I think [SPOILER] may not be enough to make some old weapons worthy

[Antiphoton]

This thread contains small spoilers about the rewards introduced afther the completion of TWW quest. Read at your own risk.

 

 

The Riven mods made me realize the lack of variety in my choices of primary weapons. While most of my loadouts have a lot of different combinations of secondary weapons and melee, many of them not-so-meta, my primary weapons are always the same: Soma Prime, Tigris Prime, Rakta Cernos and Vectis Prime (for sniper only sorties).

The introduction of Riven mods made me happy, there are a lot of primary weapons that I always wanted to use more often, but considering that the only thing I do lately is sorties, I need something relatively powerful. I don't care about enemies with levels above 100. If a primary can hold its ground in a sortie 3 (lvl 100), it's good enough for me. So I got a Riven mod that gives approximately +90% multishot and +160% critical chance for the Stradavar, one of my favorite rifles. After seeing the amount of useless effects other players got, I decided that the roll on my mod was worth keeping. I put a bunch of formas on my Stradavar, and got decent stats. With Argon Scope and the semi-auto mode, I could get into red crit territory, but after testing it in the Simulacrum, a below 100% crit chance with a higher multiplier yielded better results. So I took it into today's sortie. The first one was an Eximus Survival. I even took my Mesa to buff the damage further with Shooting Gallery, and I was highly disappointed. The damage output was very low, not even barely enough to compete with top tier weapons without Riven mods. If this would have been a sortie 2 or 3, I would have needed to rely only on my other weapons.

The idea is fine. But in its current iteration, it doesn't give enough incentive to switch away from the top tier primaries. I mean, if I wanted to have fun with a weapon that I like, I would have taken it to a random mission in the star chart, and I don't need a Riven mod for that. However, if I want to do sorties or high level endless missions, or any other content where optimal performance is somewhat needed, I still have to stick to top tier primaries.

The problem is that I don't know what to propose. A straight up buff for the effects of Riven mods is dangerous. I want them to work, I like their concept. But they are not enough to compensate the bad stats of most rifles. 

 

On a side note, I don't think the whole re-roll system serves its purpose. You said that you wanted it this way so we have an incentive to try out bonuses that we didn't expect. But I don't think many people will sacrifice 18 mod points to keep effects like +zoom, +status duration or +reload speed, specially if they also have negative stats. From what I've seen, most people will simply keep rerolling until they get +damage, +crit or +multishot, which in the end only adds another layer of grind.

Small disclaimer: I've wrote this in General Feedback because it is mostly about the whole situation with Riven mods. The weapons I mention are just examples, it isn't my intention to discuss the stats of specific weapons. But if a moderator thinks this thread needs to be moved, feel free to do it.

[Zhoyzu]

Ive a large collection of all the weapons ive used and liked. I dont think the issue is the system but the players. I learned a long time ago that i gotta keep switching it up or the burnout returns to quickly. I very rarely take the same weapon into two missions in a row or more. So no i dont think the new mods are going to fix anything. 

It seems players get so caught up in trying to be OP they forget to have fun. Very few weapons are so poorly performing that they arent viable on planetary difficultly while everything else is good enough for "normal" content.

[Antiphoton]

I have a decent collection of non-op weapons myself, too, and sometimes I take them into challenging content for fun. But sometimes you need to have something done quickly. Sometimes it's fun to kill stuff faster. The whole goal behind Riven mods is to give players the opportunity to do that without recurring to the same 4-6 choices, leaving dozens of others collecting dust. I'm merely stating why, based on my experience, I think that goal was not achieved. Yet.

[Zhoyzu]

23 minutes ago, Antiphoton said:

I have a decent collection of non-op weapons myself, too, and sometimes I take them into challenging content for fun. But sometimes you need to have something done quickly. Sometimes it's fun to kill stuff faster. The whole goal behind Riven mods is to give players the opportunity to do that without recurring to the same 4-6 choices, leaving dozens of others collecting dust. I'm merely stating why, based on my experience, I think that goal was not achieved. Yet.

I feel like they were intended to add "flavor" but not fix them. A lot of the rifles could use some QoL buffs/fixes but i wouldnt look too or want riven mods to be that bandaid.

[ComCray]

If their aim was to make some little used weapons more viable, they shouldn't have included the ridiculous crit chance/crit damage mods for the n00btubes tonkor or simulor. 

And the whole notion you can reroll and get worse stats then before completely blows my mind...

[Antiphoton]

4 minutes ago, Zhoyzu said:

I feel like they were intended to add "flavor" but not fix them. A lot of the rifles could use some QoL buffs/fixes but i wouldnt look too or want riven mods to be that bandaid.

According to Rebecca's post: "What [Riven mods] can do is add an interesting buff to a comparatively underpowered weapon in order to encourage players to think outside of that meta box."

I've tried it. My argument afterwards is that said buff is not interesting enough to encourage me to do that.

We must keep in mind that there are two mindsets when approaching this matter: "fun" and "optimal results". I don't need Riven mods to have fun, be it in the star chart, or in higher tier content as a way to challenge myself. But when we consider it from the viewpoint of "high performance", Riven mods do not achieve their goal.

I didn't want Riven mods before, and I wouldn't mind that much if they were removed. But they are here, so I'm giving feedback with the intention of improving them.

[Zhoyzu]

i see, i hadnt seen that quote. I may be of like minds now. Bandaids dont cut it for me anymore.

[Xzorn]

Riven mods do indeed work to improve low end weapons. You must consider enemy HP grows an an exponential rate

Low end weapons are improved through a greater span of levels than meta weapons because the HP gains per level that the meta weapons deal with is a great deal higher per level. You might get +100 levels out of Soma but you'll get +150 levels out of Braton Prime and Braton Prime happens to already outperform Soma against high armored enemies.

In some cases it makes the low end weapon perform better but in majority of cases it simply shortens the level gap between weapons.

 

[TaylorsContraction]

Long story short I agree. The riven mods allowed my vectis to reach the next level of damages, but even if you could equip 2 riven mods on a tetra, it would probably still under perform.

Perhaps the solution is, the weaker the weapon the more riven mods it can have up to a maximum. The buzzlock for example will never be good with just one riven mod. DE can decide what's weak /strong by just looking at the meta. In my own arsenal I can list of every weapon and the corresponding number of riven mods they need.

Ampex - 1

Boltor Prime - 2

Braton (vandal / prime) - 2

Dera (vandal) - 3

Flux-rifle - 3

grataka  (prisma) - 1

gorgon (wraith / prisma) - 2

Karak (wraith) - 2

Ogris - 2

Rubico - 1

Snipetron (vandal) - 1

Soma p - 1

tetra (prisma) - 3

Tonkor - 1

Vectis (prime) - 1

Just to give people an idea what's going through my head.