It’s been nearly 3 years since Damage 2.0 was released in Update 11 and almost two years since Digital Extremes first began hinting at yet another iteration on Warframe‘s combat system. Now that The War Within has finally shipped, the developers are finally diving back into combat system to bring the core gameplay a much needed overhaul. The developer workshop offers insights and a unique perspective of what the developers hope to accomplish with the rework.

Before reading on, keep in mind that the contents of the workshop are still subject to change. The developers have put together this workshop to generate player feedback to help influence the final direction of the rework. The source of the post can be found here: https://forums.warframe.com/topic/732616-dev-workshop-damage-30

What is Damage 3.0? A fair question to ask seeing as it’s taken us years to figure it out ourselves. Warframe is constantly evolving in different directions and sometimes we have to completely overhaul older gameplay systems to keep up with the rest of the game. We recently gave a massive overhaul to Mod Fusion (now Endo), the Star Chart and Void, Parkour movement systems, and even the Market… so it’s about time we jump back in to the core of Warframe’s gameplay: The combat system.

Think of this as a “Part 1” of many. Damage 3.0 has taken a while to build and it might take a little while longer to bring to the public build. We’re still working out a few things and would love to hear your feedback.

What still works and what we will still build on.

– Combined Elements. Damage 2.0 introduced Blast, Corrosive, Gas, Magnetic, Radiation, and Viral damage types along with new Status effects created by combining elements. They added meaningful choices when picking which elements to use.

– Health Types. 13 different Health types with unique defenses and weaknesses for players to discover the depths of the combat system’s hidden complexity.

– Improved UI. Players can immediately see the impact of their modding choices with the improvements made to the UI.

Damage 2.0 forced the rust off of Warframe’s combat system in a way that encouraged better build diversity. The original system Warframe launched with in regards to modding had already been improved upon a few times, but the overhaul added some much needed depth to the combat system.

We breathed new life into the existing factions by giving players an incentive to mod differently when facing each faction. Magnetic damage against heavily shielded units, Gas damage against Infested forces, or just modding Corrosive + Cold or Heat for general use against everything because it’s the best middle ground to avoid the headache of dealing with nuanced modding for every single mission.

Damage 3.0 has been here all along! Kind of…

We have already added several experimental mods over the past few years which offer unique effects based on conditions rather than providing flat bonuses to your weapons. Augments provided by Syndicates, Acolyte mods introduced in Operation: Shadow Debt, and a variety of band-aid mods for lackluster weapons added in through Rathuum and The Index.

Several other changes have been made over time to set a better foundation for Damage 3.0 to be built upon. In 2016, we’ve added:

– The return of Charge attacks.

– Improved base modding capacity based on Mastery Rank.

– Unique weapon passive effects.

– A variety of improvements to Stealth gameplay immersion.

The goal is to deliver something which can challenge players at all levels. Something fun, immersive, and rewards players for demonstrating skill. Damage 3.0 will tackle the big issues like “power creep” and how Mastery Rank doesn’t really matter since you can get some of the best weapons in the game within your first week of playing and then get all the mandatory mods by trading with friends or just straight up buying them from other players. And it will do all of this without giving enemy AI an overhaul!

What changes are coming?

Right now our priority is still to follow up with The War Within and the new systems introduced with it, so we’re planning on introducing the first wave of changes in December. Here’s what you can expect to see before the holidays:

– The removal of “mandatory mods” (such as Serration/Hornet Strike/etc).

– Elemental modding rebalanced.

– An overhaul of the Modding station on the Orbiter.

Mandatory Mods:

We’ve found that over 80% of our most active players share nearly identical builds across several different weapons. For Secondary weapons, nearly every single weapon with at least one Forma installed follows the same recipe: Hornet Strike, Lethal Torrent, Barrel Diffusion, and at least two elemental damage mods. Mandatory mods, such as Serration, Pressure Point, and Corrosive Projection are being removed entirely and players will be compensated for the removed mods.

We also found that with the new modding system, players seem to prefer the variations with +120% (or more) Damage more than the options with -100% (or more) Damage. It was surprising to all of us here that players would want the stronger options over the interesting utility variants. With so many other mods available to choose from, we’re hoping to give players a reason to experiment with what works best for each unique weapon in a way that encourages experimentation.

Weapon damage will be changed to scale with the weapon’s rank. Mastery Rank will still influence modding capacity and gain the added benefit of improving weapon damage in a similar way.

Elemental Modding:

Elemental mods have always been a source of tremendous power in Warframe and we want to preserve that, but add more meaningful choices. Currently, adding an elemental mod will convert your total physical damage into the selected element and add it to your overall damage. As a result, many players mod for elemental damage as a raw form of power rather than for the utility of each unique status effect.

These mods are being overhauled to no longer provide extra damage directly, but instead empower their status effects. For example: Hellfire will increase Ignite damage and influence a stacking damage amount, Cryo Rounds will increase the strength of the Freeze status, and combining the two for Blast will increase the damage and duration of the status effect.

Modding Segment Changes:

To both improve immersion and encourage creativity, the modding segment on your Orbiter is being given a limitation of 100 mods + scaling with Mastery Rank. An MR10 player can have up to 200 mods, an MR23 player can have up to 330 mods. Duplicate mods will automatically be converted into Endo after the cap is reached. If a new mod is obtained over the cap, it will be available in the modding segment after choosing which mods to remove in favor of it.

To Be Continued…

Stay tuned for the next Dev Workshop coming next month to share some more of the fine print before the update!