Armor and enemy level scaling nerfs will adversely affect the wrong people...

[Avienas]

32 minutes ago, GKP_light said:

If you play in endless, you take 4 corrosive projections, or you play against infested or corpus.

Which is always fun when you frequent one of the most common things every player will do, farming fissures.

Aka the corrupted region where all enemy groups get enhanced into one group.

Aka where you have to bring 4 C.P. AND measures to yeet ancients & nullifiers and deal with crap like bombards.

Quote

It is unthinkable to let them have some armor.

Which funfact, unless enemies have a different formula. 300 armor is literally the 50% D.R. mark, so outside of those with non-existent armor. They already have E-health twice thar health at that point and of course, scaling makes it WAY worst to where 2700 armor already brings them up to 90% D.R. Where unless D.E. redesigns how armor is stripped to remove the bottom half of armor instead of the top half (aka the part that has most of the D.R., then one needs to strip more then 75% of enemy armor in mid-level cases and all of it on anything that is level 50 or higher more often then naught).

Just a small funfact using https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Elite_Lancer

A level 1 Elite lancer has 200 alloy armor meaning it already has 40% D.R. 

A level 103 Elite lancer will reach that 90% D.R. i talked about but by then that now 2728.39 Alloy armor has brought its 17,574 clone health to 177,403.3 or basically 10 times the amount. Which we all know how fun it is to YEET enemies with that much health without armor stripping measures.

 

Oh and lets say they DO stop the scaling at 75. A Elite lancer will still have 1,493.49 armor or 83.27% D.R. and 8,250 health. Meaning it still has a E.health of 49,321.11. Meaning that 28 level gap is easily less then a 3rd of what it was before, but still a chunky durability for a common enemy. But in the other case, how MUCH will the scaling drop since it would need to be a drastic reduction to make an impact.

 

Edited February 24, 2020 by Avienas

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

The entire argument you keep defending is that between levels 75 and 100 there's content in the game (sortie 3 and liches for the most part) in which the nerf would benefit people. I'm telling you the difference is so minimal when builds already exist in excess that one-two shot lvl 100.

That's kind of the point, though - that you need to resort to these builds is the restriction. Armour spikes particularly aggressively past 90-ish. Up to that point, one can reasonably target other vulnerabilities of the Grineer, such as Viral and Radiation, or at the very least make do with non-Status toxic weapons. Past level 90, Grineer damage resistance grows high enough to be actively disruptive to anything that's not specifically built to target armour. Now, I'm not entirely sure what builds you're referring to here, whether it's just specialised anti-armour builds or some kind of Riven obscenity. Speaking purely from my own experience, however, the step up between Lich level 4 and 5 is the step where the experience of playing the game just stops being fun, specifically because my pool of available builds and weapons shrinks down significantly. I can still succeed in these missions just fine - I'm not in danger of dying or losing. However, TTK and the general feel of weapons degrades drastically in those ranges. We can argue about what constitutes a "minimal" difference if you want, but my experience of it shows what I would describe as a significant difference.

More than that, though - I don't see the design goal achieved by jacking up Grineer armour exponentially. For one thing, it goes against the design of the armour formula. Whoever designed the resistance = armour / (armour + 300) formula went out of their way to ensure that EHP is a linear function of armour. Because EHP = HP + HP*(armour/300), every point of armour gives you 1/300th of your HP's worth of extra HP, whether you have 0 armour or you already have 1500 armour. So the system is set up for linear progression, yet DE toss non-linear armour scaling with enemy level thus fundamentally undermining their own deliberate design. I mean at that point, why not just give them, like 1% or 0.5% damage resistance per level. It would accomplish the same goal without bastardising what is otherwise pretty clever math.

And it's all besides the point anyway. Enemy toughness needs to be scaled based on EHP, not just armour, and definitely not on HP and armour independently. If DE really wanted the Grineer to have millions of EHP (if their game balance sucks so hard that that's the only way to go), then they are fully capable of giving them all 500K HP + 300 armour. I remain utterly convinced that Grineer armour should be a fixed value and their EHP should scale based purely on health. As such, I'm absolutely in favour of reducing armour scaling. It's not exactly what I want, but it's a damn sight closer to it. As a bonus, EHP more heavily weighed towards health de-emphasises the need for high-status Corrosive, Corrosive Projection and Slash damage shenanigans, thus opening up a larger pool of if not "viable" then fun builds outside of the extreme outliers that people keep bringing up that I almost never actually see.

 

2 hours ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

Veil Proxima grineer, the ones that have a LOT more armor than their normal counterparts.

Correction. Kosma units have more HEALTH, not more ARMOUR. They have the same amount of damage resistance as regular Grineer, just a lot more health. A standard Elite Lancer has 150 base health, 200 base armour. A Koisma Elite Lancer has 2500 health, 200 base armour. Both of them Alloy, incidentally, so Radiation damage would be quite effective against them. Thing is, though - Radiation damage is still anti-armour, and Kosma Grineer don't seem to spawn a lot of Ferrite armour units. That's kind of the issue with level 100 Grineer in regular missions. Packing a heavy Radiation weapon typically works well against Bombards, Napalms and the like due to the frankly pretty S#&$ system DE have for armour interaction with damage types - 75% more damage against 25% of the armour. It's Heavy Gunners and to a lesser extent Troopers which then become an issue because those also have ballooning armour but theirs isn't weak against Radiation and offers full protection.

The Kosma units ought to show you two things. First of all, they show that DE seem to have their heads out of their asses and aren't just using armour as a one-size-fits-all solution to EHP woes. They appear to have recognised what kind of mess they've put themselves in and - when time came to create "tougher" Grineer - they opted for a different approach to achieving that, instead. Secondly, it shows that enemies can be given high EHP without needing high armour. I mean... Kosma Grineer still HAVE high armour as they use the same values as other Corps, but they didn't need MORE of it to be MORE tanky. Armour is not the be-all end-all of EHP, so reducing armour doesn't necessarily have to make "your" game that much easier. It's mostly going to have the knock-on effect of making more weapons usable against armour.

I can already see a counter-argument here: "DE didn't say anything about increasing health to compensate." This is true, they didn't. Two things here. First of all, we've so far been given only shorthand numbers from memory, and drawn off of a process in the middle of development. Secondly, we have actual precedent for this. In 27.0.9, DE slashed the armour many Kosma fighter units by half, but increased the health on a number of them by a third to compensate. I did the numbers at the time, and that actually resulted in an increase to EHP, but that's besides the point. And yes, that was a change to the BASE armour and health values of those units, not to their scaled values, but that's largely because I'm pretty sure scaling is handled globally rather than on a unit-by-unit basis. Changes to that would be far-reaching, clearly.

What I hope to have established here is that DE are experimenting with using things OTHER than armour to boost EHP, thus it's natural to reduce reliance on armour in the process. This frees their hands to experiment and it has the side benefit of reducing pressure on us to focus on dealing with armour. I'm sure you have the kind of awesome pure damage builds that can one-shot anything with a sideways glance unless it's level 500, fair enough. For the average player, however, a reduction in armour is going to create an increase in diversity by de-emphasising anti-armour tools.

So yes, I'd argue that an S-curve for armour progression which peaks around 75 (I'd argue it ought to peak earlier, but eh) will have an effect on people playing Lich, Sortie and Railjack content while also opening the door to less S#&$ balance.

---

And just because it has to be said - I do want to apologise for reacting as I did initially. I genuinely doubted the sincerity and good faith of your argument, because it genuinely seemed you were looking to pick a fight over making an actual point. Seems like I misjudged you. Sorry about that.

[SpringRocker]

12 hours ago, Educated_Beast said:

I want to believe it is to start balancing weapons. It's impossible to balance weapons when armor and health scale.  With capped armor, one one knob is turned to adjust effective health on high level mobs.  

I assume that, by extension, you mean mods aswell?

The mods are a big part of weapons being either peashooters or killing everything in sight with one shot.

[Althaline]

12 hours ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

armor scaling isn't busted in a vacuum

Have you ever fought a level 5 Lich? The difference from level 4 to level 5 is "1 (One) shot from Rubico Prime" to "Dear Lord why isn't it dead yet, I've hit it in the head 100 times and it just won't go down". That is how busted the scaling double-dip gets. There's no reason for the Grineer to scale in two different ways simultaneously, especially not since they stack up so hard so fast in the higher levels.

[Thrymm]

The idea that this helps those that "don't know how to mod" is just outright stupid.

Modding is not hard, and we shouldn't pretend it is.  You're not going to run into a whole lot of people that can't grasp the concept of "mod armor removal(corrosive) and as much damage as possible".  I'm not saying there isn't somebody out there that doesn't get this, people never cease to amaze me.  I am saying, however, that only a moron would think that the general game populace is somehow missing out on how to utilize this deep and nuanced(/s) modding system.  Heck, corrosive might as well stay on weapons for everything, because it has the best combination of proc usefulness and damage bonuses/lack of penalties in the game.  That's not exactly a hallmark of a system that a person really needs to have a degree to learn how to use.

Further, this does virtually nothing to long endurance runs anyway.  They where already ignoring all the armor.  You simply don't just deal with it on super high level enemies, ammo consumption and simply the cost of keyboards would destroy you.  Armor could be brought to nearly any non-zero number and endurance run strategy would remain largely the same.

In fact, the very people the original post claims wouldn't be affected will be the most affected, in a positive way.  Virtually none of the newer content is outside of the level range affected by this.  If you're playing current stuff, you're fighting the range targeted by those level numbers.  Veil and Lich damage reduction is so steep that sortie enemies seem like squishy punks in comparison, and lest we forget, sortie 3 enemies were largely considered to be something of a handful by many(perhaps even most) when that content was first released.

A more logical armor scaling would allow us to actually---get this--learn how to mod!  If you didn't just mindlessly work around the borked armor scaling in virtually every mission, you could actually consider whether or not toxin or gas would be more viable than corrosive, or perhaps find a use for electric, blast, or cold to handle some greater crowd control duties. 

The current system leaves us modding corrosive(armor removal) with a side order or heat(more armor removal) and preferably slash(because, get this, it ignores armor, because we wanna start making damage before we strip it all).  About the only time you'll find a deviation is when you're running 4 CP, then viral/slash is the way to go because you're already ignoring the armor, so why not halve the health at that point?  If we weren't constantly doing this, we might actually get to mod weapons, instead of running what might as well be a pre-packaged anti-armor kit that any pleeb can figure out.

[ShortCat]

With time, my perception of the "Armor dilemma" topic changed. Right now, I do not see how reduced Armor scaling will achieve a positive effect on the game, besides making it even easier. Even with reduced Armor scaling, not much will change with regards to moding: Grineer are still weak to Corrosive, Corrosive still reduces Armor, Corrosive is still hardly penalized by other health types. Most effective builds against armored units will remain Corrosive or Slash based. So what's the point?

Armor stopped being a roadblock long time ago, due to all the power creep. DE integrates base DR (unrelated to Armor), ability immunity, status immunity or status protection for years to creaty some form of challenge, as Armor  Armor rework on its own will just drastically lower the ceiling; an ideal solution wouold require a combined enemy/damage types/mods/weapons overhaul and we won't experience this any time soon (if ever).
 

3 hours ago, Thrymm said:

I am saying, however, that only a moron would think that the general game populace is somehow missing out on how to utilize this deep and nuanced(/s) modding system. 

Never underestimate the abyss of human stupidity or inability. While modding has a fairly low entry level, there are some pitfalls further down the road, which require a thought or two. Players will utilizy Corrosive just becasue they are told to and they will see how effective it is, without even understanding why it works. Just the comment above yours from @Iamabearlulz showcases it. It is an exaggeration, at least I hope it is one, but a lvl5 Lich is by no means hard to take down, yet there seems be a substantiol fear for them.

[Althaline]

31 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

It is an exaggeration, at least I hope it is one, but a lvl5 Lich is by no means hard to take down, yet there seems be a substantiol fear for them.

It is not an exaggeration, and by no means do I not know how to mod. My Rubico is capable of killing all 3 Eidolons before running out of ammo, and yet somehow a level 5 Lich will take it to the face and laugh. They're not hard, sure, once you start abusing triple/quadruple dip mechanics and permanent full immunity to damage, but why should they have 99.95% DR in the first place?

[ShortCat]

5 minutes ago, Iamabearlulz said:

It is not an exaggeration, and by no means do I not know how to mod.

Add me ingame, call me to one of your Lich hunts, I will show you how a lvl5 Lich melts in seconds without triple dipping and perma invulnerability.

Edited February 25, 2020 by ShortCat

[CopperBezel]

If they happen to have Corrosive immunity, they're pretty absurdly tanky. "Just use Mesa" tanky, but still. The weaknesses, resistances, and immunities are layered on top of a normal Ferrite health type with status immunity, so that's ... awkward, and not how that should have worked at all. 

Anyway, armor weirds a lot of things, and I don't think this change will fix that. Armor values would need to be lower and possibly fixed, and we'd need to have a lot of our options for reducing its effects nerfed to the point of being viable options instead of necessities. 

Right now, we have Corrosive damage that circumvents armor such that it's dealing 7x what most other types do against the most common armored units, Slash that circumvents armor entirely, and Corrosive Projection squads that also ignore armor completely. We also never deal directly with armor values, since every armor strip but Mag's Polarize is a % effect, so getting them down to a manageable amount of armor is just counting procs. A unit with twice as much armor simply takes three more procs. So armor is already something that has to scale exponentially to work at all, making raw damage without status more irrelevant with each step up the ladder. And endurance runners don't need to care about armor values at all, they could well be infinite - the squad only needs either to bring four CPs or use Slash. 

In terms of raw internal weirdness, we still have some effects that deal damage based on enemy health, and plenty of abilities that absorb player damage and then output it again as raw damage in a given type with no status effects, both of which work as expected on Corpus and Infested units but nonlinearly on Grineer. Anything pinned to enemy health is going to be useless at that level 80-100 range that is now within normal content, which is unlikely to be much affected by this change. Armor would need to plateau a lot earlier and health would need to be buffed to compensate; a Heavy Gunner has over 4k armor, correlating to over 90% damage reduction, at 75.

The change does still have the possibility of putting the factions on balance with one another, but whether that means building our weapons differently remains to be seen.

I'm still hopeful in the future that damage and related values might be flattened a bit, and the melee rework was a good sign in my opinion. Damage was flattened significantly, so that weapons start stronger but don't get quite so many ways to increase exponentially in damage.

14 hours ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

At lvl 80-100 there's many weapons that can be modded for something that isn't corrosive or slash and will still make short work of normal grineers. As someone said above it's past level 100 that armor starts to become more and more of a hurdle. Way past the level of normal game content and into the realm of endurance content. Which was exactly my original point. 

There aren't any weapons that won't always do better with Corrosive at 80-100. Slash doesn't really shine yet at that point, since armor is still easy to strip, but because Corrosive double dips on its health type advantage against Ferrite and gets a bonus while also ignoring 75% of armor, it'll do more damage to an armored unit even without proccing status than Heat or Viral does to a unit affected by their respective procs. Radiation gets the same double-dipped bonus against Alloy but without the chance of stripping armor, and since Alloy units are much rarer, it's not really as much an option as Corrosive or even Slash in most cases.

The Corpus in the Index use Alloy, and it's pretty illustrative to play alternately with Corrosive and Radiation builds, because you can see how much a difference the type advantage gives you and how much the proc does. By the third round, they've got enough armor that Corrosive starts taking over again thanks to the proc.

19 hours ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

I mean, sure against grineer you use corrosive, heat or slash. What's wrong with that? Or you strip their armor with abilities and use gas, viral, etc. There's so many options. Specially up to level 100. You don't even need corrosive at those levels, gas is usually enough depending on the weapon. 

Well, what's wrong with that is that Grineer are the only faction we're worried about building our weapons for, because they're the only ones that can take a few hits, so there are three elements worth building for, and heat only if you can get it as a free bonus proc in there somewhere without losing too much of your damage into a type that doesn't come with a giant advantage. They also have three elements for which status effects are a way of causing damage to effective health, while other factions have only Viral. (We'll see whether the shield rework makes those relevant enough to consider Magnetic here too.) If every faction was like the Grineer and had only a couple of viable damage types that worked on them, we'd have an annoying ritual of switching weapon builds for every mission and possibly take two different elements for Void missions, and I don't think that would be ideal either, but right now there's no point bothering to build for the weaknesses of the other two factions. Ideally, if we need to have these vulnerabilities at all, they'd stop being faction things and be mixed up among the factions instead.

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, ShortCat said:

Even with reduced Armor scaling, not much will change with regards to moding: Grineer are still weak to Corrosive, Corrosive still reduces Armor, Corrosive is still hardly penalized by other health types. Most effective builds against armored units will remain Corrosive or Slash based. So what's the point?

Not quite. "Grineer" aren't weak to Corrosive damage. SOME Grineer are. Plenty of them - the ones with the most EHP - use Alloy armour which is at best neutral against Corrosive. What they're weak to is Radiation. Additionally, all Grineer are weak to Viral, but you don't see a lot of people use that because it's can't double-dip into bonus damage AND reduced armour. Yes, the Corrosive proc will reduce armour, but you need rather a large amount of procs to have any meaningful impact, and that requires high-Status weapons, in particular 100% Status shotguns which heavily limits weapon choice. Reducing Grineer armour to something sane means using Radiation and Corrosive, as well as in general using Critical-based weapons becomes a lot more viable. A lot more weapons re-enter the field, and so we're better able to pick the weapon we LIKE, rather than the weapon which game mechanics tell us to use.

There's also the issue of armour itself. See, EHP is a linear function of HP but a rational function of resistance. DE attempted to mitigate this modelling resistance itself as a rational function of armour, which turns EHP into a linear function of armour. However, what DE may have missed at the time but seem to have realised this recently is a bit of a quirk with the function they came up with. Namely, this one:

EHP = HP + HP*(A/300)

See, EHP is a linear function of HP assuming static armour and a linear function of armour assuming static HP... But actually a quadratic function when both armour and HP increase together. Layering armour and health in equal measure (not equal amounts because armour weighed down by 300) turns EHP into a quadratic progression, i.e. its progression curve is a parabola along the "mid point" between armour and health. What this means is that scaling BOTH armour AND health at the same time increases EHP by the multiple of both. My impression of DE's comments on the dev streams is that they seem to have realised this issue and are taking steps to try and avoid stacking S#&$-tons of armour ON TOP of S#&$-tons of health.

Actually, here's a 3D graph of the relationship, slightly re-scaled to fit into the display area. Note the diagonally-oriented parabola That's the shape of EHP progression if both HP and armour are increased in equal measure. You'll note that progressing any of the two in isolation is still linear, but the steepness of the lines for "one" grows the higher the "other" becomes. Because of the multiplication [EHP = HP*(1 + A/300))] the effect of the two is cumulative, at most quadratic.

Long story shot, the "issue of armour" is that using both it and HP to scale EHP causes cascading issues.

[CopperBezel]

3 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Yes, the Corrosive proc will reduce armour, but you need rather a large amount of procs to have any meaningful impact, and that requires high-Status weapons, in particular 100% Status shotguns which heavily limits weapon choice.

Machine guns, burst rifles, fast melee. Like, 100% status shotguns can utterly eliminate armor, but a burst rifle with normal levels of multishot and status will still more than halve armor in the first burst, and that isn't nothing. 

It's still a stupid system, because Corrosive is the only status effect that stacks this way - everything else is either a one-off effect that merely refreshes with a second proc or a DoT based on weapon damage under some formula, or both like Heat is now. The raw number of times something procs status matters only for Corrosive. But to be clear, it very much does benefit the player.

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, CopperBezel said:

It's still a stupid system, because Corrosive is the only status effect that stacks this way - everything else is either a one-off effect that merely refreshes with a second proc or a DoT based on weapon damage under some formula, or both like Heat is now. The raw number of times something procs status matters only for Corrosive. But to be clear, it very much does benefit the player.

I agree. Warframe's implementation of armour is honestly rifle with systemic problems, and I can't think of any other reason for it BUT an attempt at mimicking real life. See, shields don't have the same issues as armour since the Magnetic shield capacity debuff is temporary - even on enemies. You kill their shields for a bit, then they come back. We COULD do the same for armour, but making it make sense visually and thematically would be a bit different. The closest I could think would be what The Division 2 does, which is to say replaceable armour plates.

Completely off-the-wall suggestion I'm figuring out as I type, but what if: Say ANY amount of damage dealt to a Grineer soldier deals damage to both health AND armour. Once brought down past a point, Grineer soldiers will try to run away, break sight and simply replace their armour plates with some simple animation. If you let them do that, they return with the same amount of health but full armour. That way ALL weapons deal damage to armour the same way all weapons deal damage to shields, but that damage is - or can be - temporary. Corrosive, then, can shred additional armour as its status effect.

[--END--Rikutatis]

17 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

---

And just because it has to be said - I do want to apologise for reacting as I did initially. I genuinely doubted the sincerity and good faith of your argument, because it genuinely seemed you were looking to pick a fight over making an actual point. Seems like I misjudged you. Sorry about that.

 

That's cool man, no hard feelings at all. I won't go into a lot of details in my response to the rest of your post to keep my reply from being too long, but Liches are different from normal enemies due to their extra resistances, weaknesses and etc (regarding your comment about lvl 4 to 5 lich). As I said earlier, I don't think armor (and the rest of WF's combat for that matter) is well designed and balanced at this point, but without a full overhaul of the system this will be nothing but another step into making the game easier and more trivial IMO. Because atm armor is just another speed bump you need to take into account when building and playing, specially at higher levels (and no, I don't simply go 4x CP squad to deal with armor, that's boring for me, I just enjoy coming up with different loadouts and frames to deal with armor at high levels, specially because I used to play solo alot. My primary almost never has corrosive, it's either a utility secondary, frame ability or some other way). 

 

10 hours ago, Thrymm said:

The current system leaves us modding corrosive(armor removal) with a side order or heat(more armor removal) and preferably slash(because, get this, it ignores armor, because we wanna start making damage before we strip it all).  About the only time you'll find a deviation is when you're running 4 CP, then viral/slash is the way to go because you're already ignoring the armor, so why not halve the health at that point?  If we weren't constantly doing this, we might actually get to mod weapons, instead of running what might as well be a pre-packaged anti-armor kit that any pleeb can figure out.

 

You see, some of you guys keep saying this, and yet you're just wrong. The only reason you can get away with this lazy 'put corrosive on everything' mindset is due to how our dmg is extremely overkill and enemy levels too low for our DPS. Plus youtuber cookie cutter builds telling ppl what to do. Your statement above is misguided in many ways. If you can get away with corrosive killing everything, even stuff without armor, that's simply because our DPS is WAY overkill for level 80-100. In fact, our current DPS is more appropriate for killing enemies around lvl 300-400 for most top primaries and secondaries. At really high levels you're just wasting DPS and mod space by modding everything with corrosive. Specially if going against non-grineer. Plus, if right now you can get away with killing everything with corrosive, because our DPS is overkill and power creeped to hell, then if armor becomes a non-issue elements simply won't matter. Everything will die no matter what you put on your weapon. It won't create build diversity, people will just mod for raw damage and crit. 

It's like melee 3.0 and people saying it made melee builds more diverse. It really didn't. It made all melee weapon types viable and thus melee combat more diverse, which is great but a different thing. Before in melee 2.0 builds were either status with CO or crit based (as well as hybrid). Now with melee 3.0 builds are either heavy attack or crit based (plus hybrid). It changed the meta, but didn't really create more build diversity. Just swapped one mod selection for another. Same will happen if they make armor irrelevant. It won't be an utopia of builds, people will just move on to the next most efficient cookie cutter builds. 

 

5 hours ago, CopperBezel said:

...

There aren't any weapons that won't always do better with Corrosive at 80-100. Slash doesn't really shine yet at that point, since armor is still easy to strip, but because Corrosive double dips on its health type advantage against Ferrite and gets a bonus while also ignoring 75% of armor, it'll do more damage to an armored unit even without proccing status than Heat or Viral does to a unit affected by their respective procs. Radiation gets the same double-dipped bonus against Alloy but without the chance of stripping armor, and since Alloy units are much rarer, it's not really as much an option as Corrosive or even Slash in most cases.

The Corpus in the Index use Alloy, and it's pretty illustrative to play alternately with Corrosive and Radiation builds, because you can see how much a difference the type advantage gives you and how much the proc does. By the third round, they've got enough armor that Corrosive starts taking over again thanks to the proc.

Well, what's wrong with that is that Grineer are the only faction we're worried about building our weapons for, because they're the only ones that can take a few hits, so there are three elements worth building for, and heat only if you can get it as a free bonus proc in there somewhere without losing too much of your damage into a type that doesn't come with a giant advantage. They also have three elements for which status effects are a way of causing damage to effective health, while other factions have only Viral. (We'll see whether the shield rework makes those relevant enough to consider Magnetic here too.) If every faction was like the Grineer and had only a couple of viable damage types that worked on them, we'd have an annoying ritual of switching weapon builds for every mission and possibly take two different elements for Void missions, and I don't think that would be ideal either, but right now there's no point bothering to build for the weaknesses of the other two factions. Ideally, if we need to have these vulnerabilities at all, they'd stop being faction things and be mixed up among the factions instead.

I think I already addressed some of your points with my replies to other ppl above, but just to add to that: you're not correct about corrosive being the best damage type against grineer at lvl 80-100 in _every_ circumstance. As someone else said above, depends on the grineer. Let's take the two main grineer heavy units, gunner and bombard as examples. And a slow fire, high burst weapon like rubico or other snipers. Against hvy gunner, corrosive will kill faster. But against a bombard, a radiation modded rubico will kill much faster than corrosive. Because bombards are weak to rad, not corrosive. And against BOTH of them, a viral hunter munitions will be the fastest, while also indirectly increasing your DPS by allowing you to shoot other targets while the bleed procs kill the first ones. We're just too used to leaving corrosive on everything because we can get away with it due to our overkill power creeped DPS. The newly released Kuva bramma one shots everything at that level, doesn't matter what elements you put in it (but since primaries have a primed cold mod, it's more damage to use a cold based combo). And I mean, these are just some examples. 

[ShortCat]

2 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Not quite. "Grineer" aren't weak to Corrosive damage. SOME Grineer are. Plenty of them - the ones with the most EHP - use Alloy armour which is at best neutral against Corrosive. What they're weak to is Radiation. Additionally, all Grineer are weak to Viral, but you don't see a lot of people use that because it's can't double-dip into bonus damage AND reduced armour. Yes, the Corrosive proc will reduce armour, but you need rather a large amount of procs to have any meaningful impact, and that requires high-Status weapons, in particular 100% Status shotguns which heavily limits weapon choice. Reducing Grineer armour to something sane means using Radiation and Corrosive, as well as in general using Critical-based weapons becomes a lot more viable. A lot more weapons re-enter the field, and so we're better able to pick the weapon we LIKE, rather than the weapon which game mechanics tell us to use.

Actually, I have the most build variety against Grineer or armored enemies in general. I either use Armor strip builds with Corrosive or Shattering Impact; or I bypass Armor with Slash/Slash+Viral loadouts. It all depends in the weapon.
Your weapon choices are not limited to status Shotguns. You need weapons with rapid status application. Tysis, Pox or Mutalist Cernos deal with Armor rather quickly. Furthermore, it is not required to completely strip Armor, often it is enough to strip portions while steadely increasing applied damage. Depending on a weapon you do not want to overstrip, because you would lose bonus damage from heavely moded Corrosive element.
Given how Viral works, enemies need high DR, otherwise people wouldn't use anything else, as it can halve HP and has a 75% boost against Cloned Flash. At this point I leave the math to you to figure out how much DR a Grineer needs, so that Viral does not undermine Radiation or Corrosive and does not become the universal element against Alloyed as well as Ferrite Armor types. Done wrong, we will get a second Shields - Toxin relationship and some more elements will join Magnetic in the "useless corner".

This is why I said, we need enemy as well as damage as well as Arsenal as well as mods rework, all at the same time with a comprehensive design. Pulling only one lever will destabilize the whole construct.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Long story shot, the "issue of armour" is that using both it and HP to scale EHP causes cascading issues.

While this is undeniably true, what is the problem? eHP values are indeed absurd at the later stages, but we usually do not operate there. What do I care how the graph behaves at 500 lvl mark, when lvl 150 is the highest 95% of players will ever see? Furthermore, this absurd scaling was ment to turn enemies indestructible to push the player out of the mission. In this regard - Armor works as intended. Nevertheless, players still have access to tools to murder armored targets with the right build.

[CopperBezel]

2 hours ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

You see, some of you guys keep saying this, and yet you're just wrong. The only reason you can get away with this lazy 'put corrosive on everything' mindset is due to how our dmg is extremely overkill and enemy levels too low for our DPS. Plus youtuber cookie cutter builds telling ppl what to do. Your statement above is misguided in many ways. If you can get away with corrosive killing everything, even stuff without armor, that's simply because our DPS is WAY overkill for level 80-100. In fact, our current DPS is more appropriate for killing enemies around lvl 300-400 for most top primaries and secondaries. At really high levels you're just wasting DPS and mod space by modding everything with corrosive. Specially if going against non-grineer. Plus, if right now you can get away with killing everything with corrosive, because our DPS is overkill and power creeped to hell, then if armor becomes a non-issue elements simply won't matter. Everything will die no matter what you put on your weapon. It won't create build diversity, people will just mod for raw damage and crit. 

It's a slightly different way of saying "there's no point in building for anything but armor", but the issue is that 75% armor-ignore is broken and shouldn't be on the same element as an armor strip. And all the YouTubers put Hunter Munitions on everything, even weapons with poor crit and fire rate that take three seconds to actually land on a bleed effect with it, so let's not talk about "lazy". 

If damage types didn't matter, then we would indeed see more "build diversity," in so far as having different elements constitutes having a different build, and that's frankly the only way you're going to. Having a given damage type be good or bad against a faction was always a terrible idea. Either you switch builds on a per-faction basis, which is a dumb little ritual with no gameplay meaning, or you will indeed be using a non-ideal damage type. As long as there's a most effective damage type, there's no difficulty or thought involved in selecting it.

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I agree. Warframe's implementation of armour is honestly rifle with systemic problems, and I can't think of any other reason for it BUT an attempt at mimicking real life. See, shields don't have the same issues as armour since the Magnetic shield capacity debuff is temporary - even on enemies. You kill their shields for a bit, then they come back. We COULD do the same for armour, but making it make sense visually and thematically would be a bit different. The closest I could think would be what The Division 2 does, which is to say replaceable armour plates.

Eh, Heat is technically Magnetic for armor in the same sense that it's Viral for armor, which is to say that all three of those effects apply only while the proc is active and there's one each for armor, shields, and health. Corrosive is just inconsistent with how all other status procs work. Deliberately so, and it's meant to be a special case, but that doesn't make it make sense within the system. It wouldn't really matter if it was temporary, because as long as it's a stacking effect it's doing something no other status can. In the same way that if viral continued to halve health on successive procs, even if temporarily, then that would be the only element in the game. 

Edited February 25, 2020 by CopperBezel

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

As I said earlier, I don't think armor (and the rest of WF's combat for that matter) is well designed and balanced at this point, but without a full overhaul of the system this will be nothing but another step into making the game easier and more trivial IMO. Because atm armor is just another speed bump you need to take into account when building and playing, specially at higher levels (and no, I don't simply go 4x CP squad to deal with armor, that's boring for me, I just enjoy coming up with different loadouts and frames to deal with armor at high levels, specially because I used to play solo alot. My primary almost never has corrosive, it's either a utility secondary, frame ability or some other way). 

You're never going to see a full-scale redesign of everything. I may not have been with Warframe since the beginning, but I've seen enough of how DE work to know this simply isn't in the cards. They do piecemeal changes which often don't work on their own, but are implied to be aimed at some overall, eventual goal. How long did we have to work with melee 2.9 before we got the full set of Melee 3.0 changes? And even then, how long before Block becomes a separate action from Aim (to the extent that autoblock doesn't trigger an Aimglide, at least)? I don't know what your opinion on Melee 3.0 is and that's besides the point anyway - I'm only bringing it to show that this is how DE do things. They make isolated changes, and if we're lucky that ends up amounting to a major design shift over time.

The reason I believe we're due for larger changes is almost purely mathematical. I obviously can't read individual developers' minds, but there's a lot of intent implied in their actions. It's pretty clear that armour was at some point designed or redesigned to scale linearly with EHP, but a developer later went back and rejiggered level scaling to override this decision and scale EHP exponentially with critter level. It's also pretty clear that even the initial design which intended for armour to scale linearly with EHP was itself flawed, in that it assumed scaling EITHER with health OR armour individually, but seems to have either missed or ignored how EHP scales when BOTH armour AND health scale proportionally. At that point, EHP begins to scale quadratically and so begins to cascade.

DE's recent actions - the Kosma ground troops stats, the changes to Kosma spacecraft armour and health and now the talk of chaning overall armour scaling - speak to a recognition of the issues I outlined above. They speak to a desire to reduce the impact of armour and weigh EHP more heavily towards health, with the idea of making EHP scale kinda-sorta linearly with enemy level again. They seem to want to use armour to spike enemy EHP in the 30-70 range, then level off and transition to relying more on health as a means of scaling EHP beyond that point. That second part hasn't happened and I'm obviously guesstimating that it will... But it makes sense that it will, because I don't see a compelling reason to go this route otherwise.

It's entirely possible that DE are just guessing blind and I'm reading too far into their comments, fair enough. However, I don't like to assume that people are just stupid, and Warframe has a wealth of clever math buried inside it enough to convince me that these guys know what they're talking about at least some of the time. They seem to have become change-averse so these kinds of feeble attempts at testing the waters are what we should expect, but I still feel that there's a high chance that we'll see further changes beyond just armour. Maybe enemy EHP, maybe to our guns, maybe to something else. But I for one am hopeful that we're going to see actual attempts at balance, rather than this special-case exception nonsense of innate resistances and ability immunity and status immunity and all the other bullS#&$ that made the Wolf of Saturn Six such a terrible boss.

 

2 hours ago, ShortCat said:

While this is undeniably true, what is the problem? eHP values are indeed absurd at the later stages, but we usually do not operate there. What do I care how the graph behaves at 500 lvl mark, when lvl 150 is the highest 95% of players will ever see? Furthermore, this absurd scaling was ment to turn enemies indestructible to push the player out of the mission. In this regard - Armor works as intended. Nevertheless, players still have access to tools to murder armored targets with the right build.

Because that's hard to control for DE themselves. From what I can tell, both health and armour scaling is determined by a broad-spectrum formula which impacts all critters and all levels. When health and armour cascade in ways that just health or health and shields don't, you end up with an outlier which grows progressively more extreme the higher levels go, to the point where design paradigms just end up breaking down altogether. And the issue isn't restricted to 500+. Armour spikes significantly enough to cut out a lot of weapon viability somewhere between levels 80 and 100. Maybe if DE had kept level ranges lower like they are in the rest of the game, keeping us in the 40-60 range I wouldn't have too much criticism because the cascading isn't THAT prominent there. However, they keep releasing level 100 content, and at that point you need to address these cascading issues.

The level scaling system has painted DE into a corner. They're trying to build a house of cards while wearing boxing gloves, essentially. It's not impossible, but every little movement risks knocking over a whole bunch of other things along the way. You can't boost weapon damage to match armour EHP because it trivialises everything that's not armoured and pushing heavy anti-armour options has the knock-on effect of restricting build choice TO those options. Once again - you can't really balance a game when stats vary THIS wildly both from player to player and from enemy to enemy. Reducing the gaps is the only real way to ensure balance is even reasonable.

[CopperBezel]

45 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

However, I don't like to assume that people are just stupid, and Warframe has a wealth of clever math buried inside it enough to convince me that these guys know what they're talking about at least some of the time.

I'm positively convinced that the people who understand math are not the people who understand design and vice versa. There's no other explanation for shotgun status, where they did the right math on a funky statistical formula and didn't notice it created an exponential curve that doubles in the last 1%. And then there's how the word "efficiency" means two different things represented three different ways for abilities, combo, and HP/MP conversion.

[GKP_light]

il y a une heure, Steel_Rook a dit :

However, I don't like to assume that people are just stupid, and Warframe has a wealth of clever math buried inside it enough to convince me that these guys know what they're talking about at least some of the time.

this formula would be very good for a word were the strongest ennemis are level 50 ; so at the creation of warframe.

but now, we fight ennemis level 160. 

 

[Aldain]

4 hours ago, ShortCat said:

While this is undeniably true, what is the problem? eHP values are indeed absurd at the later stages, but we usually do not operate there. What do I care how the graph behaves at 500 lvl mark, when lvl 150 is the highest 95% of players will ever see? Furthermore, this absurd scaling was ment to turn enemies indestructible to push the player out of the mission. In this regard - Armor works as intended. Nevertheless, players still have access to tools to murder armored targets with the right build.

I'd say the issue more stems from just how quickly it spikes at the moment, the difference between level 30 and 60 Grineer is a dramatically larger difference between level 15 and level 100 Corpus or Infested, because of this the gameplay devolves into "If it can kill Grineer it can kill anything else just as easily".

As an example to what I'm talking about, when we compare a Corpus Tech to a Heavy Gunner of the same levels I've noted we see something hilarious that occurs.

Heavy Gunners have a little over 11k eHP at level 30, increase that to 60 and it jumps to around 137k, compared to a Tech which starts at 15 with 950 health and even by level 100 only hits around 90k, in order for a Corpus Tech to reach roughly the same level of durability as a 60 Heavy Gunner it would need to be about level 120, exactly twice the level of where a Heavy Gunner would be, which means that any weapon that can easily handle a level 60 HG could obliterate Corpus of up to twice the level with no issue.

For added fun, a level 120 Heavy Gunner sports a MASSIVE 1.947mil eHP which is more than 10 times the eHP of a Heavy Gunner at half the level.

The issue of the armor scaling is that it limits the gameplay options severely, because the moment you get something that can handle Grineer like they are nothing you get something that can handle Corpus and Infested at nearly double the level just as easily.

Edited February 25, 2020 by Aldain

[GKP_light]

il y a 55 minutes, Aldain a dit :

....

For added fun, a level 120 Heavy Gunner sports a MASSIVE 1.947mil eHP which is more than 10 times the eHP of a Heavy Gunner at half the level.

...

so summery the différence of scaling : 

the ehp of Griner are in O( level ^ 3.75 )

The ehp of Corpus and Infested are in  O( level ^ 2 )

 

edit : i did some graph of the ehp of a crewman, and a lancer. (base unit of corpus and grineer)

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Crewman

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Lancer

 

Edited February 26, 2020 by GKP_light

[CopperBezel]

Yeah, but armor is still inherently weird, and you still do not simply punch through it. As soon as we're talking 90% and up reduction, you are either circumventing or stripping that armor. And at level 60, that Heavy Gunner's already at 90%.

That level 60 Tech has an eHP of 26k according to the wiki. Thanks to armor ignore and bonus, the Heavy Gunner has the equivalent of 25k against Corrosive ignoring any strip effects. The Tech has two separate health types if you want to have a similar % effect, but you can of course use toxin and ignore shields entirely while getting a 50% bonus, bringing him under 15k. The lowest health you can possibly have to deal with with the Tech would be using Toxin to bypass shields while he's under the effect of a Viral proc, for 11k / 1.5 or the equivalent of 7.3k damage (that is, you'd see a larger number over his head but it'd be 7.3k in the Arsenal). The Gunner has 12.5k health under the armor, and Grineer health has extra vulnerability to viral, so it'd be the equivalent of 7.1k damage, or half that with a viral proc.

In theory, they both have special things to circumvent to get to dealing damage normally and extra vulnerabilties, and the Gunner can technically be cut down a bit lower. In practice, you shoot them both with 25k worth of Corrosive and they go down at the same time.

Edited February 25, 2020 by CopperBezel

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, CopperBezel said:

I'm positively convinced that the people who understand math are not the people who understand design and vice versa. There's no other explanation for shotgun status, where they did the right math on a funky statistical formula and didn't notice it created an exponential curve that doubles in the last 1%. And then there's how the word "efficiency" means two different things represented three different ways for abilities, combo, and HP/MP conversion.

Just because I want to be pedantic, it's it's actually a "radical" curve because your variable is under a root (i.e. 0 >= exponent < 1). That doesn't change the substance of your post, of course, but it's something I was curious about a while ago and had to go read up on.

More to your point - agreed completely. Per-pellet Status chance for weapons with innate multishot is a frikkin is a really smart, really bad solution. Mathematically it's clever, because it models the Status chance of each individual pellet such that it adds up to the given chance to proc at least one Status per shot across all pellets. I'm legitimately impressed by the rigour there. Unfortunately, it produces a radical function which cascades dramatically towards 100% and produces a stat which is both mislabelled and misleading. It's mislabelled because it's called just "Status chance" with no additional clarification to signify that that's the statistical probability to proc at least one Status effect per shot. It's misleading because you can alter this stat via both Multishot mods AND Status chance mods, but only the former affect per-pellet status chance. It's ALSO misleading because "at least one proc" is a meaningless metric which doesn't tell you the expected average number of procs per shot and THAT is what people generally care about.

Waframe's design frustrates the hell out of me. There are moments of really clever math like this, but they're all too often used badly or entirely circumvented by other design decisions. It feels almost like they had a "pity mathematician" on the team at some point, let this person do a few things that nobody understood the root justification for, then sort of moved on without that person. I don't THINK that's what happened because it seems highly... I was going to say "unprofessional" but let's go with "unlikely." However, there's a distinct lack of overt mathematical rigour on display in Warframe's design, and that's causing a lot of honestly pretty complicated problems.

[Thrymm]

11 hours ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

You see, some of you guys keep saying this, and yet you're just wrong. The only reason you can get away with this lazy 'put corrosive on everything' mindset is due to how our dmg is extremely overkill and enemy levels too low for our DPS. Plus youtuber cookie cutter builds telling ppl what to do. Your statement above is misguided in many ways. If you can get away with corrosive killing everything, even stuff without armor, that's simply because our DPS is WAY overkill for level 80-100. In fact, our current DPS is more appropriate for killing enemies around lvl 300-400 for most top primaries and secondaries. At really high levels you're just wasting DPS and mod space by modding everything with corrosive. Specially if going against non-grineer. Plus, if right now you can get away with killing everything with corrosive, because our DPS is overkill and power creeped to hell, then if armor becomes a non-issue elements simply won't matter. Everything will die no matter what you put on your weapon. It won't create build diversity, people will just mod for raw damage and crit. 

It's like melee 3.0 and people saying it made melee builds more diverse. It really didn't. It made all melee weapon types viable and thus melee combat more diverse, which is great but a different thing. Before in melee 2.0 builds were either status with CO or crit based (as well as hybrid). Now with melee 3.0 builds are either heavy attack or crit based (plus hybrid). It changed the meta, but didn't really create more build diversity. Just swapped one mod selection for another. Same will happen if they make armor irrelevant. It won't be an utopia of builds, people will just move on to the next most efficient cookie cutter builds. 

 

No, we're not wrong, enemy level is not the only reason we get away with corrosive on everything.  The simple reality is that corrosive is the best possible damage on anything with armor because armor scaling is so high that no amount of anything else equals the amount of damage gain obtained by armor reduction.  As if that's not quite enough, the only negative you'll find on corrosive is to proto-shielding, which protects a precious few units, all of which also either have armor or fall quickly to the rest of the corrosive/slash/heat combo(cherry picking the corrosive out of this doesn't tell the whole story, even though it tells enough to justify it).

As far as enemy level being inaccurate versus our DPS, I'm not so sure.  This is solely based upon the TTK(time to kill) that DE wants us to be achieving, not necessarily what we think we should be doing.  I'd vehemently disagree with anyone that thinks I should be unloading whole clips into every single Bombard I meet in order to kill it because that's simply not the game I want to play, I just don't want to deal with a TTK that high.  On the same token, I'd also agree that I don't particularly want to go around one shotting everything either.  Bullet sponge doesn't really add something important in comparison to one shot easy kills, it just adds a time sink before the same result.

Unfortunately at current, we just don't really have to think about it, modding just isn't hard in this game.  Go corrosive/heat/slash and win the game.  It doesn't matter if you understand why it works or not because it just works everywhere.  Anything else you do may very well work better in a select situation, but won't necessarily work in others within the very same mission.  The standard, cookie cutter corrosive build will kill the things it isn't optimal against and drastically excel versus the things it is advantageous against.  No other build or damage types do this, all of them become more targeted in some way--nothing except the corrosive/slash/heat combo encompasses the same level of either reward or neutral damage output.  It's completely out of balance with the rest of the elements, and frankly corrosive has been this way since more or less the beginning.

Corpus and Infested can be killed using other means, the only problem with them is that they simply aren't difficult---it doesn't matter what you use, which means you may as well mod for Grineer and just leave it that way.  Heck, I see minus damage to corpus or infested as a viable negative on Riven mods simply because it doesn't matter, in the current game I'll simply never meet one I can't just mow straight through anyway(I have a job, I'm never going to see what level a 23hr survival corpus is)  If you want some diversity, you can make a reasonable go with something else, it's just that it's not at all necessary at any reasonable or even semi-unreasonable level(even level 400), ever.  That's the current state of build diversity.

The proposed change to armor scaling doesn't make armor a non-issue, however.  It just makes it less of an issue, and perhaps even one that doesn't necessarily have to be the focus of your whole build strategy.  When damage reduction is 75% and over, you're in a spot that you've got to focus on reducing this and no other strategy will be viable.  Reducing that damage reduction to 50% may make area effects like gas and electricity worthwhile considerations, for example, or make reducing it by half with heat enough to deal with it.  In other words, it'd still be a consideration but, perhaps not the only consideration.  This is key, because if it DID make it a non-issue, then I'd absolutely agree that it would be counter productive.

It may not be the ONLY thing needed to create an environment conducive to actually thinking about our builds.  On this, I'd certainly agree--corpus and infested never becoming a threat worth building against is a genuine issue that armor scale reworks aren't going to fix.  I do, however, think it's a piece of the puzzle worth considering.

Edited February 26, 2020 by Thrymm
replaced word "low" with "high" in second paragraph

[FireSegment]

On 2020-02-24 at 9:29 PM, --END--Rikutatis said:

I saw dev stream snippets last week where DE talks about nerfing armor scaling up to a point around lvl 75 armor, where past that point it won't scale anymore. And another one where they talk about nerfing enemy scaling, so that enemies go up to around lvl 75 faster, but scale a lot slower after that point. 

please clarify which devstream you are talking about, the lastest devstream we have was about sound design and i don't recall any part of it talked about enemy scaling (and Scott wasn't there). If it was a devstream older than 105 or so, then the information back then kinda outdated since DE clearly took an "embrace the power creep" with their design even before that. If anything, DE would not make it possible to reach 600k red crit heavy attack on melee (to grinner enemy at sortie level) with their rework if the next step is to cap the EHP of all end game enemy to around half of that. I don't recall any instance DE officially announced/discussed about enemy scaling in devstream since before damage 3.0 got scrapped years ago. 

[CopperBezel]

@Thrymm, yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't armor one of the things that modifies DoT twice? I know it happens with type advantage, faction mods, Roar and Toxic Lash, and probably lots of other things, but I definitely had the impression it was why DoT other than Slash seemed so weak against armor. I.e., when an enemy has 90% DR worth of armor, they'll take 10% damage from a heat or toxin attack, but because they're further resisting 90% of each proc, it's only 1% of what the DoT would have been on an unarmored target, which means that the relative value of DoT as a part of damage becomes insignificant against armored targets. I don't feel like things like this are the kind of thing that happen as deliberate design choices. 

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Just because I want to be pedantic, it's it's actually a "radical" curve because your variable is under a root (i.e. 0 >= exponent < 1). That doesn't change the substance of your post, of course, but it's something I was curious about a while ago and had to go read up on.

Gotcha, cool. Thanks for the correction, and I'll remember that for the next time I run into one of these. = ]