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

[ShortCat]

@MJ12 & @Teridax68 I have no idea why you jump on one sentence and ignore the rest of my post.

3 hours ago, MJ12 said:

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.

Armor modifies multipliers from corresponding damage types. Even 1 ferrite armor point will grant 15% resistance to slash even before DR calculation from the armor value is considered. Thus, it modifies weaknesses to certain damage types, which cannot be achieved with health type alone. Furthermore, armor is "separate", because we can strip it and negate its effect, modifiers & DR, even before the fight begins. It may be not as relevant for us, Tenno, but it is important for our enemies to be able to create varaity. You focus too much on our perspective, yet you forget that enemies use the same mechanics/weapons we do and with removal of armor current damage system would become completely obsolete. So yes, "resistance to damage types" is innate to armor.

Now to the Viral misunderstanding. I was short and not specific enough on that matter, but initially I ment Viral damage in general, as most enemies are flashy and vulnerable to it. Right now, flash is often covered by an additioanl defense in form of armor and its DR, so that we have options to focus for its weakness, strip it or bypass it. Remove armor and Viral will become the go-to damage type, which will reduce weapon modding choices from 3 to 1. Prock was in brackets to remind how good it is even right now. Did not expect one word out of context to produce walls of text. Armor is an interesting concept, if you do not reduce it to its DR calculation.

Edited January 10, 2019 by ShortCat

[Kevyne_Kicklighter]

30 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

@MJ12 & @Teridax68 I have no idea why you jump on one sentence and ignore the rest of my post.Armor modifies multipliers from corresponding damage types. Even 1 ferrite armor point will grant 15% resistance to slash even before DR calculation from the armor value is considered. Thus, it modifies weaknesses to certain damage types, which cannot be achieved with health type alone. Furthermore, armor is "separate", because we can strip it and negate its effect, modifiers & DR, even before the fight begins. It may be not as relevant for us, Tenno, but it is important for our enemies to be able to create varaity. You focus too much on our perspective, yet you forget that enemies use the same mechanics/weapons we do and with removal of armor current damage system would become completely obsolete. So yes, "resistance to damage types" is innate to armor.

^^ This.

We also need an indicator when armor is stripped/or "leaky" to even NOTICE health is being damaged. Not this "bypass" system that completely IGNORES BOTH shields AND armor to go straight to health damage.

A ... Shield | Armor | Health ... bar.

Shields are the bubble that protects armor. Armor is the bubble that protects a character FROM damage itself -- be it physical or elemental damage.

[Teridax68]

7 hours ago, ShortCat said:

@MJ12 & @Teridax68 I have no idea why you jump on one sentence and ignore the rest of my post.

Now to the Viral misunderstanding. I was short and not specific enough on that matter, but initially I ment Viral damage in general, as most enemies are flashy and vulnerable to it. 

I jumped on that particular sentence because it was flatly wrong. Moreover, you very explicitly specified Viral procs, as you were quoted on previously. The response I gave was also not exclusive to that one part of your post: the general claim that armor is "a separate defense layer", and that it and damage reduction from other sources, evasion, etc. are somehow inherently interesting, is a claim I dispute, because ultimately none of these add an appreciable layer of gameplay: for sure, armor adds an extra layer of damage multipliers, and ability DR and evasion technically come from different sources, but the end result is nonetheless a blanket increase to HP, particularly since enemy damage is meant to be tuned around the player regardless. In the worst case, percentage evasion effects tend to be pretty unreliable in an environment where even a single shot can be fatal, since the bonus is all-or-nothing, which is why Nyx and Titania still aren't all that great in high-level play despite their recent reworks. As for enemies, the damage multipliers generated by armor, health, etc. have in practice boiled down to ultra-simplistic damage color-coding, where some damage types are better against certain factions by default (which isn't all that interesting), and even then some damage types stand head and shoulders above the rest (i.e. Radiation, Viral, Slash). Because of this, I think the current system of armor, damage reduction, evasion, even shields, has a lot of complexity, but deceptively little depth.

With that said, I also don't think the claim here is that literally everything can be boiled down to health, or that any sort of damage mitigation mechanic is inherently uninteresting: in a less binary environment, healing and regeneration could allow frames to survive without needing to, say, heal a frame from low to full in a fraction of a second each time. Similarly, I think there's a ton of untapped potential in temporary periods of invincibility or invisibility as a means of evading enemies, and parkour itself is meant to be the OG method of evasion (though this is also made slightly wonky by the existence of enemy hitscan weapons). Being able to increase one's health bar by creating a damage buffer, which currently is what happens with overshields and mechanics like Iron Skin, I think is also a great mechanic for allowing certain frames to get tankier. Beyond that there's also much more potential for self-resurrection and second wind-type effects, where the player could have the opportunity to recover from fatal wounds, which could itself act as a balancing counter-measure whenever there's too much damage around for certain frames.

Point being, the game already has many potential tools for survivability that are way more interesting than hidden stats like damage reduction, armor, etc., which is why I really don't see why we need to hold onto the latter forever when we could capitalize on the former for a simpler, yet far deeper health system. Even in an environment where literally every frame had the same health, and no percentage damage mitigation mechanics whatsoever, you could still have frames that'd survive in completely different ways from each other, using the above mechanics.

Edited January 10, 2019 by Teridax68

[Fallen_Echo]

A quick copy-paste of the idea i presented last year, i think it will fit here:

 

Hello there guys!

 

I was looking around the current armor and ehp suggestions what were posted and decided to put in my idea on how to fix the endlessly scaling ehp.

 

In short, all im going to do is to remove all DR, manipulate the damage system and make all armor work as additional health.

 

Lets start with the armor:

From now on the armor we have grants ZERO damage reduction, instead it act as a secondary healthbar what stops almost all damage going throught it, same goes for enemies.

An enemy with 200 hp and 300 armor will have in total 500 hp and as long as the said enemy has armor almost nothing can attack its hp directly.

Armor decreases all dot status effects damage to 5 points regardless of level and armor, the only status what can bypass armor is toxin thought its max damage is capped at 20 point when armor is on.

Damage what hit any amount of armor can only damage armor and never the health effectively creating an armor gate.

Every damage the enemy/player takes chips away the armor, corrosive damage removes it as a dot while puncture procs remove it i small amounts. Every other damage source directly hits armor.

Armor can only be regained by picking up health orbs while at full health. The enemies who currently dont take damage can regain 100/sec armor if they were safe for 5 seconds.

Corrosive projection now creates a visual aura what slowly chips away enemy armor when they enter it.

Bleed proc cannot be applied while the enemy has armor.

Puncture procs on armorless enemies cause bleeding while impact on armorless enemies cause stun.

An electric proc what destroys the last portion of armor creates a magnetic anomaly what draws in nearby enemies for 2 sec.

 

Shields:

Just as for armor shields are now regenerating secondary health bars.

Everything with a shield has the ability to regenerate it once its out of combat and doesnt take damage. Shield regen rate is 100/sec after 5 sec of peace.

As long as any damage hits a portion of the shields it cannot deal damage to the health of players/enemies.

Having shields decreases all dot damage to 5 and only heat damage can bypass shields thought its damage is capped at 20 while shields are up.

Shield disruption is now a visible aura what slowly chips away enemy shield in its range.

Bleed proc cannot be applied to enemies with shields.

Puncture proc on shieldless enemies cause a bleed proc while impact causes stun.

An electric proc what destroys the last portion of shields creates an electric shockwave dealing low damage.

 

Flesh:

Flesh takes half damage from all sources but dots are not affected.

 

All unique ehp stats are removed and replaced by flesh, armor and shield. Enemies having unique resistances are depend on the enemy and not on the health type.

Damage type effectiveness:

Slash, +25% against flesh -25% against shield and armor.

Puncture, +25% against armor, -25% against shield.

Impact, +25% against shield, -25% against armor.

Toxin, +25% against armor, -25% to shield.

Electricity, neutral to all.

Heat, +25% against shield, -25% against armor.

Cold, +25% against flesh, -25% against shield and armor.

Corrosive +50% against armor, -50% against shield.

Viral, +25% against flesh.

Radiation, + 25 against armor.

Blast, neutral to all.

Gas, +25% against shield.

Magnetic +50% against shield, -50% against flesh.

 

Lastly to not make the game too easy i suggest that everything below lv25 should have the current hp stats they have but above the with an incoming alert saying "the enemy faction has deployed the elites" all enemies should have the starting hp stat of lv 100 guys.

[MJ12]

16 hours ago, ShortCat said:

@MJ12 & @Teridax68 I have no idea why you jump on one sentence and ignore the rest of my post.

Armor modifies multipliers from corresponding damage types. Even 1 ferrite armor point will grant 15% resistance to slash even before DR calculation from the armor value is considered. Thus, it modifies weaknesses to certain damage types, which cannot be achieved with health type alone. Furthermore, armor is "separate", because we can strip it and negate its effect, modifiers & DR, even before the fight begins. It may be not as relevant for us, Tenno, but it is important for our enemies to be able to create varaity. You focus too much on our perspective, yet you forget that enemies use the same mechanics/weapons we do and with removal of armor current damage system would become completely obsolete. So yes, "resistance to damage types" is innate to armor.

Now to the Viral misunderstanding. I was short and not specific enough on that matter, but initially I ment Viral damage in general, as most enemies are flashy and vulnerable to it. Right now, flash is often covered by an additioanl defense in form of armor and its DR, so that we have options to focus for its weakness, strip it or bypass it. Remove armor and Viral will become the go-to damage type, which will reduce weapon modding choices from 3 to 1. Prock was in brackets to remind how good it is even right now. Did not expect one word out of context to produce walls of text. Armor is an interesting concept, if you do not reduce it to its DR calculation.

I have literally only been talking about Tenno health and enemy damage. This has always been solely about player durability, which is why I called the thread "rebalancing survivability," because it's about player survivability. Does armor need to be changed and rebalanced given how powerful armor removal is? Yes. But that's outside of the scope of this thread and if DE changes armor in such a way to make armor an actually interesting defensive tool that isn't just a health multiplier I'm fine with Warframes retaining armor.

None of your post is relevant because enemies don't 'build for viral' and enemies don't get armor stripping abilities.

[Tiltskillet]

Bumping, mostly because I've enjoyed reading this thread and keep on hoping more people will chime in.

[Aramil999]

DE has many more pressing issues to rework/fix than Armor and dmg reductiond. So most likely this topic will get ignored.

Healing Return with high armor valkyr is very viable option in no energy nightmares or low energy sorties. I think that it should be left as it is. 

But, many warframes lack ANY form of defense mechanic and this frames are simply bad for very high level missions (but they can be good in lower levels like Ember for examle or in teams). This makes choice of build and warframe MATTERS. If every warframe had similar ehp then you could go with any frame to any mission and choice would not matter at all. 

Btw. even if you have glass frame you still can do very high level stuff with pure skill, good gear, proper mods and build. It is very hard to take down profit taker with say Banshee BUT it is still possible, even solo, this means at least for me, that ehp changes/balance is not needed.

[ShortCat]

On 2019-01-10 at 10:05 AM, Teridax68 said:

I jumped on that particular sentence because it was flatly wrong. Moreover, you very explicitly specified Viral procs, as you were quoted on previously.

Does your answer also apply to this?

On 2019-01-09 at 10:20 PM, ShortCat said:

 Without armor Viral would become overwhelmingly strong. Now without that one cursed word.

On 2019-01-10 at 2:53 AM, ShortCat said:

 ...Viral damage in general, as most enemies are flashy and vulnerable to it. Right now, flash is often covered by an additioanl defense in form of armor and its DR, so that we have options to focus for its weakness, strip it or bypass it. Remove armor and Viral will become the go-to damage type, which will reduce weapon modding choices from 3 to 1.

My first answer was incomplete, but wrong is stretching it too much. Lets focus more on our different view on other mechanincs.

 

On 2019-01-10 at 10:05 AM, Teridax68 said:

evasion, etc. are somehow inherently interesting, is a claim I dispute, because ultimately none of these add an appreciable layer of gameplay: for sure, armor adds an extra layer of damage multipliers, and ability DR and evasion technically come from different sources, but the end result is nonetheless a blanket increase to HP, particularly since enemy damage is meant to be tuned around the player regardless. In the worst case, percentage evasion effects tend to be pretty unreliable in an environment where even a single shot can be fatal, since the bonus is all-or-nothing, which is why Nyx and Titania still aren't all that great in high-level play despite their recent reworks.

All those mechanicns provide different defensive playstlyes, if executed correctly, which is not the case in Warframe. Just on cenceptional level, DR increases eHP, but it still has a limit, so that there will be a point where enemies will become a threat again, even in Warframe. In a more moderate version, DR would be a great defense against many weak attacks, but secceptable to rare heavy hits.
Evasion is an entirely different mecahnic, as it is basicly a dice roll. You can evade a weak attack, but also a heavy hit that no DR could ever sustain. In theory, evasion is a better defense against rare heavy attacks, but secceptable to many weak hits. While Nyx and Titania have their issues, primary from heavy imbalance and scaling issues, they allow more room for mistakes, even it is just one and at this point evasion did its job.

On 2019-01-10 at 10:05 AM, Teridax68 said:

As for enemies, the damage multipliers generated by armor, health, etc. have in practice boiled down to ultra-simplistic damage color-coding, where some damage types are better against certain factions by default (which isn't all that interesting), and even then some damage types stand head and shoulders above the rest (i.e. Radiation, Viral, Slash). Because of this, I think the current system of armor, damage reduction, evasion, even shields, has a lot of complexity, but deceptively little depth.

Even with this simplistic color coding, it has still more depth than plain HP system, deceptive or not. The concept of factions succeptable to certain damage types is in my opinion interesting, because it creates room for specialysations in gear or modding act as a base for team compositions.

On 2019-01-10 at 10:05 AM, Teridax68 said:

Point being, the game already has many potential tools for survivability that are way more interesting than hidden stats like damage reduction, armor, etc., which is why I really don't see why we need to hold onto the latter forever when we could capitalize on the former for a simpler, yet far deeper health system. Even in an environment where literally every frame had the same health, and no percentage damage mitigation mechanics whatsoever, you could still have frames that'd survive in completely different ways from each other, using the above mechanics.

I dissagree. Inherent stats like armor allow more room for diversity, because it allows for tanky characters based on a stat, not an ability and can serve as a solid counter to ability canceling. Armor also allows a destinct separation to pure eHP tanks in case weakness to damagy types, usefullness of diverse healing/damaging mechanics with fixed values or %-based and how those affect said archetypes - for us and our foes. 

[ShortCat]

On 2019-01-10 at 7:01 PM, MJ12 said:

I have literally only been talking about Tenno health and enemy damage. This has always been solely about player durability, which is why I called the thread "rebalancing survivability," because it's about player survivability. Does armor need to be changed and rebalanced given how powerful armor removal is? Yes. But that's outside of the scope of this thread and if DE changes armor in such a way to make armor an actually interesting defensive tool that isn't just a health multiplier I'm fine with Warframes retaining armor. 

But you cannot talk about the one without not mentioning the other. Our armor works just like the enemy's, so does the damage. Your post does not exclude those changes to the enemies. Thus I said your idea is not thought out. Furthermore your suggestion of %-based resistance mods is the same eHP multiplier you are complainging about, the only differency is a clear indication of the said multiplier on the mod. You could just ask for a change in the UI and equal armor values for the same effect. If you think armor isn't interesting enough, read some posts again.

On 2019-01-10 at 7:01 PM, MJ12 said:

None of your post is relevant because enemies don't 'build for viral' and enemies don't get armor stripping abilities.

They do not have those effects yet. Nobody is holding DE back from implementing such enemies. Elemental damage becomes more and more common on the enemy side, then we have Viral conditions in Sorties.
I do agree with the issue of huge gap in survivability, but I do not agree with presented solutions. As I see it, your post loses its relevance when the "solution" part starts.

[Teridax68]

3 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

Does your answer also apply to this?

"If I retroactively modify critical parts of what I said, what you said in response to that sounds less appropriate!"

That aside, though, even if we're just talking about Viral damage... what's the big deal? Yes, it is good against non-Infested flesh, but even in the absolute worst case scenario where it becomes the damage type everyone takes (and it already kinda is), how is that different from the current situation? Putting aside worst-case scenarios, what's preventing DE from simply adjusting the numbers on its damage multipliers?

3 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

All those mechanicns provide different defensive playstlyes, if executed correctly, which is not the case in Warframe. Just on cenceptional level, DR increases eHP, but it still has a limit, so that there will be a point where enemies will become a threat again, even in Warframe. In a more moderate version, DR would be a great defense against many weak attacks, but secceptable to rare heavy hits.
Evasion is an entirely different mecahnic, as it is basicly a dice roll. You can evade a weak attack, but also a heavy hit that no DR could ever sustain. In theory, evasion is a better defense against rare heavy attacks, but secceptable to many weak hits. While Nyx and Titania have their issues, primary from heavy imbalance and scaling issues, they allow more room for mistakes, even it is just one and at this point evasion did its job.

What you are describing here are the consequences of these effects, not actual gameplay. If these mechanics provide defensive playstyles, what then are these different playstyles that players engage in depending on the type of damage mitigation they have? What are the choices and actions a frame with 50% damage reduction takes that differ from a frame with 50% damage evasion? Moreover, evasion allowing "more room for mistakes" doesn't really make sense when evasion chances still let you get hit, and if a hit is lethal enough to kill a frame through 50% damage reduction, it sure will be if it lands here. In neither case can the player really do anything to enhance one over the other, because as you yourself said, evasion is RNG, and thus out of the player's control.

3 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

Even with this simplistic color coding, it has still more depth than plain HP system, deceptive or not. The concept of factions succeptable to certain damage types is in my opinion interesting, because it creates room for specialysations in gear or modding act as a base for team compositions.

What depth? What specialization? There seems to be this confusion here between complexity, i.e. the information overhead required to understand something, and depth, i.e. the meaningful choices one can make. If your damage system is color-coded so one damage type is consistently better than the other in a given situation, there is no meaningful choice to "specializing" for that damage type, because you are simply choosing between what's optimal and what's suboptimal. The only people who wouldn't be doing this would be people who simply don't know or understand how the damage system works, which makes the game feel confusing, rather than deep, as seen with today's damage spreadsheets on enemies.

If you really want color-coding, there are also far better ways to do it, as well: if enemy factions were diverse enough so that some, like the Corpus, had fewer, yet more powerful units, whereas others, like the Infested, had hordes of weaker units, you'd already have different situations that would favor different types of attacks and weaponry (i.e. high-damage, single-target weapons like sniper rifles and bows for the Corpus, AoE weaponry such as the Ignis or Galatine for the Infested), particularly if the latter were balanced properly to establish meaningful tradeoffs in damage, AoE, rate of fire, etc.

If the armor on Grineer units acted as a genuinely separate entity, and only covered part of the unit's body, while being penetrated by Puncture damage and melted by Corrosive damage, then you'd have a truly deep system, because you'd have actual choices to make (e.g. trying to aim for weak spots versus picking specialized Puncture weaponry, which might be weak against other enemy types, versus picking a Corrosive weapon that might melt armor and create openings without doing significant damage of its own). As it stands, though, such a system does not exist, and is unlikely to in the future, and the current system that's been established only creates the illusion of depth.

3 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

I dissagree. Inherent stats like armor allow more room for diversity, because it allows for tanky characters based on a stat, not an ability and can serve as a solid counter to ability canceling.

Where is the meaningful difference here? Moreover, why is it better for a tank to have their tankiness based on a stat rather than their abilities? Shouldn't it be the opposite? Also, the very reason ability canceling exists is to specifically de-power players and counter their strengths, so what you're asking here is for players to be able to hard-counter hard counters.

3 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

Armor also allows a destinct separation to pure eHP tanks in case weakness to damagy types, usefullness of diverse healing/damaging mechanics with fixed values or %-based and how those affect said archetypes - for us and our foes. 

Armor is a component to eHP, and considering how all players have the same armor type (plus, as MJ12 said, enemies don't build against the player, they're balanced against the player), it is incapable of creating diversity against enemy damage types. Moreover, while armor in theory could enhance flat healing amounts, in practice the game is nowhere near a state of balance or gameplay where that matters, or where anything other than high amounts of burst healing are going to feel useful in higher-level content. As such, this defense of armor feels mostly theoretical, and completely divorced from the impact armor actually makes in-game (armor rarely makes itself felt unless it's on enemies, and even then, it's just more HP).

[Tatersail]

This is great and all but...

 

The game Scales... forever!

no matter what you do, you reach a point where inaros / nidus / chroma gets 1 shot

 

your also missing one point... Having extreme differences in frame durability is fun... messing with armor and adaptation is fun!    

Your example was great.   Nyx only has 1k ehp. 

so the frame which can make everything around her fight each other and go immune absorbing all damage is, for some strange reason more squishy than chroma?

huh, that's weird, its almost like it's party of the design.

 

 

 

Armor has also been mostly dealt with by giving almost every frame an armor removal tool and status on weapons jumping up every few months.

tho

I would love to see a change to magnetic, which is currently never used as a damage type.

perhaps have its procs remove 2% of shields and armor and detonate as a 5m aoe.   this would make it a good alternative to the other damage types in certain situations. This would move players away from the ubiquitous viral/slash or corrosive.

Edited January 14, 2019 by Tatersail

[ShortCat]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

Putting aside worst-case scenarios, what's preventing DE from simply adjusting the numbers on its damage multipliers?

Nothing. Was not mentioned anywhere in the OP. I could ask you what is preventing DE from reworking armor in the first place?

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

What are the choices and actions a frame with 50% damage reduction takes that differ from a frame with 50% damage evasion?

1 hour ago, ShortCat said:

Just on cenceptional level, DR increases eHP, but it still has a limit, so that there will be a point where enemies will become a threat again, even in Warframe. In a more moderate version, DR would be a great defense against many weak attacks, but secceptable to rare heavy hits.
Evasion is an entirely different mecahnic, as it is basicly a dice roll. You can evade a weak attack, but also a heavy hit that no DR could ever sustain. In theory, evasion is a better defense against rare heavy attacks, but secceptable to many weak hits.

I see you did not read my post, again. A frame with 50% evasion may be able to tank unlimited shots from a lvl 3 000 000 Balista, whyle a frame with 50% DR will just die. Or to put it more mundane, evasion may catch sudden damage spikes, while DR provides more general security. Evasive character should be on his toes all the time, but has statistically more room for mistakes in a presence of a big threat; while DR can sustain larger groups of weaker enemies, but cannot handle high priority targets that well.

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

If you really want color-coding, there are also far better ways to do it, as well: if enemy factions were diverse enough so that some, like the Corpus, had fewer, yet more powerful units, whereas others, like the Infested, had hordes of weaker units, you'd already have different situations that would favor different types of attacks and weaponry (i.e. high-damage, single-target weapons like sniper rifles and bows for the Corpus, AoE weaponry such as the Ignis or Galatine for the Infested), particularly if the latter were balanced properly to establish meaningful tradeoffs in damage, AoE, rate of fire, etc.

Exactly. It is not the system's fault it is not working as intended, or as desired. The implementation is faulty. If you see it, why are you questioning the system itself, not its implementation? If you think DE is not able to handle this complex design and painted themself into a corner, thus should switch to a simpler version - just say it. Those are two wastly different takes on the current problem.

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

Where is the meaningful difference here? Moreover, why is it better for a tank to have their tankiness based on a stat rather than their abilities? Shouldn't it be the opposite? Also, the very reason ability canceling exists is to specifically de-power players and counter their strengths, so what you're asking here is for players to be able to hard-counter hard counters.

You do not seem this narrow minded from all your posts I read so far, or are you just neglecting my posts because I oppose you? First of, I never said one version is better than the other, they are just different. That hard-counter is already there and is called Inaros. He tanks with stats/mods and not abilities and is not as susceptable to ability canceling. Inaros has to maange his HP not energy or cooldwons, so that it creates a different playstyle as well as gear dependancy: e.g. Magus Elevate is not as usefull on Inaros, while Arcane Grace is especially usefull on him.

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

Armor is a component to eHP, and considering how all players have the same armor type , it is incapable of creating diversity against enemy damage types. Moreover, while armor in theory could enhance flat healing amounts, in practice the game is nowhere near a state of balance or gameplay where that matters...

Same issue as above: core design and its faulty implementation. Either ask for better implementation of existing mechannics or an entirely new design.

 

Edited January 14, 2019 by ShortCat

[(NSW)DracoHouston]

18 minutes ago, Tatersail said:

your also missing one point... Having extreme differences in frame durability is fun... messing with armor and adaptation is fun!    

Your example was great.   Nyx only has 1k ehp. 

so the frame which can make everything around her fight each other and go immune absorbing all damage is, for some strange reason more squishy than chroma?

huh, that's weird, its almost like it's party of the design.

Nyx has the same base armour as Trinity, though, but far less EHP once abilities are factored in, as well as those abilities being straight up more useful. I happen to love playing two of the meta frames so this meta can go on forever for all I care, but having frames that are flat out worse for the endgame must be really boring for people that actually like them.

[kgabor]

...Or just scale down the ridiculous amounts of EHP those frames can reach.

You're not supposed to take hits with a Nyx or Banshee btw.

Banshee is a glass cannon and Nyx has abilities centered around survival.

If you could take hits with either of these at sortie levels, there would be no challenge as you could just bulletjump away like nothing happened and there needs to be a risk to justify the power these frames have by allowing you to oneshot or shut down the whole map.

Edited January 14, 2019 by kgabor

[Teridax68]

1 hour ago, ShortCat said:

Nothing. Was not mentioned anywhere in the OP. I could ask you what is preventing DE from reworking armor in the first place?

Reworking armor how? When? Are you really trying to conflate a simple numbers change with a design project with an undefined and potentially very large scope?

Quote

I see you did not read my post, again. A frame with 50% evasion may be able to tank unlimited shots from a lvl 3 000 000 Balista, whyle a frame with 50% DR will just die. Or to put it more mundane, evasion may catch sudden damage spikes, while DR provides more general security. Evasive character should be on his toes all the time, but has statistically more room for mistakes in a presence of a big threat; while DR can sustain larger groups of weaker enemies, but cannot handle high priority targets that well.

I literally responded to that in my post, which clearly stated that the frame could just as easily die from a fully-powered shot on the first hit, and has no control over when this happens due to the RNG nature of evasion, thereby disproving the feature's supposed ability to compensate for mistakes. By all means, though, do accuse me of being the one supposedly not reading what the other person has written. 🙄

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Exactly. It is not the system's fault it is not working as intended, or as desired. The implementation is faulty. If you see it, why are you questioning the system itself, not its implementation? If you think DE is not able to handle this complex design and painted themself into a corner, thus should switch to a simpler version - just say it. Those are two wastly different takes on the current problem.

Whose fault is it, then? What "system" are you even talking about here? Because what I'm talking about is establishing meaningful differences between enemy factions that legitimately affect gameplay, whereas you seem to be talking only about making players choose mods of a different color before entering missions based on an Excel spreadsheet. A game with multiple factions where each faction has meaningful changes in enemy density, strength, and movesets is a game that can present the gameplay with a variety of gameplay. A game where every faction overlaps severely in all of those is a game that is not going to be able to present such variety, regardless of whether or not you're pushing players to equip a mod of a different type whose impact on gameplay is only marginal outside of damage against one of those factions.

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You do not seem this narrow minded from all your posts I read so far, or are you just neglecting my posts because I oppose you?

Perhaps the issue here may not lie with me inexplicably turning into an entirely different person when interacting with you, and you specifically, so much as you having a tendency to antagonize, belittle and stonewall people you disagree with, as has happened several times before, including towards multiple people on this thread (e.g. the OP). Calling people names, in particular, does not exactly convey maturity or goodwill in what should normally be a civil debate.

More to the point, calling me "narrow minded" achieves strictly nothing with regards to justifying why some frames need or deserve to ignore game mechanics that are otherwise expressly meant to target them: Nullifiers and ability-nullifying enemies were created precisely because the developers felt players were becoming too powerful, and needed to be brought down to a consistent level of power so that the game could throw a challenge at them, at least in certain specific situations. You may believe that such a mechanic is unhealthy for the game, and that it should be removed (I certainly do), but said mechanic being a deliberate hard-counter to our warframes is a fact. If you want one or more frames to ignore what is meant to be a universal hard counter, you are going to have to provide more substantial justification beyond mere name-calling. Warframe isn't designed by toddlers exclaiming that their sword can break the other toddler's shield, and that their own shield can break the other toddler's shield-breaking sword, it is a video game designed by professional developers who should know better than to counter the counters they themselves have implemented, without good reason. 

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First of, I never said one version is better than the other, they are just different.

You very clearly did, as noted here:

2 hours ago, ShortCat said:

I dissagree. Inherent stats like armor allow more room for diversity, because it allows for tanky characters based on a stat, not an ability and can serve as a solid counter to ability canceling.

So you are very clearly giving preference to baseline stats over abilities. That aside, once again, there is also little "diversity" in practice generated by baseline durability stats, and the end result to tanking through baseline stats is simply that you have a frame that doesn't have to do anything to take more hits: while it could make sense for some frames to have more health if they're expected to soak up a lot of direct damage (though, once again, abilities can allow this as well), that doesn't really justify the current state of some frames having literally tens of times more eHP than others, particularly since tanks cannot manage aggro in Warframe, and therefore generally take about as many hits as anyone else.

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That hard-counter is already there and is called Inaros. He tanks with stats/mods and not abilities and is not as susceptable to ability canceling. Inaros has to maange his HP not energy or cooldwons, so that it creates a different playstyle as well as gear dependancy: e.g. Magus Elevate is not as usefull on Inaros, while Arcane Elevate is especially usefull on him.

Sure, and the results are clear for everyone to see: because Inaros can tank regardless of what's thrown at him, a fully-built Inaros is essentially immortal in virtually all of the game's content. The end result is a frame that, while certainly strong, is nonetheless perceived by many as boring to use, particularly since most of his abilities are underwhelming. Additionally, because he can tank at all levels and ignore normal counters to survivability, he trivializes game modes that test the player's survivability, notably Arbitrations. His ability to ignore Nullifiers therefore comes with clear, ultimately fairly negative consequences, both to himself and for the rest of the game.

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Same issue as above: core design and its faulty implementation. Either ask for better implementation of existing mechannics or an entirely new design.

... that is indeed what this thread is proposing, and what I am supporting. What did you think I was asking for? Are you implying it is somehow impossible to ask for a health system design that doesn't feature armor?

Edited January 14, 2019 by Teridax68

[ShortCat]

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I literally responded to that in my post, which clearly stated that the frame could just as easily die from a fully-powered shot on the first hit, and has no control over when this happens due to the RNG nature of evasion, thereby disproving the feature's supposed ability to compensate for mistakes. By all means, though, do accuse me of being the one supposedly not reading what the other person has written.

I letteraly described it 2 times so far. Path of Exile used this system of damage reduction and evasion the last time I played the game and it worked. Hell, D&D uses both system and it works too. Especailly the underlined sentence is the most questianable.

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Whose fault is it, then? What "system" are you even talking about here? Because what I'm talking about is establishing meaningful differences between enemy factions that legitimately affect gameplay, whereas you seem to be talking only about making players choose mods of a different color before entering missions based on an Excel spreadsheet. A game with multiple factions where each faction has meaningful changes in enemy density, strength, and movesets is a game that can present the gameplay with a variety of gameplay. A game where every faction overlaps severely in all of those is a game that is not going to be able to present such variety, regardless of whether or not you're pushing players to equip a mod of a different type whose impact on gameplay is only marginal outside of damage against one of those factions.

You are pushing for a different enemy archetypes or numbers, to further separate existing factions, and this is fine. However, what speaks about additional differences within factions themselves implemented in form of different armor types or shield types or Excel color spreadsheet how you would say. Are you looking down on a game that allows holy damage to be stronger on undead? I really fail to see where those supposed shortcomings of a well executed multi damage system are.

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

You very clearly did, as noted here: 

English is not my first language, but your interpretation of those lines is insane. Straw man much? Those lines clearly state that a stat based tank is different, because he has advantages in a different environment.

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

while it could make sense for some frames to have more health if they're expected to soak up a lot of direct damage (though, once again, abilities can allow this as well), that doesn't really justify the current state of some frames having literally tens of times more eHP than others, particularly since tanks cannot manage aggro in Warframe, and therefore generally take about as many hits as anyone else.

Yea, said the same words in my very first post here, thanks for reminding me.

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

... that is indeed what this thread is proposing, and what I am supporting. What did you think I was asking for? Are you implying it is somehow impossible to ask for a health system design that doesn't feature armor?

Then go and ask for an entirely new damage system with new scaling and everything surrounding it, if you think a complete redesign is the only way. This slipery slope from removing armor to redesigning enemy factions is laughable.
I say - current system is not working, because its scaling needs a look, as well as damage weaknesses/resistances need to be more distinct. It is not fine tuned.

[Teridax68]

42 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

I letteraly described it 2 times so far. Path of Exile used this system of damage reduction and evasion the last time I played the game and it worked. Hell, D&D uses both system and it works too. Especailly the underlined sentence is the most questianable.

Except Path of Exile proves what I'm saying: if you ever go for a hyper-squishy, purely evasion-based build, your clears are going to be inconsistent because you constantly run the risk of getting one-shot at higher levels, which is why even those sorts of builds typically incorporate enough resistances and base durability to take a hit, in addition to copious amounts of Life Leech. DnD the pen-and-paper game uses RNG because RNG is the only way such a game can create variance in combat, and while those mechanics have been ported to live-action games, they typically become unnecessary when clear, player action-based alternatives exist (headshots are a shooter's equivalent of pen-and-paper critical hits, for example). More to the point, you can also clearly see why Evasion doesn't really work in Warframe, as Nyx and Titania are still considered notoriously squishy in spite of the evasion percentages they can reach (again, because dodging 50% of all shots doesn't do much when one of those shots is enough to kill you, and there are plenty of them firing at you constantly).

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You are pushing for a different enemy archetypes or numbers, to further separate existing factions, and this is fine. However, what speaks about additional differences within factions themselves implemented in form of different armor types or shield types or Excel color spreadsheet how you would say. Are you looking down on a game that allows holy damage to be stronger on undead? I really fail to see where those supposed shortcomings of a well executed multi damage system are.

Honestly? Yeah, I do. If the literal only differentiating factor between damage type A and damage type B is that damage type A is listed as "fire" and damage type B is listed as "holy" then you don't have an actual damage system in your hands. Thankfully, this is implemented with some minimum of gameplay in many games, where undead are vulnerable to healing abilities, which are considered holy (which then gives cleric-type characters an extra use for their abilities in some situations), and overall, damage types do in fact work well in games that give out specific vulnerabilities to specific enemy types, each with their own unique function (so that you can build to take out some enemies faster than others in a crowd), but that simply is not the case in Warframe. Warframe isn't a game that gives the player compelling choices between which specific enemy type in a faction to build against, and it's never going to play like Diablo or Dark Souls no matter how many system it tries to mimic from any of those games.

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English is not my first language, but your interpretation of those lines is insane. Straw man much? Those lines clearly state that a stat based tank is different, because he has advantages in a different environment.

I fail to see why you would try to nit pick on semantics when you yourself admit to not knowing English at a native level. For your full information, when you claim that one thing allows "more room for diversity", or establish any statement listing some clear advantage over the other, without taking any time or effort to establish a tradeoff or list the other thing's advantages, you are clearly establishing one thing as better than the other. This is not a straw man interpretation, this is me reading what you have written.

Clearly, though, you meant to say something slightly different, which takes us back to the question you have been conspicuously avoiding: why is this difference between stat-based tanks and ability-based tanks meaningful or valuable? How do these "advantages" translate to better gameplay? As stated above, the simple difference between an ability-based tank and a stat-based tank is that the latter does not have to do anything to access their tankiness, which on its own is simply power without gameplay, and is not a good thing. The fact that you yourself seem aware that MMORPG-style tanking does not exist in Warframe, makes stat-based tanking even less justifiable in this game and discussion.

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Then go and ask for an entirely new damage system with new scaling and everything surrounding it, if you think a complete redesign is the only way. This slipery slope from removing armor to redesigning enemy factions is laughable.

... what? You are the only one here establishing a slippery slope here: my agreement with the OP on removing armor from the game, and my desire to rebalance enemy factions are independent of each other, and you so far have been the only one implying that they aren't. The only laughable thing here has been your string of bumbling attempts to shift the goalposts in this debate after you repeatedly get caught saying things that are demonstrably wrong. For that matter, too, why do I need to ask for an entirely new damage system? Why can't we just start at least with the current system, just without armor?

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I say - current system is not working, because its scaling needs a look, as well as damage weaknesses/resistances need to be more distinct. It is not fine tuned.

Except the system has never worked: even before power creep pushed Warframe's damage system past its limits, choosing one's damage types was never a particularly subtle or deep affair. In an environment where every player can equip whichever damage type they like on virtually every weapon, the difference between those damage types is simply not meaningful when the only consequence to building "right" is more damage in your current mission. Even if weaknesses and resistances were to be made more distinct (how?), this problem would persist.

Edited January 14, 2019 by Teridax68

[MJ12]

6 hours ago, Tatersail said:

This is great and all but...

 

The game Scales... forever!

no matter what you do, you reach a point where inaros / nidus / chroma gets 1 shot

 

your also missing one point... Having extreme differences in frame durability is fun... messing with armor and adaptation is fun!    

Your example was great.   Nyx only has 1k ehp. 

so the frame which can make everything around her fight each other and go immune absorbing all damage is, for some strange reason more squishy than chroma?

huh, that's weird, its almost like it's party of the design.

 

 

 

Armor has also been mostly dealt with by giving almost every frame an armor removal tool and status on weapons jumping up every few months.

tho

I would love to see a change to magnetic, which is currently never used as a damage type.

perhaps have its procs remove 2% of shields and armor and detonate as a 5m aoe.   this would make it a good alternative to the other damage types in certain situations. This would move players away from the ubiquitous viral/slash or corrosive.

When you have one Warframe that's 5 or 6 times tougher than another, baseline, with the ability to become even tougher than that (say, a dozen or 15 times tougher) at the cost of energy upkeep and nullifier vulnerability, isn't that an "extreme difference in frame durability?" It means that an attack that will kill one warframe in one second flat will take nearly a quarter of a minute to kill another. That's significant, yet allows some level of balancing because even though an attack will be a grave danger to one Warframe but not to another, it'll at least threaten the tougher Warframe.

And no, I don't think it's particularly 'fun' for most players that you can see a difference in orders of magnitude of effective durability, because that makes the game impossible to balance, as I literally said directly in the OP. Yes, having significant durability differences creates interesting gameplay, but making it so that you have a wide zone in which squishy frames are killed in one stray hit but really durable Warframes can basically ignore all incoming damage as trivial isn't actually fun or interesting. 

As to "the game scales infinitely" for practical purposes the infinite scaling in Warframe exists largely to force people out of endless missions at some point. No matter what you do, you reach a time where you get oneshot because they want you to leave missions at some point.

[Atsia]

On 2019-01-09 at 9:28 PM, Kevyne_Kicklighter said:

^^ This.

We also need an indicator when armor is stripped/or "leaky" to even NOTICE health is being damaged. Not this "bypass" system that completely IGNORES BOTH shields AND armor to go straight to health damage.

A ... Shield | Armor | Health ... bar.

Shields are the bubble that protects armor. Armor is the bubble that protects a character FROM damage itself -- be it physical or elemental damage.

You do know that not exactly how armor works in Warframe, right? The only damage that goes through armor's damage reduction is true damage,  of which the only source we players face are bleed procs. Otherwise armor always applies, unless removed by corrosive or something else (of which they're already indicators).

[MJ12]

9 hours ago, ShortCat said:

But you cannot talk about the one without not mentioning the other. Our armor works just like the enemy's, so does the damage. Your post does not exclude those changes to the enemies. Thus I said your idea is not thought out. Furthermore your suggestion of %-based resistance mods is the same eHP multiplier you are complainging about, the only differency is a clear indication of the said multiplier on the mod. You could just ask for a change in the UI and equal armor values for the same effect. If you think armor isn't interesting enough, read some posts again.

They do not have those effects yet. Nobody is holding DE back from implementing such enemies. Elemental damage becomes more and more common on the enemy side, then we have Viral conditions in Sorties.
I do agree with the issue of huge gap in survivability, but I do not agree with presented solutions. As I see it, your post loses its relevance when the "solution" part starts.

I can and I just did talk about player health and durability without talking about enemy health and durability because the two should be balanced independently of each other. Enemies can have armor even if Warframes don't have it. Plenty of enemies don't have armor at all, so it's clearly possible for Warframes and their durability to be balanced around not having armor, which again is just a eHP multiplier that does nothing but create an eHP multiplier. I think armor isn't interesting because as it currently exists, it basically does nothing. And as to "nothing is holding DE back from implementing such enemies," that really doesn't matter, because you're appealing to a hypothetical design change that may never be implemented as a possible counterpoint. I could just as easily say that in the hypothetical future, DE would remove armor from everyone because they realized armor in Warframe is really badly designed, therefore 

Similarly, the 'differing elemental modifiers' for armor are also irrelevant. All Warframes have the same health and armor types and therefore the same modifiers. And furthermore, enemies have a wide variety of non-elemental damage. Grineer use Toxin, Blast, Heat, and Electric. Infested use Toxin, Magnetic, Electric, and Blast. Corpus use Radiation, Electric, Blast, and Magnetic. This isn't Destiny 2, where each enemy faction primarily uses one of 3 elemental damage types with a small handful of exceptions, and is generally vulnerable to one of three elemental damage types, and therefore you can actually build around elemental resistances in a way which would make elemental modifiers relevant.

And furthermore, as you might have noticed, the suggestion is to convert armor mods to % based resistance mods, which count as damage resistance and would therefore be affected by the damage resistance cap that I also talked about. The entire point of armor mods in this system is an alternative to building for power strength on Warframes that have damage resistance-granting powers, or as a method of gaining damage resistance on Warframes that lack damage-resistance granting powers. That's the difference. They now do something other than just multiply your eHP because they become a substitute for defensive powers, rather than another multiplier to make your health bigger.

I mean, I could talk about reworking armor in some way to make it actually something other than a healthbar multiplier, but that's outside of the scope of this thread which is focused feedback on the core issue and creating a minimal-effort method to mitigate the problem.

[MJ12]

BTW the people going: "you can't talk about player armor without talking about enemy armor" should realize that I made a thread about armor overall and the problems with it and pointed out a large number of ways to make armor something other than 'a eHP multiplier which gives armored enemies dozens of times more health than equivalent, unarmored enemies at high levels':