Please Add Important-For-Damage-2.0 Mods To More Than One Mob

[Nicocat]

Seriously.  The drops for elemental mods and physical damage mods are... well, they're downright haphazard, even schizophrenic.  There's absolutely no rhyme or reason for this to be laid out like it is.  Many mods drop from only one normal mob, and then may drop from defense/survival or bosses.  Some just drop from one mob, period.  Some of those mobs are quite rare themselves.  This tends to limit builds, in my opinion, completely unnecessarily.

 

Mods currently on one uncommon/high level mob:

Toxic:

Contagious Spread:  Electric Crawler (Uncommon mod but a VERY rare mob, who seems to drop mods very rarely on top of that)

Pathogen Rounds:  Anti MOA (wasn't even in the game as a drop, just transmutation, until a patch or two after U11... nice work, there)

Fever Strike:  Grineer Arid Butcher (reasonably uncommon mob, only shows up on one planet, uncommon mod on top of that)

(Three out of four poison mods)

 

Piercing:

Piercing Hit:  Shockwave MOAs (again, we have a ton, newbies might not; at least it's useless now)

No Return: Corpus Crewmen (singular, but common mob)

 

Slashing:

Razor Shot:  Grineer Elite Lancer (Ok, fairly common, but still.  One mob.)

Jagged Edge:  Elite Crewman (admittedly common on Pluto, but the mod itself is rare)

Sawtooth Clip:  Grineer Seekers (common on some maps, rare on others.  At least it's a common mod... and worthless)

(Three out of four again)

 

Fire:

Hellfire:  Grineer Rollers and a tier 3 defense reward (Yes, yes, you have eight thousand of them... but think of the new players.  Also drops from Ambulas but that hardly counts)

Incendiary Coat:  Sniper Crewmen, but also a tier 1 survival reward.  Single mob but you'll still probably get this easily.

Heated Charge:  Grineer Lancers (a very common, but still singular, mob)

Molten Impact:  Tier 3 defense reward and on a ton of bosses.  Also the Stalker.  But on NO common mobs.

(That's all four)

 

Lightning:

Stormbringer:  Grineer Ballistas (uncommon in most Grineer maps if they're there at all)

Charged Shell:  Corpus Tech (schizophrenically common, depends on the map)

 

Cold: 

Deep Freeze: Grineer Elite Lancers and tier 3 defense... not for newbies for some time

Chilling Grasp: Prod Crewmen (uncommon mob, uncommon mod)

 

Compare:

Toxic:

Infected Clip:  Elite Crewmen, NORMAL Crewmen AND Corrupt Lancers.  Holy S#&$.

 

Impact:

Disruptor: Grineer Trooper AND Arid Trooper, common enough put together

Concussion Rounds: Drops on freakin' RUNNERS

Rupture:  Chargers (singular but common, also a common mod.  You'll find these instantly.)

Heavy Trauma:  Lancers and Arid Lancers (but, like all melee physical damage mods, is rare)

(Note:  ALL impact mods are incredibly easy to find)

 

Piercing:

Flechette: Shield lancers and Ancient Disruptors, also is a common mod

Sundering Strike:  Runners (but a rare mod all the same)

 

Slashing:

Shredder: Toxic Ancients and normal Crewmen, AND it's a common mod

 

Lightning:

Shocking Touch:  Grineer Troopers and a few bosses.  Probably the first elemental mod anyone finds.

Convulsion:  Corpus Drones (I assume this means shield drones, from the wiki... maybe all of them) and Chargers.

 

Cold:

Cryo Rounds: Drops from a bunch of bosses, tier 3 defense and Shockwave MOAs

North Wind:  Drops from normal MOAs AND normal Sawmen.  Even newbies should have eight thousand of these.

 

So what can we conclude from this?

1) Toxic mods are absolutely rarer than hen's teeth, with the exception of Infected Clip.  Newbies won't even get the chance to see one until Jupiter, another until Phobos.  And Electric Crawlers are incredibly rare with a low mod drop rate, AND Contagious Spread is uncommon to boot, so shotguns using any kind of toxic damage will be rare overall.  In short, the ONLY elemental damage with more than a 25% bonus on Grineer is out of many people's reach for a good bit, and everyone's reach that uses a shotgun.

 

2) Fire damage spans the continuum from incredibly common (Heated Charge on lancers?  You'll have a stack coming out of Mercury) to amazingly rare (Molten Impact is NOT on a common mob.  None.  Nada.  Not a one.).  Fire is also the only elemental damage worth using on Infested, and is used in Blast, probably the best elemental damage to use when fighting mixed bags (i.e. Void runs, or just laziness with your build).  So you can have a fire pistol, but no blast Galatine.  This is just weird, honestly.

 

3) Lightning and Cold overall rarities are split randomly between all the weapon types.  May or may not have been intentional, but it still smacks of people throwing darts at a dart board to determine what should do what.  Why should shotguns get uncommon, or even rare, drops of both?  Is it because Incendiary Coat is reasonably easy to get despite being on one mob?  Why is Deep Freeze (pistol) completely impossible without finding Elite Lancers, but North Wind (melee) drops from MOAs of all things?  Why is Convulsion set up to rain from the sky like candy compared to the others?

 

4) The vast majority of melee weapons are slashing.  So why is the +slashing mod only on Elite Crewmen, far from the reach of new players?  That's just rude.  Especially since melee physical damage mods are the only ones worth S#&$ (+15% damage for 2 points?  Yes.  I will take that vs. the +5% for 4 points for rifle mods).  Most slashing weapons will end up with some manner or other of rainbow build... and by that I mean they'll ALL do Magnetic damage, since fire and toxic mods are massively hard to find.

 

This may be a big rant post, but I had to get it off my chest.  Nothing about the mod distribution makes sense.  DE wanted to discourage rainbow builds, and that seems to have been done... by making half the mods easy for certain weapons to find and half impossible.  Unless you're running shotguns, in which case may the lord have mercy on your soul.

 

Please, DE.  If you intended every element to be equally important and wanted to encourage diverse builds, give us the tools to make those builds.  Don't hide four shotgun damage types behind an Electric Crawler.  Don't hide four melee damage types behind a lucky boss drop.  Don't make newbies and their Bratons slog through a quarter or more of the game with nothing but Cryo Rounds and some physical mods.  Diversify the mod drops so we can play with the tools you put in.

Edited December 7, 2013 by Nicocat

[VKhaun]

Noobies shouldn't be looking for them right away. Impact, puncture, and slash cover all the bases. One could nitpick what weapons are available vs when the slash/puncture/impact mods become available or how quickly they'd be found, but that's more of an internal discussion for DE to have about incentive to buy plat to get weapons/mod packs.

[Nicocat]

Noobies shouldn't be looking for them right away. Impact, puncture, and slash cover all the bases. One could nitpick what weapons are available vs when the slash/puncture/impact mods become available or how quickly they'd be found, but that's more of an internal discussion for DE to have about incentive to buy plat to get weapons/mod packs.

I'd submit that physical mods are insufficient.  Rifles ones are 5% per level, starting at 4 points, and I believe most normal hitscan rifles either have a spread of damage (making them ALL crappy) or focus on piercing (which you won't get a mod for until Shockwave MOAs... hopefully they spawn early on Venus, but I'm not sure).  Pistol ones are 10% starting at 2 points, which is a bit better, and the mods can all be found decently easy.  Melee mods are the best (15%, starts at 2 points) and found on common mobs, but are rare in general, and the slashing one is impossible to find for a while... and it's the best one for early weapons.

[Nicocat]

Also, the talk about what's best for new players was kind of a secondary point.  My main one is "What the hell are you doing with toxic and shotgun mods, DE?  DE, stahp."

[VKhaun]

Insufficient for what?

 

What do you actually find on Mercury? Should people play each Mercury mission only once? Solo? What do they find? How much do they hit a mob for in the next planet's map area? How many hits does it take? How quickly do they die? Wait, what frame did they start with? What is acceptable difficulty? Should they ever die or be in danger? Should mobs die to a good headshot/burst to the weak point or should it take two or three of those?

 

 

You can't type up war and peace about the damage types and argue that you need them sooner based only on a feeling of wanting it sooner, because that's exactly what DE counts on to sell plat. 

[VKhaun]

Also, the talk about what's best for new players was kind of a secondary point.  My main one is "What the hell are you doing with toxic and shotgun mods, DE?  DE, stahp."

 

Ya rly, wtf @ electric crawler drops.

[Nicocat]

it's been a while since I've been a newbie with newbie guns, so maybe a level xx Braton with little more than a poorly-ranked Piercing Hit and Cryo Rounds is sufficient once you hit Earth.  Newbies probably won't have the money or cores to jack them up too high, and Serration is a Survival-only drop until you find Scorpions and Nauseous Crawlers, so you don't have a whole lot of options for +damage.  But maybe DE intended that.

 

Doesn't sound very nice to me, though.

 

And I still want my Contagious Spread.

[WarOverlord]

DE really needs to rework mod distributions.q

[SlyBoots]

dunno, their fix seemed to be to make desecrate work on crawlers... which still or again doesn't work btw...

 

someone posted a rather good thread about the codex before it came out where he stated something you'd think would be obvious: if it was to help farm specific mods, knowing which enemy drops it is just one part of it, the more important part is having vastly differing enemy compositions for the planets/mission types to make sure you can even go after these specific enemies you have made out to drop the mod you want...

Edited December 7, 2013 by SlyBoots

[Nicocat]

dunno, their fix seemed to be to make desecrate work on crawlers... which still or again doesn't work btw...

Yeah, but sometimes you just get really, really tired of playing Nekros.  And again, they don't drop much on their own, it seems...

[KingTaro]

One mod per enemy type is great!

It used to be "every mob drops every mod" and that was a hell to farm for a specific mod. Since you had to hope for 1 specific mod out of a 250 mods pool. Now the pool is down to like 7 mods/ enemy or like 20-30 mods / mission.

 

However, something must be done about the spawn rate of certain enemies. For instance Electric Crawler. I've only seen it 2 times since U11!

 

NOTE: It seems they kind of sorted out the Jagged Edge myth. The Elite Crewmen appear in great numbers on Baal (Europe Mobile Defence). While I saw a few guys mentioning that they got it in 1 to 5 Baal runs, I've yet to see one in 18 runs, hopefully, it's just my bad luck.

[Nicocat]

Hey, DE?  When I asked for mods to be added to more mobs, I didn't mean for you to take away the ONLY one that drops a very important shotgun poison mod.  That is in fact the opposite of what I thought would be a nice thing.