Asymptotic armour scaling is not the solution. Removing armour scaling is.

[DoomFruit]

On Devstream 136, the idea was floated that armour scaling needed to be changed (wasn't this also stated back when Damage 2.0 was being worked on?).

Unfortunately, what I can see from the devstream summary indicates that DE want to make it into some kind of asymptotic curve, where it starts scaling, but slows infinitely as it approaches some maximum value. While this is better than our current infinitely increasing value, it's still flawed.

DE: you're trying to adapt a system, but you're not questioning the core assumption that you've made here.

Why does armour even need to scale in the first place? HP, shields and damage output already scale with enemy level. Why should damage resistance also get increased with enemy level?

Not only does it make fighting enemies more annoying, it horribly constrains your build for higher level monsters and it makes balancing the game much harder (because more variables to work around).

This isn't even player vs. enemy balance, where people might come up with some unforeseen strategy. This affects simple AI vs. AI balance too. Compare kuva siphon vs. kuva flood. In kuva siphons (level 40), the invading grineer are on a roughly even footing with the native corpus, perhaps a bit stronger. In kuva floods, a single kuva soldier will wipe out an entire squad of opposing corpus purely due to the enormous armour. One solo L80 cat lady can solo at least half of an exterminate mission if you happen to get one (those nuclear molotov cocktails are nasty).

Just get rid of armour scaling entirely. It's not necessary, it contributes to the inevitable power creep as players seek out more ways of getting around it, and it messes up your game balance as you try to clamp down on that.

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

I love getting a Hyekka Master ally on higher-level Infested invasions. They can really clean up, and their hyekka are tanky enough to survive for a while.

But I agree with your post. Enemy damage resistance shouldn't go up, or at most should go up slightly, based on level. I think part of the idea behind the current scaling is that enemies with higher base armor (mostly heavy units) would scale up faster than their grunt counterparts, but this can still be done with relative ease without heavily scaling damage resistance.

[trndr]

If armor got removed there would be more consequences than just grineer would be easier to kill.

1. Corrosive Projection would become useless. 

2. Corrosive proc would become useless.

3. Heat proc would be worse than before it got armor reduction, recent addition with damage tick reduction. 

4. Frost globe would become weaker. 

5. Valkyr would become paper.

The list goes on...

 

Having just grineer lose armor would frankly make them too easy, and it would make no sense for frames to keep armor if the enemies lose their armor. 

[EinheriarJudith]

14 minutes ago, trndr said:

If armor got removed there would be more consequences than just grineer would be easier to kill.

1. Corrosive Projection would become useless. 

2. Corrosive proc would become useless.

3. Heat proc would be worse than before it got armor reduction, recent addition with damage tick reduction. 

4. Frost globe would become weaker. 

5. Valkyr would become paper.

The list goes on...

 

Having just grineer lose armor would frankly make them too easy, and it would make no sense for frames to keep armor if the enemies lose their armor. 

hes talking about removing the ridiculous armor scaling, not remove armor. re-read.

[TheSixOfDiamonds]

Other option: Make enemies play by the same rules we do. Probly wouldn't work, but fixed increments that loosely line up with our mods. I'm spitballing here, based mostly on my experience with tabletop games.

[lukinu_u]

il y a 15 minutes, trndr a dit :

If armor got removed there would be more consequences than just grineer would be easier to kill.

1. Corrosive Projection would become useless. 

2. Corrosive proc would become useless.

3. Heat proc would be worse than before it got armor reduction, recent addition with damage tick reduction. 

4. Frost globe would become weaker. 

5. Valkyr would become paper.

The list goes on...

 

Having just grineer lose armor would frankly make them too easy, and it would make no sense for frames to keep armor if the enemies lose their armor. 

OP doesn't talk about removing armor, but removing armor scaling, which mean armor no longer increase with enemy level while health and shield still does.

Since health already increase with level and armor stack multiplicatively with health, it make sense for armor to longer scale, while having higher base value.
In the current situation, both armor and health increase as level grow, so let's imagine both are doubled from x level to y level :

• x has 100 health and 300 armor which is 100 health and 50% reduction, so 200EHP
• y has 200 health and 600 armor, which 200 health and 66% reduction, so 588EHP, which is not x2 but x2.94, because armor increase each health point value while health already increase.

So, with this change and higher armor value, the issues you highlighted wouldn't be true :

1.  Corrosive projection will perform the same.
2. Corrosive proc would perform the same, but might be tweaked to flat armor point reduction as armor no longer scale with level.
3. Heat proc would be the exact same scenario as Corrosive proc.
4. This wouldn't affect warframes, so Frost globe isn't affected
5. Same as Frost for Valkyr.

[Avienas]

1 hour ago, trndr said:

If armor got removed there would be more consequences than just grineer would be easier to kill.

People already pointed out that they were talking about SCALE-up. Not Base armor, because of how armor currently functions, its basically some double b.s. standard of sorts where any enemy who has armor health gets basically double to even quintuple the E-health jack up range. When honestly, it should be simple where grunts get low armor and eximus units would get high armor, Which would easily play into the notion of `elite` units would be more tankie in general.

But honestly i would rather they just scrap the existing armor system al-together for enemies, redesign the elemental system itself and have corpus exclusively get shields, infested exclusively only have health though much bulkier due to being walking monostosities of mutated flesh and grineer would get a special unique type of shield which would still be called armor, but it acts a bulky, non-regenerative shield which would completely block out taking bonus damage against `regular` health types until the armor is blown completely off, if special measures like slash, heat and toxin are not made use of.

Quote

1. Corrosive Projection would become useless. 

2. Corrosive proc would become useless.

In all honesty, Corrosive itself is basically like Chroma, its over-used like fking crazy because you have nothing that really detriments it (As in only PROTO shields or boss-type corpus get) and since pretty much EVERYTHING tends to have innate armor from robots, to particular infested units and anything from the grineer faction, its no wonder why these things as such omni-pick meta pick ups, especially when alot of D.E.`s boss designs like Eidolons are heavily based around Armor as its D.R. then having REAL emphasis on the shields, which are easily `yeet`d` by amp interactions, Despite the fact that Sentients are all about Damage resistance mitigation and so on, last i checked as thar FREAKING niche compared to other enemy factions.

If D.E. were to actually fix these health types so they are exclusive to thar own factions, then having some enemies running as many as 3 health types at once (Say Hello to Kuva Liches), then having some more build options might start being opened up such as using Magnetic, Radiation, Gas and the auras, Infested Impedence (Buff to 25~30% PLZ) and Shield disruption (Honestly should be jacked to 40~50% due to how shields operate in general). But granted in that regard they would need to update alot of ridiculous polarities such as how ice, silver-rarity mods still freaking use vazarin polarity instead of naramon.

Quote

4. Frost globe would become weaker. 

Last i checked Frost Globe uses a health pool type not a freakin armor value, Very sure you meant Rhino with his armor interaction, but honestly in the hypothetical way if they were to GUT armor in general, they could easily just massively buff health pools for tank frames or have stronger scaling on power strength for those abilities, jack up the base values and so on.

Granted, the person was talking about armor scaling to stop existing or for it to not scale as fking fast as health/shield pools do. So it would not really affect warframe builds who use STATIC values, meaning only enemies, aka the level scaling value is the only thing involved.

Quote

5. Valkyr would become paper.

Refer to the previous message since explaining it again would be rather pointless.

Quote

Having just grineer lose armor would frankly make them too easy, and it would make no sense for frames to keep armor if the enemies lose their armor. 

Again, refer to a previous point i mentioned, Armor itself plays too much as a catch all on too many enemy types, it should BE, a grineer only thing, where it acts as a secondary health pool that soaks direct damage until it finally taken enough damage to where the grineer unit would just purge the armor and be left as a squishie target just ready to get a bullet in its chest.

Plus again in the hypothetical on IF the previous person ment enemy armor should be removed, It also does not make sense in plenty of other games on the existence of player having ways to up D.R. with relative ease. So in warframe`s case it would be perfectly fine if we had armor to reduce the D.R. we could take if we are not going to get massive health buffs to compensate, Since even if armor were to be removed, enemies would still have rather absurd health pools due to how broken level scaling is for them.

But since the previous poster was talking about the removal/reduction of armor scaling in general for enemies, the point is honestly moot on `they lost the boon so we should not have the boon either mentality. If D.E. is not going to give us a real freaking reason to dive deeper into endless content with enemies that get a significant E-health increase in just 5 waves or 5 minutes, then they honestly need to slow down the scaling so they do not effectively go up by about 10~50% in terms of E-health in a very short period of time. Which is definitely extremely showable in lower level content, due to armor gives HUGE D.R. returns when it starts at lower values, yet apparently due to how armor scaling on enemies work, they basically get ridiculously out of control on gain values, especially at later levels.

just to give a very simple example:

A Grineer lancer goes from 312.6 E-health to 356.76 E-health from level 10 to 11. About a 14.1% increase

A Grineer lancer at level 100 goes from 96,386.02 E-health to 133,724.95 E-health at 110. Aka a 38.7% increase.

Granted you could argue its a 1 level increase vs a 10 level increase, where 101 grineer would have 99,717.32 E-health or 3.4% increase compared to a level 100 grineer, but thats basically a 10% in level value compared to a 1% increase in level value.

Anyway point is that E-health is a nasty mess where if you were to compare a similar unit, the Corpus Crewman, to a regular Grineer lancer at level 100, a Crewman has an E-health of 20,057.02 VS the E-health of 96,386.02 on a lancer. So yeah how is it fair that the most basic grunt units of grineer have basically 5 times the E-health of the most basic of corpus grunt units?

And before you point out corpus shields. Shields are treated as the same as a regular health pool so an E-health of only shields & health would be shields+health, meaning that a corpus crewmen at lvl 100 has 8,880.9 `flesh` health compared to a Lancer`s 14,801.5 cloned health, if you were to remove the interaction of Corpus shields vs the Ferrite armor of the grineer unit.

Edited January 24, 2020 by Avienas

[Thundervision]

Said it yesterday on the reddit sub that they need to get rid of armor being just an outdated extra bar:

 

• Replace it with layered armor segments instead, similar to Corpus Crewmen helmets, Ambulas armor plates, or FO4's Power Armor. So you can shoot armor pieces off exposing its user.

Example:

Say, this is an average Grineer soldier wearing his non-combat apparel and the only protection he has is some weak armor plates on his hips

 

And this is him now wearing heavy armor:

 

Instead of the overall armor he only has armoured parts on his body:

• Head armor (closed helmet/gas mask)
• Shoulder pads
• Arms protection
• Torso/back with, say, ballistic vest
• Legs/hips armor

Each of these segments acts separately: if you destroy only torso armor, then only this specific area will be receiving "full" damage (minus the resistance %s) with no DR or Armor penalties.

What to do with Corrosive in this case:

• Corrosive would be a local AoE effect: you shoot one armor piece and corrosion starts expanding to other pieces next to it effectively destroying armor. Like, you proc Corrosive status on the shoulder pad and then it will start affecting head and torso protection as well reducing their armor HP. Say, something like in the G.I. Joe movie.

What to do with Puncture in this case:

• Puncture should tear a new one in an enemy completely (or gradually) reducing their DR or armor in that area to 0% (or just by set % per proc). So if you shoot that area again, you're not getting armor/DR penalties, and maybe their damage weaknesses will be further increased (like, from +75% to +100%).

Edit:

As for the armor's HP scaling. It should only scale with every new "tier" (values are for the sake of example):

• Tier 1: Lv. 0-20 -- Armor's HP value per segment is 100
• Tier 2: Lv. 21-35 -- Armor's HP value per segment is 150
• Tier 3: Lv. 36-50 -- Armor's HP value per segment is 200
• Tier 4: Lv. 51-75 -- Armor's HP value per segment is 250
• Tier 5: Lv. 76-90 -- Armor's HP value per segment is 300

etc.

Edited January 24, 2020 by Thundervision

[Jadous]

12 minutes ago, Thundervision said:

Said it yesterday on the reddit sub that they need to get rid of armor being just an outdated extra bar:

 

• Replace it with layered armor segments instead, similar to Corpus Crewmen helmets, Ambulas armor plates, or FO4's Power Armor. So you can shoot armor pieces off exposing its user.

Example:

Say, this is an average Grineer soldier wearing his non-combat apparel and the only protection he has is some weak armor plates on his hips

 

And this is him now wearing heavy armor:

 

Instead of the overall armor he only has armoured parts on his body:

• Head armor (closed helmet/gas mask)
• Shoulder pads
• Arms protection
• Torso/back with, say, ballistic vest
• Legs/hips armor

Each of these segments acts separately: if you destroy only torso armor, then only this specific area will be receiving "full" damage (minus the resistance %s) with no DR or Armor penalties.

What to do with Corrosive in this case:

• Corrosive would be a local AoE effect: you shoot one armor piece and corrosion starts expanding to other pieces next to it effectively destroying armor. Like, you proc Corrosive status on the shoulder pad and then it will start affecting head and torso protection as well reducing their armor HP. Say, something like in the G.I. Joe movie.

What to do with Puncture in this case:

• Puncture should tear a new one in an enemy completely (or gradually) reducing their DR or armor in that area to 0% (or just by set % per proc). So if you shoot that area again, you're not getting armor/DR penalties, and maybe their damage weaknesses will be further increased (like, from +75% to +100%).

Edit:

As for the armor's HP scaling. It should only scale with every new "tier" (values are for the sake of example):

• Tier 1: Lv. 0-20 -- Armor's HP value per segment is 100
• Tier 2: Lv. 21-35 -- Armor's HP value per segment is 150
• Tier 3: Lv. 36-50 -- Armor's HP value per segment is 200
• Tier 4: Lv. 51-75 -- Armor's HP value per segment is 250
• Tier 5: Lv. 76-90 -- Armor's HP value per segment is 300

etc.

That's actually a really good suggestion I like it. Just buff armor hp value per segment times 10 or else the grineer 2 squishy. Our weapons are too op for those values

[Avienas]

1 hour ago, Jadous said:

That's actually a really good suggestion I like it. Just buff armor hp value per segment times 10 or else the grineer 2 squishy. Our weapons are too op for those values

Its honesty very possible for D.E. to make this setup, using a combination of how armor stripping works at the moment and how certain enemies like BURSAs, AMBULAS and freaking Lephantis have those fancy directional damage resistance/Armor-segment fiascos they tend to have. Since we all know Ambulas suddenly can take alot more damage as parts of it starts to blow up after you shoot it enough times. Which any Mesa with a peacemaker in Sortie Ambulas can vouch for that, especially when they are doing it right in front of a ambulas and staring at them while they hold the trigger.

Sadly, i think D.E. would be too lazy to redesign every enemy (that currently has armor) to have this same interaction as ambulas, which is why i just suggest they COPY-PASTA how corpus shields work, change the health type for the `corpus` shields to a different value and remove the ability for this new `armor-shields` to be able to regenerate, which would quite literally create what armor is like in a game like Wolfenstein, where you could only GAIN armor by taking sections of armor goodies and i assume what B.J. did was have the suit eat that materials to create padding material or whatever he did in the first game.

Ultimately, its just another interaction where the solution is absurdly simple, yet D.E. clearly wont fking take that simple solution which could make plenty of players happy, just like how the melee rework finally fking happening, made those who do not enjoy using greatswords/whips/polearms as much, have loads more fun again since range did not become as such a critical value anymore.

Edited January 24, 2020 by Avienas

[(PSN)Black-Cat-Jinx]

What  I say every time is that armor needs to work like shields. A fixed quantity that is more resilient than a shield but once it breaks its gone and like shields there are ways to apply direct damage to health. Blast for example. And puncture should deal reduced damage direct to health. 

Ips should be function of weapon. X% of each. So while an unshielded target would take damage from all three (no procs required) a shield target would not reciever the slash or puncture but the impact would degrade shields, where as armor doesn't get the slash, or effect of slash is reduced, or impact, the puncture deals part damage to armor, part to health, and just like shields, all incoming damage degrades armor.  By having armor be additive protection to health instead of part of health, you can choose if you want to focus on breaking armor, or going after the meat inside the shell. 

If we make all damage degrade armor, corrosive just being best at it, have ways to damage through armor, and just treat it as a shield,  most weapons become viable. 

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

That is literally the worst solution I’ve ever seen requested. Removing armor from the game would make literally every frame as fragile an Banshee, require reworks of Status effects, and a whole slew of other problems.

 

[DoomFruit]

5 hours ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

That is literally the worst solution I’ve ever seen requested. Removing armor from the game would make literally every frame as fragile an Banshee, require reworks of Status effects, and a whole slew of other problems.

I want to remove armour scaling, not armour itself. This means that a grineer unit at level 5 has the same armour as the same unit at level 500.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

2 hours ago, DoomFruit said:

I want to remove armour scaling, not armour itself. This means that a grineer unit at level 5 has the same armour as the same unit at level 500.

So you don’t want any form of challenge increase for the entire game.

[DoomFruit]

50 minutes ago, (XB1)GearsMatrix301 said:

So you don’t want any form of challenge increase for the entire game.

Where did I say that?

Enemy HP, shields (also HP) and damage already scale. Why should their additional damage resistance (which already belongs pretty much to one faction only) scale as well?

You seem to have missed the point of the thread. HP and damage output scaling is fine, damage resistance scaling is not fine - especially when it ruins the balance of inter-faction fights. The way things are now, the Grineer should have conquered the entire solar system by now because their higher level units are essentially invincible to other factions of the same level.

[OrSpeeder]

Oh... armour SCALES too, now that explains the sillyness fighting grineer.

See, suppose enemy has an armour that reduces 50% of your damage to him.

If he has 1000 hp, you need to do 2000 damage.

If he has 10.000 hp, you need to do 20.000 damage.

 

No armour scaling, but 10 times stronger enemy, need 10 times more damage.

 

But if you raise his armour too, then it gets just ridiculous, a 10 times stronger enemy might need 100 times the damage, that is just nonsense.

 

[NinjaZeku]

I've been debating making a topic exactly like this for a while, 100% agreement,
flat Armor values would make for a way more balanced experience, and not least more varied build options.

[CopperBezel]

I just wish they'd kill damage types and armor class modifiers. Viral and heat would already be competitive with corrosive (better outright on slower weapons) if corrosive didn't ignore 75% of armor and then get a 75% damage bonus as a garnish. Make damage types exclusively about the proc. 

Armor right now works the way it does because of the handful of ways we have to counter it - especially corrosive damage, since slash procs and CP don't actually care about the armor value and it could be arbitrarily higher with no effect on them. It goes up exponentially because our ability to strip it is multiplicative. And of course, player damage output is itself on an exponential curve thanks to the way modding works.

Plateauing armor seems okay to me as a solution just to maintain more or less the current balance, including the fact that only corrosive and slash are viable as damage against Grineer with heat and viral as useful procs on the side, while drawing them back from being too far ahead of the other factions at levels well past sortie 3 range. I'd rather a change that binned the existing meta and made other elements viable again.

[(PSN)mahoshonenfox]

I think armor should ablate naturally when taking damage. Even if you're not using corrosive, any attack should ablate it. Its not an energy shield that regenerates over time. It will crack and wear down over time as it keeps taking damage. Corrosive will just make it ablate faster.

[MysticDragonMage]

i think it would be cool if we had a standard method of progressing toward scaling with enemies. devs would be free to implement even more tougher enemies with each content update and we who would progress so far would not be so massively op in missions with lower levels than mot.

[(PSN)Onder6099]

🙄

[SilverRook]

On 2020-01-24 at 4:34 PM, DoomFruit said:

Why does armour even need to scale in the first place? HP, shields and damage output already scale with enemy level. Why should damage resistance also get increased with enemy level?

Because this community LOOOOOOES powercreep.

[Steel_Rook]

I agree, and have said so in the past. Give each Grineer unit its own static armour value and DO NOT scale that per level. Just scale their health to determine their EHP. Give Common units 100 armour (25% damage resistance), give Special rarer units 300 armour (50% damage resistance) and give the miniboss type enemies (like Noxes) 600 armour (~67% damage resistance). That's it, that's all the armour they'd have at ANY level. Instead, alter their health to match whatever EHP you want to achieve. Scaling health AND armour is double-dipping into ridiculous amounts of EHP, because:

EHP = HP + HP*(A/300)

where EHP is "effective health," HP is "base health" and A is "armour." Each point of armour adds an extra 1/300th of base health's worth of EHP, each point of health adds 1/300th of armour's worth of EHP. Increasing both increases EHP more than the sum of their parts. Fix armour, increase only health.

Of course, I'd also advocate using Railjack damage types in ground combat, as well. That is to say NO damage types have either bonuses or penalties against ANY of the health types. Armour would resist all damage equally and all damage would be equally good against it. With the current system, high-level Grineer basically require either anti-armour or armour-stripping weapons. Anything else you may as well not even bother. By keeping armour values low (but still in the 25%-50% range), anti-armour tools are still useful, but not NECESSARY. By removing all bonuses/penalties from health types, all weapons become viable, even if some are more efficient. Grineer can still be tougher than Cropus since that's kind of their theme by just giving them higher EHP, but they don't have to be THIS heavily reliant on just a single system to accomplish it. Warframe shouldn't break down along the lines of "Grineer and Everything Else."

 

Now... There's also the issue of modular armour. In general, I'm in agreement with it, though I'd personally reserve it to just Specials and up. That is to say, reserve it for Heavy Gunners, Bombards, Napalms and so on. Run-of-the-mill Lancers and Butchers don't need to have that much complexity. I'd also go with a Division 2 approach, where players can destroy "components" on the enemy in order to either permanently or temporarily alter their behaviour. For example, shoot a Heavy Gunner's Gorgon in order to force her into a slow reload. Shoot some kind of gas tank on a Napalm's back to permanently disable his incendiary cannon. Shoot a Bombard's rockets out of the air, causing them to explode and deal damage to enemies and potentially the Bombard himself, stunning everyone. That sort of thing. You can also have fun stuff like shooting heavy enemies in the legs to make them stumble, shooting them in the arms to degrade their aim for 5-10 seconds, etc. on top of special per-enemy weak points.

Generally speaking, I'm of the opinion that Warframe needs LESS enemy variety but with more complex Special and Miniboss enemies. In the past, I've proposed breaking factions into smaller Corps, each with maybe 2 Commons, 4 Specials and 1 Miniboss. Say a Kuva Alpha faction of Grineer could be Lancer/Butcher, Heavy Gunner/Bombard/Drakhmaster, Kuva Beta could be Trooper/Guardsman, Heavy Gunner/Napalm/Hyeka Master, Nox, Kiva Gamma could be Lancer/Ballista, Bailf/Commander/Bombard, Manic. That way, players could "just shoot" the cannon fodder Commons, then only have to deal with modular armour and special weak points on Specials and Minibosses.

[DrBorris]

On 2020-01-24 at 2:16 PM, Thundervision said:

-snip-

While this is all nice on paper, I can't help but feel it doesn't fit the pace of the game. We are killing basic units just too fast for any complex systems like this to have meaningful impact. On the other hand this could work well if we saw more mini-boss type enemies in the spawn tables, but first we need DE to give us those spawns *cough*replace Eximus with Arena enemies*cough*.

 

15 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Of course, I'd also advocate using Railjack damage types in ground combat, as well. That is to say NO damage types have either bonuses or penalties against ANY of the health types. Armour would resist all damage equally and all damage would be equally good against it.

The main problem I see with this is that not all weapons are status weapons. This would mean that the base stats and elements you put on low status weapons would be basically irrelevant. While I do think that some parts of Damage 2.0 are needlessly overcomplicated, I think that this would be an oversimplification.

In addition the Railjack status procs share the same fatal flaw as normal status effects, they don't scale with damage. By this I mean the status effects don't get stronger if the damage that inflicted the status dealt more damage. This leads to high rate of fire or pellet count being the single best way to inflict status in most situations, meaning that choosing elements and base IPS of low RoF weapons will also be basically irrelevant.

Railjack status was a step forward in some cases, but it isn't ready for prime time if you ask me.

[Steel_Rook]

58 minutes ago, DrBorris said:

While this is all nice on paper, I can't help but feel it doesn't fit the pace of the game. We are killing basic units just too fast for any complex systems like this to have meaningful impact. On the other hand this could work well if we saw more mini-boss type enemies in the spawn tables, but first we need DE to give us those spawns *cough*replace Eximus with Arena enemies*cough*.

Right, though I did specify that "I'd personally reserve it to just Specials and up" in the post you quoted. This was done specifically to address the issue you're proposing here - that Commons are killed quickly in large numbers by their very nature, and so excessive complexity in fighting them would be detrimental to the flow of combat. I agree with this. I'm of the opinion, however, that Special and Miniboss enemies are... Let's go with "should be" both tough enough and rare enough to merit special mechanics. I'd point to something as simple as Bulldozers in modern-day Payday 2. Though they used to be a "boss" type enemy, they are now just another Special with a ton of health, a high headshot multiplier and several layers of ablative armour protecting the head. They're fairly common, in that they spawn in pairs every minute or so, but they're still rare enough to bother manoeuvring around them to line up headshots or avoiding for a bit if they're in a bad spot.

This was also part of my comment on "enemy diversity." Warframe has a MASSIVE amount of different enemies with their own weapons and behaviour, but the vast majority of them are interchangeable, because they're fought the same way. Control/facetank them and out-trade them for damage. I feel Warframe absolutely DOES have room enough for ridiculous bullet sponge enemies like what 100+ Bombards, Heavy Gunners and Noxes represent... As long as those enemies don't show up in large numbers and offer some "clever" way to defeat them. Shoot their guns, shoot their backpacks, shoot their legs and circle around behind for a weak point, etc. "Bullet sponges" are bad only when the only way to fight them is to dump damage into them over a long period of time. A bullet sponge with weakpoints that the player can exploit, on the other hand, is I feel a decent design. Toughness means the unit can survive long enough for "tricks" to be worth investing time in, but it's not invulnerable so it can still be brute-forced if you so choose.

Basically, I feel Warframe can use a L4D-style distinction between dirt-simple Commons, rare but complex Specials and the occasional Miniboss.

 

1 hour ago, DrBorris said:

The main problem I see with this is that not all weapons are status weapons. This would mean that the base stats and elements you put on low status weapons would be basically irrelevant. While I do think that some parts of Damage 2.0 are needlessly overcomplicated, I think that this would be an oversimplification.

I disagree. It IS a significant simplification, this is true, but I personally don't find much value in "damage types," myself. I know they've been a "thing" in RPGs for as long as I remember, dating as far back as D&D zombies needing to be cut up, skeletons needing to be bashed to pieces, etc. (and probably even earlier), but... Honestly, I don't miss those systems when they're gone. I've played quite a few modern games which all but entirely eschew damage types or heavily abstract them. I could bring up Destiny, Payday and the like, but my personal favourite example is The Surge. The original game split damage into thrusting, crush, slash and a generic "elemental" with different splits between different weapons. I don't think anyone ever figured out what the difference was, other than damage resistance spread on enemies that the player couldn't see anyway. The Surge 2 doesn't do this. It has just a single "damage" stat for all physical damage. It does no feature Fire, Toxic and Nano damage types, but those are still just "damage" with a status effect - different approaches to extra damage, if I recall. Honestly, I tend to prefer that, because it means I can pick my weapons based on fighting style, rather than based on statistics.

The above is a roundabout way of saying that when damage types are absent from a game, I personally tend to not notice or mind too much. I get why they exist in RPGs - it adds a bit of verisimilitude by specialising certain weapons against certain enemies. However, I feel that the small but of RP really isn't worth the large amount of hassle trying to match the right weapon to the right enemy in what amounts to an optimisation problem with a discrete solution set. I don't feel that different damage types dealing different amounts of damage to different enemies within the same faction adds much to the experience of Warframe combat, or indeed to the experience of making builds. For me personally, it's been nothing more than a restriction determining what combo of elemental effects I use, further determined by what Primed Elemental Damage mod is available to a given weapon type.

To make a long story short, I wouldn't be at all upset if our Warframe weapons start dealing "just damage" with Status Effect handled entirely separately. I don't feel that the complexity of Damage 2.0 is worth the hassle and balance issues and I feel that Railjack's Damage 3.0? system is going in the right direction.

 

1 hour ago, DrBorris said:

In addition the Railjack status procs share the same fatal flaw as normal status effects, they don't scale with damage. By this I mean the status effects don't get stronger if the damage that inflicted the status dealt more damage. This leads to high rate of fire or pellet count being the single best way to inflict status in most situations, meaning that choosing elements and base IPS of low RoF weapons will also be basically irrelevant.

Well, Status Effects are a bit off-topic so I didn't want to get into them too in-depth, but I do agree. I remain of the opinion that we need to get rid of the "Status Chance" stat entirely and replace it with a "Status Magnitude" stat, instead. That is to say, all weapons would deal Status on every pellet and every shot, but the effectiveness of this Status would vary depending on their Status Magnitude. Damage-dealing status effects would deal a larger percentage of damage with a higher magnitude, control status effects would gain a longer duration with higher magnitude and debuff status effects would increase the strength of each individual stack with higher magnitude. This would almost entirely un-hook a weapon's status potential from its damage or rate of fire. You could have really slow-firing weapons which are still good for stripping armour if they shred large chunks per shot. You could have fast-firing "critguns" which are still not good for status due to their low magnitude, as well.

I have a long and storied dislike for the way Warframe handles status in pretty much all regards, but didn't want to go into it here for fear of being disruptive 🙂