Major Gunplay Overhaul

[Lilybun]

Since their nice intent with the multishot changes just shoehorns people into even smaller selection of viable weapons, I thought I'd suggest some bigger tweaks to the whole mod and gunplay system for improved viability across the board, more player choice and more design space for future. Maybe some day we get mods 2.0 and guns 2.0 and instead of complaining about them afterwards I thought I'd be proactive and give my two cents beforehand!

 

-Mod card system-

I'd say the main thing with mod cards is that many of them are very much mandatory*. This creates multiple issues ranging from new player experience to lategame viability. Mods like serration, primed point blank and hornet strike along with multishot mods are a staple of any viable lategame build and you simply can't make the optimal buil without them. Slotting mods is essentially a puzzle with one correct answer (per faction)

*if you feel you can get by just fine without serration and multishot then good for you, you can go back to enjoying the game

 

1) the elements

The damage 2.0 did make building weapons more fun and not as set in stone as before with the rainbow of elements, however it still is held by the fact that you need to have several elemental mods in order to deck your weapon for lategame just for the statistical bonuses. Good luck killing Geavy Gunner [97] in areasonable amount of time without all that added elemental damage.

 

So what can be done about this? Make the elemental mods just change the base damage type of a weapon instead of adding percentage of additional elemental damage. Adding fire mod makes your weapon 100% fire damage, adding fire + electric makes it 50% fire 50% electric and so on. This removes the necessity of elemental mods while you still retain the unique elemental procs and combinations. Even if you still like to have that corrosive + blast build you can, you are no longer shoehorned into it because it adds a ton of damage. Few examples of tweaked elemental mods:

 

   Heated charge: converts weapon damage to fire damage

   Piercing hit: weakness caused by puncture is increased to 60% damage reduction

   Thermite rounds: increases fire status chance

 

2) other mandatory mods

Serration and critical hit mods for some weapons fall into this category. Just get rid of them entirely and replace them with other things. So called crit weapons can keep their crits, increased to amount they'd be when modded with crit chance, but their damage would be equalized to match the DPS of the weapons without these mods. Critical hits would act as a special condition that some mods interact with, if you don't want to use the crit mods you dont have to. It's worth noting that there are several sidegrade mods already, main issue with them is that they need to compete against the damage amplifying ones making the undesirable. With a system that minimizes the amount of mandatory mods these hidden gems will finally get to shine. Few examples of sidegrade mods:

 

   Thunderbolt: arrows have an x% chance to explode dealing x% of the weapons base damage in an AoE

   Point strike: critical hits create weakspots on enemies

   Hammer shot: critical hits have significantly higher chance to cause status effects

 

I'm quite certain that these changes whilst radical would give the developers much more free space to design new and interesting mods without fearing that they break something. If you remove the ability to amplify weapons damage exponentially it should be much easier to keep all the weapons at least somewhat in check and in the same DPS curve. DPS curve meaning that all weapons in the game have approximately the same amount of DPS, tweaked accordingly based on how difficult to use and situational the said weapon is. This is a very important concept that would need an entire thread of its own.

 

-Ammo and reloads-

1) Ammo

With damage output and mandatory mods tackled, another thing that limits the usability of a lot of weapons is the ammo system. Weapons like latron and gorgon drawing from the same ammo pool and having the same amount of ammo drops is just ridiculous. Living biotech weapons having to scurry around the field looking for ammo drops for their bullet hungry guns gives me a bit of the same feel as the old stamina bar and asthmatic space ninjas. How to alleviate this?

 

   1. Start counting ammo by magazines, not by individual rounds

   2. Remove ammo drops from the game

   3. Magazines refresh over time similar to archwing ammo

 

2) Reloading

So what happens to mods like firing speed and reload speed, those would be the new DPS increases right? Implement fast reload system. Fast reload is a system seen in other more or less similar shooter games, essentially there's a moment during the reload time during which pressing reload again instantly finishes the reload. A mechanic like this adds an extra way to be good at the game but most importantly it adds a ton of potential for mods. Here are a few tweak ideas:

 

   Fast hands: fast reload can be performed earlier

   Speed trigger: after a successful fast reload your firing speed is increased by x% for x seconds

   Magazine warp: fast reloaded magazines have x% extra rounds in them

   Charged chamber: the first shot after a fast reload deals x% bonus damage (sniper only still)

 

What would happen to maximum ammo mods?

This mod would give you extra magazines under the new system.

What about ammo conversion?

These mods would instantly refund you the spent magazine upon a successful fast reload.

What about scavenger auras?

These would increase the rate at which magazines generate.

 

 

Thanks for reading! Please don't get caught up in the details the mod suggestions are concepts, not final products. Obviously there are plenty of more mods that would need to be tweaked for this kinda new system but going over every single one in one post is not feasible. Disclaimer: not all these ideas are my own and many of them come from other fellow community members that as far as I know haven't verbalized their thoughts yet.

--

Who cares about mastery ranks, what about multishot??!

To be honest I don't know what else to do with it other than to get rid of it entirely. As much as I like the idea of creating a mod that lets you empty more rounds at once it essentially just increases your burst DPS with little to no downside. Its synergy with fast reload makes it especially problematic.

[Shifted]

More like mods 3.0..

 

Anyway, I agree with the issues you mentioned, but I can't say I agree with the solutions you proposed.

Especially the part about ammo. I don't like that.

Edited September 5, 2015 by Shifted

[Lilybun]

More like mods 3.0..

 

Anyway, I agree with the issues you mentioned, but I can't say I agree with the solutions you proposed.

Especially the part about ammo. I don't like that.

Care to elaborate about what you dislike about them. Aside from ammo, there are dozens of ways to fix that one.

[Shifted]

Alright, first of all, elemental/damage type mods:

 

They already have mods that replace damage type instead of adding to it in PvP loadouts. Just use that in PvE.

Also you completely change how Thermite Rounds work, while it could work perfectly fine with the effects it has already, just tweaked values. (and obviously replace damage, not add)

 

Serration, damage overall etc.:

 

There needs to be some kind of progress. DE already announced new MR locks to make sure the most powerful weapons have to be unlocked by using other weaker ones to advance your MR. That's cool.

When you remove serration however you can't just leave it at that. The popular idea is to integrate serration into weapon levels, and I fully agree with that. Maybe not with the exact same values as the mod, but there sure needs to be a sense of progression.

One might even add reload speed, accuracy and such to that, since you're technically gaining experience with the weapon, but that's arguable.

 

Crits:

Not really a fan of completely altering how they work but I don't have a solution of how to fix them, so I'll skip that

 

Ammo:

 

Ammo regen makes it too easy. Archwing is a perfect example.

I've been preaching the idea of percentage based ammo pickups based on total ammo capacity instead of numbers, but I guess your magazine number idea works just as well. All that changes is which mods would affect the amount you pick up in the end.

 

Reloading:

 

While I liked Fast Reload in gears, I'm not so hype about adding it to warframe, probably because I don't like the changes to the mods you've proposed.

 

 

Either way, I think if we're ever to have this rebalancing of the mods, it needs to be a slow process. DE gutting multishot is a nice first step. After that's done, they need to see how that affects everything, tweak and move on to the next thing.

Dumping all those changes at once will be a mess.

Edited September 5, 2015 by Shifted