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Weapons' handling analysis - Its impact on popularity


Azamagon
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(Yes, this is somewhat inspired by the incoming weapon balance pass, but not in a kneejerk way, more like from an analytical and intrigued kind of way)

Warframe is mostly a hordeshooter. So, this has a bunch of VERY important impacts on why certain weapons become more popular than others.
I'm trying to keep this on an as objective point of view as possible (some are ofc partly based on my own opinion, but I've tried to keep it to a minimum), so there is one thing which has a very powerful popularity-impact too which I won't discuss, and that's the aesthetics of the weaponry (Like, the look of the weapon, attack-graphics and sounds etc), since such things are so highly subjective.

There is another point I won't discuss so much either (not as a purely seperate point, at least), and that's damage values. This obviously has a strong impact on a weapon's popularity too, but it's pretty much all the OTHER things I wanna talk about in this thread, the weapon handling

Further, the point of looking at these points is not just to point out the obvious, but also to propose solutions to some of these things. I'll also mainly use primary weapons as my examples.

Let's get into it:

"The bucket" mentaility
Before I go into the specific points, I wanna discuss about this first. As far as I have heard, DE themselves follow a "bucket" mentality. That's their way of balancing things. If you add/buff something, then something else has to go/get nerfed. In other words, you gotta have flaws along with awesomesauce. That's good.

Except you don't actually follow this!
Some weapons are filled to the brim with positive powers and few negatives, like the Soma and Synoid Simulor.
Then some are filled to the brim with flaws, with very few positives to make up for it, like the Spectra, Glaxion, Fang etc

If you say you follow this mentality, then can you actually show it?

Now, onto the things you can put in or out of the bucket (aside from damage):


Multitarget capabilities
This is of course an incredibly powerful attribute on a weapon in a hordeshooter. This is why weapons like Synoid Simulor, Ignis, Atomos, Amprex, most launchers etc, are so very popular.
This also explains why high rate-of-fire weapons are popular. While each bullet might not kill multiple enemies (punchthrough mods can add that power though, ofc), but the fact that you can quickly switch between multiple targets for rapid killing, helps a ton.
When you fight hordes of enemies, you wanna quickly kill those hordes of enemies. Goes without saying.

But what hasn't seemed to be obvious is then that all weapons need to be good at killing enemies rather rapidly, in one way or another.
Dual Daggers might be kind of fast, but they lack EVERYTHING else: Damage, reach, crit, status etc
Snipers might hit hard (if they crit), but they are slow, mostly singletarget, have unreliable crits, pointless scopesway, horrible accuracy unscoped...

The bucket mentality is lacking in many weapons, that's for sure.

Now, back to those weapons that DO have multitarget capabilites. Obviously, a weapon with multitarget capabilities needs to have some reasonable drawbacks, otherwise the single target weapons run a risk of never being used. But, this drawback needs to be reasonable. Which leads me to my next point...

Selfharm severeness
Selfharm on weapons where it is logical (such as on the launchers), makes sense. But, the SEVERITY of the selfharm is a problem, a lot so because of the game's hecticness, leading to situations where it is very easy for a teammate to run in front of you to (intentionally or not), most likely killing yourself in a single shot. This is (part of) why the Tonkor has been such a popular weapon. And it is also part of the reasons why people are reacting so strongly to the Tonkor now being subject to the selfharm severity issues.

Solution-proposal:
Idea 1 - Set some kind of cap to how self-harmful your weapons can be. That way, they keep an important drawback, but it means the selfharm is not such an exaggeratedly bad drawback either.
Idea 2 - Instead of being hurt by your own weapons, they could instead stagger/knock you down (depending on distance from the centre and/or depending on what weapon is being used). This makes their "selfharm" scale better with enemies; Fighting lowlevel enemies with a machinegun bears little risk to yourself, as would fighting lowlevel enemies with an explosive weapon (since it would just CC you). On high levels though, the CC-"selfharm" gets more dangerous, because opportunities for enemies to attack you becomes more and more of a potential hazard to your own survival.

Unpredictable damage (critical hits)
The RNG we know as critical hits also has a rather important popularity impact on weapons. Since I don't know how much this objectively impacts their popularity, this segment will be focused more from my personal thoughts on crit RNG.
In short, I'd describe my opinion as this: The slower a weapon is in its overall handling (taking into account rate of fire, magsize, reloadspeed, recoil, triggertype etc), the more important it is that the crit chance (if crits are supposed to be a heavy damage-focus of the weapon) is reliable.
This is one of many parts of why I think Snipers, in particular, fail so miserably. They are very slow in handling, they (mostly) have no innate multitargetting capabilities... yet they are also very unreliable on top of that?

Solution-proposal: I have 2 main opinions on this:

1) Make slower handling weapons have higher critical chances. Bows fit well here already. But also rethink Snipers, semiautos like Grinlok, Latrons etc. And remember, if this makes them too strong, there are other knobs to tweak them with, such as altering their base damage or critical multipliers...

2) Remove crit rng entirely and make critmultiplier mods be related to weakspots (and critchance to boost accuracy?), along with proper adjustments to go along with it. I have made threads about this before, and the opinion on this is always very split + the work to do such a rehaul is rather huge, so I know this is unlikely to happen. Just wanted to point out this opinion anyway :)

Recoil, accuracy, zoom and scope-sway
All of these things of course matter a lot for a weapons popularity too. And it's important to not give too many flaws of these to a single weapon.

Special note to zoom: It's generally considered a DOWNSIDE. People see negative zoom on snipers as a bonus benefit. This really speaks about how zoom-levels (and maps?) need to be mechanically changed to actual be deemed beneficial (like being able to manually adjust your zoom levels, similar to Snipers, but better so).

While there are some weapons that have some strong issues here (like the recoil on the Latrons and Cestras, for instance), there is an entire weapon category which has ALL of these problems: Snipers! Yup, those again.

They have high recoil (a moderate issue due to their low rate of fire though), low unscoped accuracy, high zoomlevels even at lower zooms, and scope-sway to boot.

Gee, I wonder why people don't like the current "rebalanced" Snipers? /sarcasm

Solution-proposal: Recoil of course makes sense to have in weaponry, so not much talk about this. Accuracy needs some tuning up for some weaponry, but a lot more so for un-scoped Snipers. Forcing the use of scopes is not very nice in a hordeshooter. Zoom could need a mechanical overhaul, but at minimum, it should not be treated as such a positive thing, so the low zoomlevel options should be just that, LOW zoomlevels (This is the ONE thing done well with Vulkars: 2.5x zoom is a pretty decent lowlevel zoom).
And scopesway just needs to be removed entirely. It has no place in Warframe.

Reloadtimes and magazine sizes (and weapon swapping speeds).
The balancing of these things is quite... off, to say the least.
We have weapons like Synoid Simulor, with a rather speedy reloadtime, a decent magsize, as well as huge range AoE damage (which will still exist in another extent post-balancing)
Then we have snipers like Vulkar, with a long reloadtime, a rather small magsize, and no innate multitarget capability whatosever. Just because it can shoot from afar, a rather niched and weak benefit.

Maybe a bit extreme comparison, so let's look at two more similar weapons:
Dex Sybaris vs Latron Prime.
Similar damage. Similar rate of fire. Similar magsize.

Now, the Dex has a rather quick reload. That, along with non-existant recoil, and reliable crits after modding.
Then the Latron Prime, it has a rather lengthy reloadtime, almost TWICE as long as the Dex's time! That, along with a massive recoil, and highly unreliable crits, even after modding. Is the superior status-chance and semiauto trigger really worth such severe weaponhandling-penalties?

Imo, this is a big issue (mainly so with all the "problem-double-dipping, or worse" which exist on most of the slower non-multitargetting weapons).
Combine this with the fact that swapping to our other ranged weapon probably takes as long as just reloading, and we have a very big hordeshooter mechanical fail.

Also, subjective opinion here: Long reloads are really boring, at least so when the magazine size is also tiny to boot.

Solution-proposal: Look at a weapon's "speed". Make sure that there is not just pure flaws in a weapon's speedyness (like the mentioned Vulkar), far more importantly so if it doesn't have much/any multitarget capability either. Another thing that would help is to have quicker weapon swapping speeds, to help swap out to our other weapon if our current weapon has a long reload incoming, and you don't have time to wait (i.e. make it a point of even equipping two ranged weapons in the first place).

Quirkyness-to-damage ratio
While this is already kind of related to the reload/mag-issues and accuracy/recoil/zoom-issues, there are some weapons that have far more quirkyness to them than that.
These are often rather clunky or time-consuming quirks. That's fine... but the payoff often is not. Think about these weapons: Mutalist Quanta. Paracyst. Buzlok. Convectrix. Javlok. Miter. Panthera. Arguably even the Opticor.
These are not very popular weapons (as can be told from their riven disposition). And, aesthetics aside, there is a rather simple question that explains why: Where is the reward in using their special and clunky quirks?

Then there is stuff like the Tigris weapons. Yes, it has a minor quirk (duplex), but its reward for using it well is far too great, honestly.

Solution proposal: Well, it seems to be looked at a bit now, as per the current weapon balance pass, either by improving the "quirk-rewards" and/or by reducing their clunkiness. But some definitely do't feel like given enough love (Miter, for one). It's important to make sure difficult-to-use weapons are properly rewarded. This does not have an easy fix though, but I still propose something: CONSTANT rebalancing. Possibly have a weapon balance pass every other month or so.

Continuous weapons
These weapons are often also very impopular (multitargetting ones aside), and I think the current continuous mechanic is a BIG part to blame for that. For being called continuous they feel rather slow... feels more like "somewhat periodic", rather than continuous.

Solution proposal: At the very least, make the periodic ticks be once every 0,1 seconds, instead of 0,3, along with status effects procing at a similar speed? This would help them with reduced overkill damage, status application, and overall "feel" too.

Sustainability
Take the Opticor vs. the Afuris. I wonder which weapon's ammo supplies is easier to sustain huh? :P
A bit unfair comparison, maybe, but the point still stands; The ammo economy is long overdue for a rehaul. A big part of this problem is the static ammo amount gained per ammo box (as well as all ammo related mods), and it really needs to be revamped.

I cannot propose anything other than this: Take a long good thinking about how scarce (or not) you want ammo to be, and then rebalance everything ammo-related based on that stancepoint. There is no easy way out on this one.


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Endnote:
I have no clue if any of these things are helpful to point out or not (or if they are even correct)? But, I still wanted to say these things, hoping to at least help out a little bit in regards to weapon balancing and/or popularity issues.

Edited by Azamagon
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Summary: All weapons need to be re-balanced honestly. Bigger weapons should have a longer swap speed be a trade off for lots of damage, single target or not. The Opticor for example has an Aoe explosion at the point of impact, but doesn't do enough with that. That's what you're getting at right? The real problem is that all the single factors add up to make one great problem that needs to be handled at the roots, and no one can agree at what root to start. I keep suggesting that DE change punch through to only affect enemies, and doing so on enemy weapons with punch through too. If enemies with explosive AoE weapons were affected by said weapons too if caught in the explosion, that would also go a long way to making the game more fair.

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