Diageticness of the new status effects

[Salbeira]

With the new mainline update the announced changes to Corrosive, Viral and Magnetic damage rub me the wrong way, both in terms of their new effect and the way the effect clashes with their name:

First Viral: The idea that we are putting a virus into our opponent that leeches their health and makes them more susceptible to other sources of damage by halving their health was "working". You saw the name, saw the effect and "got it". A virus reducing the bodies capability to sustain itself is a real world thing that happens. The new effect increases damage done to health and has nothing to do with someone being infected. It is just another kind of Corrosive damage in that regard: A Multiplicative damage bonus to health damage is exactly the same as a Multiplicative armor penalty through Corrosive damage. Just that it also works on targets without Armor. This is both more boring to work with and also doesn't make any sense looking at it at first glance.

Second Magnetic: A strong magnetic field bending the protective energy field around the enemy and making their shield malfunction "works". The new effect increases the damage dealt to shields. While this is still explainable, it makes no sense from a bullet's perspective. The energy shield would most likely be generated by a device on the target's body. Magnetic damage can drain said device's energy MORE but why would an impact that create a magnetic disturbance make it so it takes more damage on subsequent impacts? It is not like the bullet that comes after somehow has more punch in it. The overall effect also has the same problem with shieldless targets as Corrosive does with armorless targets.

Thrid Corrosive: It made sense that acidic weaponry would eat through the protective layer of their target until all armor is gone. Capping it to a value AND giving it a timer kind of eats away at the very idea of acid permanently eating through metal. We are in the future, yes, but suddenly having the Grineer invent a way to regenerate metal plating on the fly kind of seems like a stretch to me. I can live with the idea that the acid only "softens" the armor ... but Heat is already doing exactly that!

So TLDR: Corrosive damage and Viral damage serve the same purpose with the new updates and lose the inherent understanding one had with what the effect does vs. what the effect is called. Magnetic kind of seems like just a tack on effect to have the same thing existing for shields.

I propose:
New Viral damage: Halves enemy max HP and further applications slow down enemies until a threshold is reached and they kneel in agony, opening them to a meele finisher.
New Magnetic damage: Halves enemy max Shields and further applications slow down enemy movement until a crawl because their forcefield starts impairing their own movement. Depleting an enemy's shields while they are affected by a magnetic effect will cause their shield to overload and stun nearby enemies.
New Corrosive damage: Halves enemy Armor and further applications increase damage dealt to health.

Further ranting, ignore this if you came here for the title: Viral and Corrosive serve the same purpose and both originate from Toxic damage. With the changes to Toxic, Gas, Viral and Corrosive damage it is very clear that all elements containing Toxic as a base element are attacks that target Heath specifically. There is not really an equal to Shields in that area: Cold does more damage to shields and impairs movement but stacks with Toxic to viral that has no effect on shields anymore. Electricity deals AoE damage and stacks with Cold to Magnetic damage to create said "device destroying" effect but stacks with Toxic to Corrosion that has no effect on Shields anymore. Heat deals burn damage, panics enemies and reduces armor but combines with Toxic to Gas damage that "just" deals AoE Toxic damage that has no interaction with Armor anymore and is effectively made to bypass SHIELDS to kill enemies with NO armor. ARGH!

[jofipa]

i actually like the new corrosive both from gameplay to lore or real aplication, especialy since  back when you overstriped an enemy they didnt Lost their armor did they? no they were still using it so theres still suposed to be some damage reduction even if little. 

the change to magnetic seems eh, and your propousal is not too diferent 

the one thing i will agree with you is on viral, i like the old system, i like to see my enemies get sick and weak. and having a status effect that opens enemys to finishers seems really good gameplay wise. They dont need to be stunned or knell like you said (i think thats just way to much of a buff), just make them open for a parazon attack easier with each viral proc

[(NSW)Greybones]

1 hour ago, Salbeira said:

With the new mainline update the announced changes to Corrosive, Viral and Magnetic damage rub me the wrong way, both in terms of their new effect and the way the effect clashes with their name:

Hm. I was thinking how to respond while I was reading (you made good points), but then you made it clear that you’re looking at it from a “Realism” point of view while tying it to in-game mechanics, and there’s not much I can do with that without some super intense research and debating just to get on the same page, and that’s before the discussions surrounding how to balance

Edited March 4, 2020 by (NSW)Greybones

[CopperBezel]

Yeah, I honestly feel that like @jofipa said, the new Corrosive honestly makes more sense in universe than the old one did thanks to the fact that overstripping is gone. Viral didn't make a great deal of sense before (this infection you've hit them with spreads instantly?) and doesn't make less sense now. Magnetic is based on the entirely science-fantasy concept of energy shields, so whether more magnetic disruption makes them more fragile is up to the folks inventing them. 

All of these things make significantly more in-universe sense than Puncture, which reduces enemies' damage output by putting holes in their bodies that make the bullets in their guns not shoot as hard. (How did Puncture's effect survive this revision anyway?)

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, Salbeira said:

With the new mainline update the announced changes to Corrosive, Viral and Magnetic damage rub me the wrong way, both in terms of their new effect and the way the effect clashes with their name:

Your justifications are weak and reaching, which makes me suspect you're trying to make a balance (rather, "anti-nerf" argument) couched in diagetic bluff. Corrosive is the only one for which a case can be made that it "feels wrong" for enemy armour to come back. However, you've couched your argument in the space ninja bullS#&$ that is Warframe's collective "technology," and that's susceptible to technobabble. Maybe Grineer armour is made of regenerating metal, or maybe they just swap plates when we aren't looking like folks in The Division 2 do. The rest of the diagetic arguments are what I'd describe as "pedantic." It doesn't make sense for a magnetic shot to deal extra damage to a shield, but it makes sense for it to cause the shield to restrict the movement of the operator, even though we've never established that shields in any way affect movement one way or another. I mean, if shields can slow their operator, wouldn't it stand to reason that they'd drastically enhance the movement of the operator and give them super powers akin to ours? Viral is even weirder. No, my intuition isn't that Viral damage would halve the HP of the target. My intuition is "damage over time." If you pressed me for a more realistic answer, I'd say a penalty to endurance, maybe accuracy and maybe speed. Guess I haven't played enough D&D. Does disease reduce hit points in that game? Are we ignoring the fact that no such virus exists which instantly spreads throughout the body causing widespread debilitation but only lasts 8 seconds before presumably being killed by the host's immune system, but in such a way that the host never develops immunity? Or the fact that we can infect people with viruses without actually penetrating their personal forcefields?

Personally, I subscribe to City of Heroes logic, which is to say game systems don't need to conform to reality or intuition if that could impact balance. In that game, it was very much possible to inflict psychic wounds to a CRATE, with the damage dealt healing back over time as the CRATE started to realise that the wounds aren't real. To do otherwise would be to make entire enemy factions consisting of Rocks or Robots or otherwise inanimate objects entirely resistant to the Mind Control powerset, and that didn't make any sense. In that game, you could also rip a chunk of concrete from the ground and throw it, regardless of whether you were standing ON concrete or not. You very much could rip a chunk of concrete out of a metal catwalk, the roof of a box truck or indeed while standing on top of a street light. Why? Because locking the "Hurl" power to the specific ground texture would have been massively disruptive, to the point of making it unusable. The same applies here. Corrosive, Viral and Magnetic work better like this from the standpoint of mechanics, at least as far as I'm concerned. If they don't always make diegetic sense, then so be it.

In Warframe where everything is "#*!%ing weird," that sort of thing comes with the territory.

[Salbeira]

3 hours ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

“Realism”

Not really from a realism perspective but from a name to effect perspective - we all know that "realistic" is not applicable to anything in Warframe ...:
Toxin: Poison deals periodic damage. Deal!
Heat: Burns deal periodic damage and soften metal, reducing armor. Deal!
Cold: Slows down movement. Deal!
Electric: Shocks enemies, dealing damage and arcing between targets. Deal!
Corrosion: Acid corrodes armor. Deal!
Magnetic: Disrupts tech and drains shields. Deal!
Blast: Explosion knocks down enemies! Deal!
Viral: Disease reduces max health! Deal!
Gas: Releases a toxic cloud! Deal!
Radiation: Radiation poisoning confuses the mind! Deal!

Now it is ...
Viral: Weakens the flesh and increases damage taken? ... Mmmh!
Magnetic: Disrupts tech and increases damage to shields ... ok ... kind of ... but why does the Shield take more damage from subsequent attacks ... instead of just getting weaker?
Corrosion: Acid corrodes armor ... but the effect disappears after a while? Why?

With Heat it makes sense that if the armor cools down it regains some of its structure. With acid ... not so much!
 

Quote

No, my intuition isn't that Viral damage would halve the HP of the target. My intuition is "damage over time." If you pressed me for a more realistic answer, I'd say a penalty to endurance, maybe accuracy and maybe speed.

We might have played different games but "Virus" - at least as far back as FFIX in the year 2000 imprinted the "Poison deals damage, Virus affects something else" (Virus in IX disabled your party gaining EXP and in XII set your max hp to your current hp, making healing impossible).

The new viral effect is more like ... Leper.

The idea with the slowdown simply comes from the fact that Viral is combined from Toxin and Cold (making the joke "Getting the Flu" kind of obvious). I think the game could use some more effects that slow down enemies.

Edited March 5, 2020 by Salbeira

[KommandantViy]

16 hours ago, Salbeira said:

Not really from a realism perspective but from a name to effect perspective - we all know that "realistic" is not applicable to anything in Warframe ...:
Toxin: Poison deals periodic damage. Deal!
Heat: Burns deal periodic damage and soften metal, reducing armor. Deal!
Cold: Slows down movement. Deal!
Electric: Shocks enemies, dealing damage and arcing between targets. Deal!
Corrosion: Acid corrodes armor. Deal!
Magnetic: Disrupts tech and drains shields. Deal!
Blast: Explosion knocks down enemies! Deal!
Viral: Disease reduces max health! Deal!
Gas: Releases a toxic cloud! Deal!
Radiation: Radiation poisoning confuses the mind! Deal!

Now it is ...
Viral: Weakens the flesh and increases damage taken? ... Mmmh!
Magnetic: Disrupts tech and increases damage to shields ... ok ... kind of ... but why does the Shield take more damage from subsequent attacks ... instead of just getting weaker?
Corrosion: Acid corrodes armor ... but the effect disappears after a while? Why?

With Heat it makes sense that if the armor cools down it regains some of its structure. With acid ... not so much!
 

We might have played different games but "Virus" - at least as far back as FFIX in the year 2000 imprinted the "Poison deals damage, Virus affects something else" (Virus in IX disabled your party gaining EXP and in XII set your max hp to your current hp, making healing impossible).

The new viral effect is more like ... Leper.

The idea with the slowdown simply comes from the fact that Viral is combined from Toxin and Cold (making the joke "Getting the Flu" kind of obvious). I think the game could use some more effects that slow down enemies.

You forgot to mention that the gas clouds from gas procs no longer do toxin damage, they do gas damage.. a very significant nerf.

[TheLexiConArtist]

On 2020-03-05 at 1:44 AM, Salbeira said:

Now it is ...
Viral: Weakens the flesh and increases damage taken? ... Mmmh!
Magnetic: Disrupts tech and increases damage to shields ... ok ... kind of ... but why does the Shield take more damage from subsequent attacks ... instead of just getting weaker?
Corrosion: Acid corrodes armor ... but the effect disappears after a while? Why?

I'll give you corrosion, other than a 'space technomancy' argument it's hard to really identify why corroded armour wouldn't stay corroded after the fact.

However, I can justify Viral and Magnetic in my head;

Viral infections playing havoc with your immune system and general bodily responses being diverted off to fighting that, therefore less of the body's resources are standing by for 'mitigating' other forms of damage suffered. Since enemies don't naturally heal health damage, reducing/removing of which would be the most apt consequence of this explanation, it's the next-closest equivalent It's good enough to work, with our standard suspensions of disbelief (it might not hold up to biological science scrutiny, but we're not all doctors here, it 'makes sense' enough).

Magnetic effects are destabilising the 'harmonics' of the shielding technology, so that disrupting impacts are amplified. Besides being energy-based, it's sort of like how - if I remember my schooldays correctly - you can have the same carbon molecules arranged in more rigid interlinking structures (diamond) or softer layered structures (graphite). Weakening the 'bonds', the energy pattern, with the foreign magnetism effect makes the overall structure increasingly weaker and more susceptible to outside forces.