Posts by SWAT_OP-R8R
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... only ~half a million people watched the misery that night
The new war gameplay looks fresh and shiny but makes me wonder why the fuck all of a sudden we not playing as Tenno anymore. A style break.
Nidus Prime, very shiny.
Crossplay on all platforms... ultra shiny.
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Ok to recap the latest changes to melee...
Changes/nerfs were done to some melee mods to normalize it with gun play a but. In my eyes the task should have been to improve the way how primaries and secondary weapons work instead of nerfing melee. Lets face it, two years ago Melee 3.0 was introduced to Warframe as the new meta and since that most of the new content was build around it. Steel Path, Lichs, Sisters of Pavos... etc. This is content which is much harder than anything that existed prior Melee 3.0 and the only real task would have been to buff non-melee weapons.
But ok, it is what it is... a nerf to melee which makes certain content harder, especially fights against boss type enemies.
I am ok with some of the changes. It is ok that "Blood Rush" was reduced from 60% crit chance to 40% crit chance eventhough it has a big impact on builds as I will explain later. Same can be said about the "Condition Overload" nerf which reduces the damage per status type from 120% to 80% now.
I am a bit pissed at the nerf to the "Berserker" mod. It is ok that they reduced the max attack speed increase from 75% to 70% but the change of the trigger from "crit hit" to "Melee Kill" while also reducing the time this mod is active really sucks.
While the mod will work perfectly fine against every group of trash enemy the game throws at you, it will fail to work if you are facing a boss enemy with no trash enemies near you. The activation condition "melee kill" just will never apply if there is no low level enemy around, period.
You actually do not need the extra damage to kill the standard corpus, grineer or infested trash the game throws at you... but you need the damage from this mod when fighting the boss enemies such as liches, sisters of parvos, sector bosses, stalker, gustag3, zanuka, acolytes, junction specters, etc. That is where you would need the additional attack speed which eventually leads to a higher damage output.
But how bad is it when it fails?
Let's do a simple calculation.
Let's assume the melee weapon has a total damage per second of 100 and for simplicity reasons we go with the new max attack speed of +70% (2 stacks of 35%).
This obviously would increase the total dps to 170 if you can trigger the condition to activate the mod.
So in a boss fight this fails because nothing triggers the condition.
That results in "1-(100/170)" -> ~41% damage loss in a fight where you need the damage most.
The fact that this mod became such an unreliable mess bothers me most. It works when you actually don't need the extra damage but fails when you need it.
The next best alternative is Primed Fury which has a flat 55% attack speed bonus but since it is a primed mod many new players won't even have that and the normal Fury mod is even weaker.
Of course it is an option to run Berserker in combination with Quickening but that requires to have an open mod slot in your build (most good builds do not support that).
What about the other nerfs?
Condition Overload going from 120% damage per status type to 80% is much but mostly mitigated by elemental mods. It is noticeable but won't necessarily break existing builds. It would be worth to check if Condition Overload can either be replaced by "Primed Pressure Point".
Primed Pressure Point offers 165% damage increase, which makes it slightly better than Condition Overload with 2 different status effects. If you have a melee weapon which creates 3 status effects on an enemy then Condition Overload is still the better option (over PPP). If your weapons have a very uneven status distribution (IPS) and low status chance you probably should consider using Primed Pressure Point instead. As a rule of thumb I would say if your weapon has low status chance you should go to the Simulacrum, spawn the hardest enemies you can find and test the weapon with a status build on them. Do a few slashes and check how many status effects are on the enemies and then based on the result make a decision between Condition Overload and Primed Pressure Point.
Worth to mention is that in some situation a combination of both mods can work if you do not need the additional mod slot for elemental mod.
If your weapon supports a pure crit build the nerf to Condition Overload won't even matter.
The nerf to Blood Rush is a nerf to the crit chance and it is a relative heavy nerf.
I'll oversimplify the calculation a bit but it is good enough to make a good decision when modding.
Let's assume we have a weapon with 25% crit chance. We use an ordinary "True Steel" with +120% Crit chance and the Blood rush (old value 60%, new value 40%).
Crit chance = base crit chance x (1 + relative mod bonus + blood rush bonus x (combo multiplier-1) + absolute crit bonus from stuff like arcanes
Lets ignore the absolute crit bonus for simplicity reasons here.
Calculation for old Blood Rush (60%) -> 25% x (1 + 120% + 60% x (12-1)) = 220% crit chance
Calculation for new Blood Rush (40%) -> 25% x (1 + 120% + 40% x (12-1)) = 165% crit chance
The result is a 25% lower crit chance at max combo multiplier (more than you would assume by looking at the changed mod description). But that is only half of the story here. Since critical damage is based on tiers (yellow, orange, red) the 25% difference might put your weapon into a lower tier than it was before.
Yellow Crits multiply the normal damage with the Crit damage multipler. The damage for Orange crits is doubled and for Red crits trippled.
Eventually you lose MUCH more damage because of that and definitely MUCH more than the 20% change of the mod description on Blood Rush.
Lots of explanation which should help to understand how much Melee got nerfed and why you all of a sudden your melee weapons feel weak compared to what you knew prior update 30.5.
While the changes to Condition Overload and Blood Rush are massive (if you really bother to do the damage calculations) it is still the unreliability of the Berserker mod with bothers me most.
I've spent a few hours taking a look at my most favorite melee weapons and tried to fix the problems that are caused by the nerfs.
That is not always possible. Fact is you can not fully compensate such heavy nerfs but you can at least do some fine tuning.
e.g. check if condition overload is still viable on the weapons... check if a change from crit to status or from status to crit might be the better option.
While the Simulacrum is a good way to test the general strength of the weapons I decided to go a step further and test these weapons on enemies which I can not spawn in the such a test environment.
Steel Path Acolytes have a similar difficulty level than the enemies in the Simulacrum but on top they have an additional +150% armor, health and shields. With other words they are much harder to kill and probably are the best test subjects to see if your melee weapon can deal with boss enemies of high level.
Many of my melee weapons that were working flawlessly prior the nerf just did no longer work any good on these kinds of enemies. It took ages to do enough damage to kill them.
Result: new builds for all me melee weapons based on the new meta.
In some bases I switched from status to crit... in some cases I compensated the lower crit chance with a higher crit damage or more total damage. In one case I completely went away from my usual "more speed = more damage" approach and got rid of all attack speed mods in favor of more crit damage (it was scaling better).
Good news is that all weapons are still end game viable with these changes.
While melee was nerfed, primary and secondary weapons got buffs.
But to be honest I am not 100% convinced that this really is making a big difference.
The activation condition for the new galvanized mods and also for the new Arcanes is "on kill". If you can not produce enough damage to make that kill none of the new bonuses will ever apply. Again this can be an issue when facing boss enemies (exactly where you would need the damage).
I have a huge bias towards this new "on kill" conditions for mods. They work great against trash mod enemies (where you don't need the damage) and again fail you in situations where you face hard enemies (where you would need the damage increase).
Additionally have I tested the new galvanized mods... specifically the multishot variations since multishot is a variable at the very end of the damage calculation and therefore should have huge impact on the damage output.
Strangely the damage increase even under perfect condition for most of the tested weapons was much weaker than expected from the stats of the mod description. Only slow firing weapons with very large total damage (like snipers) see a very good damage improvement from the galvanized multishot variant. All weapons with high fire rates but low total damage only see minimal improvements even if perfect conditions apply.
Everything seems very inconsistent.
Dunno yet how to explain that.
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some stats should be different if working
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whatever I wrote about modding melee weapons before can be considered outdated and partly wrong with the newest update
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Well, the shield regeneration is not unlimited.
It is based on the normal shield rebuilds that all the shields have after x seconds not taking damage and a number of bats/bots which are limited to ~1/3 of what a player could use if using that specific ship.
Changing difficulty sliders mainly has impact on the damage NPCs deal. Can be useful but won't help to kill NPCs faster.
Therefore I would advice that you take a look at the crossfire starter guide aswell as the combat guide.
Combat Video Guides - SWAT Portal
There is in detail explained how to fight efficiently, what you need to take care of in terms of choice of weapons and general combat mechanics.
Just alone the choice of weapons can make a huge difference in combat due to the way how FL calculates the position of the target lead indicator based on the projectile speed of the equipped weapons (a wrong choice of weapons can in worst case make a majority of your shots miss the target).
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I'll favor of token I was thinking about more useful terms for the three qualities of the items.
Bio-neural microchip
Bio-neural circuit
Bio-neural computer
or something along the lines
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Despite the still very limited time I managed to get some more work done on the upcoming update.
I am not totally satisfied with the progress but considering how little time I currently have for working on the mod its better than nothing.
A good bunch of new 3d models were finished and are almost ready to put into the mod.
A bit of additional texture work certainly is needed... that really is not my strength but I guess Ill find a way to get it done.
Regarding the Blackstar fleet I decided to go for a token system with three different tokens.
This can be considered a new currency system for the game which is independent from the billions of $ players already have.
Tokens will be needed to craft new equipment.
They will only drop as loot from invading Blackstar enemies.
Like I said there will be three different token types with different values.
The lowest value type will drop from ordinary fighters. The middle value variant will drop from capital ships.
The high value type will only drop from ultra rare elite fighters which have a very low spawn rate.
The economy behind this is still work in progress.
Tokens can be traded with other players.
Other than that they have no value.
The whole token mechanic will only work on the server, not in Singleplayer.
Crafting blueprints can be purchased on Clan bases.
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