Is it time to rework Armor for enemies yet?

[TKDancer]

The Issue:

Armor, the stat that gives both us and enemies damage resistance to all but one damage type(True, mostly done through either Finishers or the DoT from Slash status)

For us, its pretty balanced, we can get some decently high armor on a few frames through abilities and arcanes, we can get some chunky DR for ourselves

For enemies? its a bit of a mess DE has mostly avoided fixing outright, opting instead for slight changes to enemy scaling...  turns out giving enemies scaling health *and* damage resistance with each level makes enemies with any substantial amount of armor kinda of a mess at higher levels

This issue has gotten worse over the years as the amount of content with higher level enemies has increased, to the point where DE released an update trying to lessen enemy scaling to a degree, but then they also released a "hard mode" via the steel path which exacerbated these armor woes again via adding a much higher level version of the original star chart(original+100) while also applying enhanced health/armor/shields modifiers, which is mostly a pain due to enhanced armor

Now, the current armor we have available to face at the moment isnt insurmountable, far from it, we have tons of people who fully cleared the steel path star chart, people who do hours long endurance runs vs grineer, clearly the ridiculous DR is beatable with enough dmg, specially when armor stripping is a available, specially in coordinated groups

But, this doesn't mean the system is perfect, far from it, it's most noticeable flaw is the ridiculous discrepancy between the eHP of enemies with armor and enemies without armor, this is a really wild inconsistency and makes you wonder why the corpus and infested don't invest more on getting armor for their troops as higher level armored enemies have eHP surpassing unarmored equivalents by a factor of 2 digits or more

My Solution:

Just do a borderlands! that is to say, make armor a health-bar of sorts, as health and shields currently work as, my solution is to simply make it so armor, for enemies, stops giving damage resistance beyond damage-type advantages/disadvantages, and becomes a non-regenerating shield of sorts :

 

Replace DR with a chunky extra health bar for armored enemies(chunkier than shields as they wouldn't have the benefit of regeneration! ) Literally that simple! Suddenly we don't have to worry about getting through 90+% damage resistance on high level armored enemies, which makes so many abilities near-useless(if not fully useless), for enemies with both, have THREE health-bars! Shields above armor, armor above health!

This also makes balancing for the future much easier, much simpler to just give enemies bigger health bars than to give them ludicrous damage resistance

But What About Statuses & Armor-Stripping Abilities?

This change would require Multiple statuses and abilities to be changed:
 

-Viral: should no longer boost dmg vs armor, only vs RED health (this alone would greatly shake the meta)
-Corrosive: should work as a viral/magnetic equivalent for armor, multiplying damage done to the yellow health-bar(suddenly we have 1 dmg booster for each health type!)
-Heat: Change the Burning! status to simply do increase slightly damage over time to armor to simulate the armor being melted off(never understood why the heat rework gave the heat status temporary armor strip, why and how is melted armor coming back?)
-Slash: should continue bypass armor, but rather than simply ignoring it's DR, it should bypass the yellow health-bar, just as toxic bypasses shields (and 1 bypasses for each barrier-type health type!)
-Plasma(Railjack): Just make it work with armor the same as it already works with shields
-Armor-Stripping Abilities: should be made so they work the same for the new armor as their shield equivalents currently do for shields, that is, remove large chunks at once, numbers for these abilities would have to be tweaked individually, this way they keep usability but armor stripping(or rather its lack) stops being a deal breaker for frame design

edit: maybe Slash DoT and Toxic damage shouldnt fully bypass armor/shields respectively? What if instead only a % of the dmg from toxic/Slash tics bypassed them? or maybe they shouldnt bypass either at all? whats the point of Magnetic if Toxic can bypass shields? corpus robots are resistant to Toxic at least but that doesnt matter much(at the moment) while Slash DoT is currently True Damage... not sure what to do about either yet, just something to think about!


But What About Frames, Sentinels Companions, Arch-Wing and Mechs?

Due to none of these having innate level scaling for their Armor values, there's no need to rework how armor works for them, including status

this would obviously cause inconsistency between how armor AND statuses works between us and enemies, but that's nothing new as armor ALREADY works differently for enemies since they get auto scaling as mission level goes up and status inconsistency isn't anything new either(hello magnetic energy drain!)

edit:

But What About Our Damage Output Being So High Already? Isn't This Just A Nerf For Enemies?

Well, technically yes, this alone would mainly be just a "nerf" on enemies, but i dont think all of this is enough to fix WF's problems, this is Step 1, after getting enemy health values under control again and changing armor on enemies to be less wack, we can shift our focus to tenno dmg output, maybe we shouldnt be doing millions of dmg per attack!

It's harder to theorize about this, but simply put, after all those changes above, our dmg, mainly the dmg from *weapons* would have to be heavily tweaked for a balanced middle ground that still has good distinctions between the strengths of Crit and Status, where mob enemies are still taken out fast but armored heavies are neither pushovers nor ridiculously tankier than non-armored heavies

then, we'd also have to look at the balance of damaging warframe abilities, mainly the ones that dont have auto-scaling(like Grasp of Lohk, where the 'base' dmg is affected by the level of the enemy being hit) or are affected by either weapon mods or are modded as weapons directly(exalted weapon abilities) so they also fit to this new balance

[Traumtulpe]

That sounds like a good idea, surprisingly enough. Except the entire game would have to be rebalanced, most enemies, most status, most weapons. Not gonna happen, is it?

Also, the damage type to bypass armor should be Impact by the way.

[TKDancer]

Just now, Traumtulpe said:

That sounds like a good idea, surprisingly enough. Except the entire game would have to be rebalanced, most enemies, most status, most weapons. Not gonna happen, is it?

i dont think THAT much would have change as 2 of  main 3 factions(yes i know sentients exist also) are already mostly unarmored, mostly bosses would need an in-depth re-balance, whereas most mobs could just have their health/armor get the shield treatment

statuses affected i've outlined

it'd also be a boon for the game's future in my opinion, streamlining and adding a lot more consistency between enemy factions while still keeping a decent level of difference between them

[Traumtulpe]

Your suggestion would make armor and shields functionally identical (with armor being maybe 2x the value). Well, currently shields are irrelevant still - if your weapon kills level 5000 Grineer, it kills everything that isn't immune to status.

You have to deal with armor, but can entirely ignore shields. Without significantly changing balance, you'd be able to fight everything at reasonable efficiency regardless of the weapon or element you are using - even pure impact damage would be kinda okay.

That sounds good, except the game is too easy for this. The game is artificially more difficult by requiring you to use specific elements/status effects at present. Not only would the difficulty have to get raised overall, it would also have to be much more finely balanced (instead of "right element = instant kill" / "wrong element = no damage").

[TKDancer]

Just now, Traumtulpe said:

Your suggestion would make armor and shields functionally identical (with armor being maybe 2x the value).

+ no regeneration

 

Just now, Traumtulpe said:

 Well, currently shields are irrelevant still

thats smth that needs to be addressed *regardless* of the changes im suggesting here

 

1 minute ago, Traumtulpe said:

That sounds good, except the game is too easy for this. The game is artificially more difficult by requiring you to use specific elements/status effects at present. Not only would the difficulty have to get raised overall, it would also have to be much more finely balanced (instead of "right element = instant kill" / "wrong element = no damage").

again, this is more of an innate problem of warframe that needs to be addressed as all of that is already an issue here, no armor =  do whatever and things explode, armor = use everything u have to deal wtih it

and in my humble opinion, the process to balance this game would start with removing the ludicrous discrepancy between shields and armor, 1st by making armor simply act as a temporary layer protecting the vitals of enemies

after that, DE could then start to fine tune the balance of our damage output to achieve an ideal level

[Traumtulpe]

I don't disagree with you, I'm just saying DE took a shortcut with balancing via Rock - Paper - Scissors. The actual numbers are irrelevant, you just need to pick the right element. This is often perceived as a flaw, but I am convinced it's quite deliberate.

If your weapon has Viral and Slash, the Grineers level is irrelevant. 5, 50, 500, 5000, they all die the same. If it wasn't so the game would have to be finely balanced - DE is not good at fine balance, nor do they have the time for it. They already struggle as it is.

[TKDancer]

9 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

I don't disagree with you, I'm just saying DE took a shortcut with balancing via Rock - Paper - Scissors. The actual numbers are irrelevant, you just need to pick the right element. This is often perceived as a flaw, but I am convinced it's quite deliberate.

thing is, their version of rock - paper - scissors isn't even as in-depth as that, as only 1 of the main 3 factions actually requires specific dmg types, and the same dmg types used for it are not only viable but also very strong against the other 2(viral, heat and slash), then we have sentients which are mostly status immune still, but their adaptive resistances which is stripped by void damage is a seemingly a better approach to balance than enemy armor DR(tho unfortunately they also have armor on top of that)

so again, starting by normalizing the behavior of shields and armor on enemies would be a window to start balancing our dmg output, potentially putting more emphasis on using the right elements(tho not to the level of doing negligible dmg when using the 'wrong' dmg type, just rewards people for using the 'correct' ones)

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

They already reworked enemy armor.

[DrakeWurrum]

Nah. Too similar to shields. Right now there are two forms of damage reduction to raw health: armor and shields.

Armor is "always on" but still allows your actual health to be damaged, meaning that you can still get whittled down without some form of health regen.

Shields are temporary buffers, but completely 100% prevent ALL damage from applying to your health, but still takes 75% of the damage dealt to it with no reduction. So if used effectively, you could avoid taking any damage at all.

Warframe has not always balanced these two things properly (and armor is still pretty much king, depending on the frame). This is not the solution to that balance.

1 hour ago, Traumtulpe said:

I don't disagree with you, I'm just saying DE took a shortcut with balancing via Rock - Paper - Scissors. The actual numbers are irrelevant, you just need to pick the right element. This is often perceived as a flaw, but I am convinced it's quite deliberate.

They attempted to take that route and ultimately failed.

Viral is the only damage type that is needed, for any faction. It is even superior against Corpus over Magnetic. You can add Heat to either one for the extra bonus of stripping down some armor, and it has a marginal improvement to the numbers, but numerous number-crunching people have looked into this. The best damage type for *all* enemies across *all* factions is Viral.

The only place Viral doesn't work is Deimos, because they made enemies strictly IMMUNE to it, so we revert to the old Corrosive.

That's the flaw that you speak of. Not that a rock-paper-scissors damage system sucks, but rather that they designed it poorly so that we don't actually have any choice in the matter. Beyond making sure to use Viral (or Corrosive on Deimos), you can ultimately IGNORE the damage types.

[GEN-Son_17]

Not bad ideas but I think the intention was to not make them so closely related. Also, while I do understand the big "DE don't know how to balance it" talking point, I personally think they got it right. 

- Grineer, except for the RJ variants, heavy gunners and bombards, are still lightweights to take out. The are just not "healthy", even with armor. Steel essence fixes some of that but the majority, if not ALL of armor talk, is for the heavy gunners. That said, since the game is based on a power fantasy, the armor balance is pretty much in tune with the mix of "hooray for kill fest" and "oh crap, the heavies are here". The game flows nicely in that regard.

The Corpus, minus the orb vallis varients, are squishier but have better tech defenses and disrupters. Shields and robotics do a good job of managing the killfest a bit while nullifiers are excellent for minimizing nuke performance, especially on OV. 

The infested has speed and armor, making it easier to overwhelm us but also increase the killing fun. Changing any of this disrupts the kill count and flow, I think.

[Traumtulpe]

21 minutes ago, DrakeWurrum said:

The best damage type for *all* enemies across *all* factions is Viral.

This is incorrect. People who come to this conclusion fail to take Corrosive's 75% armor penetration into account. Also there are more enemies immune to Viral status than on Deimos.

[DrakeWurrum]

12 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

This is incorrect. People who come to this conclusion fail to take Corrosive's 75% armor penetration into account. Also there are more enemies immune to Viral status than on Deimos.

It's not. People have parsed DPS and kill times on this. They have compared total number of shots/melee attacked, compared total time taken to kill. Viral beats Corrosive.

[Traumtulpe]

Just now, DrakeWurrum said:

It's not. People have parsed DPS and kill times on this. Viral beats Corrosive.

Repeating it doesn't make it any less false.

[DrakeWurrum]

Just now, Traumtulpe said:

Repeating it doesn't make it any less false.

I am repeating it because it's not false. Numbers don't lie.

 

[Traumtulpe]

There are a lot of flaws with this video. For example, the weapon used was a rapid fire weapon with slash damage and very low overall damage. In other words: Full status effects and bleeds.

Had he used a full Impact weapon with very high damage, Corrosive would have been miles ahead against Ferrite armor. You never fight enemies by shooting them 600 times, taking the presented results as facts shows only one thing: You didn't understand them at all.

And for good measure: He used 101 shots less to kill a Heavy Gunner with Corrosive than with Viral. Despite the bleeds.

Another one: All results containing the Heat element are completely unusable - Heat stacks infinitely for increasing damage, and the guy pumped hundreds of shots into each target.

[prodi1600]

Agree, One of the things I have against Steel Path its the enemy armor/Damage, makes no sense, not every frame have a way to bypass armor at those levels, not helping that only way to get kills its using melee since primary are mostly useles, also warframes should get some type of escalating armor or have Steel path mods that allow us to vamp our defenses to those level, with most of my gear even using some cheap tactics like trying to get most of invisibility frames + Rolling Guard / Adaptation no tank frames usually get one shot by AoE attacks from affar, this its bothersome because its no real challenge just cheap a$$ difficulty, when you're in a mission and you get Nora summoning glassed enemies the explosion from when you kill them does too much damage over a too long range, I'm not even going to start talking when you have like 2 ancient/Nox some Glassed enemies and the acolyte show on, total carnage, I end up running or failing the mission. 

SP its not easily doable solo with non tank /shieldgate meta abusing frames.

 

[TKDancer]

10 hours ago, GEN-Son_17 said:

Not bad ideas but I think the intention was to not make them so closely related. Also, while I do understand the big "DE don't know how to balance it" talking point, I personally think they got it right. 

- Grineer, except for the RJ variants, heavy gunners and bombards, are still lightweights to take out. The are just not "healthy", even with armor. Steel essence fixes some of that but the majority, if not ALL of armor talk, is for the heavy gunners. That said, since the game is based on a power fantasy, the armor balance is pretty much in tune with the mix of "hooray for kill fest" and "oh crap, the heavies are here". The game flows nicely in that regard.

The Corpus, minus the orb vallis varients, are squishier but have better tech defenses and disrupters. Shields and robotics do a good job of managing the killfest a bit while nullifiers are excellent for minimizing nuke performance, especially on OV. 

The infested has speed and armor, making it easier to overwhelm us but also increase the killing fun. Changing any of this disrupts the kill count and flow, I think.

a lot here im sure is the mindset DE has, but its mostly not correct

10 hours ago, GEN-Son_17 said:

- Grineer, except for the RJ variants, heavy gunners and bombards, are still lightweights to take out.

this is not actually true when considering many abilities that simply become useless cause of DR, scaling DR is just bad

10 hours ago, GEN-Son_17 said:

The Corpus, minus the orb vallis varients, are squishier but have better tech defenses and disrupters. Shields and robotics do a good job of managing the killfest a bit while nullifiers are excellent for minimizing nuke performance, especially on OV.

there should be a difference between "squishier" and "our equivalent to a grineer heavy unit has about 20x less eHP at higher levels", it makes one wonder, why do the corpus not use armor instead of shields?

[GEN-Son_17]

18 hours ago, TKDancer said:

a lot here im sure is the mindset DE has, but its mostly not correct

this is not actually true when considering many abilities that simply become useless cause of DR, scaling DR is just bad

there should be a difference between "squishier" and "our equivalent to a grineer heavy unit has about 20x less eHP at higher levels", it makes one wonder, why do the corpus not use armor instead of shields?

The Corpus have armor on their machines such as those in the Index. The human variants see a greater benefit in lighter weight shielding, as demonstrated by the jumping and flying OV units. Their belief is shields are a better option because they can regenerate and provide greater flexibility...exactly as several Warframes prefer too (hence heavy gunners and Bombards are the slowest). 

As for "useless abilities" with DR, I'm simply not finding those problems. Weapons and powers are designed to work together and it's up to you, the player, to know the enemy and terrain before you go in. That's the whole point of Steel Path: You can't walk in unprepared. It's really quite simple:

Grineer = Crowd control and armor reduction.

Corpus = High player accuracy, shield bypassing and accuracy reduction for heavy robots.

Infested = High damage aoe, speed and gassing

Sentient = Resistance resetting, max dps and high mobility.

[TKDancer]

10 hours ago, GEN-Son_17 said:

The Corpus have armor on their machines such as those in the Index.

they also have them for the humans in the index, not just machines

so again, why not all the units? it makes no sense!

 

10 hours ago, GEN-Son_17 said:

As for "useless abilities" with DR, I'm simply not finding those problems. Weapons and powers are designed to work together

this is not true at all? we have multitudes of abilities clearly meant to do dmg that simply dont do any damage, many already struggle against high level corpus/infested due to lack of scaling, but then are completely prevented from doing *any* noticeable dmg against armored foes

many abilities are not meant to be used with weapons, is spectral scream supposed to work together with the weapons i literally cant use while firing my chroma's elemental breath?

just because you wish thats how the game worked, doenst make it so

 

10 hours ago, GEN-Son_17 said:

Grineer = Crowd control and armor reduction.

Corpus = High player accuracy, shield bypassing and accuracy reduction for heavy robots.

Infested = High damage aoe, speed and gassing

Sentient = Resistance resetting, max dps and high mobility.

this is based on nothing, at all

all factions benefit from having accuracy, speed and AoE dmg, thats why the new cernos is so popular(specially since it can be modded to have corrosive, heat AND viral), only 1 faction that is encountered commonly is heavily armored, shield bypassing isnt even needed to kill corpus faster than one already kills armored grineer *since they mostly have no DR beyond dmg type disadvantages*, using viral fast guns vs corpus, by the time u reach their health they have so many stacks they explode, this without even considering other statuses like heat or slash proc'ing too, using high dmg slower guns, the dmg alone is enough to one shot most corpus with headshots

and sentients are a separate matter as we always have a way to reset their resistances thanks to operators having no conditionals, can always just pop out, shoot once, back into frame

[Birdframe_Prime]

See, this kind of change I'm completely behind as a concept, it would need work because what initial idea doesn't need work, but the basics on this are absolutely solid.

You could even push this further, for those enemies that appear to have all three, with the way that (and no, please don't hate me for this) Overwatch does it. With Health, then Armour and then Shields stacking on as bars you have to destroy in turn if you don't mod for elements that bypass. Enemies such as those in the Index and Rathuum, that have all three, would clearly just have the three bars on them instead of only two.

Shields are re-fillable over the top of the other health types, they have specific damage types that are good or bad against them and status types that are good or bad against them. Armour is a bar over the top of Health, specifically, that requires different damage types and status than Shields do, and ordinarily (without bypass elements) has to be broken first before you can damage Health, just like Shields, except the key difference between Armour and Shields is that Armour can't regen. Then Health is the actual enemy beneath it all, with damage and status types that are good against that.

We have enough damage types and status types to make the modding for these actually amazing as long as there's balance across all three base factions.

There's so much more possibility here.

And the best possibility of all?

Number-based scaling instead of EHP based scaling.

Our damage can be adjusted, that's a possibility, but there's better than that; because it's a total change over, the underlying equations can be thrown out and given pure numbers that DE can adjust based on how much damage we already deal.

We might not have to adjust our damage at all, we could simply tweak enemies to match it. Instead of having to go into spaghetti code of 'at level 175 we have all Heavy Gunners at 98.798% DR on their health, multiplying their EHP to 2 million, but because of the base difference in stats all Lancers only have 100k'... we instead have direct scaling of 'At level 175, a Heavy Gunner will have 100k Health and 80k Armour, while a Lancer will have 80k Health and 70k Armour'. All numbers, of course, subject to what we actually can dish out against them.

That shift to things like Viral will be essential, too. Because making sure that Status is specific? Important. That means that our Status is always doing one of four things; straight Damage, mechanical CC, damage buffing against one specific defense, or bypassing faction-specific defenses.

There's a heckuvalotta things we could go into from this alone.

And isn't it so much more of a sound idea than just 'Enemies too hard, make squishy plz', hmm?

[TKDancer]

31 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Number-based scaling instead of EHP based scaling.

Our damage can be adjusted, that's a possibility, but there's better than that; because it's a total change over, the underlying equations can be thrown out and given pure numbers that DE can adjust based on how much damage we already deal.

yes! that's exactly why i proposed a change like this, cause it'd be an amazing first step to a good overhaul of dmg, that is more future proof

[Desdemona-XI]

I'll level with you. my first thought to this was "Dude, DE did fix armor scaling, this year." compared to how it was before the new system has been a dream, I get that you're dissatisfied though, for whatever reason. Personally I think it works fine. the only time armor really becomes an issue is when you're taking stupid levels or steel path*. and I don't see either of those as valid reasons to change a system they finally got working reliably. However.. Long post ahead:

 

That Said, there are some good ideas in this post, and in the comments. and points raised:

-The current math on scaling could be refined and simplified and beat into a more reliable system that can be adjusted and hold up to power creep.
-I do think that DE has done a bit of overkill on the levels of armor scaling on SP as Steelpath is a bit of a nightmare solo in my experience.*
-a lot of warframe powers simply dont scale well and thus dont really work against upper level enemies, from fireball to spectral scream and many others, the farther into stupid levels you go, the more most warframe powers become redundant.
- Shields remain a largely underpowered aspect of defenses again due to scaling numbers and how generally fragile they are.
-the factions could afford a little more variance in regards to weaknesses and functionality of element types to make more of them useful.

 

However, I have to find fault in certain base premises of your arguments Primarily a broken yardstick, using stupid levels to gauge performance. and
by stupid levels I mean anything that takes more than an hour to get to from star chart levels. level 500s and so forth, theres no point to fighting them the game was never intended to go that far, and in my opinion anyone who uses well above-content-level enemies as a yardstick for measuring the viability of anything in warframe is an idiot. Honestly I'll go so far as to say if you're looking at level 200 enemies as your yardstick you're blatantly wrong. 175s are pushing it.
And by well above content I mean levels at which the normal span of a mission wouldnt run for and there is no content reward or function or cause to go for those levels, even with steel path, that caps at 200ish. excluding it, you've got a cap of around 120 on sorties and up to 150ish on arbitrations iirc.

And I know that stupid levels are the common yardstick and have been since the simulacrum was added and youtubers started using it. at first it was level 100s as the baseline, then level 150s, then 200s, 250s, and so on. meanwhile there Is no more cause now to face level 250 enemies than there was Back then, so chasing them is just the function of power creep and player-inflated difficulty.
(its also worth noting that youtubers and streamers started using these enemies as benchmarks because only these enemies had the EHP to function well for displaying the excessive ammounts of damage we can do, if a level 100 heavy gunner has an ehp of 800k than displaying a weapon that can hit 900k and another that can hit 1.5mil damage looks functionally the same: gunner go bye-bye.)

And bear in mind warframe only has over level 100 enemies because of a bug in an event that players begged DE to keep, that was like three or four years ago. and in that time over level 100 content has occurred exactly three times. Sorties, Arbitrations, and Steel Path, each gamemodes that either offer rewards of limited use, or are mostly sitting pretty close to the level 100 border. DE has made their intent pretty clear in what levels they deem the game is meant to be played on and what levels they plan to keep producing content on and which levels they might do something for once in a while.

so ofcourse warframe powers fall apart at that level, they havent been made to scale up to that level, a few have been, stat-stick powers, saryn's and nidus's 1s, and some others, do scale up rather well, but to compare, Whipclaw is so overkill at content levels and requires an obscene amount of work to get to the top end that you really have to want it to go for it. and Saryn's spores and Nidus are comparitively far less useful at low levels as it gets harder to build stacks before the mission is done and dusted.

DE has said their primary goal is making the player feel like a super powered space ninja, and you do for the majority of content, but when at 175 the scaling gets heavy and nearly any enemy that sees you can two-shot you (because of shieldgating) and 90% DR doesnt reduce damage by heavies enough for squishier caster frames, and your survival depends largely on abusing mechanics. or a narrow selection of the most powerful or durable. you dont feel like a superpowered space ninja, you feel like a quantum glass cannon.

I get that you want to feel like the game is aiming you at tough enemies who's armor scaling matters but as was said:

19 hours ago, TKDancer said:

just because you wish thats how the game worked, doenst make it so

You might not Like how scaling gets excessive at level 175, (of course, its so much less now than it was before.) But you're also approaching it as if these enemies should be what you face regularly when in reality you have to go rather far out of your way to get these enemies to spawn, they don't really offer much better drop rates than their lower level counterparts, and the way Rotations work in warframe the only difference between an hour survival and three 20 minute survival is six loading screens and needing a looter to sustain life support, and less risk of a connection loss causing you to lose a lot of what you already collected. Yes the high stakes of pushing for that 2 hour survival and the adrenaline of risk vs reward can be fun. so can playing Dark Souls with a lubed up controller or a set of donkey kong bongos. that doesnt mean that's how the game is meant to work, and it doesn't mean the devs are going to add bongo support to make that less arduous.

So I would rebut, that on actual content-level enemies, the current scaling works fine, bordering on well. and redoing scaling again seems like a lot of work for DE to fix you going out of your own way to make your life harder.

 

However, to restate, there have been a Lot of good points and interesting ideas put forward here, and I do hope DE gives this thread a thorough read.

 

*Steel path is meant as the hard mode, (opinions vary as to weather or not its hard enough or too hard, but generally its consensus is that it's the wrong kind of hard, and there I would agree) its meant to make you be prepared and ready for it, and in my experience, kind of motivates a less rushed playstyle. it also makes you effectively complete the game to unlock it, making enemy AI beefier is pointless as hard CCs are still a thing, and because the 6 hour survival crowd keep begging for beefier enemies, surprise, they made them super beefy, for an optional game mode with a limited, mostly cosmetic reward table explicitly to shut them up. not that it has. because looking for 'Challenge' while still building your weapons to do a million damage, and dropping down hard CC like its candy at Halloween is, surprise, An oxymoron.

 

[TKDancer]

1 hour ago, Desdemona-XI said:

I'll level with you. my first thought to this was "Dude, DE did fix armor scaling, this year."

except what they did do wasnt fixing it, it was slapping a band aid on the wound by making changes to the scaling, then they hit the wound with a baseball bat when SP's release, which only served to show how bad the armor system for enemies is when comparing the eHP of SP armored enemies and unarmored ones:

 

very little changed actually changed... did it help? technically, yes! was it enough? far from that

1 hour ago, Desdemona-XI said:

You might not Like how scaling gets excessive at level 175

yes, i do not, cause its bad, specially since the discrepancy of how scaling affects armored and unarmored enemies is so huge

 

1 hour ago, Desdemona-XI said:

*Steel path is meant as the hard mode

yes, it is, but that doesn't mean 1 faction should be considerably 'harder' then the order cause of how the game handles the math of armor granting damage resistance that exponentially scaling on top of health which also exponentially scales

the changes im proposing are, again as i've said multiple times in this thread, a FIRST step in re-balancing/reworking numbers in this game, getting rid of exponentially increasing damage resistance opens the doors for a lot of more controlled changes as suddenly the only resistances we'll have to deal on the regular would be damage type advantages/disadvantages, ancient auras(which can be solved by focusing the ancients) and sentient adaptive resistance(which can be solved by tapping then with void dmg)

then, DE could make changes to the end-game content and SP so that their 'hard mode' is hard, but with more consistency across factions, maybe they could give the grineer a new gimmick beyond armor(akin to how corpus have the gimmick of ability denial and infested have ancient auras)

[Desdemona-XI]

56 minutes ago, TKDancer said:

very little changed actually changed... did it help?

There we disagree, It helped immensely and it has been a satisfactory experience for me ever since it happened, chonky enemies are still chonky but the scaling does not bolt  skyward. and is by-and-large infinitely more playable, especially at  content levels, but even above it grineer are winding up with less than half the ehp they used to.

 

 

1 hour ago, TKDancer said:

that doesn't mean 1 faction should be considerably 'harder' then the order cause of how the game handles the math of armor granting damage resistance that exponentially scaling on top of health which also exponentially scales

This part I do agree with, however as you so adroitly pointed out, Grineer have no alternative tactics other than tank-n-spank. which is rather lore friendly in all honesty, and again in content levels this problem is far less oppressive.  honestly today's level 80 Sortie of enhanced shields on Lua was as painful as a lvl150 grineer run. but thats the nature of sorties.

and as I said, Good points were raised, and good ideas posted there are points that need to be addressed, despite the gating mechanic shields are by and large wet paper. and there is room for improvement. that there is an imbalance in these factions. I would point out that I feel like corpus do more damage than grineer, but at the levels you're mostly complaining about it doesn't matter as very little doesn't have damage scaling that could pound you into the dirt. (But not pound its own kind into the dirt, for the player's sake interestingly, or nyx would actually be useful.)

 

However I feel like at this junction, the amount of work it would take to re-code armor behavior, and scaling, again. to appease people who insist on playing well over content levels is not likely to motivate DE to get right on it lickity split and do the work for you. especially since if they do make these changes there is going to be an immense outcry from the quite large part of the playerbase that has spent years upping and upping their builds with forma after forma, only to have everything flip ass backwards on them. And theres the other side of them that want corpus to be brought up not grineer lowered down. the 'challenge chasers' whom I briefly mentioned as being inherently oxymoronic earlier.

 

And to restate in a quote

2 hours ago, Desdemona-XI said:

However, to restate, there have been a Lot of good points and interesting ideas put forward here, and I do hope DE gives this thread a thorough read.

I do think the EHP of corpus and grineer at least should be brought closer in line, and grineer have more interesting units than just the nox or shield lancers, I also think the enemies rely on knockdowns entirely too much and it gets frustrating. 
I do think that in spite of changes to both status effects and fundamental damage types and armor scaling there is still very much a focus on armor stripping, however, as part of that,

1 hour ago, TKDancer said:

a FIRST step in re-balancing/reworking numbers in this game

And this is my point, that's looking like a lot of work for a first step, that by and large Isn't a severe issue for content levels, I dare not even ask what your second step would be. 

I also acknowledge that throwing everything out and starting over is going to cause a lot of outrage. outrage that I personally wouldnt agree with but DE can't exactly afford to ignore. people are still salty over trading the void keys for relics despite relics being an objectively better and more versatile system, could the relic system be improved? absolutely, they could buff refinement impact on drop rates, and then watch as every prime becomes worth less than 5 plat because nothing's hard to get anymore.

Would your suggestion, or the others in this post make warframe better if they were implimented. Probably at least a bit, but it would also mess with everyone's builds and everyone will have to learn from scratch how things work and upset people, Risk vs reward, In the content levels DE seems to actually care about, the extra armor is a sizable ammount,  but overall it feels pretty even when i'm playing on those levels. the upper ones get a bit dicey but not something i feel deserves the level of theatrics you've lavished on this forum post.

One could argue that we probably shouldnt be doing over a million damage in a shot, we werent able to a few years ago after all. And i wouldnt say i disagree, but again, if DE does anything about that. the player rage will be immense, Just look at what happened when kuva bramma got a mild nerf in its area damage

[TKDancer]

18 minutes ago, Desdemona-XI said:

There we disagree,

idk why you cut off the part where... i say it helped, just that its far from enough, tweaks arent enough, actual change is needed

 

18 minutes ago, Desdemona-XI said:

And this is my point, that's looking like a lot of work for a first step, that by and large Isn't a severe issue for content levels, I dare not even ask what your second step would be.

well yeah, im proposing a complete rework of how enemies have armor, obviously its a big step, but it'd still be a start, theres other stuff that got progressively affected by the design decisions DE made over the years to accommodate for how armor works on enemies which would then have to also be addressed

18 minutes ago, Desdemona-XI said:

that by and large Isn't a severe issue for content levels, I dare not even ask what your second step would be.

i've already outlined it on the original post? after getting enemy health back in check in a way where we're dealing with more absolute numbers, DE could then take a look at *our* damage output, buffing what needs to be buffed, nerfing what needs to be nerfed, so we have a more consistent experience across enemy factions where more statuses matter rather than just viral, heat, corrosive and slash
(yes i know the word nerf is spooky, but maybe once enemies across all factions only have thousands of eHP rather than hundreds of thousands or millions, we could maybe change some things regarding tenno dealing millions of dmg, but then also we'd buff things like damage-dealing abilities so they arent forever stuck at dealing a couple hundred dmg against enemies with thousands of health/shields)

22 minutes ago, Desdemona-XI said:

 In the content levels DE seems to actually care about, the extra armor is a sizable ammount,  but overall it feels pretty even when i'm playing on those levels

the problem is that the current model is not future proof, as the years have gone by, "content level" has gone up, their scaling """"""""re-balance"""""""" was their attempt to get stuff under control as content levels went up, and while it helped, it didnt solve the issues with the current system, thats why i called it a band-aid, its treating the symptoms rather than addressing the cause

26 minutes ago, Desdemona-XI said:

 it would also mess with everyone's builds and everyone will have to learn from scratch how things work and upset people

any kind of drastic change upsets people, hell even small changes that are nigh completely positive already upset people, that's not enough reason to not do it

and i disagree that it would mess much with builds, in fact it'd mostly just improve build variety as suddenly other elements would be worth using(tho i do think an important step would also be to change how the dmg-multiplier statuses work[viral and magnetic, also corrosive if counting my suggested changes] currently work so they dont remain as domineering, mainly reducing how much they increase damage per stack)

then some damage types and statuses would also have to be buffed so they're worth using(i.e cold, for which im gonna use Brozime's idea here: stacks of cold should progressively slow enemies until fully frozen, at which point they take extra dmg, not bad for a single element, would work very well if abilities that apply cold statuses were made to apply multiple stacks per use)



being honest, even tho i personally think the changes im proposing are near universally positive(being humble here ;^]) i do not see any of them getting implemented into the game since unfortunately, as you say, they're way too ambitious, would change too much, specially now as DE is so overwhelmed trying to stick to their scheduled stuff mid pandemic and stuff being delayed.. this is mostly just me putting out my ideas for others to see