[DELAYED] Damage 2.5 Part 1: Physical Damage

[Kinetos]

What if impact, instead of scaling up to ragdoll, scaled up to exposing finishers? 

[LSG501]

17 minutes ago, Dragazer said:

 

It boggles my mind how they cant make such a simple connection

Because the main 'decision makers' seem to only play the game in 'developer mode' in their own in house bubbles, likely staying under level 40 enemies too (that's where things seem to stop when scaling is considered)... just look at how Steve was when he was doing his livestreams.

[ArcusVeles]

How is this going to affect the Hunter Munitions mod?  Will it only scale off of Slash damage as well?  If so, that's a pretty huge nerf to its viability as a mod.

[Guest]

Ragdolling a living enemy is counter-productive, since it makes them harder to hit when they need to die.  A more useful and desirable proc progression would be to stagger > knock back > stun > knock down + stun (think of a concussion) and only ragdoll on death.

 

Puncture is basically the same as it always was with these changes.  It's not any more desirable than before, and it's only real benefit is the innate bonus damage vs armor.

Making slash procs scale only on slash damage is a big big nerf, and completely destroys a lot of elemental weapons that relied completely on forced slash procs from hunter munitions and stances.  Slash procs aren't good because they stack.  Toxin procs stack, and they're not half as good as slash.  Slash procs are good because they deal finisher damage that ignores armor.

[KubrowTamer]

Well, i can't disagree with DEs reasoning, but

Impact may need to have the rag doll removed or make the rag doll threshold extremely high. "Only one I'm worried about"

Puncture seems fine. Its more viable then it would be now as 75% dmg reduction is better then 30. Its a 100% increase.

Slash nerf makes sense. The slash proc dmg should scale off slash dmg and not everything else. Tell me the last time you got punched and had a blade slice into your body, or if you burn a finger its not covered in paper cuts now is it. Im sorry but warframes space logic doesn't account for that whatever kind of logic so I'm perfectly ok with this. Besides people saying this will make mods like hunter munitions useless, no it will make it more nice and make the almost forgotten physical damage mods more viable. You use hunter munitions on slash weapons, not on your FIRE based Ignis

Also for the argument that these are useless because they don't help kill faster

Id like to point at that if all dmg types helped you kill faster there would be no reason to have dmg types. If they are all the same then it makes their existence stupidly useless. At that point it would be more logical to remove them all and just have everything do the same dmg and give all enemies the same health type.

[Riccoshot]

5 hours ago, [DE]Connor said:

while an Impact proc with high damage output (like a Vulkar shot) can scale all the way up to a ragdoll, temporarily immobilizing them...

Just no, no ragdolling at all, no by any imaginable margin.

What even makes you think this is a viable and good combat scenario? Will there be any visuals or timer for how much exactly i can ignore that enemy laying on the ground?

Why? Very likely because i won't be able to kill that ragdolled target right away, so i'll prioritize other enemies, but neither i will have info for how long safe i am, because i simply don't know how long that given enemy will stay immobilized, so again - i can't kill it and i can't really omit it, not even for a brief moment.

Enemy AI in conjunction with utmost enemy ragdoll/ragdoll recovery animations is still too clunky/clumsy to even theoretical justify the existence of said proc for what you want to make it.

Simplest solution: keep the current knockback/stagger, but make it scalable: from quick one (the current proc animation) on low damage output shot to prolonged one (same animation but with slowdown on top, similar to how Nova's Molecular Prime slows down enemy animations in general) on medium-high damage shot.

Maybe add some sort of "snapping out of confusion"-animation for an overkill Impact proc shot, when enemy will briefly shake its head after a stagger before going back to action.

5 hours ago, [DE]Connor said:

Puncture procs will now scale in effectiveness from 10% to 75% damage reduction, based on the damage dealt at the time of proc

>75%

*laughs in Napalm*

The initial number from devstream was 90% iirc?

There is currently one thing that does the same job in a very similar way (enemy damage reduction) - Night form Equinox with Pacify and its augument, this thing barely can survive Grineer Kuva Flood with 80+% damage reduction on enemies.

Aside from sarcasticness, you can try to counter it with "but it'll stack with other damage resistance or damage reduction sources"... yeah, but the thing is it won't be viable on its own. What's the point then?

[Synpai]

I really wish DE would take a page from DMC (like they did with Eidolons) and remove the silly armor stat and make enemies take different damage types to be killed.

Allow us to combine elementals ON THE ENEMY (ya know..teamwork). 

[Viges]

So TLDR: we nerfed slash procs and didn't make impact or puncture procs more useful, got it

RIP my beloved Destreza and auto slash procs with no damage.

[Malziel]

This... this is an unbelievably terrible decision and I hope it will either never make it to game, or be reverted within hours. You're making the great weapons even better, and taking what made previous weapons good (namely forced slash procs) and eviscerating them. Please, rethink these changes. Giving Impact and Puncture better unique procs sounds amazing, but having them scale off of only their own damage type instead of *all* damage will make them absolutely worthless on anything that doesn't stack a single damage type.

[aerelm]

Kudos to you guys for actually taking the time to go back and revisit IPS and try to make Impact and Puncture actually useful instead of just nerfing Slash to the ground and calling it a day. The effort put into fine-tunings like this is much appreciated.

However, the main reason Slash procs are part of many "meta" builds right now is because they are practical, which is the main thing the other two damage types are currently lacking. When shooting at an enemy the goal obviously is to kill them, and slash procs help toward that goal. Even though both Impact and Puncture sound really nice and interesting in theory, their actual practical effect in-game would either be negligible or outright counterproductive.

In case of Puncture, the damage reduction could turn out to be almost negligible in practice, mainly due to two points:

- Most Puncture-based weapons rely on precise single-target damage (with a rare few exceptions), so by the point where enemies scale enough to not be easily mass-murdered anymore, wanting to get the full potential of Puncture's damage reduction to increase survivability will not be practical, because you'll have to keep spraying between 10 enemies at once (while more are spawning) instead of focusing on killing them with just raw damage one by one, and soon you'll be overwhelmed by the horde of high level enemies pushing on you.

- We have a wide variety of CC, support and area denial frames to make use of when going for any higher level content, which makes puncture's damage reduction a rather redundant effect, as the same goal could be achieved easier, faster and much more effectively by utilizing the right frame for the task (and against any lower level enemies, the mobs will most likely be already dead long before puncture even procs enough times to offer a considerable damage reduction).

• My suggestion: Make Puncture reduce enemy armor instead of reducing damage output.
  
  Unlike Corrosive, the effect from Puncture will be temporary and will only last for the duration of the proc but would still have to be built up to offer a high enough percentage of armor reduction, and would allow for Puncture-centric builds to scale as well as Slash into higher level content and also make +Status Duration mods a viable option on builds that aren't Slash/Viral. Weapons that can stack multiple puncture hits in a short time or weapons that can hit the target with a single heavy Puncture proc would allow for a wider range of elemental builds as well, so the "endgame builds" that aren't centered around slash won't have to be mainly and mostly focused on stripping armor.

In case of Impact, while the ragdoll effect is fun and would work quite well as unique effect on some weapons like Sonicor, I'm personally strongly against having it as a common proc:

- First and foremost, to consider that point in the game where mobs can't be steamrolled anymore, anything that takes enough shots to trigger the ragdoll proc would be something that's actually giving you trouble and you'd naturally want to kill as fast as possible. In a situation like this, one would normally try to go for headshots. Now imagine you've got a nice headshot lined up, you land it and go for the finishing shot, just to realize that headshot proc'ed one too many and the enemy you could've already been done with is now bounced away to safety where they'll likely regenerate their shield (if they have any) and come back to give you some more trouble. So in practice, having ragdoll as the "ultimate proc" of a certain damage time effectively means you'd be screwing yourself over if you try to specialize your build toward that particular damage type (unless its for shirts and giggles, which is not really the subject here, and can be left to stuff like Sonicor). With the proposed Impact 2.5, an "endgame meta" build centered around Impact would more likely focus on lowering the impact damage of the gun to avoid unwanted ragdolls, rather than emphasizing on that damage type.

- Similar to the point about Puncture and for the same reasons, a CC effect isn't really useful if it's applied to a single target at a time. Imagine if Rhino's Stomp or any stunlock ability only effected a single target - No one would've considered it worth using. That's why if Impact is intended to be the CC proc, it has to turn into a proper reliable source of CC to have any chance of keeping up with Slash at higher levels.

• My suggestion: Make the stagger spread to nearby enemies with additional procs (similar to Gas) Instead of increasing the severity of stagger and leading to a ragdoll.
  
  An effect like this would be able to achieve something similar to what was proposed for Puncture 2.5 in the OP. Dealing with tougher situations and higher level mobs would be more manageable if the severity of the stagger was kept to a level where it didn't interfere with aiming, and instead applied the same proc to the nearby enemies, to allow you a little bit of a breathing room while you're taking care of the primary target without having to worry about getting swarmed by lesser mobs that may not be much of a threat on their own but can add to the bigger problem you're already busy dealing with.

That said, I understand that different people have different preferences for what they'd want to see from each proc, so the suggestions I mentioned in this post are just one of the many examples of how Impact and Puncture can be tweaked to scale as well as Slash into lategame content, which in my opinion should be the main focus of IPS 2.5. Regardless of what the proc effect actually is, long as having a specialized build for a particular proc offers a considerable enough advantage in actually killing the enemy to be worth using and doesn't come with an unwanted drawback (for example, ragdoll effectively preventing a kill) I'd say it's a rework well done.

[Salenstormwing]

I have one question.... weapons with Status Over Time.... mostly the lasers and other continuous weapons. Right now, they barely proc because of the OVER TIME portion of the effect.

So, are you going to change/adapt those weapons to be as effective as their non-laser siblings?

[Holonomic88]

I'm glad you guys are considering changes to IPS, but like most of the players I have talked to, I agree that a dead enemy deals 0% damage and until the puncture mechanic is addressed in full it will always be strictly worse than slash and impact.  Also, people have pointed out that ragdolling enemies (while funny) can make it difficult to finish them while they are thrown around.  To me, these underlying issues seem easy to fix, but maybe I'm oversimplifying it.  In any case, my suggestion is simply to have puncture procs increase damage taken by the affected unit, and instead of ragdolling enemies, have impact procs stagger enemies building towards a stun.

[Ejodai]

Just want to know how this will affect Piercing Roar, Rhino's Roar Augment. Because this would be very interesting to have a stronger damage reduction with higher power strength.

[Lion]

Just now, Ashendal said:

This whole change doesn't fix the root cause of WHY people are choosing certain damage types to run on their weapons. If anything this change just further increases that divide and now lowers the total pool of "viable" weapons for any content above level 50 which includes sorties. If the weapon doesn't have a majority in Slash the weapon is not going to be taken. If you thought people overused the Tigris Prime and Galatine Prime before, be prepared to see nothing more than that.

Scott, you need to understand that the armor scaling formula is the issue here. <snip>

You need to start over. Scrap these changes and address the problem that they don't. Look at armor scaling and shield resistances. <snip>

Very well said.

 

I sincerely hope DE doesn't push this through as is.

[Damocles]

BTW, are we going to fix the ZAW gilded stats bug with client vs host. And are we going to let
 
be a thing? I LITERALLY made it into meme to reflect the sophisticated design of this game.

[Tau.]

Here's a thought on how Impact can be made... oh idk, actually good. 

Know what bludgeoning damage really does irl? Q1: Know why maces were the unsung dark horses that -actually- won fights (over swords and all that other flashy junk)? Q2: Know why steel-toed boots are designed to cut your toes off by the metal caps curving in and doing so, before allowing them to be crushed? 

Because internal hemorrhaging induced by blunt force trauma is some serious S#&amp;&#036;. 

 

A1: A mace to the temple doesn't care about what kind of helmet you've got on, it's still cracking that skull and splattering that brain, and that's not even from raw crushing force, but from torque applied to the strike by timed twisting of the wrist upon macehead contact. A2: blood clots formed from the crushed toes dislodge and kill you via stroke or heart attack when they make their way there through your circulation. 

 

 

Given that we already have the tech for bodypart hit tracking on enemies (Banshee's Sonar and Helios' Detect Vulnerability), how about this for Impact? Impact 1, the stagger. That's fine. Impact 2: breaks chunks of armor off, making for exposed, unarmored spots. Impact stage 3: make struck exposed/unarmored spots weakspots, counting for bodypart multipliers comparable to headshots. 

 

Ever been beaten where you're already bruised, or where you already have broken bones? Yeah, basically that. You guys have the tech and opportunity here to, for the first time in any video game EVER, do impact damage some justice. Don't squander it on that counterproductive ragdoll nonsense.

[(XBOX)YoungGunn82]

1 hour ago, DrBorris said:

How about having Puncture increase the amount of damage an enemy takes? So if you inflict a puncture proc the enemy will take 10%-75% more damage from all sources. This would give ti a septate niche from Slash and Impact rather than overlapping.

This right here, exactly what I was thinking. 

And instead of Impact rag dolling enemies how bout instead it reduces armor and slows the enemy by (x)% per proc? 

[Innocent_Chatbot]

1 hour ago, mrfluffydeath said:

Sometimes people just don't understand that Death is the ultimate in damage mitigation. What's the point in ragdolling an enemy if you can kill it? What's the point in reducing the amount of damage an enemy does if it's dead? A corpse does zero damage. Well. Unless it's a Nox.

This.  Impact and Puncture status procs have always been completely useless, and will continue to be completely useless as long as they remain lite CC/debuff procs instead of damage-based procs.  The best way to ragdoll an enemy is when it's a corpse.  There's no point in reducing the damage of a dead enemy, because dead men tell no tales deal no damage.  Instead of nerfing Slash or making it inviable on many weapons, with insignificant buffs to Impact and Puncture to compensate, you guys really need to be giving Impact and Puncture a massive overhaul to bring them up to Slash's level as fearsome damage-dealers.  You can triple the amount of crap in a Puncture proc, but at the end of the day its irrelevant damage reduction effect is still crap.

[TheMugbearer]

Kinda doesn't makes sense still.

Impact is a 100% damage reduction cuz it ragdolls an enemy. Puncture damage reduction is neat, but the best way to reduce the enemy fire is to kill them so...

Not really seeing any good solutions to come out of this. I feel like IPS must get back to the drawing board, unfortunately.

[RAZORLIGHT]

mmmhhh...

[Azamagon]

Oh boy, how have the developers become THIS out of touch with the game?!

2 hours ago, [DE]Connor said:

1) Slash has long been considered the most powerful of these effects, primarily because Slash procs stack on top of one another and scale with weapon damage

2) while both Puncture and Impact procs could only have their flat effects refreshed.

3) Our primary goal was improving Impact and Puncture; both of these procs will now scale in effectiveness, based on the damage dealt.

4) An Impact proc with a small damage output (like a single Akstilletto bullet) will still only cause a short stagger, while an Impact proc with high damage output (like a Vulkar shot) can scale all the way up to a ragdoll, temporarily immobilizing them.

5) In a similar manner, Puncture procs will now scale in effectiveness from 10% to 75% damage reduction, based on the damage dealt at the time of proc.

6) Slash will continue working as it does now, stacking multiple status effects on top of one another.

-snip- Now, all procs will be calculated using ONLY the damage type of the proc that is being inflicted.

7) Impact now serves as a great means of crowd control. Got a Corpus Tech threatening your excavator? Immobilize priority targets by unloading your Akstillettos, giving you more time to address the threat. Overwhelmed by an army of MOAs? Level entire rooms with something like a Strun!

8) Puncture can be used to minimize enemy lethality for frames with less survivability. Using high status puncture melees like Boltace or Endura, go blow-for-blow with Butchers and Powerfists without breaking a sweat. And if your Lex Prime can’t oneshot the Heavy Gunner rumbling towards your defense point, the enemy’s damage will be diminished long enough to safely deal the finishing blow.

9) Slash works the same as it ever did, stacking bleed damage over time to make short work of enemies. Your 100% status Tigris Prime will still eviscerate single targets with multiple procs, while something like a Galatine will still inflict more serious singular procs in a wider area - ‘tis but a scratch.

10) It's important that everyone understands our goals and what led us to the above changes. When designing Khora, an Impact/Puncture/Slash based frame, we knew it was time to bring up Impact and Puncture to Slash competitive levels of desirability thanks to long-term feedback.

1) Dead wrong, sorry. While those are neat parts of Slash's usefulness, sure, the reason it is considered the best physical damage by far is because it ignores armor and shields.

2) Repeating Impact has always been good, imo. It's a brief stun (aka 100% damage reduction from that enemy), what's not to like about "just" refreshing it? Puncture on the other hand, yes, has always been insanely bad, no question. It's short in duration and nigh useless to boot. Considering the bursty nature of damage in Warframe (due to how you handle numerical balancing), the only truly useful damage reduction (at least on squishier frames), is 100% damage reduction. Which Impact provides already.

3) Their lack of ability to "scale with effectiveness" has never been their problem; Impact has always been fine as it is, and Puncture has always been bad, by its very inferior idea. Nothing else.
Besides, there has always been an indirect "scaling with effectiveness": Proc weighting. If a weapon has high Impact damage, it is likely to stunlock an enemy (especially with high Rate of Fire).

4) Well, ragdolling Impact-procs are now gonna both be better and worse at the same time, compared to old Impact. While it incapacitates an enemy for longer (which is arguably nice), it is also becoming worse due to being so anti-accuracy (follow-up shots are gonna be harder to do). For the most part, I do NOT like this change. And that seems to go for many others too (as you can tell from the comments).

5) So, not only have you managed to make it WORSE (10% minimum, urgh), but it's still also the same useless effect? While 75% DR for 6 seconds is maybe almost something to be considered useful, it's STILL inferior to Impact and Slash by a huge stretch.

6) No, that's a lie (the first part). You have MASSIVELY nerfed Slash-procs, is what you are saying. Anything not very Slash-heavy will now have entirely useless Slash-procs. Not only will Slash-procs be rare to happen on a low-Slash weapon (due to proc weighting), it will now also deal insignificant damage. Way to doubledip on penalties (why do you like to do that so much?)
Slash, as it was (before Damage 2.5 that is), was generally fine. A slight nerf in total damage, sure (like reducing the duration?). But a complete nuke to its useability on non-Slash weapons? Way to push the meta weapons down our throat now...

7) Meh,, it will now be a disruptive means of crowd control (something that Blast already had as its niche, btw, did you forget that?).

8) That's still useless... Look, you are not reducing the damage output of ALL the enemies in the room, right? That means it will only be sort of ok when you face an enemy, one by one. And... how often does that happen in Warframe? It's not like you are getting a buff on yourself to reduce damage taken by 75% (which would obviously be useful), it's only on that SINGLE enemy you are shooting. The rest of the enemies will still tear your to shreds. And even if you managed to put Puncture on all of them, if the levels are high enough, they will STILL kill you in no time. So... it's still useless, and it's still inferior to Impact, no matter how you look at it.

9) Like I said, way to push meta weapons down our throat...

10) Then DO that! (And if you seriously have read all our feedback, you wouldn't be doing what you're currently trying to do to physical procs!)
Impact was fine, Slash was great, Puncture was useless due to its very mechanic. Realize this and move on from that point.

But what you have done is simply this:
* Impact is better and worse at the same time.
* Slash is only useful on the meta weapons (i.e. nerfed for everything else)
* Puncture is better and worse at the same time (and still effectively useless overall)
* All Physical damage now doubledips, both positively and negatively. High slash damage = Frequent AND powerful slash procs. Low slash damage = Infequent AND weak slash procs. How can you not see this bad design?

 

*sigh*

So, let's look at this the RIGHT way. This is how the physical procs are right now:
* Impact - Defensive. Completely shuts down an enemy briefly.
* Slash - Offensive. Deals awesome armor+shield-ignoring damage.
* Puncture - Defensive. Makes an enemy slightly weaker.

There you immediately see an overlap. Puncture fills the same role as Impact, just in a worse way. So, let's go from there:

* Impact - Defensive. Completely shuts down an enemy. If you want to scale it a bit, make it so that if the Impact-damage is strong, it can stagger the enemy for slightly longer (now, this means, only go UP in stagger-duration from what we have now, don't start the lowest stagger-duration from at an even lower point than now)
* Slash - Offensive. Remains exactly how it is NOW (pre Damage 2.5)
* Puncture - Defensive+Offensive. Makes an enemy weaker, both in terms of the damage they deal, and the damage they take. Say, 30% less damage dealt and 50% more damage taken. Successive procs can stack (in an overlapping rolling manner, like Slash, not in a build-up-stacking way), and they do so multiplicatively for the damage-dealt-reduction, but additively for the damage-suffered-increase.

TADAAAAA!

Impact is slightly better (all it arguably needed), without becoming disruptive along the way.
Slash remains awesome.
Puncture becomes a decent middleground of the two other procs, with its own merits.

[SmilingMad]

My own thoughts on the matter:

The impact changes are nice for CC, but it's more of a double edged sword when you get down to it. An enemy that has been ragdolled is an enemy that is hard to hit, and more problematically the head might be impossible to access at that particular angle. For a sniper like the Vulkar or the Rubico, this is actually terrible if the shot doesn't kill the enemy in one hit, as it guarantees a very suboptimal setup for the next shot.

Puncture changes seem nice, but the issue is that I woulndn't expect it to be very useful most of the time. The primary issue is that if you are focusing on a target, it is due to die anyway. I'm not certain about this being a particularly good argument, since the same could essentially be said for slash most of the time, but at least in slash's case there are ways to abuse it. In the case of puncture, the only way that I can think of to abuse it would be a Chroma running the vex armour augment. I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense if puncture produced weakspots, considering this is more or less what an armour puncture does.

Speaking of slash, it has been mentioned multiple times probably but Hunter Munitions and certain stances with innate slash procs might not have a base amount of slash to proc off of. How will it work for pure elemental weapons like the Amprex?

[RAZORLIGHT]

2 hours ago, [DE]Connor said:

before, a Slash proc would scale based on the weapon’s total base damage output. Now, all procs will be calculated using ONLY the damage type of the proc that is being inflicted.

NO!

is there a single change form you without nerfing something good and not broken?

 

you ll face another uproar and i bet you ll revert the slash change back after 2-4 weeks as usual...

[Pyus]

1 hour ago, [DE]Connor said:

Impact now serves as a great means of crowd control. Got a Corpus Tech threatening your excavator? Immobilize priority targets by unloading your Akstillettos, giving you more time to address the threat. Overwhelmed by an army of MOAs? Level entire rooms with something like a Strun!

Puncture can be used to minimize enemy lethality for frames with less survivability. Using high status puncture melees like Boltace or Endura, go blow-for-blow with Butchers and Powerfists without breaking a sweat. And if your Lex Prime can’t oneshot the Heavy Gunner rumbling towards your defense point, the enemy’s damage will be diminished long enough to safely deal the finishing blow.

These are highly situational uses for bread and butter IPS damage types. Instead of going for that one instance where There is a Nox, on a hill, behind a rock, with two gunners near by and and you need to do a HIGH impact to the gunners, but puncture the NOX.. how about a more universal approach where the procs are GENERALLY more useful for 99% of the actual game, not just random situations that seldom happen. 

• Puncture - Causes mob to take increased damage from all sources
• Impact - Makes mob more susceptible to critical hits 

There, now players won't have to worry about strange conditions to have IPS universally useful, and synergistic with each other. 

[DecadeX]

1 minute ago, RAZORLIGHT said:

so slash is untouched and impact + puncture is better?

yes please

Sadly no. There is another couple of lines after the one that says slash is untouched that says that the procs will take 35% of slash damage instead of 35% of base damage. For the Tigris Prime that doesn't matter, for Jat Kusar that's a death sentence.