Quickthinking still staggers...why?

[Skaleek]

The stagger was originally introduced to deal with the Rage/QT combo being vastly superior to all other forms of survivability. This is no longer the case, therefore the "bandaid fix" DE implemented is outdated and should probably be reverted.

Once you get to the level of content where survivability matters, you're gonna start getting one shot no matter what method of survival you pick. Currently I think theres 3 (maybe 4 if you count stealth or invuln powers but lets not): Armor + HP, Armor + QT, or Shields(haha). Shields suck, QT allows caster frames to have high EHP.

We seriously don't need the stagger anymore, especially with the advent of massive energy drain from many of the factions. I spend most sorties at low energy due to eximus units. Also stagger/knockdown lock is already a thing in WF, before even factoring QT in. There's just so many reasons this should be removed. I don't care if you CAN roll out of it, you shouldn't need to, not to mention stagger lock is a real thing with QT.

Edited September 6, 2016 by Skaleek

[TheLoneNinja]

Maybe I'm not being hit hard enough, but I don't even notice the stagger.

[Skaleek]

14 hours ago, DSpite said:

You get Staggered because you were just slammed hard enough to put you into zero health, and you were only saved by a Health Gating mechanics?

If you can rely on ONE Mod for all Frames to use as a replacement for Abilities DESIGNED to do similar things and think you will not get a big drawback, you have high hopes.

It was and still is a one trick pony kind of trick to cheat death - regardless of how cheap that death was - so I don't see why DE would change it.

It's not health gating. You can still get one shot from full health if you take too much damage for QT to deal with. QT is a secondary source of EHP, not a gating mechanic. It's there for casters and squishy frames.

It's nice to have options. Right now shields has its own issues (mainly that they have no armor mitigation and kinda just suck). Armor and Health is the far superior choice because there is no CC associated with taking damage. QT is another alternative but has such a huge drawback that when it comes time that you need to be able to take a hit, you can't. In high level play, even a toxic aura tick will stagger you if you're dipping into energy. That means for 8 seconds you're getting staggered every second. That's just stupid.

Edited September 6, 2016 by Skaleek

[Skaleek]

6 minutes ago, TheLoneNinja said:

Maybe I'm not being hit hard enough, but I don't even notice the stagger.

Its quite similar to the stagger you get from runners exploding near you.

[Desperado14]

I get frustrated with the stagger as well, but you can still drop gear as you are getting staggered.  It may be a little frantic, but drop health restores as you are getting staggered, and energy if you are not using rage.  

[The_Tiddler]

15 hours ago, (PS4)DesecratedFlame said:

The problem is the only time you need it is when you do take a big hit. 

I never said it wasn't a problem. While I believe QT does need an effective downside, the staggering is clunky, frustrating, and that tough blow can come from anything unexpected.

I would suggest something simple that goes on for the whole time you're under QT's effects- reduced damage or movement speed. Maybe your shields don't replenish until you're back over the threshold? I'm just throwing out small ideas.

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

6 hours ago, Tiddlerdoo said:

I never said it wasn't a problem. While I believe QT does need an effective downside, the staggering is clunky, frustrating, and that tough blow can come from anything unexpected.

I would suggest something simple that goes on for the whole time you're under QT's effects- reduced damage or movement speed. Maybe your shields don't replenish until you're back over the threshold? I'm just throwing out small ideas.

It doesn't need a downside.

[DeadlyBard676]

Quick Thinking has the stagger now cause in the good old days of have a total of 9 mod slots(8 for normal mods and 1 for auras) and abilities being bound to mods, Quick Thinking + Rage would pretty much make you invincible with no downside other than losing some energy which could be regained from Energy Siphon. The stagger was added to balance the mod,  tho it is still a pretty powerful mod.

[The_Tiddler]

19 hours ago, (PS4)DesecratedFlame said:

It doesn't need a downside.

I disagree.

[Lyravain]

On 6/9/2016 at 0:01 PM, alexmach1 said:

There are so many other things in the game that let us do this but yes, Quick Thinking should be the one thing that requires a stagger because X. Good logic!

It is, in fact.

Rhino has to use energy and recast every time he so much as looks at a Nullifier. Trinity, same thing. Wukong, same thing. Valkyr, guess what, same thing.

Quick Thinking isn't limited by Nullifiers, casting time or warframe. Everyone can have it. Always and forever.

Ergo, they needed a drawback. They chose the easy way of 'let's stagger them'.

Btw; giving a reason for the way something is, in fact is good logic. You might not agree with it, but the logic is there.

[alexmach1]

Just now, Lyravain said:

It is, in fact.

Rhino has to use energy and recast every time he so much as looks at a Nullifier. Trinity, same thing. Wukong, same thing. Valkyr, guess what, same thing.

Quick Thinking isn't limited by Nullifiers, casting time or warframe. Everyone can have it. Always and forever.

Ergo, they needed a drawback. They chose the easy way of 'let's stagger them'.

Btw; giving a reason for the way something is, in fact is good logic. You might not agree with it, but the logic is there.

You know what else isn't limited by nullifiers, cast time, and can be used by everyone

Health and shields

Those can make you live for a long time and you can just spam health/shield restore, clearly OP

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

6 hours ago, Tiddlerdoo said:

I disagree.

Then you are wrong. Vitality doesn't have a downside. Redirection doesn't have a downside. Steel fiber doesn't have a downside. Armored Agility doesn't have a downside. Vigor doesn't have a downside. Et cetera. 

[The_Tiddler]

Just now, (PS4)DesecratedFlame said:

Then you are wrong. Vitality doesn't have a downside. Redirection doesn't have a downside. Steel fiber doesn't have a downside. Armored Agility doesn't have a downside. Vigor doesn't have a downside. Et cetera. 

That's a great way to start a reply.

First of all: You're listing flat stat boost mods which, in my opinion, should not exist at all as mods like that contribute to many other balancing issues in the game.

There are mods which add a flat boost with no downsides, and then there are ones that have other big functions with downsides. Take corrupted mods, for example: Decreasing one stat to majorly boost another. In QT's case, without the stagger, it could be an absolutely tremendous boost to survivability. Making you a wee bit weaker when you should be dead seems fair and encourages you to still want to try and block/dodge as many attacks as you can rather than slopping about until your health reaches the threshold.

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

10 minutes ago, Tiddlerdoo said:

That's a great way to start a reply.

First of all: You're listing flat stat boost mods which, in my opinion, should not exist at all as mods like that contribute to many other balancing issues in the game.

There are mods which add a flat boost with no downsides, and then there are ones that have other big functions with downsides. Take corrupted mods, for example: Decreasing one stat to majorly boost another. In QT's case, without the stagger, it could be an absolutely tremendous boost to survivability. Making you a wee bit weaker when you should be dead seems fair and encourages you to still want to try and block/dodge as many attacks as you can rather than slopping about until your health reaches the threshold.

Redirection offers the same thing a can regen automatically. Using your energy as extra EHP already has the downside of using up energy that you could be using for abilities or melee channeling. 

[The_Tiddler]

3 minutes ago, (PS4)DesecratedFlame said:

Redirection offers the same thing a can regen automatically. Using your energy as extra EHP already has the downside of using up energy that you could be using for abilities or melee channeling. 

I just stated I don't think redirection should even exist. But no, they are not comparable in this case.

QT takes the warframe's armour into account as well as flat-out halving the incoming damage to the energy. Shields do neither of these things.

300 energy equates to 750 health and is buffed even further with more armour. 300 shields is 300 shields and that's that.

A health conversion+equilibrium Nekros with QT would essentially be able to gather up an obsene 1450 health with 1509 armour points. That's one of the more powerful examples I could think of and it would be stupidly OP.

 

[YagoXiten]

14 minutes ago, Tiddlerdoo said:

That's a great way to start a reply.

First of all: You're listing flat stat boost mods which, in my opinion, should not exist at all as mods like that contribute to many other balancing issues in the game.

There are mods which add a flat boost with no downsides, and then there are ones that have other big functions with downsides. Take corrupted mods, for example: Decreasing one stat to majorly boost another. In QT's case, without the stagger, it could be an absolutely tremendous boost to survivability. Making you a wee bit weaker when you should be dead seems fair and encourages you to still want to try and block/dodge as many attacks as you can rather than slopping about until your health reaches the threshold.

Flat stat boost mods are not a problem for the balance of the game. The problem is a lack of diversity and competition among such mods.

Quick Thinking does not make you a 'wee bit weaker' when you should be dead. It is a death sentence in and of itself. Quick Thinking provides the most damage mitigation when you have a large energy pool, a high armor value, regeneration (such as from Arcane Grace, Oberon's Renewal or Sayrn's Regenerative Molt Augment), or all of the above. If you do not have this, you will get staggered, most likely repeatedly, and you will die. When you are revived by your team, you are also out of Energy.

 

The cases where Quick Thinking grants you effective HP that you actually get to use are the cases where you could have easily avoided death, anyways, whether through using your powers, or running another defensive mod, like Redirection, Vitality, Vigor, Steel Fiber, or an augment like Shield of Shadows. No one cares about stacking Quick Thinking with Redirection to make squishy frames tanky, because you can solo pretty much every normal mission in the game on a squishy frame without using your powers or any mods at all, and it's certainly not difficult to do it with a fully modded frame, glass cannon build or no.

 

What people care about is that there are Warframes like Hydroid, Volt, Mirage, Titania, Oberon, etc. who have utterly awful defensive options when it comes to Sortie level content. All of them have tricks up their sleeve that can let them avoid taking damage, but they have no way to prevent immediately getting downed when they fail to dodge an attack from a high level enemy. To a certain extent, this is the player's fault. That said, compare the defensive abilities of say, Volt, to Rhino. Even if Rhino's Iron Skin can fall almost immediately, he's granted a guaranteed three seconds of invulnerability, a shield which scales based upon the damage he took, and his defensive mods like Steel Fiber. He can rather easily refresh it with an augment, and he has an armor and health stat high enough that even if he is hit by a high level enemy attack he isn't guaranteed to go down. He can make use of Rage and Life Strike to keep him in the fight a little longer if need be. Volt, on the other hand, has to spend an absurd amount of energy trying to carry around an Electric Shield, or placing many of them and trying to either barricade himself in a corner or  weave between them, and spamming Shock for mini-stuns (which Ancient Healers basically rule out in many cases), and his awful CC on Discharge. Even with Capacitance, Redirection, Vitality, Rage, Primed Flow, and Quick Thinking, Volt can be downed by a single Corrupted Crewman on Mot within mere seconds. And Volt Prime has an amazing Energy pool, a very large shield, and decent health and armor for a squishy.

The effect that just Vitality has on a frame like Rhino is so disproportionate to the benefit that the caster frames get from running Redirection AND Vitality, that people want some sort of alternative to prevent the frustration of playing carefully for twenty minutes only to get instantly killed by a single Bombard that snuck up on you. They're fine with it being high risk, because those frames are squishy for a reason. No one wants it to be overpowered. They just want it to be competitive. Using Quick Thinking on a CC frame like Titania to protect you when you cannot fully lock down the fray should be an option, so that the game is not about who can one shot who first.  Currently, however, you're better off slotting in anything else, since all Quick Thinking will do is save you from some embarrassing deaths on missions no one cares about, or drain all your Energy and THEN get you killed at the worst possible time on the missions people do care about.

Quick Thinking should absolutely have the stagger removed. Don't get me wrong, I love my Volt Prime to pieces, but it gets tiring watching frames like Valkyr or Rhino or Wukong or Nezha or Inaros recklessly going toe to toe with level seventy enemies no problem when you can get instantly killed for making the slightest mistake.

 

1 minute ago, Tiddlerdoo said:

I just stated I don't think redirection should even exist. But no, they are not comparable in this case.

QT takes the warframe's armour into account as well as flat-out halving the incoming damage to the energy. Shields do neither of these things.

300 energy equates to 750 health and is buffed even further with more armour. 300 shields is 300 shields and that's that.

A health conversion+equilibrium Nekros with QT would essentially be able to gather up an obsene 1450 health with 1509 armour points. That's one of the more powerful examples I could think of and it would be stupidly OP.

 

Also, Nekros can already do this. His damage mitigation with Shield of Shadows and Health Conversion is so high that he is basically immune to Quick Thinking's stagger. And damage in general, so I'm not sure why you'd need more mitigation. That's actually the big thing to take away from this. Even if you remove Quick Thinking's stagger, no one who is already absurdly hard to kill is going to start using it to become even more absurdly hard to kill. They're already more than capable of being essentially immortal.

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

1 hour ago, Tiddlerdoo said:

I just stated I don't think redirection should even exist.

Well, until it ceases to exist, QT without stagger would be perfectly balanced. The only reason QT was ever OP was the QT+Rage loop, which no longer exists. 

48 minutes ago, YagoXiten said:

Also, Nekros can already do this. His damage mitigation with Shield of Shadows and Health Conversion is so high that he is basically immune to Quick Thinking's stagger. And damage in general, so I'm not sure why you'd need more mitigation. That's actually the big thing to take away from this. Even if you remove Quick Thinking's stagger, no one who is already absurdly hard to kill is going to start using it to become even more absurdly hard to kill. They're already more than capable of being essentially immortal.

Yep.  Trinity can make herself immune to the stagger too by using keeping link up constantly. 

[(PSN)Lord_Gremlin]

For high level missions you should have vitality and redirection on all caster frames. I've gone down to 100-200 hp hundreds of times as 555/555 loki in sortie 3 but never went down. Just lifestrike it all back. 

Quick thinking is something you put on a tank in addition to vitality etc. to make sure that tank will absolutely not die. Despite being pounded in the face on account of not having casters crowd control. Example would be atlas. 

[RealPandemonium]

Stagger makes sense to keep you from just tanking with mana shield, but chain-stagger should be removed.  A cooldown between staggers is needed, IMO.  It should punish you for facetanking but give you a fighting chance to get to safety.  

The hard part is deciding whether stagger is inflicted on amount of damage or number of hits.  Number of hits is better for Sortie-level enemies, but provides little defense against enemies with miniguns or shotguns.  A stagger based solely on damage received would ensure staggers in Sortie-level content.  Nonetheless, the idea is to provide a small "second chance" HP buffer to frames that don't benefit as much from conventional durability mods; not a third health pool.  

Edited September 8, 2016 by RealPandemonium

[YagoXiten]

2 minutes ago, RealPandemonium said:

Stagger makes sense to keep you from just tanking with mana shield, but chain-stagger should be removed.  A cooldown between staggers is needed, IMO.  It should punish you for facetanking but give you a fighting chance to get to safety.  

The hard part is deciding whether stagger is inflicted on amount of damage or number of hits.  Number of hits is better for Sortie-level enemies, but provides little defense against enemies with miniguns or shotguns.  A stagger based solely on damage received would ensure staggers in Sortie-level content.  Nonetheless, the idea is to provide a small "second chance" HP buffer to frames that don't benefit as much from conventional durability mods; not a third health pool.  

With the state the game currently is in, it /should/ be a third health pool.  Running Redirection, Vitality, and Steel Fiber is not going to help squishy frames survive at all. We want to move away from binary gameplay, where you either die instantly or completely remove the chance for your enemy to retaliate against you. Sure, maybe Damage 3.0, changes to the way base stats and/or defensive abilities work, and enemy scaling reworks could make them stand on even ground. But at the present moment, the best available option is to give them a defensive mod they can actually count on is to buff and rework Quick Thinking.

 

Imagine, for a second, if all Warframes could equip a mod that gave them the ability cast all their powers with Health instead of with Energy, like what Despoil does to Desecrate. Without those health orbs, not many frames would want that. At all. It'd completely destroy Blind Rage's usefulness on a number of frames, and it'd make them dance with death to use their abilities frequently. Now realize that Quick Thinking is literally that, except it stuns you, too. Except unlike Despoil, you get destroyed by the Magnetic status, Energy Leech eximus units, and you can't use Life Strike to replenish it. Oh, and you start with zero in your pool if you go down and get back up. And most of the ones who actually need defenses don't even benefit as much from it, because they still lack armor.

[RealPandemonium]

2 minutes ago, YagoXiten said:

snip

The issue of binary gameplay is a problem with enemy scaling and the damage system.  Giving everyone an third health pool will not fix that.  Zenurik already makes QT super powerful for all frames and Trinity is just ridiculous.  We need fundamental change, not more power creep.  

[YagoXiten]

20 minutes ago, RealPandemonium said:

The issue of binary gameplay is a problem with enemy scaling and the damage system.  Giving everyone an third health pool will not fix that.  Zenurik already makes QT super powerful for all frames and Trinity is just ridiculous.  We need fundamental change, not more power creep.  

It's a systemic matter. It's our defenses and abilities, our weapons, and the enemy scaling. There's many, many pieces to that puzzle. But this is not what I would call power creep. This isn't going to substantially buff anything that's already top tier. It's just going to even out the playing field so the bottom tier is a little more capable. Really, if all frames had survivability on par with Sayrn Prime, enemy scaling wouldn't be as significant as an issue as it is now.  Yes. There needs to be massive changes, and I don't deny that. But those kinds of major changes to entire gameplay elements take a long time individually, and we're dealing with multiple things that intertwine.

Also: Have you actually used Quick Thinking with Zenurik? Because I promise Zenurik does not do much of anything to help Quick Thinking. I know, because I've tested a number of things to make Volt Prime less paper. As in: I've used a build running Armored Agility, Steel Fiber, Vitality, Redirection, Quick Thinking, Rage, Flow (Primed Flow is not high on my priority list to max), Capacitance, Brief Respite/Stand United/Rejuvenation/Growing Power and Cunning Drift. And whilst I'm aware that Primed Flow would make quite a difference when at maximum Energy, it isn't going to mitigate the fact that a single Blast proc, Ancient Healer grapple, Shockwave MOA stomp, etc.is death. Nor is it going to stop me from dying to Quick Thinking's chain stagger. It just delays the death a couple more seconds.

[zehne]

I feel as if my earlier post that shows how the majority of warframes need ~~183 energy to make quick thinking on par with vitality has gone to waste.  Few warframes (with lower base health) need ~~138 energy to make quick thinking as effective as vitality.  Warframes with higher base heal (such as ash P)  would need ~~275 energy to make quick thinking on par with Vitality.

That's ON PAR.  Not better than.  When you throw a stagger into the mix, that means not only would you have to lose all your health AND that much energy, but you get staggered and hit more?!?

 

Throw rage into the mix, lets say there was no energy cap (like at all, you could store an infinite amount but there are no energy pads/EV, etc so orbs are your only source).  The majority of warframes have 300 health at 30.  With maxed vitality that goes up to 740.  So lets say a person takes 298 damage with rage before quick thinking kicks in.  With maxxed rage that means they'd receive 119 energy.

Basically: you'd get 119 energy when using rage and quick thinking would consume 183 at the break even point of vitality

• Rage and quick thinking combined are worse than vitality

[alexmach1]

Don't forget another drawback to using Quick Thinking: using a mod slot and losing 15/8 capacity.

Edited September 8, 2016 by alexmach1

[KittyDarkling]

Not gonna lie, I came in here with a "one stagger is fine, but we should gain immunity to stagger for a bit just after" mentality. However @zehne , @Skaleek , @YagoXiten , just to name a few seriously put in the work with their arguments. I don't have much to add other than my support for outright removing the stagger all together. Thank you guys for presenting such good points of view on the matter!