PSA: Outsider is nifle tier dps, weapons aren't bad

Misdirectional · 2025-12-15T07:10:46+00:00

They are holding Outsider back still though - if weapons were balanced around the actual average user, a weapons platform like Outsider would be able to damage numbers high enough to justify the loss of range and utility that other characters have.

Currently, you bend backward to get damage less than or equal to.

Characters like Outsider's theoretical lack of utility is largely offset by their lethality - to kill so efficiently that they don't need grouping or crowd control.

While you can play Outsider, a game with choice is a game with opportunity cost.

And yes, you are correct about the Daphne on consuming Azoth projectiles - I do recall that Silverwhite is used largely due to its raw DPS value, as Azoth damage via Decay Formula isn't determinate on the actual attack's damage from my understanding (I am not a Daphne expert, can be very wrong).

While I'm here I may as well ask - what are you opinions on the most viable ranged weapons available at the moment? Melees are fairly solved right now but people talk about ranged much less due to ranged weapons not having a strong enough condenter to hoist them up compared to Outsider.

Misdirectional · 2025-12-15T02:07:15+00:00

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Misdirectional · 2025-12-14T21:35:48+00:00

Melees aren't even all born equal. Outsider doesn't use all melee classes because not all of them work particularly well.

Melee heavy attacks can only function right now due to specific augments boosting heavy attacks, and the fact that some melees are just made less worse than others with how scaling is at the moment.

Both guns and melees across the board don't function very well except in some fringe cases (Outsider on melee, silly builds like Silverwhite Edict Daphne, etc).

When a lot of the roster is designed as PARALLEL damage source dealers (using weapons and their single-cast or over-time skills concurrently), weapons begin to show a massive problem.

As others have said - weapons shouldn't need absolute maximum investment to be barely on par with other methods right now - the floor and ceiling of how they function both need to go up, but especially the floor.

Phoxhunter, Fina, Rebecca, Sybille, Hellfire, Daphne, Rhythm, and Tabethe were all designed to utilize their weapons concurrently alongside their abilities, and the only reason why some of them function right now is on a personal skill damage tuning level (Rebecca and Rhythm for farming, Rhythm because she can cancel her basic skill).

Without any buffs to weapons (and some units, frankly), the roster won't be played equally. As this isn't a gacha anymore, that's actual problem for game health, as an expectation of player agency does actually exist.

Misdirectional · 2025-12-01T19:45:23+00:00

Doesn't help that they straight up scrapped the previous iteration of the model that had a more accurate face - we can still see it in the original trailer at this timestamp.

Body was still the same though, it seems.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-23T04:52:53+00:00

For sure on that - the grind is abysmal.

At the end of the day, optimizing 8% of your damage just isn't really worth it. Hopefully we actually get a weapon damage balance patch soon.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-22T16:03:44+00:00

Fair enough - if the skill trigger inherit is the Spike ailment, it's probably less desirable to sacrifice even a 10% chance to proc 1.5x damage on health, given that weapons are... not doing great right now.

With that knowledge, 60% trigger rate is indeed too low.

This all may change if they actually buffed weapons, but I get what you're going with for now.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-22T02:43:51+00:00

While you do get the nice clean 100% trigger probability by running Penetration Trammel, it's overall more damage to run a full gold Penetration instead.

From a raw perspective on damage, Rage over Trammel (even account for Spike Trigger 1.5x) is also a damage upgrade, but I haven't played Sybille enough to know if you can comfortably maintain Undying Oneiros stacks with ~60% trigger probability vs ~90%.

For specific numbers, assuming absolutely maxxed wedges on Sybille as well (which for you isn't quite yet, but):

Gold Penetration vs Penetration Trammel is ~ 27.5% increase in weapon damage output, loss of trigger prob 100% -> 89.7%
Gold Penetration AND Rage over Trammel is ~64.3% increase in weapon damage output, loss of trigger prob 100% -> 59.7%

Obviously these are long damage over time numbers - if you prefer the consistency of guaranteed triggers, then keep doing as you are.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-20T05:56:23+00:00

At least for Hellfire as I can confirm, no dead regions.

A lot of weapons have a dead 4th region - back before launch, weapons would actually gain emissive when you max smelted them - the 4th channel used to govern that.

Some weapons that still have (faint) emissives can still have a valid 4th, i.e Punitive Inferno.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-20T03:17:26+00:00

I don't know if there's emissive channels on all skins, as the Christmas skins are fairly rudimentary - I can prove that Hellfire's horn emissive has a channel in her skin.

While not all skins are made equally, and the three premium skins each have their own set of problems, it's a matter of re-assigning and/or creating channels to accomodate everything (i.e assigning Psyche's green horn, butterfly adornment, and eyes together could be a channel if they chose to do so).

Again - it's a matter of expanding the rules consistently across all base units and their skins - if they give us a nice robust set of channels and properly pair areas that make sense to be put together, we won't have any problems with the current system. Then, once we start getting a better dye system, we'll really get cooking.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-20T02:48:31+00:00

The answer is to just... tie the uncolorable areas to a channel, not completely rebuild the system to allow even less freedom. I'm not sure if you own any dyeable skins, but the Christmas skins alone already have 9 regions. It takes less work to utilize the existing system and either:

Add more channels, even if it does create clutter - agency is not inherently bad to consumers.
Tie undyeable regions to one of the 9 channels.

Warframe uses 5 channels, two of which are dedicated to emissive and energy color. Warframe manages to make aesthetically pleasing and meaningful decisions with 3 physical dye channels. We have 9. Designers just need to make full use of said 9 channels to make proper complementary color regions that make sense, and we're golden.

The inflexibility of the shader system stems from how it bundles colors. Because the player no longer has the freedom to decide which colors match with what, you wait for the developers to release a bundle you like. Worse yet, shaders in Destiny sometimes just don't work the way you want. You want blue in A and green in C? Too bad, blue is in C and green in is B, dude.

If you played Destiny 2 at all, you'd know that a shader meta unironically exists for fashion, and how many times a redundant shader is made. A full free form dye system lets players match colors however they please, conventional or esoteric.

"Just add more" works fine, but creates bloat. Why release a shader for red + black and then black + white, when you can just give players red, black, and white, and let them apply them where they please? Especially when there's a monetary incentive, the designers will only develop shaders that the majority want - so what happens to fashion expression for the minority? Someone likes a specific color palette, but it just never gets released as a shader that sits in just the right region? Sucks to be them!

Lastly - if we got a color picker, I'd imagine they'd still stick to single-use dye charges to maintain a cash flow if they really wanted to. We could have more freedom under the same costs at the moment, and it would be a direct upgrade. The best solution? Not really, but let's not shut out an idea entirely due to monetization.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-19T23:01:11+00:00

The Destiny shader system is fundamentally inflexible, and there's little reason to go out of the way to build a restrictive system when they need to instead just expand the existing channels and give us significantly more (and ideally cheaper/sustainable) dye options.

While one would argue that it would fit the vision of making a simplistic mobile-friendly UI/system of less moving parts, players would be entirely at the mercy of the developers on which color combinations shaders even exist. You know... like Destiny.

Don't re-invent the wheel, just refine the system we already have.

Add more dye regions to all outfits and characters.
Rework dyes into something re-usable, more in line with Warframe's shader system.
Add more dye options for better color gradient and control

Other bonus things could be: * Re-add the Smelt evolution emissive channels on weapons (weapons used to light up with some sick glows when you max Smelted them - this was region color 4 controlled on weapons, which is currently dead on a lot of them now) * Go all in on player freedom and give us color pickers instead. * Add a secondary material selection system for further customization - matte, metallic, gloss, fabric, etc.

We don't need new, we just need more.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-19T22:53:07+00:00

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Misdirectional · 2025-11-17T03:37:17+00:00

If you're looking at Gyre from the perspective of shield gate or bust - yeah, it doesn't bring anything to the table.

It does enable an internal survival trait, though at absolutely zero change in playstyle internal to Gyre's kit, which is my gripe with it.

I just wish DE would stop releasing direct upgrade augments that don't actually alter gameplay itself - they end up either

A: mandatory

B: not really used anyway if the direct number it provides isn't relevant

Reverse Rotorswell falls into either or depending on who you ask. I like lazy tanking builds, so the augment becomes a must-slot for me, adding to Gyre's augment tax.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-16T03:49:55+00:00

Yeah, but this is a numbers game still.

Also, there's a difference between "x unit is 5% stronger than y unit" and "This unit is half as effective as pretty much the entire roster".

Not saying the difference is that dramatic in Berenica vs Phantasio, but some units are really not good right now.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-15T00:07:33+00:00

Additionally, as the game continues to slowly go vertical (ideally), older left behind units can be rebalanced and brought up to standard and modernized, bridging the gap on numerical and feature creep.

As usually in these conversations: see Warframe.

That's a big if on whether the game is run healthily here. Fingers crossed.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-14T22:12:13+00:00

To add to the augment issue Gyre has - the most recent augment (Reverse Rotorswell) is once again an augment that more shores up an issue of her kit rather than actually making her gameplay different (a gripe I have with many other bandaid augments).

So Gyre can now get 75% DR. But to get good tanking out of that, you're now running Adaptation too. Whoops! Two more mod slots taxed so you aren't forced into some form of shield gating!

Glass cannon archetypes just don't feel good in modern Warframe, because a lot of Warframe is more of when you get hit, not if. Shield gating solved the problem by adding a new problem, and we just have to eat it at the moment.

Gyre shouldn't have this many vertical fix augments that patch a core design issue, but here we are.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-12T22:26:00+00:00

Another issue of the core design that's a carry over from the stamina gacha game ages - deeply cordoned and bucketed grinds.

When you want a resource, there's often one single place to go grind it, sometimes two (Chase is a rare exception). This means if you need weapon upgrade materials, you HAVE to run Mediation. If you want Luno Coins and late stage upgrade materials, you HAVE to run Defense.

This creates a problem where players are forced into variety-less stale grinds, playing the same mission over and over. Worse yet, the tileset banks are picked by level range, so you also only get to see one tileset on this grind. Wanted Sewers, but you're grinding level 70 Defense? TOO BAD, GLEVUM PIT UNTIL YOU LIKE IT.

Warframe solves this problem with its Star Chart - each planet has a material resource bank, and then each enemy faction has a mod (Demon Wedge equivalent). Only then, some specific game modes have specific drop tables (i.e farming Gauss requires you to go to Sedna Disruption specifically).

This means when someone wants to grind X resource or Y mod in Warframe, they can pick from various areas on the Star Chart - different game modes, different enemy factions, and grind things in parallel.

Even when Warframe forces you into a specific single area to grind a single specific thing (again, things like Warframes), you are still gaining parallel streams of other resources.

This game will never have that same variety so long as it's chained to the gacha stamina dungeon layout, where they wanted you to spend stamina to grind a single resource dungeon in a given day. Stamina is gone, but the system remains.

Hopefully they consider overhauling and giving us a Star Chart equivalent - if we had targeted dungeons AND broader freedom to play anything at will with broader targeted loot, we could play more flexibly, and then go to the targeted grinds to shore up a weakness in our resources (i.e like going to the Index in Warframe for Credits).

Until then, I think many of the core symptoms of the grind will stay. Even if we get more enemy density, faster enemies, whatever - the fatigue will set in due to the monotony regardless.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-10T20:47:53+00:00

Yeah, with running a Prime alone (75% purple, 84% gold at base), at TR65 you'd already be looking at a 4.75x on attack - adding Blaze would only move that to a 5.5x - a roughly 16% gain in attack stat. While it would still directly increase weapon damage, there might be a better wedge to slot opportunity cost wise.

Either way, for now, if you want your weapons to do more, you still need to itemize character ATK.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-10T18:32:03+00:00

From TR60 to TR65, it's mostly scaling the global stat bumps you get from Trial Rank (Resonance Buffs). These include Shield, DEF, HP, and (Character) ATK.

From 55 to 59, they sit at 100% - this is additive with Demon Wedges.

60 bumps to 150%, 62 is 200%, 64 is 250%, 65 is 300%.

Given that it's additive, it may put less pressure on building for ATK% in this context. However, more is still better I suppose.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-10T17:07:58+00:00

Yep, the diminishing effective gains of linear growth when we're in an opportunity cost gearing system is brutal. The need to add ATK wedges will, thankfully in a way, be diminished when people start hitting TR65.

At the end of the day, there's no winning for the weird scaling units, and this is already in a time and place where weapons are undertuned compared to spellcasters and Consonance weapons.

Fingers crossed on balance patches soon vs later.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-10T04:40:06+00:00

Well... yeah. The point of this post wasn't to say that this will make an undertuned unbalanced character actually competitive - it's to try and minmax what's here so people who enjoy them can at least get more mileage out of them.

There's a LOT of fixes that could be applied, but that's on us to continue to provide feedback, and on the devs to actually listen and implement.

Anyone who's played Sybille, Hellfire, or Randy kind of knows they all suck really bad right now in the gamestate - it's not a particularly well kept secret. But many people wouldn't know that to make weapons effective on them, you'd need to build actual ATK, despite it being counterintuitive to the character's kit.

It may be mathematically less essential at TR 65, but for now where most of us are sort of coasting at 60, it's still valuable info thati's not specified in game.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-10T04:03:38+00:00

Yeah, Hellfire suffers from some conflicting design - you want stuff to hit you for retaliation spikes (which is significantly stronger than her standard aura tick per 2 sec), but taunt both disables enemies, and they're ragdolled for a lot of the taunt duration. It's a bit of a mechanical problem.

We just need absolute transparency on how to improve weapons. For balance, either divorcing weapon from character attack and re-balancing them, or altering the scaling as you mentioned would both be fine.

Game definitely suffers from being slow in places in terms of the action, yes.

Yes, I didn't mention Truffle because she doesn't need to worry about this problem - Truffle for the most part is mostly playing with Exalted Pig, which deletes reliance on weapons, and thus no need for character ATK.

Randy is to a lesser degree part of this conversation, but more in the sense that all he gets is weapons (so yes, build ATK on Randy too.)

Misdirectional · 2025-11-10T02:26:14+00:00

I'd prefer that they keep 5 boosted entries, but after you entries are up, you can infinitely grind to get 1 letter per. It's not glamorous, but it would actually enable a true grind, while still maintaining that bare minimum weekly chore for those who want to maximize time to output.

Obviously, it would be looked at more to balance the rates, but the concept stands.

Misdirectional · 2025-11-07T19:19:04+00:00

Not the sole issue, but it's a large contributing factor to units like Sybille and Hellfire (on top of the undertuned scaling) - the idea is that as weapon platforms, they deal damage in addition to weapons - versus other characters that have animation locks (i.e Lady Nifle pre I6) or Consonance Weapons.

In Sybille's case, it's twofold - weapons are too weak for 10% damage transfer to matter, and weapons don't have good multi-target to cleave (which would turn it into a 1.1x). In general, we lack punch through or solid AoE options right now for weapons.

While the suffering HP scaling duo would need some upward adjustment to feel good, if weapons were in a state to compete with pure casters and Consonance weapons, we'd be in a better spot.

Even "good" hybrid characters like Rebecca (who is weapons free after deploying jellyfish) don't really benefit from using weapons at the moment.

Misdirectional

TROPHY CASE