Tonkor: Let's fix easy mode

[IceColdHawk]

22 hours ago, Magneu said:

The Tonkor does directly affect my playstyle, as I indicated in melee vs Timmy Tonkor example. A single player can actively deny my playstyle, shoehorning me into using similar cheesy tactics or going full try-hard to keep up, while they play at a relaxed rate. The effort vs reward ration is screwed up (this is ignoring the risk vs reward ratio which, as far as both launchers and all weapons go, is completely skewed towards the Tonkor. This is bad for...well, if you actually watched the videos instead of cussing me out, you'd know why). Even if it didn't affect me, I believe that it is extremely toxic for the game, both currently and, more importantly, in the long run.

First of all i want to say GG to you. You really managed to shoot out some good arguments in terms of nerfing tonkor. It probably felt like a meteor storm to some people! But i won't buy you this argument i've quoted right here :3

Yes tonkor is op. Yes it obliterates groups with 100k+ damage (not against chargers though). And yes it is ammo efficient as fk. Oh and no self damage. So i'm not arguing about it.

Anyway, coming back to the quoted paragraph. Just wanted to leave something here:

Spoiler

In a run on hieracon i met a banshee/tonkor guy:

Dealing more damage ;):

Showing off my accuracy because i can and also showing that the guy wasn't permanently on the ground (only 5 in total):

Believe it or not but i was mostly only sniping and occasionally spinning with my lesion. Spira Prime came to use when i was holding a battery. So, speak for yourselves when it comes to getting no kills because of tonkor. Because if you really insist in actually playing (which you probably wanna do right?), you SHOULD be able to keep up with a tonkor user. Tonkor isn't press LMB to obliterate 50m radius. But aside from that, continue arguing if you want. Just wanted to leave this here.

Edited April 16, 2016 by IceColdHawk

[TheLexiConArtist]

3 minutes ago, IceColdHawk said:

Yes tonkor is op. Yes it obliterates groups with 100k+ damage (not against chargers though). And yes it is ammo efficient as fk. Oh and no self damage. So i'm not arguing about it.

Anyway, coming back to the quoted paragraph. Just wanted to leave something here:

Believe it or not but i was mostly only sniping and occasionally spinning with my lesion. Spira Prime came to use when i was holding a battery. So, speak for yourselves when it comes to getting no kills because of tonkor. Because if you really insist in actually playing (which you probably wanna do right?), you SHOULD be able to keep up with a tonkor user. Tonkor isn't press LMB to obliterate 50m radius. But aside from that, continue arguing if you want. Just wanted to leave this here.

So, wait, you had almost four times the accuracy and still only barely won on damage? Not only that, but (albeit again barely) lost on number of kills if I'm reading that right?

At the risk of belabouring the point, that's kind of proof positive that the 'aim drawback' is absolutely not enough to counteract the ridiculous overpowering strength that comes with even a 1 in 9 hit rate.

Extrapolating this, a player without terrible accuracy (which was not even dragged down by a wildly spraying full-auto secondary while carrying Power Cells for extractors, since they're using the Sonicor) would have absolutely annihilated your damage and much more than barely won the kill count game too.

[IceColdHawk]

Yo EDY. Long time no see man!

1 minute ago, EDYinnit said:

So, wait, you had almost four times the accuracy and still only barely won on damage? Not only that, but (albeit again barely) lost on number of kills if I'm reading that right?

Yeah he obviously got a few kills more since he was using pure AoE weapon while i was sniping. Did you really expect me to get so many more kills than him? I think we both know how "awesome" snipers in this game are :P (though snipetron vandal is actually awesome)

3 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

At the risk of belabouring the point, that's kind of proof positive that the 'aim drawback' is absolutely not enough to counteract the ridiculous overpowering strength that comes with even a 1 in 9 hit rate.

I know right? I'm not here to argue the tonkor for being not op, just stating that not being able to do anything when a tonkor user is there is bull. Now when you got a blind mirage on your team, that's another story. I would never be able to back this up.

5 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

Extrapolating this, a player without terrible accuracy (which was not even dragged down by a wildly spraying full-auto secondary while carrying Power Cells for extractors, since they're using the Sonicor) would have absolutely annihilated your damage and much more than barely won the kill count game too.

Wrong. Your accuracy actually gets dragged down with every sonicor shot. And this guy was using sonicor fairly often, also when it comes to shoot some infested off the drill. So that actually "faked" his real accuracy. Not to mention missing tonkor shots isn't all that hard. Unless you're aiming at permanently stunned enemies, flying grenades missing the enemy can happen pretty often and that underlines that tonkor is harder to use in practise than most weapons.

EDY just be cool and admit that you can indeed outplay tonkor users. You just got to want it. Even if they miss most of the shots, that would probably almost never have happened with a penta for example. Otherwise yeah, when the tonkor hits, it hits pretty unfairly strong, sure. 

[TheLexiConArtist]

15 minutes ago, IceColdHawk said:

Yo EDY. Long time no see man!

Yeah he obviously got a few kills more since he was using pure AoE weapon while i was sniping. Did you really expect me to get so many more kills than him? I think we both know how "awesome" snipers in this game are :P (though snipetron vandal is actually awesome)

I know right? I'm not here to argue the tonkor for being not op, just stating that not being able to do anything when a tonkor user is there is bull. Now when you got a blind mirage on your team, that's another story. I would never be able to back this up.

Wrong. Your accuracy actually gets dragged down with every sonicor shot. And this guy was using sonicor fairly often, also when it comes to shoot some infested off the drill. So that actually "faked" his real accuracy. Not to mention missing tonkor shots isn't all that hard. Unless you're aiming at permanently stunned enemies, flying grenades missing the enemy can happen pretty often and that underlines that tonkor is harder to use in practise than most weapons.

EDY just be cool and admit that you can indeed outplay tonkor users. You just got to want it. Even if they miss most of the shots, that would probably almost never have happened with a penta for example. Otherwise yeah, when the tonkor hits, it hits pretty unfairly strong, sure. 

Well, with regards to "aimless" weapons it can be very odd when it comes to accuracy. Some missions I get 360% Ignis accuracy, some missions I get 0%. I was more referring to sheer rate of fire whereby poor aim would create a lot larger of a missed-to-hit ratio with a fast automatic pistol secondary.

I'm not going to go full fallacy and claim that nobody using the Tonkor can ever be outdamaged or even outkilled, but the balance aspect still exists. If you were playing hard, performing excellently to tag those Ancients in their tentacular faces all the live long day (you did well enough to maintain a fairly high accuracy, after all), but you still got competed closely (or outmatched) by a Tonkor user with terrible accuracy (let's safely assume that the Sonicor is not the entire 88% of 'misses' for the purpose of validating the 'Tonkor accuracy sucks' argument in theory), that's still an egregious imbalance of effort to reward.

 

Mind you, the Sonicor's not much better (and has that extra effect of horrible particle spam). Can we just get rid of all weapons that end with -or? I think we'd be golden then. Heck, while you're at it, do it phonetically and we lose the (Broken-)War too.

[This is a joke, not an actual suggestion, before someone picks up on this and claims it to be my actual preferred outcome.]

[IceColdHawk]

18 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

Some missions I get 360% Ignis accuracy, some missions I get 0%

You sure your accuracy wasn't 420%?  

18 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

I'm not going to go full fallacy and claim that nobody using the Tonkor can ever be outdamaged or even outkilled, but the balance aspect still exists. If you were playing hard, performing excellently to tag those Ancients in their tentacular faces all the live long day (you did well enough to maintain a fairly high accuracy, after all), but you still got competed closely (or outmatched) by a Tonkor user with terrible accuracy (let's safely assume that the Sonicor is not the entire 88% of 'misses' for the purpose of validating the 'Tonkor accuracy sucks' argument in theory), that's still an egregious imbalance of effort to reward.

Yeah man, like i said, not arguing against the balance. Just stating it's possible as long as you're actually playing. But sure, tonkor obviously gives a better output than snipetron vandal. When it comes to effective dps (especially in groups), not facturing grineer armor shred potential in, nothing beats the tonkor. But to be honest, i had much fun in this round. I'm not the usual guy to complain about things ;P (except for nullifiers). But yeah, there is still the balancing aspect that's why i said you can continue arguing if you want. Can't really argue much against the tonkor. I wanna stay as factual as possible.

Also, doesn't it annoy you writing walls of texts the whole freaking time? I mean, really, wow. And you still manage to stay calm. Please lend me some of your drugs. ^^

18 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

Mind you, the Sonicor's not much better (and has that extra effect of horrible particle spam). Can we just get rid of all weapons that end with -or? I think we'd be golden then. Heck, while you're at it, do it phonetically and we lose the (Broken-)War too.

Ohh you little bast....

Spoiler

18 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

[This is a joke, not an actual suggestion, before someone picks up on this and claims it to be my actual preferred outcome.]

...Oh....oh.....okay...

Anyway, have a nice day.

 

Edited April 16, 2016 by IceColdHawk

[Cpl_Facehugger]

2 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

All weapons need to be aimed, some more than others but the Tonkor is far from the hardest to aim for its greatest effect.

Er, what? It has bouncy, arcing grenades with a "aim guide" that's of dubious usefulness. I'm legit trying to think of harder guns to aim here and I'm coming up short. Uh... Bows dependent on headshots? Maybe? Castana type explosive throwing knives? What weapon are you thinking of that's harder to aim than tonkor?

 

Enemies infrequently spawn in perfectly intermittent, nice and tightly-packed radial groups. The moment there are several enemeis to your left and right at the same time, the Tonkor is going to be better at dealing with them than a Penta regardless of skill with the weapons (assuming comparitively equal-in-ratio Tonkor skill to Penta skill) because it's completely fire-and-forget. You shoot one Tonkor grenade left, one right, both groups blow up in 1 second + traveltime of second grenade. You shoot one Penta grenade left, wait on its travel time and detonate it, then one right, traveltime and detonate. The doubled actual firerate of the Tonkor is even more relevant because regularly shooting one Penta 'nade per second is not useful because every projectile out detonates with the same alt-fire click. Effective shots that can be made per second: 2 for the Tonkor, less than or equal to 1 for the Penta, most likely less.

That doesn't mesh well with how spawn points on most tilesets are set up. It kinda works like that for certain defense tilesets (ODD especially), but even that's kind of arguable due to range - no grenade launcher is going to be rapidly taking down infested charging from both ramps at the same time unless you let them get close to the pod. Terrain is very rarely set up such that you can fire off a tonkor, turn, then fire off your second grenade at a second squad faster than someone with a penta can detonate and do the same while still retaining accuracy.

Even then, since we're going dangerously theoretical, what about when enemies successfully encroach upon you? Any other explosive forces you to reposition before tackling the enemies due to self damage. Tonkor does not.

Yes? Okay? Uh, yes, tonkor is indeed the best explosive for close encounters. That's not really in question either. :\

"Skill" is immaterial. Skill floor and skill ceiling are more important. Fact: The Tonkor has a massively great output with a low skill floor due to overwhelming damage, aim guide, no self damage. The skill ceiling is relatively far less important in that it merely eases your aiming time. This isn't a "learn how to headshot" precision weapon. It's Kill Everything For Free.

I don't really agree with the notion that it's "kill everything for free" weapon. Its grenades are easily the hardest to hit with of any explosive, and as I said I tend to use tonkor for amusement instead of effectiveness precisely because it's not nearly so reliable as many other guns.

I also don't really agree with your "fact" that it has a low skill floor due to its aim guide and lack of self damage. The aim guide doesn't work all that well in combat (which you'd know if you actually used tonkor a lot), and the grenadejumping that happens when you fire a tonkor danger close will completely ruin your aim.

Again, parts of the whole. Addressing one facet of the whole picture of why the Tonkor is utterly broken which its own defenders are typically admitting and calling that the entire argument is just fallacy.

I'm kind of addressing the only remotely objective point you have here. The DPS is vaguely objective if you squint at it, it's just not really the whole story or even a large part of the story. All your other stuff is basically just unfalsifiable subjective stuff that I can't do more than disagree with and point out how it doesn't fit my experience at all.

Is it a straight DPS comparison, or is it damage, ease of achieving peak damage, viability in the typical (horde) state of the game, inadequate and/or already compensated drawbacks, lack of inherent risk as it applies to every other member of the weapon category, accessibility of the weapon itself, the effects it has on the rest of the squad's gameplay...

Well, a lot of that is extremely subjective. Like, massively so. The DPS comparison is the only remotely objective thing to attack, so yeah I'm attacking it. 

I mean, how is someone supposed to falsify a claim that it has harmful effects on the rest of the squad's gameplay? It's basically impossible without anecdotes and you're S#&$ting the bed every time one of those comes up. Lack of inherent risk? A weapon with a tiny magazine that requires good aim isn't inherently risky now? 

If the Secura Penta was comparable at all to the Tonkor, we'd see it used comparitively often. We do not.

Would we? That presumes that the meta is perfect and everyone has a perfect understanding of it. That seems fairly unlikely. The current vile accel corrosive critspam of the synoid simulor meta didn't emerge on day 1 - when synoid simulor was released the meta considered it utter garbage. Then the meta shifted as people tested it out. They tested their builds in gameplay. Only then did the meta put synoid simulor in the top tier. The theorycrafting came later to confirm what gameplay experience said. 

There's also the matter of accessibility. Tonkor is considerably more accessible to the masses than secura penta given the relative costs of the weapons. MR4, argon, cryo vs MR12 and 125k rep from a rank 5 perrinbro. That's another factor that skews things but has nothing to do with how "OP" a weapon is.

Mind you, I wouldn't really consider spenta a top tier weapon myself. I simply said the utility of a room-encompassing rad proc is useful, enough that someone could plausibly make the case that it belongs in the top tier.

Buffing other things is not the answer to an overpowered top-tier-of-its-own weapon.

You haven't established it's a top tier of its own weapon, at least not with me. Maybe this is in one of those twenty pages I didn't read. If so I apologize, but I don't think it unfair to ask you to summarize if you have.

Please explain to me how the advantages of the Tonkor are in line with the advantages enjoyed by other weapons when it does more damage than a Single Target weapon AND does that damage in full to entire groups.

Difficulty delivering that damage to targets, poor handling due to low magazine, low effective range due to the arcing behavior of its shots and travel time.

Meanwhile, an assault rifle (ie soma/boltor prime) with shred is gunning down groups in about as much time at greater range unless we're talking the highest levels of content we have, where armor scaling is such that everything is weighted towards damage. (Which is a problem DE's working on fixing and which doesn't fall on tonkor exclusively, which means it's a systemic problem for which tonkor is at worst only a symptom.) And even then, soma and boltor prime are both very respectable weapons even in sorties and raids, and I'd argue that a lot of warfarm map design is such that you'll find a use for these weapons even when tonkor's nailing whole groups due to their significantly greater range. Tonkor's good for close in stuff but pants at range, and that matters a lot more often than it seems like it would in Warframe.

Your argument here is identical to ones I've seen leveled against both ogris and penta in the past. "These weapons do more damage than a single target weapon and does that damage in full to entire groups!" That is almost word for word what I've seen from people just like you. I don't think you're any more correct than they were then. I've been at this anti-nerf thing for a long time now. The arguments to nerf never change, just the weapons they apply to.

We may not have one gun to rule them all, but two, three or four is a pale mockery of the variety that we had before their introductions. When Soma and Boltor Primes were being considered as too strong, despite the prevalent usage also of Pentas, Amprexes, Dreads, Paris Primes, Synapses, Latron Primes, on and on (there's 8 to begin with).. not just Tonkor, Synoid Simulor, Sancti Tigris, (Vaykor) Hek.

I wouldn't call it three or four. Let's see. Off the top of my head for top tier guns, we've got:

Synoid Simulor. Soma Prime. Boltor Prime. Amprex. Tonkor. Hek. (Count vaykor hek as the same even though it's another gun.) Tigris. (Same.) Vaykor Marelok. Dread. Rakta Cernos... Need I go on? I'm sure I can think of some more. These are all still top tier in the meta. We've also got edge cases like status build burston prime w/gilded truth, opticor, paris prime, sonicor, and a few others.

These guns aren't all perfectly equal, but I've never seen nor heard of anyone getting denigrated for taking any of these into high level content. Be honest now, have you? If I go on council chat right now and ask "hey guys, is Soma Prime in the top tier", do you really truly think they won't tell me yes? There might be some spirited debate, but for a gun to be OP it kind of can't involve spirited debate.

Define a good balance team, because balance is barely objective. What some people praise, others will find cripplingly detracts from what they enjoyed, and I'm not just talking "fix OP".

Well, I'd define a good balance team as one who tests their changes extensively in an environment as close to real gameplay as possible before deploying them, precisely because on paper effectiveness can diverge completely from real world effectiveness? Have you ever heard the phrase "paper tiger"? It's the same general idea. Trying to render hugely complex situations down to simple mathematical DPS calculations is flatly dumb. 

I don't give even the loftiest of flying fucks about your experiences, I stick to hard logic and mathematics because they are things that are incontestable when correct. You find a problem with my algorithms? Please tell. You disagree with my logical conclusion? You bring counterpoints, preferably evidence and not fallacies or anecdotes, and I do the same in return, rinse repeat.

That's nice and all, bro, but "hard logic" and "mathematics" doesn't really have all that much place in a massively complex emergent system like a video game of this nature where actual effectiveness is dependent on huge numbers of factors that "hard logic" and "mathematics" don't account for. Go on, show me an algorithm that takes into account all relevant factors in a weapon's ingame effectiveness in warframe. (That's a rhetorical request - I know you can't.) Your whining to me about how you want "hard logic" and "mathematics" is foolish because my core point is that the situation as it stands is massively more complex than you're giving credence to and working out an algorithm to account for everything from map design to weapon stats (all stats, accuracy, DPS, ammo efficiency, etc etc etc) is the kind of math work that would get you a doctorate.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you don't have a degree in game design with a supercomputer and genius coding skills able to come up with a system that exhaustively analyzes this. So for the rest of us, all on paper theorycrafting does is provide a starting point for thinking about the situation. Then you test it. And you test it a lot. In as many situations as you can to determine whether a gun really is so powerful that it renders all other weapons obsolete.

That's how you do balance. You don't play with it in the simulacrum for a few times, see someone outplaying you with it a few times, and then say it's massively OP.

I say this because DE isn't really the best balancing team. They nerf early without much testing and then need to rework their nerfs later because they overnerfed. They have a habit of overnerfing things and taking many months or even years buffing them to usability, if they ever do. Synoid gammacor comes to mind immediately. At one point it was the meta in a way that tonkor wishes it could be. We're talking double the DPS of everything else except brakk (which had been nerfed long before), long range, ammo efficiency, pinpoint accuracy... It still had flaws, but overall there were very few hips that went without a synoid gammacor clamped to them. But then DE nerfed it. Good show. Except rather than gently toning it down they took a ripkas to it. No, really they took two ripkas to it. And it still hasn't been fixed. When was the last time you saw a synoid gammacor in the wild?

How about Acrid? Acrid in its day was the king of all guns. Its toxin damage ignored armor and stacked infinitely and proc'd automatically, making it the go to choice for killing enemies in damage 1.0. Then d2.0 hit and well, it's not exactly a common sight these days, is it?

Acrid or Synoid Gammacor is the gold standard for OP guns. A gun so powerful that the meta unanimously agrees to crown it best gun. Very little argument is had on a gun that's truly OP. There's no "well, it competes with [this other gun]" type stuff. And this is borne out by the use stats, which DE then uses to nerf it. Usually rapidly.

But here? I'm seeing the exact same stuff that people said about boltor and soma. Both somas, even. "This gun is too powerful! It makes killing to easy! I'm having my fun ruined by this guy with his Soma, Boltor Prime, Soma Prime, Amprex, etc etc etc."

Can a gun be top tier and be OP? Of course.

Here's the thing: Your point here is wrong by definition unless the entire top tier is OP. If the top tier is OP that's one thing. If a gun is only one of many in its tier, it's not OP - otherwise it'd be in its own tier. That's what top tier means. The top.

Tonkor is hardly alone in its tier.

Is it likely that a gun that is many times better in rewarding effects than previous top tier weapons with a reduced risk of previous top weapons in the same category IS in fact OP? It is.

Many times better in rewarding effects? Reduce risks? Ehhhhhh. I've got my doubts about this. The trouble you're running into here is that basically the only vaguely objective thing you've got is DPS calcs. But I'm disputing those because they're misleading at best on account of how many factors go into a weapon's balance in gameplay so in reality you have basically nothing.

Again, the Soma and Boltor Primes used to be targets of nerf-threads by being 'OP'. Now, despite receiving ZERO CHANGES, they are merely mediocre at best. Is that not strong evidence that the new 'top tier' power few are improperly balanced, given that they are not the result of progression (and in the Tonkor's case, are in fact available much more easily than many prior top-tiers)?

Mediocre at best? What the hek. What. Are you serious? Something that's viable for literally all content in the game is mediocre at best? What crazy definition are you operating off here for mediocre?

Also, boltor and soma prime have received nerf threads en masse (using the exact same arguments you're using now even) since forever. They still receive nerf threads on occasion. But these nerf threads have always been dumb because when DE actually released the numbers boltor prime wasn't outcompeting the other weapons, for example. When they polled the community they found that overwhelmingly the community didn't feel boltor prime was OP.  

Considering tonkor has been out for nearly a year now, I strongly suspect this is another case of tonkor not being as overbearing as you say. I mean, synoid gammacor got meganerfed after much less time. Excal had syndicate mods removed from exalted blade within, what, weeks? Hydroid's pilfering tentacles got nerfed within weeks of people realizing you could quadruple loot via power strength stacking? Or was that days?

Fact: Explosive autoheadshots still occur for damage purposes but merely no longer count on tracked statistics (or the Headhunter affinity challenge).

Really? That sounds fishy. People were complaining about it a lot and I noticed a rather large drop in my penta and tonkor DPS when the change hit. Did DE break it again?

If indeed it is as you say, then it sounds like a bug that should be fixed. Considering the patch notes explicitly said headshot damage was removed unless actually hitting the head. That wouldn't be a nerf though, just a bugfix.

You use the Tonkor so you're not going to be convinced by anything I say. You've made many claims about difficulty aiming, to which I provide your own words:

I have certainly considered my own words. I'm not the one who's having my fun ruined by grenade launchers though, and as I said, when I play, I'm never actually outcompeted by tonkor users outside of extremely rare situations that play to tonkor's strength. 

Logic dictates that it would be seldom used if the burdens of aiming, of reloading, and the net result after such drawbacks was sufficiently hindered. Meanwhile, in reality:

A weapon can be popular for reasons other than being awesome. And indeed, players can find the drawbacks sufficiently hindering but choose to use it for a variety of reasons. Remember the goal isn't "this gun is so hard to use that it sucks", the goal is "this gun is hard enough to use to balance its advantages in such a fashion that it's competitive with other weapons in its tier." 

Seriously, that logic of yours up there is incorrect. If A then B does not automatically mean the reverse.

You cherry pick bubbles as a drawback, citing the inability to detonate reliably on the flaw, I cherry pick a mod you can use to make that function more reliable.

Except in the process of making that function mildly more reliable it also vastly reduces TTK so nobody would actually use it. That it also reduces damage is just icing on the cake, the sheer reduction in kill speed due to changed mechanics means that nobody actually uses sticky grenades on their tonkor. There's a reason why I brought up the fire resist mod. It's a niche mod that reduces general effectiveness so it's not part of the meta. So too is sticky explosives.

I mean, enemies with shield bubbles are a major concern. Three out of four major factions have them. Two of those factions have tons of them, including the horror that is the arctic nullifier eximus. You very likely won't go through a grineer, corpus, or T3+ void mission without running into some. You might not like it, but this is something that has to be taken into account as a balancing point given how integral bubble shields are to enemy force composition in this sort of content. It's hardly cherry picking to bring up bubbles and tonkor's ineffectiveness against them when most missions will involve you encountering them and when the most challenging missions tend to involve a ton of them.

Meanwhile your suggestion to fix this via sticky grenades sharply reduces Tonkor's effectiveness in general, so it's no solution at all. I can have a gun that kills effectively or one that is sticky but takes two to three seconds after impact to do anything in a game as fast paced as warframe? Come on now.

The projectile impact does the same thing with a Tonkor grenade as it does with, let's say, an arrow. So where's the difference? Well, what happens when you do pop the bubble; the Tonkor gets its usual one-shot-kill-everything back.

Well, one difference is that tonkor's a crit weapon and bubble shields can't be critted. Meanwhile other explosives can aim for the ground to damage the bubble with their full effect and in some cases can even kill the null through the shield through AOE, though I think DE might have reduced the frequency of that.

Yeah bows and snipers (and shotguns and many pistols and...) have problems with null bubbles, but at the time we weren't discussing bows etc, we were discussing explosives.

Oh, and there's that other aspect, the one where you can go into a Null/Arctic bubble with a Tonkor and kill the contents freely without endangering yourself.

Yes? That's cool and all. You have this habit of saying obvious things that aren't really in contention though. Yeah you can go into a null bubble with tonkor and kill whereas with a penta you can't (but also don't have to sometimes), but that in no way changes the fact that a lot of the time that option isn't available for a variety of reasons.

Please explain how Terminal Velocity makes it more difficult when you already stated that misses (causing bounces) are functionally useless. You don't really have to bounce the grenade at all to begin with, but especially with extra projectile velocity at your disposal.

Because halfway decent tonkor players know how to use the bounce to hit targets, even ones outside their normal range or around cover? Because the bounce is actually both a strength and a weakness for tonkor? This sort of knowledge is why I'm so dismissive of your points, because you don't really understand the handling of a tonkor so how can you possibly comment on it in an informed fashion? Every time I see you say that it's "easy" because of the aim guide I have to laugh.

I'm far from a tonkor master but I know there is an art to using it effectively. It's a lot harder than you're making it out to be.

I submit to you that you are suffering from confirmation bias. You see other players using it very effectively so it must be OP, even though you haven't seen all the times they miss and the grenades sail off into the distance because they didn't work the bounce.

Can I complain about the Tonkor because of its overpowering imbalance of risks and rewards, and its impact on others' gameplay, when I have to experience it on a daily basis despite not using it often myself? You bet I can.

I don't think you are in a position to comment on tonkor's risks and rewards considering you don't use it yourself. Especially with flawed metaphors like cooking vs game design.

 

The anecdotes can't cancel each other out if I don't provide the other one, and prompts DE to look at which is accurate when they look into this. Remember the outcome of the thread is not within either of our controls, we just argue our evidence as weight to point DE in the right direction.

Here's the thing though - Tonkor's been out for almost a year now. DE's had plenty of time to acquire use stats. The only possible thing that I can think of that's changed is argon and bladed rounds coming out, and even that's been months. DE's usually quite a bit faster on the nerfs. Especially when something is clearly OP as you keep claiming tonkor is. ;)

My anecdote will, however, resonate with the players reading who do see it all the time, as opposed to you playing with a subset of clanmates who have their own relatively consistent weapon tendencies instead of randoms. For example, if you played with me often, you'd think people used the Brakk reasonably often. However, I've seen one other person toting it in the past... several months? What can I say, it was nerfed but I like it so I use it anyway.

My anecdote will resonate with players who don't though. Who's right? Well, I dunno. I do know that DE's got use stats and we haven't heard a peep about tonkor nerf.

Not going to pretend I have any base for suggesting other reasons your team don't use Tonkors for that, I don't do trials (Clan of two, represent)

Hitting maneuvering nullifier drones is virtually impossible and trial maps are large enough that tonkor's range and travel time are broadly debilitating. That's the reason. This also applies to a number of other missions.  .

Substitute sniper with bow, with other weapons for a similar result. I used a Sniper because it's a more easily explicable comparison. One shot one kill, rather than trying to represent many-shots one-kill from a Soma. Which incidentally is even farther disfavourable; one shot missed adds barely any delay, but one shot hit adds barely any reduction in the opposition at mid to high levels where you don't kill with a single weak LMG-analogue round.

I have to wonder what you're defining as "mid to high" levels considering a soma prime will burst down a given foe in less than a second even in nightmare raids and most level 3 sorties assuming 4xCP meta and proper builds.

I'd say that hitting (once, anywhere) with a Soma/Prime is easier, but doesn't do much in comparison. I'd say that hitting consistently and at peak output goes immensely to the Tonkor though, as its autoheadshots and lack of sustained spray give a better margin than trying to hold a Soma Prime in place for 200 fully-spooled bullets to enemy faces.

That's the thing though, you don't have to hold a Soma Prime in place for the whole magazine except for the highest of the high levels. The highest vanilla content (ie level 3 sorties, NM raids) doesn't need all two hundred bullets to take down any enemy. Not even bombard eximuses.

And then you factor in shred and the way enemies will very frequently line up and, well, tonkor might do a little better at close range but worse at long and suddenly we've got balance.

That's the point of "benefit of hit" - what matters missing one or two grenades when two seconds later you've accomplished what the Soma took one or two hundred well-aimed shots to do?

But it hasn't taken what took soma half or all of its bullets to do. One tonkor shot isn't worth a whole soma mag. I get exaggeration for effect and all, but it's hurting your case here.

Tonkor's primarily elemental too, you know.

Yes, but it's a crit build. Different beasts entirely. You could switch tonkor from blast to all puncture or all impact and it would still be roughly as effective.

Let's look at some Eximi resistances:

Not going to explain too much about this since it's a tangent, but you might want to look into how eximus DR works for future reference. It's not really standard.

You know, because that totally counterweighs the multikilling Tonkor versus two-hits-per-target Ickies.

You're using a melee weapon, and not even one with a lot of reach, and trying to beat a grenade launcher. No S#&$ you're getting outperformed. :\

Melee's biggest downsides are getting to the target and staying alive in close range. I was already at the target and carving through them when Timmy's Tonkor Turd appeared and vaporised the lot. I had the Shadow Step invisibility for safety (and the stealth multiplier, on top of the Blood Rushing crit heaven). By all accounts, I should've been rocking the damage at its apex.. but the Tonkor still won from a safer, easier position. Totes balanced yo.

Dude, melee in this game has always been subpar compared to shooting. This is a longstanding issue that has nothing to do with tonkor. This isn't a tonkor problem, it's a guns can kill at range with significantly higher DPS problem and even blood rush and body count meta is just a bandaid over this fundamental issue. Melee's biggest downsides are getting to the target, staying alive, and dealing with the fact that the newb with his soma he bought off trade chat can kill more effectively at range than basically any melee user.

You cite being outkilled a lot. You don't need to be outkilled or outdamaged to get vexed out of your enjoyment. It's like trying to fight things with a huge-range, efficient Ash around. He's reserved all those red targets, so there's just no point trying to even help kill them.

If you'd prefer the phrase "outplayed", that works too. I've never experienced this thing that you say is so common - tonkors beating me so badly that I demand nerfs. Granted I don't try to do something silly like. say, beat a grenade launcher with a pair of fast but low-reach crit axes when it comes to wiping out large numbers of enemies.

Bear in mind I don't go into Sorties looking to be the damage of the team. I prefer utilitarian and supportive play. But I can use logic to extrapolate to the point of view ofpeople who do, using my experiences from casual Void farming where utility is largely unnecessary as a starting point

.

Someone looking to be the DPS of their team in a sortie is probably not going to be running into issues with tonkor users stealing their thunder because someone who can DPS a sortie should have the skills to outpace someone with a tonkor for kills.

But how else can one prove understanding balance, since you already disregard the evidential factors we've already brought? Sadly, all you bring is "I don't see it", "I don't get outclassed by it" and "I have trouble aiming with it".

Well, they can start by showing an understanding of what makes a game balanced. Which in most cases means not trying to address systemic problems (ie armor scaling, melee v ranged viability) by focusing in on one warframe or weapon as if that will fix anything. Not a whole lot of people in this thread actually doing that tho. You brought up how tonkor's damage scales better than most and this is true but this is a symptom of the real problem - DE's love of ridiculous armor scaling.

I totally understand not wanting to trudge through 32 pages of arguments and counterarguments, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, and the fact that I've had to refine and repeat defenses against the same rhetoric all this time should lend credence to the fact I have something solid backing me up by now. Otherwise I'd be still argued to be bringing falsehoods and fallacy, and if I had been adequately and categorically disproven, I would've conceded and left, or at least as so many before me, I would have descended to ad-hominems or toxic behaviour as a last resort.

Having to repeat the same argument over and over doesn't mean there's any foundation to it at all. That is not a logical conclusion.

So what makes the Tonkor unique? You could argue the 'grenade jump', to which I ask what value this has, being obsolete as of 3 months since the Tonkor's release (with the advent of Parkour 2.0), and whether you've seen my overarching goals for changes (which optionally include retaining the risk-free 'grenade jump' but removing its reward factor by making it concussive, doing no damage but forcing knockdowns on enemies).

Actually the uniqueness is the grenade jump. The value there is that it's fast and a unique option for movement to complement bulletjumping. It's certainly not obsolete; with tonkor you have a whole extra option for mobility - one that you can use in conjunction with bulletjumping and the other parkour 2.0 maneuvers to move even better.

Would self-damage cause the users to not use it in point-blank range (without suffering a drawback for such recklessness)? Would it cause the users to have to be more careful with their aim (functionally reducing firerate/output with this added burden)? Would it cause allies to be more likely to appreciate highly skilled, highly rewarding Tonkor usage because they know the risk that had to be overcome to achieve that (as a product of risk/reward balance)?

The problem of tonkor isn't really its use at point blank though any more than sonicor or simulor has this problem. (They don't. A strong case can be made that the other explosive weapons shouldn't have self damage either for reasons of other players moving in front of your rockets either accidentally or trollishly.) Would it cause users to be more careful with their aim? Yes, but - and I think you'd know this if you actually used tonkor a lot - tonkor users are already careful with their aim because otherwise they miss. Spoiler warning: That aim guide you think is so effective? It's terrible for snap shots, which is what a tonkor user has to rely on if they want to kill with the speed you're complaining about.

Would it cause allies to appreciate skilled tonkor usage? Hahahaha, no. No, it wouldn't. Not at all. Because fundamentally this is an ego thing. "That person is beating me."

Heck, you yourself show this when you complained about trying to beat a tonkor with ichors. "Man timmy with his turd launcher beat my axes! Nerf plox!"

Edited April 16, 2016 by Cpl_Facehugger
I hate these forums' formatting. :(

[cx-dave]

1 hour ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Dude, melee in this game has always been subpar compared to shooting. This is a longstanding issue that has nothing to do with tonkor. This isn't a tonkor problem, it's a guns can kill at range with significantly higher DPS problem and even blood rush and body count meta is just a bandaid over this fundamental issue. Melee's biggest downsides are getting to the target, staying alive, and dealing with the fact that the newb with his soma he bought off trade chat can kill more effectively at range than basically any melee user.

The guy you're referring to just goes permanently invisible with Ivara. Then, puts everything to sleep and Sheevs everything (Sheev can be rank 0 + stance + Covert Lethality). No risk vs reward whatsoever, until quick Energy draining Eximus show up at around lvl 350. 

[arch111]

It's so surreal. I JUST built the thing, looking for a weapon to use in T3. I saw people suggeating trying the Tonkor.

Then I came here.

I don't get it. So far the weapon hardly is either easy or op.

[Magneu]

34 minutes ago, arch111 said:

It's so surreal. I JUST built the thing, looking for a weapon to use in T3. I saw people suggeating trying the Tonkor.

Then I came here.

I don't get it. So far the weapon hardly is either easy or op.

Serration, Split Chamber, 2x 90% elementals, Point Strike, Vital Sense, Argon Scope, Bladed rounds (or sub either of the two last ones for Heavy Caliber, between rank 7 and 10).

Enjoy the strongest single target DPS in the game applied in an AOE, obtained at MR5. If that's not broken and OP, IDK what is.

Getting kind of tired of posting in this thread, as people continuously strawman and ignore arguments, with ad hominem flying everywhere; to be perfectly honest, the anti- Tonkor-nerf camp is by far the worst offender of this. I've made snide remarks, even the venerable EDYinnit is starting to get a little abrasive (serious kudos to you man, for sticking around), but nowhere near the blatant insults from the other side, with zero contribution to the discussion, just a constant diatribe against us (thank you to those in the anti-Tonkor-nerf camp who engage in meaningful debate to promote the discussion; that's how progress is made, and helps DE make a player-assisted decision). To those who are yelling just to fill space...I claim the Fifth.

I would love if DE would release, or even just look at, usage statistics. That would hopefully put an end to the eternal back and forth. Granted, my views are skewed by, well, my views, but, objectively, my statement above about DPS is completely true. Refer back to my post a page or two ago with the linked videos to understand why the Tonkor is a horrible idea in its current state, or just search "Extra Credits Power Creep" and watch the Hearthstone videos (don't just dismiss them like a certain someone).

It's turned into formal logic and semantics because when voicing opinions, both sides are getting frustrated; that's just the nature of human opinion. Where it gets really annoying though, is when a factual, logical, fully explained argument is laid out and the opposition resorts to name-calling and ignoring the argument.

However, to fully give up means giving in to what I believe is an unbalanced, toxicity promoting (game-health-wise) piece of equipment that tends to create sub-par players that rely on it to accomplish anything high-level, while also detracting for other's games (the severity of which can be argued with anecdotes). For this reason, I'll still be popping in from time to time to either take down fallacious arguments, or engage in meaningful discussion.

 

 

Speaking of which, does anyone remember the idea Irorone had a looong time ago (with some additions by me), where the Tonkor kept 80-90% of its damage (because let's face it; highest in game DPS in an AOE is too much), scaled self-damage to 300-500 flat damage to remove the quite silly point-blank aspect of it (if you love point-blanking, get a shotgun), and had its blast mechanic changed to be a 90-180 degree, 5-8 meter shaped blast? Explosion direction would be dictated simply by momentum of the grenade (aka, can be facing any direction and still deliver charge in the intended direction). A change like this would keep the viability of the Tonkor at top-tier, increase the (low) skill cap, and give it a unique identity to other launchers. With this, modify other launchers to taste, fix AOE headshot crits, and increase the mastery to 10 or 12.

Boom. Fun, effective, unique weapon.

[cx-dave]

17 minutes ago, Magneu said:

Speaking of which, does anyone remember the idea Irorone had a looong time ago (with some additions by me), where the Tonkor kept 80-90% of its damage (because let's face it; highest in game DPS in an AOE is too much), scaled self-damage to 300-500 flat damage to remove the quite silly point-blank aspect of it (if you love point-blanking, get a shotgun), and had its blast mechanic changed to be a 90-180 degree, 5-8 meter shaped blast? Explosion direction would be dictated simply by momentum of the grenade (aka, can be facing any direction and still deliver charge in the intended direction). A change like this would keep the viability of the Tonkor at top-tier, increase the (low) skill cap, and give it a unique identity to other launchers. With this, modify other launchers to taste, fix AOE headshot crits, and increase the mastery to 10 or 12.

Sounds fun. I'll just use a Bless Trin to get rid of that pesky self-damage. Add a Banshee, Nova, Rhino Roar to that and you got a nice whatever 30x damage amp. lol

[arch111]

On 2016-3-13 at 11:54 PM, Lokime said:

Well, here's my two cents. 

1. There's no point of nerfing everything we consider OP, when there's tons of other weapons you can clearly use (If you feel hardcore/Tryhard enough).

2. Buff every other weapon, and make the enemies more challenging, not in the bullet-sponge way they currently do for high level enemies, but maybe in tactics and team work. 

3. Tonkor is end-game weapon, it is supposed to be useful against high leveled enemies. 

 

Changing the gun seem important for alot of you for "reality and logic" reasons,  right?

But I have the impression that Tonkor is supposed to be High Leveled content,  where you actually really NEED this kind of damage.

I see most people zapping with simulors and Excalibur/Nova/Mirage anyway. That to me is the real End Gear, I am so far removed from it that it's laughable.

I used to use Penta but I find it too weak and useless against high leveled foes.

Who uses Penta anymore? If at all.

[TheLexiConArtist]

Thanks for fixing those quote pyramids. Tutankhamun was getting jealous. (The autoformatting is awfully overzealous.)

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Er, what? It has bouncy, arcing grenades with a "aim guide" that's of dubious usefulness. I'm legit trying to think of harder guns to aim here and I'm coming up short. Uh... Bows dependent on headshots? Maybe? Castana type explosive throwing knives? What weapon are you thinking of that's harder to aim than tonkor?

With or without Heavy Cal involved? The fact that it's a staple speaks volumes about how little the accuracy actually is harmed (or matters at all, per IceColdHawk's example up there).

Note that I said for peak effect. So, all weapons need their headshots and matching the crowdkilling potential through punch-through requires not only a line of enemies, but an angle where the punch-through goes through all the heads of those targets (not easy between the different unit types that could comprise that line). The Tonkor has one arcing grenade that needs to hit one target anywhere to deal its full damage in the whole area. Bows are a good start for comparison, where the projectile travel and slight arc are going to make it a lot more difficult to hit a moving and much smaller target of the headshot. Add in the punch-through for not being inferior through single target damage and good luck getting that headshot chain anywhere but Void Defense.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

That doesn't mesh well with how spawn points on most tilesets are set up. It kinda works like that for certain defense tilesets (ODD especially), but even that's kind of arguable due to range - no grenade launcher is going to be rapidly taking down infested charging from both ramps at the same time unless you let them get close to the pod. Terrain is very rarely set up such that you can fire off a tonkor, turn, then fire off your second grenade at a second squad faster than someone with a penta can detonate and do the same while still retaining accuracy.

As compared to what tiles that don't offer you the possibility of being flanked on a regular basis outside of Extermination? A locker room? Even a lateral spread of enemies that sprawls wider than a single grenade blast radius gives you that scenario too. All that doesn't even address the easymode option of going to cuddle the enemies while you obliterate them on an atomic level with an infinitesimal miss chance instead.

If a Penta is comparable, why aren't they used comparably often?

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Yes? Okay? Uh, yes, tonkor is indeed the best explosive for close encounters. That's not really in question either. :\

Yes, it is in fact the only option for close encounter explosive. Which is not a niche, it is a categorical cheat. If it were the niche, then the reward would be lesser, not greater, to offset the lack of risk. We go to balance again.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

I don't really agree with the notion that it's "kill everything for free" weapon. Its grenades are easily the hardest to hit with of any explosive, and as I said I tend to use tonkor for amusement instead of effectiveness precisely because it's not nearly so reliable as many other guns.

I also don't really agree with your "fact" that it has a low skill floor due to its aim guide and lack of self damage. The aim guide doesn't work all that well in combat (which you'd know if you actually used tonkor a lot), and the grenadejumping that happens when you fire a tonkor danger close will completely ruin your aim.

Come back to me when you can hit those same groups reliably with a Heavy Cal Ogris, or hell, even accumulate the full damage of (charged) Angstrum or the entirety of a Kulstar shot's clusters onto a similar controlled area without putting yourself in harm's way to do so. You may use Firestorm to give the Ogris something approaching a reasonably comparable blast radius to what the Tonkor and Pentas have.

I use the Tonkor when it comes up in the Loadout Randomiser, which I use relatively often. When I'm using it, I have to contend with a typically under-par loadout: poor or vulnerable warframes, weapons that all lack good mods for the most part. So, because I don't have the capacity to stuff all the essentials into the Tonkor (Serration, Split Chamber, Point Strike, Vital Sense) due to a lack of Catalyst, I cannot afford inaccuracy and depending on the mission being run, may even have to land two or possibly even three grenades for a kill (Split Chamber helps, of course).

Despite having to be much more evasive, enemies being dangerous due to a vulnerable frame being selected (and lack of ability spam because why random if you're not going to use the weapons it gives you), and the need to land multiple shots, I have little issue rolling through these missions with a Tonkor. I may not speak for all people, but I seem to be just fine with its accuracy and resulting output despite my lack of familiarity. What's their excuse?

 

Also, what relevance does a 'ruined aim' hold with a danger-close explosion? Those enemies are dead. If anything, it gives you a better view of what else there is to go for, that's not the enemies in your general vicinity which have all just died.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

I'm kind of addressing the only remotely objective point you have here. The DPS is vaguely objective if you squint at it, it's just not really the whole story or even a large part of the story. All your other stuff is basically just unfalsifiable subjective stuff that I can't do more than disagree with and point out how it doesn't fit my experience at all.

No, the DPS is not the whole story. But it is relevant. Making autoheadshots actually fixed, or even just disqualifying explosions from the 'headcrit' bonus would go a long way to bring the reward down to the point where combined with the riskless aspect it makes it the best by some margins rather than by leagues.

Bring down the reward to justify the lack of risk, or bring up the risk to justify the immense reward. Current stats are incomparable to almost anything else.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Well, a lot of that is extremely subjective. Like, massively so. The DPS comparison is the only remotely objective thing to attack, so yeah I'm attacking it. 

I mean, how is someone supposed to falsify a claim that it has harmful effects on the rest of the squad's gameplay? It's basically impossible without anecdotes and you're S#&$ting the bed every time one of those comes up. Lack of inherent risk? A weapon with a tiny magazine that requires good aim isn't inherently risky now?

See, you've inadvertantly landed the right conclusion here: It is impossible to say that it can't adversely affect squadmates after the evidence (properties of the weapon) we have available. The arguments then become:

Is it likely that this outcome can occur? Yes, because of the overpowering rewards that any present risks have been shown to inadequately offset, and the resulting likelihood of having the source of the problem enter a game (accessibility and easy-enough use that it is rapidly and very frequently taken up by those to whom it is available).

Is it acceptable for this outcome to occur? Many have argued yes, because they find it fun and the fact that solo/manual matchmaking exists. However, I argue that those are fallacious claims and prior evidence defeats them, for example, Limbos are no longer able to inescapably Banish other players despite those players having the capacity to solo/private or use Limbo themselves to avoid this negative effect.

So, if it can, is likely to, and is unacceptable in causing these effects, it needs to be changed. Exactly how is up for debate. Appropriate self-damage (optionally with nondamaging altfire grenade jumps) is a start.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Would we? That presumes that the meta is perfect and everyone has a perfect understanding of it. That seems fairly unlikely. The current vile accel corrosive critspam of the synoid simulor meta didn't emerge on day 1 - when synoid simulor was released the meta considered it utter garbage. Then the meta shifted as people tested it out. They tested their builds in gameplay. Only then did the meta put synoid simulor in the top tier. The theorycrafting came later to confirm what gameplay experience said. 

There's also the matter of accessibility. Tonkor is considerably more accessible to the masses than secura penta given the relative costs of the weapons. MR4, argon, cryo vs MR12 and 125k rep from a rank 5 perrinbro. That's another factor that skews things but has nothing to do with how "OP" a weapon is.

Mind you, I wouldn't really consider spenta a top tier weapon myself. I simply said the utility of a room-encompassing rad proc is useful, enough that someone could plausibly make the case that it belongs in the top tier.

The meta need not be understood when the evidence is there. Oh look, someone with a Tonkor just joined. Oh look, they kill massive groups instantly while I'm picking off individuals or whittling the group down over time. Oh hey, they don't even have to avoid the explosion either. Maybe I should get me one of those.

A regular Penta has few shortcomings compared to the Secura version. Lacking a proc and 25 base damage shouldn't offset the core functionality. If it were so much easier to wield to functional effect than a Tonkor is, little reason to not see even that (more accessible) version instead of SYSIM - TONKOR - TONKOR. Combine the entire usage of the two Pentas and the Ogris and you likely wouldn't scratch the surface of the usage of the Tonkor. No, I don't have the metrics to prove it, but there's something to be said when you see one mutliple times daily and the others... almost never.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

You haven't established it's a top tier of its own weapon, at least not with me. Maybe this is in one of those twenty pages I didn't read. If so I apologize, but I don't think it unfair to ask you to summarize if you have.

Forgive my hyperbole. Buffing is not the answer to power outlier(s). Take a good close shave with Occam's Razor, as reducing the few does the exact same thing as buffing the many in terms of increasing the variety and viability of other options. Less power creep, less testing load, less risk of side-effects.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Difficulty delivering that damage to targets, poor handling due to low magazine, low effective range due to the arcing behavior of its shots and travel time.

Meanwhile, an assault rifle (ie soma/boltor prime) with shred is gunning down groups in about as much time at greater range unless we're talking the highest levels of content we have, where armor scaling is such that everything is weighted towards damage. (Which is a problem DE's working on fixing and which doesn't fall on tonkor exclusively, which means it's a systemic problem for which tonkor is at worst only a symptom.) And even then, soma and boltor prime are both very respectable weapons even in sorties and raids, and I'd argue that a lot of warfarm map design is such that you'll find a use for these weapons even when tonkor's nailing whole groups due to their significantly greater range. Tonkor's good for close in stuff but pants at range, and that matters a lot more often than it seems like it would in Warframe.

Your argument here is identical to ones I've seen leveled against both ogris and penta in the past. "These weapons do more damage than a single target weapon and does that damage in full to entire groups!" That is almost word for word what I've seen from people just like you. I don't think you're any more correct than they were then. I've been at this anti-nerf thing for a long time now. The arguments to nerf never change, just the weapons they apply to.

Debatable, partial picture (already addressed magazine/reload downtime issues), rarely low enough to actually matter (and ignorable due to free usage at closer ranges).

How much power of a 19.5 firerate Soma Prime can you put reliably into erratically moving heads at 50m out? Skill only counts for a part of it. Unpredictable movement and latency hamper the effort.

How much power of any Tonkor hit at any range goes into heads? All of it.

 

I wouldn't have as much problem with the Tonkor if it just had appropriate risk. Those arguments you mention against the Ogris and Penta, if limited to what you say, those fail to acknowledge the self-damage risk factors (and the Ogris being horrible for rate of fire/AOE). The arguments made against the Soma probably addressed its similar lacking categorical drawback - it has all the DPS and mag size of a LMG-type weapon but without the recoil and inaccuracy they're known for. Not that I partook in either.

 

Are the Soma and Boltor Primes still solid weapons? Are a lot of things still solid? Sure they are. Do they compete with the top-tier special snowflakes? Not really, their drawbacks are more relevant or their damage begins to fall off too soon.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

I wouldn't call it three or four. Let's see. Off the top of my head for top tier guns, we've got:

Synoid Simulor. Soma Prime. Boltor Prime. Amprex. Tonkor. Hek. (Count vaykor hek as the same even though it's another gun.) Tigris. (Same.) Vaykor Marelok. Dread. Rakta Cernos... Need I go on? I'm sure I can think of some more. These are all still top tier in the meta. We've also got edge cases like status build burston prime w/gilded truth, opticor, paris prime, sonicor, and a few others.

These guns aren't all perfectly equal, but I've never seen nor heard of anyone getting denigrated for taking any of these into high level content. Be honest now, have you? If I go on council chat right now and ask "hey guys, is Soma Prime in the top tier", do you really truly think they won't tell me yes? There might be some spirited debate, but for a gun to be OP it kind of can't involve spirited debate.

I suppose that depends on how tightly you define 'tiers', you see. Subjectivity. Most of those weapons have very big drawbacks that aren't equated by any drawbacks of the others.

Take the Amprex: It's limited by range (more so than a Tonkor is). Its AOE is of a lesser value than the direct damage. It must be consistently aimed during damage, which is dealt over time (the Tonkor aims once and deals fatal damage instantly when that one shot connects). Its ammo economy is horrendous. You are essentially forced to sacrifice multiplie mod slots to offset these. A punch-through mod allows multi-chaining to offset the lesser AOE. Ammo Mutation is practically mandated. Range may only be modded for (not just "look up a little more"). What do you have left of your 8 slots after all these essentials? Serration, Split Chamber, Point Strike, Vital Sense, Ammo Mutation, Shred. You can fit, say, Heavy Cal and a Toxic elemental to go Corrosive. Such choice. You lost two potential straight damage slots to combat drawbacks and antisynergistic fire-rate on an already awful economy weapon.

Many others have similar details. Bows take time to draw, have difficulty hitting heads, natural punch-through is limited due to projectile velocity and motion vector shenanigans that tend to occur when punching through things. Rifles take time to add up the damage to a kill as levels increase. An Ignis has great AOE with its cone and punch-through once mods are again sacrificed to provide it with distance and width, but suffers damage falloff and only deals damage over-time, putting the user in potential danger until the damage adds up to a kill, because not everything can be efficiently handled from behind cover with that punch-through.

You might not be called out on taking them to a Sortie, but that doesn't mean they're actually strongly competitive in that context.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Well, I'd define a good balance team as one who tests their changes extensively in an environment as close to real gameplay as possible before deploying them, precisely because on paper effectiveness can diverge completely from real world effectiveness? Have you ever heard the phrase "paper tiger"? It's the same general idea. Trying to render hugely complex situations down to simple mathematical DPS calculations is flatly dumb.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

That's nice and all, bro, but "hard logic" and "mathematics" doesn't really have all that much place in a massively complex emergent system like a video game of this nature where actual effectiveness is dependent on huge numbers of factors that "hard logic" and "mathematics" don't account for. Go on, show me an algorithm that takes into account all relevant factors in a weapon's ingame effectiveness in warframe. (That's a rhetorical request - I know you can't.) Your whining to me about how you want "hard logic" and "mathematics" is foolish because my core point is that the situation as it stands is massively more complex than you're giving credence to and working out an algorithm to account for everything from map design to weapon stats (all stats, accuracy, DPS, ammo efficiency, etc etc etc) is the kind of math work that would get you a doctorate.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you don't have a degree in game design with a supercomputer and genius coding skills able to come up with a system that exhaustively analyzes this. So for the rest of us, all on paper theorycrafting does is provide a starting point for thinking about the situation. Then you test it. And you test it a lot. In as many situations as you can to determine whether a gun really is so powerful that it renders all other weapons obsolete.

That's how you do balance. You don't play with it in the simulacrum for a few times, see someone outplaying you with it a few times, and then say it's massively OP.

I say this because DE isn't really the best balancing team. They nerf early without much testing and then need to rework their nerfs later because they overnerfed. They have a habit of overnerfing things and taking many months or even years buffing them to usability, if they ever do. Synoid gammacor comes to mind immediately. At one point it was the meta in a way that tonkor wishes it could be. We're talking double the DPS of everything else except brakk (which had been nerfed long before), long range, ammo efficiency, pinpoint accuracy... It still had flaws, but overall there were very few hips that went without a synoid gammacor clamped to them. But then DE nerfed it. Good show. Except rather than gently toning it down they took a ripkas to it. No, really they took two ripkas to it. And it still hasn't been fixed. When was the last time you saw a synoid gammacor in the wild?

How about Acrid? Acrid in its day was the king of all guns. Its toxin damage ignored armor and stacked infinitely and proc'd automatically, making it the go to choice for killing enemies in damage 1.0. Then d2.0 hit and well, it's not exactly a common sight these days, is it?

Acrid or Synoid Gammacor is the gold standard for OP guns. A gun so powerful that the meta unanimously agrees to crown it best gun. Very little argument is had on a gun that's truly OP. There's no "well, it competes with [this other gun]" type stuff. And this is borne out by the use stats, which DE then uses to nerf it. Usually rapidly.

But here? I'm seeing the exact same stuff that people said about boltor and soma. Both somas, even. "This gun is too powerful! It makes killing to easy! I'm having my fun ruined by this guy with his Soma, Boltor Prime, Soma Prime, Amprex, etc etc etc."

Here's a chunky one to address. First off, no, I haven't heard that 'paper tiger' phrase. Enlighten me.

As lovely as your argument through verbosity is, the fact is that these hardproven factors are factors. Whether or not they are outweighed by factors we cannot hard-prove (those pesky usage metrics again, for one instance) is not for you to assert.

The risk of self-damage is hard-provable to be incomparable (flat vs. scaling). The reward is hard-provable to be much larger (autoheadcrits go!). The risk of a small mag and frequent reloading is hard-provable to still insufficiently provide a drawback (before autoheadcrits and the allowance of better mods, sustained DPS is already better than the Ogris / very marginally less than a Secura Penta). Ease of use is not hard-provable, but can be argued to a considerable point with logic. Aiming difficulties are not hard-provable, but can be proven to be at least partially mitigated because of the aim guide 'starting point' for the user's judgements to work from.

 

As it happens, I see SyGams moderately frequently. Turns out that the nerf wasn't enough to turn people off that genuinely like it, and realised that oh, it's still pretty good, I just lost out on ammo economy overall so Mutation has to go in now. Not anywhere near as often as I see the Sonicor though, which is basically the Secondary Slot Tonkor in terms of function for accessibility and easy use. MR2, literally can be acquired before you finish levelling your starter set. Nonsense.

The Acrid lost out on the advent of Damage 2.0, but so did my Twin Gremlins that were absolutely beastly because they ignored armour too. You can't fairly compare pre- and post-systematic rework.

 

I was pretty upset with the Soma too, after the potato I put in my basic Gorgon back in the day, because I love my LMGs. Even the special-edition Gorgons can't compare to a regular Soma because crit master race and better handling, which is frankly criminal. The Supra can, but only after a heavy buff, and falls short when using the Soma Prime and/or including headshots (headcrits). But those problems all pale in comparison to the current power outliers which are so much more anomalous.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Here's the thing: Your point here is wrong by definition unless the entire top tier is OP. If the top tier is OP that's one thing. If a gun is only one of many in its tier, it's not OP - otherwise it'd be in its own tier. That's what top tier means. The top.

Tonkor is hardly alone in its tier.

Did it/they significantly improve over the previous uppermost data points available? (yes)

Is there any justifiable reason for the scale of this improvement (progression argument, difficulty of acquisition)? (no)

It's perfectly possibly for more than one thing to be OP. Two anomalous results don't define a curve in a data set of hundreds.

Currently, I'd say top-tier is occupied by the SySim and Tonkor, shortly followed by the Power Shotguns and likely the Sonicor, with all other previous top-tiers having fallen down to a 'very good, but not the best' tier, including your Soma and Boltor Primes, Dreads, Amprexes, etc.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Many times better in rewarding effects? Reduce risks? Ehhhhhh. I've got my doubts about this. The trouble you're running into here is that basically the only vaguely objective thing you've got is DPS calcs. But I'm disputing those because they're misleading at best on account of how many factors go into a weapon's balance in gameplay so in reality you have basically nothing.

See previous for hardprovable factors. Reduced risk is definitely objective. I'm getting tired of writing this post but I must be diligent.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Mediocre at best? What the hek. What. Are you serious? Something that's viable for literally all content in the game is mediocre at best? What crazy definition are you operating off here for mediocre?

Also, boltor and soma prime have received nerf threads en masse (using the exact same arguments you're using now even) since forever. They still receive nerf threads on occasion. But these nerf threads have always been dumb because when DE actually released the numbers boltor prime wasn't outcompeting the other weapons, for example. When they polled the community they found that overwhelmingly the community didn't feel boltor prime was OP.  

Considering tonkor has been out for nearly a year now, I strongly suspect this is another case of tonkor not being as overbearing as you say. I mean, synoid gammacor got meganerfed after much less time. Excal had syndicate mods removed from exalted blade within, what, weeks? Hydroid's pilfering tentacles got nerfed within weeks of people realizing you could quadruple loot via power strength stacking? Or was that days?

Those genuinely are not my words. Other players have provided that definition, some directly and some through simple inference, and it really goes to show how much better the current top-tier really are that it could ever be entertained as a thought.

While I'm biased (as previously mentioned) about the Soma, I always questioned the Boltor being termed OP. It while fully modded can be defeated by a Soma Prime with a mod slot down for Ammo Mutation or something.

Argument by inertia is also not valid. How many times I've seen in patch notes, "fixed a long-standing issue with X" where 'long standing' is in the order of months to years where applicable. Whether it's a bug or imbalance, the issue remains an issue no matter how long it's been in effect. Also relevant: the Tonkor somewhat-recently got the capacity to be even more powerful because it's a Crit weapon and those delicious Shadow Debt mods work fantastically on a crit weapon with that instant killing and autoheadshotting.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Really? That sounds fishy. People were complaining about it a lot and I noticed a rather large drop in my penta and tonkor DPS when the change hit. Did DE break it again?

If indeed it is as you say, then it sounds like a bug that should be fixed. Considering the patch notes explicitly said headshot damage was removed unless actually hitting the head. That wouldn't be a nerf though, just a bugfix.

Autoheadshot and headcrit: Ancient and Runner Infested (crawlers and moa unsure; ospreys and chargers no autoheadshot), Grineer humanoids (not rollers, drones).

Autoheadshots without headcrits: Corpus humanoids (not Bursa, Ospreys, and I am unsure about Moas)

I'll post the Orange Mist Screenshot again (several Volatile Runners being hit by a naked Tonkor for autoheadshots and a full headcrit) if you wish.

That fix alone would bring the Pentas much better comparable at least, if they regained the 'airbursting' mechanic to allow it reliable headshot damage through skill.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

A weapon can be popular for reasons other than being awesome. And indeed, players can find the drawbacks sufficiently hindering but choose to use it for a variety of reasons. Remember the goal isn't "this gun is so hard to use that it sucks", the goal is "this gun is hard enough to use to balance its advantages in such a fashion that it's competitive with other weapons in its tier." 

Seriously, that logic of yours up there is incorrect. If A then B does not automatically mean the reverse.

People largely seek to be effective.

Most people do not possess great skill while unfamiliar with the game, some will not achieve this even after great familiarity.

If it's hard to use the Tonkor effectively without great skill, then it would not be often used due to the overwhelming proportion of less-than-stellar players who would not be effective as a result.

 

It's more of an "If A then B; some A, therefore some B" situation. Not everyone would stop using the Tonkor due to difficulty-related ineffectiveness, but most people, who seek only effectiveness, would. It would still be less prevalent and not generally in the hands of players from MR 6 onwards, who would prefer a stabler, more reliable weapon.

Either it's not as difficult as you make it out, or it's so disproprotionately rewarding that its difficulty is providing an insufficient skill floor in limiting effectiveness.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Except in the process of making that function mildly more reliable it also vastly reduces TTK so nobody would actually use it. That it also reduces damage is just icing on the cake, the sheer reduction in kill speed due to changed mechanics means that nobody actually uses sticky grenades on their tonkor. There's a reason why I brought up the fire resist mod. It's a niche mod that reduces general effectiveness so it's not part of the meta. So too is sticky explosives.

I mean, enemies with shield bubbles are a major concern. Three out of four major factions have them. Two of those factions have tons of them, including the horror that is the arctic nullifier eximus. You very likely won't go through a grineer, corpus, or T3+ void mission without running into some. You might not like it, but this is something that has to be taken into account as a balancing point given how integral bubble shields are to enemy force composition in this sort of content. It's hardly cherry picking to bring up bubbles and tonkor's ineffectiveness against them when most missions will involve you encountering them and when the most challenging missions tend to involve a ton of them.

Meanwhile your suggestion to fix this via sticky grenades sharply reduces Tonkor's effectiveness in general, so it's no solution at all. I can have a gun that kills effectively or one that is sticky but takes two to three seconds after impact to do anything in a game as fast paced as warframe? Come on now.

Well, one difference is that tonkor's a crit weapon and bubble shields can't be critted. Meanwhile other explosives can aim for the ground to damage the bubble with their full effect and in some cases can even kill the null through the shield through AOE, though I think DE might have reduced the frequency of that.

Yeah bows and snipers (and shotguns and many pistols and...) have problems with null bubbles, but at the time we weren't discussing bows etc, we were discussing explosives.

Yes? That's cool and all. You have this habit of saying obvious things that aren't really in contention though. Yeah you can go into a null bubble with tonkor and kill whereas with a penta you can't (but also don't have to sometimes), but that in no way changes the fact that a lot of the time that option isn't available for a variety of reasons.

This is the post that never ends. It goes on and on my friends.

I'm pretty sure 'explosions kill the Nullifier through their bubble' has long since been fixed. Many-target Shield Polarises sometimes circumvent it by having enough points of explosion to beat the bubble down and take out the unit, but that's a bit of a unique case.

So, you say the Tonkor has a specific drawback against a type of enemy (shield globe units) compared to other explosives, but the Tonkor naturally has a specific advantage against that same enemy type compared to other explosives (the ability to go in and blow them up without killing yourself), even without modding to account for it.

Another drawback with pre-existing mitigations. Onwards!

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

Because halfway decent tonkor players know how to use the bounce to hit targets, even ones outside their normal range or around cover? Because the bounce is actually both a strength and a weakness for tonkor? This sort of knowledge is why I'm so dismissive of your points, because you don't really understand the handling of a tonkor so how can you possibly comment on it in an informed fashion? Every time I see you say that it's "easy" because of the aim guide I have to laugh.

I'm far from a tonkor master but I know there is an art to using it effectively. It's a lot harder than you're making it out to be.

I submit to you that you are suffering from confirmation bias. You see other players using it very effectively so it must be OP, even though you haven't seen all the times they miss and the grenades sail off into the distance because they didn't work the bounce.

You could fit T.Velocity as a core mod on all your Tonkor builds and learn to utilise the new arc, velocity and bounce trajectories in your favour. You have that option while still retaining outrageously improved damage over alternatives because autoheadcrits.

Tu quoque: you see other players using it ineffectively so it must not be OP, even though you haven't seen all the times they hit groups other players are engaged with, while flinging themselves around at the maximum speed Parkour 2.0 has to offer.

58 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

I don't think you are in a position to comment on tonkor's risks and rewards considering you don't use it yourself. Especially with flawed metaphors like cooking vs game design.

Game design? The argument was that I can't comment on something I don't use. Explain how the "I'm not a professional cook but I can criticise food provided by one that I eat" metaphor is in any way flawed. I don't use it, but I can criticise it based on my frequent experiences with it in others' hands (and my own limited experience which supports those third-party outcomes).

 

 

And I just lost the rest of my answers because I dared to press Ctrl-Z and it irrecoverably undid the latter part of my responses. Nope, I'm not redoing them, it's already been way too long. 

suffice to say I got past the stupid strawman attack on my Ichor example (>100x accumulated damage multiplier on a single target from Ichors still outperformed before AOE by the Tonkor in question) and shot everything down really sensibly but damn I'm tired.

[LOKIME]

5 hours ago, arch111 said:

Changing the gun seem important for alot of you for "reality and logic" reasons,  right?

But I have the impression that Tonkor is supposed to be High Leveled content,  where you actually really NEED this kind of damage.

I see most people zapping with simulors and Excalibur/Nova/Mirage anyway. That to me is the real End Gear, I am so far removed from it that it's laughable.

I used to use Penta but I find it too weak and useless against high leveled foes.

Who uses Penta anymore? If at all.

uhm, yeah, i didn't really asked for tonkor changed here. 

[NKDG]

Alright, I'm back to hopefully dumb down the wall of texts to keep all the bystanders sane. I've (not so carefully) read through EDYinnit and Magneus' posts (the plz nerf side that I generally agree with, in order to prevent a lot of my own personal bias from diluting the other side's point) to try to find a summarizing reason to nerf the tonkor. So this is what I found and I'm prolly even projecting a bit, but hey, I tried:

 

The tonkor is, at the very least, pushing the boundaries of op (something we can all agree on hopefully). It's like a child who was told "no" going back and, again at the very LEAST, going very close outta spite. If DE lets this weapon be, at the very least, pushing the boundaries of op, what's going to block the brunt of powercreep? It needs to be made an example, but not as harshly as the gammacor and acrid(although I believe acrid really wasn't nerfed so much as it transitioned horribly and just didn't fit the new system) and flux rifle and gorgon. It needs a slap on the wrist nerf or a mechanical change to preserve the balance of the game. 

 

I prolly projected my ideas a ton, and this prolly will have no effect on the text walls, but one can hope... I've said my peace yet another time, so, again, peace. 

[arch111]

1 hour ago, Lokime said:

uhm, yeah, i didn't really asked for tonkor changed here. 

Sorry if it looked like I think you do. 

I quoted YOU because you made alot of sense and I agree with you.

[LOKIME]

18 minutes ago, arch111 said:

Sorry if it looked like I think you do. 

I quoted YOU because you made alot of sense and I agree with you.

Oh. Ok, I thought you miss clicked, but now i know.

[Magneu]

3 hours ago, NKDG said:

Alright, I'm back to hopefully dumb down the wall of texts to keep all the bystanders sane. I've (not so carefully) read through EDYinnit and Magneus' posts (the plz nerf side that I generally agree with, in order to prevent a lot of my own personal bias from diluting the other side's point) to try to find a summarizing reason to nerf the tonkor. So this is what I found and I'm prolly even projecting a bit, but hey, I tried:

 

The tonkor is, at the very least, pushing the boundaries of op (something we can all agree on hopefully). It's like a child who was told "no" going back and, again at the very LEAST, going very close outta spite. If DE lets this weapon be, at the very least, pushing the boundaries of op, what's going to block the brunt of powercreep? It needs to be made an example, but not as harshly as the gammacor and acrid(although I believe acrid really wasn't nerfed so much as it transitioned horribly and just didn't fit the new system) and flux rifle and gorgon. It needs a slap on the wrist nerf or a mechanical change to preserve the balance of the game. 

 

I prolly projected my ideas a ton, and this prolly will have no effect on the text walls, but one can hope... I've said my peace yet another time, so, again, peace. 

Nah, you just about got it. Powercreep happens over time, yes; accelerating it massively through outliers like the Tonkor is a really bad idea.

Again, I urge people to watch Extra Credit's Power Creep videos. Very enlightening, and directly applicable to Warframe.

You can throw in an argument for consistency like EDYinnit (all explosives should self-damage), argument of comparison (Tonkor is better than all explosives/better than mostly every other weapon), and a slightly more shaky argument of affect (Tonkor use negatively affects my gameplay), but I'm mainly sticking with game balance and powercreep. Powercreep has ruined many a game before; it would be a shame if it started in Warframe with the Tonkor.

[cx-dave]

Common! The Tonkor is fun. Just watch how that Boiler blows it out of the back of his arse.

[IceColdHawk]

Please...

1 hour ago, cx-dave said:

Common! The Tonkor is fun. Just watch how that Boiler blows it out of the back of his arse.

You call that a hit?

That's a hit.

[TheBrsrkr]

1 hour ago, IceColdHawk said:

Please...

You call that a hit?

That's a hit.

2366689

2366689

23 666 89

Taking the numbers from both sides

8-2=6

9-3=6

89-23=66

Of the seven hits, all the numbers with a 6 have a 6 somewhere in every position but the 6th number

Tonkor is loominarty confirmed

Edited April 16, 2016 by TheBrsrkr

[Hayabusa97]

The only flaws regarding the Tonkor that are listed on the wiki can be shortened to the following

• Poor accuracy (won't matter with all the AOE damage, especially with Firestorm on)
• Ammo is rare (Sniper ammo drop mods can solve that)
• Self Damage (Capped at 50 damage so irrelevant)

Overall, you have a fast firing grenade launcher that can function as a room cleaner, has obnoxious crit stats (higher crit chance than the Soma Prime at the cost of a slightly lower, but still high crit multiplier of 2.5), it can be modded to potentially deal out Red crits (or around 4x damage without crit damage mods), and generally has too little a risk for how much of a reward there is.

 

Compared to the Penta and the Torid, The Tonkor has less damage, less accuracy, faster fire rate, a much higher crit chance, higher crit damage, lower proc chance, smaller mag, and a faster reload.

It's amazing how having so much crit damage and a very high crit chance can make it outstrip its Corpus and Infested equivalents despite a faster fire rate and a faster reload being the only other advantages it has over said equivalents.

[RealPandemonium]

8 hours ago, Magneu said:

Powercreep has ruined many a game before; it would be a shame if it started in Warframe with the Tonkor.

Hell, from my perspective the powercreep started in 2014.  Damage 2.0 was designed with 50-60 as the high-end levels for enemies; warframe health/shield values, enemy scaling coefficients, damage type modifiers, and, orignally, weapon stats were all tailored to that model.  What we have now has spiraled far out of proportion from that original scheme, propped up by bandaids like weapon powercreep and powerspam with almost totally unregulated Corrupted mods.

[cx-dave]

11 hours ago, Hayabusa97 said:

Overall, you have a fast firing grenade launcher that can function as a room cleaner, has obnoxious crit stats (higher crit chance than the Soma Prime at the cost of a slightly lower, but still high crit multiplier of 2.5), it can be modded to potentially deal out Red crits (or around 4x damage without crit damage mods), and generally has too little a risk for how much of a reward there is.

Complete 1000 Cryotic (legit way) in today's Sortie 3 solo with Tonkor. Then, come here and claim it's still OP.

[TheLexiConArtist]

30 minutes ago, cx-dave said:

Complete 1000 Cryotic (legit way) in today's Sortie 3 solo with Tonkor. Then, come here and claim it's still OP.

You forgot a bit:

Before you return, also complete that same 1000 Cryotic ('legit' way, whatever that is) Sortie 3 solo with other weapons, so you have some actual comparisons to make on how much easier it was or was not to actually eke out a success (in a fundamentally broken mission type, considering that unscaling integrity on a large stationary defense target).

Oh, and make sure they're primarily elemental so you aren't arguing a situation with strong red-herring factors like one test weapon's effectiveness is specifically reduced by a lot because of that specific sortie mission's modifier.

 

Out of curiosity, does your "legit way" mean no using defensive abilities for the targets you're tasked to defend?

Edited April 17, 2016 by EDYinnit
Yes, Forum, I absolutely wanted a page of negative space magically appended to my post. Why do you do this?

[cx-dave]

7 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

Before you return, also complete that same 1000 Cryotic ('legit' way, whatever that is) Sortie 3 solo with other weapons, so you have some actual comparisons to make on how much easier it was or was not to actually eke out a success (in a fundamentally broken mission type, considering that unscaling integrity on a large stationary defense target).

Complete it first solo without excuses. Then you can come here and spin your threorycraft.

 

8 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

Out of curiosity, does your "legit way" mean no using defensive abilities for the targets you're tasked to defend?

Legit as in actually digging and completing the majority of them.