DEV 136 About the rework of the armor problem: Greneer armor like corpus shield

[(XBOX)SandioKan93]

During the devstream you mentioned the rework of love, which scaling of the armor at high levels becomes impractical since they have too much damage reduction.

I propose to adopt a corpus shield type system as in the image below.

https://ibb.co/mtmNXbv

 

The idea is to insert the armor not as a general damage reduction but as a value. The damage reduction is completely eliminated but increasing the level only increases the HP value of the armor, as happens with corpus shields.

 

What do you think?

Edited January 19, 2020 by (XB1)Nerf Napalm

[Kaotyke]

2 minutes ago, (XB1)Nerf Napalm said:

increasing the level only increases the HP value of the armor, as happens with corpus shields.

The health of Corpus enemies increases too.

Some dont get too much compared to shields, like Anti-Moas, but Techs? They get a ton of health.

[(XBOX)SandioKan93]

Obviously with a new recalculation of the HP upscaling, however health no damage reduction.

Edited January 19, 2020 by (XB1)Nerf Napalm

[Loza03]

26 minutes ago, Kaotyke said:

The health of Corpus enemies increases too.

Some dont get too much compared to shields, like Anti-Moas, but Techs? They get a ton of health.

It's still nothing in comparison to Grineer effective health. Techs at level 100 have about 90,000 effective health (amount of damage needed to kill them overall), Grineer Elite Lancers (Your regular mooks) have 157,000.

To be honest, it also doesn't matter as long as the health pools are  proportional to one another.

[(PSN)ATreidezz]

So whats the difference with shield? What armor means to players then? If we have both armor and shield as value, then which 1 will get hit first if damaged? If armor takes the hit and depleted, will it regenerate? If not that means a HUGE nerf to armored enemies, but if its regenerate, then its no different with shield. Have you take into account the damage type that can bypass armor like slash? If increased level only increased armor value and not hp, then most high level enemies will die in an instant, and we already powerful enough without this "NERF" 

[0_The_F00l]

I do think this is what it was in the early days ... the days when grineer spoke fluent english and formation bravo was a thing.

I would not mind honestly, I just think there needs to be some number balance ,

 

I cant help but think of Nezha and its warding halo. 

Grineer with armor similar to nezha (but not exactly):

They still have the DR , but the armor itself takes damage as well as their health.

Or Imagine every attack is like corrosive , but with varying effectiveness, as per the damage types and armor types.

Formula is simple:

Damage to armor= Current DR x Damage received

Damage to health = DR Before armor reduction x Damage received

Example:

damage	Health	Armor	DR
0	500	300	0.5
50	473.9130435	275	0.4782608696
50	446.6941086	251.0869565	0.4556213018
50	418.3014666	228.3058914	0.4321471616
50	388.6980654	206.6985334	0.4079319748
50	357.8530308	186.3019346	0.383099308
50	325.7432217	167.1469692	0.3578038181
50	292.3547438	149.2567783	0.3322304426
50	257.684307	132.6452562	0.3065912645
50	221.7402957	117.315693	0.2811197732
50	184.5434227	103.2597043	0.2560625403
50	146.126859	90.45657727	0.2316687246
50	106.5357706	78.87314104	0.208178233
50	65.82625581	68.46422939	0.185809704
50	24.06373769	59.17374419	0.1647496376
50	-18.67906666	50.93626231	0.145143913

 

 

[JackHargreav]

I propose not to do that. 

Armor is fine the way it works now. You won't meet those beefy eat every bullet boys normaly. Only if you go for a hour long survival run on mot.

[Lost_Cartographer]

The new damage types introduced in Railjack would pretty much put corrosive and a minor, reverse form of viral on on all IPS weapons.  Yeah, DE needs to do something with armor scaling, and it sounds like they're trying to address it (plateauing at ~150... how many people go that far?) but I think converting all Warframe/Archgun weapons to the new damage types might be the answer we're looking for.  Though ballistic could do with something more notable.  Reduced enemy damage is the current puncture, and that only really works if we're dealing with ONE target, not... 20, as is common in this horde shooter.

[Corvid]

50 minutes ago, JackHargreav said:

You won't meet those beefy eat every bullet boys normaly.

You will in Proxima nodes.

[JackHargreav]

2 minutes ago, Corvid said:

You will in Proxima nodes.

I did.

They are easy to kill if you build a loadout for it.

[Corvid]

Just now, JackHargreav said:

I did.

They are easy to kill if you build a loadout for it.

Not the point.

[JackHargreav]

4 hours ago, Corvid said:

Not the point.

Then what is it?

You don't meet those enemies that often nor they are a big problem if you're prepared.

[Corvid]

1 minute ago, JackHargreav said:

Then what is it?

You don't meet those enemies that often nor they are a big problem if you're prepared.

The point was to refute this:

5 hours ago, JackHargreav said:

You won't meet those beefy eat every bullet boys normaly.

Which it did.

Saying this:

5 hours ago, JackHargreav said:

They are easy to kill if you build a loadout for it.

is moving the goalposts.

[TARINunit9]

8 hours ago, (XB1)Nerf Napalm said:

I propose to adopt a corpus shield type system as in the image below.

https://ibb.co/mtmNXbv

What do you think?

That this proposal gives me dangerous Wolfenstein: Youngblood flashbacks.

I mean there's a lot of fundamental differences between Warframe and Youngblood that work in Warframe's favor (big bright colors are better than crappy boxes and lines, for example), but still: why would you remind people of Wolfenstein Youngblood?

[Cubewano]

6 hours ago, JackHargreav said:

I propose not to do that. 

Armor is fine the way it works now. You won't meet those beefy eat every bullet boys normaly. Only if you go for a hour long survival run on mot.

And even then our tools are more than adequate to turn those enemies into smears on the floor within seconds. I'm honestly not sure where this need for nerfing enemies is coming from right now when enemies are notoriously trivial in the game 90% of the time, and that the target is just the grineer who frankly aren't even the most annoying faction late game is just ugh. This game is brain dead easy and scaling is effectively broken (not from enemies, from us) and making enemies weaker under the current games state is only going to worsen DE's issues with game balance, content trivialization, build diversity, challenging content, and resource management/game pacing.

Fix the bigger balance issues first then fine tune DE, like our entire damage system could use a look for starters. (higher levels just being a trade off of who one shots who first is a terrible state of affairs to be in)

Edited January 19, 2020 by Cubewano

[Annnoth]

6 hours ago, 0_The_F00l said:

I do think this is what it was in the early days ... the days when grineer spoke fluent english and formation bravo was a thing.

Armor was always a thing. Grineer heavies did have shields ON TOP of ho and armor though.

In fact armor used tk be way worse than what we have now. The ONLY saving grace was 20% of the weapons in the game just ignored it.

[Leavith]

8 hours ago, (XB1)Nerf Napalm said:

During the devstream you mentioned the rework of love, which scaling of the armor at high levels becomes impractical since they have too much damage reduction.

I propose to adopt a corpus shield type system as in the image below.

https://ibb.co/mtmNXbv

 

The idea is to insert the armor not as a general damage reduction but as a value. The damage reduction is completely eliminated but increasing the level only increases the HP value of the armor, as happens with corpus shields.

 

What do you think?

They may need to do a lot of rework on powers and augmentation because a lot of power selling point is the benefits or the ignoring of armor.

I suggest an adjusted change, it's inspired by your suggestion but make armor like shield but keep is reduction capability.

Sure this itself obsoletes corrosive proc  in itself, but if the value of armor goes down with hp proportion such as:

Enemy has 100 health and 100 armor

You shoot 50 damage to the enemy, and the damage is reduced by 90%(45)

Then enemy suffers 5 damage and also looses 5 armor...

My numbers are just representation not an ideal scenario, but just to help visualize what i mean.

Then we can still have armor and health value still go up corrosive proc will still work the same removing % of armor, but now damage will work like shattering impact... Not sure though if taking it from base is better or from current sum, because if we use based i can see it being a huge nerf to armor but if we take it from current sum i don't know if it be enough of difference.

Edited January 19, 2020 by Leavith

[MysticDragonMage]

7 hours ago, JackHargreav said:

You won't meet those beefy eat every bullet boys normaly. Only if you go for a hour long survival run on mot.

 

6 hours ago, Corvid said:

You will in Proxima nodes.

these are what i personally believe to be the source of the armor scaling controversy.

surviving hours on endless nodes was optional before but only now the developers are doing something about it because players are just now encountering highly scaled enemy armor at the beginning of missions since the introduction of railjack.

@JackHargreav is partly correct because anything below the first 5 minuets of mot is easily due-able to experienced players (specifically lvl 40-45). the entire problem, however, is that we are progressing in the star chart, and that only means that we will encounter stronger enemies than proxima ones in the future. this is where @Corvid is correct. insane amounts of armor scaling is inevitable.

that either means:

• everything the player has needs to be massively buffed.
• the developers can just keep all future content at a max level of 80-90.
• or the devs need to find progression method to which players can work toward scaling strengths and weaknesses along with the enemy's level.

my vote is option number 3.

Edited January 19, 2020 by MysticDragonMage

[SpringRocker]

8 hours ago, (PS4)ATreidezz said:

So whats the difference with shield? What armor means to players then? If we have both armor and shield as value, then which 1 will get hit first if damaged?

This is probably the biggest point to consider.

Not only is it basically armor just being an extension of health, but the only frames that would be able to "tank" would be ones like Inaros, Mesa, and Trinity. Mods like adaptation and aviator would become a must have.

Not to mention that weapons that deal primarily slash damage might be more deadly than the first iteration of the enemy Detron to some frames.

[(XBOX)Dex Xean]

I dont agree at all with this change might as well make it all shields at this point to reduce the amount of numbers in the game at that point.

They just need to really do what they said which is soft cap the armor scaling up or imo hard cap the dmg reduction of enemies that they get from armor. the problem about Enemy armor scaling is since it keeps going up enemies can actually hit 99.99% dmg reduction since their armor goes up forever compare to warframes that are locked on how high our armor can go. I feel enemies should at most get 75% dmg reduction and just stop even if they get more armor. The fact HP and armor keeps going up at the current time is what really makes enemies so damn tanky.

Warframe dmg reduction should stay the same as it is since our HP values are hardlocked so its fine we can reach 80%-95% dmg reduction.

Edited January 19, 2020 by (XB1)Dex Xean

[Avienas]

32 minutes ago, (XB1)Dex Xean said:

I dont agree at all with this change might as well make it all shields at this point to reduce the amount of numbers in the game at that point.

An easy way of the whole Shields are Corpus Armor as Armor is Grineer Shields is easy to setup in a simple manner:

1. Grineer `Shield` Armor would not be able to regenerate but would be much more bulkie, this would also do a rather good job of making corrosive such a less priority element and allow other elements to be more beloved.
2. Corpus `Armor` Shields could regenerate if they are not given any attention but would be alot less bulkie, ultimately it turns into a simple idea of wearing huge armor to protect you from initial gun-fire Vs. a more portable light-weight system to last long enough to get some shots in but not as long as armor so `enemies` would be forced to run to cover and such if they get low on shields or lose them while they try to pot shot you as they run away to regenerate the shields.

As for warframes, it could easily be setup where Armor can take time to restore or has to have some ability/arcane/interaction to `recover` it, kind of like how current shields work for warframe where they take a very long time to regenerate and require not taking damage for extended periods of time to recover.

With Shields they would need to get updated for warframes where they will regenerate, but not block damage, until they have completely been refilled or at the very least 50 or even 75% it has recharged. With of course, regeneration speed would be vastly improved, such as maybe scaling based on shield capacity as in shield regeneration speed is a % gain per second then what feels like a fixed recharge value currently.

Quote

They just need to really do what they said which is soft cap the armor scaling up or imo hard cap the dmg reduction of enemies that they get from armor. the problem about Enemy armor scaling is since it keeps going up enemies can actually hit 99.99% dmg reduction since their armor goes up forever compare to warframes that are locked on how high our armor can go.

This is honestly where i wish D.E. would give enemy armor scaling the same freaking cap out as how certain warframes with D.R. abilities get. Such as how Gara stops at 90% D.R. with Splinter storm, they could put a cap of around 75, maybe 80% for Grineer armor so they actually start slowing down on the ridiculous D.R. scaling which also gives more ample room for Corrosive and Heat to actually work then enemies able to infinitely scale much higher numbers, even when they are only getting .01% or less extra D.R. every 1000 armor, which just means Heat & Corrosive procs need to get exponentially multiplied to shred enough armor to then deal with the million-billion or so health pudge that is behind the armor wall. Where even if you could somehow use both Corrosive and Viral with 100% proc guranteed on a gun and could fire it at a ridiculously rapid fire pace, will likely amount to nothing at all in situations like those.

Kind of why i would rather lean to the Grineer Armor=Corpus Shield logic with the bulk VS regeneration spin on handling Grineer ridiculous tank structure.

Quote

I feel enemies should at most get 75% dmg reduction and just stop even if they get more armor. The fact HP and armor keeps going up at the current time is what really makes enemies so damn tanky.

Warframe dmg reduction should stay the same as it is since our HP values are hardlocked so its fine we can reach 80%-95% dmg reduction.

Best case scenario i would rather damage, health, shields & armor would be all normalized across the map so enemies have similar stats to ours and we would have much smaller numbers to be dealing with(especially on our damage crunching0, but over-all it would still be the same thing where we would be dealing with large amounts of damage in proportion to thar E-health, but they can eventually get really tankie, but things like self-damage would get corrected better and maybe even make certain things stand out better like us feeling that our rapid fire dakka guns feel good, instead of them having to be status nutters or crit nutters with hunter munitions and so many other things i could likely chatter about on such an adjustment but i will just avoid doing so instead to not inflate the text wall iteself.

Edited January 19, 2020 by Avienas

[Midas]

10 hours ago, (XB1)Nerf Napalm said:

During the devstream you mentioned the rework of love, which scaling of the armor at high levels becomes impractical since they have too much damage reduction.

I propose to adopt a corpus shield type system as in the image below.

https://ibb.co/mtmNXbv

 

The idea is to insert the armor not as a general damage reduction but as a value. The damage reduction is completely eliminated but increasing the level only increases the HP value of the armor, as happens with corpus shields.

 

What do you think?

Here is a bit more advanced information on that topic.

Health itself is a very fragile factor, Health is easily removed especially with gas damage.

It is essential in my opinion that shields to something a bit like armor but different, take a peak!

Please... USE THE FEEDBACK SECTION FOR GAME CRITICISM!!!

Edited January 19, 2020 by Midas

[ZetekP]

I have an idea, how about just make armor breakable? reworking status I think is important in relation to an armor nerf(when it comes to armor and status, you know slash/viral, heat/corrosive are the main things), I think reworking status is important because it seems like especially heat/corrosive is made to remove armor, so anything relating to armor at least should effect those two. 

Back to the breaking armor, I think armor scaling as it is right now is okay, its just the means to deal with heavy grineer is kinda... way too streamlined in a game where u need different builds. As you know, when it comes to endurance run(lvls 100+ to start) heavy grineer, the armor makes it so raw damage is obsolete, unless you have some type of insane multiplier which isnt really a thing. What do you have? first operator has nothing for dealing with armor, so move on to warframe. certain warframes DO have armor reducing abilities which removes 100% if you have a certain ability strength, which is cool, but what if you dont? Lets look at naramon rhino for example(if you get the reference, you a bro).

Rhino has rhino charge, okay, no damage, useful for gaining armor cool cool

Rhino has iron skin, you know this iframe then health sponge thingy cool cool
roar, this is a multiplicative damage multiplier, which is actually really good

Then u have stomp for cc
now, as you can see, you have armor/armor/damage buff/cc
lets look at the last two for dealing with super armored targets
damage buff simply multiplies your damage, but ofc with infinite armor scaling, eventually falls off, but falls off less than other stuff
CC allows you to get in more hits
now, if we are to complement this, assuming u are someone who wants to not switch between stuff for different factions, due to how armor is just busted COMPARED to other faction's defenses, ofc you would just go viral/slash or corrosive/heat, lets pick some weapons
A naramon rhino would use... ignis wraith, atomos, and redeemer prime les go with that
on all 3 weapons, since they arent slash based, corrosive heat cool cool
Now, lets jump into MOT and lets say you are at 2hrs
the gameplay loop is just get armor from 1 for 2, have 3 up, and 4 when u need cc, pretty simple
then u shoot ur ignis wraith with heat corrosive which reduces armor, then u shoot with redeemer prime for actual damage I suppose.
now, where am I going with this? what I am saying is that, there really isnt any diversity with this, depending on your warframe and the weapons you pick, that decides pretty much how you are going to play, and when you get into high survivals enemies are just bullet sponges, which is why changing armor is a subject in itself.
Me personally, my take on this is changing status effects and what weapons have what status, and how armor is reduced, as the problem here is how high armor makes everything obsolete, just go with those two combinations, and boom
one thing I like about elemental combos is that you can choose which ones you want
thing about physical ones, you cant add them, so I have an idea
how about adding more physical types, making them more... "streamlined"(not in a bad way) and making every physical type have an innate thingy.
so, about adding more physical types,
Impact
Puncture
Slash
these three dont cover every single weapon, nor do I think every weapon should have IPS
lets take the ignis wraith for example, it wouldnt make since for IPS at all, which is why it has heat, but in my ideal rework, everything should have a physical type
so lets just use place holder "continuous" physical type, it would have a beam physical type and some heat ofc. 
Now, adding a "thingy" lets visit a mod, shattering impact. this, when a weapon has impact, every melee weapons' hit reduces 6 BASE armor. so if you use it on a butcher, one hit = armor stripping, which is NICE, thing is since it takes a mod slot, no one uses it, except on sarpa. just to emphasize base armor, heavy gunners have 500 I think? so you reduce 500 by 6 every hit, so linear armor reduction.

now, my proposal is that every physical type has a innate shattering impact, like continuous might have 1 or 2 per hit, so for the heavy targets, might take 500 or 250 hits(numbers can change). in practice how base armor reduction works it reduces it linearly, but only after a few hits you actually reduce armor to an amount where your damage starts increasing a lot. Now, I dont want every single thing to be like "okay, 250 hits and then ill be doing damage", so I think base armor should scale- NOW, not like how it does now, maybe like lvl 1 heavy gunner has 500, 100 has 600, 200 has 700 or something like that, but just dont wanna make every single enemy no matter the lvl be the same.
for IPS I guess it would be like, Impact is 4 per hit, puncture is 6 per hit, slash is 0 per hit(since it has bleed status proc after all).

Then with elementals, we would have to change them a bit, specifically corrosive and heat because their damage reduction, while effective, I think should be used for something else. Keep the faction damage bonuses the same, but maybe make it so corrosive is a DOT that starts way weaker than something like gas, then increases per hit, then heat, I mean tbh stagger + dot is heat idk what more lol.
In addition to this change I believe getting rid of that power creep corrosive projection is essential, and reworking aura/exilus mods for more unique and interesting builds
now, I am not a game creator so idk how this would implement, but at least recognize that I think the problem isnt with how armor scales, but more how you reduce armor. 

[zakaryx]

10 hours ago, ZetekP said:

I have an idea, how about just make armor breakable? 

Something along this line of thought would be much better for balancing. If impact and puncture damage (not status)could break/strip armor you would suddenly have more build variety. 

 

Balancing centered around enemy health and damage is easier when you know a player with any weapon will eventually be able to damage that enemy enough to actually kill it. 

 

Impact and puncture mods could actually be useful if they helped strip armor.

And if your weapon has no/low impact/puncture you always have heat and corrosive to fall back on.

 

Edited January 20, 2020 by zakaryx

[(PSN)thegarada]

This is regarding the latest dev stream armor discussion. It is good that DE is looking into reducing enemy armor. However, I think the discussion is missing the main issues, damage types.

As we currently stand, the way to go is slash and viral on melee weapons. Why bother with armor at all when you can bypass it? A well decked melee weapon with a riven can eliminate a 150 bombard in like... 2 sec tops? How about using a ranged weapon with magnetic? You will be here all day. 

In my opinion, the best solution is to hard cap armor at around 50% damage reduction, and instead scale enemies HP. This way, you get far more consistent effective HP pools and majority of weapon damage types and weapons become viable. Some damage types will still have advantages against specific enemies (as they should), but when enemies have 80% damage reduction from armor, instead of 90%, that is not exactly fixing the issue. 

In addition, increasing enemy damage is not the way to go. Enemies in level 100+ territory already deal incredibly high damage that majority of frames are not viable in that content. If DE wants to add difficulty, they will need to add mechanics, not more damage.