Rebalancing Survivability: Remove Armor, Increase Health/Shields, Cap Damage Resistance, Reduce Enemy Lethality

[MJ12]

Survivability in Warframe is weird. It's weird in part because you can have ludicrously different eHP values and therefore ludicrously different TTKs that make balancing enemy damage output nearly impossible.

Nidus, for example, can use his parasitic link and his high innate HP/armor to get something around 50k eHP. This is without also adding in Adaptation or other shenanigans that can boost the number even higher. Inaros running Adaptation can easily end up with ~70k eHP. Chroma using Vex Armor and Adaptation can easily end up with similarly ludicrous eHP pools as well. Meanwhile, a fragile 'caster' Warframe like Nyx with only a Vitality ends up with a whopping 1k eHP.

How do you balance enemy damage when you can easily have characters who can survive dozens of times the damage of others?

There's a simple answer: You can't. Anything that will challenge the first guy and threaten them will basically completely vaporize the second with absolutely no effort. Even though heavy warframes should be significantly more survivable than glass-cannon ones, having the ability to have literal orders of magnitude difference in survivability dependent solely on character and build choice is not going to work.

If DE wants to be able to balance damage so that new players can progress while veteran players are challenged, and you don't end up with some Warframes which are invincible and others that die in a stiff breeze, something needs to be done to bring just about everything in line. The problems here are:

• Armor/health multiplication isn't as much of a problem for players as it is enemies, but it is certainly a problem. It disguises the durability of Warframes because armor's benefits aren't intuitive. It also leads to horribly broken scaling results because boosting armor on warframes with high armor multiplies their effective HP significantly.
• Damage Reduction powers can easily increase a Warframe's durability by a literal order of magnitude or more. Shatter Shield, Parasitic Link, Link + Blessing-you can easily make your Warframe a dozen times tougher. Even the much-maligned Vex armor, which due to its additive stacking with armor mods is weaker than almost any other durability mod, easily quadruples a Warframe's eHP.
• Damage is too high for weaker Warframes to survive and too low to threaten stronger Warframes. Self-explanatory.

But finding problems is easy. Suggesting fixes is harder. So here's what I'd suggest, fix-wise:

• Remove armor from Warframes and Operators. Armor is a bad stat because it obfuscates durability and makes it hard to balance durability because you can double-dip on survivability and get an effect greater than the sum of its parts by boosting both armor and health. It's not as if enemies have a plethora of ways of armor-stripping, which means that armor is just 'making your health pool better' instead of any qualitative change. Ideally you'd rework armor entirely so multiplicative durability stacking is rare, but for now strip it from Warframes. This leaves armor boosting mods and passives sort of in the lurch though, and they should probably be reworked to provide some interesting defensive effect.
  • Possible suggestion: Turn Steel Fiber/Umbral Fiber/Armored Agility/Gladiator Aegis into "elemental resistance" mods that affects I/P/S damage.
    • Steel Fiber might give +3% a level, for a maximum of +33% resistance and a ~50% eHP increase against most enemies (because most enemies use non-Elemental weapons).
    • Umbral Fiber might give 3/3.5/4% a level, for a maximum of +44% I/P/S resistance and a ~79% eHP increase.
    • Agility/Aegis could probably give 4% a level, giving a maximum of +24% resistance and a ~33% eHP increase.
  • Uniaru's passive should probably just be like, 5% untyped damage resistance per rank for a maximum of 20% damage resistance. Having 25% more flat durability doesn't sound like much on paper, but it'd be a fairly strong passive. Similarly its waybound should also be flat untype damage resistance to the Operator.
  • The +armor Arcanes could give temporary damage resistance instead.
  • Vex Armor needs to become straight-up damage resistance instead of armor boosts because of these changes.
  • You'd probably need to find a new and interesting effect to stick on Ice Elemental Ward, which stumps me.
• Increase Warframe health/shield pools to reflect the lack of armor. This will primarily result in significantly boosting "heavy" armored Warframe health/shield pools to make them more survivable given the removal of armor. I'd say that 'heavy' Warframes should be ~2.5-3 times tougher than lighter Warframes (so something like Rhino, Frost, or Chroma should probably have like, 200 shields/300 health) and the rest would be largely build choice.
• Cap damage resistance and make all damage resistance additive up to the cap. I would suggest 67%, which means that at the highest, you will still take 1/3rd damage from enemies, making damage resistance powers extremely powerful but not a question of 'is basically immortal'/'instantly dies.' I could see arguments for lower/higher numbers though.
  • And I do mean all damage resistance here, including things like Adaptation.
  • Nerf their damage reduction somewhat as well. You could probably cut all the numbers by 30% or so here, but increase duration slightly.
  • This might make some powers notably weaker or less desirable. Those powers can be provided buffs as a result.
• Reduce enemy damage so that Sortie-level enemies will threaten a max level light Warframe (e.g. Nyx, Loki) with no defensive mods with some effort but not instantly kill them. This means that a heavy Warframe with some defensive mods will survive a sizable amount of fire but still be vulnerable, and a heavy Warframe using defensive powers and/or tons of defensive mods will be nearly immortal but obviously pay for it via energy upkeep and sacrificing offensive power or other tools to keep survivable.

This would make tanky Warframes still pretty tanky (but less tanky), fragile Warframes still pretty fragile (but much less fragile), and allow for easier balancing of enemies and encounters because now there's no chance you'll run into a Warframe literally 20 or 30 times tougher than another Warframe, and have to somehow figure out a way to threaten both with your enemy mix.

[Kevyne_Kicklighter]

What would be nice is that we have an armor indicator on the bar, to show players when the armor is stripped and "leaking". We only see indicators of shields and health.

And that we can MOVE that health indicator UI element to even SEE when players are DYING!

[Girador]

The problem I have with this is that I simply cannot see how this wouldn't just make things much much worse. Just to start with what would you describe as a fragile frame? because some frames are fragile by design and are designed that way as a balancing feature. Then you have the frames that are only durable due to their abilities, how do you rebalance them? I mean take Trinity as an example, well built her durability goes to 182.4K EHP from just her shields no less add on health and things go up by another 200k ehp not counting armor adding on an armor arcane and while it's active her ehp goes up by another 400k EHP giving her full kitted out 782.4k EHP  and yet without her abilities she can still go to 11.4k EHP with just shields and add on another 12.5k with health no armor involved don't believe me here's the build grand total of 3 forma and i'm not even using the primed version which gets half again ehp from shields. And yet, similarly built, the so called fragile frames can get higher EHP then the average rhino gets.

[MJ12]

35 minutes ago, Kevyne_Kicklighter said:

What would be nice is that we have an armor indicator on the bar, to show players when the armor is stripped and "leaking". We only see indicators of shields and health.

And that we can MOVE that health indicator UI element to even SEE when players are DYING!

There's no armor indicator on the bar because your armor number is a constant. Pretty much no enemy exists who can generate corrosive procs outside of a rare sortie condition.

4 minutes ago, Girador said:

The problem I have with this is that I simply cannot see how this wouldn't just make things much much worse. Just to start with what would you describe as a fragile frame? because some frames are fragile by design and are designed that way as a balancing feature. Then you have the frames that are only durable due to their abilities, how do you rebalance them? I mean take Trinity as an example, well built her durability goes to 182.4K EHP from just her shields no less add on health and things go up by another 200k ehp not counting armor adding on an armor arcane and while it's active her ehp goes up by another 400k EHP giving her full kitted out 782.4k EHP  and yet without her abilities she can still go to 11.4k EHP with just shields and add on another 12.5k with health no armor involved don't believe me here's the build grand total of 3 forma and i'm not even using the primed version which gets half again ehp from shields. And yet, similarly built, the so called fragile frames can get higher EHP then the average rhino gets.

Her durability goes up by that much because she stacks multiple forms of damage resistance. This would literally be impossible in a world where total damage resistance is capped.

The entire point of this thread, and my notes about both removing armor and capping damage resistance stacking, are that this sort of thing, where you have one Warframe with 2k eHP and another with 300k eHP and have to figure out a way to threaten both of them somehow. That's why I talk about removing armor (so you don't have health/armor stacking, which incidentally makes shields a relatively better choice), capping damage resistance (so you can't stack your way to taking 5% normal damage), and finally reducing enemy damage (so tougher Warframes don't instantly die from gunfire despite being oriented around being 'tanky').

This proposal is intended to simultaneously raise the durability floor (by lowering damage and making it harder to kill Warframes with few defensive powers and poor defensive stats) while lowering the durability ceiling (by negating the power of damage resistance stacking and health/armor stacking) of all Warframes. Your argument is based off of a setup that would be literally impossible to manage if this rework was done-simply because that sort of stacking multiple forms of damage resistance would be impossible to do.

[Kevyne_Kicklighter]

2 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

There's no armor indicator on the bar because your armor number is a constant. Pretty much no enemy exists who can generate corrosive procs outside of a rare sortie condition.

Can't go from Shields to Health without damaging armor (i.e., slash damage). Armor is the shield before health. BECAUSE the armor is gone or "leaking" is how your health goes down.

Procs damage the armor to get to damage health. Shield operate as a warning you're getting pelted.

So, armor needs to be indicated on your protection bar right in the middle of it.

[midtarget]

I don't feel like that is a good idea, while I cannot currently come up with a better idea, it feels to me like that will simply end up making pretty much all the tank mains pissed off, and ruin higher level content, fragile frames are supposed to be fragile because they are glass cannons, so making them more reliant on their abilities would help, there aren't a lot of horde shooter class character games, so its hard to see how other game developers did it.

Edited January 9, 2019 by midtarget

[Yasha-7HS]

Would this not just have the opposite effect of making a regeneration meta since reduction is now pointless without coordinated stacking?

Would this also not make shields the new health due to how they function at base, and since health would have no added durability they're just 1-to-1 points?

What would stop anyone from just using the lowered damage to just run a bunch of shield increasing mods and arcanes that make almost the same difference as putting armor on shields and removing it from health?

This rework would fail without an entire damage and enemy AI overhaul.

[MJ12]

7 minutes ago, ShichiseitenYasha said:

Would this not just have the opposite effect of making a regeneration meta since reduction is now pointless without coordinated stacking?

Would this also not make shields the new health due to how they function at base, and since health would have no added durability they're just 1-to-1 points?

What would stop anyone from just using the lowered damage to just run a bunch of shield increasing mods and arcanes that make almost the same difference as putting armor on shields and removing it from health?

This rework would fail without an entire damage and enemy AI overhaul.

There are no mods or arcanes which "make almost the same difference as putting armor on shields." Similarly I suggested a mere ~30% reduction in the value of damage reduction powers, meaning that almost all DR powers would be able to reach the cap by themselves with a handful of power strength mods.

Furthermore the question about shields/health is why I specifically had frame health numbers biased towards health. Health increasing mods would give you significantly more survivability, shield increasing mods less instantaneous survivability in pitched combat but shields regenerate. Of course, there are ways to regain health as well, and obviously shields can be bypassed.

And yes, this would make shields much more valuable rather than worthless. This is desirable because it means mods that increase shields are now actually desirable, and shield regen isn't a laughable dumpstat.

By the way, the point here is that if you want to have an entire damage overhaul you're going to need something like this anyways, because you can't balance a game when you have a two or even three-orders-of-magnitude difference in durability between comparable high-level builds.

39 minutes ago, midtarget said:

I don't feel like that is a good idea, while I cannot currently come up with a better idea, it feels to me like that will simply end up making pretty much all the tank mains pissed off, and ruin higher level content, fragile frames are supposed to be fragile because they are glass cannons, so making them more reliant on their abilities would help, there aren't a lot of horde shooter class character games, so its hard to see how other game developers did it.

Fragile frames are far too fragile and being "reliant on their abilities" generally means "hard-CCing the entire map" or "using powers to kill people without LoS long before they can attack you" which is not actually good for the game's design. I am a "tank main" in the sense you're using it and I want the game to be set up so that I'm threatened by enemies without said enemies instantly vaporizing people playing more fragile Warframes, so that the hard-CC/CC-immunity arms race in Warframe doesn't lead to well, this screwed up meta. Fragile Warframes need to be tougher, tanky Warframes need to be a bit less tanky. Bringing these numbers in line will make the game play better for both because tank mains like me won't need to spend half their time picking up more fragile teammates because one enemy mook got close enough to fire one burst, while said fragile teammates won't need to lock down the entire map or spend half the game on their butt.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

So you have an issue with the fact hat there are frames specifically designed to be tanks can take more damage than frames not designed to be tanks.

I don’t get it.

[MJ12]

3 minutes ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

So you have an issue with the fact hat there are frames specifically designed to be tanks can take more damage than frames not designed to be tanks.

I don’t get it.

No, I have no issue with there being Warframes that are tougher, or even several times tougher, than other Warframes. I have an issue where some Warframe builds can take literally orders of magnitude more damage than others, because you literally cannot balance the time the AI needs to kill a player when you have such ludicrous differences in effective durability. Anything that threatens the super-tanky Warframe will instantly vaporize any other Warframe, anything that threatens other Warframes without instantly killing them will plink off the super-tanky Warframe.

I want something that threatens the frame designed to be a tank to be dangerous, but not instant death, to other warframes, and something that threatens the latter to take a good long while to kill the heavy Warframe but still be a vague threat to them.

You felt pretty damn tanky in Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode as a Geth Juggernaut, and a full-survival spec juggernaut was "only" 10 times or so tougher than a baseline character with no health or shield upgrades at all.

[Kevyne_Kicklighter]

1 minute ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

So you have an issue with the fact hat there are frames specifically designed to be tanks can take more damage than frames not designed to be tanks.

I don’t get it.

WF doesn't operate like other games. In other games we have counters to the 1,000 cut and rat-tat-tat damage because we can AVOID it and even SEE WHEN we get damage.

So even "glass cannon" DPS can survive and not have to relay on 1,000 healing and energy pads, instead!

Camera angle can't be changed nor the FoV; we have no mitigation abilities which we can weave into our "rotations", either.

The game plays differently and people used of how older games play that offer mitigation abilities, the way WF operates is weird.

Armor = mitigation (tanks always have more) and their abilities are specifically for tanking -- they win no DPS awards.

Shields = like a paladin's bubble or shields; or even a mage shield PREVENT the damage seen in WF (and they're on cooldowns, so can't abuse it).

It takes getting use too, but some don't like it. In WF "glass cannons" ARE "glass cannons" and you have no real mitigation BUT using 1,000 healing or energy pads!

[Girador]

9 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

There are no mods or arcanes which "make almost the same difference as putting armor on shields."

Allow me to introduce you to ADAPTATION yes it works on shields and if anything is better than armor mods and should have higher priority even on armor based tanks Note that this puts the possible EHP from shields up above 10k on almost every frame in the game save Loki and a few other frames who have alternative methods of handling enemies. 

as for arcanes please take notice of Arcane Aegis and Arcane Barrier both are superior to the heath affecting arcanes (including the armor arcanes) in terms of EHP after accounting for adaptation and once combined with adaptation can make you damn near invincible compared to before, even on the so called "fragile frames". Now I put that in quotes because i cannot think of an actually fragile frame where taking damage doesn't mean you've done something horribly wrong, and simply being in LOS of the enemy does not count as doing something horribly wrong. 

[MJ12]

1 hour ago, Girador said:

Allow me to introduce you to ADAPTATION yes it works on shields and if anything is better than armor mods and should have higher priority even on armor based tanks Note that this puts the possible EHP from shields up above 10k on almost every frame in the game save Loki and a few other frames who have alternative methods of handling enemies. 

as for arcanes please take notice of Arcane Aegis and Arcane Barrier both are superior to the heath affecting arcanes (including the armor arcanes) in terms of EHP after accounting for adaptation and once combined with adaptation can make you damn near invincible compared to before, even on the so called "fragile frames". Now I put that in quotes because i cannot think of an actually fragile frame where taking damage doesn't mean you've done something horribly wrong, and simply being in LOS of the enemy does not count as doing something horribly wrong. 

Yes, adaptation, which also affects health equally and also would be reduced heavily in power by the DR cap in this proposal because it provides damage resistance.

It would still be pretty potent, giving you something like triple the toughness outside of situations where you're taking single high-damage hits, but it also wouldn't stack with other forms of damage resistance and that's a lot closer to fine and a lot easier to balance for than the current situation.

 

[Naneel]

Maybe make not such drastic change as removing armor, but lower the Armor of some Frames and allow a max of 2 instances of damage reduction, one from Armor and one from MODs and Abilities(maybe with a hardcap under 90%). This should probably cut down the eHP of tankier frames and would allow for better balancing without removing Armor as a whole.

[Teridax68]

The OP on this thread I think pretty clearly sums up the issues I also take with armor. In the end, I don't think armor as a stat achieves much on its own, because its sole function is to multiply health. To some extent, I don't even believe there's that much of a significant difference between health and shields, aside from the fact that health currently benefits from armor (and is therefore the only part of the health bar that truly matters), because the game at large is in no way balanced around the player managing a non-regenerating health pool (which is why there are so many sources of healing nowadays, as a band-aid to this). While one could technically argue that one could just reduce health and armor values on certain frames to bring them to more reasonable EHPs, I think the process would be made significantly easier if we simply condensed health, armor and shields into just health, and balanced everyone around the resulting clear values.

As for damage mitigation effects, I also personally believe damage reduction falls into the same problems as armor: DR simply acts as a not-so-clear way of making players more durable, usually with emphasis on already durable frames, and is not only currently used in significant excess (how exactly is damage reduction part of a gunslinger fantasy on Mesa, or a literal glass warframe like Gara, for example?), but often generates little to no additional gameplay. Much like armor, perhaps even more so, it contributes to a metagame where, at high levels, the only frames who'll be able to play adequately without dying all the time will be frames with innate damage reduction steroids, or some similar mitigation, whereas frames who lack them will often get one-shot. Profit-Taker Bounty 4 is a particularly egregious recent example, imo, as the sheer amount of damage and crowd control thrown at the player from all sides is only excused by the fact that most of the people entering the bounty play Chroma, Trinity, or some similarly ultra-resilient frame.

As such, along with the above, I think we need to start pruning and reworking current damage reduction effects: I think it'd be much more preferable for frames to be able to generate bonus health, quick self-heals, self-resurrects, temporary damage immunity, or even more esoteric pseudo-damage reduction (Mesa, for example, could slow down incoming projectiles, which she could also shoot down), rather than express their survivability through some boring, often poorly visible steroid. Allowing health to regenerate just like current shields as a baseline would also help. Following this, I agree with the OP that we need to start rebalancing enemy damage numbers, so that even with some frames being tankier or squishier than others, all frames should be able to survive at higher levels without requiring some ridiculous tanking effect.

Edited January 9, 2019 by Teridax68

[ShortCat]

10 hours ago, MJ12 said:

The problems here are

I absolutely agree on the 3 bullet points.

8 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

So you have an issue with the fact hat there are frames specifically designed to be tanks can take more damage than frames not designed to be tanks.

Yes. I see the same problem. Tanks in Warframe are way too durable.
This is only half of the problem though: in other games tank archetypes exist and can also reach rediculous defense, however their role is different, because they are ment to sustain damage from the whole enemy armada with taunts and do only little damage in return. In Warframe, there is hardly a way to taunt enemies and redirect fire from teammates on yourself. Furthermore, in Warframe lack of offensive abilities can be covered by stupidly overpowered weapons, so that you have an immortal god steamrolling missions with a boomstick. The absurdity reaches new hights if we consider, that tanks also can have damage buffs in addition to their defensive kits: Chroma, Rhino, Nezha even Inaros.
As a result, we have frames which struggle to survive and die as soons as the player makes 1 mistake; and frames which trivialize content with high defensive and offensive capabilities. That is the reason Sorties or Arbitrations are dominated by Inaros, Rhino or Nidus players and Forum is full with "we need endgame" threads. Even a monkey can finish Warframe with Rhino and A.Plasmor.

 

10 hours ago, MJ12 said:

So here's what I'd suggest, fix-wise

I do not agree with all of your suggestions though:

• Armor is an interesting defensive mechanic and leaves more options than just simple DR or evasion. Furthermore, universal DR mods feel boring and mandatory.
• Simply boosting stats does not reflect frames survivability, as abilities, mobility, CC, damage output and player skill affect it. This is a complex topic.
• Most Sortie lvl enemies are already there, only in missions with bossted damage and resistance conditions I experience OHKO frequently.

Edited January 9, 2019 by ShortCat

[MasterBurik]

Quick Note: Based on previous testing, Damage Resistance and Damage Reduction are placed in different areas of the damage equation. Damage Resistance takes Shield and Flesh strength/weakness modifiers into account, while Damage Reduction does not.

 

Please ensure you differentiate between the two, even if you want to place a similar cap on both.

[OliverSniper]

The problem is enemy scealing it's retared until it is not fixed there is no poin talking about nerfing Warframes 

 

PS: sry it's just my opinion

[MJ12]

6 hours ago, ShortCat said:

I do not agree with all of your suggestions though:

• Armor is an interesting defensive mechanic and leaves more options than just simple DR or evasion. Furthermore, universal DR mods feel boring and mandatory.
• Simply boosting stats does not reflect frames survivability, as abilities, mobility, CC, damage output and player skill affect it. This is a complex topic.
• Most Sortie lvl enemies are already there, only in missions with bossted damage and resistance conditions I experience OHKO frequently.

Armor is just a multiplier on your Warframe's effective health, which is a huge deal in terms of effect but isn't actually all that interesting. The difference between a Warframe with 600 armor and 100 health and another Warframe with 0 armor/300 health is mostly only seen in how effective non-percentage healing is, which is a very niche difference. If you really wanted to keep the same effect as armor, you could have a mod that increases Warframe health + healing received from all sources, which would in effect be the same thing.

Also, yes, things other than raw stats affect survivability-but I already mention the biggest contributors (damage mitigation on abilities, health + armor scaling) and provide fixes for them. Bringing things like mobility and player skill into the question is overcomplicating the problem, which is that the eHP of Warframes increases or decreases by far too much. The solution I suggest is to compress the eHP scale significantly by capping how powerful damage reduction can become and changing how Warframe durability can be scaled, so you can balance survivability better. Player skill and mobility will still improve survivability but that's working as intended-being better at dodging fire should make you better at surviving incoming fire. The question is more about how survivable Warframes are assuming equivalent skill levels, and there's a pretty huge difference there.

[MJ12]

8 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

The OP on this thread I think pretty clearly sums up the issues I also take with armor. In the end, I don't think armor as a stat achieves much on its own, because its sole function is to multiply health. To some extent, I don't even believe there's that much of a significant difference between health and shields, aside from the fact that health currently benefits from armor (and is therefore the only part of the health bar that truly matters), because the game at large is in no way balanced around the player managing a non-regenerating health pool (which is why there are so many sources of healing nowadays, as a band-aid to this). While one could technically argue that one could just reduce health and armor values on certain frames to bring them to more reasonable EHPs, I think the process would be made significantly easier if we simply condensed health, armor and shields into just health, and balanced everyone around the resulting clear values.

As for damage mitigation effects, I also personally believe damage reduction falls into the same problems as armor: DR simply acts as a not-so-clear way of making players more durable, usually with emphasis on already durable frames, and is not only currently used in significant excess (how exactly is damage reduction part of a gunslinger fantasy on Mesa, or a literal glass warframe like Gara, for example?), but often generates little to no additional gameplay. Much like armor, perhaps even more so, it contributes to a metagame where, at high levels, the only frames who'll be able to play adequately without dying all the time will be frames with innate damage reduction steroids, or some similar mitigation, whereas frames who lack them will often get one-shot. Profit-Taker Bounty 4 is a particularly egregious recent example, imo, as the sheer amount of damage and crowd control thrown at the player from all sides is only excused by the fact that most of the people entering the bounty play Chroma, Trinity, or some similarly ultra-resilient frame.

As such, along with the above, I think we need to start pruning and reworking current damage reduction effects: I think it'd be much more preferable for frames to be able to generate bonus health, quick self-heals, self-resurrects, temporary damage immunity, or even more esoteric pseudo-damage reduction (Mesa, for example, could slow down incoming projectiles, which she could also shoot down), rather than express their survivability through some boring, often poorly visible steroid. Allowing health to regenerate just like current shields as a baseline would also help. Following this, I agree with the OP that we need to start rebalancing enemy damage numbers, so that even with some frames being tankier or squishier than others, all frames should be able to survive at higher levels without requiring some ridiculous tanking effect.

The reason I just suggested reducing the magnitude of damage reduction and making it unstackable is that it costs a lot less time and effort to change variables than changing defensive powers to all work in different ways, indirectly nerfs premade teamcomps by greatly reducing the power of coordinated defensive buff stacking (this is a good thing because if the difference between an optimized premade and four randos is too high, balancing the game for premades is going to make pickup groups struggle with the content, while balancing for pickup groups will let premades trivialize content), and damage resistance is either a visible and active power that costs energy to upkeep or would be based upon installed mods.

Now it's true that energy generation in the late game isn't a huge deal but it's still a deal and it's there. Your suggestion might lead to better overall balance and interaction, but it's also a lot more work than just changing variables because it needs a lot more design work that's put into every power.

[Neightrix]

Mechanically, if you were to lower how quickly enemy damage scales up as the level increases, then you might be able to justify reducing the effectiveness of armor, as you're really just normalizing the effectiveness of shields. Hard to say exactly how this would math out, but it seems like a reasonable goal. Sadly, shields will never be considered effective as long as player shields can be bypassed. DE should have the goal of offering a consistent player experience where deaths feel more earned, rather than having specific frames be inconsistently weak to the damage system itself. The UI and visual effects for players receiving damage would need to be updated too, and possibly relocate player health/shields to the top center or bottom center of the UI.

16 hours ago, MJ12 said:

I want something that threatens the frame designed to be a tank to be dangerous, but not instant death, to other warframes, and something that threatens the latter to take a good long while to kill the heavy Warframe but still be a vague threat to them.

You felt pretty damn tanky in Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode as a Geth Juggernaut, and a full-survival spec juggernaut was "only" 10 times or so tougher than a baseline character with no health or shield upgrades at all.

^ This guy gets it. Not every enemy has to be mandatory damage or merely scaling HP and damage. It's more about presenting players with threats to deal with. You'd need an enemy with damage reduction so they don't get nuked, and a consistent weak point so they're not merely a bullet sponge, and resistance or immunity to crown control so they can actually participate - but also this enemy would not have a gun and need to telegraph a melee attack, and have audio and visual cues so it's impossible not to see coming (maybe not as loud and obnoxious as an ME3 Banshee but you get the point). Not exactly as you described, more of a universal threat to all frames.

With the Profit-Taker fight, we see enemies typically considered fodder have a much better chance to be relevant when players aren't focused on them. Factions might feel like they're there to murder you rather than just get murdered. As a broad concept, different types of enemy threats also relieve warframe imbalance woes, as you create more use cases for frames than simply damage, CC, and tankiness. It's much better than trying to create use cases out of mission types, and likely easier than trying to change the whole of how damage is dealt in the entire game.

Edited January 9, 2019 by Neightrix

[Yasha-7HS]

16 hours ago, MJ12 said:

There are no mods or arcanes which "make almost the same difference as putting armor on shields." Similarly I suggested a mere ~30% reduction in the value of damage reduction powers, meaning that almost all DR powers would be able to reach the cap by themselves with a handful of power strength mods.

Furthermore the question about shields/health is why I specifically had frame health numbers biased towards health. Health increasing mods would give you significantly more survivability, shield increasing mods less instantaneous survivability in pitched combat but shields regenerate. Of course, there are ways to regain health as well, and obviously shields can be bypassed.

And yes, this would make shields much more valuable rather than worthless. This is desirable because it means mods that increase shields are now actually desirable, and shield regen isn't a laughable dumpstat.

By the way, the point here is that if you want to have an entire damage overhaul you're going to need something like this anyways, because you can't balance a game when you have a two or even three-orders-of-magnitude difference in durability between comparable high-level builds.

 

What I mean is that in a regeneration meta you don't need to have so much reduction because there are means of simply outhealing the damage coming in towards you. I don't literally mean putting armor on shields, but in the relative scheme equipping Aegis and/or Barrier would make even a frame that's threatened in Sortie Levels tank with no need to really care about using the point of their kit. Regeneration isn't usually a meta on it's own, but in the games where it is it's almost indistinguishable from having an infinite health bar when dealing with things that don't kill you in one shot.

You also decreased the max shields for Frost and Rhino to be comparable to Chroma in strange terms so I disregarded that entirely. They do have larger shields for a reason. 

Shields being bypassed also makes little difference if you lower the damage to make shields relevant in Sortie Levels. With so little damage, slash and toxin procs do almost nothing.

 

 

 

[ShortCat]

1 hour ago, MJ12 said:

Armor is just a multiplier on your Warframe's effective health, which is a huge deal in terms of effect but isn't actually all that interesting. The difference between a Warframe with 600 armor and 100 health and another Warframe with 0 armor/300 health is mostly only seen in how effective non-percentage healing is, which is a very niche difference. If you really wanted to keep the same effect as armor, you could have a mod that increases Warframe health + healing received from all sources, which would in effect be the same thing.

On this one I disagree even more.

Armor is interesting, because it is a separate defense layer: there is DR (mostly in abilities), evasion (again abilities) and different stats shield/HP/armor. This leaves more conceptional room to create frames  and enemies with a variaty of weaknesses. Executed correctly, those different stats make it possible to create different tank archetypes. Furthermore, the difference between a character with 0 armor and 600 is not only in eHP, but in resistances to damage types. Without armor Viral(procs) would become overwhelmingly strong. Your idea is not throrough, more so, if you remain silent on existing damage types.

I am all in to reduce number bloat, introduce new armor calculations or DR cap. But I am against homogenization of stats.

[MJ12]

32 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

On this one I disagree even more.

Armor is interesting, because it is a separate defense layer: there is DR (mostly in abilities), evasion (again abilities) and different stats shield/HP/armor. This leaves more conceptional room to create frames  and enemies with a variaty of weaknesses. Executed correctly, those different stats make it possible to create different tank archetypes. Furthermore, the difference between a character with 0 armor and 600 is not only in eHP, but in resistances to damage types. Without armor Viral(procs) would become overwhelmingly strong. Your idea is not throrough, more so, if you remain silent on existing damage types.

I am all in to reduce number bloat, introduce new armor calculations or DR cap. But I am against homogenization of stats.

Armor is not a "separate defense layer." All it is is a multiplier on eHP. The difference in 'resistances to damage types' isn't innate to armor. You can see this in Rhino's Iron Skin, which uses the Ferrite Armor archetype for elemental damage modifiers but has 0 actual Armor. 

Viral procs wouldn't become "overwhelmingly strong" without armor because Viral procs reduce your HP by 50% and thus effectively halve the time it takes to kill the target for the duration of the proc, no matter if the target has 0 armor or 1 million armor. The only procs which would be affected are enemy corrosive procs, which only exist in a ridiculously rare condition (you need to roll the elemental modifier, then of all the possible extra elements the modifier can roll, you need to roll corrosive, then you need to suffer a corrosive proc).

People seem to be imputing a lot of complex interactions to armor that don't exist because they can't believe that the armor mechanics in Warframe are that simple but that's basically it. Armor in this game is just a multiplier to effective health. It doesn't have anything that interacts with it. Now, I don't innately hate the idea of armor, but right now it doesn't do anything and the absolute simplest way to deal with armor is to get rid of it as a redundant stat that largely serves to obfuscate statistical differences.

[Teridax68]

1 hour ago, ShortCat said:

Without armor Viral(procs) would become overwhelmingly strong.

This statement I think belies a misunderstanding of how armor works. As MJ12 said, armor acts as a multiplier to the player's health, thus the formula for their effective health is as follows:

EHP = Shields + (Health * Armor)

Let's suppose warframe A has health and armor, and warframe B has no armor at all, but health exactly equal to the other frame's health multiplied by armor. Let's also assume they have the same amount of shields. The equation is as follows:

Shields_A + (Health_A * Armor_A) = Shields_B + Health_B

Because the two frames have the same shields, the equation can be simplified:

(Health_A * Armor_A) = Health_B

Suppose frame A gets hit with a Viral proc. Their effective health becomes the following:

EHP_{A_Viral} = Shields_A + ((Health_A / 2) * Armor_A) = Shields_A + ((Health_A * Armor_A)/2)

However, from the above, we know that frame B has as much health as frame A has health multiplied by armor. Thus, we can plug in frame B's health:

Shields_A + ((Health_A * Armor_A)/2) = Shields_A + (Health_B/2)

And because the two frames have the same shields, we can plug in frame B's shields:

Shields_A + (Health_B/2) = Shields_B + (Health_B/2)

Which is exactly frame B's effective health when hit with a viral proc. Thus, removing armor from the game would not change the power of viral procs whatsoever. It is also because of this kind of common mistake that I agree with MJ12's assessment that armor in Warframe gets credited for gameplay and depth it simply does not possess. The fact that armor confuses even people who have had the time to sit down and think about the underlying mechanics, let alone players in the middle of fast-paced in-game combat, I think is all the more reason to remove it, as it is clearly obfuscating discussion on the state of damage and durability in Warframe.

3 hours ago, MJ12 said:

Now it's true that energy generation in the late game isn't a huge deal but it's still a deal and it's there. Your suggestion might lead to better overall balance and interaction, but it's also a lot more work than just changing variables because it needs a lot more design work that's put into every power.

This is true, which is also why I don't think our suggestions are wholly incompatible: in the long term, I'd like my suggestions to be applied to the game, but in the much shorter term, establishing the simple baseline rules you have set in the OP, namely cutting out armor entirely, readjusting numbers as needed, and imposing some automatic cap on damage reduction effects, would easily deflate many of the worst cases of excessive durability in the game. In turn, this could give a much clearer picture of how enemies need to be rebalanced as well, and thereby pave the way for a state of the game where DE wouldn't feel like they'd have to overload on damage reduction for every new frame they release in order for them to be viable (e.g. Baruuk, who incidentally isn't all that viable, despite his ability to reach a ridiculous 98% total damage reduction, in addition to an extra layer of 80% frontal damage reduction from auto-blocking during his ult, situational total damage immunity, and without even beginning to factor in additional DR mods like Adaptation).

Edited January 9, 2019 by Teridax68