CL Should Be Innate Part Of Daggers

[Inmemoratus]

Just now, (XB1)Snicket002 said:

I think the rank 30 perk could work (just do like they do for warframe abilites) and upon reaching level 30 you gain the perk and it stays even if you forma (which would make forma'ing stuff less of a chore.

Rank 30 on a weapon is nothing. I don't think there would be any feeling of progression if that's all it took. I guess with the mods most of them take a trivial amount of fusion cores but at least there's some feeling of progression when you first acquire the mod.

[(XBOX)Snicket002]

1 minute ago, Inmemoratus said:

Rank 30 on a weapon is nothing. I don't think there would be any feeling of progression if that's all it took. I guess with the mods most of them take a trivial amount of fusion cores but at least there's some feeling of progression when you first acquire the mod.

maybe make 30 harder to reach? though I can see this pi**ing off a lot of people

[Inmemoratus]

4 minutes ago, (XB1)Snicket002 said:

maybe make 30 harder to reach? though I can see this pi**ing off a lot of people

Now we're talking changes that would affect other systems too.

I think this is why DE is moving slowly on the "mandatory mods" issue. Because mods represent progression and trying to move the progression elsewhere is very difficult.

[(XBOX)Snicket002]

Just now, Inmemoratus said:

Now we're talking changes that would affect other systems too.

I think this is why DE is moving slowly on the "mandatory mods" issue. Because mods represent progression and trying to move the progression elsewhere is very difficult.

true like with serration, since weapons don't actually gain anything by ranking up making them gain damage with each rank innately would require a massive rework

[Naramor]

There is only 5 melee weapons worth looking at in Warframe and you talk about single mod for like 4? most useless melee weapons.

[Faulcun]

If this were to be even considered, the ONLY way it should be implemented is on a natural stealth kill. It definitely should not be able to apply to power influenced finishers (ie: blinded enemies) otherwise you create a pathway for the ultimate cheese gameplay. The balance of the game would be so offset... a low MR player with little to no experience could solo a sortie mission with a simple build using a mirage. As it stands right now, the mod itself is not very widespread.

[(XBOX)Snicket002]

15 minutes ago, Faulcun said:

If this were to be even considered, the ONLY way it should be implemented is on a natural stealth kill. It definitely should not be able to apply to power influenced finishers (ie: blinded enemies) otherwise you create a pathway for the ultimate cheese gameplay. The balance of the game would be so offset... a low MR player with little to no experience could solo a sortie mission with a simple build using a mirage. As it stands right now, the mod itself is not very widespread.

also a good point

[Genoscythe]

Even if they would instakill on stealth finishers most other weapons would still be a better choice as it does not really matter until level... what? 200? 300? Apart from most weapons being able to finish off even high level enemies in one hit anyway, stealth finishers do not only take way too much time, they also force you to stand still for valuable seconds. You can't even stealth a nullifier (OK, that one's rather because of bad enemy design) without losing your buffs/invisibility in melee.

Single daggers need an all-around buff, from base damage to natural finisher damage. they are also not very fast considering that they almost deal no damage (without CL). My redeemer does way too much of a good job by just being able to silently kill multiple enemies at once without even approaching them. Then comes war, then broken war and the rest of all those high damage melee weapons.

[IceColdHawk]

3 hours ago, Faulcun said:

If this were to be even considered, the ONLY way it should be implemented is on a natural stealth kill. It definitely should not be able to apply to power influenced finishers (ie: blinded enemies) otherwise you create a pathway for the ultimate cheese gameplay. The balance of the game would be so offset... a low MR player with little to no experience could solo a sortie mission with a simple build using a mirage. As it stands right now, the mod itself is not very widespread.

Unlike excal or inaros' blind, mirage doesn't open enemies for finishers.

[Faulcun]

9 hours ago, IceColdHawk said:

Unlike excal or inaros' blind, mirage doesn't open enemies for finishers.

Ah, didnt know that. I dont play mirage much at all. All I see is the current spam she is used for.

But my point is still valid.

[motorfirebox]

12 hours ago, Faulcun said:

If this were to be even considered, the ONLY way it should be implemented is on a natural stealth kill. It definitely should not be able to apply to power influenced finishers (ie: blinded enemies) otherwise you create a pathway for the ultimate cheese gameplay. The balance of the game would be so offset... a low MR player with little to no experience could solo a sortie mission with a simple build using a mirage. As it stands right now, the mod itself is not very widespread.

A low MR player can already solo high-level content with Mirage or Excalibur, at least in theory (nullifiers and other units make it tough for even high MR players). Having CL, or a dagger with free CL, just makes it go slightly faster on the really tough enemies. Without CL, you just sneak attack them a few times in a row, re-applying blind as needed. If you can do it with CL, you can most likely do it without.

[YasaiTsume]

Things I agree on : Covert Lethality is a bandaid, and should have been implemented into the dagger in the first place.

Things I do not agree on : Covert Lethality is a wasted mod slot.

Covert Lethality is actually very good for Daggers like Karyst which allows the Player to go damage on it and hack at enemies, as it is basically an additional damage slot.

If one were to build a Dagger solely for the purpose of insta killing enemies, they would just mod Covert Lethality and push in as much attack speed as possible to go for full Finisher builds. ( Yes Lethal Damage means 1 shotting regardless of Level or Health, as long as it is a Stealth kill, the enemy will drop dead) 

If one were to build a Dagger for some form of dueling usage or to use as their melee, Covert Lethality gives bonus damage. 

 

 

Here is a video example of exactly how Covert Lethality works , and why it isn't a wasted mod slot.
 

 

[motorfirebox]

Yeah, definitely not a wasted mod slot whether you go for finishers or not. +100 damage is well over a 100% damage buff on every dagger but the Karyst—on which it's exactly 100%. CL is significantly better than Spoiled Strike.

Edited March 29, 2016 by motorfirebox

[Faulcun]

7 hours ago, motorfirebox said:

A low MR player can already solo high-level content with Mirage or Excalibur, at least in theory (nullifiers and other units make it tough for even high MR players). Having CL, or a dagger with free CL, just makes it go slightly faster on the really tough enemies. Without CL, you just sneak attack them a few times in a row, re-applying blind as needed. If you can do it with CL, you can most likely do it without.

Thats a lot of IFs and assumptions. The video in the post in the spoiler below:

Spoiler

6 hours ago, YasaiTsume said:

Things I agree on : Covert Lethality is a bandaid, and should have been implemented into the dagger in the first place.

Things I do not agree on : Covert Lethality is a wasted mod slot.

Covert Lethality is actually very good for Daggers like Karyst which allows the Player to go damage on it and hack at enemies, as it is basically an additional damage slot.

If one were to build a Dagger solely for the purpose of insta killing enemies, they would just mod Covert Lethality and push in as much attack speed as possible to go for full Finisher builds. ( Yes Lethal Damage means 1 shotting regardless of Level or Health, as long as it is a Stealth kill, the enemy will drop dead) 

If one were to build a Dagger for some form of dueling usage or to use as their melee, Covert Lethality gives bonus damage. 

 

 

Here is a video example of exactly how Covert Lethality works , and why it isn't a wasted mod slot.
 

 

 

is a perfect example of what im talking about. You would be giving EVERY dagger this ability, and making it available to mastery rank 0 players right from the start. No mod points required, no leveling required. Rank 0 dagger right from the go, able to trivialize every single enemy in the game except for ONE, by merely using a blinding ability.

I honestly dont think DE would even entertain the idea, but if they did, it would have to be on a natural stealth attack only. Otherwise, it would be beyond nerfing, it would be game breaking.

[motorfirebox]

Yeah, but blinding abilities already trivialize every enemy in the game except one. The fact that CL lets you one-shot them after you've blinded them is just icing on the cake. They're blind, they can't shoot you or do much of anything. I run around with Inaros and a Nikondi in spy sorties, because I'm too lazy to switch weapons. Once I blind something, I can sneak attack it for as long as I need to until it finally dies, re-applying blind as needed. Sometimes it takes 5-6 sneak attacks to finally kill the tougher guys. I could do the same with Excal if I wanted, albeit with very slightly reduced efficiency (0.3 seconds per energy instead of Inaros's 0.32 seconds per energy).

If a low-MR player is able to blind enemies consistently, then it doesn't really matter if he has CL or not. He's already won the game.

[Brosephelon]

Karyst with Pressure Point, Covert Lethality, and 4x 90% elemental mods.  966 damage per hit.  This leaves two mod slots open for lifestrike, fury, or whatever you want really.

Karyst without Covert Lethality but using a 60% damage mod instead is 572 damage per hit.

Broken War with Pressure Point, Buzzkill, and 4x 90% elemental mods.  1100 damage per hit.  This leaves two mod slots open for lifestrike, fury, or whatever you want really.  

Dakra Prime with Pressure Point, Buzzkill, and 4x 90% elemental mods. 734 damage per hit.  This leaves two mod slots open for lifestrike, fury, or whatever you want really.

While yes the Broken War is stronger its also a top tier weapon, and was a MASSIVE source of powercreep.  Covert Lethality is not only giving daggers competitive damage numbers with top tier one handed weapons, its also giving them a unique passive ability for 1shot kills.  It is in no way a wasted slot.  

Edit, I added in the Dakra Prime with the same damage build to help show a non-power creeped to hell version of damage so you can realize just how strong the Karyst is at 966.  

Now you might argue that they should just buff dagger damage and make the 1shot finishers a passive, at that point why use ANY other one handed weapon.  You'd be putting dagger damage for normal attacks likely exceeding that of things like Broken War while also letting it have passive 1shot finishers.  That is NOT balanced.  Its important to realize that by making cover lethality a mod instead of an across the board buff to all daggers its in effect a "balanced buff" because it eats up a mod slot instead if this was a passive buff they would have to balance in mind that a dagger would just add in another damage mod in its place and just do absurd damage which means they have to scale the damage buff back, but then you end up with the pre-covert lethality issue of daggers just doing limited damage compared to other one handed weapons unless you just run 29 elemental mods.  

What I'm saying and trying to show is that covert lethality as a mod was and is actually a great balancing move by the devs.  It gives daggers relevant damage, and a unique passive effect, and yet it also doesn't make them completely nutso strong.  

Honestly I want more mods like covert lethality.  I'd love a whip mod that gives them extra reach and damage that can stack with reach/primed reach so they can truly be the long reaching melee weapons they deserve to be.  A sword and shield mod that give them more damage and a block passive that matters (reflected block damage, block damage charges energy, anything really).  Mods like these are what you can use to make specific weapon types really break into a great and useful niche but without making there base versions insanely strong/stat bloated.  By making these changes in mods you "gate" them to a certain extent that they can sacrifice a raw damage mod to instead specialize in the weapons unique abilities.  If you could just passive use a rank1 full unmodded dagger to 1hit that would be unbalanced as F***, it would kill any real sense of progression for the weapon or modding it.  Things like these need to have some progression and unlocking to it, in earning them.  Yeah using a niche weapon like a dagger without covert lethality might not be great but thats ok, you still have staple melee weapons like nikanas, single swords, and heavy weapons to just go hulk smash things without the need for specialized mods.  

So I'm sorry, but I can't agree with the idea of removing covert lethality or not making mods like this.  I personally think cover lethality was a great addition and want more mods like it.  

Edited March 29, 2016 by Brosephelon

[Faulcun]

On 3/29/2016 at 5:54 PM, motorfirebox said:

Yeah, but blinding abilities already trivialize every enemy in the game except one. The fact that CL lets you one-shot them after you've blinded them is just icing on the cake. They're blind, they can't shoot you or do much of anything. I run around with Inaros and a Nikondi in spy sorties, because I'm too lazy to switch weapons. Once I blind something, I can sneak attack it for as long as I need to until it finally dies, re-applying blind as needed. Sometimes it takes 5-6 sneak attacks to finally kill the tougher guys. I could do the same with Excal if I wanted, albeit with very slightly reduced efficiency (0.3 seconds per energy instead of Inaros's 0.32 seconds per energy).

If a low-MR player is able to blind enemies consistently, then it doesn't really matter if he has CL or not. He's already won the game.

I disagree. You already said it yourself. If it takes you 5 or 6 finisher attacks to kill an enemy, then you are already having to do some kind of work. On top of that, to even begin getting to a level where you are killing most things without CL requires a few mods, and a few ranks to apply them with, and maybe even a potato and possibly a forma or two if you are really going for it.

That in itself requires at least some kind of investment. What you are asking for, is a rank 0 weapon to be capable of killing a level 900 enemy in one hit... on day 1... with no mods, no investment, and no experience..... which makes no sense.

Edited March 31, 2016 by Faulcun

[motorfirebox]

I don't see that it matters whether it takes 5-6 finishers or just one, because for the whole time I'm doing those finishers, the enemy remains helpless and harmless. Not that having a dagger in the first place is a "day one" proposition to begin with. Farming out the materials and credits to build your first weapon is a pretty big deal when you're starting out. Nor is a day one player going to have the mods necessary to keep every enemy blinded long enough to stealth kill them all, whether he has CL or not, especially in a sortie where the spawn rate is extremely high. Nor is a day one player going to be able to survive the first few ticks of a level 100 (much less 900) shock or venomous eximus.

I mean, seriously, dude, try it yourself. Equip Excalibur with no aura mod, no uncommon or rare mods, no mods with any levels. Equip a dagger with nothing but CL. Congratulations: you are now a day one player. Try out a sortie, and let me know how you do.

 

[Faulcun]

11 hours ago, motorfirebox said:

I don't see that it matters whether it takes 5-6 finishers or just one, because for the whole time I'm doing those finishers, the enemy remains helpless and harmless. Not that having a dagger in the first place is a "day one" proposition to begin with. Farming out the materials and credits to build your first weapon is a pretty big deal when you're starting out. Nor is a day one player going to have the mods necessary to keep every enemy blinded long enough to stealth kill them all, whether he has CL or not, especially in a sortie where the spawn rate is extremely high. Nor is a day one player going to be able to survive the first few ticks of a level 100 (much less 900) shock or venomous eximus.

I mean, seriously, dude, try it yourself. Equip Excalibur with no aura mod, no uncommon or rare mods, no mods with any levels. Equip a dagger with nothing but CL. Congratulations: you are now a day one player. Try out a sortie, and let me know how you do.

 

Challenge accepted.

[motorfirebox]

24 minutes ago, Faulcun said:

Challenge accepted.

I might try it myself when I get a chance, actually. It sounds like fun, at least against Grineer. Corpus and Infested have way too many units that simply can't be sneak attacked. Even with Grineer, there's the problem of rollers and hyekka.

[Faulcun]

13 hours ago, motorfirebox said:

I might try it myself when I get a chance, actually. It sounds like fun, at least against Grineer. Corpus and Infested have way too many units that simply can't be sneak attacked. Even with Grineer, there's the problem of rollers and hyekka.

I completed the mission solo on today's sortie sabotage. I brought a lato for the doors and objectives considering the mission.

Used two revives. First, I chose to attack an alerted enemy rather than kicking him down and using a finisher. I didnt have the energy to take advantage of the mod either way, but it gave me the opportunity to show the difference in the power that that mod brings to a low level build.

Second revive was shortly after. Simply got hammered. What can I say.... cant take a hit.

All in all, wasnt that hard. But I can tell you a LARGE part of my success was being able to kill enemies that I otherwise would not be able to do.  But a group of 4? All doing the same thing? The mission would be even easier.

This is simulating a day one frame. Sorties cant even be played until you hit MR 4. At that point, you have access to all kinds of mods. The potential for abuse if these weapons had this as an innate feature? Its exponential.

People already complain about weapons being so good, there is no reason to use anything else. Of course I dont agree with those people, because its a choice, but I wont go into that now. Point is it would be creating such an imbalance if every dagger had this. Again, as it sits right now, this mod is not very widespread. So theres not a whole lot of abuse.

If you cant see how bad things would actually get if this was widespread...

 

[Chroia]

8 hours ago, Faulcun said:

I completed the mission solo on today's sortie sabotage. I brought a lato for the doors and objectives considering the mission.

Sab is an objective mission, i.e. 'you can actually not kill stuff' mission. Good luck completing anything that isn't Sab/Spy/Rescue with that kind of loadout.

On top of that, not-killing is hugely unrewarding - as it leaves you with essentially only end-of-mission credits (and any additional rewards) and whatever you happen to have gotten from containers.

Beyond which, unless I completely missed a change, CL instakill only works on stealth and parry prompt-finishers, so

8 hours ago, Faulcun said:

First, I chose to attack an alerted enemy rather than kicking him down and using a finisher.

^ That, would not have worked. Meaning that your 2nd death (which was even just 1v1) would be par-for-the-course, and potentially mission-ending, as soon as you got detected because the only ways to reliably trigger stealth are actual stealth(/Invis) and blinding powers. And if you're new, but still have the mods for 50%+ Eff, you bought them and can just as easily have bought CL.

(Example: Had you not had enough energy for a Radial Blind in the first coolant room? -> Dead -> -1 Respawns -> Radial Blind, and enough of those is game over.)

 

And all this is solo. Add in even 1 other player, and chances are that there go your stealth-kills.

 

idk, I don't see it as any kind of big deal.

 

(P.S. The start of a bullet jump does a small bit of area damage. You can use that to pop sensor bars, grates, and so on without alerting people on the other side of the door - but you need to be careful with lines of sight. Would have spared you the first death.)

 

All argument aside, well played.

Edited April 1, 2016 by Chroia
Better phrasing.

[Faulcun]

33 minutes ago, Chroia said:

Sab is an objective mission, i.e. 'you can actually not kill stuff' mission. Good luck completing anything that isn't Sab/Spy/Rescue with that kind of loadout.

On top of that, not-killing is hugely unrewarding - as it leaves you with essentially only end-of-mission credits (and any additional rewards) and whatever you happen to have gotten from containers.

Beyond which, unless I completely missed a change, CL instakill only works on stealth and parry prompt-finishers, so

^ That, would not have worked. Meaning that your 2nd death (which was even just 1v1) would be par-for-the-course, and potentially mission-ending, as soon as you got detected because the only ways to reliably trigger stealth are actual stealth(/Invis) and blinding powers. And if you're new, but still have the mods for 50%+ Eff, you bought them and can just as easily have bought CL.

(Example: Had you not had enough energy for a Radial Blind in the first coolant room? -> Dead -> -1 Respawns -> Radial Blind, and enough of those is game over.)

 

And all this is solo. Add in even 1 other player, and chances are that there go your stealth-kills.

 

idk, I don't see it as any kind of big deal.

 

(P.S. The start of a bullet jump does a small bit of area damage. You can use that to pop sensor bars, grates, and so on without alerting people on the other side of the door - but you need to be careful with lines of sight. Would have spared you the first death.)

 

All argument aside, well played.

Well yes, all of that is kind of my point though, except im pointing out the opposite. Due to the challenge, I chose to use my blind sparingly as I was not forced to engage enemies, like you said. This just happened to be the only sortie I could do at the time. The first mission was pistol only, and the last mission was an assassination on vey hek...... which would have been impossible as well. If I had the choice of an exterminate, I would have done that and approached it differently.

So the subject of this thread is that daggers should have this ability innate, and get rid of the mod all together. The fact that I can take this frame with no mods, and a dagger with no mods (as we are simulating this insta kill feature as innate property), into what is considered end game content, and still do this well? This should be an eye opener that something needs to change, and its not that all daggers should have this from go.

So lets assume that daggers have this ability innate. yeah, you can get your hands on some broken mods, or even buy a couple regular ones. You can even purchase some base energy restores from the market for cheap.

My point is, if its already possible to do these missions with NOTHING, then when you start adding things to the equation, you are simply creating an environment where easy cheese becomes even easier, especially if nobody needs a special mod to do it.

BTW, where I was talking about kicking the guy over and using a finisher. Even if it didnt insta kill, it was a better choice because it stops my incoming damage, and a ground finisher was still more damage than the simple attacks I was doing. I was just trying to point out there was a better choice than the attack I chose.

Edited April 1, 2016 by Faulcun

[motorfirebox]

10 hours ago, Faulcun said:

I completed the mission solo on today's sortie sabotage. I brought a lato for the doors and objectives considering the mission.

Used two revives. First, I chose to attack an alerted enemy rather than kicking him down and using a finisher. I didnt have the energy to take advantage of the mod either way, but it gave me the opportunity to show the difference in the power that that mod brings to a low level build.

Second revive was shortly after. Simply got hammered. What can I say.... cant take a hit.

All in all, wasnt that hard. But I can tell you a LARGE part of my success was being able to kill enemies that I otherwise would not be able to do.  But a group of 4? All doing the same thing? The mission would be even easier.

This is simulating a day one frame. Sorties cant even be played until you hit MR 4. At that point, you have access to all kinds of mods. The potential for abuse if these weapons had this as an innate feature? Its exponential.

People already complain about weapons being so good, there is no reason to use anything else. Of course I dont agree with those people, because its a choice, but I wont go into that now. Point is it would be creating such an imbalance if every dagger had this. Again, as it sits right now, this mod is not very widespread. So theres not a whole lot of abuse.

If you cant see how bad things would actually get if this was widespread...

 

Nice job. However, I'll see you and raise you a "day one" run with no CL. I don't have a recording setup, but here are the screenshots.

 

 

 

 

I made sure to unequip my companion before I went, as shown in the second pic. I'll admit, it took me three attempts and all four revives each time, but I was able to complete yesterday's 2nd sortie using nothing but blind.

Like the other guy said, this was an objective mission where you don't actually need to kill anyone. Nearly any other mission type, including several of the sabotage mission types (Earth, Void) would be impossible for a day one player, with or without CL.

Edited April 1, 2016 by motorfirebox

[BlackCoMerc]

On 3/28/2016 at 5:50 PM, Tesseract7777 said:

DE has talked about how they don't want mandatory mods. We have heard parts of their plan to fix the damage system, which includes making things like Serration an innate part of weapons as they level up. It is clear they don't actually want mandatory mods, but sometimes they accidentally create them, and this is definitely the case when it comes to daggers and Covert Lethality. 

To start with, I would like to point out that there are multiple categories of weapons in terms of finishers. Hammers do by far the most damaging finishers, daggers and dual daggers do the weakest of all, while the rest of the weapons sit somewhere in the middle. This is silly. Weapons designed not for open combat, but for finding openings in an enemies armor (especially through stealth or guile, such as throwing sand in their eyes) and then exploiting those openings for lethal blows, are the weakest at finishers in the game without mods. 

For this reason along with the fact that daggers have low base damage, tend to have weak crit/status stats, and very short range, daggers were mostly ignored until CL was released. There wasn't much reason to use them beyond gimmick. Just as an aside, by the way, daggers are actually pretty fast, and that isn't one of their major problems. The number you see listed is an attack speed multiplier based on dagger animations. Daggers have extremely fast weapon animations, so they are actually some of the fastest weapons in the game. Speed is not their problem. 

The problem is that the only reason that daggers are being used right now is because of a bandaid mod that does nothing to fix their real problems. Along with making stealth finishers lethal, it also increases the weapons regular damage, as if giving you a mod all in one package that admits the flaws of daggers and says "here, us this to fix them!". The reason this is a big issue should be obvious: It means there is no point in using daggers without this mod, which means we have another mandatory mod on our hands. 

However, before anyone gets prepared to yell "nerf" at me, that is the opposite of what I want. As evidenced by the title, I think that daggers do indeed need what CL provides. Their base damage is very weak -- they need a damage increase to be at least slightly viable in higher level play. Most daggers have very poor stats even beyond just base damage to begin with. Karyst is only remotely crit viable dagger at a poor 15% chance, and sheev is status at 25% but still not that high compared to some of the status weapons we currently have. And the fact that weapons designed for stealth assassination have the worst finishers in the game in terms of damage (innately) is just sad and makes no sense. In my opinion the way to fix this is simply to make CL innate. Give daggers innate passive where they get guaranteed kill on stealth/gimmick finisher, and also increase their innate damage based on how much CL would give them. This would be a significant buff because they would have the abilities of CL and have another slot freed up for more utility and damage. 

TL;DR: What CL does for daggers is needed, but since it is very arguably mandatory/always needed, it should be innate. This would make sense, give daggers a long needed buff, and give people an extra slot on their daggers to play around with for more damage/utility. 

Also, this should be for dual daggers as well. Because dual daggers are also the weakest finishers along with daggers, but they can't even use CL, and have awful stats. They are easily the most neglected melee weapon type. If they could have this innate change as well, daggers and dual daggers would finally have a good place in the game, and be where they should be. 

Edit: I understand if this needs to be moved to weapons feedback, but I thought it might go better in general since I am also talking about a popular mod. 

 

Completely agree. Well said.