Damage 2.5: Changing Puncture and Impact to compete with Slash (Updated with Stagger)

[Krisnar]

Lately, there has been much talk over Damage 2.5

A lot of talk saying it won't do anything to make Puncture or Impact any more worthwhile than they currently are. And to an extent, I can agree. The changes proposed won't change the fundamentals of how a weapon works, or plays. Upon thinking about it, I have come up with a new affect for Impact and Puncture that could potentially make people stop to consider using them, as apposed to defaulting to Slash. 

 

Impact:

One big complaint about the new idea for Impact is that it will make handling enemies harder. You are trying to fire upon a Heavy Gunner, when one of your Squad send them flying off with a heavy hit from a hammer. Hilarious. But now that Gunner is just going to get up again, and chase after you once more. 

The idea for change I have had is to do away with that altogether. We already have ways to fling people around the map. It's called Blast. We don't need another. 

Instead, what Impact could do is transfer through Shields. Using the logic that a big enough blunt impact warps the shielding. I am sure Mr Crewman with his skintight layer of shielding will not appreciate it suddenly distorting into his rib-cage. Perhaps a percentage of up to 80% of damage being transferred through Shields, with a big enough impact. 

 

Puncture:

The main complaint with the new affect for Puncture is it is still just as useless as ever. There is a reasonable logic to this. 75% Damage reduction is all well and good, but killing the Bombard reduces his damage by 100%, and Slash is still the fastest way to kill something. A reasonable conclusion. 

So instead, why not have it that Puncture bypasses a portion of Armour? This would put it in the same usage as Corrosive, as a way of getting around the high armour of many Grineer enemies. Mrs Heavy Gunner won't be quite as tough with up to 70-80% of her armour just being completely bypassed. 

 

Slash:

Now, a lot of people see this as perfect. Should not be changed. What I say now might earn me quite a few heated remarks (If this gains any attention at all. One can hope).

A trend can easily be seen among my changes to Impact and Puncture. They make the respective damages more effective against a particular faction. However, even with those changes, Slash would still be better. It already bypasses armour, and shields, completely. 

Which is why I think, if DE want to make it so Impact, Puncture and Slash are all equal to each other, they need to make it so Slash is not as good against Grineer or Corpus. Make it so that Slash is affected by Armour. Make it so that it does not bypass shielding. 

Yes, this would be a Nerf. A substantial one. But only against Grineer and Corpus. Against Infested, which Slash is already meant to be good against, it would still melt them. And it just means that you would need to remove Armour, or Shielding, before you can bleed someone to death. Something which can be achieved with Elemental builds. 

 

Stagger:

With the system in its current state, an Impact Proc is what causes a stagger. With the change I have suggested to Impact here, I think tying staggering enemies to one damage type can be done away with. All three damages types should have an innate chance to stagger an enemy. Something rapid fire would have a small chance to stagger an enemy, while something that delivers all its damage at once would be more likely to put them off balance. I feel this logical because, no matter what damage type it is doing, a shot from a Vectis, a Vulkar, or a slug from a Tigris could potentially knock someone off their feet, so it would not be too much to say it could result in staggering the enemy. 

 

Benefits to the Tenno:

Which, with this kind of system, there are. With the changes to Slash, it would mean Slash is far less effective against us. Your High Shields, Low Health Warframe won't be completely destroyed by a single Slash proc. Same with your High Armour Frame. The Armour would reduce it, and you would not get a Slash proc at all if you still have your shielding up. 

 

In closing, I understand that this would be a radical change to the system. I understand many might not like it. But DE have shown in the past they can make huge changes. Parkour 2.0. The Mod System. How good an idea this would be to implement, well, that I would like to hear as feedback. 

 

 

Edited January 3, 2018 by Krisnar

[Genitive]

I like those ideas.

[Hixlysss]

Problem with the impact change is it's too corpus focused. Admittedly we have the same issue with magnetic/corrosive, but that doesn't mean we need to add yet another status effect that only works on like half the enemies in the game. The puncture idea has been suggested before, the fact it keeps getting suggested just means everyone is on the same page for how puncture should work in this game, which means hopefully DE will actually take the suggestion of puncture ignoring % of armor or making "weak spots" with reduced armor.

IMO I feel like the best change to slash is to make armor/shields reduce status effects by a %. Which it already does for slash, as slash proc damage is based on the damage of your proc which IS affected by armor. The slash damage from the proc itself isn't affected by armor, but the damage that is used for the slash proc damage IS affected by armor.

[Krisnar]

3 minutes ago, Hixlysss said:

Problem with the impact change is it's too corpus focused. Admittedly we have the same issue with magnetic/corrosive, but that doesn't mean we need to add yet another status effect that only works on like half the enemies in the game.

Admittedly, aside from Ragdolling which does not seem to be much liked as a whole, I could not hink of much else to do with Impact. However, as a point to raise, yes, it has a great benefit against the Corpus. Puncture ignoring Armour would really make it a primary thing to use against Grineer. Corpus, to my knowledge, barely have Armour. 

A way that this new Impact Proc idea could still have benefit against Grineer is to have it that the Proc just helps to deal more damage. It was a blow that buckled in a section of Armour, which is going to hurt more. With no shields to bypass, it just applies normally to potentially armoured health. Still useful against that faction, but more focused on Corpus because of the fact you are going near straight to their health, rather than wasting time with their shields. 

 

The Slash change is a tricky issue to manage. The main problem with it being that it's Finisher Damage. Bypasses everything. As you said, it needs to be affected by Armour and Shields somehow. 

[MasterControl]

The best suggestion I have heard for Impact is that you get an extra hit at 50% extra damage when it procs. So say you hit something with a hammer, it takes 100% of damage. But, it impact proc'd. So, it adds a second hit immediately after (which, for obvious reasons, cannot proc impact again.) Makes things more dead faster in a unique-ish way. This, of course, is on top of the current stagger.

 

either that or for a more simple solution impact staggers could open to melee finishers but yknow

 

That said I enjoy the idea of puncture bypassing a certain amount of armor. Slash.. well, Slash is alright as is, but I suppose it could stand to be toned down a bit. But I disagree with it being based entirely on your slash damage - it ruins so much Hunter Munitions fun when you do that. Perhaps slash could have a minimum amount of overall % weapon damage that it does, like 10%. So say your weapon only does 5% slash damage, but it will always do 10% of the total damage minimum, instead of the 30%ish now. But, if your weapon is 50% slash, the slash proc will do 50% of your overall damage. This encourages focusing for slash still while keeping it from being the only option on everything.

[Krisnar]

6 minutes ago, Mastercontrol98 said:

The best suggestion I have heard for Impact is that you get an extra hit at 50% extra damage when it procs

This is kind of what I am suggesting here. An Impact Proc would deal up to maybe 50-80% extra damage. Taking that one step further by adding that if there are shields in the way, this extra damage bypasses them. If Impact opened enemies up to finishers, it would become far too unbalanced. You could start instant killing most high level enemies after one hit. 

I have always seen the Impact, Puncture and Slash damages to be a Rock, Paper, Scissors system. Against the three factions, one is more effective than the other. However, because of how Slash functions, it is just the best. 

With a system like the one I'm suggesting, Slash could actually get a buff. It could deal an even higher percentage of damage over time, because it is negated by Armour and Shields, to put it level with the other two against Flesh. 

 

And in my personal opinion, I think Hunter Munitions is catering to a system that is flawed. It's using how broken Slash is to seem to amazing, so powerful. A simple fix would be to change Slash, and then just change Hunter Munitions to openly do Finisher Damage. Same affect, no need to exploit Slash. 

[Anthraxicus]

40 minutes ago, Krisnar said:

Admittedly, aside from Ragdolling which does not seem to be much liked as a whole, I could not hink of much else to do with Impact. However, as a point to raise, yes, it has a great benefit against the Corpus. Puncture ignoring Armour would really make it a primary thing to use against Grineer. Corpus, to my knowledge, barely have Armour. 

A way that this new Impact Proc idea could still have benefit against Grineer is to have it that the Proc just helps to deal more damage. It was a blow that buckled in a section of Armour, which is going to hurt more. With no shields to bypass, it just applies normally to potentially armoured health. Still useful against that faction, but more focused on Corpus because of the fact you are going near straight to their health, rather than wasting time with their shields. 

 

The Slash change is a tricky issue to manage. The main problem with it being that it's Finisher Damage. Bypasses everything. As you said, it needs to be affected by Armour and Shields somehow. 

If you make a bleed proc be affected by armor or shields, not only it wouldn't make any sense, you would effectively kill the proc and make it even more useless than the others. The solution to a useless status effect is not making another viable stat even more useless.

 

Slash is so beautiful that even otherwise useless impact or puncture  (and even elemental) weapons became viable and fun thanks to Hunter Munitions. KIlling slash won't help these weapons one bit. Quite the opposite.

DE had this great idea of messing with damage types because of Khora and its ability to change its damage type. The thing they are missing is that people will always go for only one of them: the most effective at actually killing the enemies. And that is gonna be so considering the ability in question will be even useful and viable, which it probably won't. If they really wanna change the damage types, using Khora as an excuse is not the way to go.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Anthraxicus

[Krisnar]

10 minutes ago, Anthraxicus said:

If you make a bleed proc be affected by armor or shields, not only it wouldn't make any sense, you would effectively kill the proc and make it even more useless than the others. The solution to a useless status effect is not making another viable stat even more useless.

This system is designed to have some failings. Areas where a Damage Type isn't as effective.

A Puncture Proc to bypass Armour is useless against an enemy that does not have any Armour to begin with.

Impact arguably is the more well rounded. While not as effective against an armoured unit, it would still deal extra damage. But this holds true to actual combat. When a Knight went up against another Knight, he was not aiming to slash his opponent's armour. He wanted to buckle it. A Broadsword was not sharp, it was a precise impact. 

 

As for it not making sense why Armour or Shielding would affect a Slash Proc, there is a logic to it. You can't cut yourself through a chainmail glove. I imagine the same would apply to a skintight layer of personal Shielding. 

All this means is that Slash can be made even more effective than it currently is. Because a step needs to be taken for it to come into its own against Grineer or Corpus, it could be buffed to do even more damage. There are plenty of ways to remove Armour, or Shielding. 

 

I also direct you to an earlier comment I made where I said Hunter Munitions could be kept as it is by simply changing it to do Finisher Damage outright. 

[Hixlysss]

18 hours ago, Krisnar said:

Admittedly, aside from Ragdolling which does not seem to be much liked as a whole, I could not hink of much else to do with Impact. However, as a point to raise, yes, it has a great benefit against the Corpus. Puncture ignoring Armour would really make it a primary thing to use against Grineer. Corpus, to my knowledge, barely have Armour. 

A way that this new Impact Proc idea could still have benefit against Grineer is to have it that the Proc just helps to deal more damage. It was a blow that buckled in a section of Armour, which is going to hurt more. With no shields to bypass, it just applies normally to potentially armoured health. Still useful against that faction, but more focused on Corpus because of the fact you are going near straight to their health, rather than wasting time with their shields. 

 

The Slash change is a tricky issue to manage. The main problem with it being that it's Finisher Damage. Bypasses everything. As you said, it needs to be affected by Armour and Shields somehow. 

In most games there are 3 damage types, each doing a unique feature. Puncture pierces armor, Slash causes bleed, Impact smashes armor. This is the standard trope across videogames when it comes to physical damage types. DE want's warframe to be...unique, apparently, by deviating from this trope by having impact and puncture function completely unlike how they are in virtually every other game.

IMO, Impact should function like the mod Shattering Impact, where in each time you proc an impact status it does flat armor damage. So say you proc for 100 Impact damage, it then does a % of that damage as raw armor damage and for calculation purposes let's say your gun is 80% impact damage, so it takes 80% of that 100 damage and does 80 damage to the base armor of the enemy who has like 8000 armor. That means the enemy will have 0 armor after around 100 hits or so, because remember the proc damage is affected by armor, so each time you remove armor you do a little bit more damage. Admittedly these numbers will be tweaked, but it provides an example of how it would work.

Slash on the other hand, I believe DE's original plan to limit the number of instances is good, as currently you can stack pretty much infinite number of slash procs on an enemy and wipe em clean in nanoseconds. So if they limited the number of slash procs to like 10-15 at once it would be good, but allowing us to stack upwards of 50-100 procs on a single enemy....where as every other status it only refreshes the counter.

[Krisnar]

4 hours ago, Hixlysss said:

so each time you remove armor you do a little bit more damage.

This I feel is the primary issue DE are trying to address. Slash is the best because it kills everything quickly. The other two have Utility, granted, but that's not what is needed in my opinion. An Elemental build should be more Utility focused, with the base damages being raw damage procs. 

The problem DE is facing is they are half following a trope. You have three damages because you have three methods of defending yourself. Warframe has the three methods of defence, but it only allows the one method of attack. Maybe in this case, what has been done before might be the best route, just done with Warframe's own flare. 

[Hixlysss]

23 minutes ago, Krisnar said:

This I feel is the primary issue DE are trying to address. Slash is the best because it kills everything quickly. The other two have Utility, granted, but that's not what is needed in my opinion. An Elemental build should be more Utility focused, with the base damages being raw damage procs. 

The problem DE is facing is they are half following a trope. You have three damages because you have three methods of defending yourself. Warframe has the three methods of defence, but it only allows the one method of attack. Maybe in this case, what has been done before might be the best route, just done with Warframe's own flare. 

Aye. Like how they wanted the effects to sort of stack? With each instance ramping up the effect to a certain degree/damage cap. As the intial idea with impact was staggering, that builds to knockdown, which builds to full on ragdolling. IMO if they just have Impact procs do armor damage(I.E. remove flat number of armor) it wouldn't need much more than that. How ever having puncture increase with each proc(let's say starting out with making an area with 10% less armor, capping out at 75% max.), or each instance of slash increasing it's duration to a cap.

[Krisnar]

3 hours ago, Hixlysss said:

With each instance ramping up the effect to a certain degree/damage cap.

A system that could be interesting. Having a Proc that can get more intense based on various factors. What they have in mind for Impact does sound so very amusing, but in the end might be more annoying than effective. We can have that kind of fun making a Blast hammer, or gun. 

The biggest issues I have with the idea of an Impact Proc removing armour is, what's the damage good against Shields? How would it scale for higher level enemies? What would you do with the Mod that has that affect? 

I think it could be a good, potentially easier and simpler system to understand, if Impact can go through Shielding, if Puncture punches through Armour, and if Slash causes such horrific lacerations to unprotected flesh. That, I feel, would be a good step to balancing them out. 

[A-Midnight-Shanking]

Any kind of change to the status procs that adds increased damage by bypassing a % means that against factions without what is bypassed, these status procs become useless. I can see certain enemies having resistance to some, but not an entire faction. To that end (in regards to IPS), any kind of damage boon for Impact/Puncture needs to be a universal damage increase similar to the one @Mastercontrol98 mentioned.

To those that say Slash and Armor mitigating some amount of bleed damage based on shields/armor base multipliers: If you slash across a surface that is in parts armor and flesh, do you create a gash across all pieces? Or only the section where there is flesh and not armor? If you slash into leather (as shields in this game are essentially skin-tight defenses) does the blade go as deep? Or is it met with resistance and the cut reduced?

However, if this comes to pass, the Grineer Armor scaling needs to be addressed as armor and health are multiplicative in overall effective health of a unit (in comparison to the Corpus shields being additive to base health).

Having status procs that only do Offensive or only do Defensive will create a preference towards the ones that are offensive given this type of game, so I propose that all status types have offensive and defensive properties.

this is what I would suggest:

Spoiler

Remove Armor Scaling, Adjust Grineer Base Health.

Make Slash procs deal Slash Damage rather than Finisher Damage. Slash Procs Weaken the targets (Reduce their damage done) which scales based on number of Procs, IPS%, and Damage done.

Have Impact Procs lead to a knockdown (Ragdoll on Death), and Have Impact Procs deal additional Damage to Immobilized Targets equal to Total Impact Damage (like Slash calculation). (Less overall damage bonus in comparison to slash and puncture, since the innate CC provided is rather strong compared to the others)

Have Puncture Procs make the enemy vulnerable: Increasing subsequent Puncture Procs and Slowing enemy movement which scales based on number of Procs, IPS%, and Damage done.

Now IPS procs have Offensive and Defensive capabilities.