Can you make a weapon viable without damage,multishot, crit and status chance buff?

[Fallen_Echo]

The question is up there, im interested in how many ways could one make underused/useless weapons into sortie viable choices without adding the upper stats.

I start the list of ideas with a less used weapon what is outclassed by many:

The Karak.

Poor guys looks like the grinner bought it from a vault dweller (fallout) and despite the efforts of that ductape the weapons stats are just trash. How to make it a viable chice?

Well we can do a few things:

1. Increase the magazine size to 100
2. Add in passive 1m punchtrought
3. And finally make every 3rd bullet push back the target by 0.3m

With these changes this weapon turns into an excellent crowd controller as you can literally push back the enemy while you charge into the area and also it adds in oppurtunity to kill an enemy simply by pushing it off from the ledges.

 

The Embolist.

This thing would be a great weapon choice if it would actually have an usable range and better ammo economy.

For this weapon my idea is to use up its toxic spray and turn it into a paint spray. Heres what i want to see:

1. An alt fire mode what has the same stats as the normal fire mode
2. The alt fire leaves a trail of toxic "paint" on the ground slowly evaporating
3. For 5 every ammo spent on the spraying it stays on the ground for 2 sec
4. As long as the "paint" get sprayed at it wont evaporate
5. Spraying at the paint again refreshes its duration

These changes can turn this weapon into an efficient defense tool, where you can turn a simple corridor into a game of "the floor is acid".

 

The Cernos Prime

Now this weapon is good and all, but its firemode is terrible. Damage is evenly distributed between the 3 arrows meaning that if only one hit the target you dealt less damage than with the basic cernos.

Now there wont be a list here. This weapon only needs its spread mechanic changed into a tight triangle spread. Like the predator aim.

Or just add this as an alt-fire mode for those who like the current one. This simple change could really help the bow become more useful as a ranged weapon and not as a shotgun bow.

 

If anybody has some more interesting ideas please share it.

 

[Arkvold]

To be sortie-viable, a weapon needs the following:

1. Enough damage to kill in a reasonable amount of time
2. A means of dealing enough damage through sortie-grade armor to kill in a reasonable amount of time
3. Enough fire rate, ammo capacity, and/or AoE to deal with crowds effectively

#1 requires there to be some form of damage mod on the weapon.  You simply aren't going to have a functional sortie weapon if it can't deal enough damage to put down threats before they can overwhelm you, and few weapons actually have the base damage to accomplish #1 without damage mods.

#2 requires one of four things - either Corrosive damage and a high status chance, to reduce or remove that armor, Viral damage and a modest status chance, to cut in half the amount of HP you have to chew through, high Slash damage and a high status chance, to inflict bleed procs to kill them out from under their armor, or just a metric crap-ton of damage to make armor's reductions irrelevant.  #2 is necessary because even Corpus have access to Armored units, such as Oxium Ospreys and Bursa, and both of them are very dangerous in Sortie environments.

#3 is somewhat less necessary than the first two, but it's important to note that Sorties tend to throw large packs of enemies at you, far more than a normal mission of the same type.  A good sortie weapon either has an answer to crowds, or is just so damned powerful that it's worth bringing to ensure takedowns on heavy enemies, even if it's terrible at crowd-busting.

Your ideas aren't bad.  In fact, I'd particularly love to see the Cernos Prime and Embolist ideas implemented.  But they don't make these weapons sortie-viable in the absence of damage, status, crit, or multishot mods.  For instance, the Karak change would not be sortie-viable; the knockback effect is already accomplished by impact procs on a high status build, and there's not always pits to dump enemies into.  While it might be useful as a suppression weapon, you can't suppress enemies forever - eventually you're going to have to kill them.  The Embolist change would not be sortie-viable on its own either - it doesn't matter if you can make the enemy play "the floor is acid" if the acid has all the impact of spilled table vinegar.

That said, I do want to encourage these lines of thought - making weapons tactically different from others instead of merely statistically different, by giving people new ways to use them, is a good thing.

[1tsyB1tsyN1nj4]

The Karak is actually a pretty decent weapon for low to mid-tier without damage or multishot, I would know, I didn't have either mod for the longest time. It just needs more ammo, but that can be said about a lot of weapons, mostly the sparce ammo reserves for bullet hoses and the fact that RNG can keep you from getting ammo. At later points you should have the Karak Wraith anyway, all I need is the BP and I got it. Sadly Duct-Tape Prime doesn't work on the weapon.

Most weapons can be good without damage or multishot or status or crit, you just need to mod for what the weapon does since there are 4 distinct catagories, and yes, in those 4 types there will be high, mid, and low tier weapons, although actual trash weapons are rare, like the Mk1 stuff. Mostly it's just kids being salty because their weapon doesn't kill everything in one shot and they have the skills of a wall when it comes to movement and powers. If I can clear a room with Excalibur without reloading, you all sure as hell should be able to do the same.

[1tsyB1tsyN1nj4]

8 minutes ago, Arkvold said:

That said, I do want to encourage these lines of thought - making weapons tactically different from others instead of merely statistically different, by giving people new ways to use them, is a good thing.

This pretty much ^ I was thinking that more about melee weapons first to give them even more distinction, but the same could be applied to regular guns too and so far there are quite a few with good mechanics, like the Stradavar, the Hind, Zakti, etc.

[Chipawapa]

Give the game a proper endgame so that the devs can use it as a reference point for what would be acceptable damage output and tankiness both for the warframes and the enemies. Anything less is just duck tape over duck tape over duct tape of a fix and sooner or later it will all fall apart. We keep getting new weapons with higher and higher damage while our defensive stats have remained largely unchanged for the longest time--so now we get one shot by everything that we dont one shot.

[Fallen_Echo]

12 hours ago, Arkvold said:

But they don't make these weapons sortie-viable in the absence of damage, status, crit, or multishot mods

I did not meant to make these weapons viable without mods, i only meant changes what can make them usable in sorties without buffing damage, crit and status chance and multishot.

There are always one thread about buffing one weak weapon by adding more status, crit or damage to it but i want to see something what could make them useable and unique as you said:

12 hours ago, Arkvold said:

That said, I do want to encourage these lines of thought - making weapons tactically different from others instead of merely statistically different, by giving people new ways to use them, is a good thing.

 

The karak idea was indeed based on changing it into a supression gun. Adding in shred, firerate and the mandatory mods can turn this weapon into the ultimate supporter gun. You might not kill the target but you give a chance to your teammates to do it while you are defending the objective.

[DrBorris]

Critical mods scale multiplicatively with other mods and status chance is the only way to combat enemy scaling. So without these stats, a weapon will never have potent kill potential. 

 

Sure, you can add some gimmicks to weapons, but you shouldn't need to add a gimmick to make an entire class of weapons worthwhile. 

 

The ideas seem fine, but you have to be very careful when you add CC to a weapon because chances are your Warframe can CC much better than just a weapon. So for late game content, CC weapons will rarely be picked. It would be a great change to push Karak as being a strong new player weapon though. And as for Embolist, the trick is for it to actually do meaningful enough damage to be worth it. Which is not the case as it is... 

 

For Cernos though, what if charging concentrated your shots to a single arrow. If you did not charge the shot at all you would not lose out on per-arrow damage, there would just be a spread. 

This way you could "rapid fire" spread shots or charge for the hardest hitting Bow (if I remember correctly Cernos Prime has the highest DPH of short bows). This would also justify the absurd reload time.