Too Many Damage Types Makes My Head Spin

[dyuxi]

Maybe this is just me, but I can't help but find that Warframe's Damage Types are way too varied and confusing.

Would it be asking too much to just tone down and simplify this a little bit?

 

Currently, we have:

Armor Piercing, Blade, Serrated Blade, Impact, Physics Impact, Knockdown, Bullet, Explosion, Stun, Laser, Force Field, Poison, Fire, Electricity, and Freeze.

(More details on Warframe WIKI http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Damage )

 

...and on top of this, we have that confusing Armor value (which Devs will be reviewing, thank you),

new Anti-Grineer/Corpus/Infested Damage booster MOD...etc.  to take into consideration.

 

I really appreciate the variety they're presenting us, but this is way over my head.

Whenever DE are going to review the "Almighty Armor Piercing" balancing issue,

I just hope they could also find some time to look into this issue too.

[Keiiken]

If it hurts thinking about all those damage type pick one and only use that.

[Maou]

just go with what kills faster :) imo ap is the most important atm/ poison.

[Angius]

AP - Bonus damage to armored units
Blade - Umm... Blades?
Serrated Blade - Armor ignore, direct damage to health / triple damage to unarmored units

Impact - ???

Physical Impact - bolts, arrows, every physical projectile

Knockdown - that's not a damage type

Bullet - normal projectile

Explosion - self explanatory

Stun - that's not a damage type

Laser - flight time like Physical Impact, but no impact at all like Bullet

Force Field - that's not a damage type

Poison - Armor Ignoring DoT

Fire - bonus damage to light units

Electricity - bonus damage to Corpus

Freeze - slow effect

 

IMHO all of those types are necessary. They cover pretty much every type of damage that can be dealt. Removing one of them will cause certain weapons to became trash - Kunai without Armor Ignore? SELL!

 

Anti-faction mods are not damage types and are pretty easy tu understand (GRINEER SOMETHING will kill Grineer better)

 

This is not an issue. You don't have to learn all those types to recite them in the middle of night while being neck-deep into ice cold water...

It's all logical. Grineer got armor. So probably Armor Piercing will be good on them. Infested are made of flesh. What is better than fire? Corpus are mostly robots - Electricity will kill them. And Ice... Well, Ice is Ice - it'll freeze enemies.

 

You don't have to bother those Physical Impact, Bullet or Laser types. You want certain gun - read about it on Wiki. You just want to know if the projectile got flight time and if it pins enemies to the walls.

[Lyker]

The way you write about serrated blade makes me think it bypass shield???

Is that true?

Edited August 26, 2013 by Lyker

[Tsukinoki]

@Angius

Actually the Kestrel charge damage is "forcefield" as is the corpus laser doors. Forcefield damage generally has a ragdoll effect on hit.

Also knockdown is a damage type too, though generally used purely for melee slam attacks. As expected it only knocks enemies down.

Impact damage is the type of damage enemies take when being struck by bodies being pinned to the wall by bolt type weapons. The Sobek and Hek shotguns also do this type of damage.

And finally, Serrated blade does *not* deal direct damage to health. It will not bypass shields, it only bypasses armor.

And one last thing: physics damge ignores armor as well and is actually what most people call "Armor Ignorring" damage. The akbolots, twin gremlins and other similar bolt weapons deal physics damage.

@Lyker

Serrated blade only ignores Armor, not shields. Similar to blade damage it deals tripple damage to light infested (and *only* light infested), but ignores armor on all targets meaning that it will deal full damage to armored targets like Ancients or Grineer.

Edited August 26, 2013 by Tsukinoki

[Alexandeath]

What? Is even too simple for me. I wish for more damage types to fully customize my frames and weapons for every type of mission. And with the stealth missions on the future, it'll be even better.

 

This is a MMO, if it becomes too simple, it'll never last for more than 50 hours before players getting bored of it. Deep systems give more longevity to the game, and this one needs it.

[ValhaHazred]

Force Field - that's not a damage type

It is in-fact a damage type. Laser doors, Kogake and the Kestrel all use it.

EDIT: Ninja'd!

Edited August 26, 2013 by ValhaHazred

[Tsukinoki]

@ValhaHazred

Yep.

And the forcefield damage type generally causes some form of ragdoll effect on damage. Which is why the Kestrel causes knockdowns on its throws against nearly all enemies.

[Bakim0n0]

If a handful of damage types are too confusing for you there's always hello kitty online.

[dyuxi]

IMHO all of those types are necessary. They cover pretty much every type of damage that can be dealt. Removing one of them will cause certain weapons to became trash - Kunai without Armor Ignore? SELL!

 

You don't have to bother those Physical Impact, Bullet or Laser types. You want certain gun - read about it on Wiki. You just want to know if the projectile got flight time and if it pins enemies to the walls.

 

True and true.

I'm not saying its necessary to remove any of the Damage Types, that would cause more trouble than solve them.

I'm saying that if we may visibly see any of these Damage Types as a statistic ingame instead of having to WIKI for every detail,

(Assuming these damage types are pretty important to the player, not just itty bitty details that we can look over)

I would at least want them to have a distinct, less confusing name.

 

On a personal note, having a distinct name will save me a heck tons of time trying to explain the 

difference between Impact and Physical Impact in a limited amounts of texts when I'm writing out the localization for this game

...but that's just me being whiny

 

EDIT: and uh... maybe I should've given this thread a different title then huh?

          Yeah that's my bad :(

Edited August 26, 2013 by dyuxi