Have I Missed Something Or Is Armor Worthless?

[wgrant]

(Disclaimer: All stats and equations are from warframe.wikia.com)

 

The first time I found a Steel Fiber mod I thought “Wait, I can increase my hit points AND  my damage reduction? I wonder how they balanced that”.  Well as far as I can tell they didn’t.

 

So to talk about damage reduction and hit points at the same time you need to understand effective life.  If you don’t know what that means lets go through an example made up of two cases:

Case 1: You have 100 hit points and 50% damage reduction.  You are about to take 100 damage.  Now that damage is reduced by 50% so you only take 50 out of your 100 hit points, you have lost half (50%) of your effective life.

Case 2: You have 200 hit points and 0% damage reduction.  You are about to take 100 damage. Now that damage is not reduced, you take 100 out of your 200 hit points, you have lost half (50%) of your effective life.

 

Using effective life, there is no difference between halving damage or doubling your hit points.

 

Using this principle I threw together a table of every warframe (at level 30) comparing their effective life with, maxed Vitality and no Steel Fiber, no Vitality and maxed Steel Fiber, and maxed Vitality and maxed Steel Fiber.  The results can be seen below.

 

 

Looking at the table you will see that you lose almost twice as much effective life if you are built with Steel Fiber versus being built with Vitality…  So building 14 points of Steel Fiber gets you twice as hurt as if you built 12 points of Vitality?  That doesn’t seem right.  On top of that stacking Steel Fiber on top of Vitality only cuts your damage around 5% of your max hit points, so stacking them isn’t even viable…

 

Have I missed something or is there just no value in Steel Fiber past fusing it to level up your Vitality mod.

 

 

P.S.  You will also notice that Saryn always takes the least damage and Vitality-built-Ash takes the second least.  So Saryn is the tankiest and Vitality-built-Ash is the second... but good effort Frost/Rhino, good effort.

[Mak_Gohae]

Jebus.... folks are doing spreadsheets for a video game...

I hope you guys have the same dedication at work or school.

[SolluxCaptorTA]

Edit: I'm stupid.

 

Edit 2: Nevermind, it is a percent reduction. In that case, good work on the math.

Edited May 3, 2013 by SolluxCaptorTA

[LoRDxDeMoN]

You have the whole picture. Don't use Steel Fiber.

[Davoodoo]

Armor is useless cause most of ppl have brain and will hide or use defensive powers when their shield is out. Health doesnt regen like shields you know.

[Gearb0x]

Good work.

 

What about alt helms?  The Frost gets bonus armor and reduced hp.  The Rhino gets +25 flat hp.

 

Edit:

 

What about adding Shields with maxed redirection to the mix?  There's 0% damage reduction, but you can drop, say 150 damage/second on the frame and see how long it lasts.

 

Also: double stacked Rhino and Frost take less effective damage than double stacked Ash.  Ash is only tankier than those 2 frames in one of the three situations you outlined.

Edited May 4, 2013 by Gearb0x

[wgrant]

Well just based on the wikia I can't do helms. 

 

I don't know how the %'s stack on Frost; do they modify the base before the mods/levels, with the mods/levels, or after the mods/levels.  More or less the same with Rhino's, I would need to know if it modifies his base HP or the number after Vitality and 30 levels.

[SolluxCaptorTA]

Vitality only works on Base HP. Don't know about the Frost helm.

[Xrylene]

Well just based on the wikia I can't do helms. 

 

I don't know how the %'s stack on Frost; do they modify the base before the mods/levels, with the mods/levels, or after the mods/levels.  More or less the same with Rhino's, I would need to know if it modifies his base HP or the number after Vitality and 30 levels.

 

I'm pretty sure that Rhino's helm just adds the health on top, similar to Excalibur and his shields. So it's 25 extra health regardless of levels or vitality mods, no more, no less. As for Frost's armour, I'd have to guess that it is added to the base as well, as that seems to be standard, but I don't know of any way to be certain on that.

[Gearb0x]

Rhino gives a flat 25 hp after all mods.  No change to base HP or Vitality.  765 Vit hp and 325 natural lvl 30.

 

I haven't played around with the Frost enough to lock down the % stacking.  Though the main Frost page mentions that the %health reduction is AFTER mods.  So it'd be 703 vit hp (199.5 armor) and 285 natural lvl 30 hp (with unknown damage reduction)

[CY13ERPUNK]

+1 OP

 

pre-U7 my rhino had to stack around +300%ish extra armor before i didnt feel like a paper rhino

 

so yes the non-stackable steel fiber we have now is MUCH less powerful/effective

 

personally i think steel fiber needs to be +20% per rank instead of 10

[PhantomWay]

IMO Steelfiber should give addictive not percentual flat armor bonus....

+10,+20,+30 so goes on, instead of +10%,+20% etc

So it can be viable from any Frame, not just for some with heavy base armor....

[Davoodoo]

IMO Steelfiber should give addictive not percentual flat armor bonus....

+10,+20,+30 so goes on, instead of +10%,+20% etc

So it can be viable from any Frame, not just for some with heavy base armor....

It wouldnt be fair cause frame with 10 base armor is alot weaker in that term than a one with 30 armor. While +100% armor will still mean that it will have 3 times less armor, while + 100 flat armor will be somewhere 20% diffrence between 2.

[Zeddypanda]

Armour is inherently more useful than health because health refills are constant. A health orb refills 25 or 50 hit points. If you take 50 damage that's refilled by 1 health orb but if you take 100 damage you'll need two health orbs to be able to take another one of those hits.

 

For this reason, armour is balanced out to be less effective than health assuming no health refills are dropped at all.

 

This is not saying that vitality is not currently better than steel fiber, that depends a lot on just how abundant sources of health regeneration are, but it is a factor I have not seen you consider one bit.

[TwilightAsh]

Armour is inherently more useful than health because health refills are constant. A health orb refills 25 or 50 hit points. If you take 50 damage that's refilled by 1 health orb but if you take 100 damage you'll need two health orbs to be able to take another one of those hits.

 

For this reason, armour is balanced out to be less effective than health assuming no health refills are dropped at all.

 

This is not saying that vitality is not currently better than steel fiber, that depends a lot on just how abundant sources of health regeneration are, but it is a factor I have not seen you consider one bit.

 

This is a good point

[Liminal]

I wouldn't call health refills "constant". You have to open a locker or destroy a container, something that is not always possible in a fight. And even then there's no guarantee you will get an orb.

[Mietz]

Armour is inherently more useful than health because health refills are constant. A health orb refills 25 or 50 hit points. If you take 50 damage that's refilled by 1 health orb but if you take 100 damage you'll need two health orbs to be able to take another one of those hits.

 

For this reason, armour is balanced out to be less effective than health assuming no health refills are dropped at all.

 

This is not saying that vitality is not currently better than steel fiber, that depends a lot on just how abundant sources of health regeneration are, but it is a factor I have not seen you consider one bit.

 

+1

[Argoms]

Frost/rhino are defensive in abilities, you get ripped to shreds pretty quickly if you stand still in the open no matter what your ehp is.

 

Armor mods seems to be the crit bonuses of frames. 

[Necrio]

The advantage to using steel fiber is that your max health is lower

 

that means each red orb restores more % of your HP.

[TehJumpingJawa]

The really silly aspect of the current system is that every frame should take vitality, even Loki & Mag. (unless you like dying to poison a lot)

 

Equally every frame should take redirection, regardless of their base shield.

 

It really stifles build diversity when 2 of your not-ability mod slots are already predetermined. (4 if you assume flow & streamline)

[PaperAlien]

Well just based on the wikia I can't do helms. 

 

I don't know how the %'s stack on Frost; do they modify the base before the mods/levels, with the mods/levels, or after the mods/levels.  More or less the same with Rhino's, I would need to know if it modifies his base HP or the number after Vitality and 30 levels.

For now, just use the assumption that it adds to the base. All the upsides of alt helms add on base, which is funny considering all the downsides are on the end total >.>

 

 

Armour is inherently more useful than health because health refills are constant. A health orb refills 25 or 50 hit points. If you take 50 damage that's refilled by 1 health orb but if you take 100 damage you'll need two health orbs to be able to take another one of those hits.

This is also a factor, although I also agree that the balance currently favours Vitality.

A flat increase system would not work, as it would help low-armour frames way more than high-armour frames. I think the best current solution without a complete overhaul is to simply increase the percentage to about 30% per level.

[neKroMancer]

Jebus.... folks are doing spreadsheets for a video game...

I hope you guys have the same dedication at work or school.

 

Good sir, we don't do spreadsheet in school.

 

We do it only for videogame.

[Irfir]

There is a big flaw.

You can use BOTH mods at the same time.

So vitality vs Steelfiber is quite useless.

 

The main question is: Is Steelfiber worth using.

And the answere to that is easy.

Doing it without math: If u have enough base armor, yes it is :)

[Dawnseeker_Ch]

If 2 of your mod slots are already predetermined because everyone takes redirection and vitality, why don't they just remove those mods (or change how they work, perhaps by adding shield armor) and add the scaling directly to the warframes? It means more control over player's shields and health at each level, and lets us have more options by freeing up those 2 slots.

 

When i first read the thread and looked at the chart, I admit, my 2 warframes, frost and rhino, which I was lead to believe were the tankiest are fighting for 3rd place.  I felt really gypped to know that those two warframes who were designed to be tanky/tanks (as far as I was informed) are not.  I'd like to see some really tanky but lower damaging roles because I prefer to be the protector of my group and while Its not bad, I want to play guardian if i can.

[11.11.11]

The advantage to using steel fiber is that your max health is lower

 

that means each red orb restores more % of your HP.

 

Is it just me - or is this a good point?