Powercreep, Powercreep, Does Exactly What Powercreep Does!

[Aeiroth]

Now that I've got your attention, how about you take a seat, and have a nice little chat with me about DAMAGE, ARMOR/DEFENSE AND SCALING in Warframe, and how simplifying it could benefit the game more than hurting it.

 

Numbers given are made by using the calculations given by the Warframe Wiki and myself. They are not dead accurate numbers, but rough numbers.

 

I have tried to keep this relatively short so that it won't be too difficult actually read some of it. If you still don't give a rats arse about me and truely want to hurt my poor feelings, there is a TL;DR down below.

 

 

 

Let us start with some pretty numbers shall we?

 

There are a lot of mods in Warframe that increases the damage we deal to mobs, and when all added together, we achieve immense numbers with some reaching the millions if the circumstances are just right. There are actually 85 mods that purely increases our damage in-game, excluding multishot and melee channeling mods,

 

Rifles and Shotguns have 43 mods that increase damage. Secondaries have 21 mods that increase damage and Melee has 21 mods that increases damage.

 

That is a huge amount of mods that outright increases damage with the most popular ones being that mods that increases damage by the most out of the bunch. For example, for Rifle Primaries these mods are specifically, Serration, Heavy Caliber, Hellfire, Cryo Rounds, Stormbringer, Infected Clip, Thermite Rounds, Rime Rounds, High Voltage and Malignant Force.

 

We can't even use all of these mods at once, let alone 85 of them! We have already had people calculate the sheer amount of damage in specifics, but let's give a quick rough rundown to jog your memory.

 

A weapon at base damage, becomes 2.65x stronger with a maxed Serration alone. This becomes roughly over 4x with Heavy Caliber. Now add the Elemental mods which adds 90% more, based on the roughly over 4x damage which gives you roughly 8x damage. Now add another elemental to combine them and you get roughly 12x damage. and you can add even more too this and after all that comes critical damage and after that comes resistances. Simply put, we've suddenly got a f***ton of damage.

 

Now you might be thinking "And so what? In other games you can becomes HUNDREDS of times stronger!" and you do have a point, BUT, yes there are big BUTTS here, in those games you also grow more RESILIENT. In other words, your DEFENSE also goes up.

 

So let's make this really simple.

 

"Do we get 12x (And beyond!) more resilient?!" No. Not even close.

 

Our dear Ol' Frosty for example becomes roughly 3x more resilient when fully ranked from 0 to 30 excluding armor. Add in maxed shield and health and you get 7.4x more resilient. So the players defense does NOT keep up with the players offensive capabilities.

 

 

 

All of this is a Warframe and their weapons at Rank 30/Level 30. So why don't we try and compare this to a level 30 enemy? Sounds fair, right?

 

From Level 1 to Level 30 an enemy gets roughly 12x more health, 8x more shields, 3x more armor and 4x more damage when applicable. Which means they are much better off than a Warframe when it comes to resilience and can do damage comparatively higher than a Warframes increase. Except this is when faced against an Unmodded Warframe and weapon. When we add mods to a Warframe and weapons we see the problem more clearly.

 

A Level 30 Mob against a Level 30 Modded Warframe.

4x More Damage - 12x (AND BEYOND!) More Damage.

7.6x More Resilient - 7.4x More Resilient.

 

I got the 7.6x for a Mobs resilience by calculating the average from all 3 stats. We see that a Warframe is evenly matched Defensively, but Mobs are completely crushed by the Damage a Warframe has, and 12x damage is with only 4 Mods.

 

This is why SCALING is completely out of hand for mobs. [DE] Have themselves states that Level 70-80 Mobs are "End-Game". Which means that an enemy with 80x Health, 40x Shields, 10x Armor and 14x Damage is a fair, but challenging comparison.

 

F***ing WHAT?!

 

When a completely normal enemy, more than 10x more resilient than the strongest Warframe in rough numbers in a game with HORDES of enemies, HEAVY enemies, SPECIAL units and HEAVY SPECIAL units, you've gone wrong somewhere.

 

Which in turn comes full circle... They are this powerful because we have so god forbid many damage mods.

 

TL;DR kinda...

 

We have insane damage, which forces the game to scale to ridiculous heights, which in turn makes Warframes turn into fragile snowflakes, which in turn forces us to up our damage to kill before we are equally instantly killed.

 

The main reason simply being that we have so many mods that multiply our damage outright, rather than given slight advantages like they should've. They become "Must have" due to immense enemy scaling, which caused every single mod that doesn't outright increase damage to become redundant and useless.

 

Any thoughts and critiques are welcome. I am by no means a specialist, but even I find this to be a problem that renders a lot of [DE]'s work pointless with both mods and weapons becoming "Fodder" for the crowd.

 

Suggestions? (Since people seem to want these somewhere in a post when you complain)

 

Greatly reduce the effectiveness of elemental mods so that they become "Unit Specific" in order to take down annoying enemies better rather than simply "More damage" since as of right now, all weapons in-game are Elemental weapons. They do mostly elemental damage with these mods, thus they are elemental weapons.

 

More ranks/stages for the player character? Since it is the Warframes that fall behind and not the weapons, one possibility is to bring the Warframes up to par by giving them a way to increase their base stats?

[-Krux-]

I have no idea what you just said mainly because I barely read what you wrote but I think you made a point somewhere about enemy units being able to 1-shot us.

If you said nothing of the sort, I'm going to pretend you did and agree with you.

 

Yeah, I hate that but it does only happen at extremely high levels. It would be nice if armor actually meant something for warframes. Maybe using % dmg reduction across the board on all frames instead of a light damage resistance to most attacks (where there are still factors in damage types that can even ignore that armor)

I think DE spends too much though on making us do more damage than giving us more survivability. We need resistances, not damage.. we can do damage on our own (assuming you don't change that while giving us resistances)

[Doforcash]

ahh, Reading, my arch-nemesis.

[Aeiroth]

I have no idea what you just said mainly because I barely read what you wrote but I think you made a point somewhere about enemy units being able to 1-shot us.

If you said nothing of the sort, I'm going to pretend you did and agree with you.

 

ahh, Reading, my arch-nemesis.

 

Ouch... My Feels...

[-Krux-]

Ouch... My Feels...

Sorry. I upvoted your thread though.

[Nako-Chan]

 

Read. Upvoted. You see this is an issue the community is widely aware of. The mod system is a bloated mess and likely several mods will need to be axe'd entirely. Not to mention the mod system only offers an illusion of choice since straight up maximizing dps is the only way to go to keep up with the mobs. Progression as a whole needs a strong rework.

 

As for suggestions? Honestly I think DE just needs to hire this guy: https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/382328-progression-20-a-complete-rework-of-the-presentation-of-warframe-update-127/

 

He's got awesome vision. His suggestion of how to entirely rework Warframe's progression has tons of depth and a lot better than anything I can come up with.

Edited August 31, 2015 by Nako-Chan

[FoxyKabam]

we and (maybe) DE knows that this is a problem

how the hell do we go about fixing it without having the player base torch DE headquarters?

 

I pretty sure the whole mod system hole DE dug themselves into is too deep to get back out of

how to go about fixing it what we'd need to figure out

[AEP8FlyBoy]

The way you say of Warframe's increasing their base stats is a to-be function of the Focus System. (I think)

 

I do agree with you after reading your quite long and educational post that Warframe's Defensive abilities are not quite on par with the amount of Offensive capabilites we have, including our weapons.

 

It would be nice to see a progressive scaling for base stats in certain situations for those long haul missions, and I'm hoping the upcoming Focus system will address some of those concerns.

 

But you are right, at level 70-80+, enemies are way too strong for their own good, and not necessarily defensive-stat wise.

They deal a crap ton of damage only because our base 1,000 - 8,000 (or more for highly armored frames combined with shields) HP is not enough to take the insane amounts of damage enemies deal at that level.

 

I do think some slight changes are in order, mainly on our defensive side. I think that the enemy scaling and their damage output in numbers would be bearable and fairly similar to lower levels if our Warframe's base stats scaled along with them... But then again, what would be the fun in that? I like knowing that a few shots from a Bombard will completely cream you, and I use that knowledge and the fact that we can parkour to turn the tide in battle. :)

 

That's another thing though, Warframes can parkour like beasts. You don't see Napalms or Heavy Gunners jumping all over the place like that. (Thank God that they don't... Could you imagine?)

 

That would be a true... nightmare mission.

LOL! :D

Edited August 31, 2015 by AEP8FlyBoy

[MechaTails]

TL;DR kinda...

 

We have insane damage, which forces the game to scale to ridiculous heights

 

I don't know about that. Seems to me more like the enemies have infinite scaling, which is something you can't balance weapon damage for. There has to be some arbitrary enemy level the devs set for weapons to stop being effective at.

 

On its own, most of my gear craps out at around Level 50 enemies, some of it can go farther. So, I say the weapon balance point is around LV50 enemies. However, with Banshee's Sonar I can make any weapon last.

 

What it is, yo.

[AEP8FlyBoy]

Have you ever thought that the reason enemies continue to scale far into endless missions is that they expect you to be prepared and have a slew of Warframes and Damage combinations that will make those level 200 enemies feel like level 50s?

 

Not that most people would go that far, when the reward system is the same regardless of difficulty.

 

Why spend an hour in a T3 Survival for Ash Systems, when you can run to 20 minutes and recycle keys over and over again.

 

I normally go to 40 minutes in survivals, because I have a limited amount of time to game. It isn't because I can't go to an hour or more, I just don't simply have the time to deal with harder enemies with a fixed reward system and a limited schedule.

Edited August 31, 2015 by AEP8FlyBoy

[APBladeX]

I skimmed through it, but I agree wholeheartedly.

[Tyrian3k]

Just to give a rough example of how much difference there can be between an unmodded and a modded weapon with the example of a crit weapon: Soma Prime.

 

Unmodded burst DPS: 288

Modded burst DPS: 27835

 

Almost 100 times the damage output unmodded vs. modded. Nice one, right?

[Lorthos_Mornin]

I don't know about that. Seems to me more like the enemies have infinite scaling, which is something you can't balance weapon damage for. There has to be some arbitrary enemy level the devs set for weapons to stop being effective at.

 

On its own, most of my gear craps out at around Level 50 enemies, some of it can go farther. So, I say the weapon balance point is around LV50 enemies. However, with Banshee's Sonar I can make any weapon last.

 

What it is, yo.

 

 

Have you ever thought that the reason enemies continue to scale far into endless missions is that they expect you to be prepared and have a slew of Warframes and Damage combinations that will make those level 200 enemies feel like level 50s?

 

Not that most people would go that far, when the reward system is the same regardless of difficulty.

 

Why spend an hour in a T3 Survival for Ash Systems, when you can run to 20 minutes and recycle keys over and over again.

 

I normally go to 40 minutes in survivals, because I have a limited amount of time to game. It isn't because I can't go to an hour or more, I just don't simply have the time to deal with harder enemies with a fixed reward system and a limited schedule.

 

These guys get it.  Yes, we do crap tons of damage.  Yes high-level (>=~50) enemies have significantly more resilience than we do.  However, no one ever need face enemies that high to get all the rewards in the game (barring Trials which I will address later in this post).  The enemy's best defense is defense, a Tenno's is offence, and when that stops working, cc.  I don't see how "simplifying the system" helps anything when people have already dumped hundreds of hours into maxing those mods.  Ultimately, the right team makes enemy level irrelevant, which brings me to Trials, the ultimate proof that Tenno can make enemy level irrelevant.

 

And you know what?  Some people like looking at really big numbers.

[0zryel]

 

Read. Upvoted. You see this is an issue the community is widely aware of. The mod system is a bloated mess and likely several mods will need to be axe'd entirely. Not to mention the mod system only offers an illusion of choice since straight up maximizing dps is the only way to go to keep up with the mobs. Progression as a whole needs a strong rework.

 

As for suggestions? Honestly I think DE just needs to hire this guy: https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/382328-progression-20-a-complete-rework-of-the-presentation-of-warframe-update-127/

 

He's got awesome vision. His suggestion of how to entirely rework Warframe's progression has tons of depth and a lot better than anything I can come up with.

Ouch, DE is going to feel that! XD

 

I think FoxyKabam what said is true, as it stand the current mod system affect so much of the game that if they try to fix it they might create a bigger problem just like a trying to fix a broken sticky web, it will do more harm than good if DE is not careful. 

Edited September 1, 2015 by 0zryel

[Hammahness808]

I read your full post, TL;DR and all and I'm too lazy to check those numbers but assuming they are, it does bring light to the scaling issue. I think if DE doesn't want to change the mods around and upset people (getting rid of serration and the like, upsetting those who paid full plat for a maxed rank...) then they'll have to expand everything. More mod space, more Frame durability, and due to the higher mod space ... increased enemy base durability.

 

These guys get it.  Yes, we do crap tons of damage.  Yes high-level (>=~50) enemies have significantly more resilience than we do.  However, no one ever need face enemies that high to get all the rewards in the game (barring Trials which I will address later in this post).  The enemy's best defense is defense, a Tenno's is offence, and when that stops working, cc.  I don't see how "simplifying the system" helps anything when people have already dumped hundreds of hours into maxing those mods.  Ultimately, the right team makes enemy level irrelevant, which brings me to Trials, the ultimate proof that Tenno can make enemy level irrelevant.

 

And you know what?  Some people like looking at really big numbers.

Right, even so, we've had a full teams of just 1 frame clear the trials (like a full team of Ash just recently) Doesn't even need to be a selected and carefully selected group. Though, it becomes very trivial when it is done.

Edited September 1, 2015 by TGKazein

[4G3NT_0R4NG3]

 

 

I've thought very long and very hard about Warframe's endgame, and I came to this exact conclusion. We have the exact same thought process.

[Sakatchi]

This sounds like a 'chicken or the egg' argument.

 

But its not really that difficult. Have you seen the enemy leveling curve. The damn thing just goes straight up after a certain point. There's no curve anymore, its just a wall.

 

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Enemy_Level_Scaling

 

This here is the problem, considering how enemies level can go into the thousands, and a normal tenno can barely take level 50s.

 

Then because of these damage mods, the devs are afraid to buff anything. despite this curve.

So what if, you were to integrate the damage mods back into the gun like they used to be, brain storm up some mods that alter the guns functionality (like say being able to swap what type of projectile it fires, making a grakatta a makeshift dera or something), and tone the level curve to something more sane.

 

You could very well start introducing level 1000 enemies that have the current level 100's stats, and players would feel more comfortable with them being that god damn strong.

 

Of course with the gun absorbing the damage mods, this will make a ton of weapon mods redundant, and open up space for new mods, which is both a good and bad thing. Good cause its fresh, and gives you a point to getting your weapon to 30, besides moar mod capacity. Bad because it would take a good deal of effort to replace the odd couple dozen damage that were removed.

[Liminal]

I completely agree. I've always said broken scaling is the bane of WF :/

[Volinus7]

This sounds like a 'chicken or the egg' argument.

But its not really that difficult. Have you seen the enemy leveling curve. The damn thing just goes straight up after a certain point. There's no curve anymore, its just a wall.

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Enemy_Level_Scaling

 

Isn't it a vertical parabolic function? It is not a regressive logarithmic function or horizontal parabolic function right?

There's no vertical limit in a vertical parabolic function.

Edited September 1, 2015 by Volinus7

[Volume]

Serration and such mods should be innate or removed.

Multishot should be removed, or changed to splitting the damage on weapons that actually have different mechanics with multishot (rocket launchers, for example), perhaps consuming the extra shot from your ammo supply, or the second shot created being weaker, or something.

All elemental mods should just change a percentage of your damage into that element, for "Damage 2.0" purposes.

Status effects should be changed to not do more damage, but have other utility-based impact, so modding status isn't for a DPS increase, but for utility.

 

Heavy Caliber needs to be tweaked so it's more like the Pistol version (more of a "balanced" drawback), and it needs to affect weapons in a significant enough way to make it not a no-brainer (Ignis / Quanta, for example)

 

 

 

I could go on, but that's the foundation of the start of the solutions to damage scaling and a damage ceiling, a concept that has been foreign to this game since before day 1, but is even more critical now with all the "endless" modes we have.

 

To clarify, all mods should be similar to the PvP mods. a + in one stat, a - in another, or a true conversion, instead of a boost.

 

Balanced. Choice. Optional.

Edited September 1, 2015 by Volume

[akira_him]

They need to redo both enemy scaling and mod at the same time I guess

[Fifield]

What exactly is the problem with scaling?  Game too hard vs level 120 enemies?  It's supposed to be.

 

We have insane damage, which forces the game to scale to ridiculous heights, which in turn makes Warframes turn into fragile snowflakes, which in turn forces us to up our damage to kill before we are equally instantly killed.

 

How exactly does being fragile snowflakes force DE to boost our damage?  Are you sure it isn't DE introducing overpowered stuff like Soma Prime and Boltor Prime, asking the community if they should nerf them and the community saying no?

 

Do you realise that if we weren't one-shot, we'd never actually die with a half-decent Trinity on our team?

 

It's not just the instant global heal/shield restore.  What's Warframe's metagame?  Go watch any Recruitment channel for as long as you want and check how many mission hosts call for 4 forma'd Soma Primes.

No, they ask for Frost for his globe, Loki for his disarm, Vauban for his ability to mass stun enemies for 30s or block the entrace to your camping spot, or Trinity for her heals but mostly EV so people can play CC-frame instead of Warframe.

 

Nobody would ever have seen a level 120 enemy if it wasn't for such abilities.