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Posted

I'm mostly curious why you would stack a lot of health in favor of shields. I am looking at playing Saryn and compared to the Rhino/Frost where they have the boost in shields and it seems that the extra 50% health on Saryn is wasted. The shield mechanic seems to just be better for survivability. Is there any way you can make health work for you better than shields or is it just not possible at this time?

 

I know Rage exists (also seems really hard to get) and this would be one of the reasons to stack a large health pool, but other than that you seem to lose a lot by trying to build health as a resource rather than shields for defense. There is no regen for health and nothing seems to heal on a percentage (looking at you Rejuv). 

 

Can anyone give any good examples where building health is a reliable mechanic over just building shields? Why would I want more health on a frame?

 

Thanks

Posted (edited)

ancients... a lot of them, green and red. Nightmare as well when you have 0 shields or vampire.

Edited by Aure7
Posted

Well I haven't played a lot of saryn yet, but if you have high armor with high health and rejuvenation that will certainly increase your survivability. I don't really know specifically how it could be more useful but as you said a rage build might benefit.

Posted

I wish i could give such example, Nekros might benefit with equilibrium a bit, but it's not that great either.

 

Health requies steel fiber and proper class with it to actually feel benefit of it against higher level opponents.

Posted

If you have a good trinity is the group stacking hp in my opinion is better than shields because armor makes health more efficient at soaking up dmg. Then the trinity can just top your health off.

In most cases however, its better to just stack shields because they regenerate.

Posted

Any attack that ignores shields...

 

Um... 

 

Nightmare modes where you don't have shields. 

 

If you don't want to lose a lot of health when getting attacked, upgrade armor. 

 

Um...

 

To not get one-shot by tougher enemies...

 

There's plenty of reasons.

Posted

Stacking HP also requires the right Frame. Saryn, really, is the only health tank. Good armor and high HP, so both armor and health mods are good on her. For Saryn to really health tank though, she needs a Trinity or Nekros on the team as well as Equilibrium so she can keep her health stocked.

 

Vitality.. Vigor.. Steel Fiber and Equilibrium, just to health tank. Both shield mods are generally better to use. The only real reason one should health-tank is because of two mods: Quick Thinking and Rage.

Posted

I'm mostly curious why you would stack a lot of health in favor of shields. I am looking at playing Saryn and compared to the Rhino/Frost where they have the boost in shields and it seems that the extra 50% health on Saryn is wasted. The shield mechanic seems to just be better for survivability. Is there any way you can make health work for you better than shields or is it just not possible at this time?

 

I know Rage exists (also seems really hard to get) and this would be one of the reasons to stack a large health pool, but other than that you seem to lose a lot by trying to build health as a resource rather than shields for defense. There is no regen for health and nothing seems to heal on a percentage (looking at you Rejuv). 

 

Can anyone give any good examples where building health is a reliable mechanic over just building shields? Why would I want more health on a frame?

 

Thanks

 

 

That is an excellent question

 

toxic 

 

Something that's dead can't kill you.

Posted

Health is found only in cannisters.Why wouldn't you stack the most precious resource in the map? It's basically your defense against toxics,and the most important in tough situations,since your shield will go down in seconds

Posted

Thanks for the responses. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious. It would be nice if rejuv was % based or something. Right now there just seems little reward for people who want to use health as a resource. Any % scaling out there for anything?

 

It also makes soloing very unbalanced, as the bonus stats on Saryn / Ash would be much better served for shields. Also, putting an innate regen on health (maybe very slow) would also be nice so I can actually heal on solo missions.

 

Anyone have any tips on how to increase healing on a health based build? Quick thinking / Rejuv the only two outs?

Posted

I can see why you wouldn't want health. it generally doesn't regenerate, and by the time your shields are down your health is drained fairly quickly, though that is somewhat mitigated by your armor rating( saryn frost and rhino have the highest values).  ancients and other high hitting mobs really aren't an issue though to address the concern.  fact of the matter is is that no matter how high a value your health has, your shields are more important, and like kittens said, if its dead it can't get you. 

 

if mobs dropped hp then it might be worth investing in armor and vitality, but since they don't unless you have equillibrium equipped or a nekros in your group, the whole idea is fairly negligible and worthless

Posted

add equilibrium to your build.  it gives you hp for every energy orb you pick up.  that would atleast give you some regen outside of rejuvie and quick thinking. i suppose if you have it a maxed steel fiber over redirection is plausible, but you'd have to have a high enough hp rating to not have it burned through in  a few seconds( armor sucks mostly on frames.....)

Posted

Well I haven't played a lot of saryn yet, but if you have high armor with high health and rejuvenation that will certainly increase your survivability. I don't really know specifically how it could be more useful but as you said a rage build might benefit.

 

If only it worked properly - that was my thought too in making a Saryn build, but boy it sure didn't work.  For starters, and maybe it's a UI glitch, but equip Steel Fiber on Saryn and watch how her armor doesn't go up on selection screen.  Then take her into mission, and watch how people cut through your health and no amount of rejuvenation will keep up.  It should be viable, but isn't right now.  Until frames with say 100+ armor can achieve a large % buff to armor through mods, it will probably never be worth it.

Posted

If only it worked properly - that was my thought too in making a Saryn build, but boy it sure didn't work.  For starters, and maybe it's a UI glitch, but equip Steel Fiber on Saryn and watch how her armor doesn't go up on selection screen.  Then take her into mission, and watch how people cut through your health and no amount of rejuvenation will keep up.  It should be viable, but isn't right now.  Until frames with say 100+ armor can achieve a large % buff to armor through mods, it will probably never be worth it.

 

I've done the sums, trust me, steel fibre is nice to have on most frames. It gives around a 15% boost to the total damage you can take to your health. For a frame with lots of health, like Saryn, that 15% is a lot.

Posted (edited)

Consider it like this:

 

Shields have no resistance offered to them whatsoever from any mods.  They will take full damage from every hit thrown at them.  At first, high shields seem excellent, but once you start hitting high levels you can't depend on your shield very much anymore like you could before because mobs will dish out more than your shield can handle.

 

Now there is something called base health, which is the number you see while playing, and then there is effective health.  Effective health is calculated by taking your base health and taking into consideration all of the mods and your warframe's stats, armor being the biggest stat.

 

Let's say I am a Frost and I have 150 armor.  I'll add Steel Fiber for 80% and the Aurora helmet for 25% for a total increase of 105%.  Now the Frost has an armor value of 307.5.  Using the wiki for armor scaling, we can assume Frost only takes 24.5% of damage from standard mob attacks.  This will boost his effective health to 3120 assuming he had 780 to begin with.  When your shield is wrecked, you fall back on that pool until you die, and it is in essence a larger number than it appears to be with all things considered.  So if I got a health orb, I'd get 100 effective health back as oppose to 25 base health.

 

Of course you need to consider things that ignore armor like fire and toxic damage, along with appropriate armor ignoring weapons.

 

What I am saying is, eventually your shield will get wrecked in possibly less than a second.  When that happens, you have a more resilient pool to fall back on to keep you from dying.  It won't last forever, but if you had say... 250 health without vitality, you'd be killed just as fast as your shields, or faster based on armor/damage reduction mods.

Edited by Penthos
Posted

Toxic ancients.

 

Their poison ignores shields.

 

 

ancients... a lot of them, green and red. Nightmare as well when you have 0 shields or vampire.

If you're that close to an Ancient you're doing something wrong.  And Nightmare is for bragging rights, and masochists, you go in KNOWING you'll get screwed.

Posted (edited)

I've done the sums, trust me, steel fibre is nice to have on most frames. It gives around a 15% boost to the total damage you can take to your health. For a frame with lots of health, like Saryn, that 15% is a lot.

 

Edited: Penthos' post is making me rethink how I understood Warframe armor to work.  I've never been very clear on that, and my experience with armor/damage mitigations builds has been very unsuccessful.  In this case perhaps perception was not reality.  Take Penthos' advice, he seems to have the data to back up his post.

Edited by KARMA2605
Posted (edited)

Consider it like this:

 

Shields have no resistance offered to them whatsoever from any mods.  They will take full damage from every hit thrown at them.  At first, high shields seem excellent, but once you start hitting high levels you can't depend on your shield very much anymore like you could before because mobs will dish out more than your shield can handle.

 

Now there is something called base health, which is the number you see while playing, and then there is effective health.  Effective health is calculated by taking your base health and taking into consideration all of the mods and your warframe's stats, armor being the biggest stat.

 

Let's say I am a Frost and I have 150 armor.  I'll add Steel Fiber for 80% and the Aurora helmet for 25% for a total increase of 105%.  Now the Frost has an armor value of 307.5.  Using the wiki for armor scaling, we can assume Frost only takes 24.5% of damage from standard mob attacks.  This will boost his effective health to 3120 assuming he had 780 to begin with.  When your shield is wrecked, you fall back on that pool until you die, and it is in essence a larger number than it appears to be with all things considered.  So if I got a health orb, I'd get 100 effective health back as oppose to 25 base health.

 

Of course you need to consider things that ignore armor like fire and toxic damage, along with appropriate armor ignoring weapons.

 

What I am saying is, eventually your shield will get wrecked in possibly less than a second.  When that happens, you have a more resilient pool to fall back on to keep you from dying.  It won't last forever, but if you had say... 250 health without vitality, you'd be killed just as fast as your shields, or faster based on armor/damage reduction mods.

 

 

Nope. Effective health is a myth after level 80, and you could have used that slot to give yourself an increase in offensive potential that would have mitigated ever needing SF in the first place, and before you retort  about synthetic stats this is my standard loadout:

 

Warframe%202013-10-06%2022-36-50-89.jpg

 

Synthetic buffers are just that; synthetic, and power offense 100% rules WF's metagame up to level 150 or so, and after that mitigating abilities combined with completely stacked weapons are your only option to survive.

 

Defensive stats/mods asides from shields and QT are ridiculously inefficient and economic suicide.

Edited by -Kittens-
Posted

Better question: Why use shields or health mods at all when at high levels the mods are pointless? As far as infested go, avoiding them is pretty easy, especially in more 'stationary' game modes like Defense b/c you can just jump up somewhere. Corpus/Grineer are a bit more tricky, but if you're going after high level content you should have a frost w/ you anyway.

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