Weapon Tiers And Sidegrades.

[Voidflow]

At current state of game only few weapons are effective for high end game, partially because of the armor scaling and partially because of weapon tiers. So the outcome is, that some weapons are kind of useless and only good for mastery. At the end only a few weapons will be used.

Why not to allow people to use weapons they like as effective as high tier weapons by spending more time via formas.
So the idea to keep tiers and to bring low tier weapons to higher level as "sidegrades".

Tiers + Sidegrades How2:

 

Scaling:

 

- Number of polarities depends on tier (tier 2/4/6 respective 1/2/3 polarities)
- At level 30 high tier weapons are better than low tier counterparts
- Upgrading with forma process adds polarity slot and increases weapon stats depending on weapon tier
- Damage increase via forma on high tier weapons is relatively low
- Damage increase via forma on low tier weapons is relatively high
- Damage increase via forma can be caped (8 Formas?) and non-liniear

- Damage increase via forma can be weapon specific (own scaling for Latron for ex.)
- Upgrading via forma can be appled to other weapon stats such as, crit chance, crit damage.

Example:

Vulkar is Tier 1 weapon and available from beginning, no polarity slots
Lanka is Tier 7 weapon and available at mastery rank 7 with 3 polarity slots

Both maxed and polarized (formaed 8 times) have comparable DPS with a maximum difference of 15 %
(so that Lanka is still better than Vulkar)

 

DPS scaling between mastery rank 6 and 8 shouldn't be that high. The higher the mastery the lower the difference between those ranks (6 and 8, 7 and 9 etc.). Otherwise you will increase power creep and making lower tier stuff obsolete.

DPS increase via tier / mastery rank should be flat at the end (asymptotic curve), see below  

http://modelinginsights.com/Datamodeling/images/Fig2-3.gif

 

Sidegrades:

 

In my opinion it is the wrong way to put some weapon variety / sidegrades to the game via "weapon only for faction X"

Flux "for" infested <-> Synapse "for" Corpus. so you need 2 similar guns, even if you only enjoy one of them to play. 

 

A different and better way to put variety is:

 

Flux for precision, but less range, low critical hit chance.

Synapse less precision, more range, high critical hit chance.

(No rifle is useless against specific faction.)

 

Chose the one is better fitting you own feeling, not the faction you playing against. 

And yes one rifle can be a bit stronger against faction X compared to Y and vice versa. But then only by 10-15 %.

 

Summary:

 

- This way we could have sidegrades, weapon tiers and less useless / obsolete weapons. 

- With high tier weapon you will be rewarded with more polarity slots, less to forma, unique look, and a bit higher DPS output.

- With low tier gear, you can master it by installing some formas into it (up to 8!), making it on pair with high tier weapons. 

 

EDIT: updated

Edited September 25, 2013 by Voidflow

[MIRROR_ell]

Another idea discussed by someone in Council(forgot his/her name) was to allow weapons to have "skill points," via leveling or formatting or a new system, and that these points can be used to further customize a weapon to a person's preference. Ideally, weapons will not share the same skill loadout so that people will try all weapons and even rebuild variations of these weapons to try all the possible combinations or builds they can have.

[Voidflow]

Just updated some stuff and put bullets instead of wall of text.

With upcoming new toys the gap between tiers became even bigger.

 

With stats scaling of low tier gear via formas we could have a smaller gap and more useful weapons.

Serration grind can be also lowered, or better to say partially shifted to forma process.

Edited September 19, 2013 by Voidflow