Heat Damage: Is the Unreliable CC Enough?

[SteamlordD]

I would say no. Instead of rabidly denouncing it, though, I'd like to propose a change.

Heat Damage, as it is, is one of the most resisted elements in the game. Its status causes enemies to panic, while taking damage over time. That's all well and good, but the panic is unreliable, and a little bit of DoTs from one of our weakest elements isn't particularly exciting.

So, my idea is this: Heat status could increase damage taken by the afflicted target from other sources of Heat damage. As far as how effective it would need to be, the numbers would need some testing and fiddling with, but if a Heat status increased further Heat damage, it might actually be able to eke out a place in some builds, especially with the changes coming to Ember. Gifting your allies bonus Heat to their weapons wouldn't sound so bad if you were increasing enemy vulnerability with Accelerant and status instances, and with the amount granted by Flash Accelerant and the new Fire Blast combined, it might just be a powerful setup.

Just a thought, anyway.

[AcceptYourDeath]

It is at least a more interesting concept compared to just stacking DoT`s the way we do it with Slash, Toxin, Gas at the moment. If just the fact something deals heat damage would slowly ramp up its damage that would be pretty neat. And it fits perfectly to the fire theme. You know stuff gets hotter the longer it burns 

[BiancaRoughfin]

Heat Damage overall is crap, special effect lasts too little, damage over time too low and doesnt stack. Hope this changes with Damage 3.0.

Making Heat damage stack would be the most important feature for it, allowing it to scale better as it occurs on enemies and also making Ember's skills better.

[TheGrimCorsair]

Heat damage is okay. Heat procs are pretty awful, except when you can constantly re-apply them, such as with Nightwatch Napalm.

[Edit]

Also, it's only reduced by Protoshields, used almost solely by bosses, the Tech Crewman, Sniper Crewman, and Nullifier (with the latter two being essentially made of tissue paper). No other Corpus unit is especially resistant or vulnerable to it. It does bonus damage to every Grineer unit once their armor is gone, and pretty solid bonus damage against the most numerous Infested units while not being at a disadvantage against the rest of their cadre. Some types of Eximus have 50% resistance to all elemental damage, including heat.

 http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Damage_2.0/Heat_Damage

Edited February 10, 2018 by TheGrimCorsair

[Raspberry]

It's rather unfortunate that the only units legitimately vulnerable to heat are the weaker units from Grineer and Infested. Feels almost like heat was designed for noobs to use, and it is logically reasonable, given how fire is universally viewed as dangerous to almost any organic creature. Since we do have mods that go by the name of Volcanic Edge and Thermite Rounds, I would hope that in the future, it will be a better tool to burn through some of the thick armor that higher level Grineer have.

Edited February 9, 2018 by Raspberri
grammar

[Terrornaut]

Any buffs to heat damage would be welcome to me. Being able to multiply my heat damage by 7x, or in cases of melee, 11x before combo multipliers and such, is already fantastic.  If that's a headshot also, or happens to get multiplied by any external sources, its amazing.

+50% damage vs unarmored targets is handy.  <0% on only shields is not good, but corpus don't have a ton of hp at higher levels anyways.

There are weapons you can fire 2 shots from and strip armor, so, for me as an Ember player, being able to put heat damage on say a Tigris P (I use other weps mainly though) and then multiply a large percentage of that weapon's damage by 7...which far, far, far outpaces radioactive vs a heavy grineer unit's 75% bonus, for example.  Its nice, and very destructive.

But more than 2-4 sec of CC would be cool.  It would also just be nonsensical on Ember who is built to inflict it constantly, leaving nearby enemies with maybe .5 sec to get a shot off before panicking/falling to the floor again.

This is just for Ember though.  But then again, you have one frame who is entirely built around this effect.  How to change?  Its possible they would change Ember's Accelerant after making a big change to heat, because anything increased in the damage direction would just be crazed and you'd pretty much be running around with an aura of finisher damage (which is basically a less efficient Ash post upcoming update).  Affecting armor or scaling off of armor is also damage.  So CC is the only way it can be adjusted.  If it reduced accuracy while it was affecting targets (the longer it burns), I could settle for that.

Honestly I don't think it really needs changing, but that's from Ember's perspective.  I know an entire damage type probably takes priority over a single warframe, so Accelerant will probably be changed at some point to work around this.