Power Creep, What Really Is The Problem.

[PyroPaul]

Power Creep is a term that has been thrown around a lot as of late, and rightfully so as it is to games as what inflation is to economy.   And the reason it is a problem is because Power Creep is a numerical based growth of power as things get more difficult.   Rather then looking at a weapons functionality, utility, and purpose, the players look at the effective DPS and use that as the end-all-be-all stat that defines it's usage or not.   Which means if it don't got the Dps, it ain't in your inventory...

 

But is that really the problem?   Or is that the unfortunate outcome of another problem?

 

I propose to you think this-

If an Ancient could only be reliably killed quickly with melee through stuns, knock downs and execution moves... If Grineer Armor was Ablative rather then Mitigating... If Corpus Shields removed all over damage on breaking... would a guns DPS be even considered?

 

Power Creep is only a problem in that the game is only using Numerical Values to identify individual power.   a Level 50 mob has X health and deal's Y damage per second.   There for you have to be able deal that amount of damage and survive that damage output in order to counter them, which means you only consider weapons and warframes capable of granting you such options. 

 

and i believe THAT is what the problem is...

 

to fix it.

Armor needs to be re-worked to be Ablative (removes a Value of damage per shot rather then a % of damage)

Melee combo's, sync'd combat, and style kills should be looked into and added.

Conditional weak points and damage alteration due their destruction.

 

This doesn't remove EHP (effective hit points) nor the math-crunching players that work on optimized DPS output, but instead Adds AHP (Actual hit points), a much lower value which is hidden behind hoops that the player must 'jump' through so to speak. 

[RoboDoge]

You are to smart for this forums. Are you a wizard?

 

I think that DE is working on style kills, new animations for melee strikes.

 

Armor scaling in WF is pain in the &#!. It makes defense mission past wave 40 boring. Not hard, but boring. Look at T3 defence, after wave 10 you get bored, mobs are still killable but it takes some time to kill them. I am not asking for easier kills nor damage buffs, but we need proper scaling of enemies.

 

Something that would give us excitement and sense of achievement with higher level bosses.

[BadAimbot]

Flat damage reduction has the same problem as what we have now, except instead of AI weapons dominating it's high damage per shot weapons. Other ideas are fine.

[PyroPaul]

Ultimately yes, almost all of the suggestions mentioned favor one damage method over the other, the shield favoring rof while the armor favors the raw damage output. It is only the melee idea which effectively ignores EPH as it stands.

But these are the first steps, individual weak spotting, armor/shield degeneration, you know... Shoot here and this chunk of armor falls off exposing a normal damage spot. Damage this and his shields don't regenerate. Hit this and he stumbles over for a few seconds... So individuals can use know how, skill and even team work to crush opposition rather then just overwhelming fire power.

[Mietz]

Ultimately yes, almost all of the suggestions mentioned favor one damage method over the other, the shield favoring rof while the armor favors the raw damage output. It is only the melee idea which effectively ignores EPH as it stands.

But these are the first steps, individual weak spotting, armor/shield degeneration, you know... Shoot here and this chunk of armor falls off exposing a normal damage spot. Damage this and his shields don't regenerate. Hit this and he stumbles over for a few seconds... So individuals can use know how, skill and even team work to crush opposition rather then just overwhelming fire power.

 

This would work well with my proposed melee enhancement system where continuous usage/comboing of enemies without being staggered/hit would temporarily increase melee damage.

It would allow you to style on an enemy even with sub-par weaponry and conceivably win.

[PyroPaul]

to re-iterate,  In this game the biggest problem that causes 'Power Creep' is EHP and EDPS (effective hitpoints/dps).

 

rather then looking at Actual and Potential of each and have them effected by specific pieces of gear, weapons, or abilities the game simply continues to throw down modifiers which compound the problem of the 'Effective' value.   Armor is a prime example of this because even if a mob has a health value of 100, if his armor mitigates all but one point of incoming damage, he may as well have a health value of 1000, as it is effectively the same.   Hence the complaint of Bullet Sponges against higher level mobs as they mitigate so much damage and have such high effective health values that you're acting more like a jack-hammer against a concrete slab then a warrior against an armored foe.

 

although it may take a little work and extra programming, the alteration of the games current health and damage system to have a mixture of Actual, Potential, and Effective damage and health can result in a less severe power creep.  

 

which is the problem that arises from this... you literally have to, from the ground up, re-consider and alter the damage and health mechanics of the game which creates a whole network of conflicts and issues.

 

The suggestion of Ablative Armor is a type of work around to alivate some problems.

 

with Ablative armor values in place, you can then create resistances and weaknesses based on your damage types.

so say, we have Generic Armor type which removes 20 damage of the shot per impact...  which means that person is bullet proof against most of the automatic weapons in the game.   but at the same time, we can then make thermal type damage outright ignore generic armors ablative effect... we can make explosive damage actually amplify the damage output...   

[Bakercompany86]

The problem, is that the entire basis of progression of this game is getting more powerful.  Except you're not really getting more powerful in regards to your appropriate level content.  You're simply keeping up.  So while you can go obliterate old content, the new content won't give you any real sense of progression.

 

You add damage because you have to.  You don't get to add fun diverse effects to your abilities or weapons.  It's just spit out enough damage with enough armor bypass to win.  Nothing creative about it.  Everyone has to do the same thing.

 

So in reality, we're all putting in all of these hours to do the exact same thing.  "Oh yay another level on my XX weapon, time to bump up serration another tick".  

 

Then you go fight the exact same enemies, with absolutely zero difference.  I would love to substitute the damage progression that isn't really progression at all, for more creative effects on your weapons.  Effects that allow far more creative customization than simply more damage, which is about as boring as it gets.

[Elhazzared]

I don't belive this idea would solve any of your percived problems, all it would do is depending on the faction you'd face, you'd have a different weapon set to deal with them but other than that it would still boil down to DPS, DPS in the form of high damage output or high rate of fire. At the end of the day this means nothing would truly change and that is because of a much simpler design flaw than EHP. Weapons are made solely on the purpose of doing damage. They aren't made with real special abillities which would give them an utilitarian usage... Of course the reason why they also don't have a real utilitarian usage is because you're limited to 1 mellee weapon, 1 main weapon and one side arm. It does not bothers me but it removes utilitarian from the equasion making the warframes carry that role specificly with their abillities.

 

So the answer isn't as simple as it looks and quite frankly the problem of enemies at high level absorving a ton of damage comes from (as said before) incredibly high damage resistences. This could be solved in a much simpler way which would be, damage resistences have a cap, then only HP would increase with levels but not in a suficiently significant way as to make 4 people unload their weapons multiple times just to kill it.

 

There also should be a so called scaling system for high level enemies and abillities where as an example. If an ultimate is enough to kill evey single weak mob at the beggining of the level, then no matter how high you go then same abillity should still kill those mobs even if they were 100 levels above the starting level. Similarly, if the said abillity takes half the life of a strong enemy at the beggining of the level, it should scale to take the same amount of life of that enemy at high levels.

 

By doing this you remove the brick wall problems and it's a farly simple thing to do as far as DE's work... Now this also means that you'd need a more proper scaling in reguards to enemy spawn numbers relative to the numbers of players in the battle... Probably like. 1 player = 1.0 enemies. 2 players = 1.6 enemies. 3 players = 2.3 enemies. 4 players = 3.0 enemies.

 

To be noted as well that defense missions would need to be substancially changed so that decoys and players would get target prioritisation in such way that so long as they were with a certain range of the pod, the pod would never be attacked over a player since mobs are getting much larger (excep if it was impossible to attack the players protecting the pod like someone on a crate fighting infested). Similarly, mobile defense missions would benefict from that and they should have the original numbers highly reduced (except in the corpus case which is the only done right as far as numbers are concerned).

[Manly_McManface]

You're idea on shields and armor... pretty good ideas. Not 100% sure what you meant talking about ancients, but hey, heres a +1. 

Edited August 8, 2013 by Shamefulprawn41

[Destro6677]

+1 for this. I'd really like to see 'shoot the armor off and focus fire that part' style of gameplay.

 

And different armor/shields/health scaling systems for different factions.

 

Edit: As an afterthought, how would armor ignore weapons interact with this system?

 

Would they stay the same or would they instead have a % chance to deal direct health damage?

Edited August 8, 2013 by Destro6677

[PyroPaul]

There is a point of discussion in the fact that weapon's all around are designed to fill one single role- to kill; which in turn kind of mitigates their overall effectiveness to a primarily numbers driven equation.     but just because that is the primary role does not mean that it is the Only Role said weapons can fill,  we've already seen some degree of experimentation with weapons such as the Dread and several melee weapons which allows for much more intresting and varied methodology of attack resulting in different over all outcomes...

 

adding 'secondary' flavors to weapons could very well add 'utility' to a weapons effectiveness while still maintaining that damage is one of the primary outputs it is meant for.   Shotguns doing knock-down if X% of pellets hit.  Sniper Rifles penetrating several bodies allowing for insane damage potential.  Assault Rifles's staggering allowing crowd control....    These things all kind of exist in game but are masked underneath the veils of elemental damage and mod effects...

 

such changes would be some what difficult and require a large degree and time of balancing, but much like the EHP's, monitoring and modifying the EDPS is just as important.

[TheHeraldXII]

I think that while those ideas are cool it's a complicated fix for a simple problem. Well, in my opinion 2 problems. Maybe 3 if we include the wonky armour scaling.

The first problem is that DPS calculations are beholden as gods in this game for some reason whereas really they don't mean much. I use a wide range of weapons, having used almost every ranged weapon in the game, I found that the best DPS weapons weren't the ones that were most effective. Range and accuracy are just as important as damage, if you can be bothered repositioning yourself to take advantage of it.

 

The second is that there are straight up too many damage mods. For most weapons you could fill up every single slot on the weapons with damage mods and there aren't enough points to spend on it. If damage mods were more condensed we could easily look at variation in our builds without thinking "I'd love to, but if I don't stack damage the enemies will scale out of control". High RoF weapons are great with stun, shotguns are near guaranteed to stun enemies if you put the mod on. If we had the slots/points to spare, those weapons could fulfil that role.

Also if there were more proper "utility" mods other than stun, puncture and zoom, then we could take a look at making weapons fit certain roles instead of just killing enemies faster or more safely.

 

As a last little note, I 100% support the idea of stunlocky-combo kills for melee.