Arca Plasmor Change

[--C--Notorious]

ikr LUL

[o.0-]

O K

[TinySuperSalad]

DE: You're welcome!

[Ogarra_Remaellus]

You actually tried headshots with Plasmor? Just make it do crap tons of damage, point and shoot.

 

[Misgenesis]

We do have a problem with spin2win babbies, its just a broader issue to deal with.

Hows your knees? I hope that jerk wasnt too bad.

[-VS-Airikr]

>killing the arca plasmor

nice joke, dude.

[Voltage]

18 minutes ago, Misgenesis said:

We do have a problem with spin2win babbies, its just a broader issue to deal with.

Hows your knees? I hope that jerk wasnt too bad.

We have a problem with matchmaking, not spin2win. Efficient players will always be efficient. It doesn't matter what you change, there will always be a "problem" to people who want "balance" in PvE (which does not exist).

On the topic of Arca Plasmor: I believe the changes were not justified. The weapon was far from overpowered, and this is another Caustacyst situation. Granted, this change does not kill the weapon, but it was definitely questionable and unnecessary. 

Edited January 28, 2018 by --Q--Voltage

[Misgenesis]

23 minutes ago, --Q--Voltage said:

We have a problem with matchmaking, not spin2win. Efficient players will always be efficient. It doesn't matter what you change, there will always be a "problem" to people who want "balance" in PvE (which does not exist).

On the topic of Arca Plasmor: I believe the changes were not justified. The weapon was far from overpowered, and this is another Caustacyst situation. Granted, this change does not kill the weapon, but it was definitely questionable and unnecessary. 

In your world.

 

In a sense it was an unnecessary change because Arca Plasmor still mows down groups of enemies with ease. Caustacyst was obviously broken, you should instead be asking for a buff to its base stats.

[kyori]

You might not be the first to be disappointed   

[Kell_Prime]

I didn't even know this happened.

The hell DE.

[AzureTerra]

Eh whatever, still does what i use it for fine

[Toppien]

you dont kill the arca-plasmor...

the arca-plasmor kills you

[Kell_Prime]

Still more of a matter of how many times is DE going to give unnecessary nerfs. It happens often.

[Cytobel]

Y'all know, if the main reason for this change was an Augment mod, then all that needed to be done was a more careful review of the mod, perhaps even reworking it.

Hell, I need to check out this Augment along side Ignus, just to see if this is a thing.  After that I can roll Flux with punch through, Quanta Vandal with punch through, a Hema...  I mean, if it comes down to something being borked from launch by ONE weapon with punch through, then all we need to do is abuse the hairy fuckles off of this Augment until it's actually pulled.  After all, that's looking about as likely as anything at this point, given the possibility of abuse.

Rather than targeting this ONE WEAPON, they could have looked at the mechanic of the Augment.  Instead they didn't think things through and now we have a nerfed gun and a gross Augment.

My criticism, and the idea of pulling punch through from the Arca instead of this heavy debuff, are based off the fact that little was done to fix "the problem" and instead we had this mess crop up.  After all, you can add punch through back to the Arca Plasmor if it's taken off of it baseline (at the heafty cost of a mod slot, restricting builds), or you can sit and spin because there is no way to get headshot damage back once it's disabled.  Hell, it's not as if the Arca Plasmor was a game-breaker.  It's just that it now falls off harder Destiny 2's playerbase...

[UncleWalrus]

22 minutes ago, Cytobel said:

Y'all know, if the main reason for this change was an Augment mod, then all that needed to be done was a more careful review of the mod, perhaps even reworking it.

Hell, I need to check out this Augment along side Ignus, just to see if this is a thing.  After that I can roll Flux with punch through, Quanta Vandal with punch through, a Hema...  I mean, if it comes down to something being borked from launch by ONE weapon with punch through, then all we need to do is abuse the hairy fuckles off of this Augment until it's actually pulled.  After all, that's looking about as likely as anything at this point, given the possibility of abuse.

Rather than targeting this ONE WEAPON, they could have looked at the mechanic of the Augment.  Instead they didn't think things through and now we have a nerfed gun and a gross Augment.

My criticism, and the idea of pulling punch through from the Arca instead of this heavy debuff, are based off the fact that little was done to fix "the problem" and instead we had this mess crop up.  After all, you can add punch through back to the Arca Plasmor if it's taken off of it baseline (at the heafty cost of a mod slot, restricting builds), or you can sit and spin because there is no way to get headshot damage back once it's disabled.  Hell, it's not as if the Arca Plasmor was a game-breaker.  It's just that it now falls off harder Destiny 2's playerbase...

Tried it with the Amprex (That other Corpus crit elemental weapon with massive reload and a tiny magazine that tends to get free headshots), and it is deeply silly. Arguably as silly as with the Arca Plasmor.
Linky. (Sorry for the nonexistant mic volume.)

Lasting Covenant went from 30something seconds at the start to 85 seconds or something at the end, aiming at one Grineer's face until he died and letting the Amprex arc as it wanted, then kept zapping his corpse until it vanished or I had to reload.

Sure, you can argue, these are stationary targets and aiming's easy. Thing is, in most missions enemy density is going to be higher, so more arcing, and the enemies are still going to be either coming right at you, or hiding behind cover, so you can get a bead on their noggins reliably anyway.

[Cytobel]

Yeah...  Okay, a few points.

-So, about Arca Plasmor's "status chance"...  Let's look at some simple math here:

81.1% x 1.10 = 89.21% chance to proc status, per second.  The Arca Plasmor may have the punch through to hit more than one foe, but so do all the beam weapons when you add punch through (especially Ignus, with it's innate punch through).  If we say that we hit 6 foes, then (6 x 89.21 = 535.26) we get ~5 procs on a crowd.  This means that the only 2 elemental options to take advantage of this would be Gas and Electricity, both of which are somewhat marginal in damage output to single targets.

-I'd talk about status shotguns, but people should understand what those do.  If ANYTHING survives a few hits (as in 3-5 usually) from a built 100% status chance shotgun, it's armor is GONE.  Compare that to the roughly ~30ish (29.4393 with a bit of rounding) shots the Arca Plasmor would take to strip armor from a high-level target.  And, before anything comes up, TRUST ME when I say you'll take more than a few hits to kill high level heavies with this gun.  It did before the nerf, and now...

[By the way, at a 41.8% crit chance you wind up with a 12.54% chance to proc from Hunter Munitions.  Not really all that great in my mind, but you race those odds like a champ, go-getter!]

-Now, let's look at a Soma Prime (because status output doesn't always require high status chance):

37.6% x 15 = 546% status chance, per second.  Better still, this is with only 2 60% elemental/status mods added in, and it includes a relatively standard Argon Scope build, PLUS there's one mod down on these stats (because Rivens aren't relevant).  This means there's space for a punch through mod IN THIS BUILD.

-Alright, how about something FAR less meta and STILL a better crit AND status option that's also a projectile weapon with a possible headshot guarantee, the Buzlok:

Split Chamber, Vigilante Armaments and 2 60% ele/stat mods leaves you with a 46.3% status chance.  Base RoF is 6.25, thus:  46.3% x 6.25 = 289.375% status, per second.

That's more than TRIPLE the status chance of the Arca Plasmor, and yet there's MORE!  As the Buzlok's alt fire makes the projectiles home in on the targeted location, you can guarantee headshots.  That's the plural form, as in "more than one headshot".  Include the sheer number of projectiles and the fact that this gun ACTUALLY is Hunter Munitions viable (BARELY), and you wind up with a gun that out-crits, out status', and generally out-does the Arca Plasmor at higher levels.  Yes, it's single target, and punch through doesn't help it tremendously, but this is still a viable choice when compared to the Arca Plasmor.

The simple conculsion is this:  Arca Plasmor is NOT A STATUS WEAPON, first because the only group-targeting status procs aren't tremendously useful later on (armor and health scaling kill them), and secondly because the low RoF, long reload, and limited ammo pool leave you with little option but to target large packs in the hopes of wringing as many procs out of each shot as possible.  It's beam weapons and status-per-second all over again.

[Cytobel]

@UncleWalrus: Believe you me, I KNOW what the Amprex can do.  The game decided I need 2 Rivens for that silly gun, and I'm NEVER going to complain about that!  Also, I main Volt, and firing an Amprex through an Electric Shield makes entire rooms do the Electric Boogaloo and brings ALL the crits to the yard...

I roll a Viral/Electric/Hunter Munitions Amprex and find that I can kill high-level mobs fairly effectively.  As long as you aim at the toughest target, you'll get a viral proc EVENTUALLY and then it's going to die to bleeds.

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I guess I just don't get why this was done in the first place.  A casual glance told DE there could be an issue with that mod when you combined Harrow and the Arca Plasmor, but there are TONS of other weapon choices that ALSO allow you silly numbers of headshots.  If this was all about that Augment, then BRAVO DE.  Gross Augment in game, good mid-upper level gun out.

What's next?  Amprex can't headshot?  Then what about Argon Scope builds for the Amprex?  How about all the beam weapons?  Why would ANY of them be exempted from this change?  Then there's the Buzlok.  Then there are any of the hitscan rapid-fire guns with low damage and high crit (like the Grakatas or the Somas) that are also abusive with just a pinch of punch through...

It's not about this gun being OP, it's about an OP mod that should have been reviewed before something else in game became a scapegoat.

[Cytobel]

5 hours ago, Kayll said:

I never said anything like that.
The same fix was applied to the tonkor, by this logic if they nerfed the weapons damage by 50% but it was still able to headshot bringing it back to how it is now, you'd probably still be here on the forums complaining cause your overpowered weapon isn't as strong anymore, not anything to do with the mechanics of headshotting.

The Arca Plasmor?  Is this the "overpowered weapon" you're referring to?  I'm a bit confused here, I can't really tell what's going on, so I'll just go back to my KOHM / ACID SOBEK / TIGRIS (et al)/ VAYKOR HEK over here...

Oh, wait, there are a fair few assault rifles and MGs that are pretty goddamn OP too, better...  OH HELL, I almost forgot my BOWS, and I... DAMMIT ALL!!!  Sniper rifles WORK now, and...

Get the point?  And that's just Primaries.  There are so many OP choices that can perform at or WELL ABOVE the level of the Arca Plasmor that it's freaking NATURAL that we'd have a problem with this ONE GUN being singled out for the problems caused by something else entirely!  Scapegoating the Plasmor didn't fix what is breaking the game!

[Cytobel]

4 hours ago, Senguash said:

If you ignore lasting covenant for a second, I think the arca plasmor nerf in isolation is pretty fair and brings it more in line with other shotguns.
It deals less damage than the hek or the tigris but the large aoe more than makes up for that. *snip*

So, thing here is that I can tell you don't generally play upper-end play here.  The Arca Plasmor is a damage-based shotgun with a little crit and a little status thrown in (because ~90% chance for a status proc per second does NOT a status weapon make, and lets not start arguing about crowd procs).  The Vaykor Hek is going to delete things well into the level ~120ish range (no rivens here) and the Tigris, well...  The thing is that the Hek crits better and the Tigris (Prime) is a 100% status shotgun.  In fact, ALL the 100% status shotguns do TERRIBLE things to enemies, and that also includes groups.

Sorry, the Arca Plasmor was a second-tier shotgun at best.  Now it's not even that.  Damage and MARGINAL crid DOES NOT CARRY, even with Hunter Munitions factored in.

No, the Plasmor just lost it's place in Sortie runs for me, sorry.  I've got tons of gear that ACTUALLY WORKS here, and better still it all synergizes with the new Harrow Augment!

[Fallen_Echo]

12 hours ago, TheDefenestrater said:

Why?  It's been 4 months since it was released to broad praise and comments that it was a very well designed, well balanced, strong-but-not-op weapon.  The headshot crits were known from the start as being a major factor in it's overall damage, and helped to offset the horrible handling characteristics of the gun.  How on Earth is it suddenly a bad idea?

Thats what i was talking about.

People come up and defend this senseless nerf because apparently the devs realized it does something they do not want to do anymore. All these white knights come and defend DE for removing one of the main damage source on a weapon because:

1. it was not intented
2. its a bug
3. it shouldnt have done that

And yet the weapon was active for 4 months, if it was too good they could balance it in week 1.

12 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Should they take time and see how things play out or just rush to make changes?

Dude the weapon was known being capatable of this from the start, after 4 months this is not a fix this is a straight nerf.

Should i use the same argument on channelling? How much they want to see things play out before they decide it needs fixin?

[Fallen_Echo]

5 hours ago, peterc3 said:

If anything, the number of threads spawned shows that the nerf was justified.

So if DE decided that from now on Mag has no access to any ways to regenerate energy or gain energy on a mission from any source (pizzas,orbs,teammates all of them) you would say the nerf is justified because a lot of people spam the forums to fix this nonsense?

[peterc3]

12 hours ago, (PS4)Lei-Lei_23 said:

Should DE keep claiming that Warframe is forever in beta, or with the mass congregation of players communing and enjoying Warframe with its many updates and balance passes that it become finally recognized past beta status?

Popular betas are now automatically feature complete? Can betas have too many updates? Balance passes mean something is out of beta?

There are core systems that are continually being changed. The game itself is not done. The game is out of beta when the devs say it is.

5 minutes ago, Fallen_Echo said:

Dude the weapon was known being capatable of this from the start, after 4 months this is not a fix this is a straight nerf.

The augment just went live. Should DE now be forbidden from changing things if the community thinks too much time has passed?

Greg the intern messed up a function call back in U14, but we can't fix it because it's been in-game since then, oh well.

[Man_In_Suitcase]

This plasmor nerf has come just now because of harrow's lasting covenant augment. And in a way I can see their reasoning as it would become a new grossly op'd meta by abusing the plasmor's headshot arc, thus giving a near permanent massive crit buff. It was bound to see it's end like the mirage spamular, and other metas before it...

But my issue is here that DE never really battered an eyelid for near 8 months until lasting covenant, and I'd rather that they don't sink into the mantra of rebalancing weapons around an optional mod aug as it affects many other players who don't use or have harrow. I also feel that they is an acceptable window of time to nerf, rebalance a weapon and the plasmor's had been gone for quite awhile now.

[peterc3]

Just now, Fallen_Echo said:

So if DE decided that from now on Mag has no access to any ways to regenerate energy or gain energy on a mission from any source (pizzas,orbs,teammates all of them) you would say the nerf is justified because a lot of people spam the forums to fix this nonsense?

Because that is equivalent to making a weapon do what they intended it to do, that is spread a status over a group of enemies in a single shot. This would be like Pull ripping the heads off enemies and doing extra damage and DE fixing it to where Pull grabs the enemies' entire body and not do extra damage.

The community only gets upset when they can only kill things 7x over instead of 10. Maybe DE would actually listen if they kept it to a single thread and didn't cry about not doing enough damage to max level Simulacrum enemies.

[Midrib]

Just a clarification because it seems that a lot of people are confused.

Headshots with Arca plasmor doing 0 damage is not intended and it seems to be a bug involving Elemental based weapons ( at least it affected by Gas Chromatic blade Excal when i played last night ) so that's not a part of the nerf just a side effect of the extremely buggy update that they rolled out.  

On the nerf itself though, there's a lot of weapons that are much lower maintenance than the Arca plasmor which are much more powerful and scale much better, so personally I don't really understand where this nerf came from, But It doesn't change much for the Arca plasmor, it'll still remain to be a kickass weapon that mows down groups.