Here's How We Remove Serration And (Attempt To) Balance The Game. Damage 2.5 (Designated Megathread)

[Jahadaya]

Okay, so I was in the middle of typing a MASSIVE thread about this like 5 minutes ago, but then I pressed backspace then SUDDENLY the page reloaded and all my 4 paragraphs were gone. That's happened 3 times now on these forums and each time I've just said screw it and given up and not shared my ideas. I'm not  doing that again., I feel too strongly about this subject.

 

Granted, I'm still gonna say screw it and not type nearly as much, but I'm still posting nonetheless. 

 

So here's just a quick rundown on how I feel DE should handle this situation:

 

 

1. Remove all pure base damage mods. These include: Serration, Hornet Strike, Point Blank, and Primed Point Blank. 

 

2. Compensate us with credits and cores equivalent to the amount spent, plat, or legendary cores. 

 

3. Integrate +5.5% damage per level into every weapon, for a total of +165% damage at level 30 - equal to a max Serration. Keep the same numbers the same for primaries, secondaries, and melee's for consistency. 

 

4. Add in the Conditional mods Rebecca spoke about on Devstream 44 (such as +x% damage on headshots, or +x% damage on unalerted enemies). This would be a great way to encourage varied playstyles while also having effective variety, something that the massive scaling and base damage mods help to kill (more on this later).

 

5. Heavily nerf (Hear me out. This is what's needed, and I'll tell you why) the other "essentially-essential" mods that people say would just replace Serration's spot in everyone's builds. These include: 

 

 

Heavy Caliber - Give it something like +30% damage and -15% accuracy. On the other hand, make it easier to max for less unnecessary grindy-grind. 

 

Elemental Mods - Instead of having them just add straight up more damage, have them change a portion of your weapons damage to become that elemental. For example, say you have a weapon that does 50 slash, 50 puncture, and 50 impact damage. Say you put on a +30% fire damage mod. It would then do 35 slash, 35 puncture, 35 impact, and 45 fire damage. 

 

Multishot mods - Instead of these mods just adding extra shots for free, have them sort of "split your shots in two", doubling your proc chance, and increasing crit. Either this, or just nerf them to do something along the lines of +25% multishot. 

 

I could do more mods, like spoiled strike and magnum force - but you get the point. These mods should be nerfed to a point where you'll actually consider using Utility mods that fit your playstyle over them, and using the newly freed Serration slot for a higher variety of mods. With this, and the addition of Conditional mods that also encourage a higher variety of playstyles, players won't be forced to use mods that make their weapons 90x more effective in every situation. Also, this helps to make it so that damage output is more innate as you level up and less tied to mods that you grind to max. Now of course with these heavy nerfs, enemies will have to change too. 

 

6. Rework enemy health, armor, and shields to scale correctly with out new damage outputs. This one's obvious, as since we just recieved such heavy nerfing, enemies will have to, too. This ties in with my next suggestion.

 

7. Completely rework scaling. This includes a reworking of enemy scaling, level scaling, and endless mission scaling. Our damage output, now with the removal of ridiculous damage-altering mods, won't scale nearly as much as it does now. This is a good thing. This makes missions generally more enjoyable, and the game a lot more balanceable. We won't be one-shotting things up until 40 minutes into a T4S, when they then start one-shotting us and becoming bullet-sponges. 

 

I actually think they should remove endless missions entirely. There's no point in having them go on forever, when once after a certain point the mission literally becomes impossible. That's not good at all. Instead, I think endless missions should each end at a certain point, and have their scaling reworked so that they scale a bit quicker so Vets and the people looking for a challenge still get the challenge they seek.

 

Survival could only go for 60 minutes, or 90 minutes or something. And Defense; only for 100 waves. But the scaling is different so it's still just as challenging as now - but more exciting as there could be a SUPER good end-of-mission reward for those that complete it (like 100-200 R5 Cores, or a Prime Part in that mission of your choosing - just something really good that makes it worth it).

 

Maybe there could also even be an even more challenging bonus-mission at the end of these endless missions to spice things up. Something with even BETTER rewards to really make things worth it. 

 

8. Introduce more obvious weapon tiering, and mastery locking accordingly. There could be 5 tiers. 5 being the highest, 1 being the lowest. Which weapons go in which tier is another topic, but it should be very obvious in the UI which tier a weapon is in. This also makes it easier to put out an equal amount of weapons in each tier for DE. 

 

To make newbies not have as much of an exponential increase in their weapon damage (previously Serration stopped this, but since in this case it gets removed and integrated in weapon levels, getting +165% damage at level 30 will make new players just swipe through all the early star chart too easily) the Tiering system could work like this:

 

We could have weapons of lower tiers have a smaller damage increase (Since 5.5% per level maxes out to be 165% like Serration, that could be for tier 5 and tier 1 could be a 1.1% increase per level for a max of 33% increase in damage). Of course, that could greatly anger people who liked using weapons that are not of higher tiers, so you can raise that with maybe a new potato/ a forma/ mastery rank/ something else DE comes up with :P

 

And I think the tiers of weapons you can use/unlock should be tied to Mastery Rank. Tier 1 for Ranks 1-2. Tier 1+2 for ranks 2-4. Tier 1+2+3 for ranks 4-6. Tier 1+2+3+4 for ranks 6-8. All 5 Tiers unlocked for Ranks 8 and above. I think this would be great. 

 

This is where I start things start to get a bit hard for me to decide, so that's where you guys come in!

 

Upvote if you mostly agree, and surely leave a comment on this (huge) change that DE may be planning. 

 

 

EDIT: A great post in the spoiler about why this should happen, which my post didn't really cover fully - I covered more how we should implement it. 

 

 

Innocent_Flower made this post. It's at the bottom of page 6 of this thread. 

 

 

So I looked at the hot topic and noticed a big change in the percentages. Whereas before more were voting for either Removal, Changes or 'other', more now are voting for 'they're fine' and even the 'buff them' option is gaining momentum.(it's currently 30% and 15% versus 13%,23% and 5%. It was on first sight 25%,10% versus 14%,24% and i forgot what the 'other' percentage was.)

 

Now this is probably one of the biggest questions to ask in hot topics. It affects the entire balancing of the game. It's essentially something that could end with a damage 3.0, and would at the least call for a damage 2.1

 

Voting to make such mods more powerful... Well, that's a bad joke. Especially considering the weight of such a change. If you want to powertrip, make a thread for an easymode so that you can powertrip without impacting the game for everyone who doesn't want that. 

 

Voting 'they're fine as they are' because you've missed information (or didn't like the 'no opinion' or 'other' option ) is... bad. Very bad. 

 

1- Should DE remove +damage mods then there's a 90% chance of players being compensated in credits, cores and ducats. (if you traded for a mod in plat, then you essentially bought a lot of cores. Still worth it) outside that 90%; the mods turn into something else. It's extremely unlikely that DE will give players nothing for anything they remove. You might not get legendary cores, but you'l get enough. 

 

2- Any change to mods will have a change to the way enemies level/scale. If you're thinking "How am I going to do 40 mins t4 survival without serration" then, sadly, you're a bit silly. 

 

3- Removing +Damage mods will likely not be the end of 'progression'. Rather, it might be the beginning of meaningful progression. Enemies will go from 'more health and damage' to 'smarter, have more abilities and spawning in more devilish patterns'. Veteran players will have better weapons modded with far more utility, specialization and functionality to deal with enemies better whilst not becoming something that can instantly make mid-level content boring and irrelevant. Allowing players to move more easily between high and mid-level content without needing to constantly make load-out adjustments. 

 

4- Removing + damage mods will not mean that 'people will find the most optimum build again using the remaining mods and then we will need more nerfs'. Will there be an optimum build? Most likely. But will it be as bad as the optimum builds we have now? Not nearly as bad. Again: just removing/amending the damage mods isn't it. DE will have to look at 'the whole animal' and will change multishot, the corrupted damage mods and probably the elemental/physical damage mods too. It's not like power-spaming will become more prevalent as weapons 'decline in power' as DE will probably touch on the damage dealing abilities too   

 

Edit:

5- It isn't about buffing or nerfing. It's not that we want enemies to be super-hard or guns to be super weak. It's about both increasing the sense of progression and accessibility. It's about customization and better game mechanics. And just maybe it might make things easier on the developers: Maybe DE would be better at fine-tuning things if they didn't have to worry about players increasing their damage a hundred-fold. Maybe bosses wouldn't need to pull BS-weakspots because many players can instantly kill them if they weren't otherwise immunize. Maybe better AI could be worked on if it wasn't wasted on enemies that were all one-hit-dead. Do something like this and players will be able to better set themselves to have be challenged or not through means that aren't painstaking damage calculations. 

 

..Or maybe DE themselves just don't recognize the change that removing serration (and causing damage Something-point-something) could bring (those are some cool questions in the hot topics, but none of them that central to warframe's future growth as this) It could have been a hot topic on it's own. Maybe [DE] Drew could/should have explained it differently. 

Edited January 21, 2015 by Jahadaya
Language - Designating Megathread.

[(PSN)jwernecke]

No. Besides there is already a very long thread about this.. and split chamber, and everything else that makes warframe, warframe.

[Spears]

Maybe they shouldn't compensate to remove the damage mods (and replace them) because all the plat/L cores would cause massive unbalance.

 

Maybe if they replaced the damage mods with other mods of the same rank, that wouldn't unbalance the entire game.

[rechot]

I feel like the serration rebalance is a bad idea. Serration is a huge part of warframe. Also nerfing all other mods that help with dmg sounds horrible. You missed a key ingrediant in all of this. The enemys will have to change if we lost all that extra dmg we wouldnt even be able to do T2 survival missions.

I feel like serration and other mods like it are the very core of our mod system. Removing these would need a total rework of the mod system. I feel like they would instead rush it, and the game would be broken in many too many ways.

[Satwo]

no, we dont need 12 mercurys, and i happen to enjoy multi Tiered void missions, as well as a reasonable time to leave an endless mission. i dont have all day to play one mission.

[Jahadaya]

No. Besides there is already a very long thread about this.. and split chamber, and everything else that makes warframe, warframe.

There's lots of very long threads about it. But our current "Warframe" Is unbalanced and admittedly has issues that could be fixed, so I don't know why people are complaining to keep those problems. We're here to help make the game better, so why don't we? Who cares if the changes may have to be big.

[Kuestenjung]

 SUDDENLY the page reloaded and all my 4 paragraphs were gone.

 

You should have taken this as a sign, cause this belongs into feedback and not general.

[Jahadaya]

I feel like the serration rebalance is a bad idea. Serration is a huge part of warframe. Also nerfing all other mods that help with dmg sounds horrible. You missed a key ingrediant in all of this. The enemys will have to change if we lost all that extra dmg we wouldnt even be able to do T2 survival missions.

I feel like serration and other mods like it are the very core of our mod system. Removing these would need a total rework of the mod system. I feel like they would instead rush it, and the game would be broken in many too many ways.

no, we dont need 12 mercurys, and i happen to enjoy multi Tiered void missions, as well as a reasonable time to leave an endless mission. i dont have all day to play one mission.

For some reason I feel like you guys failed to read the OP.

[(XBOX)MAXsandwich]

Removing mods like seration would basicly be removing to only actual meaningfull progression in Warframe.



 

[Zoracraft]

It's fun running around with godlike strength and finess.

However, this forces DE to make godlike enemies to keep the game "challenging". (Nullifies, tar MOAs, bombards w/ seeking missiles)

Having the serration effect be innate (as it basically is now anyways when you have the mod energy to equip it) as well as changing the straight power mods will allow DE to more accurately create challenge, as well as add new styles to warframe combat (snipers who aim for explosive headshots? Melee players who try to decapitate enemies?)

I love almost all of your ideas, especially the elemental changes.

[Altey]

Removing damage mods solves nothing

[iuki.]

Remove all those mods and there better be some really really good compensation b/c if not I be plenty upset. Also if they do this changes then what is going to happen is that ALL your weapons and frames you or I forma'd perfectly to match these will be screwed which they have done in the past already a few times and THAT was never compensated for EVER; all that time, creds, and wasted.

 

See here's the thing, I know this is still beta but problem is many us have spent money here and some are getting mighty tired of them changing stuff and expecting us to pay in either money or time...or both.

 

ie. my trinity was revamped 2+ times now and I have 2x lovely red, useless polarities on her now which DE didn't give two cents about. I am supposed to pay more money/time to fix it apparently.

Edited January 18, 2015 by fizbit

[Satwo]

For some reason I feel like you guys failed to read the OP.

 

7. Completely rework scaling. This includes a reworking of enemy scaling, level scaling, and endless mission scaling. Our damage output, now with the removal of ridiculous damage-altering mods, won't scale nearly as much as it does now. This is a good thing. This makes missions generally more enjoyable, and the game a lot more balanceable. We won't be one-shotting things up until 40 minutes into a T4S, when they then start one-shotting us and becoming bullet-sponges. I'm running out of time, so I won't go deeper into this. 

 

if you look, i posted on the biggest flaw in his post. without that scaling, we will have 12 mercurys, and there will be virtually no difference between T1 and T4 missions.

Edited January 18, 2015 by Satwo

[zebar1313]

I like the idea to scale the damage to your gun leveling up, but as far as nerfing elements, and multI shot and that such just seems unnecessary. Plus in their last stream they said it would be discontinued if they did take it out of the game, so most people would still have a copy

[Chaosyn]

There's lots of very long threads about it. But our current "Warframe" Is unbalanced and admittedly has issues that could be fixed, so I don't know why people are complaining to keep those problems. We're here to help make the game better, so why don't we? Who cares if the changes may have to be big.

Strange....I came to PLAY the game,not WORK on it.

 

And I care if the changes are big. Why? Because 1)You might end up with a very different game,and it might not be fun to play. 2)You're essentially asking for a (roughly) 80% rewrite of the entire game....that means it is a really BAD idea for any content to be released in the time it would take to make such a big change....So no new content for how long? Weeks? Months? Years?  Big changes take time....time people might NOT want to spend waiting to see IF the game gets better....

[Samoth95]

if you look, i posted on the biggest flaw in his post. without that scaling, we will have 12 mercurys, and there will be virtually no difference between T1 and T4 missions.

You say that now. But how do you know this would be the case? They could easily rework it and keep the difficulty varied. They did it when they reworked levels in the first place.

[Azjhoolies]

Remove all those mods and there better be some really really good compensation b/c if not I be plenty upset. Also if they do this changes then what is going to happen is that ALL your weapons and frames you or I forma'd perfectly to match these will be screwed which they have done in the past already a few times and THAT was never compensated for EVER; all that time, creds, and wasted.

 

See here's the thing, I know this is still beta but problem is many us have spent money here and some are getting mighty tired of them changing stuff and expecting us to pay in either money or time...or both.

 

ie. my trinity was revamped 2+ times now and I have 2x lovely red, useless polarities on her now which DE didn't give two cents about. I am supposed to pay more money/time to fix it apparently.

Forma isn't supposed to mean "Better" It's supposed to make your frame/gun more suited to a specific pre-planned build. If the build or the mechanics around said build gets changed, well *shrug* that's the price you pay for chosing to heavily modify your gun/frame to a specific speciality.

Edited January 18, 2015 by Azjhoolies

[Husla]

You can't spell compensation without legendary core.

[rechot]

For some reason I feel like you guys failed to read the OP.

Oh I read it and im going to be completely honest. I HATE THE VERY IDEA OF REMOVING SERRATION. Why you ask it took me forever to max that mod me and my friends olayed togsther and worked our hardest to get that mod. These friends I dont even talk too anymore sadly. Also I feel like you for theet that free to play games are mostly about grinding for whatever you need. EXAMPLES league of legends has IP, smite has its own things forgot, neverwinter has gold. I FEEL THE THAT the people who want the removal of serration arnt doing it cause its "OP". I think they are doing it cause they dont want to work for it.

Edited January 18, 2015 by rechot

[swihart91]

This is all honestly because people want an addition mod slot not because it is unbalanced, if you run into any low lvl mission with one of your ideas of a lvled weapon it will still be strong to make the game challenging they are introducing new enemies and long t4s survivals or defenses are the only way to get a challenge as of right be

TL; DR don't believe the hype people just want mod slots and found a way to get de to give them one

[iuki.]

Forma isn't supposed to mean "Better" It's supposed to make your frame/gun more suited to a specific pre-planned build. If the build or the mechanics around said build gets changed, well *shrug* that's the price you pay for chosing to heavily modify your gun/frame to a specific speciality.

 

More like put forma on to actually fit mods in the first place. Any rate, if they remove these mods; most people will have to re-forma and relevel every thing. And then the end result will be the same darned thing, just replaced with different mods; it solves nothing and only thing it really does is drum up some cash for DE by forcing people to regear.

[Jahadaya]

Oh I read it and im going to be comoletly honest. I HATE THE VERY IDEA KF REMOVING SERRATION. Why you ask it took me forever to max that mod me and my friends olayed togsther and worked our hardest to get that mod. These friends I dont even talk too anymore sadly. Also I feel like you for theet that free to play games are mostly about grinding for whatever you need. EXAMPLES league of legends has IP, smite has its own things forgot, neverwinter has gold. I FEEL THE THAT the people who want the removal of serration arnt doing it cause its "OP". I think they are doing it cause they dont want to work for it.

What? Nobody wants it for either of those reasons. We want it gone because it wastes a slot and is "essential" for every build, essentially helping to kill build variety. It shouldn't be a "trophy" that you grinded to make your gun actually effective. What should be a "trophy" is skill. I have Serration maxed by the way, so no I'm not lazy. Just because you spent a lot if time maxing Serration doesn't mean this game should be held back.

[Azjhoolies]

More like put forma on to actually fit mods in the first place. Any rate, if they remove these mods; most people will have to re-forma and relevel every thing. And then the end result will be the same darned thing, just replaced with different mods; it solves nothing and only thing it really does is drum up some cash for DE by forcing people to regear.

You fit mods to make a gun stronger (and to follow builds which are effective, ergo make them stronger in that way.), how you chose to forma your weapon is up to you, and there is no guarantee that how you want to make your gun/frame will always be viable and always be effective. Nobody ever said it would. If the way you style a gun/frame stops working for whatever reason, you've gotta go with the times and roll with the punches. Nobody promised everything would work all of the time, after all. Besides, forma'ing thing is pathetically easy these days. You can put 3 forma on a gun/frame in just as many days, even less if you have a stockpile of forma built up. I forma'd my braton prime 3 times in half a day.

[ThePrimarchSystem]

We seriously need a Negative rep button for this thread. Please.  Just please, DE, give us the Down vote option.

[Kaisty]

A good tip for posting in any forum is to use a program like Word pad, note pad, or anything like that to type up your post and save a copy of it. Then just copy and past it into the box so it won't take so long the next time.

 

As for your post, I do admit the removing of the pure damage mods in favor of giving every weapons a pure damage buff that equals max damage mod at 30 is a nice idea. As for the elemental damage, it would probably not fly well if it takes a portion of the damage and converts it unless we remove all % chance of proc from the weapons. Nobody would like to have a weaker weapon with a chance of the elemental damage and effect occurring.

 

Of course it would be great if folks were compensated with the amount required for each mod to be at the level it is at. While some folks would hate it (especially if it means they need to forma the weapon again to change the slot), as long as their time and effort is repaid with then there shouldn't be too much outcry.

 

I will admit that the feeling of “I need to use [insert pure damage mod here] to make my weapon feel like it is doing something to the enemy” gets real tiresome. To have a majority of builds rely on those mods makes the grind feel longer and tedious.