Volt - Ride the Lightning: 3 Videos of Ownage

[LemonKing]

Sargeron worked on his Warframe a bit using some math to bring his Shields to ~10500 and his Gorgon's Crit to about 198%.

These stats are now breaking Warframe's gameplay down to going room to room using Overload and burning down the Boss with ease, trivializing core gameplay.

If things do not change, I give it about two months before endgame will become like this for nearly every player.

We also used 2 Energy Syphon Cards to speed up energy regen.

One Card is useful, Two makes it extremely easy, Zero you have to use weapons a bit.

Video 1 - 2 Players:

Video 2 - 3 Players:

Video 3 - 4 Players:

Sargeron's View

Tetra and I are chilling in the background, you can also see me recording on the Crate.

Click to Embiggen

Volt Mods:

Gorgon Mods:

Edited January 6, 2013 by LemonKing

[Mortarion]

Wow that is insane, I thought the Volt was already powerful but this takes the cake. At level 19 it's still pretty obvious that some aspects of Volt need to be tuned down, even if I don't want them to be >.<

[neKroMancer]

I don't think Volt is the culprit, just an example. The multiplicative nature of shield mod is the thing that needed to be changed. You can slap all these mods on any frame and achieve the same result.

It;s fine with armor mod which can mitigate percentage of damage on health but 10K shield is game breaking.

Multiplicative bonus should be more subtle in the game like debuff power which gives an edge for an entire team against bosses or Trinity's buff/heal powers. Also, from the above example - restrict mod type on weapon or limit a cap on frame/weapon would be another solution for this problem.

[MJ12]

I don't think Volt is the culprit, just an example. The multiplicative nature of shield mod is the thing that needed to be changed. You can slap all these mods on any frame and achieve the same result.

It;s fine with armor mod which can mitigate percentage of damage on health but 10K shield is game breaking.

Multiplicative bonus should be more subtle in the game like debuff power which gives an edge for an entire team against bosses or Trinity's buff/heal powers. Also, from the above example - restrict mod type on weapon or limit a cap on frame/weapon would be another solution for this problem.

There should be shield 'soft caps' around 800-1K, wherein each further shield point requires exponential increases (so 801 shield points requires a total 'base' shield of 800, 802 requires 804... 803 requires 809... 900 requires 10,800 (exponential growth is a hell of a drug, better than geometric growth)..

Adjust to taste. Maybe it shouldn't be so impossible to get +100 shields over the soft cap. Maybe it should be +200 or so. Who knows?

[AmmokK]

I don´t actually see the amount of shield as a problem, rather the fact there is very few damage directly affecting your health like eg poison. If there would be more stuff like this, a pure shield build would sometimes be useless.

But yes, for now, shield is the way to go!

[Ced23Ric]

Shield mods need to work on the base shield amount, not each other, that is all. 50% of 100 is 50. Another 50% of that is 50 again, not 75 of the new value 150. The thick shields are an issue of wrong formulas, which should be easily fixable.

The problem, which is way stronger, is the combination of Overload's massive AoE insta-kill Ultimate with Energy Siphon.

[Sargeron]

my opinion:

- Volt is overpowered by far: ESPECIALLY against Corpus

- Passive energy generation (Energy Siphon artifacts) is also overpowered, because abilities are overpowered

- Shield stacking, which i've mentioned in my own threads, is overpowered

When you can spam overload to clear all waves, and then not have to worry about dying ever, you can stack crit and just shred bosses in seconds. As far as me and LemonKing are concerned, this is completely gamebreaking as it trivializes all content that this game currently has to offer to the point where you could have a bot control my character and farm levels.

[MJ12]

Shield mods need to work on the base shield amount, not each other, that is all. 50% of 100 is 50. Another 50% of that is 50 again, not 75 of the new value 150. The thick shields are an issue of wrong formulas, which should be easily fixable.

The problem, which is way stronger, is the combination of Overload's massive AoE insta-kill Ultimate with Energy Siphon.

That's not "wrong formulas", that's how most real-world math works. a 100% increase on a 100% increase is a 400% increase, not a 200% increase. Geometric growth is much more common in the real world than purely arithmetic growth. Of course, far more common still is logistic growth, which would have shields growing even faster than they do now up to a certain point and then leveling off.

Given that literally everything else runs on geometric growth (and if the toughness of late-game enemies is any indication the game is balanced around this), from mag sizes to crit chance/damage to damage to rate of fire, I think it'd be easier to soft-cap shields to a level which lets you survive a lot of pounding late-game but doesn't make you invulnerable.

I know that at ~1300 shields they do go down a fair amount of the time on Pluto and the like or if I waltz into a room full of Grineer marines in all directions.

[7cNickel]

They just need to go to additive instead of mulitplicative bonuses.

If I did this right, it looks like right now the mods listed are boosting his shield by 2621%

If they switched to additive bonuses it would only be 420%

[Ced23Ric]

That's not "wrong formulas", that's how most real-world math works. a 100% increase on a 100% increase is a 400% increase, not a 200% increase. Geometric growth is much more common in the real world than purely arithmetic growth. Of course, far more common still is logistic growth, which would have shields growing even faster than they do now up to a certain point and then leveling off.

Given that literally everything else runs on geometric growth (and if the toughness of late-game enemies is any indication the game is balanced around this), from mag sizes to crit chance/damage to damage to rate of fire, I think it'd be easier to soft-cap shields to a level which lets you survive a lot of pounding late-game but doesn't make you invulnerable.

I know that at ~1300 shields they do go down a fair amount of the time on Pluto and the like or if I waltz into a room full of Grineer marines in all directions.

That's a fallacy. You are saying that synergy between mods is the right way to go, yet propose artificial, arbitrary softcaps. You statement also has no correlation to value. A shield mod by itself has a value. Credits and Shield points. Add another shield mod, and the Shield points are amplified, whereas the credits stay the same. There is no geometric growth to it.

Nevertheless, the same thingeymajigger produces more and more shields, if just enough of it are around. It would also imply that 35% and 35% on two mods are stronger than 70% on a single mod. Etc. pp. - They may make sense to mathematicians, but that makes zero sense in a real world application of, say, physics. If I have a 50% power increase through one thing and another 50% through another, they don't magically amplify each other to 75%. If anything, they may interfere with each other, reducing the effective improvement - with car engines, for example.

Also, with 200 base shields, stacking 8x 70% (=140 shield points per mod) results in a peak value of 1320, which not only is in the neighborhood of what you are proposig, it is also attainable without any arbitrary softcaps and convoluted formulas. It's just plain and simple a straight increase from the base value.

[LemonKing]

This is the LUA Logic for the shield math.

local FrameShieldBase = 400

local ShieldTable = {
    1.70,
    1.69,
    1.70,
    1.67,
    1.64,
    1.40,
    1.40,
}

local totalShields = FrameShieldBase
for i=1,#ShieldTable do
    totalShields = totalShields * ShieldTable[i]
end
print( totalShields )

To test the code copy and paste it on the Lua Demo: http://www.lua.org/cgi-bin/demo

Edited January 6, 2013 by LemonKing

[Sargeron]

even if they swapped from exponential growth to additive growth, my shields would still be close to the 2k mark, which is still enough to trivialize content. You have to consider, these mods are not perfect, if I had a full set of 70% mods you could reach over 16k shields (with the current math). It would be simpler if they just stopped using percentages all together. It is proven to overcomplicate gear scaling when it could be done a lot simpler and make both the player and the dev happier. After all, with whatever base shields you're running, additive growth + percentages is just a fancier way of adding integer to integer

Edited January 6, 2013 by Sargeron

[Ced23Ric]

This is the LUA Logic for the shield math.

Yeah, it keeps on multiplying with itself instead of with a fixed base value.

[AmmokK]

Mathematically it´s perfectly right.

Just use real values instead of % and everything is okay. But on the other hand, wait till the game gets to the "next level" maybe there will be more stuff ignoring shields then. So, you have 15k shields? Guess what, i don´t care about shields!

Pewpew, dead!

Edited January 6, 2013 by AmmokK

[MJ12]

That's a fallacy. You are saying that synergy between mods is the right way to go, yet propose artificial, arbitrary softcaps. You statement also has no correlation to value. A shield mod by itself has a value. Credits and Shield points. Add another shield mod, and the Shield points are amplified, whereas the credits stay the same. There is no geometric growth to it.

Nevertheless, the same thingeymajigger produces more and more shields, if just enough of it are around. It would also imply that 35% and 35% on two mods are stronger than 70% on a single mod. Etc. pp. - They may make sense to mathematicians, but that makes zero sense in a real world application of, say, physics. If I have a 50% power increase through one thing and another 50% through another, they don't magically amplify each other to 75%. If anything, they may interfere with each other, reducing the effective improvement - with car engines, for example.

Also, with 200 base shields, stacking 8x 70% (=140 shield points per mod) results in a peak value of 1320, which not only is in the neighborhood of what you are proposig, it is also attainable without any arbitrary softcaps and convoluted formulas. It's just plain and simple a straight increase from the base value.

Why not just have mods give a certain fixed value instead of percentages then? It's simpler and it means that lower-level players get relatively better benefits from mods.

Edited January 6, 2013 by MJ12

[Ced23Ric]

What is complex about additive relational values?

70% of 100 is 70.

70% of 150 is 105.

70% of 200 is 140.

Base +70% = 100+70, or 150+105, or 200+140. All is good in the hood.

Edited January 6, 2013 by Ced23Ric

[Sargeron]

What is complex about additive relational values?

70% of 100 is 70.

70% of 150 is 105.

70% of 200 is 140.

Base +70% = 100+70, or 150+105, or 200+140. All is good in the hood.

Believe it or not but not everybody can do math on the ball beyond 10x10. It is better to keep things as simple as can be so that it is appealing to the biggest aspect of the community - people who understand math and those who don't can still relate to a simplistic 100 + 70 rather than 70% of 100.

[ApokalypsBZH]

I'd prefer mods to stack additively, things would go less out of control it would be easier to plan/calculate your build.

[[DE]Steve]

Thanks for this! Please bear with us while we address balance. I must admit there was something badass about watching those vids... Glad to see the Artifacts getting in to circulation.

[LemonKing]

Welcome, Volt does seem a tad too powerful for how much it costs in Plat vs the other starting frames.

[Seventhwolf]

Why did I choose Loki --'

[Antharax]

How does one get those artifacts?

[ApokalypsBZH]

By playing the alert missions that pop up from time too time on your top left corner.

[Antharax]

Ah. I'm guessing they are blessed since I got about 10 mods on my first alert mission which was just a few minutes earlier. Thanks.

Edited January 6, 2013 by Antharax

[Dreed]

sorry for offtop.. but how i can get ant Cards.. ?