'overcharging' Mods

[Xianyu]

Just an idea for overcharging mods to create a very specific, personalized weapon.

 

The basic premis is that 'overcharging' lets you add more to a mod power to a mod card at a cost. Like, use a forma on a fully made mod card for, say, rifle Split Chamber.

 

At level 15, you get a 90% chance of firing two bullets at once.

 

But say you want to make it BETTER?

 

Overcharge that sucker. You can increase its level again, giving it a 105% chance of firing twice, but at the same time, increasing its equip cost from 15, to 17.

 

If you leveled it again, you'd get a 120% chance of firing two rounds, with an equip cost of 19. And instead of white icons going up the side of the card, you could make them red for each 'overcharged' level.

 

Then, we'd have a way of making some really, really unique weapons. A Boltor that fires insanely fast with a huge huge magazine, for instance? Ether daggers with super-increased fury allowing you to strike upwards of five times a second?

 

It'd be interesting, I think.

[Xoxile]

This might be alright IF we couldn't polarize our weapons, and frames.

[Namacyst]

Ya because the game isn't easy enough already with weapons and mods at standart levels dealing over 9000 damage.

[LazerusKI]

i think they are capped for a reason.

overcharge would jsut be increasing the level with using different materials (forma)

 

it would be exactly the same as it was before the forma.

level up your mods as high as possible with limited points.

now if you have enough time and forma you can mod nearly everything to the max.

so, increasing the mod level over and over again would result in exact the old system. level up and take as much as possible.

Edited July 3, 2013 by LazerusKI

[Xianyu]

i think they are capped for a reason.

overcharge would jsut be increasing the level with using different materials (forma)

 

it would be exactly the same as it was before the forma.

level up your mods as high as possible with limited points.

now if you have enough time and forma you can mod nearly everything to the max.

so, increasing the mod level over and over again would result in exact the old system. level up and take as much as possible.

That why I suggested a double hit for each upgrade past the current 'max'. That way, you wouldn't be able to increase all of your mod cards to super high levels. Rather, you'd have to have one or two really really good ones and the rest just normal.

 

Then they could add some super-high-level planets for masochists.

[Xoxile]

That why I suggested a double hit for each upgrade past the current 'max'. That way, you wouldn't be able to increase all of your mod cards to super high levels. Rather, you'd have to have one or two really really good ones and the rest just normal.

 

Then they could add some super-high-level planets for masochists.

You can already max every mod on a weapon or frame thanks for forma. You don't even need every slot to have a polarization in order to do this. With this suggestion it would be possible to polarize every slot to have every mod at max level with spare points. With those spare points you could then proceed to make the most important mod even more powerful. This is no good.

[LazerusKI]

That why I suggested a double hit for each upgrade past the current 'max'. That way, you wouldn't be able to increase all of your mod cards to super high levels. Rather, you'd have to have one or two really really good ones and the rest just normal.

 

Then they could add some super-high-level planets for masochists.

yeah, as i said, it would be like "before forma"

we could not max everything, now we can and we are realy powerfull.

instead of further upgrading our old mods, i would want to see new stuff, new elements, new effects.

[Argoms]

We wouldn't have weapons be any more unique because damage mods are just better until you can kill everything in one hit. A boltor with triple the magazine size will, with the current cost of mods, cost just as much as a boltor that does 5-10x the damage (which would be much more efficient in every way).

 

The concept of diminishing returns on mods could be interesting and increase mod variety though. Having something like serration's benefits exponentially decrease per level could make other mods that don't directly increase damage like zoom more viable. Instead of the current "trade +80% base damage for +60% zoom", it could be more along the lines of "You can have +65% damage and +60% zoom, or you could have +80% damage" (numbers are pulled out of nowhere).

[lstalri]

+1

I'm never a fan of having a hard limit from the numbers stopping you from going any farther.  The more content to upgrade, the better, and I like where this is going. 

 

Really, all that I'm hearing are complaints of "the game is already too easy, why buff the players even more?"  To which I respond: "Have you even seen a lvl 250+ enemy?" because I have (saw my first lvl 280 something last night; could've easily gone farther if we felt like putting up with the lag), and I'll tell you right now that our current weapons do jack S#&$ to them (compared to the 1-hit wonders we're used to).  The content is there for these "OP" weapons to be used on, all that needs to happen is it be implemented. 

 

Even if you allow infinite "overcharging" of the mod, it will still be limited by your 60 mod points on your weapon, so you could still only have like 4 mods that require 30 mod points each (with forma: 30/2 *4 = 60). 

 

Currently, your in-game end-game is lvl 100's (if you're lucky on a t3, but they're more like 50-80's), and we're are looking at lvl 100-150 for our next end-game content.  I see no reason why we can't go as high as lvl 500 for our "end-game" content as long as items support it.  Not only is this an excellent side-grade (does not make one thing any more or less clearly better than another than it already is), it allows for a resource dump for players who have pretty much already finished them game (mod/credit dump), and it opens to doors to weapons being a viable source of damage past lvl 100 enemies (because every time I've seen lvl 100+ enemies, we just stopped using weapons and went ability crazy). 

[Xoxile]

+1

I'm never a fan of having a hard limit from the numbers stopping you from going any farther.  The more content to upgrade, the better, and I like where this is going. 

 

Really, all that I'm hearing are complaints of "the game is already too easy, why buff the players even more?"  To which I respond: "Have you even seen a lvl 250+ enemy?" because I have (saw my first lvl 280 something last night; could've easily gone farther if we felt like putting up with the lag), and I'll tell you right now that our current weapons do jack S#&$ to them (compared to the 1-hit wonders we're used to).  The content is there for these "OP" weapons to be used on, all that needs to happen is it be implemented. 

 

Even if you allow infinite "overcharging" of the mod, it will still be limited by your 60 mod points on your weapon, so you could still only have like 4 mods that require 30 mod points each (with forma: 30/2 *4 = 60). 

 

Currently, your in-game end-game is lvl 100's (if you're lucky on a t3, but they're more like 50-80's), and we're are looking at lvl 100-150 for our next end-game content.  I see no reason why we can't go as high as lvl 500 for our "end-game" content as long as items support it.  Not only is this an excellent side-grade (does not make one thing any more or less clearly better than another than it already is), it allows for a resource dump for players who have pretty much already finished them game (mod/credit dump), and it opens to doors to weapons being a viable source of damage past lvl 100 enemies (because every time I've seen lvl 100+ enemies, we just stopped using weapons and went ability crazy).

The problem with that logic is with endless defenses there is no limit. It could go on infinitely. So you would need weapons that would have no limit to it's power. There needs to be a cap otherwise the power of older players will get so out of hand that the newer players will feel like they will never catch up. Which is true, and what would happen.

[LazerusKI]

and people would only use

Serration

Split Chamber

Armor Piercing

maybe the crit mods.

the rest would not be needed anymore.

[Phatose]

What if overcharging altered a mod's polarity to one which is specific to overcharged mods and can not be added to a weapon via forma?

 

In that case, overcharging would be far more costly.  It's a much harder choice - taking split chamber from 90% to 105% would actually cost you 8 mod points.  That's the equivalent of a 45% additional fire damage hellfire mod.

[Ghobe]

Only 2 mod capacity to increase? No. Take it further. Right now the limit is not 60 mod capacity, the limit is 120(fully forma'd + potato).

 

Suggested formula: Capped Cost + (Capped Cost * 30%) ^ (Overcharged Level / (10 - Overcharged Level) + 1)

This means for the Split Chamber example...which caps at 15...

Level 5: 15

Level 5 + 1: 20.3

Level 5 + 2: 21.5

Level 5 + 3: 23.5

Level 5 + 4: 27.2

Level 5 + 5: 35.3

So fully polarized, that's still 18 mod capacity of the 60. Only problem is, does overcharged cap? It had better cap at 9 for this formula, but it should probably cap based on the card as well.

Level 5 + 9: 3405077.9

Level 5 + 8: 1860.3

Level 5 + 7: 165.4

Level 5 + 6: 58

Though with the formula, as we can see, nobody would take it past 6, as it would be unusable beyond that ;p

 

The only problem I really have is how well it interacts with the damage mods which kind of already let us reach ridiculous damage. And level 250+ mobs is not a justification. Aiming for their weakpoint still allows you to deal insane damage.

Right now with maxed out mods...

Serration: 165%

Piercing Hit: 60%

Hellfire: 90%

Cryo Rounds: 90%

Stormbringer: 90%

 

And the basic way they combine for raw damage...

(Weapon damage * 2.65) * 4.3 = Weapon Damage * 11.395

Now that's not totally accurate, but it helps you understand how radical it can get. With this change, for every overcharge level of serration, you're adding .645x more damage. Keep in mind that Serration's capped cost is 1 cheaper than our little experiment with Split Chamber.

Level 10 + 6: 50.15

Level 10 + 7: 133.54

Although it can't be taken to 7 overcharges, it could still go to 6 and you could have all the other damage mods maxed out as well.

50 + 11 + 9 + 11 + 9 = 90 Raw Capacity

25 + 6 + 5 + 6 + 5 = 47 Polarized Capacity

You could still drop maxed Split Chamber and maxed Speed Trigger on that for more insanity, as well as perfect polarized mod capacity of 60(114 raw). So let's look at that...

Level 10: 165%

Level 10 + 6: 255%

(Weapon damage * 3.55) * 4.3 = Weapon Damage * 15.265 * Weapon Fire Rate * 1.9 * 1.9 = DPFR Increase of Weapon Damage * Weapon Fire Rate * 55.1

*DPFR = Damage Per Fire Rate

**Not totally sure if fire rate is shots per second, doubt it.

So, more than 55x where a weapon starts out at in comparison to the current limit of 41.1x.

 

In terms of current content, what we have now is already incredibly powerful, adding this on top of it is just kind of stupid at this point in time. I'd say hold off on something like this until we have much harder content to test against.

[LazerusKI]

*snip*

In terms of current content, what we have now is already incredibly powerful, adding this on top of it is just kind of stupid at this point in time. I'd say hold off on something like this until we have much harder content to test against.

exactly.

first we would need realy strong badass enemys, but we will probably never get them that high, i think the T3 guys are pretty much endgame.

maybe with the announced "nightmare mode" but yeah, even higher enemys would be no problem, because we are already OP, once he have max. forma in our weapon and max. mods.

i mean...with my dread i can onehit pretty much everyone of the regular enemys.

hyena takes 2 hits when im solo. some bosses take more, some take less, based on the level.

[Ghobe]

first we would need realy strong badass enemys, but we will probably never get them that high, i think the T3 guys are pretty much endgame.

T3 is CURRENT end-game. However, with new systems/planets, nightmare mode, etc still coming, it's hardly THEE end-game. It might be the area we go to at the end of each bracket, but there's no way level 63 is the end-game xP maybe early mid-game, if that.

[lstalri]

The problem with that logic is with endless defenses there is no limit. It could go on infinitely. So you would need weapons that would have no limit to it's power. There needs to be a cap otherwise the power of older players will get so out of hand that the newer players will feel like they will never catch up. Which is true, and what would happen.

And the problem with your counter to that logic is you disregard any possibility for that type of content (the kind that we want to see) to be anywhere outside of Endless Defense.  Imaging an Assassination mission with lvl 300 enemies left and right.  Every enemy would be a boss, and you'd have to kill God himself as the boss.  How awesome would that be? 

 

As I said, I recognize that this level of content is not in the game as of yet, but I see no reason why it can't be, and no reason why this type of mechanic can't come along with it.  DE already said they'll be adding more end-game stuff, both player made (which I assume will have its fair share of outragiously difficult missions) and DE made (which I assume would probably be more towards the underpowered side; if not, they're finally headed in the right direction and a major +1 to that). 

[Ghobe]

Imaging an Assassination mission with lvl 300 enemies left and right.  Every enemy would be a boss, and you'd have to kill God himself as the boss.  How awesome would that be?

I've played a mod on Killing Floor that replaced all the normal enemies with the Boss. Not as fun as you would imagine. The results looked like this...

 

As you can see, there was no where to hide and no way to live /nod and that was wave 1.