Concerns about future enemy damage scaling

[Duality52]

Somewhat late for this, but Devstream 136 mentions how

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"With changes to armour, we still want higher-level enemies to feel deadly, so altering damage output scaling would most likely be part of the change -- doing so without making players be one-shot is a tricky balance here." - Devstream 136 Overview

More damage does not mean harder challenge. It will force us to resort to frames with tanky and/or damage builds (Mesa, Inaros, Rhino, Revenant, etc.) while more fragile frames with little survivability options (Nova, Banshee) will get ousted out of this new change.

This may be asking much, but there needs to be additional enemy variants such as the Nox that is fair in the design and role they play against us while fighting them. Empyrean/Gokstad Grineer not only have absurd damage output, but overtuned health and armor that have remained unaddressed for more than a month.

While they weren't the first (the Terra Corpus in the Orb Vallis upon Fortuna's launch), Empyrean/Gokstad Grineer made this issue more apparent.

[8faiNt]

 

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More damage does not mean harder challenge.

well, grind doesnt mean content either but thats what we get. wouldnt surprise if they make the scaling something worse.

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

Here's my suggestion.........................................

Armor. Doesn't reduce damage. It completely blocks it. Serving the same effect as a shield. Shields can be broken more easily, but regenerate, armor doesn't regenerate, but is much harder to break. Instead of corrosive being the only thing that strips armor, everything you do to it will damage the armor, but no damaging the squishy center till you get past the armor. That is to say, you HAVE to strip armor in the process of killing the target. Blue numbers are shield, purple numbers are over shield, white, yellow, orange,and red numbers are damage to health, and we'll say... What... Green. Lets do green... will be damage to armor. Once you've broken the armor, you can start dealing damage to health. But since it doesn't regenerate it takes longer to get through.

But just like shields.................  There are things that can bypass it. Like. Blast (i commented on this recently) if you know anything about the body's response to an explosion, blast should bypass shields... To be specific, if you are within a certain blast radius of any explosion above a certain yield, it doesn't matter if you're wearing armor, or if you are protected from shrapnel, there is a hard kill zone where just the concussive force of shockwaves passing though your soft tissues and brain will kill you no matter what period. That is why demolitions which can drop a building on a dime none the less have a large clearance zone, it's not just about delay, shock waves will KILL you. Blast concussions are one of the most common internal injuries treated by both military hospitals and long term the VA hospital system. In addition to blast you have pierce, which should do a percentage of it's total damage against health directly, so, 60% of proc damage hits the armor, 40% goes to health. Punch through should also cause armor penetration for obvious freaking reasons.

This might require a nerf to slash/viral builds in how they function, but the real issue with armor scaling seems to be largely that armor is part of health and you kinda have to strip it off as you get their health down... Making it it's own thing that is not part of health just like shields are not part of health, means that you can focus on things that bypass the armor. You're going into a sortie with hardened armor targets? Bring blast weapons and puncture weapons to get straight at their health. If that makes any sense. 

[(XBOX)EPOSSTYLE]

There definitely needs to be a serious breakdown of how armor works. And do base it off reality,  visually at least, cause is some systems working behind the curtain that are questionable at best and have no rhyme for reason. 

No slam or fall damage has a instant reality break when witnessed. Getting blown off a cliff and falling 50ft (on your back) shouldn't have the same effect as falling 2ft.

Getting hit and moved/ thrown back into a stationary object before all your momentum is gone should have an impact result. (Also getting knocked off your feet should come with corrective gameplay not a chance system) which equals to missing gameplay.

[zakaryx]

42 minutes ago, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

Here's my suggestion.........................................

Armor. Doesn't reduce damage. It completely blocks it. 

This would be far better than just tweaking armor scaling. 

Having a finite amount of armor to break would make literally every weapon in the game somewhat viable. 

 

Imagine being able to kill high level grineer without having to use corrosive on everything everything. 

 

Gas/bleed are already used to bypass armor.

 

Impact damage should break it and puncture could bypass part of it. Ips shouldn't rely on status procs at all. 

 

[Teridax68]

6 hours ago, Duality52 said:

More damage does not mean harder challenge. It will force us to resort to frames with tanky and/or damage builds (Mesa, Inaros, Rhino, Revenant, etc.) while more fragile frames with little survivability options (Nova, Banshee) will get ousted out of this new change.

This may be asking much, but there needs to be additional enemy variants such as the Nox that is fair in the design and role they play against us while fighting them. Empyrean/Gokstad Grineer not only have absurd damage output, but overtuned health and armor that have remained unaddressed for more than a month.

I completely agree with this, which is why I think implementing difficulty through changes in enemy stats is doomed to fail regardless of whichever upper bounds are set. Making enemies tankier doesn't test us on our skills, so much as force a meta of high-damage weapons with emphasis on penetrating/stripping armor. Similarly, making enemies more damaging in an environment where we can still get hit even when parkouring at full speed just means that the only frames that aren't completely dysfunctional at higher levels are those who can survive lots of damage, or kill everyone before they can take a hit. Capping enemy scaling is a start, but eventually I think the devs will have to go further, and find entirely different ways of making content more challenging.

[Sdric]