Damage 3.0 Concept Idea

[Arunasoul]

A while ago DE Steve mentioned on a devstream that he constantly hears damage needs a rework, but doesn't tend to get feedback beyond that so I'm tossing this up because I have thoughts. Those thoughts revolve around a few major things I see in the current damage 2.0 that realistically could be dealt with in a few ways, that may not even require a complete rework or rebuild of the current damage 2.0 system.

 

Essentially, the problems I see with the current system is the 'weakness' of several damage types versus the massive armor numbers of enemies as they grow in level has seriously damaged the value of damage types. For instance, I find Impact damage just doesn't feel like it has a place in my kit at all, since shields are generally a non-issue to me in comparison to 'flesh' or 'armor', as such, any time I see a weapon come out with 90% impact, 5% slash, 5% puncture, I instantly relegate it to 'mastery fodder'. Max it and purge it when my weapon slots get full, effectively. This is because if I wanted to kill shields better, magnetic damage works a million times better, even more so if it procs. Slash and toxin kinda fill the same role

 

First and foremost, primary and secondary weapons have a LOT of very good, very LARGE mods that pretty much require forma to get to a good build in a lot of cases. So to alleviate that issue, and because stances were a great idea that helped alot, I was thinking about 'stances' for primaries and secondaries. This also helps deal with the major issue of 'that's an awesome or cool gun, but it's damage type sucks', since what I'm looking at is 'damage conversion' with primary and secondary weapon 'stances'.

So, the 'stances' could be a 'coating' for bullet type weapons, or 'payloads' for launchers. The mods themselves would convert the damage of a weapon completely, as well as provide a slight bonus to other things (ammo capacity, damage, status chance, crit chance, etc.). This is so that their more than just converters, since converters alone wouldn't be as exciting or interesting for the players. 

 

The second thing I'd like to see for damage 3.0 is revamping status procs, which I'll do in list form cause it'd be a thick paragraph. The vast majority are meant to be 'in addition to current effects', so unless I mention reducing the current effect, like I do in puncture's case to balance it a bit with the proposed additional effect, basically assume I mean 'on top of' the current effects. Also, I wanted to add some dynamic effects and interactions to statuses that would make them more enticing to use in certain combos, and overall more interesting as their kinda bland in their current form. Also, I used the damage type name that inflicts the status for the statuses for ease of use.

 

1) Impact, reduce armor value permanently at a much lower rate than corrosive procs.

2) Corrosive, procs with slight damage over time. Each 'tick' decreases armor value permanently by a small amount. (

3) Radiation, procs causing continual damage in a radius around the affected target. Radiation proc chance increases for every instance of radiation damage taken. (increased chance to proc stacks up to 90%, and goes up by 1% per instance of damage taken by radiation sources.)

4) Magnetic, procs causing projectile weapons to 'home in' a bit on the affected target. Gas, causing reduced accuracy for proc affected enemies.

5) Viral, causing regular enemies (non-boss) to stop and cough at times (kinda like a stun), causing viral spread around the coughing target. Additional procs of Viral on an affected target cause a stacking slight decrease in status resistance, crit resistance, and damage. (by slight I mean like 1% or less.) This decrease would reduce every 'tick' (basically the enemy would get their status, crit resist, and damage returning by like 1% per 'tick'. So if you reduced it by 10%, then it 'ticked', it would be 9%) and the current timer for it's effect would refresh on application while retaining the decreased stats.

6) Blast, causing slowed enemy movement (say like a short duration concussion where their disoriented), and more vulnerable to crits (like a 5% increased crit chance against them for 3-6 seconds). 

7) Puncture, would reduce damage by a lower amount (same duration as before) and reduce their armor values (permanently).

8) Cold, would increase the effect of armor permanent decreases (proposed in this list), as well as temporarily boost incoming Impact, Puncture, Electricity, Blast and Corrosive damage. Heat procs would remove Cold procs.

9) Heat, interacts with toxin procs by causing 'gas procs' and consuming the toxin status. (remember, the current gas status DOES damage over time, thus this doesn't 'remove your DOT', just changes it's form.) Armor values decrease each tick (permanent reduction to armor done on the ticks, not up front) while impact, slash, and puncture damage are increased against the afflicted.

10) Electricity, interacts with the environment similar to volt's overload, causing 'tech' and 'charged enemies' (basically others with electrical procs) close (short range, like 3-5 meters) to deal another instance of the damage that caused the proc (so if an attack did like 300 damage and scored a proc, the effect would deal another 300 damage to the target. for balancing purposes this will likely need to be toned down to about 20% or less of the overall damage inflicted being dealt, so instead of another 300 being dealt, it would be 60.)

11) Toxin, interacts with Electricity procs by amplifying the radius of the electrical proc (double?, testing with the idea would be needed to balance it), as well as causing the toxin damage over time to increase by 2%-ish. (too much of a damage amp, like say 100% so it deals double after an electrical proc would get insane too quickly, plus it would be stacking. So toxin proc would be dealing X, then X+2%, then {X+2%}+2%, etc. Since toxin is relatively short duration, the number of electrical procs in a short time shouldn't be enough to get it to deal more damage than the bullets coming out of your gun each tick.)

12) Slash, reduces the duration of toxin and viral stacks by 1 second each time a slash 'tick' happens. Electricity and corrosive damage increases to targets with a slash proc, and targets under the effects of a Slash proc taking an additional Slash proc have a chance to fall down (like a blast proc does right now).

 

You'll notice a lot of armor reducing effects in my change list there, the reason for that is because the way armor scales right now pretty much makes damage impossible after they reach a certain level. While I love overcoming an uphill battle, there's a difference between having a battle that feels 'winnable' if I'm using all the tools the game gives me to bring enemies down, and a battle that feels like I'm not given a way to win simply because numbers got too big. Don't get me wrong, I've played games where you literally 'could' win a battle with a boss you were dealing 1 damage to while they've got a bajillion health, but when I'm fighting a mob of a hundred dudes with more damage reduction and health than most of the indestructible trees in the environment, I begin to feel like it's not worth dealing with and just not fun to do.

Granted, most of the enemies that hit that category are above level 150, I still want to feel like I 'could win' if I fight anyone, no matter how many tricks I have to pull out to do it, and the scaling armor values alongside health do reduce that. At the sametime, if it was more the beginning of the fight with them where their armor had the biggest impact, and we wear it down until their completely kill-able, it would provide a better experience than the current system where we just all of a sudden have to fight these gods of war that we don't have the tools to fight. This brings me to point number 3...

 

Third, and my last point, make armor values decrease by at least 1 point per instance of damage outside of a proc PERMANENTLY. Anytime a bullet hits something it's armor goes down by 1, launchers would decrease armor by like 10 (much more of an impact than bullets because the number of individual hits from launchers are generally much lower, with the exception of the Zarr which has cluster bombs). Warframe powers that deal damage would also decrease armor, but by much more than bullet hits or launcher explosions. This makes it so that the enemies with massive levels would come out with massive HP and armor, but players CAN, eventually, take the enemies out and they become more manageable as the enemy gets hit more. As we all know, the difference of 600 armor between Valkyr and Banshee makes a massive difference in survive-ability and it's the same for our enemies, so if you empty 100 rounds of a grakata into an enemy with 600 armor, they now have 500 armor so they'd still be tough, but more manageable than they were before all those hits.

Edited December 10, 2016 by Arunasoul

[Arunasoul]

More of a wall of text than I realized, I'll add spoiler tags in a bit to make it less of a monster to look at.

[WhiteCopain]

Thinking of the "Right now" is not the proper way to redesign something. Your entire post hinges on armor numbers and concepts never changing. All you really want is to counter armor so you can get to higher levels easier.

[Arunasoul]

6 minutes ago, WhiteCopain said:

Thinking of the "Right now" is not the proper way to redesign something. Your entire post hinges on armor numbers and concepts never changing. All you really want is to counter armor so you can get to higher levels easier.

Not a bad point. The major reason I have so many 'armor' related changes listed is because the only things right now that aim at dealing with enemy armor is Corrosive Projection auras or the Corrosive proc itself. This pushes their value up so high that it almost feels mandatory to bring them for higher level content, which pulls away from free choice. Also, there's a lot of stuff in the proc changes that aren't simple anti-armor changes, and aren't dependent on armor numbers and concepts never changing. I also don't believe that the current system is completely flawed, just in need of a rework, not a redesign, which is why I said rework.

Edited December 10, 2016 by Arunasoul

[Redthirst]

7 minutes ago, Arunasoul said:

Not a bad point. The major reason I have so many 'armor' related changes listed is because the only things right now that aim at dealing with enemy armor is Corrosive Projection auras or the Corrosive proc itself. This pushes their value up so high that it almost feels mandatory to bring them for higher level content, which pulls away from free choice. Also, there's a lot of stuff in the proc changes that aren't simple anti-armor changes, and aren't dependent on armor numbers and concepts never changing. I also don't believe that the current system is completely flawed, just in need of a rework, not a redesign, which is why I said rework.

That is true, only instead of adding more ways of removing armor, we should fix armor scaling so it isn't as insane.

[JohnKable]

14 minutes ago, Redthirst said:

That is true, only instead of adding more ways of removing armor, we should fix armor scaling so it isn't as insane.

TBH i always found the current armor scaling formula kinda brilliant, it perfectly reflects the wished resistance in levels ranging from 1 to 110ish that are the levels we can find in the starmap + sorties.

If we want to go further we can do only in endless missions where we are supposed to stay as long as we can (yes not forever). And if we plan to stay for really long we should plan accordingly and that means 4x CP team or any other trick that works.

As for damage revisit, i think we definitely should get rid of pure damage mods, yeh even elemental mods- i mean not erasing from the game but make them work in a different way. The system as now works fine enough, its really hard to figure out something that can work out better without doing BIG changes. And even considering something really big its still hard because it will need an enemy rework too.

[Akavakaku]

I agree that the difference in viability of damage types is a problem, but I don't think damage conversion is the solution. That still wouldn't have us going out and doing impact damage. Ideally, we should be going out using puncture for Grineer, impact for Corpus, and slash for Infested, as was probably intended.

So I nstead, I just think enemy defensive capacities should be changed. For shields, their vulnerability to magnetic could be addressed by making magnetic do very poorly on unshielded Corpus, while impact retains some use. Toxic and slash procs could be balanced by reducing those elements' effect on shields, and forcing the proc health damage to scale down to match that low vs-shields damage. 

For Grineer, most people prefer to just reduce their armor and then use only slash. So to encourage the use of puncture, armor reduction could be replaced with armor impairment: the armor remains, but its weaknesses are amplified. This way Corrosive Projection would actually encourage, not discourage, the use of puncture.

Using slash vs the Infested is fine. 

[Arunasoul]

6 hours ago, Akavakaku said:

I agree that the difference in viability of damage types is a problem, but I don't think damage conversion is the solution. That still wouldn't have us going out and doing impact damage. Ideally, we should be going out using puncture for Grineer, impact for Corpus, and slash for Infested, as was probably intended.

So I nstead, I just think enemy defensive capacities should be changed. For shields, their vulnerability to magnetic could be addressed by making magnetic do very poorly on unshielded Corpus, while impact retains some use. Toxic and slash procs could be balanced by reducing those elements' effect on shields, and forcing the proc health damage to scale down to match that low vs-shields damage. 

For Grineer, most people prefer to just reduce their armor and then use only slash. So to encourage the use of puncture, armor reduction could be replaced with armor impairment: the armor remains, but its weaknesses are amplified. This way Corrosive Projection would actually encourage, not discourage, the use of puncture.

Using slash vs the Infested is fine. 

Good points. I figured a damage conversion mod would allow us to do something more than just go from one of the 3 standard damage types (impact, puncture, slash) to another one, I was thinking more like converting it so you could take the original damage types on the gun and replace them with a single damage type (so your 4 slash, 6 impact, 10 puncture could become 20 toxin). This would reduce some of the issues around 'proc pools' where you have 5 damage types on your gun and only 1 status proc can fire off at a time, so even though you have 100% proc chance, you have a 20% chance to proc the one you want. It also has a built in trade off, in that you go from dealing some of everything so that it'll be effective in at least 1 category to dealing only 1 type of damage that will naturally have weaknesses. I do like the idea of amplifying damage weaknesses, since it effectively increases the importance of building weapons towards dealing with particular threats.

 

Also, impact damage does has some use right now, but it's only really in it's ability to proc a knock down effect, for which blast overlaps and is far more effective because it knocks down a radius instead of a single target. That was part of the reason for the 'status effect' changes I was proposing along with it. The overlap in effectiveness of particular types of procs ends up making 1 better than another. For instance, the heat proc is effectively a weaker variant of the Gas (AoE DOTs that stack) or Toxin (shield bypass DOT that stacks) status because it can't stack damage, but it DOES have a stun built in, of course if your looking for a stun, impact and blast procs do it better while radiation is simply better for CC purposes in most cases if that's why you want to stun someone. 

15 hours ago, JohnKable said:

TBH i always found the current armor scaling formula kinda brilliant, it perfectly reflects the wished resistance in levels ranging from 1 to 110ish that are the levels we can find in the starmap + sorties.

If we want to go further we can do only in endless missions where we are supposed to stay as long as we can (yes not forever). And if we plan to stay for really long we should plan accordingly and that means 4x CP team or any other trick that works.

As for damage revisit, i think we definitely should get rid of pure damage mods, yeh even elemental mods- i mean not erasing from the game but make them work in a different way. The system as now works fine enough, its really hard to figure out something that can work out better without doing BIG changes. And even considering something really big its still hard because it will need an enemy rework too.

I agree that the resistance increase on most enemies is handled well, it's more for the longer duration stuff that I have a difference of opinion. I like the way enemies scale and become more difficult to kill, I'm not a fan of how it forces particular build types, and effectively narrows player choice from the ridiculous number of choices we have when looking at level 50 and below content, to like 5 guns and a couple of warframes that can handle end game well with the current system. I also think that some of the various issues regarding damage mods stem more from the difference in mod effectiveness between different weapon types. For instance, rifles have 90% multishot (rivens aside) at max rank on their multishot mod, while Pistols can reach 180% (granted between two mods, but one alone does 120%), and shotguns can reach 120%, since this effect is basically a damage multiplier, there's automatically a decrease in most rifle's damage that shotguns or pistols simply don't face. That's just in talking about multishot, if you look at the damage increasing mods that do flat damage, the variance becomes even more insane. This automatically means that there's going to be a tendency for rifle type weapons (I know the soma exists, it's an outlier because critical damage skewed it outside the norm) to be less effective than shotguns, snipers, or launchers, so the majority became mastery fodder while some with crazy stats in an easy to exploit area (hello soma, and synapse) could tap into a different multiplier that made them nuts despite the weakness of mods for that category of weapons (namely, the crit multiplier which can easily go over 4 times as much damage depending on the gun). 

 

The reason I'm aiming at armor reduction methods is weapons like say the flux rifle, that could be fairly good and interesting if every individual hit dealt armor reduction, even in small amounts. I don't know if there's anything that can drag the Supra out of the hole it's in, aside from a complete rework of the weapon, but continuous beam weapons could step up a bit as a result of the changes proposed (the synapse would, of course, be buffed too by this, which is somewhat unfortunate because it really doesn't need it), weapons with crazy bullet output like the grakatas or gorgon, maybe even the Supra but I doubt it would be enough on it's own, would take a serious step up in their considerations for endgame content. Probably not quite enough to make everything viable on it's own, but enough to drag the list of 5 guns that are good for end game up to a list of 20, maybe more that are entirely viable.

 

Every possible system where guns can be modded the way we can now would automatically have a gun everyone needs (Soma Prime anyone?), the only way to get around that would be a system where guns scaled with usage, but that system would be near impossible to balance as if DE balanced enemies towards players who have been around a million years using the same gun, then new players coming in would get wrecked by low levels that they couldn't possibly do enough damage to without spending more time in the game. So while getting rid of the damage boosting mods completely might deal with some issues, technically 'crits' aren't direct damage boosts so they'd be an outlier in a system that aims at removing flat damage, causing critical weapons to completely dominate the damage scene a billion times more than they do right now. Rainbow builds would disappear and only weapons with a crit chance above 25% would be anywhere near viable. So while they 'could' get rid of direct damage boosting mods (and i'd file crit dmg +x% in that category) the system for crits would still exist. Balancing it would require the removal of crits or making crits and headshots the samething, removing the chance to crit and making the multiplier on the gun apply directly to headshots. Even then, if a gun came out with a medium range damage value and a godly crit multiplier came out it would completely dominate and nothing else would matter. So while I think you have some point with the damage mods, I don't directly agree that removal of their effects or a massive decrease in them is the correct answer since it would make the crit scene even more horrifyingly unbalanced than it already is for many guns.