Could melee benefit from a "poise" mechanic?

[Drunkenbagel]

After I finished mourning the dethroning of the Dakra by a broken sword, I decided to try and have it retain some of it's dignity as a Prime weapon. While fooling around in mid-tier missions and comparing it to the Nikana Prime with only pressure point equipped on both(The logic there was that since they were both Primed weapons they should be able to compete with each other), I noticed myself getting my tuckus handed to me with the Dakra and less so with the NikanaP(shouldn't be a surprise. It is better in every way after all). Now most things died in around 2-3 hits with both the Nikana and Dakra(mostly with the NikaP) so damage wasn't too much of an issue at that level. The problem was stagger. The Nikana could stagger with every hit of it's basic combo on all three of it's stances. While longswords have it on Crimson Dervish and Iron Phoenix but not Vengeful Revenant.

That got me thinking. Why not have a mechanic similar to/pretty much exactly the same as poise in Dark Souls. Instead of having the stagger be wholly dependent on the stance, why not have it depend more on the weapon? Make it a stat on the weapon. Smaller weapons do less poise damage larger ones do more, speed of the weapon would be a factor as well etc. It'll give DE more options in balancing weapons and could also give fights a little more depth other than "do the most damage". Regular dudes like Lancers, Butchers, Crewmen etc would be staggered by most weapons except for maybe daggers and other small/ light weapons which would require 2 maybe 3 hits depending on the exact weapon. And the heavier guys would need a few more for swords, NIkanas, and other "mid-weight" weapons(again, varies from weapon to weapon) and the heavier weapons should need only 1 hit. And just so stances aren't gimped much, certain swings in certain combos should do a little more "poise damage" as well.

Bosses though...not too sure about them. While I would love to be able to stagger them and throw them into a vulnerable state and then perform some sort of "visceral attack", that's probably asking a little too much hehe. But it would add a little something more to bossfights. Not to mention it could make them go by faster if you're more geared and are farming them for a certain mod or drop.

So would people actually like such a mechanic to be present in Warframe? Do you think melee could benefit from such a mechanic? I do...

EDIT: I probably should've mentioned this before but, I'm talking about all of this in a PVE mindset. I don't know if it would work very well in PvP and it might be throwing a wrench into the delicate machine that is PvP, so just think of how this mechanic would work in PvE.

Edited May 6, 2016 by Drunkenbagel

[RealPandemonium]

Seems like more trouble than it's worth, and more work for the balance team than they can possibly handle.  Hell, they can't even handle it now.  

[Drunkenbagel]

On 5/7/2016 at 10:45 AM, RealPandemonium said:

Seems like more trouble than it's worth, and more work for the balance team than they can possibly handle.  Hell, they can't even handle it now.  

That is part of the reason I posed the idea actually. It'll give them more flexibility. Like I said in OP the Dakra was being outperformed a whole lot by the Nikana, but if the Dakra was able to stagger and stunlock like the Nikana's stances then it could perform just as well I feel.

[RealPandemonium]

13 minutes ago, Drunkenbagel said:

That is part of the reason I posed the idea actually. It'll give them more flexibility. Like I said in OP the Dakra was being outperformed a whole lot by the Nikana, but if the Dakra was able to stagger and stunlock like the Nikana's stances then it could perform just as well I feel.

But then DE would have to go through every weapon and give it a poise-decrease value, and then go through every enemy and give them poise values, and then adjust poise-decrease values on stances.  Then they would have to tweak the whole thing to make it work properly, which would just never get done, bringing us back into a mess.  

[Drunkenbagel]

1 minute ago, RealPandemonium said:

But then DE would have to go through every weapon and give it a poise-decrease value, and then go through every enemy and give them poise values, and then adjust poise-decrease values on stances.  Then they would have to tweak the whole thing to make it work properly, which would just never get done, bringing us back into a mess.  

Why would it never get done? Sure it's probably not one patch away from being done but isn't that the case with every new game mechanic?

[Lyravain]

 

21 minutes ago, Drunkenbagel said:

Why would it never get done? Sure it's probably not one patch away from being done but isn't that the case with every new game mechanic?

No it's not, really. To start out, count down every melee weapon in the game -that includes unique weapons, stances, etc etc. Also, not just melee weapons -some ranged weapons would also stagger (being shot by a rocket launcher and not at the very least flinching?), Then count down all enemies. Add new mechanic of 'poise damage'. Balance everything out so not one thing is more powerful than the other. Do it again and again and again until it works.

No, it would take months to do it.

In fact, I'll tell you one more thing; it would make daggers EVEN MORE USELESS. By your own experience, daggers would have been even weaker, as they wouldn't be able to 'poise damage' even a butcher. And they are, at the moment, one of the, if not the, weakest weapons in game (Machetes not included).

See what we mean about balancing? You fix one thing, a dozen others get messed up. Welcome to the world of game creation, I guess (as a fellow homebrewer for several PnP games, there's been plenty of times of me banging my head on a wall).

Wish it were that simple to fix, but it's not, I'm afraid.

[Drunkenbagel]

3 minutes ago, Lyravain said:

 

No it's not, really. To start out, count down every melee weapon in the game -that includes unique weapons, stances, etc etc. Also, not just melee weapons -some ranged weapons would also stagger (being shot by a rocket launcher and not at the very least flinching?), Then count down all enemies. Add new mechanic of 'poise damage'. Balance everything out so not one thing is more powerful than the other. Do it again and again and again until it works.

No, it would take months to do it.

In fact, I'll tell you one more thing; it would make daggers EVEN MORE USELESS. By your own experience, daggers would have been even weaker, as they wouldn't be able to 'poise damage' even a butcher. And they are, at the moment, one of the, if not the, weakest weapons in game (Machetes not included).

See what we mean about balancing? You fix one thing, a dozen others get messed up. Welcome to the world of game creation, I guess (as a fellow homebrewer for several PnP games, there's been plenty of times of me banging my head on a wall).

Wish it were that simple to fix, but it's not, I'm afraid.

Yeah I see your point now. But I wouldn't include ranged weapons though. You can do damage with ranged with not much risk compared to melee so I don't think they would need this mechanic.

Also daggers are supposed to be fast so getting 2 hits in shouldn't be a problem. I've never actually had a problem with daggers before though. If they are one of the weakest weapon classes, they have to be tied with longswords(excluding broken war).

But yeah I see your point. Still doesn't mean it's out of the question is it? It'll take a long time for something that wouldn't be extremely noticeable, but like I said it'll give them more options in balancing future melee weapons.

[Lyravain]

16 minutes ago, Drunkenbagel said:

Yeah I see your point now. But I wouldn't include ranged weapons though. You can do damage with ranged with not much risk compared to melee so I don't think they would need this mechanic.

Also daggers are supposed to be fast so getting 2 hits in shouldn't be a problem. I've never actually had a problem with daggers before though. If they are one of the weakest weapon classes, they have to be tied with longswords(excluding broken war).

But yeah I see your point. Still doesn't mean it's out of the question is it? It'll take a long time for something that wouldn't be extremely noticeable, but like I said it'll give them more options in balancing future melee weapons.

It's not out of the question and is not illogical. It's very realistic -I expect my poise to be pretty much shattered if a giant axe of Doom smacks me in the face after all. Just that the amount of effort needed to do so, would be extreme. And the problem with a weapon system that Warframe has, if you do a change in 1 weapon, it needs to exist in them all. If you add a new stat (Poise) to weapons, you're going to have to add the same state to ALL weapons, melee and ranged alike and, if you're going to go through THAT trouble, might as well add a score instead of zeros.

Daggers are not fast hitting. Not even close, unfortunately. Fist weapons are fast, anything with Berserker is fast. Daggers... are slow. They can't get a decent Berserker build on them (highest crit chance is 10% for crying out loud) so they only have the illusion of 'speed' by depending on their stances' multi-hits. In other words; they are not fast, we just think they are. Now, if daggers got a boost to the point of being equivalent to Heavy Blades in usability and Quality of Life, I'd consider them decent. They're not.

[o.0-]

I get the gist of the idea, so I wonder if existing systems could see tweaks, to create this effect?

So melee weapons get a chance to proc Impact's Knockback stagger on connecting with an enemy, maybe based on base damage, so War gets a 140% chance to proc on each hit, Jat Kittag 130% Chance, Broken War 90% Chance and so on.

The actual formula can be more detailed and could utilize other variables such as crit damage and/or status chance, but it might be plausible to consider something along these lines.

 

Could possibly even have a mod.

The mod could be setup to proc Impact's Knockback stagger as brainstormed above. With mods like Shattering Impact, that can remove armor, maybe a mod to stagger can be considered?