Damage Abilities Need To Be Buffed.

[Zext]

With the new changes to enemy levels, fighting enemies that are lvl 50 or lvl 60 or even lvl 70 becomes a much more common task. Some might welcome this change, happy about high level enemies outside of late-wave-defense and additional "difficulty." 

 

While difficulty is great and all, this brings with it a problem. 

 

With enemy scaling still as it was before, enemies have mass amounts of health and armor. While at first it may just seem like this is a justifiable decision because of the power of highly modded weapons, there is something that people have forgotten about -

 

Warframe Abilities.

 

New damage mods for weapons, a damage buff for pressure point, and yet they leave poor little focus at 30%, and poor little damage skills at 500 or 1000. 

 

What does this mean for damage abilities on warframes? It means that, not only are they beaten by weapons like they were before, but now they cannot even kill the weakest of enemies at higher levels. Because of their energy cost as well as the now less-universally-used energy siphon, you simply cannot afford to spend twice the energy to kill an enemy. Even faster then before damage skills quickly become more and more useless or obsolete when compared to weapons. 

 

A quick example using a frame some of us are probably pretty familiar with, considering this forum's population : Ash.

 

Shuriken deals 500(650) damage (w/ focus). Costs 25 energy, and can hit two targets.

 

My modded akboltos deal 70 + 21 damage per bolt. With multishot (only assuming 100% and not 120% for this), that's 140+42 damage per bullet. With three to four shots, I can match the damage of my shuriken. Three to four shots takes less than a second. Hell, I could shoot out 8 shots and kill two guys in nearly the same time it'd take my shurikens to kill two guys. 

 

That's not all.

 

Bladestorm. Deals 1000(1300) damage to 13 enemies. Cost 100 energy. 

My modded fangs deal 1000 damage with a charge attack. For no energy, I can easily deal the same damage, even possibly killing more than one enemy at a time, using fang. With smoke screen, I can use 35 energy to worry a lot less about getting hurt, as well as dealing two times the damage.

 

 

 

 

Warframe damage abilities just do not have any growth. They stagnate quickly.

 

This needs to be addressed. Fast. Both frame abilities AND focus should be buffed. 

[Genoscythe]

I think the same, Warframe abilities should become stronger. I was hoping there would be a nightmare mod for more ability damage, because my frost cant even kill lvl 50 corpus with focus maxed, thats a shame.

[Zext]

Not letting this go past the first page that fast.

[fatpig84]

DE are in a bad spot.

Because if you buff abilities, there will be endless whines on "press 4 to win" will return.

[Helljack84]

It's the same for everyone, hurts ash really bad because his abilities were/are bugridden and he doesn't really shine at anything than doing solo stealthruns imo. He just lacks utility and even his ultimate won't save the pod because it most likely won't take baddies out fast enough or kill the thing you want dead.

 

Any ability that deals damage or is affected by enemy damage (decoy, molt, iron skin) will break at some point.

The problem is to balance the scales somewhere between godmode (*cough* trinity *cough*)/keeping enemies cc'ed forever (chaos/bastille) and a complete waste of energy or warframe slots.

[Zext]

It's the same for everyone, hurts ash really bad because his abilities were/are bugridden and he doesn't really shine at anything than doing solo stealthruns imo. He just lacks utility and even his ultimate won't save the pod because it most likely won't take baddies out fast enough or kill the thing you want dead.

 

Any ability that deals damage or is affected by enemy damage (decoy, molt, iron skin) will break at some point.

The problem is to balance the scales somewhere between godmode (*cough* trinity *cough*)/keeping enemies cc'ed forever (chaos/bastille) and a complete waste of energy or warframe slots.

 

Yes, they can break, but they shouldn't be breaking so easily or so quickly. I was originally going to direct my thread at the current badly implemented enemy scaling and the problems it brings, but I felt like this should get addressed first. The disparity between the effectiveness of guns/melee and warframe skills is too big as of right now. 

 

It makes no sense to give your frame special super moves that are actually really inferior compared to everything else. 

[Moonunitz]

Only some frames really need a damage buff, the newer ones in my opinion need a nerf rather than buffing the old ones.
My reasoning behind a nerf rather than a buff is that the game will become too easy, I mean seriously, look at Vauban on a defense mission, the only constantly scaling mission where it's supposed to get harder as you continue and against infested he just stops them in their tracks.
Frost is the best for Gineer and Corpus defense missions but pretty balanced in most other cases if a bit on the op side.
Nyx, she's just unbalancable unless you limit how many enemies she effects with chaos to balance her in defense without really effecting it in other missions.
I as a Dota player like that abilities only scale up to a pouint and then weapons become more relevant, it gives the game some more interesting than simply being good at everything. I don't think damage should go up significantly, but I do think that some of the lesser spells need a bit of an edge.
I also use Ash as a speed run frame and on those grounds he doesn't need a buff because he has the speed and a massive hp pool of 450. I wouldn't mind the Shuriken going through enemies so they can hit 2-4 each.

[DiabolusUrsus]

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/78593-update-9-and-its-broken-melee-system/

My apologies for shamelessly promoting my own thread, but please read the section I've written about changes to enemy resistance scaling. It's aimed at preventing enemies from becoming near invulnerable at higher levels, while still maintaining a noticeable increase in difficulty. This should also improve the effectiveness of existing Warframe damage abilities, which removes the need to buff them into being overpowered against lower-leveled enemies.

 

Saryn will probably need a nerf, but that's only because she has a damage type all to herself that enemies (as far as I know) don't have resistance values for. If that is the case, I'd suggest an indirect nerf by introducing poison resistance values to some enemies.

It's an idea that occurred to me after writing the thread, and I thought it best to simply update the thread rather than create an entirely new one.

[Helljack84]

Yes, they can break, but they shouldn't be breaking so easily or so quickly.

That's exactly what i wanted to say. It's not just Ash but many Frames that are hurt by the current mechanics.

[aTaVaX]

Its a problem with high levels having their health scaled way too high. I mean, most of these scaling issues were obvious months ago, i don't know why they continue down the same path and make it even worse. 

 

If you want to have higher levels more difficult to kill, it should primarily be through resistances. Then you can control exactly how much damage they reduce from things like abilities without making abilities way too strong against lower level mobs. Also great for weapons, high tier weapons don't have to kill every low level boss in the game in less than 5 seconds this way. 

Edited July 14, 2013 by aTaVaX