Element Adjustments

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

The update and improvement of Damage 2.0 has been an ongoing debate, with several opinions comming from both DE and the community alike. As it currently stands some damage forms are simply better than others; restricting the diversity of many people's play styles. So I'm just going to throw in my 2 cents into the fray purely for the sake of keeping the debate going.

• Physical Damage
  • Slash: The "king" of damage; being able to eat away huge chunks of an enemy's health in seconds. In a game that focuses mainly on killing as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible, slash is invaluable. For the sake of avoiding calamity in the comments, I'm going to avoid critiquing this effect.
  • Impact: A 'shield-buster' damage type, doing more damage to shields but less to squishy flesh. Its effect is "knockback" which simply forces the target to real back for a moment; a simple, but rather underwhelming effect. My proposed change would be to alter the effect to "disarm". Basically each impact proc applied has a chance of disarming the target, with repeated procs scaling up the odds. Basically it would simulate the disorientation that comes with being bludgeoned with blunt objects.
  • Puncture: The 'armor-buster' damage type. Its proc reduces a target's damage output by 50%. Good but not really logical. Perhaps it would be better to roll with the 'anti-armor' theme and cause it to open up weakpoints. Procing puncture would create "weakpoints" similar to Banshee's sonar at the location hit. This would allow dedicated puncture builds to reward accuracy by cleaving into enemy armor.
• Basic Elements
  • Heat: A good basic element for damage; good against flesh targets. Its main problem is its proc doesn't stack, instead refreshing with each proc. Adding a stacking effect would make it much more effective. After all what's better than fire? MORE FIRE!
  • Toxin: Arguably better than heat in most circumstances; only failing against infested. Really doesn't need any changes.
  • Cold: Slows target and partially ignores armor. Good any any situation save for infested. No real change needed.
  • Electricity: A controversial element. Stuns target and nearby enemies for a couple of seconds upon a proc. Only resisted by alloy. Its only real flaw is that Impact already does something similar; though if impact is altered that would give it a bit more shine.
• Combined Elements:
  • Blast: Heat and Cold. Proc knocks down enemy effected. Fun and good for suppressing fire, but not much use otherwise. Perhaps it could have a "deafening" effect, where those effected become less responsive to their environment? Not much tactical value, but it would be funny to watch enemies stumble around after getting blown up.
  • Corrosive: Toxin and Electricty. Arguably the best combined element due to its ability to strip even the heaviest of armor. Really its appeal comes less from type advantage and more from its ability to eat huge amounts of armor in little time. That in itself is fine, but the fact it becomes nearly essential to deal with higher level enemies is foolish. The only real fix for this is to dampen enemy armor scaling, relying more on health pools than armor pools.
  • Gas: Toxin and Heat. An oddity in that the damage itself is terrible against flesh but great against infested, while its proc is great against flesh but terrible against infested. Its proc creates a cloud of Toxin damage, making for great crowd control against flesh but not infested. Really all this element needs is an adjustment in its damage tables, as it doesn't make much sense for organic creatures to resist toxic fumes while nonliving machinery and the like take normal damage.
  • Magnetic: Cold and Electricity. People often disregard this element as its only real perk is eating through shields (a highly conditional niche) and doing nothing else. What this element needs is a secondary proc that makes enemies effected temporarily lose their abilities. Scorpions can't grapple, Seekers can't lob grenades, Corpus can't deploy equipment. Simple, but super effective at aiding target priority.
  • Radiation: Heat and Electricity. Procs confuse enemies and make them attack each other. Good when applied to a large area, but fairly useless against single targets. I recommend the logical secondary effect of "Radiation Poisoning". In real life radiation not only damages electronics but causes cellular deformations and apoptosis. Essentially it could be considered a secondary bleed proc that excels where bleed would fail and vice versa.
  • Viral: Toxin and Cold. Procs temporarily halve enemy health, allowing double damage. Deadly enough as it is.

And those are my 2 cents. Thoughts?

[VoxGray]

Radiation has no secondary effect because it can be stacked with Viral, possibly the single most powerful status effect in the game. Combining the CC of Radiation with the damage amplification of Viral can render a weapon devastating against nearly all targets,, with Infested units being the only exception due to their resistances. When considering changes to damage types, you have to consider what other procs could accompany your change. With your proposed model, you'd be stacking the potency of Viral's halved health with a stackable DoT, the end result of which would be difficult to balance without rendering the DoT useless when not used with Viral. I haven't gone over how the other changes would mesh together, since I'll be heading into work momentarily, but hopefully this provides you with some food for thought as to how you might re-evaluate your idea here. Always have to pick through these things with a fine-toothed comb, or you wind up with another Castanas Trinity.

[ShortCat]

I don't think it is as simple as that. Here are my thoughts:

• Damage 2.0 was clearly not designed around a lot of status procs. At release there were no 60/60 mods and status chance in general was lower. As a result the actual damage type multipliers like Puncture and Corrosive against Armor played a bigger role (this was the time Boltor P was the king). Over time our offensive focus shifted from "crush defense" to "bypass defense".
• Any damage type, that can bypass a defensive layer, like Slash for everything and Toxin for shields, is superior when kills are important, especialy in case Toxin - Magnetic, as not only the status proc but the entire damage value is a loophole, invalidating other available option. Thus, those loopholes require special attention.
• Given, that besides HP enemies usually have another defensive layer, it would make sense to adjust one damage type for one specific role. Lets say Magnetic has a huge boost vs. shields but penalty vs. flash; Slash/Viral struggle with shields, but destroy flash once shield is down; whereas Cold does moderately fine against both. In this case, modding would be based on personal preference or selected gear: Dread would require anti-shield countermeasures via mods, while Simulor works fine with Viral; and Gorgon(Impact) is already decent vs. shields could work with Cold. Extreme case (HP) - middleground(s) - extreme case (defense). Frames would shake this up even more, as they can strip armor or shields and do damage on theier own.

[peterc3]

14 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

Slash: The "king" of damage; being able to eat away huge chunks of an enemy's health in seconds. In a game that focuses mainly on killing as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible, slash is invaluable. For the sake of avoiding calamity in the comments, I'm going to avoid critiquing this effect.

Any discussion about damage that doesn't involve Slash is pointless.

[(PSN)big_eviljak]

Heat shouldnt stack... Instead it Should grow hotter as more procs are dropped... Increasing damage up to 200%

Impact procs should cause shields to explode doing 200 - 500% dmg in a 3m aoe. Non shielded enemies should suffer confusion.

 

Puncture should cause armor to splinter doin a DoT effect and non armored enemies Should take a damage resistance drop.

Edited August 15, 2018 by (PS4)big_eviljak

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

19 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

Any discussion about damage that doesn't involve Slash is pointless.

Its a simple matter of no-competition. Slash is invaluable at higher levels due to its ability to bypass massive armor and shield pools, however because it is the ONLY thing that does this, it becomes a crutch for most builds.

So all arguments will devolve into one of two things: Nerf slash or Buff everything else. I'll admit I'm putting bias into the latter argument, but by avoiding the subject of slash I'm hoping to at least stall its argument and give the other elements some room for discussion.

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

2 minutes ago, (PS4)big_eviljak said:

Heat shouldnt stack... Instead it Should grow hotter as more procs are dropped... Increasing damage up to 200%

Kinda what I was going for, but couldn't think of a way to explain it. Basically instead of adding more damage ticks, we add more damage per tick.

[(XBOX)GhostofaMessiah]

23 hours ago, (XB1)alchemPyro said:

The update and improvement of Damage 2.0 has been an ongoing debate, with several opinions comming from both DE and the community alike. As it currently stands some damage forms are simply better than others; restricting the diversity of many people's play styles. So I'm just going to throw in my 2 cents into the fray purely for the sake of keeping the debate going.

• Physical Damage
  • Slash: The "king" of damage; being able to eat away huge chunks of an enemy's health in seconds. In a game that focuses mainly on killing as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible, slash is invaluable. For the sake of avoiding calamity in the comments, I'm going to avoid critiquing this effect.
  • Impact: A 'shield-buster' damage type, doing more damage to shields but less to squishy flesh. Its effect is "knockback" which simply forces the target to real back for a moment; a simple, but rather underwhelming effect. My proposed change would be to alter the effect to "disarm". Basically each impact proc applied has a chance of disarming the target, with repeated procs scaling up the odds. Basically it would simulate the disorientation that comes with being bludgeoned with blunt objects.
  • Puncture: The 'armor-buster' damage type. Its proc reduces a target's damage output by 50%. Good but not really logical. Perhaps it would be better to roll with the 'anti-armor' theme and cause it to open up weakpoints. Procing puncture would create "weakpoints" similar to Banshee's sonar at the location hit. This would allow dedicated puncture builds to reward accuracy by cleaving into enemy armor.
• Basic Elements
  • Heat: A good basic element for damage; good against flesh targets. Its main problem is its proc doesn't stack, instead refreshing with each proc. Adding a stacking effect would make it much more effective. After all what's better than fire? MORE FIRE!
  • Toxin: Arguably better than heat in most circumstances; only failing against infested. Really doesn't need any changes.
  • Cold: Slows target and partially ignores armor. Good any any situation save for infested. No real change needed.
  • Electricity: A controversial element. Stuns target and nearby enemies for a couple of seconds upon a proc. Only resisted by alloy. Its only real flaw is that Impact already does something similar; though if impact is altered that would give it a bit more shine.
• Combined Elements:
  • Blast: Heat and Cold. Proc knocks down enemy effected. Fun and good for suppressing fire, but not much use otherwise. Perhaps it could have a "deafening" effect, where those effected become less responsive to their environment? Not much tactical value, but it would be funny to watch enemies stumble around after getting blown up.
  • Corrosive: Toxin and Electricty. Arguably the best combined element due to its ability to strip even the heaviest of armor. Really its appeal comes less from type advantage and more from its ability to eat huge amounts of armor in little time. That in itself is fine, but the fact it becomes nearly essential to deal with higher level enemies is foolish. The only real fix for this is to dampen enemy armor scaling, relying more on health pools than armor pools.
  • Gas: Toxin and Heat. An oddity in that the damage itself is terrible against flesh but great against infested, while its proc is great against flesh but terrible against infested. Its proc creates a cloud of Toxin damage, making for great crowd control against flesh but not infested. Really all this element needs is an adjustment in its damage tables, as it doesn't make much sense for organic creatures to resist toxic fumes while nonliving machinery and the like take normal damage.
  • Magnetic: Cold and Electricity. People often disregard this element as its only real perk is eating through shields (a highly conditional niche) and doing nothing else. What this element needs is a secondary proc that makes enemies effected temporarily lose their abilities. Scorpions can't grapple, Seekers can't lob grenades, Corpus can't deploy equipment. Simple, but super effective at aiding target priority.
  • Radiation: Heat and Electricity. Procs confuse enemies and make them attack each other. Good when applied to a large area, but fairly useless against single targets. I recommend the logical secondary effect of "Radiation Poisoning". In real life radiation not only damages electronics but causes cellular deformations and apoptosis. Essentially it could be considered a secondary bleed proc that excels where bleed would fail and vice versa.
  • Viral: Toxin and Cold. Procs temporarily halve enemy health, allowing double damage. Deadly enough as it is.

And those are my 2 cents. Thoughts?

It'd be great if burning would stack to 10 and then become an AoE of fire. 

Magnetic procs should make other enemies with magnetic procs be pulled together bunching them up. Could make for fun magnetic/ punch through builds. Not to mention the cc that would have constantly making enemies bunch together.

I also agree with you about the inconsistency of toxin and gas.

Edited August 16, 2018 by (XB1)GhostofaMessiah