The inner contradictions of Saryn 3.5's spores

[Hamsterius]

And also to a certain extent, with Saryn 3.0

Spores, there's two ways to look at them. Some just see them as a free Corrosive Projection, an armor stripping tool. Some, see them as a tool for actual damage dealing.
If you're the former, this post isn't for you. Recasts are back, and if you're not here for the killing power of spores, you could sidestep this issue by just spammingly recasting. The procs will proc even if the damage never goes above 50. The issue for you is probably losing the 2 energy on pop, rather than what I'm about to talk about.

If you're in the latter camp of people who cast spores with intent to deal damage,(rather than just as a built-in CP) then chances are you already encountered this issue yourself.

Premise 1 - The purpose of spores is to deal damage. (This is how we just defined them)
Premise 2 - The purpose of dealing damage to enemies is to kill them.
From P1 and P2 follows Conclusion 1 - The purpose of spores is to kill.

Premise 3 - If spores kill a target, spores don't spread.
Premise 4 - If spores don't spread, they either don't build up more damage, lose damage to decay or lose damage to ability recast.
From P3 and P4 follows Conclusion 2 - In order for spores to be able to deal damage, they must not kill their targets themselves.

From Conclusion 1 and Conclusion 2 follows the following contradiction -
C1 - Spores build damage in order to kill. 
C2 - In order to build damage, they must NOT kill.

So in order to kill, spores must not kill.

What?... I don't think you need to be a genius to realize that Spores, as it is designed, is an ability that shoots itself in the leg. 
Premise 3 might trick you into thinking this can be solved just be reintroducing spread on kill, but this is just a band-aid for the real problem. It'll help spread to existing enemies, but the real issue?
The real issue is that unless you never leave Onslaught, you're probably fighting the spawns. Saryn 3.0 had spread-on-kill but still struggled outside onslaught because like I showed, you need living enemies to grow stronger, with or without spread on kill, and it's the contradiction of needing enemies not to die in order to have enemies die that's behind this problem.

Imagine if Nidus lost mutation stacks every time he actually dealt a finishing blow with his first or forth abilities. That's basically Saryn right now.

Now honestly? I don't know what's the best way to solve this. I think the problem is deep rooted in the very mechanic of the new spores, and that playing with numbers, spread conditions and stuff like that won't really fix the problem. I always enjoyed debuff Saryn, so if I were to redesign spores I'd probably make them not even deal damage and instead just give blood rush and body count powers to all weapons, or something of that nature. They count up when on targets, you have a 12 seconds grace period to reapply them on things if all hosts die, and based on how much they counted up everything else you do, your guns, melee, miasma, will do more damage.

Probably a bad idea in practice, but it seems like a possible way to accomplish all three goals - 1) Not having to fight your own ability for kill rights. 2) Spores being an escalating damage tool. 3) Spores not encouraging passive play and requiring actual interaction with enemies.
I also heard it suggested somewhere that spores should be similar to Oberon's first ability in the sense that they'd just deal a percentage of the target's health. Also seems like a good solution, just that I don't know what percentage would actually be appropriate.

Edited May 27, 2018 by Hamsterius

[TARINunit9]

The problem seems to be, going off the production goals from the reason they made Saryn 3.0 in the first place, the devs can't find a way to make spores useful that don't allow Saryn to cast them once or twice and then idle in the corner.

[Soulden]

Spores has always been a greatly advantageous ability for its cost and needed management to continue to spread (none before, like seriously how much more convenient you need it to be?, putting it nicely).

And yes, Spores nature has Always been contradicting (going by that premise, all frames abilities that requires targets - friend or foe are contradicting), you always had the need to kept enemies alive in order to spread....or have you never tried spreading on a empty room? Even before 3.5?

 

Edited May 27, 2018 by Souldend78

[Hamsterius]

25 minutes ago, Souldend78 said:

And yes, Spores nature has Always been contradicting (going by that premise, all frames abilities that requires targets - friend or foe are contradicting), you always had the need to kept enemies alive in order to spread....or have you never tried spreading on a empty room? Even before 3.5?

 

The problem isn't keeping them alive to spread, it's keeping them alive in order for them to be able to kill. Other frame abilities don't do that. You confuse needing living targets to have someone to kill with needing targets to survive an ability designed to kill them for the ability to be able to kill them.

Saryn 2.0 spores didn't do that. Even if everyone died, the next time you cast spores you'd still have the full power of the ability, which were HP halving and toxin carrying.

Edited May 27, 2018 by Hamsterius

[Soulden]

17 minutes ago, Hamsterius said:

The problem isn't keeping them alive to spread, it's keeping them alive in order for them to be able to kill. Other frame abilities don't do that. You confuse needing living targets to kill with needing targets to survive an ability designed to kill them for the ability to be able to kill them.

Saryn 2.0 spores didn't do that. Even if everyone died, the next time you cast spores you'd still have the full power of the ability, which were HP halving and toxin carrying.

I so do miss the halving hp part of it. I would not deny that.

I think they understood that as well, and thats probably the reason they added the wonderful 50% cost with the added bonus of 50% off current stacked dmg on recast.
Probably works best at lvl 80++++ enemies mark. Content, that I currently don't play.

In my case my only concern is that spores can be too powerful to maintain with under lvl40 enemies, which is most of the starchart. Which should be the premise on any threads about spores, since anything over lvl 50, should not be the way to determine changes to abilities. But everyone is so stuck in nostalgia and convenience that end up making weak arguments that are easy to counter.

Edited May 27, 2018 by Souldend78

[Hamsterius]

4 minutes ago, Souldend78 said:

In my case my only concern is that spores can be too powerful to maintain with under lvl40 enemies, which is most of the starchart. Which should be the premise on any threads about spores, since anything over lvl 50, should not be the way to determine changes to abilities.

Sounds like we at least agree the patient is sick, despite disagreeing on the diagnosis. I can live with that. As long as someone vocal out there knows how to fix her, I don't mind if it ain't me.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

Seems like a player made issue than an actual one.

Spores smother themselves so you can't have the issue of what the spores did before.  Which was AFK kill and spread.  It also gives allies the chance to actually participate instead of watching your ability kill everything.

Also ignoring the other benefits of spores and only focus on "spore killing" makes it easy to make your point.  The strip is helpful.  And while they're corrosive procced but still have armor you do a lot more damage due to how damaging an enemy with their weakness works with the interaction of armor.  Essentially you can have your spores basically do no damage and run up with a strong weapon and do tons of damage while they're corrosive procced.

This "contradiction" is from reading between the lines a bit too much looking for something.  It's more of a "hey this is kinda funny" and less of a "hey this is an actual design flaw."

[Hamsterius]

3 minutes ago, (XB1)Knight Raime said:

Seems like a player made issue than an actual one.

Spores smother themselves so you can't have the issue of what the spores did before.  Which was AFK kill and spread.  It also gives allies the chance to actually participate instead of watching your ability kill everything.

Also ignoring the other benefits of spores and only focus on "spore killing" makes it easy to make your point.  The strip is helpful.  And while they're corrosive procced but still have armor you do a lot more damage due to how damaging an enemy with their weakness works with the interaction of armor.  Essentially you can have your spores basically do no damage and run up with a strong weapon and do tons of damage while they're corrosive procced.

This "contradiction" is from reading between the lines a bit too much looking for something.  It's more of a "hey this is kinda funny" and less of a "hey this is an actual design flaw."

I ignored the armor strip precisely because of that. If you're in the spore game for the strip, then as you stated the damage of the ability is pretty irrelevant. However, about 62% of the game's factions,(Infested, Corpus and some corrupted) don't have armor. If you answer "You're not supposed to use her against any of those(Corpus/Infested/Corrupted Corpus/Infested)" than yes, I'd agree spores are perfectly fine. If you answer "Who cares about spores, I just use her for *insert any other ability*" than again, for your needs spores are perfectly fine. If you answer "I just use spores to power up Condition Overload", than again, spores are fine for you as they are. However if you even partially disagree with those statements in quotations, if you see spores as anything other than free corrosive procs and still intend to use them, than the issue of the non-corrosive proc aspects of spores has to be dealt with.

Personally, my design philosophy might be considered shallow, but I share the basic thought that any thing A that is supposed to accomplish goal X should reward the player in direct proportion to the player's ability to successfully use them for that purpose. So if you believe spores are a damage tool more than they are a built in Corrosive Projection(/Condition Overload amplifier / don't use them / similar) then it follows in my opinion that spores are actually punished for fulfilling their purpose successfully, which is bad, and as I mentioned I don't believe that the removal of spread on death is the cause so I'm definitely not advocating to just slap it back on and be done with it.

Spores encouraged AFK in 3.0 in my opinion mainly because of the very problem of spore-smothering. Back in 3.0 you only had one spore, and intervening with it could mean you'd cut it's run short yourself by either outright wiping everyone, or by killing in such a way that enemies are split and the spores are locked in a corner doomed to run out since there's nobody close enough for them to spread to when those enemies die. Either way that'll reset your spores, so lazy or not lazy, you'd want to stay away from infected. Now you're forced to interact with them, even though the issue of accelerating enemy deaths has not been solved. (Considering the growth rate is in numbers while decay is in percents, 90% of the time you'd lose faster than gaining making wiping out all infected still be a problem, though the spore-locking problem has been solved by recasts somewhat)

As for giving allies the chance to kill things too, I fully agree with the sentiment, I just think that it could have been handled in a better way that wouldn't have aggravated a problem that already existed in 3.0

[Djego27]

In my opinion the issue is simply the decay mechanic not working that well together with the way units spawn on different maps.

Just look at body count/drifting contact that fixed a fairly basic issue of melee(what DE should have simply fixed by increasing to combo counter to 6-9s by default), losing the combo counter all the time because 3s are most of the time not enught to get to the next unit on most maps. Assuming DE would add a grace period of 6s after the last spore died till the decay would happen it would be a lot more manageable for normal game play and it would hardly affect onslaught, given that you lose nearly everything of your counter while moving to the next zone anyway.

Il y a 8 heures, TARINunit9 a dit :

The problem seems to be, going off the production goals from the reason they made Saryn 3.0 in the first place, the devs can't find a way to make spores useful that don't allow Saryn to cast them once or twice and then idle in the corner. 

Well they could have just add damage falloff to spore(10-20m for the toxic transfer, spore spread still up to full range), make it reliable with more weapons by consider toxic damage as stack instead of just transferring one proc and cap the maximum of toxic dot that you can transfer to 5% of the enemy health(what is still a metric ton of damage assuming that you would have toxic dot build-up on nearly all units that you can transfer by depleting and recasting spores).

Molt should have just stopped applying spores and new damage when shot after the target was full of spores.

Edited May 27, 2018 by Djego27

[schilds]

The contradiction is really only in players' heads. Players want to kill stuff, and they want to maintain spores 100% of the time without it ever decaying. Here's my advice: Just go kill stuff as quick as possible and the spore stacks will take care of themselves. Yes, there will be periods where they decay because all the enemies died, but enemies respawn, you can recast spores, and you'll find you can maintain the stacks within some damage range, depending on enemy density and respawn timing.

You do not need to babysit spores. If you're struggling to make Saryn work, it's because you're trying to babysit the spores, or you're trying to build to keep spore damage low so they hang around longer. Don't do that.

Edited May 27, 2018 by schilds

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

3 hours ago, Hamsterius said:

I ignored the armor strip precisely because of that. If you're in the spore game for the strip, then as you stated the damage of the ability is pretty irrelevant. However, about 62% of the game's factions,(Infested, Corpus and some corrupted) don't have armor. If you answer "You're not supposed to use her against any of those(Corpus/Infested/Corrupted Corpus/Infested)" than yes, I'd agree spores are perfectly fine. If you answer "Who cares about spores, I just use her for *insert any other ability*" than again, for your needs spores are perfectly fine. If you answer "I just use spores to power up Condition Overload", than again, spores are fine for you as they are. However if you even partially disagree with those statements in quotations, if you see spores as anything other than free corrosive procs and still intend to use them, than the issue of the non-corrosive proc aspects of spores has to be dealt with.

Personally, my design philosophy might be considered shallow, but I share the basic thought that any thing A that is supposed to accomplish goal X should reward the player in direct proportion to the player's ability to successfully use them for that purpose. So if you believe spores are a damage tool more than they are a built in Corrosive Projection(/Condition Overload amplifier / don't use them / similar) then it follows in my opinion that spores are actually punished for fulfilling their purpose successfully, which is bad, and as I mentioned I don't believe that the removal of spread on death is the cause so I'm definitely not advocating to just slap it back on and be done with it.

Spores encouraged AFK in 3.0 in my opinion mainly because of the very problem of spore-smothering. Back in 3.0 you only had one spore, and intervening with it could mean you'd cut it's run short yourself by either outright wiping everyone, or by killing in such a way that enemies are split and the spores are locked in a corner doomed to run out since there's nobody close enough for them to spread to when those enemies die. Either way that'll reset your spores, so lazy or not lazy, you'd want to stay away from infected. Now you're forced to interact with them, even though the issue of accelerating enemy deaths has not been solved. (Considering the growth rate is in numbers while decay is in percents, 90% of the time you'd lose faster than gaining making wiping out all infected still be a problem, though the spore-locking problem has been solved by recasts somewhat)

As for giving allies the chance to kill things too, I fully agree with the sentiment, I just think that it could have been handled in a better way that wouldn't have aggravated a problem that already existed in 3.0

but both corpus and infested have units weak to corrosive.  So it's still useful.  I don't think spores are meant to have a 100% up time.  Or that would kind of defeat the purpose of the decay mechanic that practically every person I saw was asking for.

[Kaerd]

I already made a big post in the spore feedback thread (its in page 7 for anyone that cares to read it) where I addressed this contradiction and came to the conclusion that spores have only two options:

A) Spores deal damage, but are not allowed to easily spread, and must be micromanaged to avoid AFK play.

B) Spores deal very little damage but can propagate like before, leaving the damage dealing to the player. This avoids AFK play by making the players do the killing themselves, since spores would never really kill anything except for the lowest levels of enemies after a lengthy period of time. 

I prefer option B, since that lets me PLAY Saryn, instead of babysitting spores and that infernal counter. Read my post if you'd like and leave some feedback. 

 

[Hamsterius]

35 minutes ago, (XB1)Knight Raime said:

but both corpus and infested have units weak to corrosive.  So it's still useful.  I don't think spores are meant to have a 100% up time.  Or that would kind of defeat the purpose of the decay mechanic that practically every person I saw was asking for.

I meant they're unaffected by corrosive procs, not damage. There are some very rare corpus units that have armor, but unless you have a weird glitch that floods the map with oxium ospreys and bursa's I wouldn't place them in the same group as corrupted, nevermind grineer. As for infested, only infested I could find with armor is the Juggernaut.

Decay mechanic was asked in the age of 3.0 when damage ramped up quickly, and either way I don't think most people imagined the current state where a weaker than before number based increase has to somehow recover from a percentage drain. I mean, let's say you have 1k damage built, you decay for 2 seconds, you're now at about 650. At 200% power strength, it'll now take you eight seconds to recover assuming you're maintaining 10+ infected at all times. 8 seconds of work to recover from 2 seconds of decay, not what people imagined I assume.

19 minutes ago, Kaerd said:

I already made a big post in the spore feedback thread (its in page 7 for anyone that cares to read it) where I addressed this contradiction and came to the conclusion that spores have only two options:

A) Spores deal damage, but are not allowed to easily spread, and must be micromanaged to avoid AFK play.

B) Spores deal very little damage but can propagate like before, leaving the damage dealing to the player. This avoids AFK play by making the players do the killing themselves, since spores would never really kill anything except for the lowest levels of enemies after a lengthy period of time. 

I prefer option B, since that lets me PLAY Saryn, instead of babysitting spores and that infernal counter. Read my post if you'd like and leave some feedback. 

 

B does sounds better. Was a big fan of original Saryn 2.0 spores where all spores did was assist you with viral and toxin, but were super-reliable and with a good gas melee you'd see some pretty nice results on all factions. I read your comment in the spores feedback thread just now, the only feedback I can give is that if you haven't opened your own post yet open one so people can see it easier and know about it because I like 99% of what you said there. Viral debuff spores being back, Miasma working like Ravenous, and it seems to fix what I complained about in this post. Don't just let your post disappear in that thread mate.

Edited May 27, 2018 by Hamsterius

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

3 hours ago, Hamsterius said:

I meant they're unaffected by corrosive procs, not damage. There are some very rare corpus units that have armor, but unless you have a weird glitch that floods the map with oxium ospreys and bursa's I wouldn't place them in the same group as corrupted, nevermind grineer. As for infested, only infested I could find with armor is the Juggernaut.

Decay mechanic was asked in the age of 3.0 when damage ramped up quickly, and either way I don't think most people imagined the current state where a weaker than before number based increase has to somehow recover from a percentage drain. I mean, let's say you have 1k damage built, you decay for 2 seconds, you're now at about 650. At 200% power strength, it'll now take you eight seconds to recover assuming you're maintaining 10+ infected at all times. 8 seconds of work to recover from 2 seconds of decay, not what people imagined I assume.

You do know that the 10% decay after the 20% chunk is 10% of the current number and not your max right?  that means every time you lose damage from decay it's 10% of that new number.  (this is ofc without mods where you can effect the decay rate and how much you lose per decay tick.)  I did the math in a different thread and you really don't lose that much damage.

[Kaerd]

5 hours ago, Hamsterius said:

I meant they're unaffected by corrosive procs, not damage. There are some very rare corpus units that have armor, but unless you have a weird glitch that floods the map with oxium ospreys and bursa's I wouldn't place them in the same group as corrupted, nevermind grineer. As for infested, only infested I could find with armor is the Juggernaut.

Decay mechanic was asked in the age of 3.0 when damage ramped up quickly, and either way I don't think most people imagined the current state where a weaker than before number based increase has to somehow recover from a percentage drain. I mean, let's say you have 1k damage built, you decay for 2 seconds, you're now at about 650. At 200% power strength, it'll now take you eight seconds to recover assuming you're maintaining 10+ infected at all times. 8 seconds of work to recover from 2 seconds of decay, not what people imagined I assume.

B does sounds better. Was a big fan of original Saryn 2.0 spores where all spores did was assist you with viral and toxin, but were super-reliable and with a good gas melee you'd see some pretty nice results on all factions. I read your comment in the spores feedback thread just now, the only feedback I can give is that if you haven't opened your own post yet open one so people can see it easier and know about it because I like 99% of what you said there. Viral debuff spores being back, Miasma working like Ravenous, and it seems to fix what I complained about in this post. Don't just let your post disappear in that thread mate.

There's so many Saryn posts already I kind of don't want to do that. I'm hoping my feedback kind of goes through if Pablo and co read the forum thread. I'm assuming they're closely monitoring the feedback thread so I can just hope. 

I think that option B would be unpopular for a few reasons, first being that if Spores don't do any more damage, then people would demand for Miasma to be brought into line to help with the damage loss, bringing back the Miasma Nuke Saryn that many people seemed to dislike. I would also have to assume that people would feel that the new damage mechanic where you as the player are responsible for damage ramp up with toxic proc chaining is the same as micromanaging spores (which it isn't but if you have to be convinced of this then I'm not sure what to say). Yes, Saryn will no longer be the queen of the post mission kill count and damage done, but I think she can still be fun to play without being broken. 

DE is going to have a tough time getting this one right, and I don't envy Pablo's position, but I'm looking forward to how they take the feedback. While Saryn isn't my most played frame, she is definitely my favorite, and I'll keep giving my feedback until the changes are final. 

[Hamsterius]

4 hours ago, (XB1)Knight Raime said:

You do know that the 10% decay after the 20% chunk is 10% of the current number and not your max right?  that means every time you lose damage from decay it's 10% of that new number.  (this is ofc without mods where you can effect the decay rate and how much you lose per decay tick.)  I did the math in a different thread and you really don't lose that much damage.

1000*0.8=800 (start)
800*0.9=720(first tick)
720*0.9=648(second tick)
How else would you do the math? Start at 1000, two seconds of decay plus that instant one is 650~, just like what i said.
Did you assume duration mods are being used?

[Guest]

Personally I'd prefer we keep a flat damage for Spores like Saryn 2.0, but kept the current changes regarding status chance, infinite duration, damage type, and spread range and include spread from spore death. 

Although I think it'd be fine if the damage was as high as in 2.0 to keep it as a useful armor stripping ability, as of right now, I personally just see more work for a player to keep Spore stack up, and just see that long duration of work of Spore stack get to 0 within 30 seconds because of the decay.

 

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

12 hours ago, Hamsterius said:

1000*0.8=800 (start)
800*0.9=720(first tick)
720*0.9=648(second tick)
How else would you do the math? Start at 1000, two seconds of decay plus that instant one is 650~, just like what i said.
Did you assume duration mods are being used?

You'd be surprised but a lot of people thought they lost the same 10% every tick instead of it changing based on the new number after each tick.  You had people claiming that after the 20% loss from no infected and then 3 ticks later you lost 50% of your damage.

And nah when I did my math (which is what you did) I didn't account for mods.  Because mods effect how often a tick happens and how much you lose per tick.

[Hamsterius]

27 minutes ago, (XB1)Knight Raime said:

You'd be surprised but a lot of people thought they lost the same 10% every tick instead of it changing based on the new number after each tick.  You had people claiming that after the 20% loss from no infected and then 3 ticks later you lost 50% of your damage.

And nah when I did my math (which is what you did) I didn't account for mods.  Because mods effect how often a tick happens and how much you lose per tick.

I find it odd people thought that. I personally noticed right on my first Simulacrum test with Saryn 3.5 that the decay rate changes as the damage counter lowers.

[DreamsmithJane]

22 hours ago, Hamsterius said:

As for infested, only infested I could find with armor is the Juggernaut.

Swarm Mutalist Moas provide armor to all allied units.

Anyway, I'd say the purpose of Spores is to contribute to killing, not to be the sole method. And in that role, they don't have any trouble spreading and maintaining their growth. DE said from the start that having Spores spread when killing the target directly was the thing they were most apprehensive about. That instinct proved correct.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

7 hours ago, Hamsterius said:

I find it odd people thought that. I personally noticed right on my first Simulacrum test with Saryn 3.5 that the decay rate changes as the damage counter lowers.

yeah I know right?

[Zilotz]

On 2018-05-27 at 11:27 AM, TARINunit9 said:

The problem seems to be, going off the production goals from the reason they made Saryn 3.0 in the first place, the devs can't find a way to make spores useful that don't allow Saryn to cast them once or twice and then idle in the corner.

I was never resting in the corner, i did ramp up damage with my Ignis until it got useless from damage cap.

There were small idle periods i did idle while spores killed ... when no mobs near enough but that was just 3-5 sec, not longer than 5 anyway.

Now i just spit, spread and try to hide as there is no point of using Ignis on enemies all the time, it brings only pain(as enemies target you around 80% of the time even if you have molt around) and no damage increase(as damage is hardcapped now).

So it isn't only damage nerf but also gameplay nerf.

[TARINunit9]

1 hour ago, Zilotz said:

I was never resting in the corner, i did ramp up damage with my Ignis until it got useless from damage cap.

Maybe you didn't, but you still could...

1 hour ago, Zilotz said:

Now i just spit, spread and try to hide as there is no point of using Ignis on enemies all the time, it brings only pain(as enemies target you around 80% of the time even if you have molt around) and no damage increase(as damage is hardcapped now).

So it isn't only damage nerf but also gameplay nerf.

But yeah, that definitely does sound like a problem

[RealPandemonium]

Spores are strong AF.  You can easily get to 500+ damage in mere seconds, which is 1500 Corrosive damage per second on each enemy, more or less passively.  Combine with armor strip and Miasma synergy, and you can't deny that this power is strong.  What do you want, to make it easy to get 2000+ damage per spore with no effort?  The people complaining about Spore's latest iteration are arguing for a one-button solution that circumvents gameplay.

[Birdframe_Prime]

I think I've found to logical flaw in your argument. It doesn't necessitate that the ability's self-limitation isn't an inconvenience, but that you've made an assumption on the base of this that needs addressing before your logic can be processed through again;

Premise 1: the purpose of Spores is Damage, and arguably you're correct as Status means Damage in this case too.

Premise 2: The purpose of an Ability dealing damage is so the Warframe can kill.

From P1 and P2: The purpose of Saryn, the Warframe, using Spores, the Ability, is to kill.

So when it comes to the Spores ability being self-limiting, this is not inherently a problem. Because the ability is not the be-all and end-all function that kills enemies, the Warframe as a whole with Weapons, Abilities and Allies is what kills things.

Premise 3; if Spores kills an enemy, Spores don't spread.

Premise 4; if Spores don't spread, they don't maintain damage, or their upward climb of damage, so enemies cannot be killed as quickly or as easily.

Premise 5; if enemy is killed by any other means apart from Spores, they spread.

From P3, P4 and P5; The method of the Warframe in killing is to ensure that they and Allies are actively participating and spreading spores by killing enemies with all means aided, rather than inhibited by, the damage of Spores.

 

Conclusion 1: Spores must build damage in order for the Warframe and Allies to kill optimally.

Conclusion 2: In order to build damage, Spores must not kill, the Warframe and Allies must kill to ensure Spores continues to deal damage for longer for more optimal killing.

 

Does this make more sense? I mean, that's likely the more accurate translation of how DE is working with this premise anyway.