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

[CopperBezel]

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

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 🙂

Which is, of course, different for every element, which would be fine if it mean that different elements built differently were equally viable, but neither of those things is the case, and in reality most status effects are one and done and require building for status only on very slow weapons, while Corrosive alone incentivizes stacking up a sheer number of procs no matter what percentage of your fire or damage they represent, and slash (and toxin) incentivizes building to maximize the amount of damage that lands on slash procs.

But yeah, damage types are just a waste of complexity that somehow end up providing negative depth. In practice, in higher level stuff, they really only mean that Grineer don't take damage from the hit itself with slash damage and take like seven times the damage with corrosive, which also comes with the chance of armor strip. Heat and viral would be equally viable damage types with corrosive if not for corrosive ignoring 75% of armor. It's whole spreadsheets of numbers to provide one right answer you never have to think about again. 

Screw Railjack damage types, though. Take the regular Warframe ones and remove damage type vulnerability / resistance, and combined elements if you want to be crazy with it. The actual status effects for Railjack damage are a mismatched mess, sharing only the quality of being terrible. Space Slash is the worst, and in fact the worst status effect in the game, with its multiplicative damage vulnerability like old Condition Overload.

Edit: Incidentally, I'd have no issue with the possibility of more enemies like Nox that require shooting a weak point, but when I think bullet sponges with weak points, I think Thumpers, and we definitely do not need more of those. First because CC-immune enemies are just a selective nerf against the frames that are honestly the more dynamic to play, second because the amount of damage required just becomes insane and slows a game that's supposed to be kinetic and frantic into a dead slog.

Edited January 27, 2020 by CopperBezel

[Zalabim]

13 hours 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.

That's not how railjack damage types currently work. Railjack damage types have all the same interactions as their ground-based equivalents.

[CopperBezel]

The stated intent and things was that these were wholly new damage types and that existing health types have no vulnerabilities or resistances to them, so that the only difference is in the status effects. If that's not the case, then yay for more widespread RJ misinformation. X /

[Benour]

Yeah cant wait when they turn this kindergarted difficulty game to ven bigger joke so some casuals can have "more fun".

Literally armor is what gives atleast SOME challenge in this game (and enemy dmg scaling ofc). Yeah cant wait to faceroll trough everything with even less resistance.

Only bads and newbies are whining about armor scaling being issue, the big bois found many ways to make armor scaling obsolete years and years ago.

[EvilChaosKnight]

24 minutes ago, Benour said:

Yeah cant wait when they turn this kindergarted difficulty game to ven bigger joke so some casuals can have "more fun".

Literally armor is what gives atleast SOME challenge in this game (and enemy dmg scaling ofc). Yeah cant wait to faceroll trough everything with even less resistance.

Only bads and newbies are whining about armor scaling being issue, the big bois found many ways to make armor scaling obsolete years and years ago.

Congratulations. You played yourself.
So, if armor scaling can be made obsolete easily, what's the point of having it the way we do?

PS: "Big bois" lol. Seriously. Are you 12?

[CopperBezel]

14 minutes ago, EvilChaosKnight said:

So, if armor scaling can be made obsolete easily, what's the point of having it the way we do?

He can't brag about how much e-health his slash/viral builds can cut through if doing the same thing has exactly the same effect, but the numbers that aren't in the UI but he's miscalculating from the formulae on the wiki are smaller. It's a slash brag nerf.

[Benour]

19 minutes ago, EvilChaosKnight said:

Congratulations. You played yourself.
So, if armor scaling can be made obsolete easily, what's the point of having it the way we do?

PS: "Big bois" lol. Seriously. Are you 12?

Yeah whats the point of removing armor scaling as it is now, when its issue just for bads and clueless individuals.

And more like im 12 inches 👍

[Benour]

3 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

He can't brag about how much e-health his slash/viral builds can cut through if doing the same thing has exactly the same effect, but the numbers that aren't in the UI but he's miscalculating from the formulae on the wiki are smaller. It's a slash brag nerf.

Its Gas now so call me GasBro if you want to know more, you should go back and read my comments on that braindead khora thread you were whiteknighting, there is bunch of cool info you dont have to pay for.

Actually its Gas/Slash with Bane now, but thats just for very advanced players, so nothing to see here for you "basebro". 

Armor is issue for baddies and newbies im sorry... 😿

[EvilChaosKnight]

27 minutes ago, Benour said:

Yeah whats the point of removing armor scaling as it is now, when its issue just for bads and clueless individuals.

Just a small list of about a dozen points you can find on the first page. From faction balance to promotion of powercreep to EHP graphs making no sense. Nothing major at all.

28 minutes ago, Benour said:

And more like im 12 inches

I'm deeply sorry about your condition.

28 minutes ago, Benour said:

Armor is issue for baddies and newbies im sorry

Or maybe, just maybe armor scaling is just a bad unfun mechanic which narrows down build and equipment variety to the point of being detrimental to overall feel of the game while also further highlighting the problem of having "good" (useful) and "bad" (trash) types of damage. And said problem eventually boiled for long enough that DE could no longer ignore its existence, so they started taking baby steps towards fixing it at last.
I know it's heresy for you to even consider that the current bullet-sponge spawning, exponential EHP growing, 90%+ DR enemy providing system is flawed. But have you ever considered that it actually is? Just some food for thoughts.

[Redfeather75]

I am torn about workarounds becoming necessary instead of optimal. In some cases it's good, but in general it shouldn't be the norm. The s-curve armour thing shouldn't be applied to everything.

[Benour]

15 minutes ago, EvilChaosKnight said:

Just a small list of about a dozen points you can find on the first page. From faction balance to promotion of powercreep to EHP graphs making no sense. Nothing major at all.

I'm deeply sorry about your condition.

Or maybe, just maybe armor scaling is just a bad unfun mechanic which narrows down build and equipment variety to the point of being detrimental to overall feel of the game while also further highlighting the problem of having "good" (useful) and "bad" (trash) types of damage. And said problem eventually boiled for long enough that DE could no longer ignore its existence, so they started taking baby steps towards fixing it at last.
I know it's heresy for you to even consider that the current bullet-sponge spawning, exponential EHP growing, 90%+ DR enemy providing system is flawed. But have you ever considered that it actually is? Just some food for thoughts.

Or maybe just maybe armor scaling is what makes the fun for ppl, so they have to build around it and think about stuff if they want to go tryhard. Some ppl actually like some "challenge" in this game (also you can just you know slap 4x CP and BOOM no armor issues, such magic i know and very hard to find out for many individuals it seems, so PSSSSSH dont tell anybody). 😼

Yeah we are just few the majority of potatoes wants to "fix armor scaling" yeah there is nothing to fix imo you just want easymode cause you are clueless about modding and fetures this game is giving you. Also might be cause i spend more time, you know, actually playing the game than being forum warrior. 

We will see this game cant get easier anymore for me anyway and if i tryhard for 3h+ in mission with less armor on enemies, well then be it. I will be so happy for you guys (and you will come to forums cry about armor being still to much anyway or enemy doing to much dmg or similar "cool idea").   

So yeah enjoy your EASYMODE.

 

[CopperBezel]

You just can't help yourself, can you. "Armor is the only thing that makes the game difficult - now here are my top eight ways of getting around ever thinking about it." X ]

1 hour ago, Benour said:

And more like im 12 inches 👍

I can't, I just can't. Are you entirely certain you're not a joke? It's only funny if you're real. Oh my god.

26 minutes ago, Redfeather75 said:

I am torn about workarounds becoming necessary instead of optimal. In some cases it's good, but in general it shouldn't be the norm. The s-curve armour thing shouldn't be applied to everything.

I don't think the S-curve would necessarily be an ugly workaround by itself, like if it was health or something we were talking about. Armor does have some funky effects, though, that a lot of things in the game just aren't built around. Like, there are weird effects from the disparity between the health and effective health of an enemy even comparing two enemies whose effective health values are the same. For instance, all of those terrible syndicate augments that create an explosion based on enemy health, or warframe abilities that take something based on the target's health value etc. It's weird for those things to just stop working around Grineer, and is just this weird reminder that a lot of elements hanging around in this game were designed before these huge armor values were a thing.

And I mean, I'm not talking about the high-level armor values that the asymptotic scaling is about, that slash is useful against, etc., but even the comparatively low armor values you see at level 100 or something. Obviously, the gameplay wouldn't make sense without them, but they're fundamentally a very weird arrangement. So in that sense I agree with the OP that flat armor and much more dramatically scaling health would have made more sense. (And even then, it wouldn't be scaled to the same levels of e-health, either. There's no stacking % health strip after all. The actual e-health values aren't any more a gauge of how difficult something is to kill than their health without considering armor is.) 

It'd also mean that a given damage value would be a lot easier to pin down to meaning a specific thing, which would help quite a lot for making everything else easier to design without breaking.

[Loza03]

On 2020-01-24 at 5:01 PM, 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. 

Those would be the immediate consequences, at least taken in isolation.

However, observing from the bigger picture, this would also enable DE to make more informed balancing decisions. A tighter band of player and enemy EHP allows them to more accurately balance everything, because right now, the average time to kill for players and enemies is completely out of proportion with the extremes. This could in theory be done pretty much alongside armour changes.

[Redfeather75]

35 minutes ago, CopperBezel said:

I don't think the S-curve would necessarily be an ugly workaround by itself...

Sorry was not talking about that.

Higher level armour = corrosive projection and/or specific status builds necessary, not optimal because they are workarounds to a scaling problem.

S curve is what was planned to remove those things being mandatory.

I don't really want s curve for all armours.

Because mandatory corrosive projection and/or specific status build for SOME content is a good thing.

Edited January 27, 2020 by Redfeather75

[Steel_Rook]

19 hours ago, Redfeather75 said:

Because mandatory corrosive projection and/or specific status build for SOME content is a good thing.

Why, though? That's really not something you can claim without demonstrating it. Because from where I'm standing, mandatory builds is never a good thing. It reduces build diversity, it funnels people into builds they might not enjoy and it represents a needless newbie trap. "Mandatory Corrosive Projection" is always a problem, as far as I'm concerned. I'd go as far as to say that mods like Corrosive Projection are not solutions but rather symptoms of unaddressed fundamental balance issues.

 

On 2020-01-27 at 4:31 AM, CopperBezel said:

But yeah, damage types are just a waste of complexity that somehow end up providing negative depth. In practice, in higher level stuff, they really only mean that Grineer don't take damage from the hit itself with slash damage and take like seven times the damage with corrosive, which also comes with the chance of armor strip. Heat and viral would be equally viable damage types with corrosive if not for corrosive ignoring 75% of armor. It's whole spreadsheets of numbers to provide one right answer you never have to think about again. 

And then there's also Slash, yes. I personally consider Slash itself to be equally a symptom of bad balance. I don't know the full history if it, but it feels like someone made Slash procs deal True damage rather than Slash because "it's internal bleeding, it's not going to be resisted by armour." This was done prior to armour being the be-all end-all of enemy EHP, so naturally damage types which ignore or reduce it will be the most popular. This is what I mean when I say "optimisation problem." Damage type selection right now is a problem with solutions arrived at via basic optimisation and have no real room for player preference. In fact, building for preference like I used to just gives you overall weaker builds. I HAVE noticed that more than just Corrosive works - Viral and Radiation are also fairly potent depending on the specific type of Grineer. But even then, your damage type is far more often determined by what you're fighting and what Primed damage mod is available for the weapon you're using. It's complexity for the sake of complexity, which fails to add meaningful depth.

 

On 2020-01-27 at 4:31 AM, CopperBezel said:

Which is, of course, different for every element, which would be fine if it mean that different elements built differently were equally viable, but neither of those things is the case, and in reality most status effects are one and done and require building for status only on very slow weapons, while Corrosive alone incentivizes stacking up a sheer number of procs no matter what percentage of your fire or damage they represent, and slash (and toxin) incentivizes building to maximize the amount of damage that lands on slash procs.

Right, but this is where fixed armour values work in our favour, though. If all enemies have the same armour value regardless of level, then Corrosive could remove armour by flat amounts instead of percentages. A heavy, slow-firing weapon built for status could strip, say, 100-200 around per shot, stripping the armour of Commons in one shot but needing 2-3 to strip a Heavy Gunner. Fast-firing weapons built for Status could similarly strip, say, 5-10. At for instance 15 RPS, that's still 75-150 armour stripped per second. This does two things. It "flattens" the armour stipping curve where you don't get the most benefit in the first few "stacks." It also means that weapons can more consistently strip enemy armour fully, thus giving players a bit more visual feedback. Right now, it's very hard to tell if Corrosive is doing anything up until the enemy's health bar turns from yellow to red, and that rarely happens against high-level Grineer right now. Not unless you abuse the radical formula for back-calculating per-pellet status chance.

With the generally lower damage resistance values I proposed (25% for Commons, 50% for Specials, 67% for Minibosses, at ALL levels), armour stripping itself becomes less important. It's still useful, but about as useful as shield stripping - it's nice to have, but you aren't completely SOL without it. And again, we're talking about most Grineer having 100 armour, some having 300 and very rarely any having 600. If enemy armour is standard, then that allows Corrosive to be standardised as well.

 

On 2020-01-27 at 4:31 AM, CopperBezel said:

Edit: Incidentally, I'd have no issue with the possibility of more enemies like Nox that require shooting a weak point, but when I think bullet sponges with weak points, I think Thumpers, and we definitely do not need more of those. First because CC-immune enemies are just a selective nerf against the frames that are honestly the more dynamic to play, second because the amount of damage required just becomes insane and slows a game that's supposed to be kinetic and frantic into a dead slog.

I wouldn't think Thumpers, myself. Thumpers are a bad example for the reasons you stated - they're status-immune. They're also a bad example because they're not well-designed. You have an enemy with a weak point which can often only be accessed when it's engaging someone other than you, it's a weak point which moves a lot on an enemy which has a propensity for running and jumping and is generally incredibly fast. When I envision "bullet sponge" enemies, I envision something closer to the existing ones like Bombards and Napalms. They move slowly, they don't rotate a lot and their weak points are large relative to their total size. Granted, we'll probably need either tweaks to their visual models or brand new models, but that's doable.

Imagine a Napalm with a gas tank the size of a Hellion's backpack. I'm sure you've seen it, but those backpacks can be shot from the front quite easily because they tower over the Hellion's head. That's pretty much what The Division does, in fact, with Cleaners wearing their flamethrower tanks slanted on their backs so they can be seen from the front just over their left shoulder. Or have a Heavy Gunner who wears her spare magazines on her thighs, in those giant fanny packs most Grineer have. Shoot those, force her to reload or cause them to explode or cause them to stagger her. DE have a bad habit of creating tough enemies with pinpoint weak points who also move around constantly and thus make for a frustrating experience fighting them - this is true. However, that's a flaw with their implementation, not necessarily the core design.

And while we're on the subject - I feel ALL Grineer should have a weakpoint for headshot damage on their back. It's silly that flanking an enemy and attacking them from behind is easily the worst approach because their giant Terminator Armour humps block their heads from behind. Again, Destiny 2 fixes this by giving the Kabal glowing vents on the back which take headshot damage, too.

Edited January 28, 2020 by Steel_Rook

[Benour]

I still dont see, what this, in my opinion completely useless change will bring?

You still gonna use 4xCP (3CP 1CD) for endurance and on low lvl enemies armor doesnt matter (i like the mobs in RJ being somehow beefy, but yeah might be i can actually mod my stuff propertly 4Head). So what this change to armor will bring? Can somebody explain? Also i dont see single issue with enemies scaling in armor as they are higher and higher level, every single RPG i played the higher lvl enemies were, higher was their armor/HP/dmg. Literally fundamental feature for every RPG.

This change will bring literally nothing except even less resistance for endurance runners (if they decide to go vs Grineers/Corrupted and as i said they dont care about armor at all, not even solo, and even after this change you gonna need some source of armor stripping anyway, so again nothing changed).

So pwetty pwease someone explain.

Oh and im all up for enemies with weakspots and stuff,some more Nox alike units would be cool, something that can slow down nuker frames would be nice to have. Or something that would make CC frames more viable by giving you more/better time for destroying such weakspots etc. THAT i would like to see not this armor change for toddlers 😹

Edited January 28, 2020 by Benour

[Tyreaus]

On 2020-01-24 at 2:55 PM, (PS4)Black-Cat-Jinx said:

What  I say every time is that armor needs to work like shields

Have said similar before:

Health - Armour - Shields - Toughness

-Health and Shields work the same as usual.
-Armour (basically "overhealth", so can be regenerated with Tenno) has self-damage reduction based on its current value, but doesn't recharge, and any weapon damage will degrade it
-Toughness replaces what armour does now and is just the measure of innate damage resistance (a multiplier applied to all EHP values), which already exists throughout Warframe (Various abilities, Noxes, Eximus units...), but—importantly—doesn't scale.

Then a multitude of other changes can get introduced to work with that change. Various statuses can then get built around bypassing armour and shields or applying armour / shield bypass procs in an area. Others (e.g. Puncture) decrease Toughness, eventually turning it into a damage buff rather than a resistance. Some damage types may bypass armour's damage resistance (e.g. reducing the DR effect by a flat %, instead of ignoring a % of the armour—25% armour =/= 25% armour DR), but not the armour itself. Armour damage reduction can be capped, since it is its own EHP class and the added values wouldn't just be fluff. So on and so forth, however people / DE likes.

The end result nevertheless being that "one must mod for armour" stops being a thing and status immunity isn't necessarily quite so egregious.

[Cpl_Facehugger]

 

5 hours ago, Benour said:

So pwetty pwease someone explain.

Okay. The beauty of this solution is that you no longer *have* to go with 4xCP or a similar build. You can still, but with no armor scaling it's possible to kill effectively without focusing your entire build on armor removal/mitigation. Suddenly all those lesser used elements like heat, electricity, blast, etc can compete better, since armor scaling is no longer the giant infested elephant in the room. If armor no longer scales, armor stripping turns from "absolute must have" to "nice to have", which means all the other elements can compete better, since they also provide things that are nice to have, like viral's proc or blast's CC utility.

The reason why corrosive is considered so good is purely because the armor scales into the stratosphere, resulting in things like grineer officers in railjack having more ehp than eidolon gauntalysts. If armor no longer scales, corrosive still has a niche since it reduces TTK by lopping off whatever percent of DR the enemy's base armor provides, but it's no longer the obvious best in slot.

 

 

Edited January 28, 2020 by Cpl_Facehugger

[CopperBezel]

And you wouldn't even have to bother with armor-strip-immune bosses, although ... has anyone noticed that this is already pointless? Armor strip immunity just means that eHP is the only HP you actually have to cut through. It always comes with status immunity to kill slash, too. So it's only different from a simply immense health pool with no armor in that it actually has less gameplay complexity.

But yeah, flat armor scaling and massive nerfs corrosive and slash would be the way to go. I still say damage type vulnerabilities have to go completely, though, not just for corrosive. (You could get the latter effect already by simply replacing all Grineer ferrite armor with alloy. Where the damage vulnerability and the status are split into two elements (radiation and corrosive for alloy armor) they're about equally viable.)

Edited January 28, 2020 by CopperBezel

[Benour]

16 hours ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

 

Okay. The beauty of this solution is that you no longer *have* to go with 4xCP or a similar build. You can still, but with no armor scaling it's possible to kill effectively without focusing your entire build on armor removal/mitigation. Suddenly all those lesser used elements like heat, electricity, blast, etc can compete better, since armor scaling is no longer the giant infested elephant in the room. If armor no longer scales, armor stripping turns from "absolute must have" to "nice to have", which means all the other elements can compete better, since they also provide things that are nice to have, like viral's proc or blast's CC utility.

The reason why corrosive is considered so good is purely because the armor scales into the stratosphere, resulting in things like grineer officers in railjack having more ehp than eidolon gauntalysts. If armor no longer scales, corrosive still has a niche since it reduces TTK by lopping off whatever percent of DR the enemy's base armor provides, but it's no longer the obvious best in slot.

 

 

Yeah but they also showed this graph and the armor/curve flattening is not starting at lvl 1. They not going to lower armor on lets say lvl 50 enemies the curve flattening starts at levels far beyond sortie level. So what does that solve (yeah i get your point that some elements MIGHT be viable and to be honest im still gonna use corrosive for armor strip or viral/bleed to bypass armor or use gas sniper/melee with bane, literally nothing changes for me, i dont care about blast - i hate blast, radiation is meh - except bosses and index, and you not going to use magnetic on grineers anyway). So lets say the curve flattening starts at level 300+ and starts slowly and slowly flatten up to lets say lvl 5000 when the curve become perfectly flat (no armor increase past that level).

So tell me again what does this excatly solve anything, when the low lvl mobs will be same armor and the curve flattening starts to "kick in" at very high level anyway.

IF they start flettening this armor curve on lets say lvl 50+ yeah that would "solve" this "issue" you guys having (aka they will make grineers easier to kill which i dont like at all). 

You still gonna run 4xCP if you want to be effective at killing (ok maybe 3x CP would be enough, so you have ONE spare slot for different aura mod, WOHOOOOO literally couldnt care less about that) you still gonna need to "work around" armor at high level solo its just gonna be less corrosive procs to strip armor completely (yeah my kuva brakk, pox, mara detron and few others gonna be so happy about this change).

[Cpl_Facehugger]

7 hours ago, Benour said:

Yeah but they also showed this graph and the armor/curve flattening is not starting at lvl 1.

 

The OP's suggestion is to get rid of armor scaling entirely, not DE's current idea of flattening the curve at level ~70 or so. DE's current plan is simply a bandaid over a gaping chest wound, and while it will make things a little better it still won't actually fix the underlying issue.

See, the reason why DE needs to just axe armor scaling entirely is because it's impossible to balance around. If armor scales up alongside health, then armored enemies scale up exponentially, which means that the only way to kill them is either removing (corrosive) or ignoring (slash procs) the armor, which leads to all builds looking identical. What we've got here is three broad factions. Two of the three scale in a vaguely similar fashion to players - linearly - while the third scales up exponentially with every level. Once armor scaling is dead, DE would be able to take a look at balancing player and enemy damage since they won't have one whole faction who is exponentially more durable than the other two.

Armor scaling is also at the root of why certain frames are generally MVPs in the current meta and certain frames are considered completely worthless. It's telling that most frame abilities that are worthwhile for damage are either exalted weapons that get to benefit from weapon and frame mods, ignore armor entirely (ie equinox slash proc), or scale upwards so powerfully that they deal millions of damage (ie nidus tentacles w/lots of stacks, banshee sonar, chroma, etc.)

DE knows that armor is a problem, which is why with damage 2.0 they made it so only grineer and some heavy corpus/bosses have armor whereas in damage 1.0 everyone had armor. Seriously, I remember damage 1.0. It was even more horrible than what we have now. You had piercing damage and serrated blade (honorable mention to Acrid which had stacking DoT poison that ignored armor too) being the only useful damage types, because those two ignored armor and every enemy in the game at T4 void levels had enough armor to completely ignore all other attacks, even ones they were "supposed" to be vulnerable to, like infested with fire or normal blades.

The trouble with the armor scaling meta is that it effectively kills build diversity since the only way to effectively kill armored enemies above level ~70 (with said enemies belonging to the most prolific faction in the game) or so is with armor mitigation, which means... Corrosive, slash, CP, or a handful of frame powers. Preventing the armor from scaling up means that other damage types and frame powers get more useful in comparison, and it means that players are no longer locked into corrosive damage.

DE can't even nerf corrosive damage alone because the core issue is that grineer enemies are so durable that you need to ruthlessly optimize for damage to kill them in a timely manner, so the solution needs to be the removal of armor scaling beforehand, because there's no other way to actually balance player damage without it.

Remember, enemy health and damage scales up as it stands, armor scaling just increases enemy durability exponentially. Problem is that the playerbase needs to kill armored and unarmored enemies both, sometimes even in the same mission.

[6-BristleBack-9]

On 2020-01-24 at 7:34 PM, DoomFruit said:

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.

if AI would be better, i could also say it's not necessary.

i wished if DE decides to do something like this ⬇️

regular crits : ignores small percentage of armor

orange crits : ignores more of armor

red crits : ignores huge amount/all armor mobs have (cuz hitting with red crits should hurt)

that way even weapons like soma prime can actually become decent even high levels. Can't say armors are unnecesary as it is, because game needs some difficulty and we have to rely on something like dmg reduction instead of better AI. 

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

See, the reason why DE needs to just axe armor scaling entirely is because it's impossible to balance around. If armor scales up alongside health, then armored enemies scale up exponentially, which means that the only way to kill them is either removing (corrosive) or ignoring (slash procs) the armor, which leads to all builds looking identical. What we've got here is three broad factions. Two of the three scale in a vaguely similar fashion to players - linearly - while the third scales up exponentially with every level. Once armor scaling is dead, DE would be able to take a look at balancing player and enemy damage since they won't have one whole faction who is exponentially more durable than the other two.

This is a good summary. Scaling armour with enemy level does more than just give enemies more EHP. It also progressively incentivises the use of anti-armour tools, to the point of making them mandatory. Sure, fighting high-level Grineer without Corrosive Projection, Corrosive damage or Slash procs isn't impossible, but the difference in TTK is so significant as to make that decision for players. This reduces build variety, creates a fairly stale "meta" and leads to generally unsatisfying which ends up consisting of trading DPS with bullet sponge enemies more or less all of the time.

As far as I'm concerned, fighting Grineer without a dedicated anti-armour build should still be functional and viable, even if it's not AS effective as bringing a more specialised build. Giving Grineer fixed armour values which don't scale per level does this. That way damage resistance can be kept low allowing players with non-anti-armour weapons to compete while enemies can still be made tanky by giving them more health or implementing some breakaway segmented armour design.

[Educated_Beast]

I like the idea of keeping a flat damage reduction, and constant armor for units.  However, I don't think armor should be limited to grineer.  

The Hi-Tech corpus would certainly be intelligent enough to see the advantages in using armor.  Thier armor could be lightweight and of a different class than grineer (less DR because suppliment with shields).  Thier base speed could increase as well. 

Grineer would have heavy armor, slower, and of a different type material because I like the elemental interactions. I'd like to see more bonus towards certain elements to give bonus to players who set up different build configurations for different factions.  

Infested could also have armor in certain body part locations.  Like wearing shoulder plates, helmets and such.  Boost thier health significantly to balance.  

But all of this would require rework to mods and base elemental damage.  While it may make for a fun user experience, I can't see why DE would pay for development of something they cannot monetize.  I'm not saying they are a bad greedy company, I'm saying everyone has to eat to live.  I do not see why they would significantly change thier game.  

[Benour]

15 hours ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

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Yeah what you wrote makes sense, im just being VERY sceptical about DE balancing stuff. And as i said we have this armor scaling in game for many many years and everybody got used to it, yes you need specific or more like specialised builds (its no rocket science to mod/"exploit" against armor) but me/we got so used to it its nonfactor really and i kinda like that you have to mod against armor if you want to go tryhard.

Also i agree with many frames being useless when armor scaling kicks in (granted you can survive long enough to "feel" it). Perfect example is Atlas, this guy can do lots of dmg with his Landslide and stat stick, but he falls off in 2h+ kuva survival so hard its unbelieveable, even with using his 3 + arcane avenger this guy just cant punch trough enemy armor and it takes forever to kill eximus (without any armor strip or outside buff or other feature). Cause all he got is RAW damage with pathetic 5% status, literally cant scale for shizzle, same for Baruuk 4, Valkyr 4 (well she can proc slash so thats atleast something) and many others.

I just hope DE will think this inside out before making changes to armor scaling.