Damage 2.5 Part 1: Physical Damage

[Shadowy The Insane Bovinemancer]

Hail Tenno!

I’m here to talk nitty-gritty on a large systemic change that was discussed on Devstream 101: our upcoming changes to physical damage types and status procs.
https://youtu.be/SkVN_njQpj4

Setting the Stage:
Since Damage 2.0, physical damage has three types (Impact, Puncture and Slash, often referred to as IPS) brought to the forefront of Arsenals for modding and weapon diversity. There are also ten elemental damage types, consisting of four base elements (cold, electricity, heat and toxin) and the six combinations formed by modding two elements together. Each of these damage types is stronger or weaker against specific enemy types.

However, each of these damage types also have “status effects” that can be applied based on a “procedural random chance” percentage, often known as procs. Impact procs cause enemies to stagger, Puncture procs reduce the enemy’s damage output by a flat 30%, and Slash procs inflict “bleed” damage over time. Slash has long been considered the most powerful of these effects, primarily because Slash procs stack on top of one another and scale with weapon damage, while both Puncture and Impact procs could only have their flat effects refreshed.

Leveling the Field:
Those of you who watched our most recent Devstream will remember Khora, our next Warframe. Her powers allow players to switch between Impact, Puncture and Slash type modes, influencing the damage skew of her abilities. We saw this exciting new idea as an opportunity to revisit the various status proc types, and shake things up a bit!

In an update coming soon, we will be making changes to IPS status effects and proc damage calculation. Our primary goal was improving Impact and Puncture; both of these procs will now scale in effectiveness, based on the damage dealt. An Impact proc with a small damage output (like a single Akstilletto bullet) will still only cause a short stagger, while an Impact proc with high damage output (like a Vulkar shot) can scale all the way up to a ragdoll, temporarily immobilizing them. In a similar manner, Puncture procs will now scale in effectiveness from 10% to 75% damage reduction, based on the damage dealt at the time of proc. Slash will continue working as it does now, stacking multiple status effects on top of one another.

Covering our Bases:
Here’s where the math starts to get complicated - for all you stat-savvy Saryns and min-maxing Mesas out there, read on!

Our more observant theorycrafters may see a flaw in the examples given above - these new damage-scaling procs would favour weapons that can output large damage amounts all at once, like snipers. In order to help rapid fire weapons compete in this regard, we are also making a systemic change to repeating procs: additional status effects will not “reproc”, but will instead additively increase the effectiveness of the existing proc. The upgraded proc is calculated using the damage total from the original proc and the new proc added together. For Puncture, this also refreshes the duration of the proc.

We are also making a change in how a proc’s associated damage output is calculated - before, a Slash proc would scale based on the weapon’s total base damage output. Now, all procs will be calculated using ONLY the damage type of the proc that is being inflicted. Players may feel encouraged to focus their weapon builds around certain damage types in order to consistently inflict powerful procs, or go for raw damage across several damage types to inflict multiple procs at once!

To help visualize how these changes will look, let's deep dive into the physical damage types to see how they play out in-game:

Impact now serves as a great means of crowd control. Got a Corpus Tech threatening your excavator? Immobilize priority targets by unloading your Akstillettos, giving you more time to address the threat. Overwhelmed by an army of MOAs? Level entire rooms with something like a Strun!

Puncture can be used to minimize enemy lethality for frames with less survivability. Using high status puncture melees like Boltace or Endura, go blow-for-blow with Butchers and Powerfists without breaking a sweat. And if your Lex Prime can’t oneshot the Heavy Gunner rumbling towards your defense point, the enemy’s damage will be diminished long enough to safely deal the finishing blow.

Slash works the same as it ever did, stacking bleed damage over time to make short work of enemies. Your 100% status Tigris Prime will still eviscerate single targets with multiple procs, while something like a Galatine will still inflict more serious singular procs in a wider area - ‘tis but a scratch.

Final Intentions:
It's important that everyone understands our goals and what led us to the above changes. When designing Khora, an Impact/Puncture/Slash based frame, we knew it was time to bring up Impact and Puncture to Slash competitive levels of desirability thanks to long-term feedback. Having a frame specialize in the physical damage types is a pretty appropriate way to debut changes! Please approach all feedback with the understanding that from our end, our goal is a more interesting systemic change. Any edge case things that feel like massive nerfs should be civilly listed so we can address.

...And what about Elementals!?
With little time remaining in the year to properly iterate, we decided to split this into two parts. Part 1 is Physical and it is coming soon on PC. Part 2 is Elemental and coming in 2018. We didn't want to release something wholesale over the Holidays that we wouldn't be around to properly monitor. You will be seeing a new Dev Workshop in 2018 on Part 2 - Happy Holidays!

https://forums.warframe.com/topic/896601-damage-25-part-1-physical-damage/?tab=comments#comment-9315647

[Mouse...]

so impact is the new tenno space program ?

[Spook]

I put my thoughts in the thread itself and tried to be civilly spoken about it, but since these are the steam forums, may as well be more reactionary here.

These changes as written are so mind-numbingly atrocious sounding and completely ignorant of the actual state of the game that they might convince me to stop playing entirely.

[Ishawi1996]

Since Lenz is a impact weapon, it could be a nice CC weapon after the IPS change but not sure if Puncture would help not getting one shot from a Lvl 40 Corrupted Crewman when you are using Nova Prime or Banshee Prime.

[robruckus65]

So they are weakenign slash proc damage making it only based on teh slash damage of the weapon isntead of full damage. Then making impact and puncture scale with their respectie damage types. Honestly not a huge fan of this I wish they would have just changed puncture status all around the damage reduction it does has always been pointless. Impact I prefer as a stagger most of the time I avoid blast since the knockdown it causes makes getting multiple headshots impossible so now high impact weapons will suffer the same fate. Slash is one of teh few things that can deal with high level heavily armored mobs so weakening its damage output is just going to make people drop other damage types and focus solely on slash on those weapons which in turn dampens their effectiveness greatly. Won't now how good or bad any of this is though until it releases hopefully it works better than I am expecting.

[Luke3079]

I don't like where this is going

[Drago]

Does seem like something of a nerf to slash from the wording of the article. While knocking people around is fun, it doesn't really help headshots and killing many enemies while some would rather enemies die faster than reducing their damage with puncture. Perhaps these ideas could be looked at further before implementing them with Khora?

[Ishawi1996]

I got a feeling more people is going to use Ash more than any frame after Slash have it’s changes.

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

Impact and Puncture status procs have always been completely useless, and will continue to be completely useless as long as they remain lite CC/debuff procs instead of damage-based procs. The best way to ragdoll an enemy is when it's a corpse. There's no point in reducing the damage of a dead enemy, because dead men tell no tales deal no damage. Instead of nerfing Slash or making it inviable on many weapons, with insignificant buffs to Impact and Puncture to compensate, you guys really need to be giving Impact and Puncture a massive overhaul to bring them up to Slash's level as fearsome damage-dealers. You can triple the amount of crap in a Puncture proc, but at the end of the day its irrelevant damage reduction effect is still crap.

[F3nr1r299]

What I got from this was "we are changing normal damage to be more 'leveled' across the board so when the new frame based around normal damage comes out everyone doesn't use one damage type"
That's not good design
If you have to overhaul a portion of your game to accommodate a new frame then you're doing something wrong

[C.C. 折オリ枝 の 夫]

If you think DE will listen (and thus, bother commenting on the main site) you are highly mistaken.

I do enjoy the game, and it's fun, and DE DID a good job at balancing weapons until they released Gara. After her nerf, everything went downhill.

Sad but true, many weapons I enjoyed and were fun will now make me hate them because of their high impact NOT letting me kill enemies, Puncture is still useless, and Slash...no comment.

[PhellAsleep]

Unless Puncture and Impact increase the efficiency by which you can eliminate an enemy altogether, they will never be as effective as Slash.

My suggestion would be something like,

Puncture: Reduces enemy current hp by 5-30% (scales with base fire rate) per application.

Impact: Applies 1-15 stacks (scales with fire rate) per application. The first stack initiates a trauma timer of 10(?) seconds. At the end of the trauma duration, the enemy ruptures internally and receives an additional X amount of damage, with X scaling with the number of stacks it had.

[anarchy]

Originally posted by F3nr1r299:

What I got from this was "we are changing normal damage to be more 'leveled' across the board so when the new frame based around normal damage comes out everyone doesn't use one damage type"
That's not good design
If you have to overhaul a portion of your game to accommodate a new frame then you're doing something wrong

I don't think that's how we should look at it, they tried to build a physical-based frame and realised that they couldn't ignore how imbalanced physical damage was any more. It isn't overhauling the system to make a frame work, it's overhauling a system that needed to be overhauled. I know that it's a nerf to some things, but I'd prefer to see more weapons be more viable in general than just have slash damage completely outclass impact and puncture.

That said, I don't really like the new status effects. Impact staggering is fine, but going full ragdoll seems like it could be really annoying to kill things efficiently, rather than being able to chain headshots im going to be chasing their limp body around trying to keep damaging them.

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

Originally posted by anarchy:

Originally posted by F3nr1r299:

What I got from this was "we are changing normal damage to be more 'leveled' across the board so when the new frame based around normal damage comes out everyone doesn't use one damage type"
That's not good design
If you have to overhaul a portion of your game to accommodate a new frame then you're doing something wrong

I don't think that's how we should look at it, they tried to build a physical-based frame and realised that they couldn't ignore how imbalanced physical damage was any more. It isn't overhauling the system to make a frame work, it's overhauling a system that needed to be overhauled. I know that it's a nerf to some things, but I'd prefer to see more weapons be more viable in general than just have slash damage completely outclass impact and puncture.

That said, I don't really like the new status effects. Impact staggering is fine, but going full ragdoll seems like it could be really annoying to kill things efficiently, rather than being able to chain headshots im going to be chasing their limp body around trying to keep damaging them.

Issue is, with the currently proposed changes, slash still completely outclasses impact and puncture just as much, if not more; if anything, the I and P of IPS become even more irreparably useless. All these changes do is massively drop the number of weapons that are capable of viably exploiting Slash procs, while making current metas like Tigris Prime and Atterax even more broken.

[anarchy]

Originally posted by Totally Innocent Chatbot:

Issue is, with the currently proposed changes, slash still completely outclasses impact and puncture just as much, if not more; if anything, the I and P of IPS become even more irreparably useless. All these changes do is massively drop the number of weapons that are capable of viably exploiting Slash procs, while making current metas like Tigris Prime and Atterax even more broken.

Like I said, I don't think what they've done has fixed the system, I just like that they're attempting to fix it.

[Ras-pica]

Originally posted by anarchy:

Originally posted by Totally Innocent Chatbot:

Issue is, with the currently proposed changes, slash still completely outclasses impact and puncture just as much, if not more; if anything, the I and P of IPS become even more irreparably useless. All these changes do is massively drop the number of weapons that are capable of viably exploiting Slash procs, while making current metas like Tigris Prime and Atterax even more broken.

Like I said, I don't think what they've done has fixed the system, I just like that they're attempting to fix it.

I like how you phrased it. I agree.