Wf Weapons Issues We Keep Talking About.

[DSpite]

TL;DR - Slightly ranty wall of text, and since I'm trying to cover a number of things, hard to pin down. Seriously, if the first 10 lines bore you, just stop reading. This is mostly because I like to hear how people think on game mechanics, and not because I'm pushing for changes.

 

I'm really hoping I won't open a can of worms here, as the reason I'm starting this is quite innocent.

 

I basically understand the OP/UP arguments, one of the most common being over the Boltor Prime, that seems to be able to cover too much of the spectrum in combats then it maybe should, over say, the Braton Prime that, because the latter is a fairly simple, straight out bullet weapon, having the issue that when you throw on the usual damage multiplier MOD's, even with every slot polarized, the actual on-paper DPS falls around a few other non-prime and easy to assemble guns, and does not have extra knock back ability.

 

Now with that out of the way, onto the feedback part.

 

... note that I can't untangle DPS from the argument, because that metric is the primary metric that will keep you alive by determining how fast we remove enemy DPS from the field, but it's also the sticking point, so the general question is:

 

How much power is really needed for a WF gun?

 

Taking Abilities out of the equation for a moment - because even my Excalibur casting a Radial Blind and then exploding a Glaive will apparently get a 1600% AoE large radius damage multiplier - just how much "killing power" do we generally need coming out of the barrel in day to day work?

 

Using purely the ugly DPS yardstick, once a weapon hits about the 5K DPS mark, you are already very effective against level 30 units, I tried this setup (do not have a Braton or Braton Prime set for testing, so the Flux Rifle is the most simple gun I had that could be setup this way)

 

 

Basically straight damage, no elements, and I picked the Flux so I could, If I wanted, make sure I was aiming at faces. I took a Zephyr with 1100/1100 Shields/Health and default low armor so I could see what the bad guys were doing back to me.

 

Normal mobs, I waved the beam on them and a few ticks killed them. For example, if two mobs were standing in a line, and did a casual sweep across and back, they would both drop. Heavy units would take a solid 2-4 second steady beam to kill, depending on how "tough", Heavy Gunners probably being the harder to kill, then again, I did not aim to cause weak point crits like headshots, which would kill faster.

 

A ton of bleed procs on me kept happening because I was going gun-ho, and had to pop one HealthR and at least one AmmoR each run (no space for Ammo Mutator on my first setup), but overall, the 5K mark felt balanced for that level mission, and we all know that doing a decent percentage of Procs via elements would of helped a ton by extra CC's via fire/shock/rad/etc.

 

Leaving extremes like high-er waves T3/T4 Void missions out of the equation (for now), what the hell do we expect out of our guns?

 

My personal expectation, is that if, with 4-6 Forma, you can hit the ~10K DPS burst, there is no normal content you can't reach - even overkill on - and by normal, I mean the minimal Rotation C to reach all the "unlockable" items in the game.

 

* Can our player base, with say, 4 Forma available to them, just pick an average gun, and run ALL the Void missions necessary to get all the content, when they have available to them all their Frame abilities to complement that gun?

 

* What is the player base exactly complaining about when they compare one gun over the other? Is it really that the gun can't do the job or that their favorite weapon is not as "blingy" as other guns? Is it because there is an expectation of not having to re-level the damn thing 4-5 times to finally unlock it's proper potential? Should not that be the whole point? ... I do admit on this point that since power-levelling gear can be really trivial, extra power can be unlocked a bit too easily.

 

* On mission maps/Alerts/Void to Rotation C, is 50K DPS going to be any different than 10K DPS other then when focus firing Heavy Gunners? Almost every gun we have, when two players pop the right abilities will archive damage values high enough that a single tap of the trigger (that being a single arrow, a 3 round burst etc) will insta-pop any unit, so is the real complaint that <insert favorite gun name here> is not as good as <gun name another guy on my team has> after 40 minutes in a T4?

 

* Rather then increase the Armor/Health/Shields of enemy units, would it make more sense to have damage scaling on our guns, like say this (I've posted this concept before):

 

 

Which will mean at a certain point, the diminishing returns from adding more damage mods, might be better used by plugging in utility MODs. Also, in such a system, DE would know that since we can never, EVER hit around 6K "output" (unless they drop the ball with a new MOD combo, and even then you would need ~40K DPS on the actual "input" damage scale).

 

This would mean that 10K and 20K "input" guns would fall much closer together in the damage scales. They would still have enough damage differential that make it worthwhile modding for, but not so high as to break after mobs hit a certain level anymore, but the biggest change would be that DE could finally balance the mobs around a specific damage point in space.

 

Would a system like this, or a change on damage stacking via mods, negate the need the need for DE to make bullet sponges or throw ever increasing numbers of things at us, and allow more interesting combat mechanics?

 

* On the extra topic of running T4's for long waves, is there actually a short list of "must have weapons" purely because burst damage, one-hit on Heavy Gunners or special utility that are seen a LOT on those runs?

 

Anyway, if you have read this far, feel free to say something.

Edited November 2, 2014 by DSpite

[KairaSilvermist]

I actually have noticed certain things along the lines you point out here. It's a bit hard for me to reply, but this does seem like it would fix the scaling issue for harder and harder enemies, and balance out  nicely.

[Llyssa]

The main arguments people have about weapons is centered on t4. As you noted, pretty much anything can do quite well outside of t3/t4.

 

However, there are those of us that LIVE there, battling the void so endlessly that tweaks to the "regular" game go unnoticed.

 

The problem becomes what expectations you have of how a weapon of any type will perform against the most difficult opponents. Weapons that do not perform well in this situation are railed against.

 

If things are set up for them to do well in t4, though, then, on the obverse, you have people that don't do t4, but have gear setups of t4 quality.

 

These people get angry about the game being "too easy", as they're going in over-matched to their opponents.

 

There's no straight guide for what goes where, and even disagreements on how things work best, but the underlying point remains the same: How does it compare to my current content?

 

One other part of immense import is usage.

 

Most people angry about weapons(or frames) being "too weak" either haven't figured out the proper usage for them, or haven't figured out a usage that works adequately in t4.

 

Most people angry about weapons(or frames) being "too strong" either have figured out the proper usage for them, or haven't bothered using them in t4.

 

The game keeps a pretty narrow balance, but when your usage or content aren't matching the equipment, the difference between them is striking.

 

It's of note that there is no "must have" list of anything(again, it's merely a question of knowing how to use it), but for certain play styles, adapting different weapons(or frames) is awkward/difficult/impossible.

 

For example, when they were making melee 2.0, they had a huge drop off of content releases. This allowed me to forma every weapon I wanted to, and then I started plugging forma in to weapons I had no reason to do so with. This culminated with learning I could do high level content just fine with a heavily-tricked out MK-1 Braton--it turns out, with a half dozen forma and a potato in it, it's quite a beast--the mod list for making it so isn't what most people would guess at first, but I did many missions with nothing but.

 

Now, most people would tell you the MK-1 Braton is worthless and useless and has no business being in t4. I can attest that isn't true, it's just that nobody ever bothers doing that to an MK-1 Braton, as it doesn't make much sense to, and there's other guns that can do the job as well with a lot fewer heavy investments.

[Llyssa]

Oh, one other thing I must mention: Multipliers.

 

The system currently allows for, with a proper setup, of multi-million points of damage per hit.

 

You would have to remove a great deal of mods and skills to bring things down to anywhere near 6k.

 

EDIT: Please note, this video is from december 29th of last year--many, MANY more mods and skills have been added since then.

Edited November 2, 2014 by Llyssa

[LazyKnight]

Since you covered so many points, i'll just going to post about the power issue. Warframes power suffer from a fundamental problem with it's implementation of damage scaling, and it has been a problem that should have been fixed a year ago.

 

DE has not even balanced Excalibur's base damage of his radial javelin to kill a level a level 16 NPC lancer (exaggeration, bear with it). It requires using power augmentation mods to go higher just to keep pace with very low level NPC. The problem is DE hasn't balance scaling and relies far too heavily on mods. Realistically, power should scale based of target's Level and growth (DE can plot the equation) they scale to the NPC level (always do same percentage, with mods allowing to kill stronger types). An example of this is if it takes 1 and 1/2 radial javelin to kill a lancer without mods, it should be able to kill any level with power mods.

Edited November 2, 2014 by LazyKnight

[R34LM]

-snip-

You smacked the issue right on the head. Most players find their home in certain gamemodes and base their opinions off of how well equipment can handle the situation.

 

Take Limbo, for example. He does great in missions where enemies don't come in swarms, but he can't solo Ceres as effectively as other frames for that reason.

[direcyphre]

Nothing could ever possibly 'fix' the scaling issue because there are those who want to see those super ridiculously high levels, and others who may never see them. When it comes to tweaking games of this nature, you've still got the butterfly effect; if at one point you change something to better suit a particular need (like damage or armor scaling), you inadvertently effect the very nature of gameplay that may be entirely unfavorable for everyone.

 

What If: The game magically had proper scaling, and all content had a pre-defined tier with which to gauge skill/experience/level/mod requirements. Then suddenly there would be no real challenge or high tier 'end-game' that a lot of people play. You'd be down to an end-all, be-all build that would be needed to the highest level of content. That would be that, and there would be nothing to really look forward to.

 

The current problem is that there are in fact modes where people can keep going near infinitely (sans certain game-breaking bugs), with content that scales with it. It leads people to build their loadouts in various, interesting ways, as not everyone agrees upon how to tackle those challenges, and there is always something to look forward to with the addition of new mods. We're given a multitude of ways to define how we get further and further into more difficult territory. Adding some sort of ceiling wouldn't help anyone.

 

The ability to complete T3 and below was never under question because you can generally get it done with any weapon and without a plethora those 10-rank rare mods. Provided you've played long enough and have a decent loadout, level 40 and below is irrelevant.

[LazyKnight]

I could, within the current mod system, balance all weapons within a range of 10-20% by only changing the base stats of weapons (I am sure other could too). All weapons scale predictably, and there is only an exception with status effects and critical weapon that just need extra work. Since they all scale the same DE is already doing this.

 

DE has not made weapons equal, and the NPC scale aggressively making weak weapon seems weaker at higher levels. Like it or not, DE has tiered weapon unequal and it is painfully visible past level 40. If Scott wanted to, he could easily make every weapon have the same DPS as Boltor prime, and the mods system is not stopping him from doing this. 

 

The short version of what you want is a smaller number output in displayed damage difference. 

 

Edited for typos

Edited November 2, 2014 by LazyKnight

[DSpite]

Oh, one other thing I must mention: Multipliers.

 

The system currently allows for, with a proper setup, of multi-million points of damage per hit.

 

You would have to remove a great deal of mods and skills to bring things down to anywhere near 6k.

 

 

I purely meant that via diminishing returns, the absolute ceiling from the pure damage of guns will be that magical 6K - or whatever the number comes to when a "magic formula" is applied. The actual number is not the important factor, just the fact that all gun damages will converge if you mod purely from nothing but DPS.

 

My idea in not a good one to apply to all gun equally, I'm just pointing out that I don't personally agree with a purely linear damage potential from mods because even small starting numbers in guns will equate in very large numbers when fully modded, and maybe the scaling should be curved in some way, even if that formula was slightly different for each gun or category of guns.

 

We all seem to agree that the current system seems to get out of hand because of stacking, so maybe linear stacking is not the best way?

Edited November 2, 2014 by DSpite

[LazyKnight]

My idea in not a good one to apply to all gun equally, I'm just pointing out that I don't personally agree with a purely linear damage potential from mods because even small starting numbers in guns will equate in very large numbers when fully modded, and maybe the scaling should be curved in some way, even if that formula was slightly different for each gun or category of guns.

You are making this way more complicated that it needs to be. What you are asking for, in a very round about way, is removing the scaling added by the core damage % mods (serration, heavy caliber) and multiple shot (split chamber). Remove them and all weapon would be capped at under a few thousand DPS.

 

Again, all your asking for is to make weapons have smaller numbers.

Edited November 2, 2014 by LazyKnight

[DSpite]

I could, within the current mod system, balance all weapons within a range of 10-20% by only changing the base stats of weapons (I am sure other could too). All weapons scale predictably, and there is only an exception with status effects and critical weapon that just need extra work. Since they all scale the same DE is already doing this.

 

DE has not made weapons equal, and the NPC scale aggressively making weak weapon seems weaker at higher levels. Like it or not, DE has tiered weapon unequal and it is painfully visible past level 40. If Scott wanted to, he could easily make every weapon have the same DPS as Boltor prime, and the mods system is not stopping him from doing this. 

 

The short version of what you want is a smaller number output in displayed damage difference. 

 

Edited for typos

 

The larger numbers will still happen. Look at Lyssa's linked video, a team just has to play smart.

 

I just find it illogical that because of how damage stacking and multipliers work now, a 10 point difference from single rounds at the start can mean a 4K DPS difference when fully modded.

 

EvE Online had that same problem with stacking on modules, and they moved to a diminishing returns model, otherwise the only optimal way was to stack as much damage module as would fit on every ship.

[LazyKnight]

I just find it illogical that because of how damage stacking and multipliers work now, a 10 point difference from single rounds at the start can mean a 4K DPS difference when fully modded.

I feel like a broken record; I have talked about this multiple times in other topics

 

The scaling is screwed because of the mods that are 'damage +%' and 'split-chamber type' mods. These mods are what makes a 1 point of damage so large, and none of the elemental type mods (or even any other type really)  are contributing to this problem. Primed chamber and charged chamber are flat multiplicative damage mods, and are basically the most power-full mods that can be placed in the 8th mods slot, after core mods and elemental mods.

 

EvE Online had that same problem with stacking on modules, and they moved to a diminishing returns model, otherwise the only optimal way was to stack as much damage module as would fit on every ship.

Damage +% mods are the bane of this game's balance and are the ones that magnify the difference and exasperate issue. People will always stack damage, and that is not the core issue. If it was not for the core-damage mods, comparing a metal auger, or ammo capacity mod, to an elemental mod would have people consider what they want more.

Edited November 2, 2014 by LazyKnight

[DSpite]

You are making this way more complicated that it needs to be. What you are asking for, in a very round about way, is removing the scaling added by the core damage % mods (serration, heavy caliber) and multiple shot (split chamber). Remove them and all weapon would be capped at under a few thousand DPS.

 

Again, all your asking for is to make weapons have smaller numbers.

 

The damage part regarding guns was only one issue. I was not pointing directly to changing the damage anyway, it was just simply to explain in those terms, I was pointing out damage TO enemies.

 

Higher level enemies impact damage potential of weapons, so they all get curved, so when your 30K DPS shoots a Level 1 mob, the damage might still be 30K, but when a 30K weapon shoots a level 40 (40? 50? 60?) mob, after damage mitigation, it might only be 1.5 times as high as a well modded Braton Prime, and not 3 times as high as it is now, meaning that all weapons behave more "similar", and not feel like one bullet is magically 3 times more powerful then another bullet.

 

EDIT: The mobs would of course have MUCH reduced HP pools of course. The damage reduction is INSTEAD OF larger and larger armor and health and shield values.

 

I'm not sure I'm explaining well enough still.

Edited November 2, 2014 by DSpite

[LazyKnight]

 

I'm not sure I'm explaining well enough still.

I fully understand what you are trying to explain, and that is not the issue. What you want is to have a tier-less game, or flatten game by penalizing weapons that have better stats by getting poor results from mods; Again, it would be needless complex math, because the difference can be smoothed by reducing the variance of the base stats of the various weapons, mainly buffing the weaker ones. It would be trivial to balance base stats, compared to implementing a diminish returns on damage input, or mitigation amounts on target.

 

If the averaged DPS of the weapon's stats was raised, by buffing the weaker weapons, it would have a end result of having a less noticeable difference in how weapons scale compared to each other. 

 

If boltor prime or -insert top weapon - was too strong for NPCs, then a case can be made for changing NPC strength or nerfing stronger weapons. If anyone wants to claim it would be easier to nerf or whatever, it's very obvious what weapons are far too low and is easy to fix* imbalance, and it's not hard on spreedsheet.

 

There will always be problems when a weapon's base DPS is 2x-4x the value of the weakest weapons, and the weak weapon will never be more than a entry level weapon.

 

Edits: for endless typos.

Edited November 2, 2014 by LazyKnight

[Llyssa]

(sidenote, damage mods are only best if you're trying to max burst damage).

[LukeAura]

Dps isn't vital, I think the fixation with dps is more so that utility has many flaws dependent on the mod in question. 
dps is really only so valued because there's never a situation in even end level planets Ceres/pluto missions where more damage isn't going to have an effect on the mission on a semi regular basis at least(Heavy units, eximus, enemies being buffed by shield ospreys that aren't in sight of you, random stalker attacks, bosses).
You could equip increased zoom, but how often will you need it to accurately make headshots in the tight halls of the corpus ship, compared to needing more damage in order to take out the heavy eximus and techs without being able to headshot because of the constant damage you're under? And how many more meters of accurate headshots are you actually getting from that zoom any ways? utility is usually too weak, too questionable, too easy to compare to dps, or just plain backwards. Utility is flawed, and until that's fixed altering the damage output of guns in any way isn't going to make utility more useful. 
 

[MixterFox]

I really see this as a 4 part issue. It's kinda long but its a big multi faced problem

 

Mods:  Damages mods are too powerful, utility mods are weak. There's really no point to specing for anything but damage cuz even loosing one mod for something like ammo mutator on most weapons lowers your ammo efficiency so much its a net loss. I'm not gonna post any numbers as it would be pretty long and I'll prolly make my own post on this.

 

It was my understanding that DE balanced the game around unpotatoed braton powered weapons with a less than optimal build. Since potatoes cost Plat DE can't remove these from the game without robing players and keeping them in causes a lot of power creep.

If they were to balance the game around having potatoed gear it would kinda push the game in to pay to win territory, which would kill the game.

Something that could be done is make them give an aura/stance like slot that adds a little something else and give everyone 2 mod points/rank.

 

Modded a weapon goes up by like 40-75X as powerful as an unmodded one. Which the number its self doesn't matter but can you tell me a lvl 45 enemy is 45X stronger than a level 1? You just outscale them so fast, so much so that the mods make the weapons not the other way around.

 

Base stats: Many weapons still have damage 1.0 stats where they put out 300+ dps unmoded while others put out 200ish while being comparable weapon types. A fully modded Soma will do 50% more damage per shot than a modded Braton Prime on top of firing 50% faster. Making it both more efficient but also better dps. The higher fire rate is somewhat forgivable as it means you'll need ammo more often but when you hit harder on top of it its a flat upgrade.

 

Prime weapons are pretty bad here as they are with one or two exceptions massive upgrades from the base weapon. I feel they should be a slight upgrade like 5% more status. 10% faster reload etc. its still an upgrade and people will still want them over the base weapon but they wont make them into masterly trash, something to just level for mastery and then throw away. I know a lot of people will say that's how DE makes money. They release something everyone wants to spend plat on but prolly 80% of the player base has a slot just for leveling weaker weapons then throwing them away because they know that they cant use them endgame. I've leveled a few weapons for mastery then threw them out but I might have kept them around bought a slot/potato if I knew it was something worth keeping. I'm the kind of player that likes to change my loadout all the time so having 10 assault rifles that all play a bit differently is very appealing, having boltor prime put every other weapon to shame does not. Obviously you can't get perfect balance on everything but you can get it close enough that preference comes into play.

 

Damage table: Currently a single elemental mods will add +90% damage and get a +50% bonus combined elements are +180% and get a +75% bonus increasing the value of a single elemental mod from +135% to +157.5% per mod slot making it better to spec for on top of having a better proc(usually). Part of damage 2.0 was to make ranbow builds not as common but they really just reinforced them. Another part was making it so weapons could have similar damage totals while being better against one faction than another but weapon base damage type doesn't matter as much as elemental damage(with exceptions like high status high slash weapons) they just serve to increase elemental damage.

 

I was thinking something like +50% of physical damages(its usually +25% but there are some +50%s) to make weapon choice matter a little more +50% elemental damage and +25% combined elemental. This way a combined element for 2 mod slots only nets +56.25% increase per slot(+112.5% for both) and a single elemental is +135% so now its a little more appealing to add a fast hands or zoom.

 

Abilities: There are so many powers that give damage buffs or make enemies take more damage. These numbers are all really high and stack with each other. Right now my limbo can give a 3.9x multiplier with only just intensify. Power strength should effect these numbers but the base multipliers need to be lowered to like half of what they are now in general.

 

 

Players like to defend the current system with with "its a PVE game who cares about balance?" There is PVP and its supposed to be a kind of endgame but one of the reason people don't like it is lack of balance. It would also be nice to see more than just Boltor Primes, Somas and Dreads. If only 10% of the weapons in game are worth playing then 90% of the weapons don't deserve to be in the game since you won't use them.