Balance - Armor 2.0 Must Be Flat

[-Kittens-]

Not really, you did use the explicit phraseologism of "once modded".

 

While I'll grant a you a "per target, per instance" caveat with the ignis, the right mods make this weapon preform way past the soma's legitimate awesomeness.

[Wolfstorm18]

1)Continious fire "overloads" armor, reducing it.

2)Small percentage of damage capped as minimum. (Very small, not higher than 10%)

This. And armor piercing will overload the armor faster.

Also applies armor overload only after shields are destroyed.

Edited October 7, 2013 by Wolfstorm18

[Volt_Cruelerz]

Not really, you did use the explicit phraseologism of "once modded".

 

While I'll grant a you a "per target, per instance" caveat with the ignis, the right mods make this weapon preform way past the soma's legitimate awesomeness.

"Once modded" is assumed given that we're talking about the Soma and Ignis, neither of which has base AI damage (and depending on your source, the Ogris might or might not as I've heard both and I've never tested it formally to find out which)."

 

And I'm really curious to know what circumstances it takes the Ignis to surpass the Soma.  Even against light infested, the Soma is still better.

[luanle21]

agree with armor being flat same for ther resis just have them get a set amount and doesnt change with lv increases

[Wolfstorm18]

Lets say an armor have two values: the protection which gives the user, and its durability.

 

I dont know how works all the complicated math on warframe (I leave that to the uber-pwnzord-elite nerfer gang), but lets say an armor have 10 points, and a weapon deals 20 damage. So the enemy will lose 10 health after the armor.

 

But lets say the armor have 100 durability, and it receives 10 points damage (the 10 points which didnt go to the enemy's health), each 10 points for an armor value. At the second shot the enemy will have 9 armor, and after 10 shots the armor is reduced to zero. So, no more armor, and enemy will receive the full 20 points from the weapon.

 

You can scale it, so high-level enemies will have 200 durability, taking longer to break. This is only applied after shields are depleted, so if the shields are back online, it will not take damage.

 

Armor piercing will deal a % from the base damage more to the durability, so an 50% AP will deal, in the example above, 20 points to the armor durability, and it will de depleted in 5 shots instead of 10.

Edited October 7, 2013 by Wolfstorm18

[Volt_Cruelerz]

Lets say an armor have two values: the protection which gives the user, and its durability.

 

I dont know how works all the complicated math on warframe (I leave that to the uber-pwnzord-elite nerfer gang), but lets say an armor have 10 points, and a weapon deals 20 damage. So the enemy will lose 10 health after the armor.

 

But lets say the armor have 100 durability, and it receives 10 points damage (the 10 points which didnt go to the enemy's health), each 10 points for an armor value. At the second shot the enemy will have 9 armor, and after 10 shots the armor is reduced to zero. So, no more armor, and enemy will receive the full 20 points from the weapon.

 

You can scale it, so high-level enemies will have 200 durability, taking longer to break. This is only applied after shields are depleted, so if the shields are back online, it will not take damage.

 

Armor piercing will deal a % from the base damage more to the durability, so an 50% AP will deal, in the example above, 20 points to the armor durability, and it will de depleted in 5 shots instead of 10.

I've seen similar ideas before and while it's in the category of "I might like it someday," I've never actually seen an implementation that works well.  Ideally, you'd localize it to different body parts to reward players that are accurate, but the problem you then run into is that it acts as a hard nerf on all inaccurate guns by making them less ammo efficient than they are now.  Now, if you made enemy shots hurt WAY more and made the AI responsive so that rapid-fire guns would cause them to intelligently take shelter, then these weapons could have suppression uses, but that's a lot more work.

Edited October 7, 2013 by Volt_Cruelerz

[blahdenoma]

Lets say an armor have two values: the protection which gives the user, and its durability.

 

I dont know how works all the complicated math on warframe (I leave that to the uber-pwnzord-elite nerfer gang), but lets say an armor have 10 points, and a weapon deals 20 damage. So the enemy will lose 10 health after the armor.

 

But lets say the armor have 100 durability, and it receives 10 points damage (the 10 points which didnt go to the enemy's health), each 10 points for an armor value. At the second shot the enemy will have 9 armor, and after 10 shots the armor is reduced to zero. So, no more armor, and enemy will receive the full 20 points from the weapon.

 

You can scale it, so high-level enemies will have 200 durability, taking longer to break. This is only applied after shields are depleted, so if the shields are back online, it will not take damage.

 

Armor piercing will deal a % from the base damage more to the durability, so an 50% AP will deal, in the example above, 20 points to the armor durability, and it will de depleted in 5 shots instead of 10.

 

Then armor just becomes health with another name, instead of being a hard limit on bullet damage.  Well, I mean...since the minimum damage is actually 1, armor pretty much already works like this...but functionally it's a hard limit, since you don't have infinite ammo.

[FoxRabbit]

My Flux out dps's a Soma.... because the Flux is Serrated Bullet damage... and the Soma is.... normal bullet damage lol Not sure why you think the Soma is one of the good weapons.

[CaptainohCaptain]

My Flux out dps's a Soma.... because the Flux is Serrated Bullet damage... and the Soma is.... normal bullet damage lol Not sure why you think the Soma is one of the good weapons.

I don't know why he thinks so. Especially with the fact that you can't crit the shields, rendering this rifle funny against considerable ammount of enemies.

[Wolfstorm18]

I own a Soma and dont see why people says its overpowered. The numbers are the same from a standard Braton, except they are yellow because of the criticals. I guess criticals do bleeding damage to enemies, alright? So thats the reason why they fall fast.

 

One thing is that the Soma owns the Gorgon and supremely owns the Supra. Testing Soma and Gorgon at the same defense mission at Varro (Ceres), I ran out of ammo only one time with Soma in five waves, and the Gorgon the ammo was depleted several times, and even with ammo mutation I had to resort to the secondary (there was no more ammo pickups, even from other weapon types).

 

Soma is much more accurate than Gorgon and it should be so, since its a Tenno rifle, and is supposed to be superior, since we dont do those raid missions anymore. Its understandable those artifacts recovered in raid missions were used by Lotus in research for the Soma.

[ChaoticVice777]

My Flux out dps's a Soma.... because the Flux is Serrated Bullet damage... and the Soma is.... normal bullet damage lol Not sure why you think the Soma is one of the good weapons.

 

Actually, the Soma's AP damage is superior to the Flux Rifle's base damage and AP damage combined. If it weren't for the light Infested multiplier on Serrated Blade, the Flux Rifle would be considered "obsolete".

 

 

I own a Soma and dont see why people says its overpowered. The numbers are the same from a standard Braton, except they are yellow because of the criticals. I guess criticals do bleeding damage to enemies, alright? So thats the reason why they fall fast.

 

One thing is that the Soma owns the Gorgon and supremely owns the Supra. Testing Soma and Gorgon at the same defense mission at Varro (Ceres), I ran out of ammo only one time with Soma in five waves, and the Gorgon the ammo was depleted several times, and even with ammo mutation I had to resort to the secondary (there was no more ammo pickups, even from other weapon types).

 

Soma is much more accurate than Gorgon and it should be so, since its a Tenno rifle, and is supposed to be superior, since we dont do those raid missions anymore. Its understandable those artifacts recovered in raid missions were used by Lotus in research for the Soma.

 

Criticals are more "resistant" to armor since AP mods can derive from the "base damage", which is already affected by mods and criticals. 

 

The Tenno rifles should be superior, but not to where it threatens to invalidate almost every single rifle in the game.

[blahdenoma]

If your Soma is hitting for the same damage as your Braton, you are doing something terribly wrong.

[Volt_Cruelerz]

My Flux out dps's a Soma.... because the Flux is Serrated Bullet damage... and the Soma is.... normal bullet damage lol Not sure why you think the Soma is one of the good weapons.

Then you clearly don't know how to build a Soma.  When you do, it will out-DPS every other rifle on paper except for the Hind, but that doesn't carry over into practice because the Hind doesn't actually achieve anywhere near that DPS in-game for a variety of reasons.  The Soma on the other hand gets what its numbers say.  And in fact, its damage per second is so high that the damage from its +60% AP alone mod outdoes the intrinsic Serrated Blade damage of the Flux.  Even when you account for Piercing Hit on the Flux, the Soma still comes out on top.  The Soma does 5.4k AP DPS while the Flux does 1.3k SB DPS and 800 AP DPS.  5.4 >2.1

 

Calculations and Graphs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlWVt6vp3-YWdHZJRTBvRTBrNGNrb3dNbEZsc0tZVHc&usp=drive_web#gid=0

 

 

I own a Soma and dont see why people says its overpowered. The numbers are the same from a standard Braton, except they are yellow because of the criticals. I guess criticals do bleeding damage to enemies, alright? So thats the reason why they fall fast.

 

One thing is that the Soma owns the Gorgon and supremely owns the Supra. Testing Soma and Gorgon at the same defense mission at Varro (Ceres), I ran out of ammo only one time with Soma in five waves, and the Gorgon the ammo was depleted several times, and even with ammo mutation I had to resort to the secondary (there was no more ammo pickups, even from other weapon types).

 

Soma is much more accurate than Gorgon and it should be so, since its a Tenno rifle, and is supposed to be superior, since we dont do those raid missions anymore. Its understandable those artifacts recovered in raid missions were used by Lotus in research for the Soma.

 

Critical hits can be thought of as a way of increasing damage per second.  The thing is though, they increase the base damage whereas the build most weapons run on work by adding several kinds of elemental damage.  The Soma build only has room for two elemental mods, so naturally people slot in Cryo Rounds and Piercing Hit.  Critical hits don't just amp up the base damage though.  They amp up any elemental mods you might happen to have on your gun, so that 60% AP turns into a world of hurt that outdoes every other rifle in the game, even the Flux.

Edited October 7, 2013 by Volt_Cruelerz

[Acos]

Agree with a lot of what you said. It always felt silly to me that Armor Piercing had nothing that would resist it (the infested seem like they should, what with them being fleshy, rubbery, masses of deadness). Hopefully DE is going in a similar route to your thinking. 

[notionphil]

Guys, stop having an irrelevant argument about the Soma's damage for a second and consider the importance of this thread.

 

Volt_cruelerz is simply stating the FACT that if armor scales with enemy level (exponentially or linearly), at the point in time enemies when reach high enough level, there will AGAIN be a situation where armor ignore/armor pierce will be the only reliable source of damage type on weapons.

 

This problem is greatly exacerbated if armor reduces elemental damage in addition to bullet/normal damage types.

 

And for anyone on this thread that says "lets wait and see armor 2.0 before making any judgements"....Um....no. We need to constructively voice our concerns regarding potential proposed changes now, before DE has put massive time and effort into a system that "might be an overhaul of every major system (mod,enemy,weapon) in game".

 

If there is an oversight on their part, (such as making armor scale higher with level but on fewer mobs, or tying elemental proc rate to weapon crit rate), it has potential for making the damage/armor system far worse - pushing us to even fewer usable weapons and viable builds. They don't want that, we don't want that. So lets have a constructive conversation and see if we can prevent those oversights from happening.

[11.11.11]

Then armor just becomes health with another name, instead of being a hard limit on bullet damage.  Well, I mean...since the minimum damage is actually 1, armor pretty much already works like this...but functionally it's a hard limit, since you don't have infinite ammo.

 

Just like to point out that armor IRL is basically artificial health with another name. Its designed to sacrificially protect the user until it wears down and breaks. 

 

 

 

Frankly I think the whole problem with the current model of armor in Warframe revolves around two aspects that we often seem to overlook:

1) It is too much.

2) It does too little.

Those two might seem  mutually exclusive, but they're not. Let me explain:

 

 

Armor in its current form is simply too much on top of other enemy factors. - What we have are enemies that hit harder, shoot faster, have more health, spawn in greater numbers AND - have armor to sheild their bloated health pools. The end effect is to avoid having your face pounded into the dirt at higher levels, the ability to negate armor is a must if you're to have any chance of managing the other factors. The best way to stop enemies shooting you with their uberguns, is to kill them, but to get access to that you must first strip away their armor. Scaling the armor up with these other traits is simply too many plates spinning in the air.

 

As for doing too little - armor itself is simply a glorified second health pool. Its even less distinct than shields, which at least have their own weaknesses (electricity / cyro), and neat little particle effects. Not only do we not even get some sort of indication of when an enemies armor is being negated - but it has zero effect on the enemy themselves. They don't stagger or scream out in pain as their carbon nano weave is shattered and scalds their skin, they don't go into a panic and run away, or throw caution to the wind, pull out a space-sword, and charge at the player. Armor currently in warframe is like DE's way of saying 'We wanted to make this enemy tough, but we didn't want you to be scared off by a giant health bar, so instead we just made them take half damage from you.'

 

 

 

What should change? Well in my honest opinion: _{Click spoilers for more detail.}

 

- Armor needs to have unique effects. 

Armor should be an element unto itself. Enemies wearing it should be vulnerable in different ways, players should be encouraged to find new interesting ways of defeating them. Its been suggested elsewhere that armor could be fragment-able - allow us to use sustained fire to break it away in chunks - let incendiary attacks cook the soldier inside it, or melt it off - let electro effects negate it by simply paralysing the wearer - let poison effects corrode and weaken it so teammates can easily shoot through it - let cryo effects brittle and harden it so that enemies actually take double damage from attacks resonating off the annealed armor. Etc Etc Etc. 

 

Make armor a clear visual and tactical presence. Make enemies wearing it look differently and behave differently. Warframe already suffers enough from a lack of variety, even a bit of colour to how armor works would go a long way to helping this.

 

- Armor can scale, but it should take into consideration the other traits of the enemy group its being applied to. 

Grineer having unarmored heads, and Corpus having helmets of titanium is a nice start, but it would be better if we saw light troops with light armor, heavy troops with heavy, and bosses with special variants, like holographic or regenerative armor. If an enemy is going to have strong armor, they should be slower, or less accurate with their fire, or spawn in smaller numbers - perhaps even have smaller/restricted ammo pools as a result of being overloaded with body armor. There needs to be variety and complexity here, with a sense of realism. Not just a buff to all enemies that increases the higher the level.

 

- Armor should never be completely effective against any one weapon.

A lot of this starts to tread into the area of game balance, but without going too far down that rabbit hole, one of the big problems with armor currently is that it is ONLY weak to armor penetrating effects. There needs to be other options. Primary not doing enough DPS to shatter enemies armor? I should be able to get in close and slice bits off with my skana. Fragor just knocking them back? I should be able to get around behind them and blast off the straps with my Kraken. Secondary making my enemies laugh at me? I should be able to use my Latron to land shots on top of each other and punch right through their protection. 

 

The player should always have options available to encourage us to come up with divergent gameplay and new strategies. THAT is how games with a fairly repetitive core concept (shoot all the badguys) - become something you can enjoy over and over and over again - by allowing people to find their own way to overcome obstacles. Not adding arbitrary requirements like 'need Acrid / Torid / kunai or gtfo'

 

 

 

 

Its funny, everytime the issue of 'armor' comes up, I realise its less about the armor itself, and more about the games entire combat model - weapons - enemy AI - and enemy scaling. Each part of the system is reliant on the others. Hopefully DE realizes they'll only be kidding themselves if they think the overhauls can stop with 'just armor'. 

[blahdenoma]

The entire point of "Armor" as a gameplay mechanic is that it is different than health by presenting a hard minimum gate on some sort of damage, as opposed to a resistance, which merely presents a % reduction in some sort of damage.  Obviously incomplete armor negation is functionally a resistance, and both of them are functionally a health pool while incomplete, but the three mechanics scale in completely different manners.  They also enable that health pool to behave differently vis a vis different damage types.

 

This enables specialization of weapon and unit types, in general.  In most games, you'll have an extremely high DPS weapon that is completely negated by moderate armor, which allows you to specialize in taking out light enemies.  The main problem with Warframe is that nearly every enemy has armor that scales upward, so there's no specialization for taking out light units quickly.  The second problem is that the weapons that should specialize in taking out heavy armor are also very good at taking out light armor, meaning there's no point in specializing in light-armor-neutralization at all, even if there were unarmored units around to kill.

 

If you think that lack of build diversity is problematic, that's the core of the problem:  there are 3 or 4 loadouts that are optimal or near-optimal in -every- possible situation.  There are several weapons and frames that just don't have any serious weaknesses, so everyone gravitates to them.

[notionphil]

The entire point of "Armor" as a gameplay mechanic is that it is different than health by presenting a hard minimum gate on some sort of damage, as opposed to a resistance, which merely presents a % reduction in some sort of damage.  Obviously incomplete armor negation is functionally a resistance, and both of them are functionally a health pool while incomplete, but the three mechanics scale in completely different manners.  They also enable that health pool to behave differently vis a vis different damage types.

 

This enables specialization of weapon and unit types, in general.  In most games, you'll have an extremely high DPS weapon that is completely negated by moderate armor, which allows you to specialize in taking out light enemies.  The main problem with Warframe is that nearly every enemy has armor that scales upward, so there's no specialization for taking out light units quickly.  The second problem is that the weapons that should specialize in taking out heavy armor are also very good at taking out light armor, meaning there's no point in specializing in light-armor-neutralization at all, even if there were unarmored units around to kill.

 

If you think that lack of build diversity is problematic, that's the core of the problem:  there are 3 or 4 loadouts that are optimal or near-optimal in -every- possible situation.  There are several weapons and frames that just don't have any serious weaknesses, so everyone gravitates to them.

 

very well said!

 

I would love to see a scenario like:

 

• Elite Mobs (tech,commander,disruptor,scorch,napalm)- Low Armor, weak against Serrated Blade, strong vs physics type

   

• Heavy Mobs: (gunner, bombard, healer) - High Armor,  weak against Physics Damage, strong v. blade

   

• Medium Mobs (lancers, moas, leapers)- Med Armor, weak against Blade

   

• Light Mobs (charger,sawmen,scorps,crewmen)- Low/no armor, weak against Bullet, v. strong vs Physics

 

And then per faction type weaknesses to elements.

 

So you gear your prim/sec/melee to be either specialize on killing a certain type, or be well rounded with few weaknesses. (nothing is strong vs bullet), depending on what role you're most interested in. Each weapon would have strengths and weaknesses, no single damage type would be effective everywhere.

Edited October 7, 2013 by notionphil

[11.11.11]

The entire point of "Armor" as a gameplay mechanic is that it is different than health by presenting a hard minimum gate on some sort of damage, as opposed to a resistance, which merely presents a % reduction in some sort of damage.  

 

I think we're largely on the same page blahde - but I really don't think armor needs to be a 'hard minimum gate'. It should be far more dynamic than that. This isn't Runescape, armor should block health damage - or for a certain percentage at first - and weaken or outright fail under our attacks. Any system less realistic feels lost on the whole visceral sci fi setting.

[blahdenoma]

The reason it functions as a hard minimum gate is to keep the high damage-per-second, low-damage-per-shot weapons from dominating both light and heavy units.  If it were degradable, it would -only- be a resistance to those weapon-types.  It would completely defeat the purpose armor is intended to address, which is to make more than one weapon type both viable and necessary.

 

I'd be open to the idea of a separate "armor-shredding" damage type (serrated blade, perhaps) that has generally low damage-per-second effectiveness vs. everything, but has the significant effect of debuffing armor, though.  This would actually open up the opportunity to specialize your warframe as an armor debuffer, allowing your teammates with Grakatas or Bratons to crack into harder targets.  That's a sort of cooperation and specialization inducing solution.  However, allowing every high DPS, low DPshot weapon to run roughshod over every unit type at the mere cost of ammo expenditure isn't really a solution, when ammo is rarely an issue.  You could introduce a more severe ammo economy, but then you're using yet another mechanic to address a problem leftover by an incomplete fix to the fundamental issue.

[11.11.11]

I'd be open to the idea of a separate "armor-shredding" damage type (serrated blade, perhaps) that has generally low damage-per-second effectiveness vs. everything, but has the significant effect of debuffing armor, though.  This would actually open up the opportunity to specialize your warframe as an armor debuffer, allowing your teammates with Grakatas or Bratons to crack into harder targets. That's a sort of cooperation and specialization inducing solution. 

 

That was more what I had in mind - rather than making every weapon the counter armor equally as efficiently. 

 

There's an infinite amount of possibilities out there - but something along the lines of:

 

 

~ Gorgon / Soma etc - High flesh damage, low armor damage, requires teammates to disable armor first to be truly effective - or use against unarmored targets.

 

 

~Shotguns - High armor damage / fragmentation - medium flesh damage, but low long range accuracy and strong recoil.

 

 

~Energy weapons - High flesh damage, moderate to low armor damage - but very high ammo pools - maybe also low elemental effect chance (can lasers really be cryogenic?) 

 

 

~Latron / semi autos - High flesh damage and high armor damage / fragmentation - but heavy recoil patterns require skill to control - maximum damage only awarded to direct hits or multiple hits in a similar area.

 

 

~Braton / Basic Projectile Assualt Rifles - A balance of medium flesh damage and medium armor damage - good all-rounders.

 

 

~Burston / Hind etc - Really ought to be no different to the full auto projectile guns. Firemode should just be a user preference. Perhaps a slight bonus to armor damage if all rounds in a burst land in the same area. 

 

 

~Acrid / Torid - Medium to low flesh damage, but damage over time and mostly ignores armor. Teamates disabling armor speeds up or increases the DoT.

 

 

~Bolt Weapons / Throwing Knives / Bows - High armor penetration - medium flesh damage, but lower firerates and charge times requires high player precision / skill, or teaming up with other players to maximize effectiveness. Also fully modded Boltors and Bolto's should never do as much flesh damage as Bows but should do more armor penetration. Knives should never do more armor penetration than bows. Bolts / arrows should be able to pin enemies to walls without killing them, effectivley disabling them for a few seconds and giving easy kills for teammates.

 

 

~Brute Force Melee (Fragor Etc) - High armor fragmentation, mid to low flesh damage. Less accurate atacks. Should be able to be swung more often than blades (faster firerate) - but not do damage to more than 1-2 enemies.

 

 

~Edged Melee - Low armor fragmentation, high flesh damage. Should swing faster, and be more accurate than brute force - but have a slower firerate. Effect 2+ enemies per swing.

Edited October 7, 2013 by 11.11.11

[CaptainohCaptain]

I wished to say something, but then I saw

~Bolt Weapons / Throwing Knives / Bows - High armor penetration - medium flesh damage

/facewall

[Scherhardt]

Furax. Think back, way back, to the days of the Furax. The days before the Soma and Swraith, before the Despair, the Acrid. Think back to the days of the Furax. Even back then when the highest level enemies in the game were low by current standards and Grineer levels hit something like 30 at max. The Furax, despite its short range was regarded as a very powerful weapon and the go-to melee by many players. Why? It ignored armor.

 

Those days. I miss it so. 

[Parinirvana]

Make armor and damage type work like Starcraft 2, problem solved.

[SquirmyBurrito]

I never understood the concept of something capable of ripping through armor failing to cause considerable damage to a person's flesh.

Edited October 8, 2013 by SquirmyBurrito