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What Riven Mods should have been


Chewarette
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Hello pals,

This is your mandatory daily thread on Rivens !

That's an idea I had when they first introduced Riven Mods into the game, I immediately thought that this was badly implemented and that it would never fix the original problem (bring mastery-fodder weapons to the battlefield).

First of all, why are some weapons underused ?

Because they sux. They have terrific stats making them barely effective. You won't be using a weapon with low crit chance and low status chance ever, unless it has something else to propose. Most of the weapons that are considered "mastery-fodder" simply have poor stats, so you can't do anything interesting with them unless you spend lots of formas on them. Even then, another weapon with better stats would do even better with the same amount of investment.

Some stats are simply too low or unbalanced. No one will ever play with low-crit Melee weapons unless they have a good-enough Slide Attack to compensate with Maiming Strike. Good Melee builds, today, simply need Blood Rush.

Same goes for Physical damage or Elemental damage stats. Slash is an overall godly stat, Puncture is fine against Grineer, Impact is meh. So an Impact weapon, unless it has something to compensate (the charge speed of the Rakta Cernos saves it from Dread's superiority, for example), will be left behind.

That's why I was thinking about the following "solution" (I'm perfectly aware that it is way too late to change Rivens now) :

- Rivens should have been sort of stance/exilus mods. An additional slot for all 3 types of weapons, with a moderate polarity cost (as the current Exilus, between 8 and 10).

- Rivens stats should've been pre-determined with several pre-determined variants and should've applied to the base stats of the weapons. With such mods, you could modify the base stats of your weapons to something else.

For example, we'll take the Lacera (nobody uses it, right ?).

Current stats : 2.5% Critical Chance / 2.0x Critical Damage / 45% Status Chance.

Lacera Critatis mod (to keep the same names as currently) : -80% Status Chance / +1000% Critical Chance / +50% Critical Damage

=> Your Lacera would now have 10% Status Chances along with 25% Critical Chance and 3.0x Critical Damage multiplier. Your Lacera is now Critical-viable and as these Rivens would affect the base stats, a Point Strike mod would affect it directly (+150% from your 25% base Chances, not from the previous 2.5%).

There should have been several pre-determined sets of Stats per weapons. Mods that switch a Critical weapon to a Status weapon, but also mods that transform a part of Physical Damage into another (giving the Rakta a bit of Puncture for example), or that slow down a bit the firerate of this crazy Twin Grakata to increase its accuracy/base damage...

I'm aware that with something like that, the main problem would be that you end up with tons of weapons dealing the same type of damage (give Slash to a Ratka Cernos and it instantly becomes an improved Dread), but :

- That could allow you to play with the weapon you prefer instead of the best one. Y'know, fashionframing and stuff ! There are some weapons that I completely love in terms of skin but that are too broken to play with today.

- That could be managed with a tight balance of the mods : a former Status weapon that becomes Crit-viable would not be a 50% Crit chance weapon but more like a 15-20%, to leave it slightly below the "best of their category".

The main problem of such idea is that it would require DE to create carefully several mods for each weapon. But at least that would avoid those Flight Speed rivens on Hitscans or +Crit on no-crit weapons...

What do you think ?

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Those proposals of you sound quite well, but you know what they should've done instead of putting in RNG-mods? Introduce what you just said as syndicate augments for weapons. We've been sitting on the starter 3 in each syndicate for almost 2(?) years. Bring some new augments there that make weapons viable!

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Mmm, I kind of like what they are now. I like the RNG and gamble effect. It's a bit thrilling and gives oldies like me something to work towards, this just sounds like you want them to make mods that are flat buffs. Why make me waste a mod slot when it's just a flat buff? Just buff it and move on.

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1 hour ago, JSharpie said:

Mmm, I kind of like what they are now. I like the RNG and gamble effect. It's a bit thrilling and gives oldies like me something to work towards, this just sounds like you want them to make mods that are flat buffs. Why make me waste a mod slot when it's just a flat buff? Just buff it and move on.

Well, first of all I'm not asking for a change right now, that's not even what I want. I know there are people out there that like/love this system and there is no reason to change/remove it now. That's just something I had in mind and wanted to share here.

Second, I know that's obviously more limited than the current Riven mods as they're, by definition, completely random. But, the problem is that even if you can theoretically get everything from your Riven, you will look for the same things if you're into optimization. I think you won't be satisfied with a +Status Duration +Impact +Zoom Riven on your Dread, you will look for Crit/Crit dmg/Multishot. The generation is random, but the finality is not. Of course you can have a +199% Crit dmg instead of a +192%, but in the end it is the same.

My idea was also to implement several mods for each weapons, not one. So you'd have several possibilities with each weapon. If you like it, we can also imagine that those mods would have randomized rerollable stats as well so that someone that will try to get the best thing ever can still have something to farm for, I don't know.

I just think the main problem with current Rivens is that they increase already high stats of your weapons. Exactly the same way normal mods work. That's not customization, you never have any choice. Plus, they fail at their main purpose, that is supposed to be "bringing S#&$ty weapons back to life", as a S#&$ty weapon will stay trash-tier, while god-tier weapons will have such a low disposition that stats will likely be meh.

Basically, your answer would be the same as me requesting to remove all 8 mod slots. We don't care about addind a +90% multishot on a weapon manually, just add it onto the weapon and move on.

Edited by Chewarette
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They did it like that because they thought it's not worth their time to backtrack around 300 items to predetermine them, just like how this game was designed from bottom up but not top down except events. 

I even thought Sean Murray himself designed rivens lol, "It's not random, it's not chaotic, it's procedually generated!!".

I wonder how much total time did they spend back in the old days to fully finish the whole D2+lod gears' predetermined stats(yeah stat ranges are still randomly generated but categories are predetermined, one could say that "procedures" in "procedual generation" are completed enough to not yield stupid results).

Edited by Volinus7
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2 hours ago, Chewarette said:

Hello pals,

This is your mandatory daily thread on Rivens !

That's an idea I had when they first introduced Riven Mods into the game, I immediately thought that this was badly implemented and that it would never fix the original problem (bring mastery-fodder weapons to the battlefield).

First of all, why are some weapons underused ?

Because they sux. They have terrific stats making them barely effective. You won't be using a weapon with low crit chance and low status chance ever, unless it has something else to propose. Most of the weapons that are considered "mastery-fodder" simply have poor stats, so you can't do anything interesting with them unless you spend lots of formas on them. Even then, another weapon with better stats would do even better with the same amount of investment.

Some stats are simply too low or unbalanced. No one will ever play with low-crit Melee weapons unless they have a good-enough Slide Attack to compensate with Maiming Strike. Good Melee builds, today, simply need Blood Rush.

Same goes for Physical damage or Elemental damage stats. Slash is an overall godly stat, Puncture is fine against Grineer, Impact is meh. So an Impact weapon, unless it has something to compensate (the charge speed of the Rakta Cernos saves it from Dread's superiority, for example), will be left behind.

That's why I was thinking about the following "solution" (I'm perfectly aware that it is way too late to change Rivens now) :

- Rivens should have been sort of stance/exilus mods. An additional slot for all 3 types of weapons, with a moderate polarity cost (as the current Exilus, between 8 and 10).

- Rivens stats should've been pre-determined with several pre-determined variants and should've applied to the base stats of the weapons. With such mods, you could modify the base stats of your weapons to something else.

For example, we'll take the Lacera (nobody uses it, right ?).

Current stats : 2.5% Critical Chance / 2.0x Critical Damage / 45% Status Chance.

Lacera Critatis mod (to keep the same names as currently) : -80% Status Chance / +1000% Critical Chance / +50% Critical Damage

=> Your Lacera would now have 10% Status Chances along with 25% Critical Chance and 3.0x Critical Damage multiplier. Your Lacera is now Critical-viable and as these Rivens would affect the base stats, a Point Strike mod would affect it directly (+150% from your 25% base Chances, not from the previous 2.5%).

There should have been several pre-determined sets of Stats per weapons. Mods that switch a Critical weapon to a Status weapon, but also mods that transform a part of Physical Damage into another (giving the Rakta a bit of Puncture for example), or that slow down a bit the firerate of this crazy Twin Grakata to increase its accuracy/base damage...

I'm aware that with something like that, the main problem would be that you end up with tons of weapons dealing the same type of damage (give Slash to a Ratka Cernos and it instantly becomes an improved Dread), but :

- That could allow you to play with the weapon you prefer instead of the best one. Y'know, fashionframing and stuff ! There are some weapons that I completely love in terms of skin but that are too broken to play with today.

- That could be managed with a tight balance of the mods : a former Status weapon that becomes Crit-viable would not be a 50% Crit chance weapon but more like a 15-20%, to leave it slightly below the "best of their category".

The main problem of such idea is that it would require DE to create carefully several mods for each weapon. But at least that would avoid those Flight Speed rivens on Hitscans or +Crit on no-crit weapons...

What do you think ?

First, People DO play with not-crit melee weapons, it's called Condition Overload, don't assume crit is the only way to go.

Secondly, it's a melee weapon, not a primary. Ergo, True Steel not Point Strike.

The system is trying to make older weapons better, NOT turn every weapon into the same S#&$ty BloodRush/Bodycount/PointStrikeVitalSense Crit only setup, there are other ways to do things in this game. It's a video game, we shouldn't have to conform to a set of stats and similar playstyles, we should be able to do things another way.

Lastly, the pre-determined stats has potential but at the same time takes away the satisfaction on rolling a good mod yourself (Yes, I know it is RNG based), but rerolling rivens (Especially for older players with nothing to do) is quite entertaining.

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