My Thoughts On Weapon Balance

[Dunkelheit]

Sniper Rifles - need to be better... at the moment, even a pistol can outshine a sniper rifle in dmg (the Lex with the right modules). Sniper rifles have long reload times and very small magazines... they should put the hardest punch in ranged combat

Melee - needs a little buff... at the moment, the time you need to run to your enemies is too big. Once you are near them, the ranged faction of your group will have torn them to shreds already.

Shotguns - Using the Strun myself, I was really surprised at what those weapons can do. I basically oneshot most of the enemies, even on pluto. You don't even have to aim , just shoot in the direction and empty your magazin and everthings falls flat fast. The surprising thing... this weapon works even great from the far. Needs a hard nerf, they are the best weapons at the moment, without real weaknesses. And the HEK is supposed to be even better than the Strun? This would make all of my teammates feel bad about their dps.

Dmg from abilities - ... is dependant on a very unreliable power source... the blue ball thingies. Somtimes you can wade in them kneehigh, sometimes they dont drop at all. So using abilities is really limited to THE swarm of enemies that is going to overwhelm your force eventually. So Volt is sadly no alternative to "gunplay" like the description promises.

What are your thoughts?

[Cruispleuro]

Your melee analysis isn't entirely true... I play as Loki and even without run speed mods I usually get 30-50% of damage dealt on my teams consistently, up to 60 if it's infested. Charged melee slashes have full armor piercing and with Killing Blow (charge atk damage) you can deal more than twice as much the usual damage. With the right strategy you can make melee extremely effective.

Also it's nice that going invisible gives you automatic crits, letting me hit up to 1.2k per melee hit.

[Pentatonix]

So his analysis of melee was accurate; You are changing the subject to melee as Loki.

[Cruispleuro]

Not really, since you can easily just slap on a run mod to suit your melee playstyle. I haven't put on any but a maxed one would give you +30% sprint speed.

[Barthalas]

Agree with the Sniper Rifles.

Running at enemies isn't too bad as long as you stack sprint mods. As a melee you should always stay ahead of your team anyways. They should take a look at the non-charge damage and stagger though. Trying to kill chargers with a normal melee attack is really painful.

Shotguns are so good because it makes sense. Most of Warframe is played in small corridors. Besides that, rifle mods are really underpowered.

Also agree with the unreliable power source. DE should think about adding special mods that come with ups and downs. E.g. Volt's Shock costs no power but has a cooldown / lower weapon damage. Would spice things up.

[MushrooMars]

Sniper Rifles do need a small buff. Snipetron is just worthless compared to Latron, and Latron is pretty bad as-is, unless you are an aiming machine. Paris is okay, so long as you can get headshots. Otherwise it sucks too.

I think Melee just needs a rebalance. ATM, Charged Attacks are ALWAYS better than regular attacks. They do more DPS, they often inflict stumble, freeze, fire, knock-down, or other awesome effects. I mean seriously - Dual Heat Swords - upwards of 1600 damage to up to 3 infected at once. Upwards of 6 infected if you're being swarmed, something like 10 if you do a wallrun to an AoE jump attack.

Shotguns are too good. They're like Sniper Rifles but with an aimbot built in. I stopped using my Strun because I got bored of it.

And yeah, Direct Damage abilities need a buff. They should just straight-up use less power. 10 power at the most for any single-target direct-damage ability. I'm looking at you, Nyx, Ash, Ember.

Edited April 7, 2013 by MushrooMars

[foodie]

Sniper weapons-up their damage for godsakes, i mean they lack the speed or acc of any of the other weps,why the hell are their damage so weak,hell if snipertron or paris had lexs base damage there would be more users

Rifles- good base weapons but their mods really really suck, the whole reason pistols shine are the fact that their mods are about 3x better

Shotguns- a slight range nerf to prevent shooting across the room but otherwise fine,shooting across the deck of a huge room should not be done with shotguns having pellets,you trade range for spread with shotguns unless using slugs of which warframe has none

Melee weapons-could use work but no where near as pressing as balancing the whole sniper-rifle-pistol issue

[Kaiku]

Yep, snipers suck in every way possible.

Melee as a whole sucks.

It's usually better to just stay away from the enemies so they can't knock you down.

Even better would be that you stay behind a cover so they can't hit you that easily.

Also, charge attacks in most cases make regular attacks useless.

They even use different mods, so buffing your charge attack makes the regular attack even MORE USELESS.

What's the point of using regular attacks once you've buffed the charge attack?

A good way to balance them would be that all the mods you install to your melee weapon affected both regular and charge attacks.

This way they both would stay viable.

Altough charge attacks are too easy to execute. Would be better off as something that you couldn't spam all the time.

Abilites... Well, single target abilites really need to be buffed.

You have to target them, they hit only one enemy, they use the same energy as your better abilites...

Really, make them 4 times more effective.

And yes, shotguns are OP.

Their range needs a nerf.

Edited April 7, 2013 by Kaiku