@DE changes that could help shield frames scale better and not be useless

[(XBOX)Duke DEFCON]

5 minutes ago, (PS4)thegarada said:

Would help frames like Mag and Banshee, as an example. They really struggle in post level 100 territory. Honestly, I have no idea how this will impact Harrow and Hildryn. Could they become unkillable? Is it so much different than Inaros with Umbras? Dunno for sure. I think Inaros with Umbras is more survivable than any Hildryn setup.

You need a Raksa kubrow my friend. It heals your shield constantly. Works for Harrow too but I think Hildryn gets most benefit from it. You can use Haven and Aegis Storm perpetually, especially with max efficiency, and take more hits with dual Arcane Aegis or Barrier. Then be sure to keep your duration high on Hildryn so that your Raksa benefits in return from super fast shield regen because of Haven. Have to pay attention to your Raksa, if it goes down, you're not far behind. Also, I have a full compliment of Perrin Sequence weapons for periodic full shield heal.

Finally, I rarely use balefire. It's true that I'm flying in Aegis Storm 99% of the time, so how do I do kill anything? My operator. I literally park my hildryn over a defense target and use my operator to hack, or kill enemies. I will periodically pop into my frame merely to relocate it, and pop out to keep fighting as needed. My operator has Magus Glitch so if he dies, I can immediately pop out again, and my frame loses nothing. It also has [magus repair] to constantly heal my team while in void mode. Here is the real trick... use Zenerik! Zenerik has an ability to pull enemies closer, which I do on purpose to bring them into Hildryns Aegis Storm - which forces them to periodically drop energy orbs on my operator keeping them in void mode perpetually... this means I'm healing my team, and my frame perpetually also. This, while also having the skill that hurts anything around me while in void mode, ensures I will ultimately kill everything. Though, my goal is CC and heals, not DPS. If I need to though, my Balefire can pack a good punch.

Zenerik also allows me to do Energizing Dash. While it doesn't help my frame, it is helpful to others in the party.

Constant health, shields, AND energy healing. Add the Kubrow mod called Mecha Pulse, you can even improve the armor of whoever kills the marked target.

[(XBOX)Duke DEFCON]

Oh, and I use a special amp that has the Klamora Prism, Plaga Brace and Phahd Scaffold. I use the primary on things like Eidolons and Phahd has crazy range, and can hit multiple targets from across a map! The secondary attack is quite powerful, and allows you to pop in and out of void mode which confuses enemies, and keeps them from attacking your frame while at the same time getting some good solid hits in.

To my knowledge, Nekros, Excalibur and Hildryn are the only frames that are worth a damn using this "park and fight" strategy.

Example: You can park your Hildryn over a node during an interception mission to keep enemies from hacking it. Unless they're nullifiers, there is nothing they can do to bring your Hildryn down. Then take your operator to another node and capture it. You can then camp one node and toss Phahd orbs at the 2 undefended stations to lock them down. If you have a party, you can lob orbs in the direction of teammates you see are struggling and the orbs will go way across the map, then suddenly change course and hit a few enemies. Allows you to effectively hold 2 positions and lock down others. Virtuous Null arcane allows you to keep fire up CONSTANTLY.

Also! Phahd is very effective at killing Arbitration Drones.

Edited February 6, 2020 by (XB1)Taz Deduction

[Birdframe_Prime]

2 hours ago, (PS4)thegarada said:

Armor stacking does not have diminished returns. This is huge misconception.

Don't mind Benour. The opinions are valid, but they don't have all the details and so tend to phrase things wrong.

To be fair, though, the argument you're making for not 'stacking armour' is actually just basic practicality over the discussion of actual DR (or the original post's discussion of making Shields more viable than they are currently).

Yes, modding for other things is often more beneficial, but when the overall point to consider is that - aside from a few units that will debuff you or stun you - all the enemy ever does is damage so you will almost always have to put on at least one or two mods for survivability. So having the stats for EHP actually be less disparate, allowing a player to put on two EHP mods instead that work to make the best of both Shields and Health is definitely something we could do with. That and having shields as a specific EHP contributor be almost entirely not worth modding for just sounds wrong.

Also...

2 hours ago, (PS4)thegarada said:

If there is a mod that increases armor by 150-200%, that stacks with Umbra fiber,

Health Conversion does. That stacks up to 1350 Armour on you (which is like putting an extra 150% Armour on Valkyr Prime, and better than that on any other frame, because it's numbers-based not percentage based) and you only lose the Armour if you take health damage, not shield damage. On frames that can generate Health Orbs, like Nezha and Nekros, that's actually pretty powerful.

Still, the discussion here isn't really about Armour, that came up basically because of the argument 'Percentage Damage Reduction is more consistent and better for EHP than Armour Damage Reduction' with the modifier that combining percentage DR with armour DR is even better overall. That part, at least, you've noted with the combination of Umbral mods and Adaptation.

Thinking of that, though, what would you say if I told you that when I was doing the actual maths on damage reduction to EHP, using the Wiki and all other methods of counting it, it brought me to the conclusion that changing Steel Fibre to instead be a flat '60% Damage Reduction' mod would make all frames across the board tankier? With the fun addition that if Umbral Fibre started at 60% and then stacked to 70% and 80% with the Set Bonus, that would give every frame, every single one, better EHP than leaving it as an Armour mod.

It's kind of a wild thought, but a flat percentage DR that's not conditional to specific damage types like Adaptation would affect both Shields and Health equally, making us have far better EHP whether we decided to only mod for Health or only mod for Shields. It would kind of make having the base stats of the different Warframes (in terms of armour) actually be worth the variety, because the Armour would work alongside the percentage DR mod, and tanky frames would stay tanky, while squishy frames would be a lot less squishy.

That was my solution to making Shields more viable; switch Armour mods to Percentage DR mods ^^

Edited February 7, 2020 by Birdframe_Prime

[Benour]

7 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

snip

Tbh sounds good, that would solve issue with shields being "weaksauce" and armor not very friendly to "stack/slot" on frames that have low base armor.

Sounds good, maybe even to good? But i like it, also ngl i would slap such mod on like all my frames. Even if its "just" 60% DR it would be worth it imo.

Also you could make it 4th Umbral (Umbral Redirection?) or something so its not so easy to exploit it and make the DR go up with every umbral you can fit on warframe. 

[Birdframe_Prime]

9 hours ago, Benour said:

maybe even to good?

Yeah, there is that debate. If you scroll back on the thread you'll find, buried in there, a lovely little EHP calculation for several frames with that.

The 'just' 60% on some frames is actually good enough that it can replace the base Vitality on them; Loki Prime for example will get about 902 Health with Vitality and his base Armour rating, but with the 60% DR he actually gets 915 Health with the 60% and his base Armour. But unlike with Vitality and Armour, Loki's Shields increase as well so instead of only 225 Shields on top, he actually gets about 562 with the DR mod. So Loki with 60% DR gets a total EHP of around 1477, and with Vitality he gets only 1127.

That's not really all that significant as a base, but it's something to consider, we could create a system where if you only have one slot for a Survivability mod, it might actually be a DR mod instead. It also does give that exact base function of 'shields being better than now' ^^

Still, it all depends on where DE want to go with modding.

Personally I'd kind of like to let multiplicative percentages burn anyway. So instead of Vitality adding 440% of your Base health, what if it just added a flat number? Same with Shields, same with Strength, Range and Duration too. Since Efficiency is capped, that's something that really doesn't need too much more done to it, except maybe a quest giving us Umbral Streamline (which in my ideal world has a base value lower than Streamline with only 25%, but stacks with the other two up to the cap of 75% meaning that frames with space for two Umbrals would still get 50%, which is great, but frames that you Umbral Forma can get to 75% with a choice of either being tankier or having ability strength. With more Umbral mods being released, some players would even be able to get to all four mods, but the set bonus still only stacks 3 times so you wouldn't over-cap with it.)

Hell, I feel the same way about weapon mods, having multiplicative percentage stats on them means that you can only ever mod a weapon for its natural bias, you can't viably increase Status on something with only a base of 5%, and you need frames like Harrow to make non-Crit weapons actually deal Crits... Additive mods would solve that by a long way, even if most of them had to be nerfed in order to make the system work.

[Chaemyerelis]

Id like to see them get rid of shields for most frames. I mean why the hell do warframes even have shields? They're infested puppets with tough skin. They should buff up their base HP and armor and remove shields; minus hildryn. 

[selig_fay]

21 час назад, Chaemyerelis сказал:

Id like to see them get rid of shields for most frames. I mean why the hell do warframes even have shields? They're infested puppets with tough skin. They should buff up their base HP and armor and remove shields; minus hildryn.

This is just left as a homage to the old days, when only a few warframes had the ability to heal themselves and allies (to be precise, 1 is Trinity). All other frames relied on shields and abilities, because the health orbs were falling just as badly. Back then, shields made a lot of sense. Now, I can restore all my hp just by making 1 hit with melee, and because slash proks will continue to restore my health to full value.

It's just a problem that there are broken things, like the operator, for example.

In eve online, for example, there are generally 3 protection systems: shield, armor, hull. And the difference in them is how many resists they can have and how quickly they can be restored. Shields are easy to restore, but active methods require a lot of energy, while passive ones have some conditions that depend on the current shield. The shield also has a good DR, but it also requires a lot of energy. Armor also takes longer to recover, but it is very good for energy. Can't be restored passively and has good DR that are good friends with energy. Hull has a good DR, but recovery takes years, plus your modules have a chance to take damage.

These are different protection systems and they are all viable, including the meme dominix hull build, which can withstand a lot of damage, but it can restore itself only in the dock. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. 

For warframe? Between shield and health, I will always choose health even if I have DR, because health is easier to restore than shields, health have armor. It just turns out that shields have many disadvantages, while health is the ideal means of protection. In the end, all of this costs nothing for thin frames, because they don't use health or shields, they use quick thinking. 

Edited February 8, 2020 by zhellon

[(XBOX)Nightseid]

I have always wanted a Shield mod slot and shields offer damage type resistances and damage reductions. The current resistance mods are so useless.

[Lone_Dude]

After playing as Mag for 2 days straight and killing 3 liches as her(also did sorties and kuva floods), I can say with certainty that some kind of one-shot protection on shields is absolutely necessary. I also tried Harrow but he didn't really fit my playstyle and I couldn't be bothered to experiment with him, so I dropped that idea.

I never got killed via continous damage or even status effects such as bleed and toxin, even when I wasn't rolling and jumping all over the place. I had to keep my shields up constantly through the use of Polarize and Crush, but it never felt too difficult or out of place because I also used said abilities to kill and CC enemies. However, nothing could save me from random oneshots that certain enemies seem to be capable of delivering. It was so sudden that usually I couldn't even tell what exactly killed me.

During the latest devstream Scott mentioned that he's working on a rebalance for shields and I sure hope that includes player shields, because the amount of effort required to keep these up and the ease with which enemies bypass them are astounding, especially when compared to armor/DR frames.