Explosive Barrel Range

[YUNoJump]

So basically the explosion range on the explosive barrels littered around most maps (both the fire and cold ones) is completely ludicrous. Not just from a balance perspective, even from a common sense perspective. 3 reasons why:

1. The general use of environmental barrels in videogames is to create a simple environmental hazard; the player has to make sure not to let one explode near them, while at the same time a player can detonate barrels near enemies for an advantage in combat. This seems to also be the point in Warframe, but their explosion size is so massive that in many cases just shooting a barrel in any average-sized tile has a good chance to hit everything in the room. As well as that, it is often far too easy to get hit with an explosion, and their effects are quite dangerous a lot of the time (over 5 seconds of cold proc out of nowhere is tough to handle in a crowd).

2. The visual effect that they show is far too small compared to the actual AoE on the explosion. IIRC they used to have a much more sensible range that fit the effect, but when they got buffed the effect got bigger. This means that it's hard to tell where their explosions are happening, and when you add the fact that their explosions don't need LoS, then what happens is that most explosions that hit you don't actually have any visual indicator. The other issue of course is that an effect large enough to show the proper range would be a massive visual hindrance on top of the explosion, but I don't think that should be the fix.

3. There are Large Explosive Barrels in the game (you see them used to collapse random bits of the environment), but somehow their explosion is nowhere near as big as a normal barrel. How a large barrel has a smaller explosion than a small barrel is lost to me, but I feel like that shouldn't happen.

Overall explosive barrels are just too ridiculous to make sense, both visually and mechanically, and if they had a more sensible range then they could actually become a good element of the environment rather than just "shoot this and the whole room gets hit by an invisible knockdown/slow".

[-Kryptyk-]

didn't think I'd see the day in the almost four years I've been here where someone complained about barrels.  out of all things.

usually those are things ya avoid.

but if it really is a big deal, imagine a napalm explosion.  graphics are kept down to reduce clutter.  some of us who have toasters don't need more clutter on the screen than there already is.  and they're explosives - they're going to be having a fairly large radius.  it's a barrel filled with gasoline?  

[taiiat]

a trope Barrel hitting everything in the room is exactly what you'd want from one, isn't it?
sounds like it's set up perfectly.

 

a large barrel having a shorter range is completely reasonable - Explosives can have short effective Ranges but create much stronger pressure waves. key examples would be something like a Demolition Explosive. incredibly powerful, but hits a very small area.
it can also go in the exact reverse, or pretty much anywhere in between.

[MystMan]

People have complained about barrels before. Their behavior is inconsistent with what is displayed on screen. The blast radius is larger than the explosion we see. It wasn't like this years ago, they had a smaller radius.
I can never tell if I'm in the safe zone or not before shooting them. There is no damage falloff.

Another issue is the explosive ice barrels having the same texture as non-explosive barrels on Corpus tile sets. You can't tell them apart unless you move your cursor over them to see a health bar.

[lapali20]

1 minute ago, MystMan said:

People have complained about barrels before. Their behavior is inconsistent with what is displayed on screen. The blast radius is larger than the explosion we see. It wasn't like this years ago, they had a smaller radius.
I can never tell if I'm in the safe zone or not before shooting them. There is no damage falloff.

Another issue is the explosive ice barrels having the same texture as non-explosive barrels on Corpus tile sets. You can't tell them apart unless you move your cursor over them to see a health bar.

yeah and the fact that sometimes im just bulletjump around the map and suddenly pop one of those damn cold barrel that make me slow for like 5 sec is really annoying

[YUNoJump]

47 minutes ago, -NvO-Venom said:

didn't think I'd see the day in the almost four years I've been here where someone complained about barrels.  out of all things.

usually those are things ya avoid.

but if it really is a big deal, imagine a napalm explosion.  graphics are kept down to reduce clutter.  some of us who have toasters don't need more clutter on the screen than there already is.  and they're explosives - they're going to be having a fairly large radius.  it's a barrel filled with gasoline?  

Yes it's a performance issue as well as just an annoying visual anomaly, but I'd rather have any form of indication at all that it's going to damage me or that it's affecting an area. Preserving performance is one thing but that shouldn't get in the way of actually having visuals that help with gameplay. In any case, I'd rather have the range reduced on the barrels than have the visuals increased, Avoiding them is one thing, but when a barrel 20m away and in another room hits me with 6 or so seconds of cold proc then I have to wonder about the physical limitations of barrels in the Warframe universe.

[Artekkor]

Not only the range - the damage is crap too. In most games barrels are good for damaging enemies but in warframe? The only use for them is easy destruction of loot-crates nearby. The damage is non-existant for both enemiee and players.

Might as well remove the thing from the game all-together.

[Tsukinoki]

1 hour ago, YUNoJump said:

IRC they used to have a much more sensible range that fit the effect, but when they got buffed the effect got bigger

The reason that the explosive range got bigger is, and I kid you not, DE made the explosive range scale with level.

If you blow up a barrel on Mercury it has a small explosion size.
If you blow up what appears to be the same barrel on Sedna it takes up the entire tile.

Problem is that while the explosive radius increases as they level up their graphical effect doesn't.

At least they deal crap damage at all levels.  The only troublesome ones are the cryo-barrels...which oddly don't seem to affect the corpus nearly as much as it affects us when they blow up.

DE really needs to tone down the size of the explosions.