Negative Stat Rivens have 0 practical usages

[(XBOX)PompousNinja156]

Title is mostly self explanatory but given that Sun and Moon are out I decided a relevant comparison can be made where, in Pokemon, intentionally inflicting yourself with debuffs or deliberately breeding/raising Pokemon to have the lowest possible stat value for a certain stat is both a thing that is designed around and actually a competitively viable strategy.

I've made mention in a previous post regarding how the Riven Mod limitation of 15 do not incentivize inventiveness because, ultimately the mechanics of the game and how they interact ultimately decide what works and what doesn't, and when the mechanics simply don't add up into something interesting or useful, it will stay that way until it does, IE until DE changes the coding. To briefly paraphase the Pokemon comparison I drew up then, A player a few years back won the VGC using a pokemon that was widely regarded as a throwaway, and the reason it was so successful was because it had the combination of abilities, typing and stats it did.

Another example was Aegislash. The devs admitted they were surprised that people ran Special/Mixed offensive Variants of it when it is predominately Physical, and the reason why it's Defensive block, King's Shield, did not protect against Status moves was because they intended it to be countered by the Burn status (DoT and cuts the power of Physical Attacks in half). The reason Special/Mixed was used though was because it didn't care all that much for Burn, and the reason this was possible was due to Aegislash's mechanics allowing this build path in the first place (Offensive form has equal power in both offensive stats, has a small but workable Special-based movepool including some Meta stuff like Shadow Ball, ect.)

To summarize, unique, unexpected stuff comes out of Pokemon all the time because despite players knowing how all the mechanics work and there being an established Meta of obviously good (Gengar) and obvious trash (Sunkern), they aren't limited to a tiny handful of Pokemon to test (There's over 700 now, go wild), every pokemon has at least 2 different abilities and have movepools anywhere between 1 and Smeargle's gimmick (Ability to use every move, limited only by the 4 move slots), and most have some kind of the gimmickiest, abusable powers about. Oh, and there's tons of items that open up even more avenues.

Even more simply, "Limitation is the mother of invention" only works IRL where we know less than a trillionth of a percent of how exactly the universe functions and are desperate for a solution and eventually find it after trying literally everything and then some, or by complete accident focusing on an unrelated issue, not in a videogame where aside from bugs creating unintentional effects, we know exactly how everything functions down to the decimal in a day or two after extensive testing and aggregating notes with the rest of the playerbase.

Now onto the topic at hand.

There are a grand total of 4 cases in game where one would deliberately lower stats

1. EV Trinity running low duration to have all the EV pulses at once (unless this changed)
2. Nova's interactions with Power Strength to get mass Slow/Speed
3. Depleted Reload on Vectis Prime wherein it lowers Vectis Prime's Magazine size to 1, used in conjuction with Primed Chamber (lotta work for a mod no one has but....)
4. Using the mod that lowers the bounces of Thrown Melee to get it back faster

In no other situation does having a stat reduction become something worth testing because having -100% damage/Multishot immediately makes a gun do nothing. Lowering Crit Chance & Multiplier/Status Chance & Duration always hurts a weapon rather than help, while having too much negative Recoil/Spread makes it to hard handle in any range higher than Melee. Zoom as a stat is so worthless it's not even funny and even then, there's no argument for intentionally lowering it aside from the other bonuses being too good to pass up, and so on, and this is not taking into account useless buffs, which are only wasted space on certain weapons, rather than simply having no use whatsoever.

That's the really sad part, because of pure RNG, your hard-earned Kuva can get wasted trying to reroll away these debuffs that serve no purpose but to make one reroll the really awful ones. Corrupted Mods worked because the Buff and Debuff were locked in and thus can be planned around, Rivens can't because you have 0 control over your rolls aside from being able to decline going from a 'meh' roll to a roll that is literal garbage.

Now remember how I said that deliberately lowering or debuffing yourself is a thing that can be done mechanically and leads to interesting results in Pokemon? There are abilities in Pokemon that apply when you are affected by Status effects.

• Guts: Boosts attack under Status, user is immune Burn's debuff
• Quick Feet: Boosts speed under Status, user is immune to Paralysis debuff (but not the stun)
• Toxic Heal: User gains health instead of Poison/Toxic's DoT
• Marvel Scale: Boosts defense when afflicted by Status
• Magic Guard (I think): User is immune to passive damage, meaning if the user is burned, they suffer the debuff but not the DoT (this is nifty since Status effects can't stack)

This post is already getting long so I won't go into specifics here, but I want to point out that Pokemon with these abilities can self-trigger them though items or attacks available to them, and because Pokemon have more than 1 Ability, you can use an entirely different build to suit your playstyles/Team compositions. 

There's also moves like Shell Shash (Halves defenses, doubles Both offenses and Speed) on Pokemon like Shuckle (Highest defensive stats of all in both defenses but poor offensive stats and Speed), Gyro Ball (Hits Harder the slower you are), Topsy Turvy (Flips all buffs and Debuffs, IE: x2 multipliers become x0.5 and vice versa),  Power/Guard Split (Splits the combined offenses/Defenses between you and the target, IE: 100 Def and 800 Def split to 450 for both, useful for crippling the other guy while buffing yourself several degrees) and so on, distributed across several different Pokemon.  

The infamous gimmick with the level 1 Ratatta is also a thing due to this intentional minimazation (Dies to everything, given an item to survive with 1 HP, Lowers the opponent to 1 HP in the same turn, then kills the opponent by chipping that 1 HP away with Quick Attack.) that spawned a variant involving Aron (Immune to sandstorm, and ability lets it endure like Ratatta's item. Instead, given an item to heal it to full after lowering the opponent to 1 HP to reset it's ability, they die to either Quick Attck or Sandstorm chip damage)

Unlike the potential shown in certain Pokemon's ability to take advantage of intentionally lowering your stats/self-applying status effects due to having mechanics that support and even incentivize a playstyle, Warframe has no such things in place, which makes it fly in the face of what you aimed goals of creating alternatives through Rivens. There are 0 gameplay applications for a gun that can't fire, does zero damage, has shoddy status/crit stats, have really awful recoil that it's a chore to use or any other negative bonus that can really hamper whatever positive gains you rolled. The best thing you can do is remove the negative modiers that do literally nothing but force one to roll again in hopes their next is slightly less awful.

 

 

[ashrah]

depends i got burston riven 122%multishot 134%eletricity -24dmg vs infested... u still doing triple dmg

[gkuoni]

The bigger problem is when it buffs stats on a weapon that the weapon can't use, for example crit chance and damage on Panthera

[NinjaKitsune56]

11 minutes ago, gkuoni said:

The bigger problem is when it buffs stats on a weapon that the weapon can't use, for example crit chance and damage on Panthera

Or +IPS on an Ignis.

[Cortanis]

This argument is really subjective to the weapon in question. Case in point, I managed to pull a nice Cernos riven. 150% crit chance, 105% flight speed, and -55% effect duration. Cernos isn't a duration based weapon. I'll gladly take that negative for the now 40% base chance at a red crit... which happens waaaaaay more than that 40%.

The flight speed was actually a really nice bonus too. If it wasn't for the Heavy Caliber, it would be SR accurate and with the range to work it too. If they ever rework the multishot into the double damage version at the expense of ammo, then this thing will be far more broken than it already is now.

[(XBOX)PompousNinja156]

5 hours ago, Cortanis said:

This argument is really subjective to the weapon in question. Case in point, I managed to pull a nice Cernos riven. 150% crit chance, 105% flight speed, and -55% effect duration. Cernos isn't a duration based weapon. I'll gladly take that negative for the now 40% base chance at a red crit... which happens waaaaaay more than that 40%.

The flight speed was actually a really nice bonus too. If it wasn't for the Heavy Caliber, it would be SR accurate and with the range to work it too. If they ever rework the multishot into the double damage version at the expense of ammo, then this thing will be far more broken than it already is now.

 

6 hours ago, ashrah said:

depends i got burston riven 122%multishot 134%eletricity -24dmg vs infested... u still doing triple dmg

In both your examples, the mods are strictly worse than just rolling both the buffs without the debuff, which is possible. Given that you can't really use the negative modifiers for anything and it's pure RNG, you would be singing a different tune if you rolled a different negative modifier. "It doesn't always screw me over" isn't really a defense when it screws a lot of players or even screws players over at all despite being an endgame system.

6 hours ago, gkuoni said:

The bigger problem is when it buffs stats on a weapon that the weapon can't use, for example crit chance and damage on Panthera

I'd argue it's the reverse. A buff that does little or nothing is better than a negative debuff that always hampers performance. That said, both the negative stats and the useless stats really showcase the ugly, sloppy nature of this system to begin with. The fact that either is even a thing, and neither have been addressed is cause for concern.

[Unknown924]

I got a Karak mod that adds damage and slash damage but fully removes impact damage.  Given how much better slash procs are currently I would call it useful - especially since the impact damage is removed after elemental mods are calculated so it is still affecting them.  I got very lucky but I think my mod is a perfect example of what the Riven system wants to be - it just needs more intelligent rolls.  It would be awesome if the negative stat impacted the positive stats - such as intentionally removing a damage type but buffing a different one by enough that the total damage remains about the same.  Basically what I got lucky on, but by design.

[(PSN)DesecratedFlame]

7 hours ago, (XB1)PompousNinja156 said:

unique, unexpected stuff comes out of Pokemon all the time

Same thing happens in WF; DE immediately nerfs it.