The problem of Armor & build diversity and my idea to fix it.

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

Armor is an infamous stat in Warframe for a very long time. This is due to the fact that armor provides percentage damage reduction that keep scaling with enemy level, this makes high level armor units bullet sponges. However, it doesn't mean that armor is bad, it is just need ONE single change to fix a lot of problems in Warframe.

For example:

1. The dominance of Slash Proc
2. Corrosive being broke or useless nothing in between
3. Infested and Corpus enemies are very fragile but Grineer are super tanky

First, we need to understand why Corpus is okay with the current method of scaling but Grineer is not.

Corpus usually only have health and shields, and shields are technically a regenerate-able 'health' with different strength and weakness. Thus the EHP scale are okay.

Grineer usually have both health and armor, while the health scaling is fine, armor is not due to it scales multiplicatively with health. Which in turn make EHP scaling off control.

For example, a level 150 Corpus Tech will have 104,087.97 EHP, which is okay for most weapons. But a level 150 Corrupted Heavy Gunner will have a whooping 2,715,065.48 EHP! The difference is 27 times which is quite insane! If we take level 500 as example, Corpus Tech will only have 207,751.55 EHP but a Corrupted Heavy Gunner will have an insane amount of 12,101,284.24!!! Jesus Christ, this is a 58 TIMES DIFFERENCE!  Oh my God, This is beyond science! 

Because of this, Slash procs are so dominant because they ignore armor, thus you only need to take away 90k health with the slash proc and you are good to go. Corrosive are so broken back then are also because they can remove most of the armor and make the EHP drops down HARD. These are the only reason why Meta builds are always viral slash or Corrosive. All because of the uncontrollable armor scaling that makes armor units' EHP scale through the roof. 

So how to fix this? It is quite easy. Don't scale armor at all.

What? Are you serious? Yes indeed I am. 

Of course it will not be that simple, my idea includes:

1. Remove armor scaling with level.
2. Increase their base armor to smooth out high level and low level armor units, make them actually tanky in all stages of the game
3. increase Corpus, infested and Grineer's health & shield scaling with level to make them not that fragile.

In the current game, low level armor units are a joke, they die with in a few hit. High level armor units are a nightmare, they are super bullet sponges. Armor already scales multiplicatively with health, which means they already 'scales' as monster level goes. So we doesn't need to scale it again to make things complicated. 

If the Grineers are going to have more health but a fixed armor, the effectiveness of slash procs will reduce quite a bit, while corrosive builds, despite they cannot remove all of the armor, can pack a punch due to the ability to reduce their armor. Players can now actually have different builds against different factions, not just viral slash everywhere just because they need to handle high armor units.

Also, double armor sorite modifier will no longer be super frustrating to deal with too. 

Increasing health and shield while removing armor scaling can balance three factions quite well. 

This change also opens new ways to design Grineer units too! For example, We can have a new unit called 'Valor Butcher', which has the ability to emit an Aura to increase armor around him excluding himself, players will need to take him down first to break through a tough army of Grineers. And I am sure there will be much more!

What do you guys think? Let me know! Also, sorry for bad english!

 

 

 

[Traumtulpe]

While you are technically correct, and your suggestion seems like a good idea at first glance, I am not convinced it would improve the game.

It is not like Grineer are hard to kill, even at the highest level - you just need to get rid of their armor (or bypass it). If you make this step obsolete, have you really made the game better?

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

1 minute ago, Traumtulpe said:

While you are technically correct, and your suggestion seems like a good idea at first glance, I am not convinced it would improve the game.

It is not like Grineer are hard to kill, even at the highest level - you just need to get rid of their armor (or bypass it). If you make this step obsolete, have you really made the game better?

I mean, i know how to deal with armor, just the numbers now are so extreme to the point that everything should be viral slash, or a frame ability to strip armor, which is not that fun and versatile in my opinion. Think about it with a fixed amount of CORRECT armor, corrosive build will be as viable as viral slash builds. They all DE need to do is tune the health scaling to give them a correct amount of EHP at that level. Which I think will be healthier. 

[LegendaryNeurotoxin]

Yeah.... I can see where you're coming from on this. Scale HP to massive pools but keep armor in a range that can be managed and effectively mitigated with Heat, Corrosive, or fast hit Shattering Impact weapon. Bosses having stupid high armor then makes more sense too, they're a boss... then again half the bosses have a boring invulnerability phase that extends their health regardless. 

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

2 minutes ago, LegendaryNeurotoxin said:

Yeah.... I can see where you're coming from on this. Scale HP to massive pools but keep armor in a range that can be managed and effectively mitigated with Heat, Corrosive, or fast hit Shattering Impact weapon. Bosses having stupid high armor then makes more sense too, they're a boss... then again half the bosses have a boring invulnerability phase that extends their health regardless. 

That exactly what I mean, also steel path..... I guess you know what I am saying LOL

[(NSW)Blackoween]

5 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

While you are technically correct, and your suggestion seems like a good idea at first glance, I am not convinced it would improve the game.

It is not like Grineer are hard to kill, even at the highest level - you just need to get rid of their armor (or bypass it). If you make this step obsolete, have you really made the game better?

I believe you have made the game have more variety, and to me, that is a way to have it be better.  Currently, the way to deal with very high level enemies is to use either so ridiculously much damage it almost doesn't matter how much armor they have (kuva kohm), or to use slash/viral, which scales much better with enemy level than the first option.

I think one important thing to remember is that this would not make slash or armor reducing effects less viable, it merely makes them not required on higher level enemies.  With this change, you can now use your status procs on slash/viral/heat, or you can use something currently not even bad, but completely useless.  Getting rid of the need to get rid of armor bypass armor with slash to have a workable build would bring a lot more variety.

It makes better sense lorewise, too, as enemies can only carry a certain weight of armor, but as they grow in level, they get a lot tougher and better at taking glancing blows on their armor.

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

8 minutes ago, (NSW)Blackoween said:

I believe you have made the game have more variety, and to me, that is a way to have it be better.  Currently, the way to deal with very high level enemies is to use either so ridiculously much damage it almost doesn't matter how much armor they have (kuva kohm), or to use slash/viral, which scales much better with enemy level than the first option.

I think one important thing to remember is that this would not make slash or armor reducing effects less viable, it merely makes them not required on higher level enemies.  With this change, you can now use your status procs on slash/viral/heat, or you can use something currently not even bad, but completely useless.  Getting rid of the need to get rid of armor bypass armor with slash to have a workable build would bring a lot more variety.

It makes better sense lorewise, too, as enemies can only carry a certain weight of armor, but as they grow in level, they get a lot tougher and better at taking glancing blows on their armor.

I am so happy that you understand my suggestion. Yes, I want to make a level 150 corrupted heavy gunner maybe still have 1,000,000 Effective health, but players can choose to deal with it with a corrosive build, a viral slash build, use warframe abilities to apply heat, so on an so on to deal with it. Rather than only viral and slash nothing else viable. 

 

Also, high armor units that immune to status will be a good tanky enemy design, rather than a bullet sponge without counter.  

[keikogi]

Been saying this for a while.  Armor should not scale per level because health already does. So the value of armor stripping would be fixed instead of increasing more and more as armor scales.

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

Just now, keikogi said:

Been saying this for a while.  Armor should not scale per level because health already does. So the value of armor stripping would be fixed instead of increasing more and more as armor scales.

DE really need to understand that no matter how they adjust their equation, armor will always out of control at some point if they don't change it. 

[keikogi]

10 minutes ago, CrimsonBladeZeta said:

DE really need to understand that no matter how they adjust their equation, armor will always out of control at some point if they don't change it. 

It has two core desing problems that can't be fixed as long as armor scales. Faction x Faction EHP can't be balanced. Elite enemy EHP and basic enemy EHP also can't be balanced because the higher the armor the "faster " the unit scales.  So stuff like a butcher barely scales his EHP while a bombard explodes his EHP in the millions 

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

Just now, keikogi said:

It has two core desing problems that can't be fixed as long as armor scales. Faction x Faction EHP can't be balanced. Elite enemy EHP and basic enemy EHP also can't be balanced because the higher the armor the "faster " the unit scales.  So stuff like a butcher barely scales his EHP while a bombard explodes his EHP in the millions 

Couldn't agree more. DE really need to fix this before Steel Path in my opinion. 

[GKP_light]

an easier change would be to keep the actual armor scaling in low level, and make it stop to increase at level 65.

with this, ti remove the imbalance when the level becam high, and there is not change in the low level.

 

and 2nd point :

give back the old hp (and shield) scaling.

actually, from the level 100 to 200, an ennemis have his HP multiply by 1.41.

in the same time, the damage are multiply by 2.93.

so for the ennemis, the damage increase more than the HP. but us, we have lot of tool to increase our damage, and far less for our defense. but if the HP of the ennemis don't increase, we dont need those increase of damage, we are dead before need it.

so the HP scaling should be higher than the damage scaling. like before. before, from the level 100 to level 200, the HP were multiply by 4.

[Tyreaus]

While I don't think the solution is necessarily bad, there's nothing about it that wouldn't fix the EHP issue, it does make me a little concerned that it could turn Grineer into Infested-but-with-guns.

If armour is too low, proc methods of handling Grineer end up with a higher TTK than ignoring the aspect of armour and going full damage. See, also, Viral often overtaking Corrosive. If it's too high, obviously, we end up right back where we started, relying on things like Slash to get past it. I have never fancied scenarios where a single number has to be nailed just right.

Moreover, it leaves in what I see as other issues with armour, like the fact it can only be managed via status - that untouchability has always been a sticking point in my side.

Personally, I would rather see it scale and have it continue to be a major factor in combating Grineer, but see armour degrade with damage taken, For example, for every hit against enemy armour, something like 5% of the weapon's damage (without the armour reduction) is dealt to the armour value. Perhaps this could be inversely related to rate of fire, so that every hit "resets" the armour damage percentage to 0.5%, which gradually climbs back up to 5%, meaning a lower-RoF weapon will always hit the max 5% armour damage while higher-RoF weapons will hover lower down. Corrosive can, naturally, increase that value and/or stop the "reset", and damage type multipliers can chew through armour faster in addition to dealing more health damage. That would put armour on a similar footing as shields: you can brute force it with flat damage, brute force it faster with some elements or procs (Corrosive and Magnetic), or bypass it with other elements (Slash and Toxin), and it doesn't require setting a number to get results that are "just right".

_{That does mean handling armour in some way becomes more important as levels increase, even if status isn't the only way to go, but I also think shields deserve a similar treatment. They're signature HP types, after all.}

Not that I'm against just removing scaling, though. But...most of my games go Viral + Heat with crit weapons and that does perfectly fine for the armour values I encounter up to sorties. I think it'd be pretty rough to set a value above that that doesn't also mess up lower levels...

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

2 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

While I don't think the solution is necessarily bad, there's nothing about it that wouldn't fix the EHP issue, it does make me a little concerned that it could turn Grineer into Infested-but-with-guns.

If armour is too low, proc methods of handling Grineer end up with a higher TTK than ignoring the aspect of armour and going full damage. See, also, Viral often overtaking Corrosive. If it's too high, obviously, we end up right back where we started, relying on things like Slash to get past it. I have never fancied scenarios where a single number has to be nailed just right.

Moreover, it leaves in what I see as other issues with armour, like the fact it can only be managed via status - that untouchability has always been a sticking point in my side.

Personally, I would rather see it scale and have it continue to be a major factor in combating Grineer, but see armour degrade with damage taken, For example, for every hit against enemy armour, something like 5% of the weapon's damage (without the armour reduction) is dealt to the armour value. Perhaps this could be inversely related to rate of fire, so that every hit "resets" the armour damage percentage to 0.5%, which gradually climbs back up to 5%, meaning a lower-RoF weapon will always hit the max 5% armour damage while higher-RoF weapons will hover lower down. Corrosive can, naturally, increase that value and/or stop the "reset", and damage type multipliers can chew through armour faster in addition to dealing more health damage. That would put armour on a similar footing as shields: you can brute force it with flat damage, brute force it faster with some elements or procs (Corrosive and Magnetic), or bypass it with other elements (Slash and Toxin), and it doesn't require setting a number to get results that are "just right".

_{That does mean handling armour in some way becomes more important as levels increase, even if status isn't the only way to go, but I also think shields deserve a similar treatment. They're signature HP types, after all.}

Not that I'm against just removing scaling, though. But...most of my games go Viral + Heat with crit weapons and that does perfectly fine for the armour values I encounter up to sorties. I think it'd be pretty rough to set a value above that that doesn't also mess up lower levels...

in fact armor is just nothing! it is just another health equation, if we give infested 27 million health they will just be as tanky as a level 500 Corrupted Heavy Gunner, the only difference is slash won't be that good on them. And don't worry that they will mess up lower levels too, it is not shield, it is not a flat value, it is just a percentage damage reduction, DE just need to make the health balance right, which is much easier as they only need to control one equation instead of two. 

Use an extreme example to explain, a unit only got 10 health but 10k armor, they still only got 333 Effective health. DE just need to make the health(and shield, which is just another type of health) scaling right!

Just remember, at the end of the day it is all about Effective Health. Armor, health, shield, damage reduction.... the list just go on and on, all are nothing but different method to increase Effective Health. 

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

4 hours ago, GKP_light said:

an easier change would be to keep the actual armor scaling in low level, and make it stop to increase at level 65.

with this, ti remove the imbalance when the level becam high, and there is not change in the low level.

 

and 2nd point :

give back the old hp (and shield) scaling.

actually, from the level 100 to 200, an ennemis have his HP multiply by 1.41.

in the same time, the damage are multiply by 2.93.

so for the ennemis, the damage increase more than the HP. but us, we have lot of tool to increase our damage, and far less for our defense. but if the HP of the ennemis don't increase, we dont need those increase of damage, we are dead before need it.

so the HP scaling should be higher than the damage scaling. like before. before, from the level 100 to level 200, the HP were multiply by 4.

I mean, it is not like the old or new HP scaling or not, these are just numbers, I trust DE could tune them right.

DE is walking on an unbalance-able path right now, this is the only problem. If they keep the current equation they can never ever balance the values right. 

I mean, 400,000 health enemy is actually the same as a 100,000 with an armor value of 75% damage reduction in terms of effective Health. 

If we use current gameplay mechanics to deal with the above enemy, what will happen?

1. Corrosive damage and proc and/or Fire proc to reduce that armor value, which will decrease the one with armor's effective health while do nothing to the one without armor..
2. Viral, just flat out do more damage, same performance in both cases.
3. Magnetic? still same performance in both cases, just nothing happens.
4. Slash procs, ignore armor means gain a 4 times multiplier with the one with 75% armor in terms of Effective Health damage. Nothing happen to the one without armor. 

I hope you(and others) can understand now! 

[GKP_light]

Il y a 8 heures, CrimsonBladeZeta a dit :

I trust DE could tune them right.

i don't trust them at all about it ; the fact that with the change, they did somthing bad is the proof that they are bad at it.

Il y a 8 heures, CrimsonBladeZeta a dit :

I hope you(and others) can understand now! 

what should i undertand of new ?

an high armor make usefull the way to reduce of ignor it, yes.

 

and i think that at high level, an armor around 900 (75% damage reduction) is good, but should not becam higher with the level.

75% damage reduction is enough high to make the way to reduce or ignor it usefull, and enought low to make the play without it is playable.

[Steel_Rook]

20 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

It is not like Grineer are hard to kill, even at the highest level - you just need to get rid of their armor (or bypass it). If you make this step obsolete, have you really made the game better?

It's not that Grineer are "hard" to kill. It's that they're substantially harder to kill than anything else in the game by a wide margin, and that margin only grows wider the higher the enemy level gets. You can, of course, just strip their armour, but that both heavily limits build diversity and it turns the game into Simon Says. We pick our damage types not based on what fits our playstyle, but based on what we fight. "Simon says Grineer." We say "Corrosive." Might as well skip the middle man and just auto-set our damage to corrosive at that point. That or Slash. Point being, choices are made for you, and that's not a great system.

Armour stripping is also a really dull system. You hit the enemy with "numbers" so that you can hit them with bigger "numbers" but nothing in the core gameplay loop changes. You shoot them in the head until they fall over, just with green ammo instead of blue ammo or purple ammo or... If you want actual "armour stripping," then go the route of The Division 2. Individual armour pieces can be damaged and shot off, revealing unarmoured health underneath. Focus fire on the same piece to expose the enemy's weakness. This would naturally reward precision weapons and - more importantly - precision marksmanship over the kind of spray-and-pray tactics which usually work against the Corpus.

Finally, the way the game handles armour creates a "functional" issue. Someone at DE went through a lot of trouble modelling EHP as a linear function of armour by modelling EHP as an increasing returns rational function of Resistance and Resistance as a diminishing returns function of Armour in order to "flatten the curve." This is clever, but it goes out the window when you scale both health AND armour because they are multiplicative with each other. So while EHP might be a linear function of health alone and a linear function of armour alone, it's a parabolic function of health and armour. The exact nature of the parabola depends on base values and scaling factors, but you always have disproportionately more EHP for having a mix of armour and health than you could achieve with just health or just armour. The same does not apply with shields, which are always additive with health. Why? Because damage resistance to shields is a flat value - always 25%. If shield resistance scaled with shield amount, the same issue would apply to the Corpus, as well - though to a lesser extent due to the resistance only applying to shields.

I'm with the OP. Don't scale Grineer resistance. Scale their health more aggressively, instead. 600 armour is plenty of a Heavy Gunner, 900-1200 armour is plenty for a Nox. We don't need Heavy Gunners at level 100 with 30K health and 6K armour because they end up with 700K EHP. None of the Corpus ever get that high, with the equivalent Corpus Tech having an EHP of I think 85K. Forcing players into armour-stripping gimmicks, limiting us to a few damage types and reducing gameplay into the singular consideration that is armour is not an improvement to the core gameplay experience. Especially since you don't need to worry about stripping the shields off Corpus units at high levels. You don't hear people arguing how Magnetic is mandatory or else you can't kill Coprus enemies.

And finally, I'm of the opinion that Grineer armour ought to disproportionately resist low-damage, rapid-fire weapons. Shield Gating successfully made the Corpus resistant to hard-hitting weapons by enforcing at least two shots to kill even with something like the Opticor. Sure, there are ways around it (via headshots), but by and large these kinds of weapons are less convenient and less reliable against Corpus enemies. Instead, automatics are much more reliable due to not caring if a shot or two is negated. I'd personally like to see the reverse happen to the Grineer, where weak autoguns would be heavily resisted by Grineer armour and necessitate bringing more "cannon-like" weapons. Unlike "just bring Corrosive," this does fundamentally alter the core gameplay loop because the resistance is based in gameplay, not so much in stats. It also creates a more intuitive sense of what weapons are good against what factions. There have been suggestions on how to implement this in the past that I don't want to get into, but suffice it to say this:

Giving Grineer fixed armour values which resist autoguns better than heavy cannons would, in my opinion, improve the moment-to-moment gameplay experience of fighting them. It's important to remember that despite its RPG elements, Warframe is still an action game at the end of the day. It works better when success or failure is determined on the battlefield, not in the Arsenal.

[Traumtulpe]

35 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Individual armour pieces can be damaged and shot off, revealing unarmoured health underneath. Focus fire on the same piece to expose the enemy's weakness. [...] And finally, I'm of the opinion that Grineer armour ought to disproportionately resist low-damage, rapid-fire weapons.

Those are some neat mechanics, they would make you "feel" the armor - instead of your only indication being a yellow health bar that is barely depleting. No objections there.

However, the original point still stands; If you make proper elements against Grineer obsolete, players have more choice, but the choices don't matter anymore. I see no improvement there. What do Grineer even do, compared to Corpus, if you make their armor irrelevant? Nothing.

[GKP_light]

il y a 15 minutes, Steel_Rook a dit :

And finally, I'm of the opinion that Grineer armour ought to disproportionately resist low-damage, rapid-fire weapons.

somthing like :

damage taken = damage * (300 + 4 * damage ^ 0.6 )/( 300 + 4 * damage ^ 0.6 + Armor)

instead of :

damage taken = damage * ( 300 )/( 300 + Armor)

 

this formula mean that :

if your hit do 100 damage, it is equivalent to ignore 17% of the armor.

if your hit do 1334 damage, it is equivalent to ignore 50% of the armor

for 10000 damage, it is equivalent to ignore 77% of the armor.

 

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

12 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

Those are some neat mechanics, they would make you "feel" the armor - instead of your only indication being a yellow health bar that is barely depleting. No objections there.

However, the original point still stands; If you make proper elements against Grineer obsolete, players have more choice, but the choices don't matter anymore. I see no improvement there. What do Grineer even do, compared to Corpus, if you make their armor irrelevant? Nothing.

Don't use your current gameplay to 'image' this change. This won't make armor irrelevant, on the other hand, armor in the current state make a lot of thing pointless. When you are using a viral slash build armor is just a pointless stat because you are ignoring it. When the armor is too high, it can even make it's 'counter', which is corrosive, pointless. Don't tell me removing their armor entirely, you are just ignoring armor once again. So, what i am doing here is just giving out a method to let DE balance EHP easier, not making armor completely useless. Just remember, armor is nothing but a percentage increase to effective health, it is always relevant.

And the main problem of the current scaling is, no matter how hard DE try, they can never balance and fix it. There are millions of methods to make armor not being ignored in the gameplay, make them scale with enemy level is the most lazy way that make it impossible to balance. 

Don't believe me? Just look at the current Steel Path.

Grineer: Guns? what are guns? Oh you mean those tubes shooting peanuts right? 

[GKP_light]

an other way to solve this problem would be to give armor to every faction.

if we give to every unit of the game 50 base armor (for the greener, in adition to their actual armor), every faction will benefit of the scaling of armor. (and the armor should also aply to shield, may be with a less efficient formula than for the health)

it would make that tool to reduce/ignor armor would be need for every faction.

but it also mean that this tools would be usefull for every faction, so more warframe, mod augment, weapon mod, weapon, could have an effect on armor, without having this effect useless on other faction than greener.

 

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

1 minute ago, GKP_light said:

an other way to solve this problem would be to give armor to every faction.

if we give to every unit of the game 50 base armor (for the greener, in adition to their actual armor), every faction will benefit of the scaling of armor. (and the armor should also aply to shield, may be with a less efficient formula than for the health)

it would make that tool to reduce/ignor armor would be need for every faction.

but it also mean that this tools would be usefull for every faction, so more warframe, mod augment, weapon mod, weapon, could have an effect on armor, without having this effect useless on other faction than greener.

 

Well I guess this is a bit overkill ha. The current design is something related to lore I think.

[Tyreaus]

12 hours ago, CrimsonBladeZeta said:

in fact armor is just nothing! -snip-

That...doesn't seem like a good philosophy, though. I already mentioned the whole bit about Viral overtaking Corrosive...

But okay. What would you set armour damage reduction to? 50%? 80%? 20-70%? Is it set to a particular enemy level (e.g. the armour enemy units would have at level 60)?

[CrimsonBladeZeta]

35 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

That...doesn't seem like a good philosophy, though. I already mentioned the whole bit about Viral overtaking Corrosive...

But okay. What would you set armour damage reduction to? 50%? 80%? 20-70%? Is it set to a particular enemy level (e.g. the armour enemy units would have at level 60)?

What I mean is Armor is just a multiplier to make effective health higher, not actually mean that armor is useless. I want to say is 'armor is not mechanics, just an equation'

maybe something between 35%(butchers) to 85%(Bombards)? I don't know, leave the mathematics to the 'Pros'  I think.

[Teridax68]

I largely agree with both the OP's critique and their proposed solutions. At the end of the day, armor is just a multiplier to health, and having it scale means that Grineer EHP scales quadratically on top of whichever exponential scaling formula is around, when Corpus and Infested don't scale nearly as hard. Consequently, Grineer are pushovers at lower levels, and eventually turn into bullet sponges, which is currently affecting the Steel Path and almost single-handedly ruining its enjoyment. Removing armor scaling and raising base armor would solve the problem neatly, and allow every faction to scale at the same rate.