Warframe's depressing state of REAL assault rifles

[Artekkor]

Assault Rifles were always my favorite weapon type in almost any game i've played. Universaly viable at any situation, even if they do not have the increased fire power of close range shotguns or long range snipers.

However, in Warframe the assault rifle sub-type of weapons is... Depressing. By that i mean i can't find a single one that i find enjoyable to use. All of them have at least some kind of gameplay issues that makes them... Unenjoyable.

Now first of all, let's define what i consider a proper assault rifle. An "assault rifle" must meet next requirements:

• Fires single separate bullets in full-auto, burst or semi-auto modes with a decent fire rate;
• No gimmick mechanics such as spin-up or charge up;
• Not an SMG-alike (no compact design - excludes Grakata, Baza and Tetra);
• Is an actual gun made of metal and not some infested abomination (debatable, but still).

Special cases:

• Boltor family is excluded due to being a full-auto boltcasters, not rifles;
• Buzzlok is excluded for being too gimmicky (extremely slow bullets + marking mechanic).

 

This leaves me with these variations:

• Auto
  • Braton
  • Dera
  • Karak
  • Stradavar (semi as alt.fire)
  • Zenith (semi as alt.fire)
• Burst
  • Burston
  • Harpak
  • Hind (semi as alt.fire)
  • Quartakk (very loosely, because of high cooldown between bursts and instant burst can be considered a mid range shotgun)
  • Sybaris
  • Tiberon (semi + auto as alt.fires)
• Semi
  • Argonak (auto is alt.fire)
  • Grinlok
  • Latron
  • Veldt

 

Now, take a closer look. Remember all of them - their stats.. Notice the patterns. (rivens are irrelevant to this "research")

 

All auto-rifles are status based. I consider status a form of gimmick because of how exclusive the status builds are (especially when it comes to bosses). Because of this i could disqualify the entire group. Combined with below-mediocre damage (the only exception being Braton Prime) this entire group feels underwhelming to use.

 

All semi-auto rifles are crit-focused. But also... All of them are not.
All of them come with high critical damage BUT mediocre crit chance. Not a single one of these rifles can exceed 70% critical chance with point strike alone.
This makes using them contradictorty in nature. You must make every shot account... But you also cant because there's a fairly decent chance to NOT crit and therefor deal not enough damage to justfity these rifles.
It almost feels like Argon Scope is implied to be mandatory on all of these rifles. But none of these rifles boost high enough raw damage to justify that.

So, again - underwhelming. Grinlok is probably the best of the bunch. When it crits - it hits.
Again - WHEN crits.

 

Burst rifles are somehow ended up the best what assaut rifles of Warframe have to offer. Often than not hybrid-capable (are good for both status and crits) they can dish out decent DPS (especially fan-favorite Sybaris and recently reworked Tiberon). Not much neat-picking can be made here.

 

In conclusion: Warframe's relatioship with PROPER assault rifles has long been an issue. Auto and semi mode rifles feel underwhelming and unrewarding to use.
Auto ones do not boost enough Damage and versatility (because they are all status, which is by default a rock-paper-scisor thing).
Semi ones are all too RNG based with their inconsistant crits for a weapon that must make every shot count. Argon scope is mandatory, but raw damage is not good enough to compensate.

Only burst mode rifles are barely decent, basically being mid-rang mini-shotguns.

Something needs to be done. We need to either fix old rifles or add a MORE lot of new ones to cover for holes in arsenal not covered.
Such as high-caliber, accurate and totally viable full-auto rifles that do not have annoying spin-up mechanics.

 

Something warframe could learn from, if not aesthetically, than at least in function and performance:

Спойлер

 

 

 

Edited June 19, 2018 by Artek94

[ShiraHagane]

8 minutes ago, Artek94 said:

 

  Hide contents

 

yes please

[GinKenshin]

this is too much opinion and subjective-ness for one thread 

[Seele]

The only assault rifles in Warframe are Tiberon Prime, Hind, Stradavar, and Argonak.

I get that what you really want is more representation of space-military service rifles, but call a spade a spade.

There are plenty of very viable auto and semiauto rifles in the game, so I'm not certain what this complaint is about. In fact Tiberon Prime is an excellent example of an assault rifle, a strong auto rifle, a strong semiauto rifle, and a strong burst rifle, with variable performance in all of crit, status, and raw damage.

[hammerheathen]

I tend to separate Assault rifles and DMR's into their own classes, but there's a lot of technicality that go into this..

That said. I primarily agree.

[Artekkor]

17 минут назад, Seele сказал:

There are plenty of very viable auto and semiauto rifles in the game, so I'm not certain what this complaint is about. In fact Tiberon Prime is an excellent example of an assault rifle, a strong auto rifle, a strong semiauto rifle, and a strong burst rifle, with variable performance in all of crit, status, and raw damage.

Yes, the Prime rifles are the best options right now. Braton Prime, Burston Prime and Tiberon prime are all the best in their respective groups.
And that's kinda the problem... Everything else is WAY behind. Take Karak Wraith - i tried to use it again and again, but once enemies hit level 60+ the gun become miserable to use. Its not slash-based like braton, so procs are sort of useless. Yes, corrosion slowly eats grineer armor away but then Karak doesn't have enough raw damage to capitalize on it.
Without riven that thing is absolutely miserable... And so is a good majority of auto-mode rifles.

Tiberon is nice indeed, but its primarily burst-focused like the original. Semi-auto doesn't add that much bonus damage, it simply allows to not waste bullets by spraying weak enemies.
And full auto mod switches crits for status... So to make it full-auto viable you'll have to ignore crit potential, go for status build and then switch the gun to auto mode every time you start a mission, which is inconvinient at best.

Actually, a quality of life improvement would be to allow us to pick which mode of the gun is "primary" and which is "alt-fire". That would be amasing.

Edited June 19, 2018 by Artek94

[(PSN)NachoZissou]

Braton Prime with the shock camo skin is the best version of the kind of gun you want I think, I say that because I wanted the same thing and it works for me. 

I started off with an experimental old school build of 8 pure damage mods (including a 200+% damage riven) but I realised that after level 60 or so it was very poor. I didn't want any gimmicks but reluctantly I'm currently reformaing it for a balanced build of high corrosive status and crit and it's an improvement for higher levels. 

Not quite the no frills raw damage build I'd wanted but at least it's balanced and not too specialised. 

[Buttaface]

Don't know why Braton or Dera would be included if compact design is an issue for OP. Why isn't Soma included? Spool? Meh, insignificant. Weapons with fast spool such as Tenora should probably be included (though I hate it, both the look and sewing machine sound, and understand if OP does too). Also, excluding energy weapons in a space ninja game seems a little harsh, could bring Supra Vandal into the category without much fuss. Then there are all the secondary bullet hoses that could qualify... but for the skin and being secondaries. So have to ask, is this more an aesthetic issue OP? or a functional one? If the former, don't know what would help that. If the latter, in a game with so many weapons, they have to be careful not to introduce "category killers"...ahem... Tiberon Prime... ahem. I don't like the look of plenty of gear in this game, so avoid those options.

If it's more about function, there are a whole host of powerful bullet hoses that do the same things as AR do they just don't look like an AR. My best AR is my Azima for example. Finally, why exclude rivens? They are part of the game, not some separate thing, and I think you will find that some of the crappier AR type weapons ingame like Dera V and Karak W can be made quite good with cheap rivens if you keep an eye out. Find a Karak riven with elements, MS, SC, mag size, reload, or raw damage on it with a high -Impact negative, for example, and you got the makings for a -really- nice, good looking, powerful rifle. Same for Dera.

Zenith has so much going for it in this department, looks, sound, reload,... and then there's its bleh stats... and having to log in 500 days to get it. Buff Zenith FA mode.

 

Edited June 19, 2018 by Buttaface

[GrayArchon]

How can you categorise status as a gimmick? It's one of the core components to how damage works. By avoiding it, you're intentionally gimping yourself.

[Artekkor]

4 часа назад, Buttaface сказал:

So have to ask, is this more an aesthetic issue OP? or a functional one?

Why exclude rivens? They are part of the game, not some separate thing, and I think you will find that some of the crappier AR type weapons ingame like Dera V and Karak W can be made quite good with cheap rivens if you keep an eye out.

Kinda both. Baza operates like one, but is actualy SMG aesthetically. The likes of Karak Wraith look like rifle, but their performance is upsetingly bad with only exception being Braton Prime - THE only full-auto assault rifle that is worth something.

Rivens are excluded because they are too luck-based to be considered. As much as i'd love to have an amasing riven for Karak - that isn't happening any time soon. On top of the luck required to actually receive the riven for the gun you need - there is also luck of getting proper relevant stats with rerolling.
And trading chat is not considered becausse i should not have to go and pay someone to have my rifle perform like one.

 

4 часа назад, GrayArchon сказал:

How can you categorise status as a gimmick? It's one of the core components to how damage works. By avoiding it, you're intentionally gimping yourself.

Corrosion status build is not going to help against corpus or infested.
Corrosion status build is worthless if gun deals no actual damage, because striped armor isn't going to much of a difference.
Gas is worthless on guns that do not have high raw damage to deliver it. Also grineer are extremely resistant to it.
Viral builds cannot utilize multiple procs and so every proc after 1st one is a waste. If the gun doesn't have firepower to capitalize on it and kill the target in next 2 seconds - its not worth it.
Magnetic is interely an anti-corpus element and nobody uses it because corpus are fairly squishy as it is. Except for robots, who are still tanky as hell. So corrosion is still favored.
Radiation does nothing to increase DPS. Neither do blast, cold, electricity, fire (almost all of them are there just for stuns and what not).
Slash-based weapons are heavily favored when it comes to status capabilities. Only 1 assault rifle has this trait - Braton Prime. Everything else is either puncture or impact, both of which deliver procs that do not help in any way to increase offensive capabilities.

 

[(XBOX)Godlike13]

Corpus and infested are squishy in general. Corrosive is still the preferred damage type vs infested, so corrosive status builds just become corrosive damage builds. Which do well. Though if you want a status effects against them heat and blast offer nice procs to deal with the swarming nature of infested. And as for Gas, it stacks. Though corpus too are squishy in general. 

Nevertheless just because there isn't a gun that caters to your personal wants, or your qualifications of "no gimmicks", doesn't mean assault rifles are in a depressing state.  

Edited June 20, 2018 by (XB1)Godlike13

[Artekkor]

10 часов назад, (XB1)Godlike13 сказал:

Nevertheless just because there isn't a gun that caters to your personal wants, or your qualifications of "no gimmicks", doesn't mean assault rifles are in a depressing state.  

Well, i guess that's true. And yet, there is not enough variety to them to even cover little old me. So many rifles, yet not a single one that i would like.
Argonak and Quartakk got close, but both of them are mediocre performance wise. At least i got a riven for quartakk... couple dozen more roles and maybe i'll get something perfect.

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

19 hours ago, Artek94 said:

Assault Rifles were always my favorite weapon type in almost any game i've played. Universaly viable at any situation, even if they do not have the increased fire power of close range shotguns or long range snipers.

However, in Warframe the assault rifle sub-type of weapons is... Depressing. By that i mean i can't find a single one that i find enjoyable to use. All of them have at least some kind of gameplay issues that makes them... Unenjoyable.

Now first of all, let's define what i consider a proper assault rifle. An "assault rifle" must meet next requirements:

• Fires single separate bullets in full-auto, burst or semi-auto modes with a decent fire rate;
• No gimmick mechanics such as spin-up or charge up;
• Not an SMG-alike (no compact design - excludes Grakata, Baza and Tetra);
• Is an actual gun made of metal and not some infested abomination (debatable, but still).

Special cases:

• Boltor family is excluded due to being a full-auto boltcasters, not rifles;
• Buzzlok is excluded for being too gimmicky (extremely slow bullets + marking mechanic).

 

This leaves me with these variations:

• Auto
  • Braton
  • Dera
  • Karak
  • Stradavar (semi as alt.fire)
  • Zenith (semi as alt.fire)
• Burst
  • Burston
  • Harpak
  • Hind (semi as alt.fire)
  • Quartakk (very loosely, because of high cooldown between bursts and instant burst can be considered a mid range shotgun)
  • Sybaris
  • Tiberon (semi + auto as alt.fires)
• Semi
  • Argonak (auto is alt.fire)
  • Grinlok
  • Latron
  • Veldt

 

Now, take a closer look. Remember all of them - their stats.. Notice the patterns. (rivens are irrelevant to this "research")

 

All auto-rifles are status based. I consider status a form of gimmick because of how exclusive the status builds are (especially when it comes to bosses). Because of this i could disqualify the entire group. Combined with below-mediocre damage (the only exception being Braton Prime) this entire group feels underwhelming to use.

 

All semi-auto rifles are crit-focused. But also... All of them are not.
All of them come with high critical damage BUT mediocre crit chance. Not a single one of these rifles can exceed 70% critical chance with point strike alone.
This makes using them contradictorty in nature. You must make every shot account... But you also cant because there's a fairly decent chance to NOT crit and therefor deal not enough damage to justfity these rifles.
It almost feels like Argon Scope is implied to be mandatory on all of these rifles. But none of these rifles boost high enough raw damage to justify that.

So, again - underwhelming. Grinlok is probably the best of the bunch. When it crits - it hits.
Again - WHEN crits.

 

Burst rifles are somehow ended up the best what assaut rifles of Warframe have to offer. Often than not hybrid-capable (are good for both status and crits) they can dish out decent DPS (especially fan-favorite Sybaris and recently reworked Tiberon). Not much neat-picking can be made here.

 

In conclusion: Warframe's relatioship with PROPER assault rifles has long been an issue. Auto and semi mode rifles feel underwhelming and unrewarding to use.
Auto ones do not boost enough Damage and versatility (because they are all status, which is by default a rock-paper-scisor thing).
Semi ones are all too RNG based with their inconsistant crits for a weapon that must make every shot count. Argon scope is mandatory, but raw damage is not good enough to compensate.

Only burst mode rifles are barely decent, basically being mid-rang mini-shotguns.

Something needs to be done. We need to either fix old rifles or add a MORE lot of new ones to cover for holes in arsenal not covered.
Such as high-caliber, accurate and totally viable full-auto rifles that do not have annoying spin-up mechanics.

 

Something warframe could learn from, if not aesthetically, than at least in function and performance:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

Or, you know, just use Tiberon Prime and have a Hybrid-viable weapon in all three categories at the same time.

I use it, and it is wonderful.

[GrayArchon]

14 hours ago, Artek94 said:

Corrosion status build is not going to help against corpus or infested.
Corrosion status build is worthless if gun deals no actual damage, because striped armor isn't going to much of a difference.
Gas is worthless on guns that do not have high raw damage to deliver it. Also grineer are extremely resistant to it.
Viral builds cannot utilize multiple procs and so every proc after 1st one is a waste. If the gun doesn't have firepower to capitalize on it and kill the target in next 2 seconds - its not worth it.
Magnetic is interely an anti-corpus element and nobody uses it because corpus are fairly squishy as it is. Except for robots, who are still tanky as hell. So corrosion is still favored.
Radiation does nothing to increase DPS. Neither do blast, cold, electricity, fire (almost all of them are there just for stuns and what not).
Slash-based weapons are heavily favored when it comes to status capabilities. Only 1 assault rifle has this trait - Braton Prime. Everything else is either puncture or impact, both of which deliver procs that do not help in any way to increase offensive capabilities.

You can say the same about the different damage types themselves. It still doesn't make it a gimmick; again, these are core components of the damage system.

Also, Heat proc deals DoT, so it does increase DPS, and Electricity proc will damage nearby enemies.

[(XBOX)RPColten]

I think we get the idea that personal preferences are important to enjoying games and entertainment, but I feel like this is just taking those 'necessary factors' a little too far.

I mean why in the world is Baza excluded from the list? That I just don't understand. I know you specify "compact design" but the weapon is barely smaller than the Braton which is included.

[Artekkor]

1 час назад, (XB1)RPColten сказал:

I think we get the idea that personal preferences are important to enjoying games and entertainment, but I feel like this is just taking those 'necessary factors' a little too far.

I mean why in the world is Baza excluded from the list? That I just don't understand. I know you specify "compact design" but the weapon is barely smaller than the Braton which is included.

Maybe compared to normal braton, but definetely not to Braton Prime. I think braton got even biger ever since the updated model.

Baza is actually the first weapon to be recognised by the game as SMG, including the fact that it has a damage fall-off finetuned for CQC encounters, like an SMG would.

[Artekkor]

2 часа назад, GrayArchon сказал:

Also, Heat proc deals DoT, so it does increase DPS, and Electricity proc will damage nearby enemies.

Heat proc has crappy proc damage (only 33% of heat damage present in the gun) and unlike far superior Gas and Toxin procs - doesn't stack.

Electricity is somewhat fine - crowd control and all - but it doesn't speed up the murder of that Level 70 tusk bombard.
Neither does heat proc when it procs for 100 damage per second (unstackale) when the enemy clearly has about 10.000

[LuckyCharm]

Hate to say it but rivens are a thing. And while you say you exclude them, you can infact customise your weapons to do what you want mostly with them. Want more slash? Get one with +slash. Want more crit? Get one with crit. 

 

My issue with assault rifles is they lack the customisation real world examples have such as red dot sight, scopes, laser sights, flash lights, thermal scopes, night vision, grenade attachments, grips, silencers and other things. Sure you can mod a couple of the benefits in like -recoil and -noise, but many you can't. I want a rifle I can attach things to to change how it plays maybe mid mission even

[JK21Games]

Actually, its not a bad thing that most automatic rifles are status based, it just has some issues with some of the current Status effects and partially with how Status in general works right now. Its best not to confuse the two, otherwise we would end up with all weapons being hybrid slash based weapons, and that's a very boring way to go.

Slash based rifles like the Braton series are useful because their base damage procs an effectively stackable amount of damage with Slash Procs. This means that the Braton series basically always procs what you want them to.

By contrast, if a Status Rifle has Impact or Puncture as its base damage like the Karak series, it is constantly procing weaker status effects that dilute its desired effects. In the case of Impact, very light crowd control, while Puncture is absolutely useless as a proc (except rarely for Condition Overload). So basically it effectively procs nothing in these situations vs. a damage ramp up type that provides increased damage over time as it is proced.

In the proposed Status reworks that DE has talked about, the effects of currently non-stacking procs become stronger over time, thereby giving Status weapons scaling damage. For example, if you set an enemy on fire, repeatedly applying the status effect will cause the fire procs to deal more damage and linger longer. Thus, all Status weapons have a damage rampup over time, compensating for having less up-front damage than crit based weaponry. While the proposed Impact and Puncture changes were not very good, I think if DE puts more thought into them (and then gets our feedback on them), they can make Puncture and Impact much better as damage types and takes away the disadvantages that non-slash Status based rifles have.

So in short, pure status weapons (that aren't shotguns) are actually only weak because of limitations with the current Status system. Once Status weapons get Impact and Puncture fixed, in addition to having scaling procs for a few other damage types, these issues should go away.

They've also talked about giving +100% status weapons extra proc power much like +100% crit has its advantages, which would be interesting. Its not something too many weapons can take advantage of, but for weapons that can take advantage of this like the Twin Basolk, it would add another layer to them.

Addendum - I personally recommend the Karak Wraith for Assault Rifle feels. Sure it has some ammo economy issues when you are up against bullet sponge enemies, but it looks, sounds, and handles great. Also great for Conclave if you ever play that.

Edited June 21, 2018 by JK21Games

[thesyndrome]

I'm definitely in favour of assault rifles getting a buff, and of those, ESPECIALLY the semi-auto rifles

The semi-auto's are pretty wimpy in terms of raw damage, and as OP said, their crit chances are extremely low (hell, a lot of full-auto's have better crit chances) making them fit into this really weird niche where in any scenario where I could equip a semi-auto, it's always better to pick a shotgun or sniper instead depending on range; this really bugs me because I've always gravitated to semi-auto rifles in games, and the Veldt's design is sexy as hell.....but the gun is basically useless at higher levels

I think a simple fix is just increase crit chance on all semi-auto rifles so it's possible to get into orange crit levels if you mod them right (not including rivens), this will offset their low RoF and damage

[Artekkor]

5 часов назад, LuckyCharm сказал:

Hate to say it but rivens are a thing. And while you say you exclude them, you can infact customise your weapons to do what you want mostly with them. Want more slash? Get one with +slash. Want more crit? Get one with crit. 

That is if you ignore layers of RNG involved in getting a riven that you might like.
RNG #1: Actually get the riven;
RNG #2: Actually get it for the gun in question;
RNG #3: Get nearly perfect bonuses that compliment gun's natural stats.

There's trading, obviously, but there's a certain level of luck in that too. And i'm extremely picky with my platinum, to the point where i doubt i'll be able to buy anything for the prices i would agree on.

So, due to EXTREME complications of getting proper rivens to fix crappy guns - they're sort of ignored.
Especially considering that rivens won't fix all auto rifles being status-focused. I just want one crit one for once! Or, i dont know, just a pure damage one, like Boltor Prime once was.

[(XBOX)RPColten]

On 2018-06-21 at 2:05 AM, Artek94 said:

-snip-
Especially considering that rivens won't fix all auto rifles being status-focused. I just want one crit one for once! Or, i dont know, just a pure damage one, like Boltor Prime once was.

You've got Baza, Soma, and Tenora for crit-focus and Boltor [Prime/Telok] for damage.

[Artekkor]

1 минуту назад, (XB1)RPColten сказал:

You've got Baza, Soma, and Tenora for crit-focus and Boltor [Prime/Telok] for damage.

Which comes back to my definition of real no-gimmick assault rifles.

Baza - not a rifle, SMG. I still love the thing, but its not a rifle.
Soma - the dreaded spin up mechanic. It looks perfect, but spin up mechanic didn't had to exist. It discourages careful burst-firing on the enemies and encourages minigun-like spray and pray without letting go off the trigger.
Tenora - same as soma. Also it looks more like a machine gun / sniper rifle hybrid.

Baza is the best of 3 still, and the only thing i failed to achieve is to actually look like an assault rifle. And even the game recognises that it is - in fact - an SMG. Both in weapon description and the damage fall-off mechanic.

[AzureTerra]

the only depressing thing about this is the need for realism in a scfi game

[DatDarkOne]

On ‎2018‎-‎06‎-‎19 at 5:02 PM, GinKenshin said:

this is too much opinion and subjective-ness for one thread 

 

56 minutes ago, AzureTerra said:

the only depressing thing about this is the need for realism in a scfi game

These two fine Tenno have managed to sum up my thoughts on this topic.  

First someone made a topic about buffing bows and now this.  Why am I not surprised.  All the while, others are complaining about powercreep.  Make up your freaking mind people.