Locational Armor

[niete]

A lvl 100 bombard has 96% damage reduction on its entire body. It would add depth if lets say the body has the 96% damage reduction then the legs and arms would have less like around 70% and the head would be the least like 40%

[Annnoth]

funny thing is, that used to exist. Way back when warframe was in open beta the norm was:

corpus can't be hurt by shots to the head without armor ignoring weapons or armor piercing damage mod (before puncture it was armor piercing as was the only non elemental damage)

Ancients take full damage to their ankles and arms. Specifically their ankles, not their legs. Caus yeah... they had armor. So much that shooting the head was actually worse than the ankle.

It was definitely neat, but it'd be better if armor was just changed to begin with or else you'd have another ancient problem where shooting some arbitrary spot would be way more efficient than blasting their head off cause the armor is so insane.

Edited November 21, 2019 by Annnoth

[Tyreaus]

2 minutes ago, Annnoth said:

It was definitely neat, but it'd be better if armor was just changed to begin with or else you'd have another ancient problem where shooting some arbitrary spot would be way more efficient than blasting their head off cause the armor is so insane.

Based on the Enemy Body Parts page on the Wiki, they seem to have pretty standardized and intuitive "weak points" already isolated. Heads on Grineer and most Corpus (humanoid and Ospreys), backs of MOAs and Bursas, and face-parts on Infested. I would figure, if they're going to do armour on a per-body-part basis, they would keep with that kind of schema at minimum, maybe with adjustments on extremities as OP suggests.

[Annnoth]

6 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

Based on the Enemy Body Parts page on the Wiki, they seem to have pretty standardized and intuitive "weak points" already isolated. Heads on Grineer and most Corpus (humanoid and Ospreys), backs of MOAs and Bursas, and face-parts on Infested. I would figure, if they're going to do armour on a per-body-part basis, they would keep with that kind of schema at minimum, maybe with adjustments on extremities as OP suggests.

I mean, at that point very little would change if headshots were the least armored + the damage multi on headshot. If they weren't, they wouldn't be gunned for at all in favor of the limbs which isn't exactly much more interesting. The enemies aren't really designed interestingly enough to gun for different parts. When you have 50 different versions of "a man" there's only so many places to shoot. 

Moas are an example of this working and even then it only barely works. Since they are a robot and have their own unique aspects, it makes sense they'd have something like that battery on their back for even more damage. Or bursas taking some damage against their gun and full damage on the back.

[Tyreaus]

1 minute ago, Annnoth said:

I mean, at that point very little would change if headshots were the least armored + the damage multi on headshot. If they weren't, they wouldn't be gunned for at all in favor of the limbs which isn't exactly much more interesting. The enemies aren't really designed interestingly enough to gun for different parts. When you have 50 different versions of "a man" there's only so many places to shoot. 

Moas are an example of this working and even then it only barely works. Since they are a robot and have their own unique aspects, it makes sense they'd have something like that battery on their back for even more damage. Or bursas taking some damage against their gun and full damage on the back.

As far as making things interesting, it's a trade-off between "interesting" and "intuitive" to certain degrees. Intuitive counts things like head and back. Shooting at an Ancient's ankles is interesting, but without bright glowing weak spots, not terribly intuitive. FWIW, the varying profiles of the Infested do make it decently interesting: you're shooting the head regardless, but the location of an Ancient's head is much higher than that of a Charger. Now, if you started adding things like, shooting the arms of Grineer or Corpus would disarm them, that's something else.

But realistically, much wouldn't change because player builds have been working around armour for so long now (e.g. slash heavy builds, corrosive builds). Those builds work the same sort of way whatever the value of armour they're working with. And the game's so horde-centric that any weapon capable of taking advantage of those precision weak-points is inefficient. You would have to design some kind of miniboss enemy of some sort to really start taking advantage of that kind of system, and even then, it'd be less about armour and more about innate forms of damage reduction. See, e.g., Nox.

[Etan-gK]

If I recall correctly, at one point we were supposed to get special enemies with location based weak spots, I think it was shown off as a kind of red crystal thing, but hitting a specific weak spot on a constantly moving target in a game where you are also constantly moving didn't work out, I seem to recall ?Reb? trying and failing to hit it several time on stream

 

[0_The_F00l]

Localised armor is something that I have requested to (try) overcome the current armor scaling problem before. 

Although weak spot damage as a concept still exists in the game, but is not very noticeable except on headshot. 

[Kontrollo]

I've been wanting something like that for a long time, but for some reason only a few special units have it (e.g. Ambulas, Nox) -- Of course, besides the headshot multiplier.

 

However, as the game has been moving into a direction of faster, easier, more enemies, more AoE, I'm not sure how they'd implement that these days and be able to make it satisfying, as well.

[Kalvorax]

1 hour ago, Etan-gK said:

but hitting a specific weak spot on a constantly moving target in a game where you are also constantly moving didn't work out,

closest i can think of now is the stupid arbitration drones that are a PITA to hit with anything NOT slightly AOE (tombfinger or slug shotties and flamers)

[(PSN)robotwars7]

meh, not sure about this. if done right it's not too bad, but after seeing their original Eximus rework plan and bosses like the Wolf I don't know if DE would do a good job or just make another terrible bullet sponge. more reactive targets that limp/fire guns one-handed when shot in the arm/leg would be a nice touch, but reactive targets would take a little more time to develop.