I repeat, You can’t balance enemies around 12045% more damage

[DrBorris]

Rather than making a new post, I am just going to add another section to the original post from past Devstream as everything I sad there is just as applicable now as it was then. Just skip to the Post Devstream 86 section if you have already been here.

 

Post Devstream 85

In Devstream 85 Steve said that removing serration was not necessarily in the plans and that reducing our overall power was not an intention, but rather he talked about adding new enemy types. As a core, I agree. In general, (excluding certain meta outliers) the speed at which we kill grunts is, IMO, okay. They are grunts and we are gods of war, of course we should melt them in a second. However, creating meaningful gameplay with enemies that you kill so insanely fast is pretty much impossible, it turns the game into one-shot or be one-shot. And just as a show of hands, who here thinks being one-shot by an enemy is fun?

 

So, it appears that the plan is to diversify the enemy roster to add new threats. Enemies that we have a meaningful fight with (so no one-shots in either direction). This is fine… except it will fall victim to the same problems we still have with Damage 2.0, scaling.

 

I feel as though we sometimes forget about player scaling, of course enemy scaling is more absurd due to its endless and exponential nature, but look at this title again. That is the difference between the DPS of a new player with a Mk1-Braton and a veteran with a Soma Prime (I chose these two weapons because they are on both ends of the damage spectrum but share a “point and shoot” gameplay).

• Unmodded Mk-1 Braton Sustained DPS: 112
• Unmodded Soma Prime Sustained DPS: 235
• Modded (Base Damage) Mk-1 Braton Sustained DPS: 3182
• Modded (Critical) Soma Prime Sustained DPS: 13491

(Keep in mind these are body-shots, so this is not counting the 4x headshot multiplier criticals get. This also is not counting in elemental resistances.)

 

Now, I understand power progression and how it is vital to a game especially one like Warframe, but if you want to have a meaningful balance between the player and enemies it becomes much, much harder as the delta of noob and veteran increases. Basically, the bigger the gap is the more extreme even the smallest tweak at base can have. Just look at an unmodded Soma Prime, it only has 235 sustained DPS, 2.1x damage of Mk-Braton. This seems balanced enough, balancing enemies around 2x damage should be pretty easy. However, just modding a sh!ty Mk1-Braton makes it 28x more powerful. How in the world do you make enemies scale with that? Does this mean that enemies need to become 10x more healthy from new player to end-game? And even at that a veteran is killing NPCs almost 3x as fast… with their starter weapon. This sounds relatively doable, but this is a Mk1-Braton.

Soma prime is a whole other story, a modded Soma Prime is 57x as powerful as an unmodded. How the hell is this balanced? First off, this is why Critical stats are broken right now as a critical weapon scales MUCH better with mods than any other weapon type, but that is not really the main point here.

Beyond just having around twice the DPS of a Mk1-Braton at base, the Soma Prime can become 120x more powerful than a Mk1-Braton of a new player.

 

Now I can hear some of you saying “so what?” Well, difficulty is the problem now. When DE creates a boss or a mini-boss they obviously don’t want it to die instantly, that would make all the work they put into its attack scheme pointless. Thus, that enemy must be able to scale to some extent with players… And you wonder why DE adds immunity to bosses.

 

 “In Warframe, the boss a player fights in the end game has 120x the health of a boss a new player fights”

 

I think you all know how ridiculous that sounds. For one, due to how mods scale weapons, good weapons don’t get much better and good weapons become amazing as mods are multiplicative. This makes that modding process have so many “mandatory” aspects. Because that delta in damage is so high, if you miss out on just one your overall potency goes down the drain.

 

So here are the two problems of you have followed my ranting so far.

• Having meaningful enemy scaling is extremely difficult if not impossible if weapons can scale so much.
• Modding is a mandatory process with little choice if mods have such a profound individual affect.

 

Therefore, when DE originally talked about removing mandatory mods, my mind went straight to massively nerfing not our effective potency, but rather the delta in our potency. So while we would still be gods of war, we wound not be gods of war dealing 100x the damage that we dealt yesterday.

This has its own host of issues as I discussed here,

but it would make balancing weapons, enemies, and abilities MUCH easier in the long run.

 

I am not saying Serration couldn’t exist, but it would be more like 20% more damage. Sure, that may still be “mandatory” on most builds, but it would allow for creating meaningful enemy scaling. Same for Rivens, after a lot of thinking I now personally think they are fine. A riven is just there to increase the power of old weapons, a system that is vital to Warframe as the staying power of a game comes from diversity. Would 230% damage and multi-shot Rivens be reduced? Probably, but the result would be the same, your Braton can compete with your Soma Prime.

And as for diversity, a “nerfed” Serration not only nerfs Serration, it more importantly nerfs the effectiveness of every other mod. Now putting on a reload or recoil reduction mod is viable because rather than losing 30% of your overall DPS, you are only losing like 5%. “Best” builds would still exist, but you would be able to use a non-optimal build that felt good and not be gimping yourself.

 

And all of this leads to the ability to create more meaningful enemies and enemy scaling.

 

/rant

I know this is a lot based on a little, but from the whole tone of [DE]Steve what I heard was “No Damage 3.0, rather Damage 2.1 with new enemies”.

 

Post Devstream 86

I repeat, You can’t balance enemies around 12045% more damage

 

So, Devstream 86 rolled around, and [DE]Steve not only reiterated what he said two weeks ago, he made it more specific.

 

Mods are not going to change.

 

This is not about mandatory mods, it is even more basic than that, this is just about balancing the game so that enemies versus players is, well balanced.

Steve, you said that you like being able to mop the floor with grunts, why exactly does that mean you have to keep mods as they are now? The concept is pretty simple, nerf enemy scaling AND player scaling, that way you can balance the game easier.

 

As long as we are able to deal that much more damage from newb to veteran, enemies will have to scale with that massive percentage. Spoiler: That is very (very) hard. This is why exponential/endless scaling are the only things that stand a chance against us, because making a rigid and meaningful scaling system is near impossible when the delta in damage is that big.

 

It DOES NOT MATTER if you make dynamic enemies that actually challenge us as a player, they will still be subject to the same broken player AND enemy scaling. If anything, they will only exasperate the problem even more. Just imagine, a Grineer with double the health and armor of a Bombard exposed to the compounded polemical scaling of Grineer. Sure, at maybe around level 40 they will be balance, but they will become absurd bullet sponges even faster than our current friend the bombard. An “elite” unit of that form will be considerably harder relative to other grunts spawning with it at level 60 as compared to even level 30 (because polynomial scaling). And let’s not get to one-shots, because we all love being one shot as there is so much counterplay involved.

It will be the same sh!t as it I now, one-shot or be one-shot. There is a small place in the middle where our interactions with our enemies is balance, but if you ask me the time when our TTK and our enemies TTK is balanced is NOT in the same spot, so I guess enemies are never balanced.

 

Now to his statement about uprooting years of effort players have put into the game… sigh again.

If you just straight squish everything, bring it all into a more reasonable delta, no effort will be lost Sure, our mods will be nerfed, but theoretically so would enemies to the extent that our mods are just as good as they were. Except maybe now you can switch some stuff around. For Pete’s sake you could even keep Riven mods with a Great Squish. Progress would NOT be relatively lost.

 

/rant

Edited January 21, 2017 by DrBorris
added Devstream 86 rant

[SeaUrchins]

You lost me when you said rivens were "fine". They were the nails in damage 3.0 coffin.

[Grebnennar]

So nerf all damage of every thing so the game can be scaled better...

That is the take away from this? Or did I miss the point....

[----_Hayden_Tenno_----]

the problem is how armor scales and how the damage of enemies scales..... there comes a point when enemies just oneshot u and become bulletsponges.... the scaling in this game is ancient, hasnt been touched for years and doesnt fit our current meta. damage 3.0 wont change that.

[Azamagon]

Completely agreed OP.
I still think our power should go up a very noticeable amount, so, even quite a bit more than "just" along the lines of "double damage when fully modded". Fully modded being, say, up to as high as 5x damage than base? That sounds more like it, imo. But the current scaling is just absurd, that's for sure.

21 minutes ago, SeaUrchins said:

You lost me when you said rivens were "fine". They were the nails in damage 3.0 coffin.

Not necessarily.

The intention of Rivens is perfectly fine: Low-tier weapons can become high-tier-viable weapons with Rivens, while still keeping the tiers and progression.
That is why I also think there needs to be a quite noticeable difference when modding your weapon (as I mentioned first in this post), otherwise Rivens will feel a bit pointless, well, bar the fact that it's still a multi-effect-mod (which is still pretty good in itself).

The execution of Rivens is not good at all though (Offtopic: as I'll discuss and try to solve here:https://forums.warframe.com/topic/744420-rivens-intentions-problems-and-some-suggestions/

Also, to OP, just wanna point out something about crits, and a partial reason why they scale so well:

 

Currently, critdamage mods modify both the critbonus AND your basedamage. This makes crit scale insanely well. But they can also be a dreadful stat if they occur as penalties, especially with -100% or more, on Rivens. Why? Because that means your random crits are now gonna randomly cause you to deal ZERO damage.

Hence this following idea:
The critdamage mods only modify the critbonus, but NOT your basedamage. In numbers, let's show what I mean:

Current system:
A weapon's critmultiplier is 2x
Vital Sense = Crits are now 4,4x (Due to being calculated as 2 * (1 + (1 * 1,2))
With -100% critdamage Riven mod = Crits are now 0x damage, as in you deal no damage at all (Due to being calculated as 2 * (1 + (1 * -1)))

Proposed system:
A weapon's critmultiplier is 2x
Vital Sense = Crits are now 3,2x (Due to being calculated as 1 + (1 + (1 * 1,2))
With -100% critdamage Riven mod = Crits are now 1x damage, as in you deal no BONUS damage, but you still at least deal normal damage. (Due to being calculated as 1 + (1 + (1 * -1)))

 

Edited January 7, 2017 by Azamagon

[DrBorris]

15 minutes ago, SeaUrchins said:

You lost me when you said rivens were "fine". They were the nails in damage 3.0 coffin.

Originally I agreed, but given that DE perfected the values of disposition, they very good for the game. There needs to be a system to bring old weapons to the end-game, diversity is the best weapon against burn-out. So, in theory, a RNG mod system with balanced base values could work. And, more to the point of the OP, having a smaller difference in damage would make balancing Rivens easier.

And the Riven thing was at the end of the OP... any comment on the rest (and main point) of the thread?

 

5 minutes ago, Grebnennar said:

So nerf all damage of every thing so the game can be scaled better...

That is the take away from this? Or did I miss the point....

That is pretty much it...

 

2 minutes ago, ..-Hayden-Tenno-.. said:

the problem is how armor scales and how the damage of enemies scales..... there comes a point when enemies just oneshot u and become bulletsponges.... the scaling in this game is ancient, hasnt been touched for years and doesnt fit our current meta. damage 3.0 wont change that.

Well... duh, the OP is about how OUR scaling has to be nerfed as well as our enemy's, of course in the process keeping our god-like damage capabilities.

 

2 minutes ago, Azamagon said:

Completely agreed OP.
I still think our power should go up a very noticeable amount, so, even quite a bit more than "just" along the lines of "double damage when fully modded". Fully modded being, say, up to as high as 5x damage than base? That sounds more like it, imo. But the current scaling is just absurd, that's for sure.

Not necessarily.

The intention of Rivens is perfectly fine: Low-tier weapons can become high-tier-viable weapons with Rivens, while still keeping the tiers and progression.
That is why I also think there needs to be a quite noticeable difference when modding your weapon (as I mentioned first in this post), otherwise Rivens will feel a bit pointless, well, bar the fact that it's still a multi-effect-mod (which is still pretty good in itself).

The execution of Rivens is not good at all though (Offtopic: as I'll discuss and try to solve here: https://forums.warframe.com/topic/744420-rivens-intentions-problems-and-some-suggestions/ )

Also, to OP, just wanna point out something about crits, and a partial reason why they scale so well:

  Hide contents

Currently, critdamage mods modify both the critbonus AND your basedamage. This makes crit scale insanely well. But they can also be a dreadful stat if they occur as penalties, especially with -100% or more, on Rivens. Why? Because that means your random crits are now gonna randomly cause you to deal ZERO damage.

Hence this following idea:
The critdamage mods only modify the critbonus, but NOT your basedamage. In numbers, let's show what I mean:

Current system:
A weapon's critmultiplier is 2x
Vital Sense = Crits are now 4,4x (Due to being calculated as 2 * (1 + (1 * 1,2))
With -100% critdamage Riven mod = Crits are now 0x damage, as in you deal no damage at all (Due to being calculated as 2 * (1 + (1 * -1)))

Proposed system:
A weapon's critmultiplier is 2x
Vital Sense = Crits are now 3,2x (Due to being calculated as 1 + (1 + (1 * 1,2))
With -100% critdamage Riven mod = Crits are now 1x damage, as in you deal no BONUS damage, but you still at least deal normal damage. (Due to being calculated as 1 + (1 + (1 * -1)))

 

I am not sure where the balanced, point would be, 2x is pretty low, but even 10x would be getting past the point of reason.

Rivens are not perfect, but I am content with the concept of RNG mods to buff weak weapons.

I (unfortunately) understand quite well how damage works in Warframe, I made it my mission a while ago to make a damage calculator in excel that did pretty much all of the math for me (including resistances and armor) as Warframe Builder was lacking in some areas (haven't figured out how to do status yet though). It also helped with me theory-crafting weapon buffs and stuff like that. While doing so I discovered criticals are OP, armor is OP, and most importantly modding is OP.

[Jangkrik]

I think they can. In fact, the enemies at level 60-ish are perfectly balanced to our normal and endgame weapons (you don't one shot everything, only basic grunts).

Still, I think they need to rework the very old scaling system first before reworking our damage. As it stands, even a top tier crit build Soma Prime is having a hard time killing high level enemies with insane armor, thus the reason why not many people bother building for non-dps builds - because it's simply not viable.

[Grebnennar]

I've seen a lot of people talking about nerfing this or that but I've never heard What exactly is the problem? That one-shot enemies and vise versa exist? Or that players are too powerful?

I have no problem with a complete re-work of how damage happens. Except..

If the mods change this drastically where they now become effectively useless I want to be able to pull my forma out and not loose the forma. This is my concern with a complete rework of the system at this point. 

 

 

[Loswaith]

Part of the issue as well is how crits work, they are inherently unbalanced.

Currently we mostly have weapons with either low crit chance and low crit multiplier or good crit chances with high crit multiplier.

However a balanced system for crits is low chance with high multiplier, or high chance of crit for low multiplier.

Here is an example (on the smaller side of numbers):
90% crit chance for 4 times damage, gives a net gain of 3.6 times damage
10% crit chance for 1.5 time damage, gives a net gain of 0.15 damage.
Thus a big gap in net damage (a difference of 24 times).
For 100 base damage that is 360 damage vs 15 damage

Now lets look at the other side:
90% crit chance for 1.5 times damage, gives a net gain of 1.35
10% crit chance for 4 times damage, gives a net gain of 0.4
A much lower gap in net damage (only a difference of 3.375 times).
For 100 base that is 135 damage vs 40 (sure still a gap, but not a canyon)

This doesn't take into account when you hit 100% crit chance or higher as well, which only increases the gap.

This is not to say that high crit chance and high crit multiplier cant work, however the base damage needs to be on the much lower side of weapons. Nor low crit chance and low crit multiplier wouldnt work either but that would need base damage to be on the higher side of the damage scale to really compete in these places.

This is why crit weapons dominate the game so heavilly.  Many of them are also on the higher side of the base damage scale as well, meaning they will simply obliterate anything else.

Edited January 7, 2017 by Loswaith
spelling

[blazinvire]

Damage can't really be examined in a vacuum though, you kind of need to look at the recovery and defense methods we have available.

If we can go from 1% hp to 100% hp in one or two seconds, that basically sets the threshold at which enemies need to meet in order to even threaten your existence in the slightest; in other words, they have to kill you in under two seconds or they can't kill you ever, which is where all the one-hit-kills are actually originating from.

If it takes you ten seconds to go from 1% hp to 100% hp, then you can drastically reduce the damage and turn it into a proper tug-of-war rather than a twitch-or-die.

[UltimateGrr]

1 hour ago, ..-Hayden-Tenno-.. said:

the problem is how armor scales and how the damage of enemies scales..... there comes a point when enemies just oneshot u and become bulletsponges.... the scaling in this game is ancient, hasnt been touched for years and doesnt fit our current meta. damage 3.0 wont change that.

Part of this is deliberate on DE's part.  They want you to leave Endless missions at some point, and pretty much immortal enemies that can one shot you is a pretty effective way of making you want to leave before you loose all your rewards.

[Xzorn]

Scaling has always been an issue with enemy damage output, not our damage output and not enemy eHP.

Players having problems killing high armor enemies should prolly stop trying to use Soma against them. There are plenty of weapons that make fun of Soma when it comes to dealing with armor and that's one of the good things about this damage system. The meta that players think is so OP isn't very good later. Looking at  you Tonkor, SImulor, Soma.

They need to fix CPx4. Oh no unpopular opinion! Fact is, there's no point in a defensive stat that you can completely ignore. CP is stupid and so is Toxic bypassing shields. I'm not saying enemies should be walking walls but something about this relation in the damage system should have been fixed a long time ago. It's a good thing that status becomes more valuable as enemies scale. It's too bad that Armor is the only health type that really conforms that. Crit isn't that OP when you do 2,700 damage out of 200k.

We can do as much damage as we want, long as we have easier access to higher level enemies. Right now, we have to wait an hour before things get interesting and that's not a good plan for the future, esp when enemies can one shot some frames by lvl 80.

I'm for one worried about these mini-boss type additions. I'm not looking forward to a stalker style disspell in the middle of a horde of lvl 300 enemies. Those meaningless fodder enemies hurt like hell at those levels. That's just cheese not difficulty and judging from the enemies they've been adding, that's exactly what we might get.

[Invisum]

I agree with the general idea and only have a couple things to add.

One, a modded Soma Prime can actually reach 34872.520 sustained dps (maybe more, haven't tested everything yet) according to warframe builder, so that gap is actually more extreme.

And two, while our enemies scale infinitely and our damage increases massively, our frames health stays (relatively) about the same. So frames with some sort of "invincibility" or self reviving stay relevant (though are usually lacking in damage) while other frames quickly find themselves in the one-shot category and are forced to compensate with nonstop cc. Not really much more opinion to add, just a couple thoughts.

Edited January 8, 2017 by Invisum

[----_Hayden_Tenno_----]

4 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

esp when enemies can one shot some frames by lvl 80.

thats exactly the problem, did a kuva flood a few minutes ago and got downed while reviving teammate... with frost, max vitality and steel fiber + 3k avalanche shield... with a single hit of a lvl 80 grineer butcher... cmon u gotta be kidding me...

8 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

They need to fix CPx4. Oh no unpopular opinion! Fact is, there's no point in a defensive stat that you can completely ignore.

[Volinus7]

Riven is just half-baked diablo magic mod that was used to monetize weapon balancing.

[Nyaa314]

6 hours ago, DrBorris said:

So, it appears that the plan is to diversify the enemy roster to add new threats. Enemies that we have a meaningful fight with (so no one-shots in either direction).

YEEES! PLEASE! 9000 knockdowns, pulls, power nullifiers, buffing enemy damage resistance, leeching player energy, and finally kurva guardians being immune to conventional damage isn't enough! We need more gimmicks so weapon or ability damage don't matter at all.

[ShortCat]

11 hours ago, DrBorris said:

Originally I agreed, but given that DE perfected the values of disposition, they very good for the game. There needs to be a system to bring old weapons to the end-game, diversity is the best weapon against burn-out. So, in theory, a RNG mod system with balanced base values could work. And, more to the point of the OP, having a smaller difference in damage would make balancing Rivens easier.

In your post you describe how some weapons scale way better with mods and you are right. So how can Riven system be a good thing, if a weapon with a "faint" disposition still scales 10x better than one with "strong" disposition? 

11 hours ago, DrBorris said:

...any comment on the rest (and main point) of the thread?

You are right with your analysis, however required changes will not be implemented.

1. Again, Riven mods by design do not support the required changes.
2. Damage/scaling or whatever rework will graze already existing Rivens and those are a very delicate topic especcialy with concerns to trading. Whether you belive in the excuse DE brought up with "Hema-dilemma" in DevStream #85 or not is up to you, the point is the same can be said about possible Riven situation.
3. Warframe is almost 4 years old, with current rework speed it would take DE at least 1 year to implement suggested changes. That would be 5 years or so in total. This ammount of time is way beyond a lifespan of a modern online game. From commercial point it would be much smarter to implement such changes in a spiritual successor.

[DrBorris]

3 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

In your post you describe how some weapons scale way better with mods and you are right. So how can Riven system be a good thing, if a weapon with a "faint" disposition still scales 10x better than one with "strong" disposition? 

That goes to tweaking Riven Disposition, Rivens are not perfect but they could work in theory. Just because a current iteration is less than stellar it does not make the concept bad.

4 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

You are right with your analysis, however required changes will not be implemented.

1. Again, Riven mods by design do not support the required changes.
2. Damage/scaling or whatever rework will graze already existing Rivens and those are a very delicate topic especcialy with concerns to trading. Whether you belive in the excuse DE brought up with "Hema-dilemma" in DevStream #85 or not is up to you, the point is the same can be said about possible Riven situation.
3. Warframe is almost 4 years old, with current rework speed it would take DE at least 1 year to implement suggested changes. That would be 5 years or so in total. This ammount of time is way beyond a lifespan of a modern online game. From commercial point it would be much smarter to implement such changes in a spiritual successor.

1. I disagree again with the Riven thing, there NEEDS to be a system to make weaker weapons better and Rivens are capable of doing that.
2. If people complain when their 200% damage riven goes down to 30% if Serration is brought down to 20%, let them cry. Their Riven still would serve the exact same purpose, just be scaled down with other mods. The mod is still there, and should theoretically be just as good, it is just now smaller numbers.
3. I don't know if a Damage 3.0 would really take that much coding work. It would take a lot of talking and planning but I feel as though the implementation would be not the most major of our reworks. I could see the talking and planning lasting months though.

[TaylorsContraction]

A lot of good points by op and others.

The problem with scaling for me has always been getting 1 shot.  In endless missions it makes sense as you aren't supposed to go on forever but there are plenty normal missions where this happens as well.

Sorties,  kuva floods,  sentients using the explosive weapon,  comba units with angstrum.

One solution is shield gating that we've all (devs and players) have been bringing up.  To make shield gating fair when our shield reach a gate point,  we can get a temporary hardened shield effect (akin to sanctuary) which blocks damage and also prevents our guns from shooting through it too.  Melee and powers will still make contact with enemies. This is exactly how sanctuary works,  you can't shoot through the bubble while someone is reviving and you're outside its effect.  Much like nyx's absorb or mag's magnetize.

[ShortCat]

2 minutes ago, DrBorris said:

 

1. I disagree again with the Riven thing, there NEEDS to be a system to make weaker weapons better and Rivens are capable of doing that.
2. If people complain when their 200% damage riven goes down to 30% if Serration is brought down to 20%, let them cry. Their Riven still would serve the exact same purpose, just be scaled down with other mods. The mod is still there, and should theoretically be just as good, it is just now smaller numbers.
3. I don't know if a Damage 3.0 would really take that much coding work. It would take a lot of talking and planning but I feel as though the implementation would be not the most major of our reworks. I could see the talking and planning lasting months though.

1. I cannot agree with this point no matter how you argue, because you assume tiered weapon system is required and even if it is required, that every weapon should be endgame valuable (which in the end result eliminates the same tier system). I genuinelly believe you can create a gear system consisting only of side grades.
2. It is not like I am against such changes. Give me the power and I would have done it yesterday in 2014. It is how DE handles those issues and how they manage their community. Not going to happen.
3. As said before, the whole process would take too much time and would mean a major change, often used in spiritual successors or sequels.

[Azamagon]

@DrBorris this also reminds me of something I have thought about before in regards to balancing, which goes along the idea of balancing our damage output (mainly thinking about weapons right now).

Mods and damage needs to be rethought TOGETHER, in more than just plain numbers. Because we don't have much choices when modding, really. And I think one thing they could do so is by rethinking Corrupted mods a bit.

The idea is: What if Corrupted mods could NOT be stacked with regular mods anymore, but Corrupted mods were ALWAYS better in some way, but also carried a negative?

Example (with new hypothetical numbers):
Serration: 55% damage
Heavy Caliber: 77% damage, but comes with a 33% accuracy loss
Choose one or the other. You want reliable damage? Or you want more damage, at the risk of missing more of your shots?

Split Chamber: 48% multishot
Dwindling Division (New Corrupted): 100% multishot, but total damage goes down by 30% (So, guaranteed 2x shots a lá 70% damage, meaning a 40% overall increase in damage)
Choose one or the other. You either have the regular mod giving you a plain, but irregular, boost. Or, you pick the Corrupted mod, giving you a benefit you can rely on, but in the long run, it won't be as much of a total boost.
On status weapons and "must kill reliably"-weapons (like Bows and Snipers) the second option might be overall more useful. On raw damage, rapid fire weapons, the first one might be better. But, it's still an actual CHOICE of what YOU want out from your weapon.

And so on. Along with stat-squishing, giving us actual choices in our modding sounds like a good idea.

[DrBorris]

Updated the OP with Devstream 86 stuff...

 

God I hope [DE]Steve is just being extremely vague and he doesn't fully mean what he is saying.

[Cloud]

On 7/1/2017 at 3:16 AM, DrBorris said:

/rant

Man, I was just thinking of doing like the exact same of this post. Totally agree.

[DrBorris]

4 hours ago, Cloud said:

Man, I was just thinking of doing like the exact same of this post. Totally agree.

Glad some other people are thinking it, feels like this topic is ignored by a lot of people because of its more "meta" nature.

[blazinvire]

The topic of compensation probably needs to be added here, as DE appears to be terrified of violating the amount of time and energy players have invested in the game, and mods are a MASSIVE time and energy sink.

Corrupted Mods are an RNG grindfarm that you need a full group for or risk not getting a drop at all, Nightmare Mods are even more annoying to acquire, then you've got the Primed Mods that consume a sizeable quantity of ducats which translates to a lot of prime farming, but then mountains and mountains of Endo to max it out.
I don't think DE is going to be willing to change mods until they have a way to not anger the players -to this extent.
Because you can bet, the first thing the players are going to say when mods get changed is: "I want a refund for all the time I spent collecting and maxing those."
And then conversely you'll have the ones who say: "I don't want a payout, that takes away gameplay value."

I imagine if you could satisfy those two groups, DE would be quite willing to futz with mods.