DE, Pls don't ruin slash damage :(

[Reaver_X]

so im excited for the new changes to damage types, making impact and puncture procs being much more desireable is great, however, it appears that slash is going to be nerfed while the other two are buffed, and wasnt it said that the intention is to bring the other two lack luster phys proc's up to the level and useablity that slash is? whats the point of doing that if slash is brought down, once again leaving things un equal.

They said something about changing it so slash damage is only based on the slash damage on your weapon, the problem with that is, its pretty much going to make slash useless on any weapon that doesnt have a huge (and i mean HUGE) amount of slash for base damage already. where as right now, any weapon that has a lean towards slash can make good use of it. Honestly i think it would be better off if the other two are buffed and slash is left where it is. dunno what they're going to do with impact, but as for puncture, reducing outgoing damage and increasing incoming damage would be a great way to go.

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

11 minutes ago, Reaver_X said:

so im excited for the new changes to damage types, making impact and puncture procs being much more desireable is great, however, it appears that slash is going to be nerfed while the other two are buffed, and wasnt it said that the intention is to bring the other two lack luster phys proc's up to the level and useablity that slash is? whats the point of doing that if slash is brought down, once again leaving things un equal.

They said something about changing it so slash damage is only based on the slash damage on your weapon, the problem with that is, its pretty much going to make slash useless on any weapon that doesnt have a huge (and i mean HUGE) amount of slash for base damage already. where as right now, any weapon that has a lean towards slash can make good use of it. Honestly i think it would be better off if the other two are buffed and slash is left where it is. dunno what they're going to do with impact, but as for puncture, reducing outgoing damage and increasing incoming damage would be a great way to go.

The problem is even bigger than that due to Hunter Munitions. Any weapon with high crit chance can do slash procs now, even if they have pure elemental damage. The proposed changes will make those slash procs useless.

[DiabolusUrsus]

If slash is left where it is, any buffs to the other two short of also giving them a proc that completely ignores armor will fail to bring them up to par. I think a better change would be tweaking the armor ignore to be partial instead of complete.

I'm not suggesting that slash should be made weak or useless (it should stay powerful), but Warframe needs to move away from a status quo where the only viable solution to a problem is to completely nullify it (ignore/strip armor, halt damage through constant mass CC, etc.).

The solution to your concern (where only heavy-slash weapons are slash-viable) is to change/buff the archaic physical damage mods to convert damage instead of simply increase it; that way players can actually switch a weapon from one physical emphasis to another, and we get some decent customization options.

1 minute ago, -AoN-CanoLathra- said:

The problem is even bigger than that due to Hunter Munitions. Any weapon with high crit chance can do slash procs now, even if they have pure elemental damage. The proposed changes will make those slash procs useless.

I think that if weapons are suddenly made useful by adding a completely different damage type to them, that points to larger problems with the damage system as a whole. Elemental weapons should be useful without Slash, the same as Impact and Puncture weapons should be comparable to Slash weapons.

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

1 hour ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

If slash is left where it is, any buffs to the other two short of also giving them a proc that completely ignores armor will fail to bring them up to par. I think a better change would be tweaking the armor ignore to be partial instead of complete.

I'm not suggesting that slash should be made weak or useless (it should stay powerful), but Warframe needs to move away from a status quo where the only viable solution to a problem is to completely nullify it (ignore/strip armor, halt damage through constant mass CC, etc.).

The solution to your concern (where only heavy-slash weapons are slash-viable) is to change/buff the archaic physical damage mods to convert damage instead of simply increase it; that way players can actually switch a weapon from one physical emphasis to another, and we get some decent customization options.

I think that if weapons are suddenly made useful by adding a completely different damage type to them, that points to larger problems with the damage system as a whole. Elemental weapons should be useful without Slash, the same as Impact and Puncture weapons should be comparable to Slash weapons.

At low levels (1-50), damage type and status vs crit largely don't matter, as long as you build for a weapon's strengths. In mid-level content (50-100), you have to make sure you are using elements that are good against your enemies, or use a weapon with a high status chance and use elements whose status procs are good against them (Gas vs Corpus, for example). However, in high-level content (100+), at least when fighting Grineer, you have to have either ignore armor or remove it. I agree that this is an enemy scaling problem and not a weapon problem, but unless DE is willing to look at enemy scaling, the slash procs and such will have to stay.

And most pure-elemental weapons are usable on up to level 100 Grineer. It's only when you go further that you need either slash procs or 4x CP. And even then, viral, radiation, blast, cold, electric, and fire all have use; viral to effectively double slash proc damage, and the others to provide CC.

The problem with the idea of making slash ignore part of armor, not all of it, is that, at some level, the enemy will take 0 damage from the attack no matter what source or how much armor ignore, unless the ignore is 100%. 99.999% Armor Reduction on 1.5 million armor still leaves enough armor to grant 99%+ DR. And the same is true in reverse; at some point, even 99.999% damage reduction will still cause you to get one-shot if they hit you. The only way to survive is to prevent all damage to you.

TL:DR - Enemy scaling requires that the current slash/CC meta stay in place.

[DiabolusUrsus]

6 hours ago, -AoN-CanoLathra- said:

At low levels (1-50), damage type and status vs crit largely don't matter, as long as you build for a weapon's strengths. In mid-level content (50-100), you have to make sure you are using elements that are good against your enemies, or use a weapon with a high status chance and use elements whose status procs are good against them (Gas vs Corpus, for example). However, in high-level content (100+), at least when fighting Grineer, you have to have either ignore armor or remove it. I agree that this is an enemy scaling problem and not a weapon problem, but unless DE is willing to look at enemy scaling, the slash procs and such will have to stay.

I bring up enemy scaling and such because it starts to show a serious difference when reaching T3 Sortie with some modifiers, which is still part of the normal game.

6 hours ago, -AoN-CanoLathra- said:

And most pure-elemental weapons are usable on up to level 100 Grineer. It's only when you go further that you need either slash procs or 4x CP. And even then, viral, radiation, blast, cold, electric, and fire all have use; viral to effectively double slash proc damage, and the others to provide CC.

The problem with the idea of making slash ignore part of armor, not all of it, is that, at some level, the enemy will take 0 damage from the attack no matter what source or how much armor ignore, unless the ignore is 100%. 99.999% Armor Reduction on 1.5 million armor still leaves enough armor to grant 99%+ DR. And the same is true in reverse; at some point, even 99.999% damage reduction will still cause you to get one-shot if they hit you. The only way to survive is to prevent all damage to you.

TL:DR - Enemy scaling requires that the current slash/CC meta stay in place.

Wrong. Endless scaling content comes with no guarantee of balance; you have no legitimate entitlement to powers or weapons that scale endlessly.

So stop using endless scaling as a reference point for balance changes.

This habit of the community is why the TTK for the player is so stupidly low that CC spam and armor stripping ever became a thing OUTSIDE of endless content.

I agree that enemy scaling needs to be adjusted, but only because it starts to show its problems before the end of normal content.

[MirageKnight]

1 hour ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Wrong. Endless scaling content comes with no guarantee of balance; you have no legitimate entitlement to powers or weapons that scale endlessly.

Absolutely correct. High-level Endless and Sortie content was released as a means of providing a challenge and a form of "friction"  and hindrance to player progress. Anything capable of overcoming that friction and trivializing content that's MEANT to eventually halt player progress is therefore severely overpowered to the point of breaking the game. 

1 hour ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

So stop using endless scaling as a reference point for balance changes.

Indeed. Even the devs said that past a certain point in enemy levels, they're supposed to be unbalanced. As such, said content should NEVER be considered in any type of balance discussion.

1 hour ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

I agree that enemy scaling needs to be adjusted, but only because it starts to show its problems before the end of normal content.

Absolutely. Even at say level 40, damage and armor scaling has already started its exponential climb.

The current meta of relying almost exclusively on slash / CC / armor stripping only serves to demonstrate how broken the elements of the meta really are and how obsessed a large part of the community is with power fantasies of breaking the game. DE needs to put their collective foot down and not cater to try-hards and glory hogs with gear and tweaks to abilities that only serve to promote and maintain power creep and the so-called "end-game" meta.

[SubtleOaf]

I hope the new IPS status will scale off the relevant IPS mods, and not just base damage as they do now.

For slash, it would mean a weapon with average slash could be improved to good slash damage at the cost of a mod. And for a slash weapon, it would mean to specialise further in slash procs, reaching a higher value 'base' value than now, again at the cost of a mod.

[OvisCaedo]

Munitions aside, the other thing that could be hilariously kneecapped by a change to slash are all of the melee stances that are supposed to have forced slash procs. Those would start looking really pathetic on the non-zaw rapiers. Possibly also the zaw one, I have no idea what its damage distribution is and don't care to check.

[DiabolusUrsus]

38 minutes ago, MirageKnight said:

Absolutely. Even at say level 40, damage and armor scaling has already started its exponential climb.

You know why that is? Because the last time the devs did a huge rebalance they defined Level 40 as the new 100. That's right. Our current L40 enemies used to be LEVEL 100 ENEMIES.

The current 100 is over 2x what it used to be, and that power creep is 100% due to players running meta builds up to level 2k+ complaining about how the game wasn't "challenging" to them.

Of course a game won't be challenging when you have too much power!

27 minutes ago, SubtleOaf said:

I hope the new IPS status will scale off the relevant IPS mods, and not just base damage as they do now.

For slash, it would mean a weapon with average slash could be improved to good slash damage at the cost of a mod. And for a slash weapon, it would mean to specialise further in slash procs, reaching a higher value 'base' value than now, again at the cost of a mod.

This is a good suggestion, and it fits in nicely with the idea of mods converting damage instead of simply increasing it.

So, convert X% of weapon damage to slash and scale it up with Serration/Point Blank/Hornet Strike/Pressure Point, then you can effectively turn any weapon into a slash weapon. Or puncture. Or impact.

It would also help physical modding stay relevant next to elemental modding.

Yayyyyyyy customization!

[MirageKnight]

2 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Of course a game won't be challenging when you have too much power!

I think it's reasonably safe to say that DE done goofed when they made that power available for use without considering the consequences of doing so.

[Reaver_X]

alls i know is that i don't want them making slash the new impact, which, from what they mentioned, sounds like it would drop quite a bit in useability.

[MirageKnight]

4 minutes ago, Reaver_X said:

sounds like it would drop quite a bit in useability

If they do it correctly, Slash will be more situational (more useful vs non-armored enemies) and less of the Swiss Army knife it's turned into...and I'm very much in favor of that.

#Makepuncturerelevant, #Impactdamagematters

 

[o.0-]

I hope that Status can grow to be its own system and be more independent of damage type, meaning that there's no longer a one to one relationship between damage and status, and a greater connection to health types, I've been sharing stuff here.

So we'd be able to add mods to our builds for the status we want to get more often; and mandatory mods, ideally, would get reduced in the process.

[DiabolusUrsus]

2 hours ago, Reaver_X said:

alls i know is that i don't want them making slash the new impact, which, from what they mentioned, sounds like it would drop quite a bit in useability.

If they don't change slash's armor-ignoring damage proc, it will still reign supreme over the other two.

As CanoLathra mentioned, ALMOST infinite scaling (non-100% damage reduction on puncture) can't replace infinite scaling (100% armor ignore on slash procs).

All DE mentioned was scaling slash procs off of weapon slash damage instead of total damage, which would do absolutely nothing to reduce slash's meta status. It would just reduce the number of slash-viable weapons. That's why I said the solution to your problem would be conversion mods that let players reshuffle the proportions of IPS. Players could use those mods to turn any IPS weapon into a slash weapon.

At the same time, I believe elemental weapons should not rely on adding missing physical damage (Munitions) to be useful. Damage types should be rebalanced so that no one type is supremely powerful, and all are equally good preferential choices.

[Reaver_X]

if they make it not ignore armor, then its going to be pretty trash....

[Reaver_X]

DE needs to see this Vid