Does slash damage need a change?

[ACULonSeer]

"Its one of those bow types that everyone hates because it's impact and puncture"

"you can do so much slash damage with..."

"impact and puncture are kinda useless..."

I could add more, but you get the idea. Slash slash slash slash SLASH. How did nobody question the strength of this status effect? It ignores armor (making corrosive less useful) comes on most weapons without modding (its in the "kinetic" category of damage types so you can just craft a gun with high base slash) and since its bleed is done as Finisher Damage, doesnt that mean it scales with finisher mods? 

I dont like how slash damage has basically become the endgame, especially since ive found alot of usefulness out of other elements:

-Taxon has insane freezing ability that pairs well with AOE weapons

-Blast damage has a huge impact on standard firearms (Ex: Marelok) and is insane on oddball weapons like Sonicor

-Gas damage works well with whips due to the super long range

-Radiation is good for long-range familiars like Diriga because it causes passive confusion on enemies you dont even see

-Weapons with AOE slams like Amphis and Heat Sword can spread status with insane consistency

 

And yet, its always slash that wins. I can understand relying on slash in Sorties and endgame content where Grineer armor is stupidly impenetrable and theres no other way to deal damage, but dumping a potentially great weapon because it relies on puncture (Ferrox FTW) should not happen. 

Personally, i think Slash be nerfed slightly OR puncture and impact should be buffed to compensate. Here are some ideas to buff other status effects:

I think Puncture should have a default 5-second status duration because otherwise you hardly see it making a difference in enemy damage output, and the same goes for radiation damage.

Fire should spread from enemy-to-enemy through touch, and Viral should rapidly infect anyone nearby.

Impact should have a 30% chance to disarm if you shoot an enemy's weapon. 

Blast should have a small chance of also setting enemies on fire

 

[Dhrekr]

11 minutes ago, ACULonSeer said:

Personally, i think Slash be nerfed slightly OR puncture and impact should be buffed to compensate. Here are some ideas to buff other status effects:

You do know that Scott discussed the upcoming... rebalancing/rework of IPS statuses, on a Devstream just a couple of weeks ago, right?

Yeah. I totally agree with you. Scott agrees with you. He's already on the case ;)

[ACULonSeer]

Just now, Dhrekr said:

You do know that Scott discussed the upcoming... rebalancing/rework of IPS statuses, on a Devstream just a couple of weeks ago, right?

Yeah. I totally agree with you. Scott agrees with you. He's already on the case ;)

I dont know where to find this information, dude. On google all i get on Warframe is a bunch of stuff from 2015. I thought recent searches were supposed to come first?

[Acos]

Slash is fine, armor scaling is absurd, other proc effects will (ideally) be better once armor scaling is removed for static armor values or whatever DE decides upon doing. Other proc effects are being brought up to be more impactful (heh). 

It's been awhile since I checked, but my understanding is that Slash is a percentage of the amount of damage inflicted against the enemy. The initial attack is already reduced by armor and then the slash proc activates with that reduced number. Having slash also get affected by armor would effectively mean you get hit by the armor penalty twice. Slash works well when a slashing weapon is paired with armor bypassing elements such as Radiation or Corrosive, but is quite pitiful if you are going for physical damage alone. 

[GordoFreeman]

DMG 3.0 will try to adress this issues, by giving utility to impact and puncture and making all 3 types scale, check devstream 100 or 101 i think. Plus something similar for status (slash will get a nerf on the process)

[Aeon94]

1 minute ago, GordoFreeman said:

DMG 3.0 will try to adress this issues, by giving utility to impact and puncture and making all 3 types scale, check devstream 100 or 101 i think. Plus something similar for status (slash will get a nerf on the process)

Damage 2.5 *

[SriJayawardenapuraKotteX]

Maybe it's just that I don't have insane crit from the likes of Argon Scope, etc to pair with Hunter Munitions yet, but I don't think Slash is too overwhelming. With the exception of something like Tigris Prime hitting many procs at once, I feel like whatever you want dead will be more or less well on its way by the time you've stacked enough Slash DoTs to kill it. I'm sure there are cases where it gets a bit broken but I don't think those are the majority here. Toxin and gas procs I think are more limited by comparison, with all the armor considerations and damage scaling based on elements, makes them feel like weak statuses to invest in. 

I like impact even in its current state because of the stagger- running pure crit weapons can be quite intimidating when you can't get an enemy to even slow down or stop shooting for one second. It's a good bit of CC/utility and could be a bit more useful, maybe. Puncture could use more work, I mean, most enemies that I hit with it will be dead in under a minute so they probably won't have an opportunity to strike back. 

[(PSN)CannaWhoopazz13]

I think it really comes down to armor being such an issue.  There's no effective way, outside slash, to deal with it at higher levels. 

 

I'm glad you provided ways to BUFF the other damage types and status effects, instead of just asking for a nerf to bleed!  

[ACULonSeer]

7 minutes ago, (PS4)CannaWhoopazz13 said:

I think it really comes down to armor being such an issue.  There's no effective way, outside slash, to deal with it at higher levels. 

 

I'm glad you provided ways to BUFF the other damage types and status effects, instead of just asking for a nerf to bleed!  

Isnt corrosive supposed to be the armor-negator though?

[(PSN)CannaWhoopazz13]

1 hour ago, ACULonSeer said:

Isnt corrosive supposed to be the armor-negator though?

It is, but it does so in an exponentially decreasing matter.  The first application of a corrosive proc drops the targets armor by 25% leaving 75% armor.  But the next application only drops the REMAINING armor by 25%, leaving 56.25% of the original armor value.  The third application drops the armor to 42.1875% of the original armor, the fourth drops to 31.64% of the original, etc.  

Every application is less effective than the last, and you need infinite applications to reach 0 armor.  Or just use a Bleed status effect to bypass all the armor to begin with!

[DreamsmithJane]

14 hours ago, ACULonSeer said:

I dont know where to find this information, dude. On google all i get on Warframe is a bunch of stuff from 2015. I thought recent searches were supposed to come first?

Yeah, it can be hard to track info that was mentioned at some point on a devstream some random Friday. But if you know which stream it was, someone is always being helpful and timestamping the important info in the comments. Like so:

Spoiler

 

Obviously not very in-depth, and doesn't address the problem with armor and level scaling, but it's a start.

[TheGrimCorsair]

Slash procs shouldn't bypass shields and armor.

14 hours ago, ACULonSeer said:

Isnt corrosive supposed to be the armor-negator though?

Sort of. Corrosive procs degrade armor, and rely on being able to be applied quickly to cutdown enemy damage resistance to a reasonable level, with the commiserate effect of your damage output going up as you apply the damage. Corrosive as a damage type is also pretty solid, being really good Ferrite armor and not penalized against most other armor and health types.

That said, that doesn't actually mean you'll always kill faster with Corrosive damage against a given armor type. Alloy armor doesn't take bonus damage from Corrosive type, but does from Radiation, Cold, and Puncture. Further, where armor is concerned, your bonus damage multiplier *also* ignores a percentage of the total armor value alongside multiplying the damage. That means for high damage weapons, it's often more practical to build with the assumption of it hitting that armor, rather than trying to shred the armor to whittle down the damage resistance to a point where you are able to start doing good damage to the target.

In the case of Slash damage, you again have a damage type that is pretty universally decent, but critically, its proc places a DoT that ignores regular shields and armor, there by allowing you to bypass armor's damage resistance entirely since it's not applied to the DoT, just the hit that applied the DoT. Now, with a few exceptions, the DoT's that are applied by slash procs aren't huge ticks of damage, but they can be stacked. In the case of rapid fire weapons (such as the Prisma Grakata  and Baza), that means you bassically hit the target many more times than the ammo you expend would otherwise allow, and do so while bypassing their defenses. Also, as enemy health climbs, they last longer allowing you to stack even more bleeds to keep doing damage in a quick, reliable manners whose effectiveness goes up as enemy health scales upwards. Add in a Viral proc, and now you're doing tremendous amounts of armor and shield bypassing damage to a target that has 50% of the health it'd normally have.

[DreamsmithJane]

9 hours ago, TheGrimCorsair said:

with the commiserate effect of your damage output going up as you apply the damage.

Do you perhaps mean "commensurate"? Because "commiserate" is a verb that means "share suffering" (i.e. show sympathy, or sometimes mutually complain). "...with a commensurate increase in damage output over time" would make sense there.

Semantics and grammar aside, I should also point out that slash damage is actually terrible against armor on its own, not only dealing reduced damage, but increasing the effective armor value in the same way that puncture would decrease it due to type advantage. It's the status effect that you really want, when fighting armored enemies. With a pure crit weapon, puncture mixed with radiation and either viral or more puncture produces the best results against Grineer.

When using a hybrid weapon that relies partly on critical damage, the preferred path is usually to use corrosive procs to enhance cold damage against alloy (while corrosive naturally does great against ferrite). This also has a couple of advantages over other anti-armor build types: cold's enhanced damage against shields (for corrupted), the ability to build from any physical damage type, and increased effectiveness against targets that are immune to bleeding.

Hunter Munitions is obviously a whole other can of worms that just got opened on the metagame, making multishot, fire rate, and base damage mods a lot more valuable on any crit weapon, due to the way bleeding status currently works. Those builds are potentially in danger because of proposed changes to the status effects of physical damage types (making them scale with the actual amount of the relevant damage type, rather than scaling with total base damage or having a static effect).

Sorry, I didn't mean to go off the rails, there. Just trying to provide some context.

[TheGrimCorsair]

13 hours ago, DreamsmithJane said:

Do you perhaps mean "commensurate"? Because "commiserate" is a verb that means "share suffering" (i.e. show sympathy, or sometimes mutually complain). "...with a commensurate increase in damage output over time" would make sense there.

Semantics and grammar aside, I should also point out that slash damage is actually terrible against armor on its own, not only dealing reduced damage, but increasing the effective armor value in the same way that puncture would decrease it due to type advantage. It's the status effect that you really want, when fighting armored enemies. With a pure crit weapon, puncture mixed with radiation and either viral or more puncture produces the best results against Grineer.

When using a hybrid weapon that relies partly on critical damage, the preferred path is usually to use corrosive procs to enhance cold damage against alloy (while corrosive naturally does great against ferrite). This also has a couple of advantages over other anti-armor build types: cold's enhanced damage against shields (for corrupted), the ability to build from any physical damage type, and increased effectiveness against targets that are immune to bleeding.

Hunter Munitions is obviously a whole other can of worms that just got opened on the metagame, making multishot, fire rate, and base damage mods a lot more valuable on any crit weapon, due to the way bleeding status currently works. Those builds are potentially in danger because of proposed changes to the status effects of physical damage types (making them scale with the actual amount of the relevant damage type, rather than scaling with total base damage or having a static effect).

Sorry, I didn't mean to go off the rails, there. Just trying to provide some context.

I probably meant commensurate, was kinda out of it on account of dreading upcoming dental work. I should have clarified that Slash as a go-to for just about any situation comes down its reduced damage vs armor being offset by being able to stack its armor-ignoring procs, when you're able to apply them reliably and quickly (or reliably and slowly, but they're powerful slash procs). Corrosive and Cold is definitely better general purpose building, and works okay on weapons with high status chance against Alloy Armor, though not as well as Radiation+Cold damage (which is fair given it's a case of generalization vs specialization).

As far as potential changes to how procs work, eh, when they land, they land. For now, Slash procs will continue to be just about the best way to kill things, provided one's threat prioritization is better than "Hold down trigger and wonder why the infested aren't dying".