Proposed Multishot Change Mentioned In Devstream 59 [Megathread]

[CrazyCatLad]

high rate of fire weapons are getting hit the hardest with the change will make most useless :P and i think kohm will get the worst of it cause of the already increased ammo consumption.

 

My poor, beloved Kohm. Through thick and thin and thick and thin again, it's had my back. Unless if its ammo is upped, looks like I'll have mod points opening up.

[Sebastianx]

For now yes, until Mods 3.0 comes out with reballancing of all mods and enemy HP + scaling, then it REALLY isn't worth the backlash, it's too much of an isolated change right now, that they can live without...without annoying the whole community.

[Nako-Chan]

 

 

 

The ostensible rationale for nerfing multishot is this. It's a "required mod" which reduces player choice.

 

The problem is, because multishot is a required mod, nerfing multishot isn't going to work. The same number of people will use it, they'll just run ammo mutators to reduce the drain of ammunition efficiency. Far from solving the problem of required mods, this change will just increase the number of required mods in the game.

 

To deal with multishot, we have to understand why it's a necessary mod, and why adding ammo consumption won't make it less necessary. After doing so, I will point out what is necessary to fix the issue this fix is intended to deal with.

 

Why is Multishot Necessary?

 

Multishot is necessary because in endgame content, such as T4 Voids, raids, and arguably even things like Pluto/Ceres, enemy health has scaled to a point where weapon damage is starting to fall drastically behind enemy health. Enemies require significantly more time to kill, which gives them more time to deal damage, and since their damage has also increased, this can get very lethal. Multishot helps make up this difference. By doubling or tripling your damage per second, it cuts down the time an enemy will survive by a significant degree.

 

Why is the Proposed Multishot Nerf Actively Counterproductive?

 

Compare, for example, the Braton Mk-1 and the Braton Prime. The Braton Prime has superior stats in almost all areas but spare ammunition, but its primary superiority is in damage. The Braton Prime does 35 damage compared to the Mk1 Braton's 18-a bit more than 190% the damage! ...coincidentally, rifle multishot adds +90% to your weapon's damage. +90% damage is the difference between a very good weapon, capable of taking you through all but the highest-leveled content, and a trash weapon that everyone recommends you shelve the moment you've done the missions necessary to get a better one.

 

This should demonstrate that the proposed fix, which makes multishot consume additional ammunition, doesn't fix anything. Nobody's going to take a Mk1-Braton into a T4S or T4D. Nobody. They're going to keep their multishot mod on their gun, and instead they're going to stick an ammo mutator in their gun to make up for the increased drain, which coincidentally leads to reduced, not increased loadout choice. Far from freeing up a mod slot for customization, you've eliminated one since now it's not just Split Chamber + Serration that's mandatory for a rifle, but Split Chamber + Serration + Rifle Ammo Mutator.

 

This fix does not succeed in even doing what it's intended to do, let alone achieving any other objectives. It is a bad idea.

 

So How Would You Fix It?

 

Well if I could tell DE how to fix their game and they'd do it for me, I'd run the company, and I don't do that, do I? But here's some food for thought.

 

The problem with required mods is simply this-you need the mods to increase your damage to the point where you can quickly take down the hordes of enemies that appear in a survival or defense. A 20 minute T2 survival will net you more than 500 kills-that's one enemy killed every 2 seconds. This is fun-murdering your way through battalions of enemy soldiers is the best part of Warframe. But it means that you need to be able to kill each of them quickly.

 

If you're going to want to eliminate required mods, the solution needs to make weapons viable in these situations without mods. I don't mean without multishot-I mean without any mods. No Serration, no Split Chamber, no elemental mods. This will either require enemy scaling to be adjusted or for weapons to gain damage while leveling up, or some form of both. Adding in elements of both will probably be most optimal.

 

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, 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. 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.

 

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.

 

As I understand it, enemy health scales to the square of their level. It does not scale arithmetically, but geometrically. An enemy at level 50 is not twice as tough as a level 25 enemy, but rather 4 times as tough. It gets worse with armored enemies, whose effective health scales to the fourth power of their level-a level 50 grineer lancer isn't twice as tough as a level 25 one, but rather sixteen times as tough.

 

Removing geometric scaling, and making enemy level scaling linear, will fix this issue. A level 50 enemy will no longer be 25 times tougher than a level 10 one, but 5 times tougher, allowing you to greatly reduce the amount of scaling necessary to have reasonable TTKs on endgame content. If you don't want 'mandatory' mods to exist, the scaling system for enemies must be brought in line, weapon base damage has to scale up enough that a unmodded weapon at 30 can take you through high-level content, albeit with difficulty, and since you're clearly determined to fix the issue of 'mandatory' mods, you're going to have to face the music at some point.

 

Why not now? If you had said "we're going to be completely redoing the scaling system because right now geometric growth means that enemy power curves are broken. Because enemies will be less powerful at high levels, some mods will have to be altered, such as multishot consuming more ammunition," people would have complained a lot less because it'd demonstrate that you're fixing things instead of just throwing down a band-aid.

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.

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.

+1 OP. Enemy scaling has always been one of the main issues in Warframe. It prevents fair balance for both us and the AI, and it breaks early-to-mid game, turning it into a joke, while making "endgame" utterly unfair and broken unless you CC the Hell out of everything to prevent getting insta-gibbed, no matter the firepower you bring with you.

Many players have been begging the devs to get their sh!t together and make a viable scaling system for almost 2 years now. We're still waiting. Meanwhile, they keep adding stuff on top of a completely broken base. It's a freaking miracle the entire edifice hasn't crumbled under its own weight yet...

 

Holy Sh*t. Best posts on the forum I have seen. +1 for nicely laying out the issue. DE has been in denial about the problems with their scaling for a long time but I hope they wake up to face the music soon. The game has been in an unhealthy state for a good while and the continued addition of lazy band-aid fixes and feature-creep is slowly bringing us to the point where the Jenga Tower is going to crumble.

 

For all the times they have had to: re-balance something, then revert the change because it broke stuff (balance not bugs), draft up a new change, find it's hated vehemently by the community, SCRAP YET ANOTHER IDEA, go back to the drawing board, then hammer out a half functional implementation that will be refined and maybe updated to be more practical later... for all the time and development cost for doing this goose-chase over and over again, you'd think they'd just suck it up and admit the current system is faulty and unstable. 

 

Here is to hoping they finally admit this can't last forever. I eagerly await "Scaling 2.0".

Edited September 8, 2015 by Nako-Chan

[Artekkor]

Topic Title.

That's me. I'm actually excited about this, despite many other people loosing their heads and currently assaulting forums with their negative aura.

I love to try different things time to time and multishot is one of them now.

Currently i'm trying to figure out what weapons be fine with it after the change.

Vaykor Marelok is probably one of them.

Vaykor Hek is not one.

To be honest i didn't liked multishot for a long time now. Having it reduces diversity in my builds, restricts me, which makes me kinda angry every time i'm trying to mod one.

I also hate that 10% chance to NOT shoot second bullet which causes me troubles with bows. Sometimes i won't stealth-kill enemy just because that second arrow didn't shot.

That Heavy Gunner just didn't die because my luck sucked dongs.

Screw that!

Looking forward to that change, especially to what DE are going to do to compensate the DPS we lost.

PS: Not sarcasm. Legit excitment here.

SO EXCITED

*All-burning fire reflects in his glasses*

Edited September 8, 2015 by Artek94

[IANOBW]

K

[Trichouette]

I am also waiting for this change, i wouldn't say "excited", but waiting for it.

I hate having to use multishot mods but if i want my weapon to deal enough damage i'm forced to and that's absolutely lame.

I can't make a nice build because of multishot and base damage mods and that's awful.

[Kaotyke]

The only thing I'm miffed about is the Formas I will have lost making that V.

[Nako-Chan]

I also hate that 10% chance to NOT shoot second bullet which causes me troubles with bows. Sometimes i won't stealth-kill enemy just because that second arrow didn't shot.

That Heavy Gunner just didn't die because my luck sucked dongs.

 

Yeah... That has happened far to many a time. I know your pain.

 

That moment your bow doesn't multi-shot during stealth runs... and a Heavy Gunner survives with 20% HP and sounds the alarms.

 

All my sadness.

[ThePrimarchSystem]

Remember how much hate DE got when they said they are gonna remove coptering?

Yeah.. DE will probably find a way, things will possibly be better than before, but the thing is;

Why bother with multishot when there are other things that are broken...hellishly broken?

And worth noting about their weird announcements about stuff being "bugs". Just like Multishot not consuming extra ammo being a 2 year old bug and we rolled with it..yeah, riight.

Update 20
     

      Fixes: 
              Fixed players being able to log into Warframe. Apparently it was one giant bug.

 

 

[MumblesMcphatty]

How about instead of all this raging and concerns over your shiny toys being taken away - why don't you try this ...

Go take multi shot out of all your builds now and go play the game. It's really not that big a deal for the majority of the content.

Sure - no one will be going for 1-2hrs in endless anymore - but frankly anyone who has time for that on a regular basis clearly needs other things to do in their life.

[MumblesMcphatty]

The only thing I'm miffed about is the Formas I will have lost making that V.

Why? You know full well in all likelihood it's getting replaced with another V mod anyway?

[Mastikator2]

I hope they buff mods like ammo drum, slip magazine and reload mods. They've needed a buff for a long time, hope they get it.

[-HAKUNA-YOUR-TATAS-]

There's always one... Just one tho. XD

[Kayblis]

Its funny how the shills here think that this change will allow for more "diverse" builds when this will KILL weapons. There are weapons out there that can work ONLY because it can S#&$ out statuses thanks to multishot. This change will make even less weapons viable.

But then again this is DE, they want you to feel like a useless sod and they want you to go naked with melee only.

[Mastikator2]

There's always one... Just one tho. XD

Nah I'm also excited for the rebalancing.

[Cyborg-Rox]

Personally I like this change too. All multi-shot mods are rare as hell and basically mandatory. And now I'll have an extra utility mod slot.

Besides, there's still weapons I'll use it on, that aren't terribly ammo-inefficient already.

[pauli133]

I'm looking forward to it. The possible outcomes I can see:

 

1: Multishot consumes ammo, no further changes. Causing magazines to run out of ammo faster shifts the meta and significantly influences weapon selection, livening up the game. Minor increases to difficulty. Positive outcome.

 

2: Multishot consumes ammo, weapons are rebalanced to compensate. Same effects as above, with a different crop of weapons coming to the fore. Little to no increase in difficulty. Positive outcome.

 

3: Multishot consumes ammo, gains additional effects. This is where it gets interesting - what if all those straight multishot mods become more like Nightmare mods, or Corrupted mods?

 

4: Multishot mods are removed, cores are issued. This probably is the most boring outcome - meta will shift, but we won't really gain a whole lot of variety in loadouts.

 

Whatever happens, it's exciting to see the status quo get shaken up.

[(PSN)LiamRising]

why do people keep saying that multishot is a mandatory mod most my weapons dont use it unless they are really weak or to help increase status no ones forcing you to use these mods but yourself but them nerfing it just because people want diversity is hurting players who do want to use it and like most people say unless scaling is fixed it will get harder to play i can barely complete high end grineer due to most heavy gunners taking a clip of my braton prime to kill now its gonna take me more and suck up all my ammo while i get killed that's not fun. plus now for guns like the grakata (my favourite along with the gorgon) will need ammo mutation as a mandatory mod thus taking a slot away from me which is ironic really.

[Trichouette]

I'm looking forward to it. The possible outcomes I can see:

 

1: Multishot consumes ammo, no further changes. Causing magazines to run out of ammo faster shifts the meta and significantly influences weapon selection, livening up the game. Minor increases to difficulty. Positive outcome.

 

2: Multishot consumes ammo, weapons are rebalanced to compensate. Same effects as above, with a different crop of weapons coming to the fore. Little to no increase in difficulty. Positive outcome.

 

3: Multishot consumes ammo, gains additional effects. This is where it gets interesting - what if all those straight multishot mods become more like Nightmare mods, or Corrupted mods?

 

4: Multishot mods are removed, cores are issued. This probably is the most boring outcome - meta will shift, but we won't really gain a whole lot of variety in loadouts.

 

Whatever happens, it's exciting to see the status quo get shaken up.

I wish the 4 would happen... we don't need to shot more bullets, at this point just buff the fire rate mods and we're done. Same deal.

[Husla]

OP have you been playing the game without multishot mods, or are you waiting for that day?

Multishot removes diversity? what, it's one of the main reasons status builds is an option.

 

I dare use this:

>Hates multishot mods

>All builds include multishot mods

>....

>Tennoskooms

[MumblesMcphatty]

If it does scale as slowly as you are suggesting, it will mean that the first 6-8 HOURS will be boring as hell. If I need to plan for a 6 hour gaming marathon if I want a challenge, I would probably quit the game.

This is pretty much my feeling - the game suffers enough from this already it does not need to be made worse. The proposed multi shot change would at least bring those windows down closer to reasonable gaming times.

Personally I don't have the time to push to that "real challenge" window very often - and I don't see spending my entire gaming allowance of an evening into one, lone mission as a good use of that time.

Also - if we're being totally honest here - that "real challenge" window is exceedingly short - a few minutes at best between one-shotting everything and the CC spamfest required to go further.

As for OP - while mostly I hear you - this:

"No one wants to have to sacrifice their unique play-style in order to have any level of success in this game, but DE has made it impossible to achieve anything without resorting to the over-rated and over-used builds that DE is simultaneously trying to suppress."

- is just bunk.

Everything in the game barring the current Primes is easily acquired and everything outside of Raids is capable of being accomplished without resorting to the over-abused meta builds.

Just because many don't have the guts/brains/skill to attempt anything beyond YouTuber cookie cutter builds is not really DE's fault or problem.

[Unholyrequiem]

Personally I like this change too. All multi-shot mods are rare as hell and basically mandatory. And now I'll have an extra utility mod slot.

Besides, there's still weapons I'll use it on, that aren't terribly ammo-inefficient already.

or another element

[Gr33hn]

I am not excited about it but I am also not dreading it or losing my mind like some do over it. It can become a benefit for the game.

 

The only thing I have a issue with is what Kao-Snake said:

 

The only thing I'm miffed about is the Formas I will have lost making that V.

[Cyborg-Rox]

or another element

 

Meh, I usually keep it at 3 per weapon. Only in emergencies do I only use 2, and only if I really don't need utility do I use 4.

[Artekkor]

OP have you been playing the game without multishot mods, or are you waiting for that day?

Multishot removes diversity? what, it's one of the main reasons status builds is an option.

I dare use this:

>Hates multishot mods

>All builds include multishot mods

>....

>Tennoskooms

Waiting for. Been using all of them so far. It's a direct damage upgrade after all.

Though sometimes had dillemas with Lethal Torrent and certain secondaries.

*COUGH* AkGrakata *COUGH*