Elements feel a bit messy: an idea to clean them up?

[Tyreaus]

Having touched the modding for the new status set, things feel a touch disorganized. 
First, there's the old confusion of "if I mix a DoT like Toxin and an AoE like Electricity I get! ... armour stripping?" 
Then, the changes to Slash makes it pair with Toxin (both DoT bypasses of respective protections) - but Toxin is a primary element and Slash is a physical one...?
And now Impact seems to have taken Blast's place, swapping back and forth just in the dev workshop alone.
They aren't necessarily bad changes, but the overall system feels kind of disorganized and like some elements are trying to fit into one spot.

So I had an idea on how we might reorganize things (with a little possible Railjack integration):

IPS:
-Slash procs revert the DoT as a % of overall damage (not base damage) that bypasses all protections (formula: damage per tick = overall damage / # of ticks)
-Impact procs make % of damage instance bypass shields
-Puncture procs make % of damage instance bypass armour

What percent? I'm not sure - 100% could be perfectly acceptable (testing pending). I would say that Slash should have a slightly smaller % than Impact or Puncture, maybe -5%, but that's largely up to the balancing overlords and whether the DoT nature is enough to compensate.

Primary Elements:
-Heat (anti-armour; same as is, but ties in Corrosive stacking armour reduction (instead of 50% reduction))
-Electricity (anti-shield; same as current, but also has Magnetic effect on initial target's shields)
-Cold (anti-health; slows with current Viral proc effect)

The long and short is that the primary elements here would have single-target CC and EHP reduction following the current status proc schema. Toxin will be addressed a little later.

Secondary Elements:
-Radiation (Heat + Electricity): Rad burst enables friendly fire and slightly reduces max shields and armour (not to the same degree as heat or electricity).
-Blast (Heat + Cold): AoE Impact stagger + Slow with armour and health reduction (see above: not as big as the primary elements).
-Ionic (Electricity + Cold): Chains to, stuns, and reduces the shields and health of nearby targets (within 2x radius as Electricity); stunned enemies killed chain the effect to nearest living enemy.

In this, secondary elements bridge the EHP reduction gap between their constituent elements and apply CC concepts over a wider area. I also tried to leverage their primary parts a little more (e.g. Ionic shares Electricity's chaining, but jacked up to 11; Blast slows with extra stagger).

Damage bonuses:
This idea also simplifies health classes a lot.
Under this schema, damage bonuses would fit with their damage reductions as above. Ionic, for example, would be effective against health and shields, but not as effective against health as Cold. This would be against any health type, not just Flesh or Cloned Flesh.

Toxin mods:
Since Toxin is removed, I thought it would be effective to replace Toxin mods with IPS-increasing mods (but not exactly how current IPS-increasing mods work). In short: take the damage increase a given Toxin mod would give, distribute that among the IPS values based on their percentages (distribution taking place after other IPS-increasing mods, I think).

Missing elements (Toxin, Corrosive, Viral, Magnetic, and Railjack Elements):
While these might not be accessible via modding, I thought it would be interesting to loop these in as alternatives to the above. For example, Toxin would behave identical to Cold (slow with health reduction), but with its shield bypass property. Corrosive would fit with Blast, but with an extra DoT. Maybe Magnetic matches Ionic but pulls targets together, and Plasma matches Blast but with chain lightning. This is primarily to work with innate elements Warframes have in their abilities.

Overall:
-Everything centres around three health types: health, shields, and armour.
-IPS becomes the "bypass" group, with Slash being the middle-child DoT boy.
-Primary elements are effective against specific health types, with single-target CC and EHP reductions
-Secondary elements are more AoE affairs with moderate efficacy against two EHP types
-Modding all available elements grants one secondary and one primary element, since Toxin is dropped

I think it's at least much cleaner and well-organized this way, but what do others feel? Is there some other way to rework things for better organization, maybe without tugging things apart quite so much? 🙂 ~T