The Issue With 'necessary' Mods Like Serration And Multishot Isn't That They're Hard To Find. It's That They're Necessary

[KvotheTheArcane1]

Ye no I will not do something like like this on a mission that scales with time. (Not going to waste a useful key on proving a point) Maybe on a T3 exterminate. 

 

But here is your Pluto run

 

What, no score card to see enemies killed? Because I can rush a mission too.

[BrotherIcarus]

What, no score card to see enemies killed? Because I can rush a mission too.

Top left of fist pic 50 kills out of 50 

[CosyPigeon]

I disagree at the moment mods do not dictate viability they add it, with mods you can take the starter gear and can run ever single mission in the game (Getting to wave 20 and 20 minutes defence and survival) 

Exactly, you need the mods to make your gear viable. hence they dictate viability. No mods. No viability. Take any gun you like at rank 30, don't put any mods on it, go and use it against level 50 enemies, watch as your weapon does negligible damage and is thus not viable. 

[taiiat]

the problem is not having enough OTHER choices which are also very good. why Reload 30% faster when you can do 2.6x as much Damage, meaning you'll reload 2.65x less? yeah.

 

in this one case, saturating the game with Mods is actually good. one Damage Mod or two of them are simply better? create others that have tradeoffs or operate on totally different mechanics, Et Cetera.

 

once you have about a dozen of them, stop. now you have choice, and you literally can't equip it all, so there's no such thing as an 'optimal' Loadout.

 

 

similar story for Utility and non direct Damage Mods. make enough of them that have tasty sounding stats. you need enough so that players feel like there's really a choice, because there would be. all of these nice things to have, which one(s) do i want? which one(s) can i fit into my playstyle?

 

 

and go from there.

 

 

Edit:

and in that Pluto Extermination, using Latron PRIME, it still probably took two, three shots tops to kill an Enemy. why? it's already a fairly powerful weapon due to powercrepe.

 

and the massive difference between the 'mandatory' Mods and not, means players will always be drawn to them. it's just how it works. so it's a good idea to make them have interesting choices, no matter what they want.

Edited June 21, 2014 by taiiat

[BrotherIcarus]

Exactly, you need the mods to make your gear viable. hence they dictate viability. No mods. No viability. Take any gun you like at rank 30, don't put any mods on it, go and use it against level 50 enemies, watch as your weapon does negligible damage and is thus not viable. 

Level 50 enemies do not happen naturally anywhere, but I proved that you can kill the highest level (30) enemies on the star chart without damage mods 

[CosyPigeon]

Level 50 enemies do not happen naturally anywhere, but I proved that you can kill the highest level (30) enemies on the star chart without damage mods 

If you think rate of fire mods and crit mods aren't increasing your damage output and making your weapon viable then I can't be bothered having this discussion. 

[LukeAura]

Level 50 enemies do not happen naturally anywhere, but I proved that you can kill the highest level (30) enemies on the star chart without damage mods 

 

Couple of questions I have then if you wouldn't mind about your run. 

How challenging was the run? 

Have you tried other than an exterminate where enemy spawns are a little heavier/less organized? 

The Latron Prime you are using requires going to 20 minutes on a T3 Survival, and has a high base damage(Although I suppose there are other readily available power house weapons with much lower barriers to acquirement), if you used something closer to an assault rifle would this run have been doable? 

Was using utility mods better or worse than damage mods? 

Grineer with their armor scaling or Corpus?

Edited June 21, 2014 by LukeAura

[(PSN)billy-d-squid]

Level 50 enemies do not happen naturally anywhere, but I proved that you can kill the highest level (30) enemies on the star chart without damage mods 

 

T3 eximus' hit lvl 50 and Pluto is lvl 40. 

[neKroMancer]

I think there were 10 pages worth of discussion about these mods, especially damage mod and multishot, being false choices. You can play without them but if you want to go anywhere higher than level 20-25 then you will need them (mostly based on leveling up a new rifle in Apollodorus, damage usually start to drop significantly at this point for most weapons).

 

IMO, multishot is a lot more problematic than simple damage mod since it increases damage, increase firerate, lower ammo consumption, increase crit chance, and increase statuc proc in one mod. No other mods can come close to this efficiency. Suffice to say that if you don't want to drag your team in higher level then you need multishot.

 

The problem is both mods and customization option. The fact that we can stack damage mods into one weapon without restriction apart from name difference means player will seek highest damage possible to combat the endless game mode for maximum loot in a single run.  

 

It's either make a customization restriction (like most shooters' attachment system) or simply delete the damage mod and MS and make weapon increase damage while leveling.

[BrotherIcarus]

If you think rate of fire mods and crit mods aren't increasing your damage output and making your weapon viable then I can't be bothered having this discussion. 

But this whole discussion was about the "vital" mods the pure damage and elemental mods. Is my point made mute because I aimed for the head as well? 

[BrotherIcarus]

T3 eximus' hit lvl 50 and Pluto is lvl 40. 

I am not talking about missions that scale with time, I played Pluto the highest (Excluding the rare spawn of a leader) was 30.

[vaugahn]

But this whole discussion was about the "vital" mods the pure damage and elemental mods. Is my point made mute because I aimed for the head as well? 

 

I believe the point people are trying to make is that instead of offering us customization options mods are instead essential to the functioning of the weapon. Personally I would like to see a mod system that focused less on "make my not-useful weapon useful" and more on "customize my useful weapon to better fit my play style"

[BrotherIcarus]

 

Couple of questions I have then if you wouldn't mind about your run. 

How challenging was the run? 

Have you tried other than an exterminate where enemy spawns are a little heavier/less organized? 

The Latron Prime you are using requires going to 20 minutes on a T3 Survival, and has a high base damage(Although I suppose there are other readily available power house weapons with much lower barriers to acquirement), if you used something closer to an assault rifle would this run have been doable? 

Was using utility mods better or worse than damage mods? 

 

It was not that challenging but still fun enemies needed some focus fire to take down so it was a slower pace. Assuming you played smart (Used cover don't get swarmed ect.) I imagine you could easily find yourself overwhelmed if you made a couple mistakes. 

 

I will run several more missions in of different types and tell you what I find.

 

Again I will use some easier to obtain weapons.

 

THe fire rate mods helped but I did not notice any of the others making a difference. 

[KvotheTheArcane1]

Top left of fist pic 50 kills out of 50

That's it? Awfully low... have you bothered to try a defense? Or a capture? Try those, something where you need to deal with enemies who keep spawning, not a mode with a limiter on enemies.

[JohnnyTopside]

TL, DR;
I feel that better ammo economy for otherwise "Weak" rapid-fire choices would help even up other mods (Rate of Fire/Reload/etc) with the damage mods in terms of value. I don't think it's just a matter of damage mods being "too good" but of other issues making the other mods far weaker choices for high level play.

 

---

 

You can kill anything without damage mods, given enough time, effort, and ammo. It's just a matter of chipping away at them slowly. The problem is that the damage mods all together provide a much more valuable bonus over other things such as fire rate, reload, etc. That's where I see part of the issue coming from.

 

I would love to do a viable FIRE RATE build be viable, as opposed to sheer damage output (Say, something like the A/furis or Grakata) but even with ammo mutation, if your damage isn't high enough, you tend to run out of AMMO way too fast because a single enemy can eat up an entire magazine or two. That can be mitigated somewhat with mods, but i feel that feeds back in to the whole discussion.

And yes, I know, I could spam ammo restores (Which cost money, where damage mods do not) or mitigate it somewhat with mutation mods and scavenger auras, but then I'm loosing out on the aforementioned high value damage to try and squeeze in some more ammo economy. Even then, it's often not enough to keep me from constantly swapping between weapons while I desperately run for ammo drops.

I personally feel that 'fixing' the ammo economy would actually go a long way towards helping to mitigate the problem. Right now, bullets are valuable, especially for heavy ammo eaters like the furis, soma or Grakata. The exception to that is if your damage is very high, and enemies die in a handful of shots. And admittedly, the soma is a bad example to add to this because it actually has fairly good ammo economy due to the massive wads of damage it can spit out. I don't think that finding ammo pickups should become less valuable, I just think that as the current system stands, you need bullet economy in terms of DAMAGE rather than pickups / ammo mods to be effective.

 

I tried doing a fire rate Braton Prime (Shred/Speed Trigger, Ammo mutation, Lots of Damage + Multishot) and found myself running out of ammo relatively early in higher level missions, even with controlled bursts. I was doing acceptable amounts of damage quite quickly, but frankly the ammo economy makes it not worth it. I found that, atleast for me, it was better to just stack on more damage.

 

An idea I had:

 

Take the weapon's magazine size and cap you to a set number. Say, 5-10 magazines, possibly depending on their type. So, with an unmodded braton prime, your ammo max would be 500, which is about what it is now. With an unmoded Latron prime, your ammo max would be 150. The problem I run in to with this idea is the soma, which would end up with an ammo pool of 1k on the high end, which is a bit excessive, especially considering how much damage it can spit out. They still take ammo classifications (Rifle would remain rifle, pistol would remain pistol, etc. Each weapon would not have it's own unique ammo pools) An argument could be made to allow these numbers to be modified by magazine capacity mods.

The next thing I would suggest is that the ammo pickups function slightly differently, restoring either 20 or half of a magazine, whichever is HIGHER. The reason for that is for weapons like the Latron prime, that have a reasonably small magazine but still spew a lot of rounds down range in short order. It's not a perfect solution and i'm not a number cruncher, it's just what seems right off the top of my head.

 

[grillv20]

No one is forcing you to use said mods.

 

if you aren't using the mod system to your advantage purposely then you're fully $&*&*#(%& and you should reconsider existing

[LukeAura]

Just after running the challenge, using a Jat Kittag with Voltaic Strike, Focus Energy and an unranked North Wind as well as a Karak with Shred and Malignant Force for damage, everything else being utility like mag size increase, reach, fast hands, increased zoom. I was able to complete a pluto mission.
However, when swapping out a Rifle Aptitude for a rank 8 Serration I was able to handle more enemies at once, kill more enemies in total, and save over 150 bullets all the while using less skill to earn those kills. 
They're not 'necessary' but they are a 'false choice'. You don't need them, but there exists no reason to use anything else over them other than to increase the challenge. 
Nothing is reliably as comparable a damage boost/mission success factor to a gun as Serration or Multishot. 

Edited June 21, 2014 by LukeAura

[Tarille]

Okay.... My views on the topic:

 

The base damage increase mods with no downsides (Serration, Point Blank, Hornet Strike and Pressure Point):

 

These are necessary to do damage in later missions. These also give a sense of progression as ranking them up is no easy task (How many Fusion Cores does it take to get the last few levels alone?) - As you progress through the game and spend time and money (Credits) on fusing this up it allow all your weapons to have the potential to do more damage and take on more difficult things.

 

If these were removed and the damage just rolled into weapons as they ranked up, newbies who's frames are still low level and unmodded would get bored as their weapons (Unmodded) would be getting the high damage scaling that a max rank Serration would give them. It'd also mean that they are more likely to go into higher level stuff as they feel they could because of their damage output (Meaning they'd spend a lot of time on the floor when they take a single point of damage to their unmodded frame) - Sure, it'd mean that veterans didn't have to put Serration into all of their stuff buy if they didn't have to do that, then there'd just be other "Mandatory" mods they feel they need to put in.

 

The Multishot Mods (Split Chamber, Hell's Chamber, Barrel Diffusion and Lethal Torrent):

 

These could very easily be balanced by making them cost additional ammo. So instead of being flat damage increases (Essentially 90%, 120%, 120% and 60% damage increase from the multi-shot respectively - Well, not exactly but it averages out like that) that also has the benefit of additional chances to crit or proc status, they become a situational mod that increases burst damage at the cost of ammo efficiency (Similar to the Fire Rate mods - Situationally they are invaluable, such as for Charge weapons - But for the rest of weapons they're just a Burst damage increase and ammo efficiency decrease)

 

The Corrupted mods that increase damage (Heavy Caliber, Vicious Spread and Spoiled Strike):

 

These are good. They provide decent damage increases (Heavy Caliber seems a bit high in comparison, but that's because a lot of Corrupted mods are woefully underpowered - Often giving less benefit than the non-corrupted variants for no reason) but at the cost of some other factor. For example, Vicious Spread makes shotguns (That aren't the Phage) pretty much resigned to being extra close to enemies because of how spread works - Spoiled Strike is pretty much unusable for slow weapons (Weapons that can comfortably use Fury and or Berserker to counteract it are exceptions though). Heavy Caliber is the only odd one out, as some weapons accuracy is high enough that they only get downgraded to other similar weapons level of accuracy so it's not a huge drawback (For example, Boltor Prime with max Heavy Caliber has about the same accuracy as Soma and Latron Prime)

 

Elemental mods (Stormbringer, Incendiary Coat, Pathogen Rounds, North Wind):

 

These could be balanced out by making other mods more comparable. For example the IPS mods - If the IPS mods worked in a similar fashion to these elemental mods there'd be an actual option to go physical outside of a few melee weapons (Where IPS mods are 90% and many elemental mods are only 60% and weapons are typically 90%+ of 1 damage type)

 

Things like Status and Crit mods could also be comparable, it's just that Crit mods are still only useful on the relatively few crit weapons we get (Though they are good on them) and Status mods aren't as easily obtainable (Only Cicero mods are publicly available outside the current event) and there are also still few status weapons to actually use them on (Since getting 60% increase of 10% is not going to make a huge difference. Heck even if you had Cicero + Breeding + Tethra mods on a Rifle with Hammer Shot for a total of 220% status increase that's still only 22% at the cost of a fair bit of damage)

 

So in short, these mods aren't the issue. Is the overwhelming number of underperforming mods that is the issue - For example, I keep looking at Critical Delay for my crit based primaries (Soma, Bows, Synapse, Amprex etc.) but it's just so bad... 48% crit (Compared to the equally cost Point Strike's 150%) AND 38% fire rate DOWN to boot. This is a god awful mod that in no way balances out it's negative aspect even on the highest crit chance weapons in the game.

 

That said, on some weapons can be considered more useful that straight up damage - For example Wildfire can outperform Hellfire on weapons that have slow reload or a small magazine. The Ammo Mutation mods can allow some bullet hoses to actually be used for a full mission (Though the hardcore players will just use ammo restores). The Bane/Cleanse/Expel/Smite mods can outperform an elemental mod (Outperforms a 4th mod on Rifle + Shotgun + Secondary and outperforms a 3rd mod on Melee)

Edited June 21, 2014 by Tarille

[SgtFlex]

I can't agree with the people on this thread on more than anything. I can't stand the fact that you have to put damage mods on almost any type of weapon to make it worthwhile to use. The damage to mod slot ratio is just too good to not use, thus almost every steamroller build has Serration+HC.

 

I like what people have said previously, you shouldn't need mods to make a gun viable, only to make it better in certain aspects, but compared to almost every other mod available, the damage you get from S + HC is just way too damn high. I dunno if these mods should even need to exist IMO, it just makes builds that much more dull.

[Lost_Cartographer]

TL, DR;

I feel that better ammo economy for otherwise "Weak" rapid-fire choices would help even up other mods (Rate of Fire/Reload/etc) with the damage mods in terms of value. I don't think it's just a matter of damage mods being "too good" but of other issues making the other mods far weaker choices for high level play.

 

---

 

You can kill anything without damage mods, given enough time, effort, and ammo. It's just a matter of chipping away at them slowly. The problem is that the damage mods all together provide a much more valuable bonus over other things such as fire rate, reload, etc. That's where I see part of the issue coming from.

 

I would love to do a viable FIRE RATE build be viable, as opposed to sheer damage output (Say, something like the A/furis or Grakata) but even with ammo mutation, if your damage isn't high enough, you tend to run out of AMMO way too fast because a single enemy can eat up an entire magazine or two. That can be mitigated somewhat with mods, but i feel that feeds back in to the whole discussion.

And yes, I know, I could spam ammo restores (Which cost money, where damage mods do not) or mitigate it somewhat with mutation mods and scavenger auras, but then I'm loosing out on the aforementioned high value damage to try and squeeze in some more ammo economy. Even then, it's often not enough to keep me from constantly swapping between weapons while I desperately run for ammo drops.

I personally feel that 'fixing' the ammo economy would actually go a long way towards helping to mitigate the problem. Right now, bullets are valuable, especially for heavy ammo eaters like the furis, soma or Grakata. The exception to that is if your damage is very high, and enemies die in a handful of shots. And admittedly, the soma is a bad example to add to this because it actually has fairly good ammo economy due to the massive wads of damage it can spit out. I don't think that finding ammo pickups should become less valuable, I just think that as the current system stands, you need bullet economy in terms of DAMAGE rather than pickups / ammo mods to be effective.

 

I tried doing a fire rate Braton Prime (Shred/Speed Trigger, Ammo mutation, Lots of Damage + Multishot) and found myself running out of ammo relatively early in higher level missions, even with controlled bursts. I was doing acceptable amounts of damage quite quickly, but frankly the ammo economy makes it not worth it. I found that, atleast for me, it was better to just stack on more damage.

 

An idea I had:

 

Take the weapon's magazine size and cap you to a set number. Say, 5-10 magazines, possibly depending on their type. So, with an unmodded braton prime, your ammo max would be 500, which is about what it is now. With an unmoded Latron prime, your ammo max would be 150. The problem I run in to with this idea is the soma, which would end up with an ammo pool of 1k on the high end, which is a bit excessive, especially considering how much damage it can spit out. They still take ammo classifications (Rifle would remain rifle, pistol would remain pistol, etc. Each weapon would not have it's own unique ammo pools) An argument could be made to allow these numbers to be modified by magazine capacity mods.

The next thing I would suggest is that the ammo pickups function slightly differently, restoring either 20 or half of a magazine, whichever is HIGHER. The reason for that is for weapons like the Latron prime, that have a reasonably small magazine but still spew a lot of rounds down range in short order. It's not a perfect solution and i'm not a number cruncher, it's just what seems right off the top of my head.

 

 

This guy gets it.  If each rifle ammo box returned 60 rounds instead of 20, weapons like the Grakata wouldn't fall off in effectiveness, and builds that incorporate rate of fire mods wouldn't essentially feel like wasted mod slots/points.

 

We drop tons of damage mods on a weapon because we need the raw power to both kill targets quickly and to conserve ammo, because the game doesn't care if we're packing a marelok that does 1000 damage per shot or afuris that deal 20 per shot, it's going to give us 20 rounds per sidearm box we pick up and they'll both cap at 210 rounds in the stockpile.  The afuris need at least 400 and to recover 40-50 rounds per box just to keep up.  By contrast, 20 per box while equipped with the marelok means no player should ever dip below 180 spare rounds.

 

Yes, there are methods to combat this - team ammo restores (which are beyond weak for a high RoF weapon) ammo scavenger and ammo mutation mods.  Two problems with these however: these mods need to be acquired (and they are rather rare) and they take up mod slots... that other, already higher damage/DPS weapons can dedicate towards more damage.  The Grakata is evidence that weapons can have individual tweaks behind the scenes, as it can carry up to 675 rifle rounds without an ammo drum mod (why 675 when it has a 60 round mag, I don't know,) even though the player spawns in with the standard 540 rounds.  I have little doubt it is well within DE's power to also tweak the rifle to increase ammo recovery from rifle ammo boxes to, say, 40 per box at the very least.  

 

Ammo mutations and scavenger mods should be for when the player might opt to incorporate RPM mods over raw damage mods, not to band-aid weapons with poor ammo economy.  No one with experience is going to take a weapon with poor ammo economy and/or poor performance over one that has great ammo economy and outstanding performance into actually difficult content.  It just won't happen.

 

 

 

 

Now to address another point in this thread: more mod slots just means more damage mods before anything else.  While I agree a mod like serration should just be incorporated into the rank of the weapon because it's freaking obvious to use it, at the same time, all doing so will accomplish is opening a slot for another elemental mod.  The two ways to beat this straight forward thinking are to face enemies that don't need that much firepower to kill on average, and to provide so many variations of nightmare or corrupted mods that players have choice through those means.  Every elemental nightmare mod that's coming out so far has status % tacked on.  This is well and good (except that the pure status % mods are STILL %15, instead of a justifying 90-120%) but it's almost monotonous.  

 

It would be nice to see mods that also introduce damage + reload speed, or damage + ammo recovery (increased ammo per box.)  Nightmare and corrupt mods are the real answer to the customization woes.  There's no room for pure utility mods in Warframe's mod system unfortunately, except maybe status effects (if the mod weren't complete $#!%.)

Edited June 21, 2014 by Littleman88

[Innocent_Flower]

Okay.... My views on the topic:

 

I disagree with you. You're right about it sucking to have damage increase as a weapon levels up.

 

Biggest problem is the scaling. Enemy become juggernauts, you become SIr-Instakill. 

 

Element mods should convert damage rather than add it on dumbly. 

 

There are many ways that multishot could work. 

[Akrocius]

Right now, the main issue I see is that player progression is split 2 ways: leveling up equipment and leveling up mods. Currently, it appears like the focus should be mostly on leveling up your gear itself, since it gives you mastery rank (which is how we measure player growth). In reality, that isn't the case, and honestly I don't think that needs to change.

 

Leveling up the "core" mods (Serration, Hornet Strike, Redirection etc) is the bigger part of growing as a player. We all know just how much effort it takes to max out these mods, with the 1 million or more credits and hundreds of fusion cores. It takes a lot of dedication to finally put that last point in, and the nice thing is that once I reach that point, it applies to every gun I have now and every one I will build in the future.

 

Comparatively, ranking up a weapon to 30 is far, far less work. I can hit rank 30 on a weapon with just a handful of Apollodorus runs, probably only 1 or 2 if I had an affinity booster. If that was all I needed to do to achieve the same power level as leveling up Serration, it would just feel empty.

 

The biggest hurdle currently is getting your hands on those mods. I've read plenty of stories about players going over a hundred hours without getting the core mods. I was lucky and got most of them back when drop tables were faction based instead of mob based (which I feel was a better system). If, per the latest dev stream, players get a version of these core mods as part of the entry quest system, I have no issue.

[StinkyPygmy]

All I'm getting from this is that if you have a thing for stats and maxing out DPS etc then these mods are needed. Funny thing is I've never had a problem stream rolling basically everything without even using serration.

 

But are they needed outright regardless?

I'm not seeing it. Some weapons may require them for endgame stuff but for a vast majority of the game I really don't see the necessity beyond pitching a tent for DPS.

[(PSN)TheRedZephyr]

I've had a possible solution floating around in my head for a while now. I guess you could call it Mods 3.0 (or 2.5, since it keeps part of the current "card" system):

 

Each weapon has specified slots for different types of mods, similar to how polarities work but more restrictive:

 

1 Damage: Serration/HS/PP (+100% Physical damage maxed); Heavy Cal/Magnum/SS (+120% Physical damage -X% Accuracy/firerate); Individual Physical damage mods (+150% Slash/Impact/Puncture); Mixtures of all of these and status proc dual-stat mods

 

3 Elemental (One combo, One standard, or three standard): Max all elements at +70% (does not stack with damage mods); Proc dual-stat mods cap at 60%; Add possible corrupted element mods (Ex. Overheat-Extra fire damage, but .01% of damage is done to your warframe)

 

2 Utility: Reload speed, Fire rate, Ammo-consuming multishot, Ammo capacity, combos of all of these, corrupted risk/reward mods, All kinds of fun stuff

 

2 Attachments: Silencer options, scopes for zoom, possible aesthetic parts as well. Not so sure how well this Mod type would work, since there are so many different weapons.

 

This system creates more "choice"--dare I call it--so not every good build ever is Serration-SplitChamber-Elements. All damage will be additive, rather than Serration/Hornet Strike multiplying ALL the damage. In theory, this system would prioritize the physical-type damages (tweaking would be needed for element-only weapons), while making elements supplimentary.

 

Players would have to give two S#&$s about what faction they are facing and use the corresponding loadout. Fighting infested? Use Fire/Corrosive (or cold and proc chance to slow them) and slash; prioritize firerate and reload speed so you don't get swarmed. Grineer giving you problems? Radiation and shock proc to stun and confuse; high puncture damage over spray'n'pray to pierce that armor. Corpus shields giving you the shaft? Shoot magnetic and toxic-laced rounds to both hinder and bypass those pesky barriers.

 

In theory, Damage and Mods 2.0 were supposed to create this scenario, but everything just turned into "MOAR DAMAGE NAO!!!" Perhaps a good nerf-to-the face is what we all need.

Edited June 22, 2014 by (PS4)TheRedZephyr

[Methanoid]

Serration should not exist, base damage percentage increase should depend on the weapons RANK, not a mandatory mod. 

 

i made a post very similar to that a while back, it wasnt popular.

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/199542-feedback-on-weaponsbase-damage/#entry2319547

Edited June 22, 2014 by Methanoid