Making focus relevant

[Birdframe_Prime]

5 hours ago, Dragazer said:

everyone knows guns are the undisputed kings of damage (and damage that is always reliable), not abilities.

It's clear I'm not going to convince you that you're repeating yourself and that you haven't addressed anything I've actually pointed out. So, I'll point out this instead because who is this 'everybody' you speak of?

Guns do not out-damage abilities. It's really just simple maths. Pick up that AMD Nova I mentioned and do quadruple the damage of any gun in the game to a 6m radius of enemies, forget explosives, headshot sniping or hitting every shotgun pellet, straight up radial damage at a quite achievable 4.8 million damage per minute. A Peacemaker Mesa has better accuracy, crit chance and base damage than any gun, now that it scales with your mods it's flat out better. Take the basic Ash-hole build and watch his 4 kill everything before you can aim your gun at something not marked with glowing red.

Yes guns can do high damage, you can even get some up to nearly 50k dps, depending on the enemy you're hitting with it and if you hit every shot, every reload, but it's always fixed damage unless you use abilities to debuff enemies.

It's fine to have an opinion that you hold onto about gameplay aspects and to have personal preferences, I have more than a few, but when you've got basic numbers wrong I'll have to stop you there.

[Dragazer]

11 minutes ago, Thaylien said:

It's clear I'm not going to convince you that you're repeating yourself and that you haven't addressed anything I've actually pointed out. So, I'll point out this instead because who is this 'everybody' you speak of?

Guns do not out-damage abilities. It's really just simple maths. Pick up that AMD Nova I mentioned and do quadruple the damage of any gun in the game to a 6m radius of enemies, forget explosives, headshot sniping or hitting every shotgun pellet, straight up radial damage at a quite achievable 4.8 million damage per minute. A Peacemaker Mesa has better accuracy, crit chance and base damage than any gun, now that it scales with your mods it's flat out better. Take the basic Ash-hole build and watch his 4 kill everything before you can aim your gun at something not marked with glowing red.

Yes guns can do high damage, you can even get some up to nearly 50k dps, depending on the enemy you're hitting with it and if you hit every shot, every reload, but it's always fixed damage unless you use abilities to debuff enemies.

It's fine to have an opinion that you hold onto about gameplay aspects and to have personal preferences, I have more than a few, but when you've got basic numbers wrong I'll have to stop you there.

Let me ask you, what is powering that AMD? Lets not forget each AMD ball has a damage cap of 50k. Ash's finisher damage becomes useless and redundant in a team setting where 4x cp is put into play reducing all armor to 0. Guns modded for viral and slash will then tear apart enemies faster than Ash could ever dream of, at that point he becomes a liability to the team. Mesa's peacemaker is balanced by the fact it roots you into place and drains a hefty amount of energy  

Edited June 8, 2016 by Dragazer

[Birdframe_Prime]

Just now, Dragazer said:

Let me ask you, what is powering that AMD?

[Sigh] A weapon that doesn't do a quarter of the ability damage? A weapon that would, under normal circumstances, cap out due to its fixed damage?

You aren't shooting the enemy, the gun is a charge mechanic, like how mods boost the Exalted abilities and how Magnetise can deal four times burst damage based on its absorb.

Besides, cherry picking that out doesn't help you with others, like Peacemaker or Bladestorm. What's powering them?

[Dragazer]

9 minutes ago, Thaylien said:

[Sigh] A weapon that doesn't do a quarter of the ability damage? A weapon that would, under normal circumstances, cap out due to its fixed damage?

You aren't shooting the enemy, the gun is a charge mechanic, like how mods boost the Exalted abilities and how Magnetise can deal four times burst damage based on its absorb.

Besides, cherry picking that out doesn't help you with others, like Peacemaker or Bladestorm. What's powering them?

made some edits to the post. Technically speaking AMD is capped as well(50k dmg cap), its just that it raises the cap for a guns damage.

Edited June 8, 2016 by Dragazer

[Birdframe_Prime]

21 minutes ago, Dragazer said:

made some edits to the post.

I notice a wrong one too, right off the bat. The cap on AMD is 400k, not 50k. That's my comment about the 4.8 million damage per minute, because you can drop that every 4 seconds. And with a good efficiency build, with casting speed increased and a hiding spot (like the under-floor parts of the void) that allows the ball to crash nearly immediately after charge under the feet of the enemy the theoretical damage is 6 million per minute.

Spoiler

Not my screenshot, but the quickest I could find.

Moving on, Ash is suddenly useless and a liability because they have no armour, meaning finisher damage isn't relevant? Hmm, a 5k stab 18 times inflicting a 14k bleed proc to every enemy, that's roughly 342k total, over 6 seconds, that's 57k dps, remembering that the highest sustained DPS of known guns is a little over 50k. It's also a period of invulnerability where all marked enemies are not attacking allies. Still better than your guns.

Peacemaker does drain energy and fix you in place. But has a 50m range, one that most enemies need to be within to launch attacks. Yes it's balanced, but you've not negated the damage it does by balancing the risk/reward of using it. In addition, at that 50m range, the highest dps weapons have fall-off, Mesa doesn't.

This isn't even just my word for it, I was taught all this by far better players than me when I made the same comment. I went out, I tested it, they were right. I encourage you to do the same.

Edited June 8, 2016 by Thaylien
Screenshot

[Dragazer]

52 minutes ago, Thaylien said:

I notice a wrong one too, right off the bat. The cap on AMD is 400k, not 50k. That's my comment about the 4.8 million damage per minute, because you can drop that every 4 seconds. And with a good efficiency build, with casting speed increased and a hiding spot (like the under-floor parts of the void) that allows the ball to crash nearly immediately after charge under the feet of the enemy the theoretical damage is 6 million per minute.

  Hide contents

Not my screenshot, but the quickest I could find.

Moving on, Ash is suddenly useless and a liability because they have no armour, meaning finisher damage isn't relevant? Hmm, a 5k stab 18 times inflicting a 14k bleed proc to every enemy, that's roughly 342k total, over 6 seconds, that's 57k dps, remembering that the highest sustained DPS of known guns is a little over 50k. It's also a period of invulnerability where all marked enemies are not attacking allies. Still better than your guns.

Peacemaker does drain energy and fix you in place. But has a 50m range, one that most enemies need to be within to launch attacks. Yes it's balanced, but you've not negated the damage it does by balancing the risk/reward of using it. In addition, at that 50m range, the highest dps weapons have fall-off, Mesa doesn't.

This isn't even just my word for it, I was taught all this by far better players than me when I made the same comment. I went out, I tested it, they were right. I encourage you to do the same.

Alright just did the testing again and you are right the dmg cap is in fact 400k, but my main point still stands. It is just a damage multiplier. Without the power of guns, it is nothing.

A lot of inaccuracies on your part as well. In Ash's case that isn't how dps works, if we are talking damage per second then that 57k is totally incorrect considering that his main source of Damage is from bleed procs, which in fact are a DoT, meaning that his true dps is some where around 7k per enemy. Not only that but you are also assuming Ash is attacking 18 enemies all at once and that his animations take a second to complete for each enemy, which simply isn't happening.

BTW what are you going to do when ancient healers and disruptors show up? 

Ancient healers give off an aura which makes all of their allies immune to all status effects including slash procs, giving allies damage reduction, while healing the ancient for damage his allies take.

so bye bye majority of ashs damage especially considering that BS auto targets and you cannot exit the animation, good luck Ash.

Ancient disruptors on the other hand provide a straight up 90% damage reduction to damaging abilities.

So you can guess what that kinda means to your precious abilities

Don't forget too that these guys have no armor as well off the bat and have massive hp pools 

Couple with the fact that Finisher has no dmg bonus against flesh, while viral and slash do, its clear once in a team setting like I stated before:

Ash is a liability. 

Edited June 8, 2016 by Dragazer

[Birdframe_Prime]

Just now, Dragazer said:

A lot of inaccuracies on your part as well. In Ash's case that isn't how dps works, if we are talking damage per second then that 57k is totally incorrect considering that his main source of Damage is from bleed procs, which in a fact are a DoT, meaning that his true dps is someone where around 7k. Not only that but you are also assuming Ash is attacking 18 enemies all at once, which simply isn't happening. Couple with the fact that Finisher has no dmg bonus against flesh, while viral and slash do, its clear once in a team setting like I stated before: Ash is a liability. 

You might want to edit again, because you missed my other points.

That said, alright, I'll concede the DoT on the bleed procs there, that was an inaccuracy. It still doesn't make a bladestorm Ash a liability, any more than bringing any other solo frame to a team game, I'd rather bring him for a six-second lockdown of a squad of enemies than a Wukong for... Defy, I guess? I've still not explored that frame enough to say if he's got any hidden ability to be a team player.

[Dragazer]

13 minutes ago, Thaylien said:

You might want to edit again, because you missed my other points.

That said, alright, I'll concede the DoT on the bleed procs there, that was an inaccuracy. It still doesn't make a bladestorm Ash a liability, any more than bringing any other solo frame to a team game, I'd rather bring him for a six-second lockdown of a squad of enemies than a Wukong for... Defy, I guess? I've still not explored that frame enough to say if he's got any hidden ability to be a team player.

Yeah, my bad I just like to post the main stuff 1st and then make the edits after, just added a bit more stuff to the post. Well considering the only thing Ash can do is damage (he has no cc or team utility), he is not a viable choice in that perspective once your team gets their hands on 4x cp, which negates his only perk of his ability to ignore armor, making properly modded guns outclass Bladestorm completely, which was the point I was making 

Edited June 8, 2016 by Dragazer

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 minute ago, Dragazer said:

Yeah, my bad I just like to post the main stuff 1st and then make the edits after.

Seems a little counter-productive. But then again so was my old job in Kitchen and Cabinet Fitting [buh-dum-tiss].

As a side point to Nova, you've not looked into Anti-Matter Absorb, have you? It charges the balls from enemy damage and attracts enemy projectiles, I can have three of those floating around, protecting me from damage, charge each up to cap and crash one after the other, casting new ones as I go, without ever clicking the fire button. It doesn't rely on your guns, guns are just part of the mechanic.

You might as well say that your weapon mods affect the Exalted weapons so you shouldn't count them either. True, Peacemaker wouldn't do as well without Lethal Torrent on your sidearm, but that's the mechanic you're using to make the ability happen.

I've already pointed out that other abilities allow you to continue doing damage with weapons, like MPrime or Sonar, after scaling would make them irrelevant. I'm trying to point out that weapons hit their damage cap way before abilities do, and I haven't even touched the idea of boosting that damage in a squad, this was all solo tactics thus far.

You want to move on to what would be possible in a squad? Because there's so many combos that never even touch weapons that make damage abilities go above and beyond simple guns. Even simply bringing a Mirage or an Equinox for their damage boosts, stick in a Resonance Banshee, there's your ability damage boost, for best results use all three to multiply the damage from Mesa, you've got no worries about damage. Ever.

Nevermind.

Despite your arguments, you haven't managed to change my point about weapons having a fixed damage, if you hit with them every time, nail every reload and generally don't mess up, and that some abilities have a higher one which, in many cases, ignores those mentioned weaknesses of guns by means of auto-targeting or no need for reloads. You're lucky that this conversation isn't happening a few weeks ago, since Mag's Shield Polarise damage was a percentage, not a number, and a simple 175% power strength build on her scaled her damage infinitely through a void survival (you only need 130% on a corpus one) so a single cast could instantly kill forty to fifty level 400 enemies as easily as it killed level 40 ones. Heck, the Saryn re-work was the same, removing an ability that nuked rooms up to level 100 and provided handy-dandy flail stuns to all affected enemies that survived.

Yes DE are balancing out the game by removing infinite scaling abilities, infinite range abilities and so on, but that's to bring them down closer to the level of guns and melee, not the other way around. And there are still abilities that don't require guns to deal damage that deal a noticeably higher amount. Absorb and Magnetise use the enemy's weapons against themselves, one cast is always enough to kill whatever is actually attacking you.

You watch, though. Guns are next. And we'll both be wrong. There's been a lot of talk about removing mods like Serration from the game and having the damage scale up with the weapon's rank instead. Things will never be the same XD

(And, I still stand by what I said about melee. Covert Lethality scales infinitely too, say what you will, but there is no other thing in this game that can one-shot a level 400 enemy. Even Mag couldn't if there were no corpus units around. Ash's new Teleport augment makes it almost irrelevant to have a gun, or even any mod besides CL on your dagger, just press the button, angle towards the enemy, insta-kill and get 50% of your energy returned.)

My over-arching point is this, though, when all is said and done: No matter which does more damage, or is more efficient at it, there are some things in this game that have been poorly implemented and need looking at. The one that's on the cards today is the Focus Schools and how powerful some are versus how powerful others are.

Some are balanced, like the healing and instant-revive skills on Vazarin, with advanced builds providing shielding and reflecting damage from yourself and allies. Some are under-powered, like needing a ten minute delay between the Unairu abilities to get the most out of it. Some, however, need their mechanics looked at, like having infinite Energy with Zenurik, or infinite Invisibility with Naramon.

This is not because those two things are better than what any one warframe can do, this is because they allow every warframe to do what some frames specialise in or break the balance of warframes that are only limited by the cost of their abilities.

Being able to infinitely stun enemies as Ember with Zenurik and Accelerant is one. Or for Saryn is another, being able to go invisible with spores popping and proc'ing everywhere for DoT ticks in the hundreds of thousands and never be targeted because you have a crit-melee Lash weapon to hit things with and a Naramon Focus? All while never losing flow of enemies because you have a Molt to draw aggro? That's both un-balancing the frames and creating exploit builds for cheesing missions.

(I didn't include Spores in my list since it takes time and effort to set up those Toxin procs that gain damage off each other until every tick hits 100k... except it really doesn't with Naramon.)

Cheesing missions has been the bane of DE's game balance plans since inception.

That's the kind of thing people mean when they say some schools are over powered and some need to be buffed.