The Armor Change And How It Barely Does Anything

[DrBorris]

2 hours ago, ShortCat said:

There is a fallacy in this thought process, because calculated eHP do not matter if you can bypass or greatly reduce armor scaling with anti-armor loadouts. Slash or Viral/Slash set-ups entirely ignore armor scaling and face only HP scaling; while armor strip set-ups do not fight the combined eHP value, but reduce it in big chuncks. At the content range we are operation right now, neither of those options struggle to achieve reasonable TTKs. Stop looking at raw eHP values in a vacuum.

Armor hardly makes enemies significant more resilient, as new Kosma units show. Their durability comes primarily from increased base HP, not armor.

Check the title again. The point of this thread is that the armor changed barely does anything. Even the last line says "These armor scaling changes may be fine, we already have our ways of killing level 100+ enemies". A lot of people have complained about armor scaling, clearly many see it as an issue, so what I wanted to address is that this new S curve on armor won't do much to the effect of actually reducing armor's effectiveness for most content. Especially when compared to shields that, while having a new gimmick with the shield gate, are pathetically weak when compared to an armored enemy. At most a Corpus unit will take double the shots to kill now, and they still have the massive weakness to toxin (slash damage does not bypass armor), the paradigm of armor being "the only thing in town" is not going to change.

While we do have our means of killing those enemies, weapons/loadouts versus armor are far more limited when compared to what are/will be effective versus shields. If DE wanted to balance the factions a bit more, the armor change will very likely not make a dent.

[Steel_Rook]

Thank you kindly for the references. I'll look through those as time permits. Gives me something to look through.

 

18 hours ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

You're right about that. One of the reasons the formula works for Path of Exile is because player weapons of similar level have similar base damage and attackspeed. Meanwhile, Warframe's weapons are all over the place. With my formula, bows and snipers will be armor killers while shotguns and assault rifles will run into trouble. I can't be the one to decide if this is a desirable shift in the meta.

While I'm not entirely opposed to your line of thinking, don't you think it's better to create a brand new "armour penetration" stat on weapons which determines this? I'm mostly referencing World of Tanks with this, because that game has an interesting dynamic. About mid-level in that game, you start seeing wide availability of large 150mm cannons, but most of them are mortars. What that means is they deal A LOT of damage but have fairly little penetration. In theory this makes them good against lightly-armoured vehicles and as a decent fallback. If you're looking for armour penetration, you're better off with 100mm or 120mm long-barrel guns which deal substantially less damage but have much higher penetration. I don't know where Wargaming are with it, but I'm told that they also intend to lower the damage on Gold Ammo, as well. HEAT and APCR shells generally have MUCH higher penetration than the peasant AP ammo most of us use, leading to them absolutely dominating people's loadouts, P2W style. The idea there was to drop their damage and by extension make AP ammo a bit more popular.

Now granted - Warframe isn't World of Tanks (and thank God for that!), but do you not feel like something like this is warranted? Or would you say that this is what the various strengths and weaknesses of various damage types were supposed to do? I guess I'm more asking if armour mitigation is best put in just raw damage, or if tying it to other independent stats might offer a bit more flexibility. After all, do we want ALL high-damage weapons to be good against armour and all low-damage weapons to be bad against it? Isn't that a bit TOO limiting from the standpoint of design? Because this basically means that we'll never get to use shotguns and autorifles against the Grineer without really offering much room for choice on their the player or developer side. Again - not really a criticism, so much as I'm curious about your opinion on the matter.

 

18 hours ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

I can't find any data on enemy base damage numbers either, but I do have formulas on enemy level scaling: https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Enemy_Level_Scaling#Damage

Supposing that a Heavy Gunner deals 25 damage (the base damage of the Gorgon) per shot at level 8 (her base level), then her damage at level 100 should be:

Current Damage = Base Damage * (1 + (Current Level - Base Level) ^ 1.55 * 0.015) = 25 * (1 + (100 - 8 ^ 1.55 * 0.015) = ~440

Interesting... See, the reason I ask is I remember Heavy Gunners on Mot being able to deal easily 2000 DPS to my Inaros through something like 1000 armour, but I guess part of that might be rate of fire. Still, this is a number I can use, so let's run that through your formula. Honestly, just because I want to see what it says 🙂

Let's say "standard Inaros," meaning 620 armour. At 440 per shot, that would be 620 / (440 + 620) = 0.585 vs. 620 / (300 + 620) = 0.674. Hmm... So even again a rapid-fire enemy, that's still a decrease in resistance. Do you think maybe weighing damage a bit lower might be warranted in your formula? Say counting only 50% to 75% of damage in the resistance formula?

I guess that's kind of an empty question, though, in the absence of comprehensive enemy damage numbers to check against.

[ShortCat]

1 hour ago, DrBorris said:

Check the title again. The point of this thread is that the armor changed barely does anything. Even the last line says "These armor scaling changes may be fine, we already have our ways of killing level 100+ enemies". A lot of people have complained about armor scaling, clearly many see it as an issue, so what I wanted to address is that this new S curve on armor won't do much to the effect of actually reducing armor's effectiveness for most content. Especially when compared to shields that, while having a new gimmick with the shield gate, are pathetically weak when compared to an armored enemy. At most a Corpus unit will take double the shots to kill now, and they still have the massive weakness to toxin (slash damage does not bypass armor), the paradigm of armor being "the only thing in town" is not going to change.

I just wanted to point out, that often stated "eHP double dipping" as well as "limited options" arguments against armor are kinda baseless. I also do not understand what a lower armor scaling could/should actually achieve under the current damage model. I would say armor is the last functioning system of aged damage 2.0 model, because it is barely holding agianst massive power creep. Damage 3.0 is long overdue.

For the upcomming armor changes, we will have to wait and see how those will affect the game in the end. My worst case is that early game will become more lax, untill armor scaling kicks in and there will be even more complains from unprepared Tenno.
Shield gate could have a sizeable impact depending on its time window. Especially spray and pray AoE weapons like Kuva Bramma or Acceltra will be hit hard, due to their unreliability to score headshots. I expect a lot of whine threads.

1 hour ago, DrBorris said:

While we do have our means of killing those enemies, weapons/loadouts versus armor are far more limited when compared to what are/will be effective versus shields. If DE wanted to balance the factions a bit more, the armor change will very likely not make a dent.

I would say shields offer even less variety in modding, espially with upcomming gate gimmick, you either go Toxin or if status is high enough Gas. That's it. On the other hand, effective anti-armor loadouts consist of Corr + Corr/Heat + Slash + Slash/Viral + Gas options, depending on weapon. The reason people can complete early Corpus missions with any loadout with ease is our power creeped arsenal. When you hit higher lvls it will require special loadouts. Armor just punishes wrong builds earlier. This is the simple truth that simulates greater variety, while the whole time weakpoint exploitation is the supperior option.

[Dracus_Dakkrius]

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Now granted - Warframe isn't World of Tanks (and thank God for that!), but do you not feel like something like this is warranted? Or would you say that this is what the various strengths and weaknesses of various damage types were supposed to do? I guess I'm more asking if armour mitigation is best put in just raw damage, or if tying it to other independent stats might offer a bit more flexibility. After all, do we want ALL high-damage weapons to be good against armour and all low-damage weapons to be bad against it? Isn't that a bit TOO limiting from the standpoint of design? Because this basically means that we'll never get to use shotguns and autorifles against the Grineer without really offering much room for choice on their the player or developer side. Again - not really a criticism, so much as I'm curious about your opinion on the matter.

Personally, I kind of like the idea of raw damage playing a role in armor penetration. But I can see how my formula could remove variety from combat. Like you said, I'm hoping the strengths and weaknesses of various damage types will offer enough flexibility.

Currently in Warframe, the most common way, other than Status, to penetrate Armor is through Damage Modifiers.

The formula for Damage Modifiers against armored enemies is taken from the following page: https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Damage#Damage_Calculation

Damage Modifier = 300 / (300 + Armor Rating * (1 - Armor Modifier)) * (1 + Armor Modifier) * (1 + Health Modifier)

An interesting thing to note about Armor Class is that its Damage Modifiers apply twice, directly modifying both armor and damage. Armor Modifiers modifying armor makes sense; it creates the impression that the Damage Type is penetrating armor. However, I don't like that Armor Modifiers also directly modify damage, because that is supposed to be the role of Health Modifiers. So long as something has at least 1 point of Ferrite Armor, it will always take +75% damage from Corrosive. But once that 1 point of Ferrite Armor is gone, Armor Modifiers no longer apply. That makes no sense. Also, because of this, there is never any reason to mod for any Damage Type other than for the highest Armor Modifier.

If I were to revise my own formula to include Armor Modifiers, this is how I would do it: the Damage Modifier is calculated separately for each Damage Type. Armor is divided among each Damage Type proportional to the amount of each Damage Type. e.g. If an attack has 50% Puncture and 25% each of Impact and Slash, then Puncture receives 50% of the target's armor while Impact and Slash each receive 25% of the target's armor.

Let the Damage Modifier formula be:

Damage Modifier = (Damage * (1 + Armor Modifier)) / (Damage * (1 + Armor Modifier) + Armor Rating * (1 - Armor Modifier)) * (1 + Health Modifier)

Now suppose a Grineer with 100 Ferrite Armor receives an attack composed of 50 Puncture (+50% vs Ferrite Armor), 25 Impact (-25% vs Cloned Flesh), and 25 Slash (-25% vs Ferrite Armor, +25% vs Cloned Flesh).

Puncture Damage = 50 * (50 * (1 + 0.5)) / (50 * (1 + 0.5) + 50 * (1 - 0.5)) = 37.5

Impact Damage = 25 * (25) / (25 + 25) * (1 - 0.25) = ~9.38

Slash Damage = 25 * (25 * (1 - 0.15)) / (25 * (1 - 0.15) + 25 * (1 + 0.15)) * (1 + 0.25) = ~13.28

Total Damage = 37.5 + 9.38 + 13.28 = 60.16

That's a bit more than the expected damage value of 50 that would have come out of the formula in my previous posts.

Now suppose a Grineer with 100 Ferrite Armor receives an attack composed of 100 Corrosive damage.

Total Damage = 100 * (100 * (1 + 0.75)) / (100 * (1 + 0.75) + 100 * (1 - 0.75)) = 87.5

That's a lot more than the expected damage value of 50 from before.

I think this revised formula might create an interesting dynamic. Low damage weapons will want to mod for the highest Armor Modifier, while high damage weapons that already penetrate most armor will want to mod for the highest Health Modifier. I think this might be balanced if low damage weapons generally have slightly higher raw DPS than higher damage weapons.

This is all without getting into stuff like Status, which DE has said will be changing in coming updates.

EDIT: Another way to include Damage Modifiers without separating Damage Types would be to take the sum of each Damage Type modified by its respective Armor Modifier:

Total Modified Damage = Damage_1 * (1 + Armor_Modifier_1) + Damage_2 * (1 + Armor_Modifier_2) + ... + Damage_N * (1 + Armor_Modifier_N)

Then plug it into the following formula which will multiply the total damage in the final damage calculation:

Total Damage Modifier = (Total Modified Damage) / (Total Modified Damage + Armor Rating) * (1 + Health Modifier)

However, the effect of Armor Modifiers will be much less, since it will not be modifying armor directly.

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Let's say "standard Inaros," meaning 620 armour. At 440 per shot, that would be 620 / (440 + 620) = 0.585 vs. 620 / (300 + 620) = 0.674. Hmm... So even again a rapid-fire enemy, that's still a decrease in resistance. Do you think maybe weighing damage a bit lower might be warranted in your formula? Say counting only 50% to 75% of damage in the resistance formula?

Were my formula to be implemented, generally you will be weaker than before against enemies that deal more than 300 damage per hit, but stronger than before against enemies that deal less than 300 damage per hit.

Like you said, putting a coefficient somewhere in my formula might be necessary. I'd probably have to look at the exact damage numbers for all enemies at all levels to get a good idea for what that coefficient should be, though. And since player armor values and enemy damage values are all over the place, not to mention that players and enemies scale differently, that might be difficult. I would rather revise the base armor values for warframes and armor bonuses from all sources instead, since these are things that I think need to be eventually looked over anyways, regardless of whether or not Armor's Damage Reduction formula is changed.

Edited March 2, 2020 by Dracus_Dakkrius

[(PSN)Spider_Enigma]

enemy damage is the issue not the armor

change my mind

[Divinehero]

at the very least it's the 1st step towards dealing w/ this trainwreck of an issue w/ armor/health scaling

[Xzorn]

It's obviously not going to make much difference. The larger contribution Armor makes is the lower range not when it's in the millions.
Players just don't notice because we do so much damage.

Players are just forcing through armor instead of dealing with it then complain about Armor scaling. You can't compare eHP for Armor because Corrosive status is an eHP counter to it. You cannot compare eHP values with two variables that scale exponentially against others that don't. That's silly. Corrosive procs literally do millions of eHP in damage at high levels. Only Viral compares but that's a one time deal while Corrosive can just spray millions of eHP per second on Armor.

When you actually gear to fight a faction; armor means very little compared to raw HP values. I've done plenty of lvl 400+ Solo runs. The faction's durability isn't a question ever. It's how some of their abilities break and I would agree with the other poster. Damage scaling is and has always been the problem.

[Avienas]

8 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

It's obviously not going to make much difference. The larger contribution Armor makes is the lower range not when it's in the millions.
Players just don't notice because we do so much damage.then

Exactly, because everyone is not concerning themselves on the threshold of a enemy`s durability when you deal reasonable damage, they are more concerned at reaching just overkill due to how enemies just scale up to negate any reason for a tuned build because the only way to deal with a hoarde looter shooter with scaling enemies is just overkill stack abuse.

This is kind of why i would prefer instead of enemies getting more absurdly durable at higher levels, they get more vicious in terms of attacking you such as rushing with larger crowds, doing more nasty actions as if they have a better idea on how to take out tenno and its not because of b.s. aura abuse from eximus units, auto lock grapple hooks and enemies with absurdly over-tuned damage like noxes and osprey grenade `nukes` and even bombards, which is more of the reason enemies get cheap, since enemies could be level 1000 and can easily be managed with plenty of warframes with ridiculous ease.

8 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

Players are just forcing through armor instead of dealing with it then complain about Armor scaling. You can't compare eHP for Armor because Corrosive status is an eHP counter to it. You cannot compare eHP values with two variables that scale exponentially against others that don't. That's silly. Corrosive procs literally do millions of eHP in damage at high levels. Only Viral compares but that's a one time deal while Corrosive can just spray millions of eHP per second on Armor.

This is kind of why i keep bashing on how elemental types are quite unbalanced, when you take into account all the health & armor types, on top of how few of the elemental types even have a stacking gag to them, it pretty much makes best wei to resolve everything is whatever is the most neutral plus damage bonus is and provides a best effect for. Corrosive when your nor dealing with shields and armor is abundant, while radiation being the catch all for corpus, mostly when dealing with index units and you cannot abuse viral or how gas is going to get more viability for corpus sweeping, just like how its the go-to for infested.

So here to hoping that the next on D.E.`s agenda for the enemy durability balancing, includes updating elemental mods in a way that does not ruin the strong elementals, But instead either buffs or consolidates the elementals that likely barely have any use, later would be preferred for me, but if they can make Gas, Radiation, Magnetic and Blast actually serve some proper purpose, then that would be nice too, especially if it lets them stand to be almost as good as viral & corrosive afterwards.

8 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

When you actually gear to fight a faction; armor means very little compared to raw HP values. I've done plenty of lvl 400+ Solo runs. The faction's durability isn't a question ever. It's how some of their abilities break and I would agree with the other poster. Damage scaling is and has always been the problem.

Honestly i tend to forget to switch elementals when dealing with different content and usually ended up using corrosive. Where after a while i just stuck to keeping one of my guns to viral while the other is corrosive, especially while fissure farming. But definitely have to admit that till D.E. gets things straighten out on loads of elements, can i then start to hope that warframe starts being enjoyable, which certainly feels quite a tight time limit if they do not get it done now with the next few updates. Instead of letting it stew again after so long, with plenty of new games that could continue to take away its player base, as more and more people get disappointed with bad content drops.

[Teridax68]

As others have said, it's a step forward, though there's certainly more that could be done. Personally, I simply don't see why armor even has to scale to begin with, given that its scaling nature will always make Grineer EHP scale quadratically in addition to exponentially, as opposed to shield+health or pure health types that just scale exponentially. Keeping armor static would solve the issue of armor overtaking the late-game meta once and for all, and if the Grineer end up becoming too squishy at higher levels, one could always make their health scale harder, or increase their base amounts.

[DrivaMain]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

As others have said, it's a step forward, though there's certainly more that could be done. Personally, I simply don't see why armor even has to scale to begin with, given that its scaling nature will always make Grineer EHP scale quadratically in addition to exponentially, as opposed to shield+health or pure health types that just scale exponentially. Keeping armor static would solve the issue of armor overtaking the late-game meta once and for all, and if the Grineer end up becoming too squishy at higher levels, one could always make their health scale harder, or increase their base amounts.

Then that would cause problems like “Hurr Durr Corrosive is irrelevant” or “Hunter Munitions + Viral is a must in high level grineer”. But still, I will have to try out the new armor myself before I comment further about the new armor scaling.

[XaoGarrent]

On 2020-02-29 at 11:15 AM, DrBorris said:

And one final note on the way DE presented the changes to armor scaling. What DE showed in the Devstream was just the multiplier that armor gave to health, all that graph represented was a magical number that exists in the background and does not directly impact gameplay. While this was relatively clear to see when you took a good look at the chart, it was a bit deceptive in that it probably led a lot of people to believe that this was the new EHP scaling for Grineer. Basically what DE showed looked a lot better than it actually was.

This was that entire stream in a nutshell, any time they had to deliver news that they knew people would hate. The shotgun discussion was similar, the entire presentation was designed to smokescreen the impact of what they are doing so they can pretend it's actually a good thing.

At this point, with how much of a dumpster fire the last two patches have been, and much of this one is lining up to be, I'll take any improvement to scaling. But I'm also not sure I'm going to stick around to actually enjoy it.

Edited March 3, 2020 by XaoGarrent

[Teridax68]

40 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

Then that would cause problems like “Hurr Durr Corrosive is irrelevant” or “Hunter Munitions + Viral is a must in high level grineer”. But still, I will have to try out the new armor myself before I comment further about the new armor scaling.

I mean, Corrosive would probably still be more relevant than Magnetic, Viral's already important, and armor makes Slash procs even more powerful, so Hunter Munitions would become less strong than they are now. Really, it's a matter of simple math, so while the Grineer will certainly feel squishier, the issue mentioned will remain.

[Steel_Rook]

17 hours ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

An interesting thing to note about Armor Class is that its Damage Modifiers apply twice, directly modifying both armor and damage. Armor Modifiers modifying armor makes sense; it creates the impression that the Damage Type is penetrating armor. However, I don't like that Armor Modifiers also directly modify damage, because that is supposed to be the role of Health Modifiers. So long as something has at least 1 point of Ferrite Armor, it will always take +75% damage from Corrosive. But once that 1 point of Ferrite Armor is gone, Armor Modifiers no longer apply. That makes no sense. Also, because of this, there is never any reason to mod for any Damage Type other than for the highest Armor Modifier.

Yup! And I strongly dislike both of those factors. Anti-armour damage types double-dipping into enemy vulnerabilities is a particularly problematic one, because it creates a substantial gap in performance between the "right" damage type and virtually anything else. Hitting a Bombard with Radiation, for instance, will deal 75% bonus damage (multiplicative with buffs, if I'm not mistaken) and be calculated against only 25% of the enemy's armour. A level 100 Bombard has 7,860.62 armour or ~96.32% damage resistance. Hitting that same Bombard with Radiation strips that down to 1965.155 armour or ~86.76% resistance. That's a LOT of lost EHP before the bonus damage against armour is even dealt. The worst part about this is it also acts in reverse. If you accidentally bring Magnetic armour against the Grineer like I did early in the game, you're shooting at half damage against 150% enemy armour. Even at low-ish armour levels, this difference is so significant as to create MASSIVE special-case exceptions.

And yes, then there's the issue of armour-specific weaknesses disappearing when armour is fully stripped. Enemies weak to Corrosive stop being weak to Corrosive the moment Corrosive damage strips all of their armour, which to me at least is massively counter-intuitive. I know why it works that way - it's a result of how armour damage resistances and vulnerabilities are implemented. However, I'm starting to think that we may need to implement armour in some form of entirely new way altogether before it's going to make intuitive sense. For instance, damage bonuses to shields disappear when we break through an enemy's shields, but that doesn't "feel" as counter-intuitive because we weren't ALSO doing damage to health WHILE doing damage to shield. Imagine if we could deal damage to shield AND health at the same time, and if we dealt MORE damage to health with shields up than shields down. In that odd hypothetical situation, players would be naturally motivated to try and NOT break through the enemy's shields so as to retain bonus damage as long as possible. That's the weirdness that armour creates.

The longer we go on, the more convinced I become that armour needs to be treated as a separate aspect from health, rather than a modifier to it. I'm constantly brought back to The Division 2, and its breakable enemy armour plates. In the past, I've insisted that armour needs to use a separate system from Shields and can't be just another health bar, but I'm starting to think about changing my mind on this point.

 

17 hours ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

If I were to revise my own formula to include Armor Modifiers, this is how I would do it: the Damage Modifier is calculated separately for each Damage Type. Armor is divided among each Damage Type proportional to the amount of each Damage Type. e.g. If an attack has 50% Puncture and 25% each of Impact and Slash, then Puncture receives 50% of the target's armor while Impact and Slash each receive 25% of the target's armor.

Interesting. So split total armour into portions and resist each damage type with its own portion, size determined by damage distribution. That's an interesting approach that I honestly wouldn't have thought of. I do worry about what happens with a large number of damage types per shot, though. If I recall your formula correctly, it was DR = A/(D + A). So let's take a simple example of 100 damage all one component against 300 armour. That would be 100*(1 - 300/(100 + 300)) = 25. Let's take the same attack but split it into four components of 25 each. That would be 25*(1 - 75/(25 + 75)) = 6.25 per component, or 25 for all four components. So absent of specific health type and damage type interactions, this does seem to track pretty well, from the perspective of working correctly irrespective of damage type split. That is, if I'm reading your formula correctly. So...

FD = D*(1 - A*R/(D + A*R))

Where FD is "final damage," D is "damage," A is "armour" and R is that particular damage type's ratio as a fraction of all damage. Does that seem about correct, minus type-specific interactions? As long as the sum of all damage adds up to the weapon's total damage and the fractions of damage add up to 1, then the amount of damage resisted should be independent of the number of splits and their precise ratio, I think. Assuming for the moment that I agree with your approach to inserting damage into damage resistance, then yes - that would be a pretty clever way of handling multiple damage types within the same shot.

 

10 hours ago, Avienas said:

Exactly, because everyone is not concerning themselves on the threshold of a enemy`s durability when you deal reasonable damage, they are more concerned at reaching just overkill due to how enemies just scale up to negate any reason for a tuned build because the only way to deal with a hoarde looter shooter with scaling enemies is just overkill stack abuse.

OK, you've repeated some variant of this argument a lot already and there are only so many times I can look past it. What you're saying is false on its face and also an argumentum ad hominem. It has no place in a factual discussion and only distracts from the main subject. No, people ignoring Corrosive procs nor wanting to disregard damage types altogether. Rather, people are criticising the current system BECAUSE corrosive procs are so essential as to displace practically everything else. This problem worsens the more EHP enemies have tied up in armour, because the value of Corrosive procs - and thus the importance of having them at the expense of practically anything else - only increases. This drastically stifles build diversity and pushes people into dedicated anti-armour builds with very little choice on the part of the end user. It also pushes people into heavy Status builds specifically for those Corrosive procs.

No amount of bolded text and shifting blame onto the playerbase will change this. Moreover, if you actually watch DE's Dev Stream, this is all but exactly what they themselves said. Health, armour and shield scaling is changing as a means of reducing the importance of outlier builds and allowing a broader range of tools a fighting chance at being relevant.

 

4 hours ago, XaoGarrent said:

This was that entire stream in a nutshell, any time they had to deliver news that they knew people would hate. The shotgun discussion was similar, the entire presentation was designed to smokescreen the impact of what they are doing so they can pretend it's actually a good thing.

It is a good thing. The calculation for per-pellet status chance for weapons with native multishot is and has always been a #*!%ing mess with no good solutions. It's a clever bit of math from a theoretical standpoint, but it creates a massive spike towards its tail end, turning shotguns into a binary state. Yes, the new changes presented are going to be a direct nerf to per-pellet status chance for shotguns, and this was never made secret. They told you this straight-up. However, it's more complicated than just "does this number go up or down" due to the introduction of post-100% status chance and "second stage" status effects. Even at low status chance per pellet, shotguns still have substantially higher potential for stacking status procs on the same enemy than single-pellet guns do.

Moreover, this is a nerf to 100% Status Chance shotguns only. And like with Corrosive procs, the point here is to enable more than just that one type of shotgun to be viable. The cost of this is that, yes, formerly 100% status chance shotguns will do objectively less status now, but as the Dev Stream said - "balance" isn't always the same thing as "fun." Sometimes some players need to give up power in order for the system as a whole to function outside of the "meta" edge cases. Shotgun status was a disgrace that should have been addressed years ago. It's also entirely irrelevant to the current discussion.

[Avienas]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

OK, you've repeated some variant of this argument a lot already and there are only so many times I can look past it.

Can`t exactly remember every time i say something when im usually doing the posts late at night or when i`m half tired or frustrated on wanting things to occur that sometimes a good deal of my `ramblings` will likely be inconsistent to what i said previously or be `false` on ends. Point n case: Im just mostly a disgruntled long-time warframe player who is still not a fan of the fact its more fun complaining about warframe, then actually playing warframe these days. Since most of warframe`s content from start to finish has just been grind grind and grind. Still a shame Destiny 2 STILL requires ps plus, because even burn out from doing a bunch of stuff can end up feeling better then being stuck in a land-lock of repeated grinding, even if i never plan to get the expansions for destiny 2. Warframe definitely had some nice funs before but we all know how long those can last if there is literally no subtance to continue enjoying, beyond the front veil of NEW stuff to do, but not much depth is present in it.

Quote

No amount of bolded text and shifting blame onto the playerbase will change this. Moreover, if you actually watch DE's Dev Stream, this is all but exactly what they themselves said. Health, armour and shield scaling is changing as a means of reducing the importance of outlier builds and allowing a broader range of tools a fighting chance at being relevant.

Which i am glad that is about damn time happening. Which i would rather keep repeating myself to make sure i am not dreaming and it was a dream all along. Which just like how i was doing some applause on the immediate fixes to railjack & kuva liches, despite some should of still been present FROM. THE. BEGINNING., especially since they have confirmed they do have a test server where they invite players in and chattered about increasing it for better data...

....well i hope the playerbase they invite are a whole lot more VOCAL on what they need to fix up first before shipping it out, so the frequency of them letting bad design work stew and nip any bad decisions before they get shipped out to pc.

 

Not to mention, i am still praying that d.e. fixed any weird b.s. like rank 3 arcanes having a bunch of them getting nerfed, not just Guardian, Aegis, Grace & Energize, where some should of honestly been buffed and some need extra effects, like how i even feel the resistance to certain status procs need a whole lot more to them then 100% immunity at max rank (seriously whats with this 102% b.s.????), such as maybe give energy when one normally would get that status effect or something like how certain mods will buff your next ability cast when a certain thing occurs. If you played mobile games like Dragalia lost, take a look at its recent addition, the mana spiral system, where they layered extra effects on existing abilities as you upgrade that char with its mana spiral abilities, which vastly improves the appeal of said abilities and made those with those mana spiral abilities, be a whole lot better in the tier list.

...AKA, warframe needs to make plenty of content which has been stuck in particular metas, have REAL reasons to break that meta, just like how shields need something strong to portray them, just like how many arcanes need such and so many other things need much more to them these days.

 

Anyway back on topic, i just expect more to occur then us just getting more stew that will sit for over a year without any further improvements.

Edited March 3, 2020 by Avienas

[ShortCat]

15 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

because it creates a substantial gap in performance between the "right" damage type and virtually anything else.

I still cannot understand how that is supposed to be a problem; right tools for the right job seems to be the approach here. It is just not executed well, as some damage types have no purpose. Magnetic for example is completely undermined by Toxin; Impact is undesirable in its entirety.

[Dracus_Dakkrius]

On 2020-03-03 at 11:25 AM, Steel_Rook said:

The longer we go on, the more convinced I become that armour needs to be treated as a separate aspect from health, rather than a modifier to it. I'm constantly brought back to The Division 2, and its breakable enemy armour plates. In the past, I've insisted that armour needs to use a separate system from Shields and can't be just another health bar, but I'm starting to think about changing my mind on this point.

That's something I've been thinking about for a while too. If this Armor Health scaled like Health and Shields, then that would be another solution to the eHP disparity between armored and unarmored enemies. It could even still be differentiated from Health with an armor-piercing mechanic. That is, damage is distributed between Armor and Health according to a Damage Reduction formula, perhaps something similar to the Damage Reduction formula we've been discussing, so that high damage weapons can somewhat pierce armor while low damage weapons can still chew through armor until armor gets to a low enough value to penetrate.

If this same change were made for Warframes as well as enemies, enemy damage would need to be decreased since the high end of eHP for Warframes would be much less, which would be good for low Armor Warframes. The only gripe I have is that I personally believe that if player damage scales exponentially, then player durability should too. If Armor were reworked into a sort of Health Type, then the eHP contributed by Health, Armor, and Shield mods would stack linearly. I want player durability and damage output to be comparable for those times when one has to be converted to the other.

9 hours ago, ShortCat said:

I still cannot understand how that is supposed to be a problem; right tools for the right job seems to be the approach here. It is just not executed well, as some damage types have no purpose. Magnetic for example is completely undermined by Toxin; Impact is undesirable in its entirety.

It's really a matter of how much more effective it should be. 2x? 4x? That's the furthest most games will go with Damage Type Modifiers. In Warframe, the difference between Radiation and Magnetic against Alloy Armor is 21x. Then there's Status and Armor Strip. Thanks to Enemy Armor Scaling, setups that completely strip or ignore Armor do infinitely more damage than the many setups that don't. There's nothing else in the game that even approaches this level of disparity.

But you're right that some damage types just have no purpose. That's something important that needs to be addressed. Let's take your example. Magnetic procs are dangerous for us because they drain our precious precious energy and screws with our HUD. It's useless against the enemy, because they don't use energy or HUD, not to mention all the problems with Shields. If Magnetic procs disabled enemy equipment and special abilities, decreased their accuracy and awareness, and/or disabled Shield Recharge and the Shield Gate, then Magnetic procs would have a purpose. Magnetic damage would still be useless, but the problem with that lies in the nature of Shields.

Edited March 4, 2020 by Dracus_Dakkrius

[Steel_Rook]

4 hours ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

That's something I've been thinking about for a while too. If this Armor Health scaled like Health and Shields, then that would be another solution to the eHP disparity between armored and unarmored enemies. It could even still be differentiated from Health with an armor-piercing mechanic. That is, damage is distributed between Armor and Health according to a Damage Reduction formula, perhaps something similar to the Damage Reduction formula we've been discussing, so that high damage weapons can somewhat pierce armor while low damage weapons can still chew through armor until armor gets to a low enough value to penetrate.

Actually... This reminds me of GTA 5's Armour system, what you're saying here. That game just straight-up has an "Armour" health bar that you have to damage before you can start dealing damage to health. Headshots might bypass that, but they're irrelevant here. The way armour-piercing weapons work is they do a portion of their damage (the majority of it, in fact) straight to health and the rest of it still to armour. I believe all enemies in GTA have the same (fairly low) health, but "tougher" enemies have an increasingly disproportionate amount of armour. Thus, armour-piercing rounds tend to kill pretty quickly because they deal slightly sub-standard damage directly to health.

The only real problem with this design for Armour, though, is... Well, Armour becomes just another kind of "Shield." It's just another extra health bar in a different colour, which another damage type can skip partially or fully, just like shields vs. toxin. It's not a BAD idea necessarily, but it kind of goes against my own personal rule of wanting to keep Armour as its own, apples-to-oranges distinct system from shields. As I said before - this is a position I'm starting to reconsider the more we talk about this. Games like GTA, the Division and even Payday with armour as a separate health bar in a similar vein to standard Halo shields seems like a basic but reliable approach. Especially because that gives you the ability to model both armour-piercing AND armour-shredding mechanics simply by having some weapons bypass armour and others deal more damage to it.

How about... Instead of armour "resisting" damage, it instead takes a percentage of the damage done to an enemy - the more the armour, the more damage is shifted to armour. 900 armour wouldn't provide 75% damage resistance, but would rather take 75% of all damage to "armour health" and only 25% would go to the character's underlying health - to use the existing damage resistance formula. That way, doing damage to an enemy naturally shreds their armour. Corrosive Damage, then, could deal its full damage to JUST armour, but with a severe damage bonus while Radiation could deal a larger portion of its damage directly to health - say as though it were hitting only 25% of the enemy's actual armour value. That way Corrosive would be good for SHREDDING armour and removing it for everybody while Radiation would be good for penetrating armour without damaging it.

I'm speaking somewhat off the top of my head since I'm in a bit of a hurry and I know this is a fairly radical suggestion, but it does make EHP into a linear function of health, armour and shields with no multiplication. Well... Somewhat. I haven't run the numbers on that. Let me know if this sounds interesting to you and I'll put some actual thought into it.

[(PSN)Crixus044]

I am fine with the armor changes, although I do wish the scaling graph would have a limit. I personally believe that tanker enemies help the game immensely, because it challenges our building and damage output limits and allows enemies to live long enough to fight back, whereas today you rarely see a lancer live long enough to say Tenno SKURRRRR, but armor isn't the way to go.

I think health scaling should be increased dramatically and that armor is almost not there. Armor to me was never a good mechanic in warframe and reducing its importance is good for me. Good riddance

Comparing corpus to grineer is not fair. I've had this discussion before. They are completely different factions that challenge different aspects of your gameplay. If you were to make corpus as tanky as grineer, nobody would play against them. They'd be avoided at all cost. They have higher damage output like detron crewmen and techs, stronger enemy mechanics like nullification, bursa, and stumpy bois, more environmental hazards and most importantly, a unique mission. They challenge you on a completely different aspect than grineer do. Grineer challenge your damage output, mano a mano. They challenge how well you can kill them before they can kill you. By equaling out their ehp, you take away the one thing the grineer had better than the corpus.

Before this change is introduced, there is an obvious discrepancy between the two factions, but afterwards, I think the balance between the two will be better. The issue before hand is that there was an easy work around for grineer aka 4xCP, but if this change is implemented and health scaling is improved, I personally believed the game will be all the better for it.

[ShortCat]

14 hours ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

It's really a matter of how much more effective it should be. 2x? 4x? That's the furthest most games will go with Damage Type Modifiers. In Warframe, the difference between Radiation and Magnetic against Alloy Armor is 21x.

This is a contestable statement. Disparity on its own means nothing, I would say it is important how it is implemented. For example, Devinity Original Sin 2 heavely emphasizes weakpoint exploaitation, Undead get healed by toxin damagae there.

14 hours ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

Then there's Status and Armor Strip. Thanks to Enemy Armor Scaling, setups that completely strip or ignore Armor do infinitely more damage than the many setups that don't. There's nothing else in the game that even approaches this level of disparity.

I can agree on the importance of status in late game, it is integral for any anti-armor build. However, the second part is that circular argument again. Why is weakness exploitation bad? Second question: What will improve if the difference between optimal and not optimal builds is brought down from 21x to 4x? Optimal builds will remain the best option, so what would you achieve with this change?

 

14 hours ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

If Magnetic procs disabled enemy equipment and special abilities, decreased their accuracy and awareness, and/or disabled Shield Recharge and the Shield Gate, then Magnetic procs would have a purpose. Magnetic damage would still be useless, but the problem with that lies in the nature of Shields.

If Magnetic will remain useless, then this change doesn't go far enough. As i see it, Magnetic was intended as anti-shield damage type. Its purpose is undermined by Toxin. A logical solution would be to make Toxin not ignore shields, maybe even slightly increase shield values across the board. Magnetic proc could also prevent shield gate. There you go - Magnetic is usefull now. (This concept is already used on big spiders in Orb Valis)
Your idea of disabling abilities is partially covered by Radiation; disabling gear and reducing awareness are really interesting ideas, but in my opinion, those would fit other procs better (Impact maybe?), as I understand Magnetic as shield destroeyr. Those are my 2 Cents on player concepts.

Edited March 5, 2020 by ShortCat

[MJ12]

On 2020-03-02 at 8:44 AM, Steel_Rook said:

While I'm not entirely opposed to your line of thinking, don't you think it's better to create a brand new "armour penetration" stat on weapons which determines this? I'm mostly referencing World of Tanks with this, because that game has an interesting dynamic. About mid-level in that game, you start seeing wide availability of large 150mm cannons, but most of them are mortars. What that means is they deal A LOT of damage but have fairly little penetration. In theory this makes them good against lightly-armoured vehicles and as a decent fallback. If you're looking for armour penetration, you're better off with 100mm or 120mm long-barrel guns which deal substantially less damage but have much higher penetration. I don't know where Wargaming are with it, but I'm told that they also intend to lower the damage on Gold Ammo, as well. HEAT and APCR shells generally have MUCH higher penetration than the peasant AP ammo most of us use, leading to them absolutely dominating people's loadouts, P2W style. The idea there was to drop their damage and by extension make AP ammo a bit more popular.

Now granted - Warframe isn't World of Tanks (and thank God for that!), but do you not feel like something like this is warranted? Or would you say that this is what the various strengths and weaknesses of various damage types were supposed to do? I guess I'm more asking if armour mitigation is best put in just raw damage, or if tying it to other independent stats might offer a bit more flexibility. After all, do we want ALL high-damage weapons to be good against armour and all low-damage weapons to be bad against it? Isn't that a bit TOO limiting from the standpoint of design? Because this basically means that we'll never get to use shotguns and autorifles against the Grineer without really offering much room for choice on their the player or developer side. Again - not really a criticism, so much as I'm curious about your opinion on the matter.

The issue is that realistic WoT/WT-style armor is kind of weird in its behavior and how it affects weapons choice. 'Realistic' armor actually behaves  similarly to StarSector armor-armor prevents damage from impacting critical systems (health/hull), is more effective against weaker individual hits (favoring slow-firing weapons to rapid-fire ones), and can be degraded by repeat hits to the same area. So powerful fast-firing weapons can eventually cause armor failures but are less likely to punch through. 

Starsector uses this to balance weapons by making higher-DPS weapons generally fast-firing high-efficiency guns. Because basically every ship has numerous weapons mounts, this encourages players to use a balanced set of weapons (or rely on allied ships) because anti-armor weapons are slow and unwieldy while anti-shield weapons tend to be rapid-fire weapons that deal limited armor damage. 

It is harder to do so in Warframe when you can have multiple damage types on a single weapon at the same time, can only carry 3 weapons, and can't set weapons to autofire so that you can use many weapons at once.

The thing DE needs to do is to go and figure out what it wants armor to do and then it can build armor mechanics to enable that.

[Steel_Rook]

16 hours ago, MJ12 said:

The issue is that realistic WoT/WT-style armor is kind of weird in its behavior and how it affects weapons choice. 'Realistic' armor actually behaves  similarly to StarSector armor-armor prevents damage from impacting critical systems (health/hull), is more effective against weaker individual hits (favoring slow-firing weapons to rapid-fire ones), and can be degraded by repeat hits to the same area. So powerful fast-firing weapons can eventually cause armor failures but are less likely to punch through. 

Again - that's not quite how it behaves in World of Tanks. Because guns in World of Tanks have an entirely separate "armour penetration" stat from their damage (and the two don't interact in any way), it's not uncommon for high-damage weapons to have low armour penetration and low-damage weapons to have high armour penetration. In fact, Wargaming have turned this into a bit of a "gamble" on the player's part. Do you pick a weapon with a lower chance of penetrating enemy armour if it's going to do a lot more damage when it penetrates, or do you take a less damaging weapon but almost guarantee you'll penetrate on every shot? My issue with tying damage to armour penetration directly is that it removes the option to do that. ALL high-damage weapons will also have high armour penetration, no low-damage weapons will have high armour penetration. I don't see the benefit from this kind of limitation.

I mean, look at something like how the FN Five-seveN is typically portrayed in video games. It's a small-calibre, low damage pistol which excels at penetrating armour and - in the case of something like Wildlands - terrain. Actually, here's a thought - Warframe already HAS a "penetration" mechanic by the name of Punchthrough. Why not tie armour penetration to THAT? Give every weapon in the game a bit of punchthrough and scale the weapon's ability to penetrate armour to its ability to penetrate walls 🙂

[Dracus_Dakkrius]

On 2020-03-04 at 4:57 PM, Steel_Rook said:

The only real problem with this design for Armour, though, is... Well, Armour becomes just another kind of "Shield." It's just another extra health bar in a different colour, which another damage type can skip partially or fully, just like shields vs. toxin. It's not a BAD idea necessarily, but it kind of goes against my own personal rule of wanting to keep Armour as its own, apples-to-oranges distinct system from shields. As I said before - this is a position I'm starting to reconsider the more we talk about this. Games like GTA, the Division and even Payday with armour as a separate health bar in a similar vein to standard Halo shields seems like a basic but reliable approach. Especially because that gives you the ability to model both armour-piercing AND armour-shredding mechanics simply by having some weapons bypass armour and others deal more damage to it.

That is a sentiment I also share. What's the point of including something as a separate mechanic if it's not somehow meaningfully different? Well, if Armor has different Damage Modifiers from Health, then that should at least incentivize players to bring two weapons each modded differently for Health and Armor, which I think is meaningful enough. But if we can add more layers of nuance, that would be great. Say for instance, Armor and Shields are immune or resistant to or interact differently with most Status Effects compared to Health. Magnetic procs will not drain energy unless your Shields are down. Impact and Blast will deal extra damage instead of causing Stagger of Knockdown when they proc against Shields. Gas and Viral procs ignore Shields but are prevented by Armor. Slash and Toxin are prevented by Shields and Armor, but are very deadly to Health.

I don't have it all worked out. (Frankly, I think it's impossible to balance all 13 Damage Types and we should get rid of most them.) But you get the idea.

On 2020-03-04 at 4:57 PM, Steel_Rook said:

How about... Instead of armour "resisting" damage, it instead takes a percentage of the damage done to an enemy - the more the armour, the more damage is shifted to armour. 900 armour wouldn't provide 75% damage resistance, but would rather take 75% of all damage to "armour health" and only 25% would go to the character's underlying health - to use the existing damage resistance formula. That way, doing damage to an enemy naturally shreds their armour. Corrosive Damage, then, could deal its full damage to JUST armour, but with a severe damage bonus while Radiation could deal a larger portion of its damage directly to health - say as though it were hitting only 25% of the enemy's actual armour value. That way Corrosive would be good for SHREDDING armour and removing it for everybody while Radiation would be good for penetrating armour without damaging it.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear before, but if you read my previous reply again, I think you will find that my previous suggestion was very similar to this. There are only a couple differences between your suggestion and mine. I wanted to use something like my damage reduction formula to determine how much damage goes to Health and how much damage goes to Armor. I also didn't have different Damage Type Modifiers for armor-piercing and armor-shredding, but I think your suggestion for these different modifiers is very interesting.

[(XBOX)Yufix4574]

On 2020-02-29 at 5:15 PM, DrBorris said:

Does following this graph mean that the armor to be balanced should stop scaling after level 30?

It would also make sense since, apart from 2 exceptions, the armor does not increase with the level of frames.

Edited March 8, 2020 by (XB1)francy x096

[schilds]

@DrBorris As far as I can tell (and maybe I've misread) you're going by the old curve for health and shields. Health and shields also follow the new curve.

[Shaburanigud]

Im starting to feel like the problem is that armor is the only multiliplier.

Why not change armor to be an additive mechanism. For weaker grineer, only 30% of its health is armored with the armor multiplier.

Higher levels will have more percentages but will never be 100% armor.

Since shields are still weak even after the buff, also buff shields as well. Since shield gating is partially working, have higher corpus units have multiple layer of shields. Therfore, while a weak corpus unit wll only have one layer of shield and therfore get the benefit of shield gating only once, a triple layered shield will allow the enemy to have 3 shield gating opportunities to benefit from.

Of course this is still all rendered useless thanks to toxin bypassing shields, so I guess that might need to be looked into. Like change it to "penetrate one layer of shield" or something.