Damage: A Simple Solution

[(XBOX)Avant Solace]

As many people know, the current Warframe meta is plagued by a lack of diversity. Nearly all damage types are considered inferior to Slash and Corrosive due to their unrivaled ability to strip or otherwise bypass armor. This has caused a major controversy as it encourages players to create uniform builds as opposed to going for the "ideal" damage types that would typically be expected. But now I have realized something: we are going about this all wrong. The damage values are not the issue, but rather how armor itself is treated in the game.

Armor in Warframe, despite what the graphs may suggest, follow a relatively simple formula. For every 300 units of armor something has, the amount of raw damage needed to kill them increases by 100% (300 armor is double base health, 600 is triple base, 900 quadruple, etc). This is a simple and sound model for basic damage formulas. However, enemies receive armor at an EXPONENTIAL rate as they grow in level. This means that they are given stark damage reduction as they grow in level, requiring egregious amount of damage to kill. This is why Corrosive and Slash are so valuable, as they can subvert this aggressive scaling and drain health faster than the ideal damage types.

So here is the solution: Make armor scale linearly. That is to say armor is given at a flat rate as enemies grow instead of exponentially growing. Example: Currently a level 10 Bombard has 462 health and 557.5 armor, giving an effective health of 1,320.56. Meanwhile a level 100 bombard has 41,772 health and 7,860.62 armor, giving an effective health of 1,136,285.36. Despite the level being a 1:10 scale, the armor increase is ~1:14, health is ~1:90, and effective health is ~1:860. Now if we adjust the armor to be a 1:10 scale (5,575 armor), the effective health becomes 805,889.47, an ~1:610 scale. While still large, it is overall more manageable; furthermore it means stripping/ignoring armor won't give as drastic a result, allowing other methods of damage to shine a little more. _{*Please keep in mind. Bombards are very armor-centric enemies. The overall difference in effective health will vary widely depending on the enemy.}

Now this of course has some flaws. DE will need to find a sound angle to scale the armor linearly. Too steep and enemies will remain too reliant on their armor, too shallow and they become exceptionally squishy. There needs to be a "Goldilocks Zone" where armor is treated as a health accessory instead of the main health pool, while still being something to consider at higher levels.

Overall we need to focus less on how to nerf/buff damage types and more on how to balance armor.

Edited October 14, 2018 by (XB1)alchemPyro
Old/incorrect data

[W3zeer]

Well it's only been 2 1/2 years since DE said they were going to adress enemie armor scaling so I expect an update any day now 😉 . Soon^TM...