Please Remove Polarities from Stances

[DiabolusUrsus]

So, as many of us know Scythe type weapons will be switched to use Heavy Blade stances sometime soon-ish.

Great, it actually looks pretty neat.

Shame I just forma'd my Hate to fit Stalking Fan (which is actually pretty decent) and 3/5 Scythes currently in-game have Zenurik as a base polarity anyway. There are no Heavy Blade stances with Zenurik, and the best ones are Vazarin!

Is there even a reason why stances need to have polarities? Why should players be discouraged from freely swapping between movesets? There's not even any seeming rhyme or reason to the selection of a polarity.

So... how about removing the polarities and just standardizing the capacity bonus to 14 for having a stance equipped (or even reducing it to 9 considering it's entirely excessive for most builds anyhow)?

I understand and support counter-balancing the benefits of specialization, but when it comes to melee stances and auras I don't think there is much counter-balancing to be done. Select stances are already domineeringly powerful in comparison to others, and when you have entire weapon classes (like Nikanas) that can swap through all their available stances it doesn't seem to make any sense. Heck, look at Longswords - the crappy stance is Unairu and the decent stances are all Madurai! At that point it's just "This sword requires a forma; this one doesn't."

Please consider abandoning such pointless restrictions on melee modding flexibility.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

No

[ArchPhaeton]

Yes.

[DDixon286]

11 minutes ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

No

Agreed....just no

[DiabolusUrsus]

41 minutes ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

No

 

29 minutes ago, DDixon286 said:

Agreed....just no

Please, explain.

Do you feel this is an overpowered suggestion?

Do you not want to risk losing the 14 mod capacity?

What is the problem here?

[Nykerios]

2 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Shame I just forma'd my Hate to fit Stalking Fan

 

1 hour ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

What is the problem here?

Your "problem" is DE's way of keeping people playing. You want to use a stance that doesn't match? Either stick it on as-is and miss out on capacity, or forma it to make it fit. Ta-da, you're either paying to get forma or playing the game to farm and build forma, then re-leveling the weapon. They're not going to change it for anyone's convenience.

[DiabolusUrsus]

1 hour ago, --Q--Stryker said:

Your "problem" is DE's way of keeping people playing. You want to use a stance that doesn't match? Either stick it on as-is and miss out on capacity, or forma it to make it fit. Ta-da, you're either paying to get forma or playing the game to farm and build forma, then re-leveling the weapon. They're not going to change it for anyone's convenience.

Considering the time invested in releveling a Forma'd weapon is <30 minutes without booster for established players, I don't find this to be all that compelling.

Grinding for Credits/Endo keeps people playing. Grinding primes keeps people playing. Grinding Rivens keeps people playing. Grinding all sorts of things keeps people playing, and you're going to have a hard time convincing me that one slot on one class of weapons is going to make all that big of a difference. I'm not suggesting that players shouldn't need to forma weapons to fit on builds... but what is the use in stance polarities? What meaningful restrictions do they enforce?

If anything, reducing the total capacity gained from slotting a matching stance would require more investment of Forma; the extra 14 you get from a matching polarity means that most weapons can comfortably float capacity at 2 or so polarities! Making stances more flexible to equip in exchange for requiring a bit more Forma work in the actual mod slots seems like a decent trade-off to me.

Edited April 14, 2018 by DiabolusUrsus

[Eirshy]

13 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

Considering the time invested in releveling a Forma'd weapon is <30 minutes without booster for established players, I don't find this to be all that compelling.

If reformaing a stance is so little work, why are you asking them to remove stance polarities so you don't have to reforma your stance?

 

Also reminder that Melee has the most good, expensive mods:

Riven (18)
Primed Fever Strike and Healing Return (16 ea)
Condition Overload (15)
Primed Pressure Point, Primed Fury, Primed Reach, Blood Rush (14 ea)
Covert Lethality (13)

[DiabolusUrsus]

25 minutes ago, TheBlueJelly said:

If reformaing a stance is so little work, why are you asking them to remove stance polarities so you don't have to reforma your stance?

Because I would like to freely switch between stances on occasion.

E.g., Tempo Royale/Cleaving Whirlwind are best, but Rending Crane is fun too.

It's literally not worth a Forma to switch, and there's no real counterbalance to preventing it.

Both the "best" stances use the same polarity!

Same goes for things like Crossing Snakes/Swirling Tiger, etc.

25 minutes ago, TheBlueJelly said:

Also reminder that Melee has the most good, expensive mods:

Riven (18)
Primed Fever Strike and Healing Return (16 ea)
Condition Overload (15)
Primed Pressure Point, Primed Fury, Primed Reach, Blood Rush (14 ea)
Covert Lethality (13)

Yep. And you can fit most of those with just a few forma due to stance capacity bonuses. Though I'm usually picking Virulent over Fever because of the +Status.

[(XBOX)ALTBOULI]

I was thinking about getting rid of my Plague Scythe zaw because of the short range and the fact that I dont really like the current stances. Glad I kept it now, this sounds like a positive change

[NeithanDiniem]

If DE changes the weapon's catagory, they would give a forma for each weapon a person owns that is affected because of this. They would also reset the default polarities of the weapon to match the existing stances, so if you have not changed it then it will still be a useful polarity.

[MirageKnight]

18 hours ago, DDixon286 said:

Agreed....just no

 

18 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

No

Well those are very compelling arguments against OP's suggestion. /s

[Naqel]

They are considering doing away with the stances completely, and it'd be the best course of action.

Melee weapons need differences that go deeper than stats, giving them unique movesets would greatly help that, but it requires that stances disappear completely.

[MirageKnight]

47 minutes ago, Naqel said:

They are considering doing away with the stances completely, and it'd be the best course of action.

Melee weapons need differences that go deeper than stats, giving them unique movesets would greatly help that, but it requires that stances disappear completely.

I do't think that's such a great idea.

Traditionally a given weapon type like say the Katana had different fighting styles formed around them which were taught by schools - with a given school advocating and teaching a particular technique of sword play to students. Stances reflect this and I think it gives weapons of the same class a bit more customization in terms of how we use them. Removing polarities from the stance slot would, I think, encourage us to experiment with stances further and see what suits us. 

That said, we could definitely use more stances. we could also stand to have existing stances tweaked so that combos are easier to pull off and are less dependent on timing. Take Crushing Ruin for instance: The Shattered Village combo is a really impressive move-set but it's a total pain in the arse to pull off because it requires near-perfect timing.

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

I think the polarity system is to encourage you to use certain stances with certain weapons... For instance spinning needle which fits the sai makes sense on the sai because the fighting stance kinda matches how that weapon is used in a semirealistic way. They want you to use the weapon with the stance in the way they imagined you doing it...

That said. Doing away with stances entirely without increasing the total number of mod slots would be "the dumb". There are very few weapons that can only be used in one way. There are dozens of different combat styles with pole arms and staves, demanding you to use a specific combat style with a specific weapon is a good way to make people stop playing the game. Right now, I have trouble picking which weapon I want to use because all of them, all of them, feel so much fun... Take my choices away and force me to use this weapon that has to be used this way, I'm going to get bored quick.

Though. If they're going to merge weapon types, id rather they merged claws with brawling gloves, they already use a lot of the same animations... And it doesn't help that a lot of the claw stances feel legitimately crappy.

[(PSN)xNaNo_Lynx]

On 4/13/2018 at 9:00 PM, DDixon286 said:

Agreed....just no

Exactly...or just give them access to both types of stances, Scythes and Heavy Blades. Sorta like the Dark Sword.

[Snake]

On 4/13/2018 at 8:30 PM, DiabolusUrsus said:

So, as many of us know Scythe type weapons will be switched to use Heavy Blade stances sometime soon-ish.

Great, it actually looks pretty neat.

Shame I just forma'd my Hate to fit Stalking Fan (which is actually pretty decent) and 3/5 Scythes currently in-game have Zenurik as a base polarity anyway. There are no Heavy Blade stances with Zenurik, and the best ones are Vazarin!

Is there even a reason why stances need to have polarities? Why should players be discouraged from freely swapping between movesets? There's not even any seeming rhyme or reason to the selection of a polarity.

So... how about removing the polarities and just standardizing the capacity bonus to 14 for having a stance equipped (or even reducing it to 9 considering it's entirely excessive for most builds anyhow)?

I understand and support counter-balancing the benefits of specialization, but when it comes to melee stances and auras I don't think there is much counter-balancing to be done. Select stances are already domineeringly powerful in comparison to others, and when you have entire weapon classes (like Nikanas) that can swap through all their available stances it doesn't seem to make any sense. Heck, look at Longswords - the crappy stance is Unairu and the decent stances are all Madurai! At that point it's just "This sword requires a forma; this one doesn't."

Please consider abandoning such pointless restrictions on melee modding flexibility.

I have to agree. Up-voted - On getting rid of stance polarity's that is. 

Edited April 16, 2018 by 5nak3Doctor

[MickThejaguar]

Quoth the first response "No"

Nah I'm just kidding. I just had a bit of scare myself because I couldn't get a Brutal Tide for my Kogake Prime and I REALLY didn't wanna forma this thing. Luckily I found a guy selling it. I wouldn't really mind.

Edited April 16, 2018 by MickThejaguar

[W3zeer]

Am 14.4.2018 um 21:46 schrieb NeithanDiniem:

If DE changes the weapon's catagory, they would give a forma for each weapon a person owns that is affected because of this. They would also reset the default polarities of the weapon to match the existing stances, so if you have not changed it then it will still be a useful polarity.

Unless it does not match Tempo Royale/ Cleaving Whirlwind, then you'd have to forma it ;)

[Naqel]

12 hours ago, MirageKnight said:

Traditionally a given weapon type like say the Katana had different fighting styles formed around them which were taught by schools - with a given school advocating and teaching a particular technique of sword play to students. Stances reflect this and I think it gives weapons of the same class a bit more customization in terms of how we use them. Removing polarities from the stance slot would, I think, encourage us to experiment with stances further and see what suits us.

I don't see how removal of stances would contradict this.

Think to Dark Souls, and how different swords there work: although they share some moves that it makes sense to include in all schools of swordplay, they will differ in which specific combination of fast and strong moves they can perform.

This would be the ideal way to handle melee in warframe, since with each weapon carrying a unique move-set of it's own, they can have unique identities even while they have similar stats.
The core issues of melee in Warframe are that the move-sets are too cumbersome to use(solved by cutting it down to a single weapon specific combo) and that individual weapons act purely as stat sticks to be attached to a stance(solved by making that bond permanent).

[DiabolusUrsus]

2 hours ago, Naqel said:

I don't see how removal of stances would contradict this.

Think to Dark Souls, and how different swords there work: although they share some moves that it makes sense to include in all schools of swordplay, they will differ in which specific combination of fast and strong moves they can perform.

This wouldn't be terrible, but it means that a lot of potential for expression is lost. I'd be pretty bummed if Nikanas defaulted to the reverse grip, and I bet there's more than one someone out there who would be just as bummed to lose Blind Justice.

2 hours ago, Naqel said:

This would be the ideal way to handle melee in warframe, since with each weapon carrying a unique move-set of it's own, they can have unique identities even while they have similar stats.

Let's rephrase this: all the base weapon movesets should be expanded into full stances, and any stat bonuses on stances should be used to normalize the DPS.

Then, stances would be more cosmetic.

2 hours ago, Naqel said:

The core issues of melee in Warframe are that the move-sets are too cumbersome to use(solved by cutting it down to a single weapon specific combo)

Agreed. Though the only real simplification needed is scrapping the slow movement-locking combos and refining the control scheme to be independent of movement (E/R for light/heavy).

2 hours ago, Naqel said:

and that individual weapons act purely as stat sticks to be attached to a stance(solved by making that bond permanent).

I honestly don't see this as much of a problem. With stances offering a different animation set for each combo but not providing statistical superiority, they would be more of a fun thing to collect and experiment with.

Heck, by simplifying things to 2 combos, we might even get to see stance-specific animations for blocking, finishers, slam attacks, air attacks, etc.

[MirageKnight]

4 hours ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

and I bet there's more than one someone out there who would be just as bummed to lose Blind Justice.

Decisive Judgement as well.

7 hours ago, Naqel said:

The core issues of melee in Warframe are that the move-sets are too cumbersome to use(solved by cutting it down to a single weapon specific combo) and that individual weapons act purely as stat sticks to be attached to a stance(solved by making that bond permanent).

I -kind of- agree with this. For the most part, I feel like I'm waving around an ornate stick in fancy ways while enemies jerk, twitch and sometimes fly backwards in not terribly convincing ways.

I wish melee was a bit more immersive, with enemies reacting more realistically to physical blows.