Proposed Multishot Change Mentioned In Devstream 59 [Megathread]

[Datarunner5]

It might just be me, but I see the multishot nerf being tied closely with the starchart overhaul. If it lives up to its promise of reducing void grind(and grind in general), then really long endless missions would't be as important, and multishot not mandatory.

[P0TAT0CANN0N]

Buff all clip sizes by 50%? There's a simple and lazy fix. Wouldn't help, but it's a fix.

Helpful buffs are preferred. 

[(PSN)speedwagonjotaro]

Yeah, if I'm not happy with the rebalance associated with the proposed multishot change, I'll probably be taking a Warframe break for quite a while as well. I've put far too many forma and re-leveling time into underpowered weapons to try and make them useful, to keep having fun with the game if my fun but underpowered weapons' reload/damage gets nerfed any further.

[JuanDeages]

My preferred analogy of Warframe's current balance is that it's a teetering Jenga tower with most of the blocks missing, except all the blocks are made out of high explosive. The tower is shaky already, and you don't know if pulling out any one block will cause the entire edifice to come crashing down, blowing you, your friends, and everyone else up.

 

The only way to rebalance the game is to adjust everything-damage mods (and I mean all the +damage/+multishot mods), enemy health and damage scaling, enemy star map levels, possibly mission rewards, and fix all of it at once. Otherwise, things get more than a little messed up.

 

Changes to single components are a thing you do when the systems, overall, work and you're dealing with a peripheral system. When the system, in total, is very shaky, changes to single components are likely to completely break the system, especially if you're dealing with anything that's "mandatory" or "important" in the system. The example I'd use for what the multishot nerf seems like, to me, is Exalted Second Edition.

 

If anyone is familiar with Exalted Second Edition's combat system, they'll know what I mean. If they aren't, I'll explain briefly. In Exalted Second Edition, because of the massive lethality of attacks (damage scaled far better than health and armor), you would get instantly killed if an attack hit you. Furthermore, attack accuracy scaled better than defenses like dodging and blocking, so you'd likely get hit if you were relying on those. Fortunately, characters were given the power to pay magical energy ("motes") to perfectly block or dodge an attack, ignoring it. Because of this setup, all fights devolved to both sides whaling on each other with perfectly normal attacks and saving all their magical energy to defend against enemy attacks, repeat until one side or the other ran out of magic juice and died. This is bad-it made perfect defenses necessary and it made combat and character building boring.

 

To fix this problem, the developers had to basically redo every single weapon's damage, recost every single armor, modify almost every power that increased attack damage, introduced several new concepts to allow people to use magical energy for offense without weakening their defenses (because otherwise they would be able to pay for fewer invocations of their perfect defenses) and only then could they nerf perfect defenses. This, I might note, didn't actually fix every issue-it was just a patch job that rendered the game system somewhat playable without investing in a perfect defense.

 

This is the kind of herculean effort eliminating 'mandatory mods' in a way that doesn't lead to the game balance breaking one way or the other will need to go through-it'll require basically an entire overhaul of hundreds of weapons, of enemy leveling, of enemy damage and scaling, possibly even of mission rewards. Now, the game will be better for the effort, but that assumes DE is actually going in and adjusting all of this together, then putting it out together. Otherwise, the result will probably be worse than the current system.

 

I have no problems with making multishot non-mandatory and thus weaker in general. I have a problem with the fact that DE thinks that multishot's mandatory nature is a problem in and of itself, rather than a symptom of deeper issues.

 

If this does happen, we may well need a public beta environment to test this massive patch. A beta within a beta if you will. They can't just rip the rug out from under our feet, toss us a sheet, and tell us to have a nice day. If this is really what their endgame for, well, fixing endgame, is going to be, it must be thoroughly tested in a separate environment by the player base at large. They NEED veteran feedback. The guys that play day in, and day out, and crunch numbers, are only going to help them figure this out. They need data from players to see if the game is sustainable with all the changes needed to overhaul the system. If the game can't be sustained, we lose everything, which I don't think any of us want.

 

My two cents.

Edited September 7, 2015 by JuanDeages

[Naqel]

Why is Multishot Necessary?

 

It isn't.

Any reasons you offer are fallacies based on the false idea that enemy scaling cannot be altered to compensate for a weaker/removed multishot.

 

 

Why is the Proposed Multishot Nerf Actively Counterproductive? How Would You Fix It?

 

Multishot nerf makes it functionally identical to a firing rate mod, which means that it might as well not exist as a mechanic...

Which is true, to an extent.

 

The core problem with multishot is that DE's approach to balance, and the implementation of the mod system has all the finesse of a sledgehammer(none). Multishot is one of many cases of a cool mechanic being wasted on poor implementation.

 

The visual/visceral component of multishot is absolutely wasted on weapons that have high accuracy, or firing rate, because it gets negated/drowned by their precision/volume of fire.

Imagine for a second a world where multishot is only available to weapons that fire multiple projectiles, and largely replaces the damage increase mods for those weapons.

Shotguns and the like immediately get their own statistical and mechanical niche(bullet-walling the enemy with countless projectiles, each with individual crit and status chance), and have an unique visual identifier of their growing power.

 

In short, to fix multishot, the entire implementation of the mod system would have to be fixed.

[KnightCole]

Or, OP.

 

Here's a novel idea.

 

Just don't use multishot if you don't think it's worth the ammo cost.  Or find a way to slip an ammo mutation into your build.

 

Most weapons overkill even high-scaled endgame content.  By the time you reach a content point where enemies take longer than a few seconds of sustained fire is about the time you leave anyway.

 

You're not meant to do survival for 120 minutes, or go 60 rounds of Defense.

THen why even allow it?  The thing should end after like 30 waves at most really....its not like playing for more then 20 minutes nets a different loot table..really it should just end at 20m....

 

 

 

But the OP, I do agree with the scaling, and i t would be neat if we did get a degree of increases on our weapons through lvling.  Or, like another person made a thread on, adding forma upgrades the weapon. 

 

I would make it a max of 8, just like forma, so maybe each forma, in addition to polarity, allows you to increase 1 weapon stat, from any on the list, by maybe 10%.  Damage increases would be all physical damage types by 10%, so Impact, slash and puncture.  Then, each lvl you gain in the weapon, could increase all stats by 2%.  This lvl increase being only the first time around, any additional increases being done by forma.  By lvl 30, all stats on your given weapon increased by 60% just by lvling it. 

 

Would be fun to try. 

[Darthmufin]

The problem isn't that we do too much damage or that there are too many enemies-it's that weapons can scale in a way that's beyond linear (multishot multiplies damage, serration/etc multiply damage, elemental mods multiply damage, and all of these stack multiplicatively) and enemies scale in a >linear fashion, while Warframe durability and powers scale linearly.

 

DE needs to figure out a scaling regime and stick to it. If enemies scale to the square of their level, so should weapons and warframes. If enemies scale linearly, so should weapons and enemies. Borderlands 1 did linear scaling, Borderlands 2 did geometric scaling, and both of them were (relatively) balanced (outside of their highest difficulty mode which broke things)-it's just that Warframe has linearly scaling survivability, geometrically scaling enemy firepower and toughness, and pseudo-geometrical weapon scaling with a hard ceiling.

 

This combines to make all progression a mess.

i don't want end game content to feel exactly like low level content, which is EXACTLY what "scaling" would do in terms of player scaling. it's what makes it possible to go to low level content when you want to have more fun (as you don't die in one shot) and go to harder content if you want a challenge. 

[MJ12]

It isn't.

Any reasons you offer are fallacies based on the false idea that enemy scaling cannot be altered to compensate for a weaker/removed multishot.

 

In short, to fix multishot, the entire implementation of the mod system would have to be fixed.

 

My point is that to fix multishot, scaling must be fixed, not "multishot will always be necessary now and forever." In the current iteration of the game, multishot is a 'necessary mod' because of how weapons scale compared to enemies.

 

 

i don't want end game content to feel exactly like low level content, which is EXACTLY what "scaling" would do in terms of player scaling. it's what makes it possible to go to low level content when you want to have more fun (as you don't die in one shot) and go to harder content if you want a challenge. 

 

How does this work? Assume DE decides that a level 31 enemy will have 7 times the health and damage of a level 1 enemy. Assume weapons are scaled and Warframes are scaled so that a modded lv30 weapon with the proper mods will kill lv31 enemies as fast as a lv1 weapon will kill lv1 enemies. You can still go back to low level content to murder everyone while being untouchable with your unstoppable death stick, or go to higher level content than lv31 and get challenged.

 

Your assumption is that because the same rough power curve is used for players and enemies that high level content will feel exactly like low level content, which is... a shaky assumption, simply because high level content, at the very least, will have significantly more enemy variety, will have things like Eximus spawns, and there can be other tools that make endgame content more difficult without actually changing the time to kill numbers.

 

For example, something as simple as giving enemies the ability to target through walls and punchthrough would greatly increase difficulty because you could no longer rely on terrain to protect you from enemy fire.

[AdunSaveMe]

The thing is that there is no mention be DE of doubling of ammo from pick up, since increasing amount of ammo weapon can hold wont change anything if they dont do that.

I didn't say anything about doubling ammo. But on the devstream there was mention of rebalancing weapons to accomodate the multishot change. Practically right after he mentioned the nerf, if I remember correctly.

[Ithlien]

If they change multishot, it'll work very differently.

 

For automatic weapons multishot will work like a ultra fast fire rate mod. So, the development team said: "weapons with high ammo consumption will have a buff". For example, Amprex (if you dare continue using multishot, of course).

It'll be a good mod for semi-automatic weapons, like Latron, Magnus, etc.

 

Just think about it: multishot "is bugged", should work like it did in Dark Sector. I remember when I was using the revolver with multishot. God, only 33 bullets and doing a lot of damage, one shotting everything.

[Judgebanks]

In fact, I'd hate to tell you this... But your entire argument here is built upon nothing but fallacies, chiefly of which is an abusive ad hominem. It is literally invalid by definition in the manner in which you have presented it. 

And yours not only fallacy but also faith which I find even more disturbing since you're a first year player. You should know better by now. Then again the people who cry fallacy this and fallacy that have no hope of dissuasion they're already of a zealous pre-set mind, incapable of reason or rationality.

 

Don't mind me though, either way I'm singing dixie till dawn.

[Lancars]

I got to the dev stream finally. Wow thats a terrible nerf.

[(PSN)aiptekfanboy]

I got to the dev stream finally. Wow thats a terrible nerf.

i saw it too and it dissapointed me in the direction the game seems to be going.

[MopUpCrewman]

The real reason why people shouldn't complain:

DE won't really care and just continue on with the change.

[Fifield]

Furthermore, weapon damage mods would have to be adjusted heavily. Call of Duty has demonstrated that if you're competing with utility mods, something like a +30-40% increase in total damage is about what you can expect to trade off against something like +100% reload speed (i.e. a utility mod).  Assuming total damage is increased additively, the utility mods become more tempting as each damage mod creates a lower proportional decrease in time to kill.

 

So for Serration to be non-mandatory, it should be a straight +35% damage buff, ie literal halving of damage. Likewise and assuming no ammo nerf, multishot mods should be 35% multishot.  Heavy Caliber should go up to something like 45% considering accuracy drop.

 

Interestingly, the +30% number is the max on a lot of Warframe mods -- though mostly ones that aren't used.

 

I personally don't give a damn if mods are mandatory.  The less time playing ModFrame the better.

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/523934-modframe-and-why-ordinary-nerfs-to-mandatory-mods-wont-increase-mod-variety/

 

So, let's talk rifles. A typical endgame rifle will probably have Serration (+165%), Multishot (+90%), and 2 elemental mods (+180%). We'll call those the 'mandatory' mods. So that rifle is dealing 2.65 * 1.9 * 2.8 = 14.1 times base damage.

 

Elemental mods don't increase total damage, only base damage -- so only the first does +90%.  On the other hand, if you're matching damage type to your enemy, both do more like +200% combined. You're forgetting Heavy Caliber which is another 165%.

 

What this is saying is that level progression should account for roughly a 900% increase in base damage, with each "required" mod accounting for maybe a 100% increase in base damage.

 

How do you get from 14.1 to 900%?

 

My Soma Prime goes up 9000% in damage.  My Boltor Prime goes up 2600% in damage.  Neither are particularly optimised.

 

This is a very interesting figure to come out to because it means +30% damage a level, which is ridiculous and clearly unworkable. This means that enemy scaling will probably have to be actually fixed no matter what you do.

 

What's ridiculous about it?  The only real problem with it is that guns are useless when you first get them, which makes people want to go to Draco.

 

As I understand it, enemy health scales to the square of their level.

 

No but it is geometric, being quite flat up to level 60ish, going proportional at 75 and scaling faster than level afterwards.

 

However, if you don't have 4x Corrosive Projection, effective health on Grineer goes crazy around level 35.  This is why you should always have 4x CP when doing endless missions vs Grineer or Corrupted.

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

[(PSN)IIIDevoidIII]

Thread cleaned of derailing replies.

[low1991]

The real reason why people shouldn't complain:

DE won't really care and just continue on with the change.

^a situation to support this, Survival Balance (recent): PLS drop from 6 to 4-ish.

[Culaio]

However, if you don't have 4x Corrosive Projection, effective health on Grineer goes crazy around level 35.  This is why you should always have 4x CP when doing endless missions vs Grineer or Corrupted.

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

 

 

I Think that this one of problems of current system, game shouldnt be balanced around full team with corrosive projections, since it ignores people who play with random teams or people forced to play solo in endless missions because of bad internet connection(I am person with bad internet connection like that that).

 

There are people people defending multishot nerf saying that we can already easily go beyond 60min in endless missions but thats ONLY true if you have full team with corrosive projection or VERY specific frame(frames that can do that can be counted on one hand and they need very specific build to be able to do that) when playing solo game gets pretty hard after 30 min and very hard after 35 minute(since you only have one corrosive projection aura), at this point killing bombard takes 1/3 ammo from your clip even if you use boltor prime with best build and bombard is affected by Molecular Prime.

Actually after 35 minute weapons become so bad dealing damage to enemies that its better for me to use Antimatter Drop and just shot it until it glows and just let it explode its MUCH better at dealing damage then strongest weapon in game.

Edited September 7, 2015 by Culaio

[ToastyCosty]

+9001 op, i would be happy if they fix enemy scaling, at that point i wouldn't mind the multishot nerf, since we could finally go through end-game without having to deal with invincible bullet-sponges

[Fifield]

+9001 op, i would be happy if they fix enemy scaling, at that point i wouldn't mind the multishot nerf, since we could finally go through end-game without having to deal with invincible bullet-sponges

 

What exactly is this endgame you're talking about?  It can't be raids.  Is it the one where you're forced out of endless missions because they become too difficult?  Because it doesn't matter in the slightest if that happens at 20 mins, 40 mins, 60 mins, except you might have to buy a couple more keys (they're about 2pl atm) and you won't be so bored in the first 20 mins.

 

@Culaio -- yes, Corrosive Projection should be nerfed, with very similar effects incidentally. And that would create the same degree of whining.

 

Whilst I'm sympathetic to solo players and have suggested many buffs to the solo game, Warfrane cannot be balanced around it.

Edited September 7, 2015 by Fifield

[Culaio]

What exactly is this endgame you're talking about?  It can't be raids.  Is it the one where you're forced out of endless missions because they become too difficult?  Because it doesn't matter in the slightest if that happens at 20 mins, 40 mins, 60 mins, except you might have to buy a couple more keys (they're about 2pl atm) and you won't be so bored in the first 20 mins.

 

@Culaio -- yes, Corrosive Projection should be nerfed, with very similar effects incidentally. And that would create the same degree of whining.

 

Whilst I'm sympathetic to solo players and have suggested many buffs to the solo game, Warfrane cannot be balanced around it.

 

The thing is corrosive project aura is mandatory for endless missions, every other aura is completly useless

Edited September 7, 2015 by Culaio

[(PSN)CH13F_CR0SSB0W]

I'm actually kinda glad they're making all these bullS#&$ changes recently. Nerf mag and hydroid so we can't farm efficiently...F*** with the resource drop tables...nerf multishot and render 100% of the forma placement and builds I have basically ineffective. Please keep it up DE. It's making it easier to not spend money on your game and will make it easier to stop playing it when better games come out. Thank you for making my transition away from this game more smooth.

[ToastyCosty]

 

What exactly is this endgame you're talking about?

i'm not talking about raids, i consider end-game any t4 past 35 minutes-waves, sorry for not getting very clear on that definition.

 

 

Because it doesn't matter in the slightest if that happens at 20 mins, 40 mins, 60 mins, except you might have to buy a couple more keys (they're about 2pl atm) and you won't be so bored in the first 20 mins.

 

i think you are missing the point of the whole idea behind this thread, the thing is "seasoned" wf players wants to have a challenge, i mean everyone can just pop another key after the first rotation C and repeat the process, but what i like of past 30 minutes t4 is that at this precise time, there is what we could call a sweet spot.

 

let me clarify: in that five minutes, from 30 to 35, the enemy scaling system is at the point at we players with maxxed gear can have a FAIR challenge

 

look at this 

 

as you can see, armored enemies after the "sweet spot" time is over, starts getting INSANELY tanky, thus, 5 more minutes from that mark the enemy scaling systems BREAKS and you start dealing no damage, THAT'S WHY people are forced to use 4 CP, to make the sweet spot extend for a longer amount of time

that's what we want, not easier enemies, but a fair progression that does not goes from "easy peasy lemon squeezy" to "prepare your anus" in literally 240 seconds


hope i made my point clear

Edited September 7, 2015 by ToastyCosty

[Etsoree]

According to one of my friends, multishot is "not overpowered and there's nothing wrong with it".

 

Yeah. Right.

 

Though an easy way to get around any gun damage nerf is Banshee.

[gizol333]

According to the devstream they want to make multishot cost extra ammo.

 

 

Discuss.

 

 

RIP anything that is not ammo efficient.

 

 

I think my Tigris has good enough ammo consumption.

Poor Tigris ...

 

and as for Synoid Gammacor..... i think we will be able to break a record in losing ammo....

 

Pure DPS builds are a bandaid fix to issues resulting from infinite scaling.

 

DE is treating symptoms, not causes, which is sad.

It is almost their trademark.

 

We need a mass gravestone.

I'll start the list.

*R.I.P*

Dual Cestra

Snipers

Castanas

Synoid Gammacor

Shotguns

Dex Furis

Autos especially auto secondaries.

Literally every weapon and weapon type that I love...

 

I'm very sad right now....