game feeling like the difficulty doesn't increase past a certain level.

That being said giving certain abilities more utility to have them be useful even if the damage can't keep up, provide some abilities with HP scaling, creating more abilities that make enemies take more damage, and having more abilities scale off of weapons would help many frames keep up in more content.

[TKDancer]

8 minutes ago, AsffluffyZ said:

When it comes to giving abilities a high flat damage it creates the dilemma of the ability functionally being overkill at lower levels

yeah i dont think thats the ideal solution

 

8 minutes ago, AsffluffyZ said:

As for giving health percentage based damage results in the game feeling like the difficulty doesn't increase past a certain level.

i disagree that abilities that scale off enemy health/level erases difficulty like as enemy health is only part of the game's difficulty, enemy density will still go up, spawn rate of special enemies will also go up, including eximus units(i say this keeping in mind that this is not quite the case with some of the more absurd abilities in the game, i.e the current hilarious state of sevagoth sow/reap nuking)


i do think that basing base dmg off level is better than off enemy health tho, as it just ensures the base line of the ability keeps up indefinitely, without just letting it do all the work by itself, i.e xaku still wants to strip armor and apply their void vulnerability debuff despite grasp of lohk scaling with level

[AsffluffyZ]

34 minutes ago, TKDancer said:

yeah i dont think thats the ideal solution

 

i disagree that abilities that scale off enemy health/level erases difficulty like as enemy health is only part of the game's difficulty, enemy density will still go up, spawn rate of special enemies will also go up, including eximus units(i say this keeping in mind that this is not quite the case with some of the more absurd abilities in the game, i.e the current hilarious state of sevagoth sow/reap nuking)


i do think that basing base dmg off level is better than off enemy health tho, as it just ensures the base line of the ability keeps up indefinitely, without just letting it do all the work by itself, i.e xaku still wants to strip armor and apply their void vulnerability debuff despite grasp of lohk scaling with level

In this game level scaling and health scaling are essentially the same in most aspects since they both increase (hp would technically scale stronger than level in most cases). Xaku is special in that his ability scales off of enemy level because he uses the enemies "guns" with the scaling being a flat multiplication buff instead of a percentage buff.

[TKDancer]

1 minute ago, AsffluffyZ said:

In this game level scaling and health scaling are essentially the same

not really, not at all, different enemies have different amounts of hp, making a dmg number scale off level = same dmg number against chaff or heavy units, making a dmg number scale off each enemy's hp = different dmg numbers for each enemy

both approaches can have merit but i think the former is better as a baseline for most abilities

2 minutes ago, AsffluffyZ said:

Xaku is special in that his ability scales off of enemy level because he uses the enemies "guns" with the scaling being a flat multiplication buff instead of a percentage buff.

nope, the gun stealing thing is just visual(if the game struggles to figure out what 'gun' was stolen or if you use it on enemies without guns you just get a lil orb or a ghost version of your own primary weapon

anyways, it's just 50 base void dmg x ability strength x enemy level per hit, regardless of what weapon is stolen

xaku is also not a special case, another frame that scales off level, and not a very good one rn, is vauban, both his flechette orb and photon strike scale off level, with their own dmg calculations

one frame that bases it's dmg off hp in a really bad way tho is grendel, regurgigate's dmg is a flat amount + 10% of the *current* HP of the enemy that was spit out, often resulting in very volatile dmg numbers, ranging from Okay if you spit out a heavy unit with next to full health down to basically nothing if you spit out a mob at low health

[AsffluffyZ]

8 hours ago, TKDancer said:

not really, not at all, different enemies have different amounts of hp, making a dmg number scale off level = same dmg number against chaff or heavy units, making a dmg number scale off each enemy's hp = different dmg numbers for each enemy

both approaches can have merit but i think the former is better as a baseline for most abilities

nope, the gun stealing thing is just visual(if the game struggles to figure out what 'gun' was stolen or if you use it on enemies without guns you just get a lil orb or a ghost version of your own primary weapon

anyways, it's just 50 base void dmg x ability strength x enemy level per hit, regardless of what weapon is stolen

xaku is also not a special case, another frame that scales off level, and not a very good one rn, is vauban, both his flechette orb and photon strike scale off level, with their own dmg calculations

one frame that bases it's dmg off hp in a really bad way tho is grendel, regurgigate's dmg is a flat amount + 10% of the *current* HP of the enemy that was spit out, often resulting in very volatile dmg numbers, ranging from Okay if you spit out a heavy unit with next to full health down to basically nothing if you spit out a mob at low health

Yeah vauban definitely should have meet his shrapnel grenade for full armor strip with the rework (Bastille is too slow as the only option).

[Xzorn]

Ability Damage has always been the worst damage scaling source.

The exceptions were abilities that used weapon damage like Magnetize.

This is a nice blast from the past though. Back when DE was constantly trying to push down ability AoE spam instead of letting players just fight higher level enemies where it became almost entirely about gun play. Saryn's 4th, World on Fire. These were ambient CC at higher levels. No one used them for damage.

It certainly works better than it used to. SP Level 500 Napalm 560k raw HP. Old scaling Level 500 Napalm 2mil raw HP.

[sunderthefirmament]

On 2024-09-05 at 11:53 AM, TKDancer said:

that would take way the hell too long to go through every frame's kit and analyze their abilities to come up with a specific explanation for the flaws of each and how to fix them

Agreed.  But here's a list of abilities that are either exclusively or mainly damage abilities that just don't scale well or have any real relevance beyond the base star chart without augments.

• Ash: Shuriken
• Banshee: Sonic Boom, Sound Quake (arguably Sound Quake is mainly CC, but...)
• Caliban: Razor Gyre
• Chroma: Spectral Scream
• Ember: Fireball, arguably Inferno
• Excalibur: Radial Javelin
• Grendel: Pulverize
• Gyre: Arcsphere, Rotorswell (controversial, I know, but she can't really nuke without heavy Helminth support)
• Nekros: Soul Punch
• Oberon: Smite
• Rhino: Charge
• Volt: Shock (maaaaybe Discharge, but it scales off of high enemy density)
• Wisp: Sol Gate

 

This list doesn't include abilities whose damage falls off significantly but make up for it in other ways, like Saryn's Miasma or Caliban's Fusion Strike.  I still find myself using abilities like those two fairly frequently due to their other effects.

 

Also, I hate to say it, but there's an argument for putting Ivara (Artemis Bow) on the list.

[TKDancer]

26 minutes ago, sunderthefirmament said:

Also, I hate to say it, but there's an argument for putting Ivara (Artemis Bow) on the list.

i actually had her on my initial listing but deleted it to avoid an argument lmao

[vFlitz]

20 hours ago, sunderthefirmament said:

Also, I hate to say it, but there's an argument for putting Ivara (Artemis Bow) on the list.

Not just Ivara. Hildryn's Balefire Charger is rather mediocre, its only purpose is that Hildryn can use no other weapon in her 4, but people don't really use her 4 either. Excal's Exalted Blade is in a sad state on its own, Chromatic Blade helps but it's still not up to today's standards. You can of course push it much higher with things like Wrathful Advance and Furious Javelin, but these apply to all melees so not really an argument in favor of EB's performance.

Iron Staff? Very underwhelming without the augment and support from Gladiator Set, with them its decent at best. Dex Pixia? Not unusable, but if Titania didn't get flight from it people would subsume over it (and probably not play Titania in general).

Admittedly, they fare better than the numerous 'simple' undertuned DPS abilities, but unlike those abilities they compete for usage with normal weapons.. weapons that can be leaps and bounds better.

[Stormandreas]

On 2024-09-05 at 5:26 AM, TKDancer said:

ash's shuriken, atlas's rumblers and his wall roll mode, , banshee's everything, chroma's spectral scream and the effigy version, ember's fireball, frost's whole situation, grendel's awful scaling calculations(and the lack of it for pulverize), inaro's stuff(you can push it with absurd hyper dedicated builds but base values suck even after rework, specially for scarab swarm), nekro's minions can't do jack for damage, nyx's laughable absorb dmg redirection from absorb, volt's godawful discharge mechanics and awful dmg that doesnt scale and his shock being basically useless by itself, so on and so forth

Have you ever used:
Seeking Shuriken
Sonar
Biting Frost, Icy Avalanche, Ice Wave Impedance
Elemental Sandstorm 
Shadows of the dead (these literally scale to the enemy level)
High strength Discharge

All of what I listed above, have much more than JUST damage associated to them.
Frosts abiltiies for example, are almost entirely Utilitarian in nature, they aren't meant for pure damage, but they can facilitate damage.
Sonar is a falt out multiplicative damage buff that stacks ontop of itself. It's insanely powerful. Sonic Boom is again, utilitarian, but yes Sound Quake leaves a bit to be desired to how it used to be.

Damage/DPS should not be the first thing to look at with abilities. Some, yes, are really JUST for pure DPS, many more, are not.

Edited September 10 by Stormandreas

[TKDancer]

20 minutes ago, Stormandreas said:

Have you ever used:

On 2024-09-05 at 1:26 AM, TKDancer said:

idk if this you being facetious but like.
...
some of these got augments to give them utility but it doesnt change the fact that they were primarily designed as damaging abilities and unless said augments are made base kit they all need to be tweaked so they can scale with content

Edited September 10 by TKDancer

[TKDancer]

saying "these literally scale to enemy level" wrt shadows of the dead is extra hilarious cause like, have you actually used them? are you being silly on purpose? come the hell on, those things are damn useless for damage, even if you subsume a buff ability on and do 100% armor strips with terrify, enemy AI is not designed to deal with others of their kind, so they are at best aggro spreading tools which suck at their job without the augment, wowie!

discharge does NOT scale well AT ALL, even with high enemy density, grouped enemies and a 100% armor strip it becomes USELESS as a damaging ability and is delegated to crappy CC by itself, it could work as a damaging ability pre-jade shadows with an armor strip at *low* SP levels but not anymore, wowie!

elemental sandstorm also does not scale well it needs a lot of work to become usable in SP and suffers from stat stick dependency, inaros's scarab swarm also sucks ass cause they had its dmg scale only off his HP and only 10% of it, love to do a few hundred dmg per tick! maybe even a whole thousand! wowie!

ice wave is on the runner for one of the worst abilities in the game cause it straight up has no place in frost's kit, not as a damaging ability and not as CC cause avalanche just does both better(keeping in mind that both dont scale, but at low levels, avalanche can at least nuke across walls, ice wave is useless), wowie!

sonar is a debuff, the banshee abilities in question were sonic boom and sound quake, 1 just tickles the enemy(bad) while ragdolling them(also bad), the other locks you into place(bad) in order to tickle enemies(also bad!), wowie!

also i just really need you to read posts in full as well as the rest of the threads before writing out responses that make you look illiterate or at least incredibly impatient next time

Edited September 11 by TKDancer

[AsffluffyZ]

7 hours ago, TKDancer said:

saying "these literally scale to enemy level" wrt shadows of the dead is extra hilarious cause like, have you actually used them? are you being silly on purpose? come the hell on, those things are damn useless for damage, even if you subsume a buff ability on and do 100% armor strips with terrify, enemy AI is not designed to deal with others of their kind, so they are at best aggro spreading tools which suck at their job without the augment, wowie!

discharge does NOT scale well AT ALL, even with high enemy density, grouped enemies and a 100% armor strip it becomes USELESS as a damaging ability and is delegated to crappy CC by itself, it could work as a damaging ability pre-jade shadows with an armor strip but not anymore, wowie!

elemental sandstorm also does not scale well it needs a lot of work to become usable in SP and suffers from stat stick dependancy, inaros's scarab swarm also sucks ass cause they had its dmg scale only off his HP and only 10% of it, love to do a few hundred dmg per tick! maybe even a whole thousand! wowie!

ice wave is on the runner for one of the worst abilities in the game cause it straight up has no place in frost's kit, not as a damaging ability and not as CC cause avalanche just does both better(keeping in mind that both dont scale, but at low levels, avalanche can at least nuke across walls, ice wave is useless), wowie!

sonar is a debuff, the banshee abilities in question were sonic boom and sound quake, 1 just tickles the enemy(bad) while ragdolling them(also bad), the other locks you into place(bad) in order to tickle enemies(also bad!), wowie!

also i just really need you to read posts in full as well as the rest of the threads before writing out responses that make you look illiterate or at least incredibly impatient next time

Absolute point that enthrall, mind control, and nekros 4 should all have a level multiplier added to them like Xaku. Lest you needed to armor strip every single enemy.