Damage 3.0: The Great Squish, The Great Nerf, and why DE is afraid to move forward

[MadHatHacker]

7 hours ago, DrBorris said:

Is the entirety of this post assumptions? Yes, but it is assumptions with some groundings. First and foremost, let’s put together what we know about Damage 3.0…

 

1. Remove “Mandatory” mods.

 

Huh, that’s it, but that one statement says A LOT about how the rework should flesh out to bring that premise to fruition. In order for there to be choice and style in modding, individual mods should not be able to have too large of an effect on your “power.”

How the hell are you supposed to balance a game where a veteran player (modded Soma Prime) deals 21097% more damage per second than a new player (unmodded MK1-Braton). Of course there needs to be some power progression, but in Warframe you regularly play missions that you played day 1 (The star chart is supposed to be a living system, not complete-n-forget).

Sure, a certain delta in power is maintainable, maybe (maybe) 100% more powerful (this could be exceeded with calculating elemental resistances in) with a full build, but once you get theoretical builds that can surpass that margin mods will start becoming so mandatory that you are causing a major impact on your performance. In a perfect world a person who mods for max DPS and a person who mods for handling should end up doing similar amounts of damage in a mission (similar, not exact). If someone told me that I would deal 20% less damage to enemies but I could mod my gun in a way that felt good to me, I would gladly take the drop in DPS. But this is my opinion, yours may vary, thus the diversity in builds starts to come up.

 

Okay, so we have a given that our delta in power will not have any massive scaling, the obvious side effect would be doing the same to our enemies. This is the first area where DE will start to really piss of large portions of the community. In order for DE to make meaningful difficulty and balance in a system where the power progression of the player is less significant, they have to pick a base TTK for players and enemies. And you can be certain a lot of people will not be happy no matter where DE goes with this. Some people want to one shot everything, some people want only a head-shot from a sniper to one shot an enemy.

 

You already see this behavior everywhere, “everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” “let people play how they want to play,” “If you don’t like it don’t use it.” No, just… no. This is not Deus Ex, in that game each of the playstyles are balanced, saying that someone should have to gimp themselves for a challenge is not how you design a game. DE must pick a “feel” (TTK) and stick with it, leaving a massive delta is a false sense of decision because at the end of the game it is a game where the goal is winning. If everything is supposed to be a one shot, the game needs to be balanced around that. If the game is supposed to require extreme precision, everything needs to be balanced around that (these are extreme cases, don’t hurt me).

Oh, and before you say “Warframe is supposed to be easy,” heh… na. Ever heard of power creep? Go watch some closed beta videos of Warframe, it is pretty much the same gameplay style as now (but less refined) but harder (due to higher TTK of enemies). I for some reason doubt that power creep is something DE planned (more something they were coerced into doing).

 

This is, as I call it, The Great Squish. Both the power of the player and the power of the enemy will be squished into a much smaller delta.

 

The Great Squish goes by another name though, the Great Nerf.

 

Why you say? Well, let’s explain with pictures

  Hide contents

 

This is my crude picture of the difference of power in our enemy and us. This is obviously not to scale.

 

Notice the degree of the slants for “Easy” and “Hard”. Right now we can make that slant pretty extreme in any direction (A positive slope is hard while a negative slope is easy), either enemies are insanely OP (broken enemy scaling) or they are insanely easy (veteran weapons versus low level mobs). Everything is very extreme. Of course there is a way to play “balanced” where you meet a reasonable power difference with your enemy, but that balance point is relative to how you want the game to be played, as discussed earlier.

And here is what the Great Squish does, it brings everything into a much smaller range, meaning you can’t be as OP or as UP. This means that the people who are accustomed to the extreme negative slope will feel a nerf, but in contrast the people who are more accustomed to a positive slope will feel a buff. It is really just a mass standardization, and with any standardization the extremes die.

 

 

Sure, The Great Squish will be just as much a buff as a nerf, but where do you think the majority of the community will place their opinion? Honestly, this is not just due to the “glass half empty” syndrome, Damage 3.0 will probably serve as a nerf to the average player. Let’s be honest here, at what difficulty do most of us play? Do you only take your high end weapons to high end fights? Only Sorties really bring us close to matching our DPS with their EHP, everything star chart is overkill.

 

That’s right, easy mode. Why are snipers useless? Because everything in this dies so insanely fast that there is no point for precision. If DE is going to go through the effort of overhauling damage, it’d be safe to say they will do so in a way where the mechanics of the game will be more prevalent.

 

So here is my conclusion, DE is very, very (very) reluctant to do anything. Far too many of the community are content and any whisper of a nerf throws them in a frenzy. Just look at SotR, this was (unfortunately IMO) a relatively minor change to a lot of Warframe game mechanics. Sure, the way you get Prime stuff now is different, but it did not really do anything to unrest the base of Warframe, it is just a new wrapper for the Prime grind. If DE dare touch the unstable foundation Warframe the amount of uproar that will ensue because people don’t like to consider any sort of nerf (no matter what the justification is) will probably cause enough of an exodus that there will be a major impact on revenue… so DE just won’t do it. IF DE dare touch the power of any weapon in a negative way people will say: “I put time into that, how dare you make my past time spent worthless” or “It’s PvE, balance doesn’t matter” or “Let me play exactly how I want to play” etcetera.

Let us just look at The Vacuum Within. Sure, it was a nerf, and we are not here to talk about it (as it has been reverted), the point is that a nerf of an entirely quality of life item caused such a massive uproar in the community that, given DE did not revert, there would have probably been a noticeable profit loss. Just imagine if DE nerfed something that had a direct impact on our in-game performance.

*Saltyness incoming* Because even though people in general agree damage is fudged up, change is bad.

 

I guess the option remains that DE maybe just do a mass rebalance of certain weapons, tweak some scaling here and there, and overall improve the current state of damage, but no matter how you sugarcoat Damage 2.0 it will still have the broken scaling (as discussed earlier). Something is better than nothing though, right?

 

I can already see the “You are stretching too far” posts already, but am I? DE is obviously scared of Damage 3.0, they themselves compared to cliff jumping. Before you cast this off as an unfounded rant, come up with a reason why it is not the case. Yeah, I could be wrong, but tell me why I am wrong not just that I am.

 

TL;DR

• TTK on both our and our enemy’s sides will be squished
• This will be a nerf to much of the community
• A (considerable enough) portion of the community will “rage quit”
• Thus, DE does not want to jump off the cliff -or- Damage 3.0 will be half-@ssed to protect the community’s ego.

 

So… speaking directly to the community here, open your mind. Don’t run like a chicken with your head cut off every time you see a nerf, make sure to look at the whole picture. If you are here, chances are you enjoy Warframe and want it to be as good as it can. We have to trust DE, yes they will make mistakes as have they have time and again, but there are some places where we have to let them design their game. Complaining about money-grabs is different from complaining about core systems, only the most tin-foil hatted of us would think DE would jeopardize core gameplay to make money, so don’t jump off the deep end right away when it comes to gameplay changes.

Maybe, just maybe, we can give DE a bit of breathing room with the new year when it comes to damage and power in general in order to (hopefully) get a reworked system that fixes some of Warframe’s underlying issues.

A well-constructed and in-depth look at the possible routes that D3.0 could take the game. A pity I can only upvote once.

As for the removal of mandatory mods, there will always be a max theoretical DPS. And as long as the supplementary mods in this game pale in comparison to those that actually affect raw damage, the build with the most DPS on paper will be the most popular.

I'd say that multi-shot and base damage modifiers need to be brought down in power by perhaps thirty percent, supplementary mods need to be buffed so their value is equal if not better (reload speed doubled, magazine doubled, instead of the 30-40 percent values they are right now).

 

[(PSN)SwagSmasha]

Warframe is one of the most difficult games ever created. 

It has a learning curve steep enough to break legs and ruin lives.

[Xaranoth]

33 minutes ago, MadHatHacker said:

A well-constructed and in-depth look at the possible routes that D3.0 could take the game. A pity I can only upvote once.

As for the removal of mandatory mods, there will always be a max theoretical DPS. And as long as the supplementary mods in this game pale in comparison to those that actually affect raw damage, the build with the most DPS on paper will be the most popular.

I'd say that multi-shot and base damage modifiers need to be brought down in power by perhaps thirty percent, supplementary mods need to be buffed so their value is equal if not better (reload speed doubled, magazine doubled, instead of the 30-40 percent values they are right now).

 

A simpler, "halfway" damage change that has been suggested is to get rid of the pure damage mods and instead work those damage increases into the weapon ranks (similar to how warframe health shield and power increases with rank).

That being said, I would love for the viability of reload, firerate, magazine size, silencer, etc utility mods to be increased to be comparable to crit and elemental mods. I'm a spastic over-reloader, so I love my reload speed mods, but they're too lackluster even when not compared to a damage mod that could use that mod slot instead. So I end up sitting through the painfully long (for me) reload animations for the sake of having drastically increased damage.

[SharkPot]

You have no clue what happened when damage 2.0 was brought in do you? Players used to slay lvl 9999 with acrid and flux rifle back then these were the holy grail of weps. Then damage 2.0 came and killing anything above lvl100 was a difficult task. And that's how wf lost over 50% of their playerbase and only the few players who said that I guess we have to deal with it were left. That's why there are not too many pre u7 players seen ingame. And this was the og reason of salt being brought into the game.

Also imo if I have to be balanced cuz a newbie can't gear upto my level as he has played 100 hrs and I have played over 1.2k hours sorry. I wouldn't ever touch this game again. The reason I'm strong is I have put time to making it strong.

[Wiegraf]

The logical way to go with a rework would be taking base damage mods like Pressure Point, Serration and the like and either do away with them or integrate them into the weapon's rank. Kind of like a rank 0 weapon dealing 100% of its total damage and a rank 30 dealing 200%.

Then, when it comes to elemental mods, that instead of adding damage based on the weapon's base damage (like how it currently adds, for example 90% fire, meaning your weapon deals 100% base + 90% Fire), it would work by converting a percentage of the base damage into that element (instead, a Fire mod at 20% means your weapon becomes 80% base + 20% Fire). This would make using elemental weaknesses much more appealing, like if an infested enemy is 300% weak to fire, then you're actually dealing 140% damage instead of 100% along with a status proc chance... and if you're taking on an enemy with a resistance (like 50% resist) then the damage goes down to 90%.

Multishot is another problem to deal with which is rather touchy... as it stand, it nearly doubles the damage for Rifle class weapons with a maxed Barrel Diffusion and much more with secondaries. I'd guess either they'd be reduced in efficiency from their high up values to something much lower... like maybe 25-30% max for rifles, 40-50% for secondaries or another system entirely for multishot.

---

There's definitively is a rather large gap in power for low ranked modded weapons VS high ranked ones, an exponential one in fact. I won't lie though : I kind of like that we can achieve ridiculous amounts of damage with some weapons (ex : Soma Prime) when they're well modded... but I'm also quite aware of how much it must suuuck for a low ranked player whenever a high ranked players steps in their mission and wreck everything in their path while they can barely scratch them. Heck, we deliberately under power our gear with our newer members so they get a chance to shoot a few enemies instead of us vets just one-shotting most things that don't happen to have a little bit of armor.

I can't claim to have solutions (those above are just speculations and ideas I thought up on the spot) but I kind of feel that if there's a rebalance of damage, it should bank more on strengths and weaknesses than merely stacking more and more damage to just blow away enemies. Damage 2.0 brought a good thing in the form of elements, combined elements and those status procs; Damage 3.0 could work with that and turn the exponential grow in damage output into something a bit more linear.

So that messing with damage is more interesting and planned out than just stacking numbers as high as you can. So that the difference between the weapon of a low ranked player and a high ranked one is that the high ranked one can be more effective against specific enemies or faction while the low ranked player can still have a fighting chance.

[Rorgal_Sina]

It's best assumed that DE dumped the idea of Damage 3.0 as a whole.

Primed Pressure Point, Primed Point Blank, and Riven Mods are the opposite of Damage 3.0.

[Brandr_]

Honestly, I feel the only way to solve this issue once and for all is to take away enemy lvls entirely, and to remove all plus damage mods.

 

The best way to lvl this field once and for all is to make all weapons do the same damage (To some extent, rockets do more, pistols do less) and have the modding system by quality of life, instead of less bullets=more dead enemies.

 

and then difficulty will have to be enemy AI dependent+environmental hazards

[Lakais]

I can only agree with the OP in that power creep is a problem and mods are the main cause. In earnest, the most sensible thing to do when discussing balance and progression of power is to establish a baseline for enemies you fight. By far the most reliable, predictable and easiest to work with option is to do away with levels all-together. No more level 20 Lancer having these stats and level 100 having those stats. A Lancer is a Lancer, regardless of mission. The difficulty comes in the types of enemies, with Elite Lancers being considerably more powerful then the grunt version, but much rarer, with heavy units rarer then those and so forth. With the tactics they employ being appropriate to their category. Elite being more tactical and cautious then Grunts and Heavies even more so. 

Basic concept being that challenge comes not from the enemy Level. But from the composition and population of their collective force. 

A more basic and questionable option is for DE to state a level-range for which they build their content. For example "Our weapons are built for levels 20 to 50." Bellow that doesn't mater because "peasants" and above that is "at your own risk", essentially you're on your own. 

Now, as for mods, it is very clear that there are MASSIVE issues. For example the insane boosts they give. Most "mandatory" mods give boosts in the 100%+ range which is just not helping. Any mod the bonus of which goes beyond 15% is mandatory, basically. 20% is a massive boost in most games. And I do believe Steve lamented on this in a Devstream or other video some months ago. Can't remember where, exactly but he said that with mods and balance they now have to tiptoe around those mods giving insane boosts. 

And then, as far as weapons are concerned, there is the cancerous growth, Elemental Mods. Which operate differently from ISP damage mods. You can add Elemental damage to any weapon, but you can't add ISP(Impact, Puncture, Slash) damage mods to other weapons. Try it out on elemental weapons, you CAN'T add physical damage types to the Silva&Aegis for example. So either standardize these mods so they work exactly the same both ways. Or completely alter how Elemental mods work. My concept would be to make elemental mods essentially just add Status procs and any damage % you add enhances that proc, but doesn't add any elemental damage to normal hits. Elemental weapons being the special snowflakes in that regard. Basic idea behind the concept being that primarily, Elemental damage is to WEAKEN the enemy, ISP is to KILL the enemy. With exceptions on certain weapons. The ability for ISP to weaken and Elemental to kill would still remain but those damage types would not be best suited for those tasks. You'd still want to have both, it's just that on a normal ISP base weapon, you'd use elemental mods to weaken the enemy and make the ISP damage types more effective. Not rely on those elemental mods to kill the enemy due to resistances. 

I have also personally considered the idea where added damage types convert some part of the existing damage into the new one, rather then just added. But that system is crude and has issues along with combined elemental mods and connections into how do ISP damage mods work with elemental weapons. 

But for that change to go through, the entire resistance system needs to be reworked to support that. Somehow. 

Lastly, purely removing +damage mods like Pressure Point, Serration etc is not enough to reign in the damage creep and in the end not the right move. Pure +damage mods have a place, it's just they should be very much weaker then now and much more costly to use. Essentially suggesting that brute force +damage is an option but at the cost of versatility and utility. The main limiter being not the number of mod slots but mod capacity. Utility mods, conversely being limited by mod slots rather then capacity. 

Edited December 26, 2016 by Lakais

[arch111]

Factions should be more vulnerable to specific weapongroups.  Likewise Elites and bosses.

The Codex and type/element was put there to let us mod against the enemy we are going to fight now.

But in reality it feels like a fake system since the same weapons are equally powerful everywhere. 

If weapons like Synoid and Tigris was not allways as good,  but we sometimes had to choose other weapons, that would be a better way of scaling.

When do we have to think?  Sorties and Sentients right? I hope that this way of design is picked up and used in clever ways one day.

[(PSN)Mofojokers]

13 hours ago, Syln said:

actually i'd love to see that coming :/ 

Don't even look at the screen. Just watching the corridors on the minimap and where I see red I turn there and shoot and I will hit something without even trying. *

That's how i play when i begin to fall asleep : eyes on the map sweeping red spot with my galatine :3

 

lol this made me laugh because my brother and i do the same with similiar things.

Say i want to farm the x resources i go to x survival map.

We take 1 Dec Nekki P and 1 Ember P if clannies want in we do 2 of each. We all take 50 energy restores and the dec nekkies take health restores as well.

Pick a good base spot  and have the two Embers stand far side so that the range matches the distance of the Nekkies. The Nekkies stand closer to dead zone so they can pull the life support in while doubling the loot.

2 people is 30 minutes over and over

4 people go for an hour and reset

Insanely Important :  Make sure to move in a up or down pattern ( every few minutes) to avoid afk timer kicking in.

Repeat till you have a good stack of the resources then move to the next one.

We normally do this while watching tv shows via laptop or having dinner.

Time the Energy so one Ember is always using her 4th ( make sure they have they augment on).

Bonus : 

You do the same thing with Akkad 20 waves back to back for EXP and credits ( mind you more effective if you actually do all 4 with Secura Lecta).

Relics pretty much the same deal - wait for a survival or defense and repeat the steps but with the added to grab the 10 every 4 minutes at least. 

Edited December 26, 2016 by (PS4)Mofojokers

[(XBOX)Graysmog]

3 hours ago, Rorgal_Sina said:

It's best assumed that DE dumped the idea of Damage 3.0 as a whole.

Primed Pressure Point, Primed Point Blank, and Riven Mods are the opposite of Damage 3.0.

For Primed Mods, yeah, there a major problem in themselves. I would personally keep some of them just due to their QoL improvements (Primed Pistol Ammo Mutation, for example), yet it is true some need to be gotten rid of, as they add nothing except unneeded and unwanted power creep (Primed Pressure Point). If they were going to keep Primed Mods, they'd either have to make them have smaller, but essentially more, buffs, or reduce their current buffs. Either way, unlike Riven Mods, I can't really see anything good coming out of them unless we nerf them, yet then, since all Mods will not increase damage without an equal drawback (for example, more Multishot, but less ammo efficiency), how would they work? I'm officially stumped on them. I suppose the best thing to do with them is to simply remove most of them, and rectify their loss with a Legendary Fusion Core or something.

They kind of put themselves into a hole with Riven Mods. They were originally meant to place lower tier weapons (like the MK1 variations, Lato, Kraken, Harpak or Seer) to a manageable level that placed them on par with Sortie-tier missions. Now, we have Rivens for perfectly fine weapons that are randomized and require so much effort to get anywhere that, if it's that annoying to constantly re-roll your Riven to get it to the best it can be, why would you waste your time with weapons that can never reach the same tier as the already capable weapons? They needed to put way more work into them, and instead took the lazy way out with them, giving them to all weapons to avoid the outcry of "why doesn't X weapon have a Riven", not even bothering to give them specific values and fixes. I'm not hating on DE, honest! Yet I can't say I wholeheartedly agree on their direction with Riven Mods.

I feel the absolute best way to fix these problems for Damage 3.0 would be to do this. The three Riven types can stay, as I feel they can help differentiate the levels of weapons. To help with Damage 3.0, I feel some of the buffs should transmute some of the weapon's damage to a specific element of your choice (so, for example, if you get a 90 Damage Fire Elemental, 90% of the weapon's damage is now transmuted into that type. That way, weapons have much better damage against specific factions, yet fall off harder against others, prompting smarter building and overall, better damage distribution while keeping a damage baseline intact). Weapons will not receive a base damage, Faction damage or multishot increase/decrease (as this should be the first step towards true balancing, wherein no Mod is better than another without a severe drawback, and let's be honest, if a weapon has a base damage problem, it should just be buffed via the Devs, not fixed with band-aids), yet they can receive a higher Crit Multiplier, Crit Chance, Status Chance, Status Transmutation (so now, to start off with, the weapon has 50% of it's damage transmuted to fire damage, if you get another Mod to increase the damage transmutation, it will not go any higher than 100%). The only thing I'm not certain of is whether I should keep the ability to get bonus Dual Elemental damage, like Corrosive, or make it so you still need to have two to do so, in order to balance out Modding a bit more. For now, I wouldn't allow damage types like those to show up, yet I would allow transmutation of Puncture to Impact or Slash via %'s, however.

Strong Disposition

This category is essentially for weapons that are pretty much useless due to their enemy faction damage distribution and pretty annoying mechanics. A great weapon for this category, in my opinion, would be the Seer. It's base damage is pretty good, yet since it has no Status or Crit chance with a sickening amount of recoil, god-awful firerate and a nauseating amount of zoom, the weapon has no point in being used whatsoever besides to torture yourself and make level 30 enemies as tough as level 80 enemies.

- One Major Status/Crit Buff, One Medium Damage Transmutation Buff, One Small Auxiliary Buff, No Negatives

- Buff Possibilities: - Seer Igninok (Strong Disposition) - 40% Recoil (Auxiliary), 50% Fire Damage (Damage Transmutation) and 60% Status Chance (Status Chance)

- Weapon Possibilities: Sentinel Weapons, MK1 Weapons, Lato, Aklato, Seer, Tiberon, Daikyu, Sprectra, etc.

Either way, you get the gist, haha. I'd put more, yet I'm too tired as of late, so either way, have a good one.

Edited December 26, 2016 by (XB1)Graysmog

[BornWithTeeth]

Yeah, chaps, Damage 3.0 ain't coming.

 

http://wccftech.com/talking-warframe-digital-extremes/

 

Little interview with Sheldon here. Take a look at the first two answers.

 

"With the benefits of hindsight, we’d make a ton of different decisions of course. At a top level, hindsight would be great when designing game mechanics/systems that are difficult to change after players have invested so much time into them. That problem is coming up again for us soon with rebalancing the combat damage system. Players have invested so much in getting the mods and gear they have — hindsight would be helpful here."

Translation: We are going to have a really hard time rebalancing the combat damage system because we gave players overpowered stuff which we now cannot take away.

 

"After this year, I think we learned the hard way to shy away from giving deadlines or dates, especially for monumental changes like Damage 3.0. These two reworks are something that will require a lot of discussion in 2017 before we can even think about implementing them. As always, we’ll keep players in the loop once we have more concrete information to provide so they know what’s going on, and so they can give us feedback to help us make sure we’re on the right track."

Translation: We're not setting a timeline for damage reworks, in fact, we're going to spend most of the year discussing the underlying problems before we are even approaching a position where we can do anything about it.

 

Riven mods and Primed damage mods mean that if and when DE try to rebalance the damage system, the toxic community will explode in avaricious fury. DE can't even back away from this now and treat it as a mistake, because they literally just released Riven mods and are only continuing to expand them. 

 

Here's my prediction, and y'all ought to feel entitled to hold me to it: Before we get either Damage 3.0 or the Focus rework, we're going to get Riven mods for Warframes, because at this point all that DE can do is double down on the powercreep platinum generators.

Edited December 26, 2016 by BornWithTeeth

[(PSN)PillarOfWar]

Being 100 percent honest I think DE should remove and maybe even ban any mention of "mandatory mods" on their forums. I mean aggressively as possible. Maybe even go after you tubers for it. Delete these kind of post and ban the poster. 

 

Soma was was one of the best weapons, but then they primed it. After seeing war and galantine prime and all the prime mods. I have no hope of "balance". 

[Ailissa]

I play it now because I like to feel powerful even though I don't have fantastic builds.

 

If they ever nerfed it to the point where it was a challenge to do anything that would be the day I walked away and never looked back.

 

As it is, damage 3.0 has not been confirmed and hopefully never will be. If it ever is I just hope they don't listen to player ideas and run the game into the ground. 

[BornWithTeeth]

28 minutes ago, Ailissa said:

I play it now because I like to feel powerful even though I don't have fantastic builds.

 

If they ever nerfed it to the point where it was a challenge to do anything that would be the day I walked away and never looked back.

 

As it is, damage 3.0 has not been confirmed and hopefully never will be. If it ever is I just hope they don't listen to player ideas and run the game into the ground. 

Mate, did you really intend to say that you would prefer for Warframe to have literally no challenge to it at all, and that it should only ever be about whether you get the right reward at the end of the mission?

 

Have you considered playing Progress Quest?

[Ailissa]

4 minutes ago, BornWithTeeth said:

Mate, did you really intend to say that you would prefer for Warframe to have literally no challenge to it at all, and that it should only ever be about whether you get the right reward at the end of the mission?

 

Have you considered playing Progress Quest?

Considering there is very little challenge now in a lot of missions your last point is irrelevant.

 

As for your first point, no, I don't game for a challenge I game to relax as I have done since I started gaming back in 1984.

 

It has nothing to do with the reward and all to do with whether i'm having fun or not. I have a busy enough life so like to spend my quiet time relaxing. If they changed things to the point where it was no longer relaxing THEN i'd stop playing.

[BornWithTeeth]

So, you've not played games which I feel Warframe could stand to be a lot more like, such as FarCry 3 (this is what it feels like to be a murderer in the jungle. Those are not the enemy. They are just victims whom you haven't gotten to yet), XCOM (buckle up, squaddies), Mass Effect (this is what managing a warship feels like)?

 

Hell, I haven't mentioned how I feel the melee combat system could take a few pointers from Bloodborne and how its totally sweetass weapon combos and movesets combine with intricate attention to movement and timing. 

 

I feel that Warframe should be a game which you play, and not one which you leave idling in the background. I feel that every time you load into a mission in Warframe, if you're using a loadout equal in level to the mission, there should be a real chance of failure.

 

Warframe's setting doesn't feel the slightest bit dangerous, because the Tenno are basically immortal, invincible gods who never suffer consequences or fail a mission.

Edited December 26, 2016 by BornWithTeeth

[EmptyDevil]

I have some things to say to your posts.

1 hour ago, Ailissa said:

I play it now because I like to feel powerful even though I don't have fantastic builds.

I strongly dislike seeing this reason being brought up as a defense against balancing the game. I've even gotten warnings or deleted posts for ranting in an extremely blunt way, directed at no one in particular, detailing how this logic isn't a valid reason to keep absurdly broken things in place. We would still be powerful if a wide number of things were reined in.

The game shouldn't be built around coddling the player, and it shouldn't be built to be a hassle either. It needs a middle ground of making the player powerful, but not in a ridiculously challenge-nullifying manner.

This makes me think back to a certain devstream in which Rebecca and Steve were roleplaying Lotus and Teshin. I forgot what Rebecca as Lotus said, but Steve as Teshin said something like 'you're coddling them'. This paints a pretty clear picture in what the character Teshin is trying to do and actually did for the Tenno, in The War Within -- he is getting the Tenno(us) to stand/fight on our own without our crutches(Warframes and ETC). One can infer that he means to do this in a 4th wall breaking way, not that he is breaking the 4th wall, just that this can apply to the real-life players as well. Makes a lot of sense for him to be the Conclave guy(PVP typically raises one's natural skill at mechanics), with his teachings about balance + bettering ourselves by facing ourselves(or similar enemies).

I'm not saying Rebecca in particular coddles us, but the way some things in game are left alone and done seems to be that way, and Steve might possibly agree.

1 hour ago, Ailissa said:

Considering there is very little challenge now in a lot of missions your last point is irrelevant.

 

As for your first point, no, I don't game for a challenge I game to relax as I have done since I started gaming back in 1984.

 

It has nothing to do with the reward and all to do with whether i'm having fun or not. I have a busy enough life so like to spend my quiet time relaxing. If they changed things to the point where it was no longer relaxing THEN i'd stop playing.

The reason there is very little challenge is due to the power creep over the years and the meta crutches that were left to fester within the community for too long.

A game focused on war, should not be built or played with the intention to relax in its combat situations(it doesn't need to be a real-life war simulator either). Social aspects in the game should be the place for relaxation(dojos/relays/orbiter), while combat should be strictly higher tension than normal.

I don't play the game to feel like a lab animal, simply pressing a button for gratification, then being rewarded for it.

[BornWithTeeth]

10 minutes ago, EmptyDevil said:

 

I don't play the game to feel like a lab animal, simply pressing a button for gratification, then being rewarded for it.

Remember that time, oh, before the summer, when I observed that one potential obstacle in the path of damage reworks is that for an apparently quite large portion of the player community Warframe really is and should be just a slot machine where you pull the lever over and over again until it spits out a rare Prime piece? There are apparently a hell of a lot of players for whom the ideal form of the game is an actual Skinner box which requires as little effort and attention as possible.

[Ryouhi]

14 hours ago, (PS4)SwagSmasha said:

Warframe is one of the most difficult games ever created. 

It has a learning curve steep enough to break legs and ruin lives.

Do you seriously mean that? o.O
Aside from going into broken level territory, the game is an absolute cakewalk.

The only difficulty comes from game systems being piled on game systems, at least for new players i guess.

13 hours ago, Xaranoth said:

A simpler, "halfway" damage change that has been suggested is to get rid of the pure damage mods and instead work those damage increases into the weapon ranks (similar to how warframe health shield and power increases with rank).

That being said, I would love for the viability of reload, firerate, magazine size, silencer, etc utility mods to be increased to be comparable to crit and elemental mods. I'm a spastic over-reloader, so I love my reload speed mods, but they're too lackluster even when not compared to a damage mod that could use that mod slot instead. So I end up sitting through the painfully long (for me) reload animations for the sake of having drastically increased damage.

I think that was the original intention, or at least what sparked the discussion - inmtegrating damage scaling to weapon level.
Removing only Damage mods would still be difficult now after releasing riven mods that have those exact stats that would be removed. 
No way is DE gonna dare removing those now that a lot of players have thrown thousands of plat at those.

Regarding utility mods, i can't tell you how much i love my reload speed/projectile speed riven for my Supra... at least for Star chart territory.
Going into sorties with that, it falls off like a rock, then i gotta switch to my Damage/Multishot/Negative Reload Riven D:

11 hours ago, Rorgal_Sina said:

It's best assumed that DE dumped the idea of Damage 3.0 as a whole.

Primed Pressure Point, Primed Point Blank, and Riven Mods are the opposite of Damage 3.0.

exactly.

Primed mods i still could have seen them remove and refunding ressources spent, but Rivens, for which people spent thousands upon thousand of plat and spent reolling a million times. No way they would dare that now.

2 hours ago, Ailissa said:

I play it now because I like to feel powerful even though I don't have fantastic builds.

 

If they ever nerfed it to the point where it was a challenge to do anything that would be the day I walked away and never looked back.

 

As it is, damage 3.0 has not been confirmed and hopefully never will be. If it ever is I just hope they don't listen to player ideas and run the game into the ground. 

They don't necesarily need to take away your power, but at least the endgame content should be a challenge.
The problem is setting a proper endgame, when weapon balance is so fricked up, that one weapon won't even tickle sortie enemies, while another will just oneshot every enemy in the room. That's why we need damage 3.0, to get weapons on a closer level to each other, instead of having "90% useless weapons" (hyperbole ofc)

This also isn't a fair reason in a co-op game.
Say we play in the same lobby, you with a Synoid Simulor + Mirage and me with Banshee and my Boar Prime.
Is it fair for you too clear whole rooms of level 80 enemies in 2 seconds before i can shoot any enemies?

I like to feel powerful in Warframe as well, but there has to be a limit, so one player isn't so much more powerful than the other.

[EmptyDevil]

22 minutes ago, BornWithTeeth said:

Remember that time, oh, before the summer, when I observed that one potential obstacle in the path of damage reworks is that for an apparently quite large portion of the player community Warframe really is and should be just a slot machine where you pull the lever over and over again until it spits out a rare Prime piece? There are apparently a hell of a lot of players for whom the ideal form of the game is an actual Skinner box which requires as little effort and attention as possible.

I remember it clearly. Yeah... It's sad to say there seems to be a lot that enjoy the idea of being rewarded heavily for menial tasks.

[Guest]

I've been thinking that a potential compromise would be the addition of the Tau system, wherein new enemies could be balanced apart from the old star chart.  This would permit the creation of a new gameplay space that's challenging and scales on its own, while preserving the cheese-filled power-trip missions that are the origin system star chart.  It feels like an inevitable extension of the game, it's just a matter of when, how, and why.  If they don't want to alienate any players, they can simply phase out the old gameplay this way, akin to most MMO expansions that include level cap raises and mechanics tweaks.  The content is still available, but it becomes trivialized by what's available in the new content.  After the Tau system becomes the status quo for gameplay, they can then introduce an in game event that would introduce similar scaling changes to the origin system.  This would blunt the shock trauma of totally revamping the gameplay all at once, and players would be much more accepting of it.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

It honestly depends on what kind of player you are.  Some seek for a challenge in the fight itself.  Others seek for a challenge in building and puzzles.  For me I think that if i've modded my weapon/frame the best way possible or the most optimal way possible I should be making end level content a joke.  I don't play warframe to have engaging gunfights.  I play warframe to flip around like a space ninja using flashy powers as often as possible.

I've been for changes to combat like the stalker/sentients and now the kuva guards.  If they can make more fights like that i'm in.  The problem with making every fight more difficult and essentially focusing on the individual fight over everything else you're going to make endless missions an absolute nightmare to complete.  Plus were not even looking at the impact this could have on warframes.  If weapons suddenly became less effective at killing as compared to frame abilities then we'd get power spam all over again and that's exactly what DE has been working hard to remove with the changes and reworks.

here is the tweet from steve:

I hope he was referring to things like automatic weapons not one shotting.  my shotguns should one shot.  same with bows and snipers and certain pistols.  IPS mods are already fine.  they just don't have room when you consider elemental combos.  Elemental mods themselves would be fine if enemy scaling wasn't an issue.  My problem with the weapon getting better as it levels means it wouldn't feel consistent as you were using it.  and tbh i'd be less likely to forma something.  They made the change with MR to allow you to have earlier mod points to get through the grind faster.  this seems to be going in the opposite direction.  Mods being less potent would again be fine if enemy scaling wasn't a problem.

imo "damage 3.0" would be a reduction of scaling on enemies and a removal of one shots on automatics.  But no weapon leveling dps like stated.  Even though i'd be mostly satisfied with this it still brings 2 issues.  as I said the obvious imbalance between powers and weapons...and well.  if automatics can't one shot but other things can why would you ever use automatics?  Plus this could equate to making rivens more needed.  which is not supposed to be the design of them.

[WARLOCKE]

Damage 3.0, as you have stated, would require far to much time and manpower. DE can not even find the time to rebalance old weapons and frames let alone the ENTIRE game. And for that reason, damage 3.0 will be a myth for the year to come, much as it was a myth for the past two years. Not going to happen.

[Lakais]

3 minutes ago, WARLOCKE said:

Damage 3.0, as you have stated, would require far to much time and manpower. DE can not even find the time to rebalance old weapons and frames let alone the ENTIRE game. And for that reason, damage 3.0 will be a myth for the year to come, much as it was a myth for the past two years. Not going to happen.

But since DMG3.0 would be such a game-changing alteration, we NEED to discuss this for the year to come. If for no other reason then for the knowledge, and thus understanding, followed by acceptance to hit the community and sink in. "Things are going to change." If for no other reason then for this portion of the playerbase who WANT things to change to be heard. They have every right to voice their opinions. 

I can see why people get upset over things like these when mentioned. But truth be told this is DE's child. And as much as we influence it's development with our feedback and ideas, it is up to DE to do what they think is right and best for their baby from their point of view. They KNOW they can't make everyone happy. They KNOW about the massive sh*t-storm that awaits them regardless of how masterfully they execute these changes. The entire thing could be a marvel of programming, fit to be put up into a museum for generations to come as pinnacle of code. And there would still be a horde of players in the forums, raving murder. 

And DE shouldn't put manpower into rebalancing less-used weapons and frames before the baselines mechanic changes have been worked out. Because doing so means that they'd need to go over these items AGAIN. You're not going to bother cleaning up that stain in the carpet if you're going to replace the whole damn thing next week.