Leveling, Progression, Damage, And The Current Mod System.

[notionphil]

Everyone is totally missing the (valid) point of this thread.

 

OP wants to remove those REQURED mods, not to nerf you, or negate your hard work in maxing them. OP wants us to have actual freedom in creating builds.

 

EX: choose between metal augur and stun (tactical choice, difference in playstyle). Not between more damage and metal augur (duh, dmg is always better)

[cataclysm2]

You know as well as i do that the health of enemies in this game (and any other game for that matter) is balanced against the amount of dmg the player can output. If you think pummelling a high level mob is boring now, it still will be when you reduce all the dmg improving mods and reduce the enemies health in accordance. Having more utility mods will not enhance gameplay.

 

By crap mods i mean duplicates of ones you have already maxed (particularly ability mods that u get in droves), or mods for frames/weapons u don't have or wont use and mods that do not suit your weapon (for example, crit % and crit dmg mods for a gun that has 2.5% base crit chance are useless)

An easy, off-the-top-of-my-head solution is to add something to the end-of-mission screen. A small box you can tick that says "sell this mod when I close the screen", with an option to auto-sell mods unless you deliberately uncheck the box of a particular mod.

That does give players more credits, but it solves the problem of having too many "useless" mods.

I dont see how this solves anything. It wasn't even a problem to begin with. If you have mods u deem as crap, u fuse them in to something u like. Done. 

[Tempera]

You know as well as i do that the health of enemies in this game (and any other game for that matter) is balanced against the amount of dmg the player can output. If you think pummelling a high level mob is boring now, it still will be when you reduce all the dmg improving mods and reduce the enemies health in accordance. Having more utility mods will not enhance gameplay.

Yeah. Except, the thing is, there's no way for the devs to actually tell this right now.

 

No, go on. Tell me. How much damage can I output on Pluto? You don't need to know my gear, or my mods. All you need to know is I have a Rank 30 Excalibur. Tell me, right now. What damage can I output on Pluto?

[MDaen]

You know as well as i do that the health of enemies in this game (and any other game for that matter) is balanced against the amount of dmg the player can output. If you think pummelling a high level mob is boring now, it still will be when you reduce all the dmg improving mods and reduce the enemies health in accordance. Having more utility mods will not enhance gameplay.

 

In regards to the balance, you're correct. However, the strategies an AI program executes and the defenses it will utilize are also balanced around the number of options that are available to a player in a given scenario, and must be balanced in a way that all players can feasibly overcome these challenges. Adding new mods that increase player utility and offer new functionality to warframes and weapons alike offers players of all frames a plethora of new options for dealing with various situations. High level encounters can be tuned to then require players to rely less on their brute force and more on their cunning and their strategic use of their abilities, their modified weapons, and their newfound utility. Players are rewarded for teaming up with friends and coordinating tactics to overcome a larger number of challenges.

 

Utility directly combats the brute force play style. Just as increasing player damage requires increasing mob survivability, increasing player utility requires an increase to enemy utility and enemy AI. A change to mods will require a serious rebalance that goes far beyond adjusting health and armor values (which, really, is why I'm interested in this type of change.)

[neKroMancer]

I think that the current mod system is largely responsible for the powercreep in Warframe. However, like many other problems, it's multifactorial. Changing one system at a time won't make the game better without changing other aspects at the same time.

In weapon, we have many mods give us power which is fine. However, when the game turn itelf into putting as many damage mods as possible into a weapon - this actually limit player's choice and give birth to powercreep at the same time. DE have to factor player who fit every available damage mods into weapon at the same time everytime they balance the game. Number got inflated without much meaning and doesn't give us much choice.

It's just using a bigger gun to blow bigger things up.

In frame, it's mostly redirection and vitality. There is no other effective ways to increase defense capability of frames except these two mods. Players are encouraged/forced to increase their rank in order to withstand AI damage. While player can use cover to reduce damage taken, most of the time you're going to face 10+ AI that spawn both in front of you and behind you. Cover simply can't negate damage from multiple directions. Therefore, choice is taken away from player and number got increase, again, without meaning.

Now, it's about a bigger shield to withstand a bigger club.

As I stated above, it's but one part of the game which required attention during the timespan between now and November, before the release of PS4.

[BenHoliday]

I think he's talking about Void T3 missions man.

 

I know exactly what he was talking about. Serration and Split Chamber can be found without a whole lot of work by farming the correct faction of defense missions, in which case there is a fair chance to see them as a mission reward. That is what I was trying to inform him about.

 

The problem with your "solution" is this: if it is implemented then we won't need damage mods at all. Why bother maxing Serration if it only gives me 20% more damage?

 

That is the point of this thread, yes.

It's not impossible to overcome, though. Take the Multishot solution MJ12 proposed, and do something similar: Sacrifice weapon accuracy in order to increase firing rate, or sacrifice total ammo capacity to increase magazine capacity. The benefits would still outweigh the sacrifice, but it no longer becomes automatically better.

 

That's not the only answer to the problem, but it's one answer, and it's the first one I thought of.

 

So what you really want is for mods to grant very little net power, but to mostly shift it around (i.e. this mod raises damage but reduces accuracy, that mod raises fire rate but reduces reload speed, that one raises reload speed but reduces mag size, etc.etc.)

 

The whole point of leveling a weapon to 30, getting a potato for it, and Forma'ing it is to be able to increase that weapon's potential power significantly. Any change that makes mods as weak as the changes you propose would stop all use of Forma on weapons, and highly reduce the necessity of the potato as well, because mods would add very little power. Why Forma a weapon to get 5% more damage once you max it again, when in the meantime the weapon is worthless up until level 20+?

 

I understand why you have problems with endgame enemy HP and armor scaling, but the best way to fix those problems is to go discuss THOSE problems rather than trying to fix them indirectly by changing (and possibly ruining) something else.

 

You are incorrect that my solution replaces one "must have" with another. A properly crafted system will always have mods that are more advantageous than others for the situations they were crafted for.

 

In the OP it was suggested to nerf damage mods and move their contributions to weapon affinity levels, with no mention of changes to utility mods. This would mean instead of Damage, AP, Multishot, and elementals being "must-haves," you'd get nearly the same damage without installing mods at all, and instead you would use fire rate, mag size, reload speed, and ammo mutator (which combined would increase DPS while decreasing time spent reloading and eliminating ammo limitations.)

 

A properly crafted system should mean that damage mods are a bit more balanced with utility mods, yes, but the proposed change would swing too far in the other direction, with the weakest utility mods being at least twice as powerful as their direct damage counterparts. The fact that the proposed change will make damage mods useless has yet to be denied (in fact it has been offhandedly confirmed to be the point of this thread.) So if damage mods are made useless, then explain why I should not simply replace them with the next four best mods?

 

There will always be some mods that are better or worse for a particular weapon choice. Does my Sobek need a bigger magazine? No, I never empty the magazine except on bosses (though reload speed would be nice.) Should I use crit mods on my Kunai? Of course not. It is impossible to design a system where everything is balanced, and there are no options that are clearly better than other options, at least once you start talking about specific situations (Ex: most combat takes place closer than 50m, therefore weapon performance at >50m largely doesn't matter.) But the bottom line is this: the mod system is fine, it is the armor scaling that people should be concerned about.

[MJ12]

I know exactly what he was talking about. Serration and Split Chamber can be found without a whole lot of work by farming the correct faction of defense missions, in which case there is a fair chance to see them as a mission reward. That is what I was trying to inform him about.

 

Under a large enough sample size, even very unlikely events will happen.

 

There will be players who spend hours with gimped weapons because they can't find damage boosting mods. This is critical because mods are where nearly 90+% of your damage comes from towards the endgame.

 

So what you really want is for mods to grant very little net power, but to mostly shift it around (i.e. this mod raises damage but reduces accuracy, that mod raises fire rate but reduces reload speed, that one raises reload speed but reduces mag size, etc.etc.)

 

The whole point of leveling a weapon to 30, getting a potato for it, and Forma'ing it is to be able to increase that weapon's potential power significantly. Any change that makes mods as weak as the changes you propose would stop all use of Forma on weapons, and highly reduce the necessity of the potato as well, because mods would add very little power. Why Forma a weapon to get 5% more damage once you max it again, when in the meantime the weapon is worthless up until level 20+?

 

I understand why you have problems with endgame enemy HP and armor scaling, but the best way to fix those problems is to go discuss THOSE problems rather than trying to fix them indirectly by changing (and possibly ruining) something else.

 

Why Forma a weapon to get 5% more damage once you max it again? Why indeed. I ask myself this question even now because honestly, Forma is largely unnecessary. However, people sometimes want that extra effectiveness boost. If Serration/Hornet Strike is balanced to be 20% of the damage of a theoretical max Serration + Level weapon, that's actually a +25% damage boost over a fully leveled weapon. So we'll use Hornet Strike because it's nice and even. Your level-ups increase the weapon's damage to roughly 2.5x normal, while Serration gives you roughly 0.5x extra damage, or 50%. 5% a level for Serration isn't insignificant, especially in the early levels.

 

Utility mods being made far more useful because damage mods are now no longer necessary is icing on the cake. Knowing how things scale is a significant benefit, the fact that it makes the mod system a mod system and increases the effectiveness of utility mods is just more reason as to why this change is fantastic and should be implemented ASAP.

[direcyphre]

After reading through the original post and your subsequent responses, I can see a few things wrong with your proposed solution:

First, you are under the assumption that we need a structured scaling of difficulty and damage output, as some means of having DE develop content based upon this progressive scaling. This is misguided at best, as one does not simply traverse all the systems and their nodes in one sweep, nor does everyone progress in the same fashion. It is expected that players replay the same planets over and over, whether to get a rare mod drop, harvest resources, or farming a boss so they can make more warframes. If you propose everyone have the same predictable damage output by the time we reach Pluto, you are suddenly forgetting that there would be no playable end-game. By that I mean currently people return to try their hand at high level endless defense.

 

If everyone had the same damage output by the time they reach Pluto (where you would have maxed weapons/mods/warframes), Endless defense after a certain wave would go from difficult to impossible. "But cyphre, there is already a problem with that being the only end-game content!" And I would say I don't disagree, and there will be more content to come, but this isn't a traditional MMORPG. In traditional MMO's, people level and hope to get rare drops after running their raids or dungeons. However, once they max their character, all they are waiting for is yet another increase in the level cap and new content introduced fit for that particular level range. This is evidenced in numerous MMORPG's because there is only so much you can do for the end-game. The difference here is that we are hoping for rare mod drops because those are the things that define our character builds. If you were to try and base our builds on the level of the weapon, something else would have to drastically change to make this game last longer than 20 hours: the rate at which weapons gain levels. If you dumb down mods and make it level dependent, there is no longer anything to scale and no content to plow through. In the end, all MMO end-game content solely rests on the same rare drops, large differences in damage-scaling, and constant raiding to get the best gear out there (i.e. finding mods and getting them as high level as possible).

 

This all above and beyond the fact that if you don't have mods like Serration by Pluto, you need to go back and keep at it because it's not that rare. Once you've run enough missions to build and max out additional weapons and warframes, you'll have run into such mods at least once. Multi-shot is probably a little more rare depending on the missions commonly run, but that's part of the experience in character advancement: Seeking out the rare!

 

The second issue with your argument seems to fall upon wanting a system similar to pre-Update 7, but I'm not quite sure you understand how it worked and why it didn't work. You see, we still had mods back then. Fewer people may have had 90%+ multishot mods, but there was nothing balanced about it, and drops were a lot less predictable. Sure, you want to dumb down mods so that they don't effect you as much, but that's a separate problem as noted in an earlier paragraph. If damage didn't scale as far as it does, there would be even less reason to bother supercharging it in order to get the most of the mod points. Such microscopic differences wouldn't feel like Player progression. There also weren't Endless Defense missions to see how enemies scaled beyond standard mission parameters.

 

 

In the end, we are given a generous 8 slots for weapons, so everyone is free to slot what they want, especially at lower levels. The only real problem, as others have stated, is the way in which enemies' health/armor scale and additional end-game content besides Endless Defense.

[BenHoliday]

Under a large enough sample size, even very unlikely events will happen.

 

There will be players who spend hours with gimped weapons because they can't find damage boosting mods. This is critical because mods are where nearly 90+% of your damage comes from towards the endgame.

 

I'm well aware that rare events can and do happen. But you can't tell me that someone who is actively farming won't eventually earn at least one complete weapon set that has multishot and damage. It took me awhile to get rifle and shotgun multishot, but long before that I had it (and hornet strike) for the pistol. I may not have been able to use rifles in T3, but there are plenty of worthwhile pistols (more so now with the ammo mutator mods.)

 

Why Forma a weapon to get 5% more damage once you max it again? Why indeed. I ask myself this question even now because honestly, Forma is largely unnecessary.

 

Eh, it is and it isn't. You don't need to Forma a weapon, but often times it gives you enough space to put the utility mods you want on a weapon without sacrificing damage. The Sobek is a good weapon, but if you've got no room for Tactical Pump because you're all damage, that reload speed will get annoying eventually. The proposed solution here would reduce the number of mods that are worth polarizing for because the mods that are currently the best will no longer be worth equipping.

 

 

Utility mods being made far more useful because damage mods are now no longer necessary is icing on the cake.

 

So you're admitting that you want to completely destroy damage mods in order to make utility mods more useful? You're better off arguing to improve utility mods, as most of them don't add a large percentage per rank. Balancing the system by improving the weak mods would work better than destroying part of it to "improve" the rest.

[xenapan]

Because, quite simply, the system they've changed to is even worse.

 

It leads to a schizophrenic level of progression over the course of the game. As I noted... in the post directly above your own, players can currently have from, well... 20 damage per bullet on a Braton, to 225 damage per bullet on a Braton, with an additional 90% chance to fire another bullet for the same damage, for an effective 427 damage per shot. That's a variation of 407 damage per shot.

 

Consider just the Serration mod. You can level it ten times. That's a whole bloody lot of variation in the damage a player could be dealing with just a Braton, due purely to one mod.

 

Have Serration at just Rank 9 equates to only 215 damage per bullet, for 408 damage. Have Serration at Rank 5, Stormbringer at Rank 2, and Hellfire at Rank 4, and you're dealing only 83 damage a bullet.

 

That's wildly inconsistent, and there's no given loadout a player can be expected to have by the time they get to a given planet due to the RNG system of mod drops.

 

Thus, DE cannot design levels/planets based on what they expect players to have by this point. Which leads to a lot of inconcistency and annoyance on the part of people with bad luck, as they're forced to go back to lower level planets and grind until they get a Serration and Hellfire or whatever.

How is it inconsistent?  Its an uncommon mod, not rare to find, shows up as a static reward in t1+2 defense missions, drops from any enemy. Yes there is variation but thats also indicated by progress. Just because you don't get the serration mod "immediately" is no cause for concern. You simply keep killing stuff at lower levels. Plus there are multiple other mods out there that help damage scale. multishot, 4 elements, fire rate. All of which increase your DPS. RNG is RNG players DONT need a set loadout. plus you have THREE weapons. not to mention warframe powers. 11/13 warframes have a press 4 to kill all small enemies button. thats the big equalizer. cause guess what... it doesn't require your weapon for that. just smart energy use. It isnt inconsistent or annoying to expect players to "go back and grind lower planets" it means they arent ready for the next stage. thats THEIR problem. There IS a fair amount of grind involved. If you dont like grinding well too bad. You cant expect to play each node on each planet ONCE and keep moving on till the end. You are EXPECTED to keep running missions to accumulate credits/mods/resources. And its not inconsistent because ANY mod can be fused into other mods. As long as you get the FIRST one, you can just fuse it up.

 

Plus you totally ignore the biggest factor in the game. ITS A TEAM GAME. you don't need to deal all the damage. you dont need to even deal half the damage. sure it doesn't feel great relying on your TEAMMATES but theres 4 of you for a reason. and frankly the number of bratons i STILL see being used means yes.. you CAN still keep using it. I've seen people show screenshots for 3-5 forma bratons. Sure YOURS isnt as powerful as theirs. But they EARNED theirs. They put the time in and grinded for mods and credits to fuse their serration up.

 

What the mod system REALLY did? was make it so you dont need to go BACK to mercury every time you get a new weapon. You rank it up, you plug in the mod, its usable. it might not be immediately ready for endgame stuff but thats kind of the point. power that you can transfer around to some degree.

[Tempera]

After reading through the original post and your subsequent responses, I can see a few things wrong with your proposed solution:If you propose everyone have the same predictable damage output by the time we reach Pluto, you are suddenly forgetting that there would be no playable end-game. By that I mean currently people return to try their hand at high level endless defense.

The idea would, of course, pretty much have to come side-by-side with some actual endgame content. ED missions in the void aren't a very good substitute for actual endgame content outside of that.

 

I'm well aware that rare events can and do happen. But you can't tell me that someone who is actively farming won't eventually earn at least one complete weapon set that has multishot and damage.

The idea that one has to farm is an idea that bothers me a great deal.

 

Grinding is great from a game designer's perspective; it keeps people playing the game for a long time.

 

It's also a really poor idea, though, as it keeps people playing the same content over, and over, and over, and over. And, believe it or not, most people don't find that fun.

 

So, yes, yet another point of this idea is that it cuts down on the necessity of grind, as people don't need to grind 1000+ missions for a Multishot mod and fifty thousand mods to level Serration to rank 10.

[BenHoliday]

The idea that one has to farm is an idea that bothers me a great deal.

It's also a really poor idea, though, as it keeps people playing the same content over, and over, and over, and over. And, believe it or not, most people don't find that fun.

 

So, yes, yet another point of this idea is that it cuts down on the necessity of grind, as people don't need to grind 1000+ missions for a Multishot mod and fifty thousand mods to level Serration to rank 10.

 

From what I remember, multishot mods were around the 3-7% reward chance range (not counting chances for it to drop in the actual mission.) Whatever percentage it actually was, that's the chance for it to be the multishot mod every 5 waves of defense. If we say the chance is 3%, and you always quit after wave 5 because you can't handle wave 10, then you have a 4.7% chance of not getting one after 100 missions, and a 0.000000000005911% of not getting the mod after 1000 missions.

 

Which is to say that I'm sure some people have gone through 100 possible rewards and not gotten the multishot they were looking for, but I doubt very many players have gone through the "1000+" you say they'd need to grind (and in any case in that time they'd also acquire plenty of other worthwhile rewards.) That said, if you're treating it as a farm as opposed to an enjoyable activity that also has the chance to reward you with the mod you're looking for, then this game is not for you.

 

The repeat of mission content is a part of this game. For me the missions aren't the content I'm consuming. Instead it is the new weapons and warframes that I acquire and try out (mostly the warframes, as each frame has different strengths and weaknesses, as well as different powers.) If I had more friends that I played with, then it would also be an experience to share with friends such as I do when I play Borderlands with my wife.

 

If you want a game that always presents new content, go play CoD campaign. Once it runs out in 10 hours, maybe you'll understand why in some games content can be played through multiple times in different ways (in this case, different warframes and weapons,) else the game is abysmally short.

[Tempera]

From what I remember, multishot mods were around the 3-7% reward chance range (not counting chances for it to drop in the actual mission.)

It's 2.21% chance on T3 Defence missions.

 

Of course, to get to T3 Defence missions, you have to unlock the planets, get the weapons, get the Warframes, etc. And then you have to play through dozens and dozens of T3 Defence missions to get a chance of it dropping. (Assuming you play through to Wave 10 each time, that's still less than a 5% chance per mission to get a particular given mod.)

 

The repeat of mission content is a part of this game.

It's pretty much the worst part of it, as it stands.

 

There's no... evolution. Or dynamic...osity. Whatever the word would be.

 

The missions don't evolve. There's not enough factors- enemy intelligence, enemy types, environmental factors, and so on- to allow missions to be meaningfully different from each other, even over the short term. Once you're out of Mercury, where everything is new, pretty much every mission plays the same as each other. Every Grineer Sabotage mission plays like every other Grineer Sabotage mission, every Corpus Spy mission plays like every other Corpus Spy mission, etc.

 

What I was aiming to do with this topic in part was to give DE a base to work with. They could look at each planet and think, "Okay, they should be able to deal roughly 200-250 DPS here. We'll give mooks 300 HP and heavies 800." instead of looking at each planet and thinking, "Okay, they might be able to deal anywhere from 400 to 1600 DPS here. We'll give mooks 2000 HP and heavies 5000 just to be on the safe side."

 

Which then allows them to balance things around a lot more than just raw/expected health/damage, for one.

 

Of course, it doesn't quite work that way, as not all weapons deal consistent amounts of DPS even if they all had equivalent rates of damage growth. But then, I'm not advocating to make every weapon deal exactly the same damage.

 

(The other thing I'm advocating for is to just remove the damage mods entirely, funneling them into the base weapon, so that other mods can then actually be useful, instead of just taking up the space that you could be using on Stormbringer instead.)

 

But, well, I don't think people are actually reading what I'm writing anyway, in favour of just reading whatever they think I'm writing into whatever I'm actually writing. So, whatever.

[MJ12]

It's a real pity, because something like this could be fantastic, except everyone's stuck on the sunk cost fallacy so hard and the natural human resistance to change.

 

Yes, the current mod system 'works'. But it's a really awful level-up mechanic (imagine in a RPG if you had to grind for levels to increase stats and that was all level-ups did, which did nothing but let you equip better gear, which was RNG dropped and couldn't be bought from shops so you could get unlucky and have a level 9999 character only as strong as a level 1 one. That's Warframe right now). I made threads about how it was an awful levelup mechanic way back in Update 7, and why implementing passive levelup damage/resistance increases was practically necessary for a fun game with an interesting level curve.

 

Only half of it was ever implemented.

[BenHoliday]

It's 2.21% chance on T3 Defence missions.

 

Ok, then, it's a little less than a 10% chance to not get your mod in one hundred runs, and a bit less than a 0.00000002% chance to not get one in a thousand runs. For every player who doesn't get multishot in 100 runs, there are 9 more who do. For every player who doesn't get multishot in 1000 runs, there are 5 MILLION more who do. It's nice to have the right numbers, but either way people don't need to do "1000+ runs" to get their mods.

 

As for the difficulty of getting to T3 defense missions ... have you heard of clans? It's not shameful to ask for help sometimes. Another useful solution is to farm for a warframe that has effective abilities for defense, such as frost, nyx, vauban, etc. etc. In a group of four, having the right mix of frames matters a heck of a lot more than having four people with the best weapons.

 

And did you read nothing I said about new content being the weapons and frames, rather than missions? Missions are repeatable for a reason, which is why there is so much variety between weapons and warframes.

 

 

It's a real pity, because something like this could be fantastic, except everyone's stuck on the sunk cost fallacy so hard and the natural human resistance to change.

 

To be fair, a big part of it is simple: a lot of people have worked hard to get those mods and level them up. Changing the system to be more balanced is fine, changing the system to completely destroy damage mods is not.

 

And of course, neither of you have discussed how to handle the use of Forma if such a system gets implemented. Namely that, instead of being able to use the polarized slots to get moderate power from potato'd weapons at low to mid levels, you will have to go back to mercury until that weapon is level 10, venus until that weapon is level 20, and so forth because weapon power is based on level only. Sections of the game don't exist alone, you really do need to think about how it affects other parts by making changes.

Edited August 7, 2013 by BenHoliday