Weapon Balancing/supra/snipers/shotguns

[JackBeloved]

I just finished watching Devstream #54, and Scott (I love you, Scott!) said that he felt like he was falling down a rabbit hole when he dives into the forums looking for input on what and how to balance weapons according to the community- meaning that there's not a clear consensus among the community as to what needs to be changed about which weapons, etc. I won't to try to speak for the massive, extremely diverse, and very widely-opinionated warframe-community-at-large, but what I will do is try to explain things as they seem to me and see how many of you think/feel along similar lines.

 

 

First of all, I think that the discussion of weapon balancing needs to happen along two fronts: weapon damage and weapon niche/mechanic. I'll explore these two ideas more fully below, but at the beginning I'd like to offer the idea that these two things are distinct, equally important, and both necessary for a truly balanced library of weapons.

 

 

Weapon Damage

I think that this aspect of weapons balancing is probably the easiest to talk about. It seems that there are some basic and self-evident 'rules' that most everyone will intuitively be looking for, even if they can't articulate it fully.

 

1) There ought to be low-, mid-, and high-damage weapons, and the cost and mastery-rank requirement ought to fit accordingly. There ought to be weapons that are quickly and easily available, but do less damage (and the starter weapons available for credits in the market seem to indicate that DE knows this); weapons that do more damage but require more time and resources to craft, and high-damage weapons that a player needs to really invest time (in the form of mastery) and a ton of resources in to acquire.

 

This is why so many people are begging for a supra buff- the cost and mastery requirement don't match the damage output. This is also why some people are so dissatisfied with having to use some weapons to craft other weapons- the perception is that if I have to give up a weapon and add in even more time, credits, and resources, then the new weapon should perform better than the old. In this sense, 'balanced' means that the output should mirror the input, and in some stand-out examples (supra), this is not true.

 

2) There ought to be access to all damage types for a given weapon type. There should be at least one Impact, Puncture, and Slash option for shotguns, snipers, bows, SMGs, pistols, rifles, etc. On an additional level, there ought to be at least one pure elemental damage weapon for each element type (and perhaps one primary, one secondary, and one melee for each?). I think that we're already well on our way toward this goal, and this point isn't as touchy as the first for most players.

 

3) The assessment of damage must take into consideration all contributing variables- accuracy, projectile speed, crit chance and bonus, reload speed, damage fall-off, etc. It would do little good to triple supra's damage numbers but leave it in its current state- constantly starving for ammo because you have to shoot 20 rounds to get 3 of them to hit something. No one complains that the soma's damage is so low- because its crit chance and bonus are what really matter.

 

So, when it comes to saying when something is or isn't balanced, the whole weapon must be assessed, not just the IPS numbers.

 

 

Weapon Niche

This is the harder of the two facets of what makes true weapon balance. Yes, damage needs to be balanced, but also, playstyles need to be balanced. Weapons ought to fill niches- although players can argue all day long about what those niches should be. Remember when Hek/Brakk was a sniper rifle? But it's a shotgun? This is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

 

There are a lot of ways to divide up niches. Long-, medium-, and short-range weapons: roughly, snipers, rifles, and shotguns, with the appropriate accuracy or fall-off to enforce these ranges. Or, you could divide by damage-per-shot: snipers, shotguns, and semi-automatic rifles and pistols do more damage per shot, but have lower fire rates, and automatic rifles, pistols, SMGs, and continuous-fire weapons do less damage per shot, but have higher fire-rates. Then, the discussion becomes one of ammo economy. Or, you could look at unique mechanics- the phage's tentacle focus, the quanta family, the penta, etc.

 

My goal here is not to say that one way of defining niches is better than another- it's simply to say that whatever DE decides the weapon niches should be in Warframe, weapons ought to stay reasonably within that general niche and not encroach (and sometimes outclass) the weapons in another niche. When exceptions are intentional ('cause hey, a super space-ninja sniping shotgun could be a thing), weapons with clear advantages need to be more costly and weapons with underwhelming mechanics need to be cheaper and easier to get (or just need to be made better).

 

To an extent, there's a good number of weapons that do seem to behave nicely- the ogris and opticor do massive damage at the cost of a charge time, most shotguns seem to be far more lethal up close, and high fire rate weapons mostly do less damage (or have crap accuracy) than lower fire rate weapons.

 

However, there are some weapons that are not playing nicely within the balanced confines of the niches DE seems to be going for. Whether its because they're old and haven't been updated, or due to a unique gameplay mechanic that didn't really provide anything new (mutalist quanta), or for whatever reason, things aren't balanced until these outliers are either brought back into their respective fold, or their cost is balanced relative to their performance across the established categories.

 

 

Final Thoughts

As I wrote this, a few ideas came to mind.

 

First, having options and making players choose it a good thing to pursue. I'm thinking of the amprex- should I mod for crit damage or for status? Both are viable. And of course, having such a flexible weapon ought to cost me a little more. Not every weapon needs to be like this, but having some around is a good thing.

 

Next, the recent attempts to fill out weapon families (boltor, bolto, and boltace, or soma, aksomati, and dual raza, etc.) could be a useful system for helping to make sure that damage type and niches are covered.

 

And last, the supra. It needs something, as has already been mentioned. Something more than just a damage and reload buff. It's a heavy machine gun, one of only a few in game. Why not carve out a clear niche for the heavies? Make them operate differently than just an automatic rifle with a little bit of spool? If you put magazine extension mods on a handful of rifles and SMGs, you've basically got the same thing without the spool.

 

What if the supra shot a stream of fairly accurate plasma bolts, but as the gun spooled up, the line of bolts widened and grew into a thick cylinder (or cone) of rounds? It starts at the beginning of the magazine with a thin line, like any rifle, but ends with a huge beam of rounds like Iron Man's ultimate combo attack in Marvel vs Capcom?