RIP tonkor? more like RIP launchers tbh

[Twistedsparkle]

now Im not gonna be super salty about the nerfs
I think its important to balance weapons statistically

However...

self damage is now a thing with all launchers..
this is something that I just dont get in warframe

in  a game where we hop right in our enemies faces being able to blow yourself up is a nonono for me
tonkor was the only launcher I used because of this

so instead of using one launcher over the others
now I probably wont use any of em at all

I would have loved to see self damage be gone with all launchers instead of giving it to all of em
I would have been okay even with band aid mod that removes self damage

but now that DE has decided to go with this self damage thing
theres nothing we can do about it really other than demand that atleast fix self damage first

I think self damage should deal only max 50% of your health at max but thats just my opinion

do you have similar feelings or do you disagree completely?
how would you fix self damage if at all?

I would love to hear your opinion
thx for reading :)

[Husla]

Self damage should've always been capped. It's already bad enough we get Juanbanged from the slightest of touches.

[AdunSaveMe]

Self damage doesn't make launchers useless or unusable. It just makes them occasionally unfair and ridiculous.

Instead of just raw damage, I think we should get CC based on distance from the explosion. So if you're on the edge of it you just get staggered, but if it's right in your face you get thrown back. Scale % of shields/HP damage according to radius if damage REALLY needs to be a thing.

[KirukaChan]

Secura Penta with Tether Grenades is still plenty usable. Especially when you leave the grenades sitting in a Zenistar disc.

I will admit though, that the mechanics of self damage need a look. Insta-fragging one's self is pretty ridiculous, especially when teammates can jump out in front of you with no warning.

Edited March 23, 2017 by KirukaChan

[NecromancerX69]

People will just jump on the Tether Penta wagon now, since they don't deal self damage.

War never changes.

[Weidro]

thinking about realism (yes even in a sci fi shooter) all grenade launchers should deal self damage and should deal full damage even to yourself
that's kinda the trade off you have to take for having a high damage aoe weapon
its a fair trade off in my opinion

the coming patch is no reason not to use any of the nerved weapons anymore
instead its a reason to overthink old builds and old gameplay

although if your playstyle was to hop right in your enemies faces i can't understand why you where using a grenade launcher in the first place
wouldn't a melee weapon fit your playstyle a lot better ?

[ScorpDK]

It's in the nature of humans to go after the next best thing, so of course the Penta, which only explodes on command (and some of the secondary explosives that do the same) or offers a mod that makes it safe to use in close quarters, will become the new meta.

And...you can't really blame them. If you shoot an enemy with an explosive weapon, and you happen to be too close, the resulting self-damage is so high that, especially at higher difficulty levels, you atomize yourself while the enemy is probably only scratched slightly.
Self-Damage by itself isn't bad, but it's a system that's badly implemented because, while the enemy keeps scaling in health, shield and armor rating, and your weapons can be modded to deal ridiculous damage to keep up with their health; your own frames' effective health is generally not high enough to resist more than one single collateral hit from your explosions at that point.

I'm all for self-damage from any type of explosions - BUT - you have to, at some point, consider putting an upper limit, or make it deal a percentage of your max health in terms of damage. Still punishing you, but not so much as to essentially make an entire weapon slot unusable.

 

Actually, it would be a non-issue if all launchers were categorized not as a primary/secondary, but as heavy weapon, and you had an appropriate fourth weapon slot that allowed you to carry one into mission without sacrificing your primary or secondary weapons. But that would probably be too much to implement.

[LABAL]

2 minutes ago, Weidro said:

thinking about realism (yes even in a sci fi shooter) all grenade launchers should deal self damage and should deal full damage even to yourself
that's kinda the trade off you have to take for having a high damage aoe weapon
its a fair trade off in my opinion

I would agree with you in any other situation, but when your enemies have at least twice as much hit points and armor as you do AND your own weapon deals enough damage to instantly disintegrate you without putting you into bleedout, this is only detrimental. A self-imposed challenge, rather than power at a cost.

[Twistedsparkle]

10 minutes ago, Weidro said:

thinking about realism (yes even in a sci fi shooter) all grenade launchers should deal self damage and should deal full damage even to yourself
that's kinda the trade off you have to take for having a high damage aoe weapon
its a fair trade off in my opinion

the coming patch is no reason not to use any of the nerved weapons anymore
instead its a reason to overthink old builds and old gameplay

although if your playstyle was to hop right in your enemies faces i can't understand why you where using a grenade launcher in the first place
wouldn't a melee weapon fit your playstyle a lot better ?

if the launchers were actually so powerful that they would kill my enemies or just deal insane amount of damage even against 70-100+lvls and so on
Id agree with you but right now I dont think they do enough damage to justify it

also I wasnt exacly talking about my personal playstyle
more like general flow of gameplay in warframe

[(XBOX)ultimategamerjr]

7 minutes ago, Twistedsparkle said:

if the launchers were actually so powerful that they would kill my enemies or just deal insane amount of damage even against 70-100+lvls and so on
Id agree with you but right now I dont think they do enough damage to justify it

also I wasnt exacly talking about my personal playstyle
more like general flow of gameplay in warframe

The zarr does more than enough damage at way higher than lvl 70-100

[Acersecomic]

Self-damage shouldn't be a thing in the least. It doesn't balance anything, it just makes using lauchers annoying at times.

Best if self-damage wasn't in the game at all.

[rngd444]

As posted in that 'Balance' thead:

Spoiler

The main reason why (almost) no self-damage is good is because of the borked aiming system Warframe has. You simply can't reliably use explosive weapons if you can't jump or run (or rather change directions) and shoot at the same time because your Sentinel ('works' with all kinds of other things as well, e.g. enemies or allies) might end up in the direct aiming path the moment you shoot - despite maybe being behind you - and you will hit it instead of shooting where you actually aimed. This will always lead to some risk that the player can't control because it's by design and not by being careless and it's stupid to be punished for it.

One can argue if self-damage has a place in a game like this. Personally, I say it hasn't and all explosive weapons would be much nicer to play with if it was gone (or rather reduced to a fixed value); just look at the Penta's 'new' Augment and how much more popular it got (purely anecdotal but I see the weapon way more often now) because of, guess what, no self-damage (and admittedly other cool mechanics).

 

37 minutes ago, AdunSaveMe said:

Instead of just raw damage, I think we should get CC based on distance from the explosion. So if you're on the edge of it you just get staggered, but if it's right in your face you get thrown back. Scale % of shields/HP damage according to radius if damage REALLY needs to be a thing.

This would be really cool but we would still be punished by the borked aiming (as stated above). But at least it wouldn't be as finite anymore.

 

30 minutes ago, Weidro said:

thinking about realism (yes even in a sci fi shooter) all grenade launchers should deal self damage and should deal full damage even to yourself
that's kinda the trade off you have to take for having a high damage aoe weapon
its a fair trade off in my opinion

the coming patch is no reason not to use any of the nerved weapons anymore
instead its a reason to overthink old builds and old gameplay

Quanta's cubes explode as well, Torid's gas clouds surely aren't controlled by some nanites to make sure we won't get affected either, etc., the list goes on. I don't think we can really talk about realism on something as inconsistent as self-damage (e.g. the reworked Magnetize letting us suicide by shooting bullets away from the center while standing in a bubble was perfectly realistic but totally borked for gameplay reasons). Also, the above mentioned reasons show why it's not really a trade-off or fair in any way. No one will change their Tonkor build because the weapon is still the same; you can't mod it to deal less self-damage, unlike the Penta which leads us to double standards again.

 

13 minutes ago, Twistedsparkle said:

also I wasnt exacly talking about my personal playstyle
more like general flow of gameplay in warframe

This.

 

5 minutes ago, (Xbox One)ultimategamerjr said:

The zarr does more than enough damage at way higher than lvl 70-100

Yes, but the majority of explosive weapons won't (Ogris (even after the 'buff'), Penta, Angstrum, Kulstar), yet they all kill you instantly even without any real build on there.

Edited March 23, 2017 by rngd444

[(PSN)SmallOh5]

this nerf is insane. while using the tonkor with frost and vauban i have noticed that while standing in the frost dome or the vauban bastille, if i try to shoot enemies my tonor ronds explode on the edge of where my power end. this happes so often. so now ill just die alot while using this thing

 yay -_-

[TheLexiConArtist]

I'm in the disagree completely group.

 

Explosives aren't fun without the risk factor to me (personally) and risk-reward should be balanced to promote weapon and playstyle variance generally.

 

It's okay for you to not like launchers because they pose a risk to you. It's okay for you to want to get into close quarters with enemies and take them out with powerful damage. Shotguns and heavy melee are your thing, perhaps. That's fine.

It's okay to like launchers with risk. It's okay to deal significant damage at range in an area. You have to make that distance and play with care so you don't annihilate yourself. You're a user of heavy explosives and play differently to preserve yourself from your own fire as a result. That's fine.

 

It's not okay to deal significant instant damage in an area at close or far ranges without having a drawback to limit the use cases, because that diminishes both the above approaches and weapon archetypes; why shotgun when you can clear massive radius instead of a cone with falloff, why use a risky launcher when there's one with no risk and better output.

 

That's an example. Balance between the various niches and archetypes isn't perfect, but there's no reason to say "remove self-damage" when there are already self-damage-free archetypes that fill that space.

It may need balancing (and I've given possible solutions several times in the past) to better befit the difference between player effective-health and enemy effective-health, and it could do with some QOL improvements for the user in other ways than straight damage mechanics, but it does not need removing outright.

[rngd444]

3 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

It's okay to like launchers with risk. It's okay to deal significant damage at range in an area. You have to make that distance and play with care so you don't annihilate yourself. You're a user of heavy explosives and play differently to preserve yourself from your own fire as a result. That's fine.

Sure, if the whole system would work. But it doesn't and more often than not one gets punished by outside factors (aim point being on stuff like one's Sentinel behind oneself and therefore dying because of some arbitrary logic despite aiming at something completely different in front of you). They won't fundamentally change the way we aim (though, they should, so our shots aren't diverted by allies running around in our FoV which is also super annoying for sniper rifles).

 

7 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

It's not okay to deal significant instant damage in an area at close or far ranges without having a drawback to limit the use cases

Take for example the Ogris which has a) travel time, b) charge time, c) no crit (and til the upcoming buff no status either) aka some significant drawbacks and pretty much no way to deal damage to anything higher level, yet you will kill yourself by just putting some mods on it. If they would balance the whole risk/reward ratio, fine, but they obviously won't. And even if they did, the ratio from weapon damage to our own health will always be so ridiculously high because of the damage we 'have to' be able to do due to enemy scaling, so it'll never work unless they adjust it in a proper way (probably %health based).

[BiancaRoughfin]

1 hour ago, Twistedsparkle said:

in  a game where we hop right in our enemies faces being able to blow yourself up is a nonono for me
tonkor was the only launcher I used because of this

Thats why you have Sidearms and Melee weapons, to not blow your smile away when you come face to face with an enemy.

I stopped using Tonkor long ago. I came to the conclusion that, yes the weapon is strong but it wasnt actually any fun to use and i still managed to do more damage with other weapons like the Vaykor Hek.

But if this makes you happy, think about it, Tonkor was just MR5, imagin what we will be doing when a MR20+ Launcher comes out?

[Twistedsparkle]

13 minutes ago, BiancaRoughfin said:

Thats why you have Sidearms and Melee weapons, to not blow your smile away when you come face to face with an enemy.

I stopped using Tonkor long ago. I came to the conclusion that, yes the weapon is strong but it wasnt actually any fun to use and i still managed to do more damage with other weapons like the Vaykor Hek.

But if this makes you happy, think about it, Tonkor was just MR5, imagin what we will be doing when a MR20+ Launcher comes out?

you know if the weapon switching speed was way way faster Id agree with you

[(PSN)marshb863]

Once I got used to it, the penta was always a good launcher for me and when I learned you can use shred on it, worrying about grenades bouncing back at me (they pass through objects instead) and fragging myself stopped being a thing for the most part.

[TheLexiConArtist]

49 minutes ago, rngd444 said:

Sure, if the whole system would work. But it doesn't and more often than not one gets punished by outside factors (aim point being on stuff like one's Sentinel behind oneself and therefore dying because of some arbitrary logic despite aiming at something completely different in front of you). They won't fundamentally change the way we aim (though, they should, so our shots aren't diverted by allies running around in our FoV which is also super annoying for sniper rifles).

 

Take for example the Ogris which has a) travel time, b) charge time, c) no crit (and til the upcoming buff no status either) aka some significant drawbacks and pretty much no way to deal damage to anything higher level, yet you will kill yourself by just putting some mods on it. If they would balance the whole risk/reward ratio, fine, but they obviously won't. And even if they did, the ratio from weapon damage to our own health will always be so ridiculously high because of the damage we 'have to' be able to do due to enemy scaling, so it'll never work unless they adjust it in a proper way (probably %health based).

From what I know about the projectile mechanics in Warframe I don't see how it's possible to hit your own sentinel unless there's something particularly egregious stopping it from taking up position. Hitscan, more likely so. I can't say that I've ever hit my sentinel with projectiles in any recent usage, certainly not with explosives since I don't use riskless and I'd be dead if it happened.

However, like you said, it does affect other weapons and should be one of those gameplay before realism benefits. Adding obvious exception cases for things that are or could be intentioned to have practical uses for colliding with allies, every other projectile should generally not be intercepted by friendlies (unless they qualify as a target under Radiation etc). Leading erratic AI is troublesome enough.

 

The Ogris is (was) horribly outdated, it's true. But the Zarr is popular enough, the Kulstar sees good use, and Pentas would as well if not for the non-damaging alternatives being better anyway (besides using Tether Grenades, which I hope will be addressed before long as well).

It's possible to balance the weapon damage much better without making it percentile-health (bad due to homogenising the tankier frames and ignoring health mods) by flattening the scale, I gave an example in the other thread's post linked in that one you quoted there. While doubling the DR we have already (70% to 85%) would only double the threshold before a player oneshots themselves, implementing a way to reduce the scaling curve of the mods you're installing could easily reduce it by a factor of four or five, without making it completely linear. The bigger your required output for beefy enemies, the more resistance you effectively have against your own fire, which is more appropriate to the limited effective health scaling we have compared to what we face.

Edited March 23, 2017 by EDYinnit

[(PSN)wildcats1369my]

will the tonkor damage other frames in the squad or just self?

[ScorpDK]

3 minutes ago, (PS4)wildcats1369my said:

will the tonkor damage other frames in the squad or just self?

Unless you're affected by radiation, nothing you do can really hurt your allies directly.

[Ventura_Highway]

3 hours ago, Twistedsparkle said:

you know if the weapon switching speed was way way faster Id agree with you

 

Yeah I think faster weapon swapping would be nice.

I'd argue you could use melees or something of that sort though, but with how melees generally work nowadays, some conditions generally need to be fulfilled in order for the weapon to start doing work, and it's not always an option to fulfill that condition in under 3 seconds, and not everyone has access to maiming strike.

[rngd444]

1 hour ago, EDYinnit said:

From what I know about the projectile mechanics in Warframe I don't see how it's possible to hit your own sentinel unless there's something particularly egregious stopping it from taking up position. Hitscan, more likely so. I can't say that I've ever hit my sentinel with projectiles in any recent usage, certainly not with explosives since I don't use riskless and I'd be dead if it happened.

It doesn't have to be in a weird position, the position just has to be relatively in line with the path of where you aim which doesn't originate from your Warframe but your camera. This is also the reason why you can miss on very close targets despite the crosshair being on them. I have definitely hit my own Sentinel, mostly while jumping (which changes its relative position to the Frame for the most part of the jump aka they lag behind and depending other factors like changes in direction, they can end up in your aiming path), e.g. with the Penta and due to the grenades bouncing off in a different angle than the one you'd expect (i.e. somewhere in front of you), you can easily kill yourself if you didn't closely watch the grenade.

[TheLexiConArtist]

1 minute ago, rngd444 said:

It doesn't have to be in a weird position, the position just has to be relatively in line with the path of where you aim which doesn't originate from your Warframe but your camera. This is also the reason why you can miss on very close targets despite the crosshair being on them. I have definitely hit my own Sentinel, mostly while jumping (which changes its relative position to the Frame for the most part of the jump aka they lag behind and depending other factors like changes in direction, they can end up in your aiming path), e.g. with the Penta and due to the grenades bouncing off in a different angle than the one you'd expect (i.e. somewhere in front of you), you can easily kill yourself if you didn't closely watch the grenade.

I've noticed projectiles actually originating from sensible locations - most notably not the camera - being why there's that point-blank issue where they go wildly astray; spawning 'in' the enemy and being pushed out to a completely incorrect vector.

Anecdotes aside (on both sides), addressing collision on friendly targets for the betterment of gameplay would fix it almost completely. With my own suggestion, the ability for a mod like Adhesive Blast to flag a projectile as "could potentially want to attach to a friendly" would still let a sentinel hold it for you with catastrophic results, though.

 

Since you mentioned wayward Penta 'nades; I also suggested borrowing the mechanic from the Elytron Archwing and providing some UI markers on explosives in the field (within reason, obviously not for every Kulstar cluster-fragment etc). This would help people avoid taking hits from their own reflected explosives (from nullifiers, especially) and forgotten Penta 'nades.

[rngd444]

31 minutes ago, EDYinnit said:

I've noticed projectiles actually originating from sensible locations - most notably not the camera - being why there's that point-blank issue where they go wildly astray; spawning 'in' the enemy and being pushed out to a completely incorrect vector.

Yea, I don't mean that the projectiles originate from the camera but just that there's a 'line' from it to your crosshair and if anything crosses it (even if it's not in the actual's crosshair's position), you'll aim at it instead. Shooting arrows through glass in those Corpus Spy vaults is another awkwardly funny example for this. And Lanka in itself is a prominent example for the sensible locations you mentioned where your shots will simply originate behind the enemy because it's 'too long' for point blank hits.

Anyways, I'd welcome any change to the problems this behaviour (no matter whatever description is right) causes on the end of precision weapons and explosives. UI markers would definitely be a good start for anything that can linger around.