Is it time to rework Armor for enemies yet?

[Desdemona-XI]

On 2020-11-30 at 4:28 PM, TKDancer said:

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

Because That was the part i agreed with, "Far from enough, change is needed" to me feels like a gross exaggeration. Which I went on to state. theres is room for improvement, but I wouldnt call it a vital issue, especially at content levels.

 

 

On 2020-11-30 at 4:28 PM, TKDancer said:

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

except content levels havent gone up, not really. Plains of Eidolon? the Granum void? Deimos? Fortuna? Syndicate missions? Frame quests? story quests? The Body of where actual content is placed is Under 100, and always has been, every once in a while they pop out an over-100 game mode to spar with, sorties, and arbitrations, and now steel path. Thats three mission types (made of recycled normal missions with a mild twist) total, in three years, accompanied by three open worlds, a handful of frame quests, new normal mission types, two tileset reworks, a nemesis system, I'm probably forgetting a little bit, And Railjack. Railjack's levelling is a bit odd to me so I forget offhand what level enemies are up in the upper levels there, its been a bit since i checked. even kuva liches have to be pushed to level 5 to cap over level 100, and still dont reach arbitration levels. 

DE makes content for star chart levels, they recycle and inflate content once a while for excessive levels, sometimes sprinkling a new mechanic like arbitration drones on, and that has been constant for three years, before then there wasnt even any recycled inflated content for level 100+ Content levels haven't genuinely risen in years if ever 

 

On 2020-11-30 at 4:28 PM, TKDancer said:

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

I agree with this, but the problem is while we as players can afford to say "The panic will die down and people will adapt and eventually accept that it's better this way" DE cant afford to not think about that. the kuva bramma 'nerf' for example, saw quite a few players leave the game. the level of salt still on certain forums and farcebook pages is nothing to sneer at, Player goodwill matters, and what you're suggesting is a fundamental change to a core system of a 7 year old game now?
This is not something that is easy to change without breaking code not even remotely related to it. so the game'll be a mess for months of bug fixes because we know the DE test cluster while improved from prior years has only so much that it can catch. Builds will be changed because when 'build variability' becomes a thing the 'meta' always shifts. and the meta chasers will always complain when their perfect weapon loses its perfection. Thats going to upset a lot of people, and thats going to cause a lot of ragequitters, and that is something DE cant afford not to think about. new players rotate in and old ones rotate out all the time sure, but if they drop that and its a mess on release, or even if it works fine and the salt rides high? reviews bomb, fewer new players want to give it a go because of the salty reviews of how "they dont care about the players anymore, and they hate fun" is a thing, and a F2P game relies on customers to sustain itself. if theres a big dip in player goodwill, theres less people and less spending, and that puts them in financial trouble, Warframe is DE's only running IP at the moment i believe, literally all their eggs in one basket.

 

On 2020-11-30 at 4:28 PM, TKDancer said:

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)

I would personally approve of this, I also think that a lot of damage types are underperforming or are overly nichey to see much relevant use, magnetic for example, when cold and eletricity also deals extra damage to shields.

 

 

On 2020-11-30 at 4:28 PM, TKDancer said:

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

This was ultimately the second of two main points i was making. that these ideas are very ambitous and carry consequences because of it, and the change while warranted, is not vital at the levels DE is creating content for. and that i dont think they care that level 175 is hard, or imbalanced because their game isnt built for level 175 and half the people demand it be made harder. 'give us ultra steel path with +200 level enemies next!' it can be a difficult thing to balance the requests.

I do hope DE reads this post, and I do hope they take the time to mull it over, and I would be thrilled if they used some or all of this idea. albeit perhaps a more streamlined form. or something easier to impliment. because your ideas (and the others in this forum post) are good ideas they just might need to be tweaked, adjusted, and they may not be the direction DE wants to go, maybe they'll just bring the scaling down more and bring up corpus scaling or something, I dont know, these are issues that can be worked on, and no doubt should be worked on. when they arent totally overwhelmed with pandemic delays.

[TKDancer]

5 hours ago, Desdemona-XI said:

Which I went on to state. theres is room for improvement

and to me theres no way to really fix things while keeping the current system

 

5 hours ago, Desdemona-XI said:

I would personally approve of this, I also think that a lot of damage types are underperforming or are overly nichey to see much relevant use, magnetic for example, when cold and eletricity also deals extra damage to shields

and they'll continue to under-perform in the current system because of how valuable heat and viral procs are for dmg output + the nature of element combinations (i.e if u want electric u'll have to give up on heat since u'll get radiation with both and you'll be losing the armor strip, if u want cold, u'll have to get rid of viral, same for magnetic)

i really cant see a way in which DE properly balances under-performing dmg types, i can only see them either remaining bad or they get buffed enough to replace the current 'meta' of universal dmg, another band-aid

thats why i think dmg and enemy armor needs an overhaul, specially enemy armor, it puts too much emphasis on armor stripping + viral multipliers while unarmored enemies dont require this, even if we benefit of other statuses more(i.e gas vs corpus and infested), its not strictly needed for them,specially since we have weapons that already deal good AoE dmg(like our new cernos, the arm cannons, the grenade reload pistol, kuva nukor, even the bramma, despite its nerf)

 

5 hours ago, Desdemona-XI said:

except content levels havent gone up, not really

but it has! armor has been a 'problem' since its inception!

"content level" saw many increases since the creation of armored enemies with scaling armor per level till DE's scaling rebalance

[BahamutKaiser]

They already fixed armor, the problem is that Steel Path forgot why it was fixed. 

[Teridax68]

I very much agree with the premise and criticism: given that armor multiplies health via its damage reduction, and both scale with level, it is obvious that there will inevitably be a discrepancy between the EHP growth of armored and non-armored enemies, as all else held equal the former's will grow quadratically on top of whichever baseline linear or exponential scaling there is. I'm also personally not a big fan of damage reduction as a mechanic in Warframe either, not even for ourselves, because it muddies our perception of health values and can generally just be boiled down to extra health.

While personally I'd like to see armor and shields removed entirely, and status effects simplified accordingly, I think the OP's proposal is a good one as well: armor as an extra, non-regenerating health bar has become a more modern staple in video games to armor-as-damage-reduction, and each time it makes for much clearer indication of how tough an enemy is. Games like Mass Effect and Hades show that making armor a separate health bar makes building and playing against armor much clearer, as well, as one can have effects deal bonus damage to armor or bypass its normal benefits, instead of having to rely on armor penetration or removal. I would also suggest reworking it for warframes, vehicles, and pets too, if only for the sake of consistency, though that arguably carries many more knock-on effects given how many of our own mechanics are tied to armor, so starting with just enemies would make sense.

I'm also in full agreement that, while this would nerf armored enemies in the short-term by making their scaling less harsh, it would also make them easier to balance in the long-term, so it's a sacrifice work making (not that nerfing armored enemies really hurt the game in the past, either). I also fully agree with the OP that the problem with our balance lies in a bunch of different, interconnected systems, so trying to address it is going to involve changing things in ways that will cause disruption in the immediate. I'd rather have those short-term balance problems and a healthier game down the line than let a fundamentally broken set of systems stagnate and worsen as the game continues its development, as has been the case for years now.

[TKDancer]

On 2020-11-27 at 8:37 PM, (XBOX)GearsMatrix301 said:

They already reworked enemy armor.

5 hours ago, BahamutKaiser said:

They already fixed armor, the problem is that Steel Path forgot why it was fixed. 

it didnt get fixed or reworked(definitely not reworked, what?), it it's scaling tweaked, armored enemies continue to have ridiculously higher eHP by a huge factor, continue to be the main thing we actually build our weapons for, continue to be a hindrance to the balance of damaging abilities, continue to demand frames to have armor stripping abilities, continue to keep many damage types under-performing due the need for armor stripping/health dmg multipliers

[Enjin3]

The entire system is fundamentally flawed in several ways.

The information that players need to make appropriate choices is both hidden and where it is available, the various status effects are not offered with certainty; As evidenced even in this thread and the linked video some effects have undocumented features. There's almost nothing in-game to help players figure out how best to navigate this central feature.

There are literally hundreds of modifiers to the damage types vs various kinds of armour. All of which is made (nearly) meaningless because Grineer armour is so much more consequential than anything else (which I suspect came about for the need way back at the start for Corrosive damage to have a purpose). Before the last round of changes (which brought Viral to the fore) none of them mattered, armour stripping was essentially an "IWIN" button and not using armour stripping was a waste of time.

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Damage#Grineer_

Most of that is completely inconsequential to players (in terms of what we need to know or care about). Even if we did memorize the hundreds of permutations, there's little that we can do with the information. We don't build per-enemy, few people customize their builds per-mission, I'd be surprised if most people don't settle on a general build for a given item and only change it every few months (unless it's new and they're still experimenting or are trying to ignore the meta).

It truly doesn't matter if Infested Sinew for example swaps a couple of resistance types around. Having four different types of armour per faction is just splitting hairs. Their value to game play is almost non-existent, even less on a map that features a bunch of different enemies that each have their own set of vulnerabilities and resistances - we can't build for all of them so we necessarily build for the one thing that works best on most stuff.

"Ahah! Infested Sinew is resistant to Blast damage but vulnerable to Puncture! I'll bet you weren't prepared for that, Tenno! Muahahahah!!!"

"Puncture huh... ok, whatever... So, which enemies have Infested Sinew? Are they visually distinct? Do they behave differently? I just destroyed scores of monster things with whatever I had to hand; Do you think some of them had Infested Sinew?"

 

Systems that reduce enemy armour are very 'mathy' and not theatrical or visually appealing in a _game_. They're also very difficult to balance even in fairly simple scenarios and as we've seen, need to 'go to the moon' to even begin to challenge end-game players, who in turn don't care because armour stripping has to be viable at all levels, which means that when they strip armour, they always strip all of it. Viral/Slash are similarly problematic.

Further, there's no indication of how much armour we're stripping. It's either an orange (armoured) health bar or it's red (just health); and red health bars vanish as nearly completely inconsequential. 

If player damage however doesn't change enemy armour values, enemy armour values remain consistent and scale with certainty through the entire game. This also means that Effective Health (ie all kinds of mitigation) should scale with certainty through the game, which sets the foundation for weapons to be properly balanced.

 

 

 

[TKDancer]

4 hours ago, Enjin3 said:

-snip-

and thats why i think dealing with scaling DR armored enemies have is the correct 1st step to fixing a lot of these issues, as after that we're left with just damage-type advantages and disadvantages, auras and 'DPS caps', meaning that re-balancing dmg output from players and statuses can be done without destroying the balance of the game

[Desdemona-XI]

On 2020-12-01 at 11:11 PM, TKDancer said:

but it has! armor has been a 'problem' since its inception!

"content level" saw many increases since the creation of armored enemies with scaling armor per level till DE's scaling rebalance

Except it hasnt. to both parts of that. four or five years ago, the meta was crits because armor meant nothing, status wasnt very important back then because armor wasnt an issue for most of the game, and the cases where it was were solved just as reliably with a what we now call an orange crit but back then were red crits, Armor never scaled high enough to be an issue because levels capped at 100, hard cap. corrosive was used as a damage type simply because back then it was the most overall effective to damage resistances. and also this was before the 60/60 mods and before status chance mods got their more recent buff, before augments, and generally before anything was needed to win more than tank-n-spank. sure level 99 bombards were tanky but they also still went down with a dread to the face.

Armor stripping only became a meta thing some four years into warframe's life because thats when they removed the cap at player request. they didnt have any way to get there except hour long survivals either. players chose to subject themselves to the consequence of an armor scaling equation that was never designed to produce levels over 100. so naturally it went insane. DE gave out some mods that were bandaids to let them strip armor away. auments happened. and later abilities were reworked to factor in armor stripping. real band-aid solutions.



And Content levels havent risen, theyve been been 1-100 since warframe's inception, that has not changed. The introduction of 3 minor 'endgame' time fillers (that at best could be called recycled content) over three years opposed to the wealth of actual content, Open worlds, giant bosses, the kuva lich system and railjack, Have all been capped at 100 or slightly over, the same as its been for four years, and before then it was a hard cap at 100 preventing enemies from even levelling that high in endless missions

the fact you can go well beyond 'content levels' was introduced exclusively because players asked for it. DE hasnt started making new quests or storylines that expect that. even Scarlet Spear had to be run to the absolute maximum to get to upper level enemies. over level 100 has always been an afterthought in Warframe updates, and you cannot justifiably pretend otherwise. The fact that so many of them arent well thought-out when other parts of the game are much better balanced is evidence of that.

One could even argue that steel path, arbitrations, and even sorties, had less design thought put into them over all than building lunaro, or conclave, has had, or archwing, perhaps even frame fighter, wyrmius and happy zephyr. because each of those had something *new* original ideas and mechanics. 
-Sorties were just recycled nightmare missions with inflated numbers with map effects mostly ripped right from nightmare missions, or hive missions, and the remainder being incredibly predictable buffs to damage and damage resistances.
-Arbitrations were the same recycled endless mission with the only new mechanic being a shield drone that makes enemies invulnerable, basically just a super shield osprey.
-and Steel path is literally nothing more than "star chart with more zeroes on everything"

These are not content levels. doing a four hour survival is not content levels. those are "well people keep asking to let us fight harder stuff so throw something together and let em chew on it while we make content we actually give a crap about" Levels.
The only actual content levels havent gone up since i joined when mirage and kubrow were new. the most you can argue is content levels have raised from 1-100 to 1-120 with max level liches, and sorties. and to me thats being excessively generous.

[TKDancer]

3 hours ago, Desdemona-XI said:

doing a four hour survival is not content levels

i never claimed that to be the case, im very well aware DE has no plans to make balancing decisions based on endurance runners

 

the amount of activities beyond sorties that fall on the upper levels *has* increased tho, i remember when the only activities of worth that were above average starchart levels was sorties, kuva floods and trials, tho trials are gone many more activities on the higher-level side of the spectrum have taken its place

and DE has often given newer armored enemies more armor or health than equivalents(remember Railjack fighters needing both health and armor halved? or railjack grineer having multiple times the health of equivalent units? least they patched those! more armored infested in deimos is likely a good indicator of whats to come)

3 hours ago, Desdemona-XI said:

Armor stripping only became a meta thing some four years into warframe's life

i'll admit i havent played as long as you, but since i started in early 2017 armor stripping was already a major aspect of the game and a very needed thing for any weapon trying to do good dmg vs sortie grineer, specially since back then only armor stripping we had was corrosive and abilities, no heat 50% strip and viral was 'just' a temp. health halver rather a multiplier that went up to 3.25x, i remember builds generally revolving around pure corrosive or corrosive+heat, viral being reserved for slash-heavy weapons that could dish out tons of slash procs, and gas for niche anti-corpus/infested builds that werent trully needed as corrosive still did the job faster than against grineer even despite type disadvantage

then we got the scaling tweaks + the rework of many statuses, which instead of fixing the issue just changed the 'meta' to viral+heat for the combined dmg multiplier and minor armor strip+DoT

 

regardless, as it stands even in high content level armored enemies retain much higher eHP, harming build diversity and the future of balancing

i continue to see this as a major problem for the current state of things and the future of the game, i still think if armor continue to work as it does, regardless of any scaling tweaks, it'll continue to make most dmg types worthless, it'll continue to make new frames require armor stripping or strong self-buffing capabilities

[Enjin3]

Enemies, players and bosses should have to do something* to gain significant temporary damage reduction. Blunts and hiding behind walls are a great start and I'm sure were part of the early vision of the game to accomplish greater challenge without just resorting to larger Effective Health pools. Parkour and aoe weapons are the counter-play 'solutions' in those cases. The extreme amounts of damage that we do undermines all of that, but that's a whole other set of issues to solve (which would also be at least much less necessary if enemies weren't just monolithic health bars).

At least if enemies had to for example, activate and defend a 'thing' to gain that extra protection there'd be game play involved. Shield drones are a great example of the right way to handle active damage reduction. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of thematic measures people could come up with for each faction - I've had a number of ideas just while writing this. It would also support the potential for enemies to have identifiable roles or goals (other than shooting and stabbing). 

I think it would be interesting for some of our other roles to be reversed - running into a pack of enemies for example that have to conduct an escort mission, getting their leader/engineer to a particular room where they may then (after a timer) activate something that makes the environment more dangerous for players. While enemies are just health pools with guns there'd be very little challenge to that, if they had active defensive/offensive measures though it may be a very different story. 

Leveraging your idea of additional 'health' bars on the topic of play/counter-play, enemies could be given 'stamina' bars from which to use point-cost abilities and maybe something to telegraph their intentions, even if it's just an icon over their heads. Some player actions might be able to reduce an enemies stamina and so deny their more consequential attacks - you'd have enemies that are challenging and don't need omg damage to defeat, while rewarding potentially creative solutions.

Professional game designers though: Bullet sponges! Bombs! Invulnerable bosses with occasional dart boards!

 

*Pressing a button every half minute to self-buff does not count as 'doing something' in this context. I mean something with some game-play/intelligence.

[ShortCat]

There are no problems with armor, only players who cannot mod their weapons.

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 hour ago, ShortCat said:

There are no problems with armor, only players who cannot mod their weapons.

I... don't think that's the argument here.

The argument here is not 'we don't do enough damage', that was the one on that other thread, you saw me arguing there too I would guess.

This is 'We do stupid amounts of damage, but look at the difference between the enemies, one type actually stands up to our damage after scaling, the others are an uncooked hot-dog', and that's not something that's really fair on the game itself.

The issue at hand is that, with the way DE has spec'd us into stupid amounts of damage, the only enemies that even begin to challenge us and get us to actually mod our weapons correctly, are the armoured ones. Everything else, even up to Steel Path endurance level, can go whistle. You can take the same build that goes for armour into everything else and, because it does stupid amounts of base damage, it still works and you never, ever have to change anything. Or, if you do change it up, it works even better and the enemies melt even faster because they're uncooked hot-dogs.

So... what can be done to fix that?

How can we make enemies actually have meaningful health without this affecting us, the players, in an adverse way? And how can we change it so that our 'stupid amounts of damage' doesn't seem so stupid anymore? And even further, how can we make it all seem fair?

As it stands, TK here has proposed one of the better solutions that I've seen so far. That solution is to take the scaling armour as a damage reduction formula and instead make it a scaling over-health health pool that DE can adjust to the stupid amounts of damage we deal.

We get to keep the things that bypass Armour, strip it, reduce it. The same as we have things that strip, reduce and bypass Shields. We can rework the way our Status and Damage types affect each, with specific ones having utility and specific ones having damage bonuses. And because of that our damage stops being stupid amounts, and starts being just damage.

When the system is broken in our favour, we have to see how we can fix it without losing our superiority, otherwise the meta-slaves will cry. If that means we have to rework the base system... that's not exactly a bad thing.

[ShortCat]

24 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

This is 'We do stupid amounts of damage, but look at the difference between the enemies, one type actually stands up to our damage after scaling, the others are an uncooked hot-dog', and that's not something that's really fair on the game itself.

This is exactly how I see it - armor is the only mechanic that can somewhat keep up with power creeped damage.
I just come to the opposite conclusion - since armor is working, do not change it. You already mentioned that shielded enemies scale like "uncooked hot-dogs", then why would you suggest to change armor following a similar template?

The only change armor needs is a comprehensive one. How much DR does 3487 armor provide? "Let me search on Wiki for a formula" is a stupid answer. Make it simple: 10 armor =1%DR; 20 armor = 2%DR; 325 armor = 32,5%DR; cap armor at 999.

32 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

As it stands, TK here has proposed one of the better solutions that I've seen so far. That solution is to take the scaling armour as a damage reduction formula and instead make it a scaling over-health health pool that DE can adjust to the stupid amounts of damage we deal.

That's just "yellow shields". Atm shields and armor work inherently differnt, which is more compelling.

45 minutes ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

If that means we have to rework the base system... that's not exactly a bad thing.

Yes, rework the entire damage system in line with health types and make shields a proper defensive layer against unfavored damage types.

[TKDancer]

9 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

That's just "yellow shields". Atm shields and armor work inherently differnt, which is more compelling.

which is to me a better solution, i dont find DR to be any more or less compelling than corpus shields, but it is, mechanically, a more problematic source of survivability when it scales exponentially along with health

 

11 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

The only change armor needs is a comprehensive one. How much DR does 3487 armor provide? "Let me search on Wiki for a formula" is a stupid answer. Make it simple: 10 armor =1%DR; 20 armor = 2%DR; 325 armor = 32,5%DR; cap armor at 999.

the calculation is actually pretty simple once you look it up, but i do agree that the lack of 'transparency' is also an issue when it comes to current armor, specially since as someone else mentioned in this threat, we have no idea to see how much armor an enemy has relative to their health without looking up their base stats and then running the scaling calculations, its either there or it isnt, their health bar is either yellow, red, or gone

anyways

your idea isnt awful tbh, but it wouldnt help with the issue of dmg types being left in the dust or the discrepancy of eHP between armored and unarmored enemies unless DE also reworked the under-performing dmg types+status, did a complete balance check on the stats of every armored enemy in the game AND abilities that dont auto-scale or benefit from weapon mods

 

16 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

This is exactly how I see it - armor is the only mechanic that can somewhat keep up with power creeped damage.

i dont want to be rude but it seems like you did not fully read the post, as i clearly state changing armor to a barrier-type of health bar is a 1st step, before then doing a balance check on tenno dmg output, lowering weapon dmg it to more reasonable levels where heavy units are tanky across the factions and mobs remain mobs, then also buffing abilities meant to do dmg so they can compete or at least work in tandem with weapons

maybe then we could also get rid of weird "DPS caps" some enemies have

20 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

Yes, rework the entire damage system in line with health types and make shields a proper defensive layer against unfavored damage types.

that is what im suggesting here, and while you clearly think its better to keep armor working as DR, which i greatly disagree as i think its gonna remain causing problems no matter how much is changed without making it stop working like DR

[ShortCat]

42 minutes ago, TKDancer said:

which is to me a better solution, i dont find DR to be any more or less compelling than corpus shields, but it is, mechanically, a more problematic source of survivability when it scales exponentially along with health

The virtue of armor being mechanically different allows new ways for implmentation -> more tools in the toolbox. "Yellow shields" are just yellow shields. We also had a discussion about the exponential stacking and how eHP is a deceptive stat.
I oppose your idea due to its proximity to shield mechanic,

42 minutes ago, TKDancer said:

i dont want to be rude but it seems like you did not fully read the post, as i clearly state changing armor to a barrier-type of health bar is a 1st step, before then doing a balance check on tenno dmg output, lowering weapon dmg it to more reasonable levels where heavy units are tanky across the factions and mobs remain mobs, then also buffing abilities meant to do dmg so they can compete or at least work in tandem with weapons

This is a non-argument, since fixing scaling issues or damage calculations for players is inherent in case of a faulty system. Changing one cog (armor) will require adjustments to the entire machine in the process. This is self-explanatory.
There is no need to accuse me of not reading, becasue I can agree with global changes, yet oppose your armor concept or disagree on the importance of eHP.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

28 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

 This is a non-argument, since fixing scaling issues or damage calculations for players is inherent in case of a faulty system. Changing one cog (armor) will require adjustments to the entire machine in the process. This is self-explanatory.
There is no need to accuse me of not reading, becasue I can agree with global changes, yet oppose your armor concept or disagree on the importance of eHP.

The issue I have with armor scaling is how it breaks IPS balance. Early game operates on a different logic than late game simply because of armor scaling and not in a way that enriches gameplay.

Against a Level 8 Heavy Gunner with 500 ferrite armor, which is 62.5% Damage Reduction. Puncture is the best physical damage type against armor like the tool tip says.

• 100 Neutral will deal 37.5.
• 100 Impact will deal 28. 
• 100 Puncture will deal 82.
• 100 Slash will deal 42.
• 100 Base damage, Bleed ticks for 35 each.

In sorties, against a Level 100 Heavy Gunner with ~6000 ferrite armor, which is 95% Damage Reduction. Slash is the best physical damage type against armor?

• 100 Neutral will deal 5.
• 100 Impact will deal 3.75.
• 100 Puncture will deal 13.5.
• 100 Slash will deal 5.
• 100 Base damage, Bleed ticks for 35 each.

At Base level in this case, Puncture with +50% against Ferrite (50% mitigation and 1.5x multiplier) deals 2.1xNeutral, while at Sortie level it deals 2.7xNeutral.

At Base level in this case, Bleed (ignores armor) tics for 0.9xNeutral, while at Sortie level tics 7xNeutral.

This is in stark contrast to the the advantage Impact has against Shields over Puncture and Slash which is static and unchanging.

DE started to peel off band-aids (capping Corrosive and nerfing Corrosive projection) when they adjusted the armor scaling, but the fundamental issue remains unchanged. 

If Armor was a flat, unchanging value, then the early damage balance would simply carry over, but that would also require them to flatten player damage scaling, as armored units are the only ones that can tank that damage and player damage should be flattened because I don't want more boss fights with invincibility phases or "throw the thing" because we do "too much" damage for DE to balance.

If DE is going to invalidate our damage in new content anyways, I would like it to be simple and transparent instead of the voodoo mathematics they are resorting to like with the Viral immune Jugulus with Damage Reduction that scales with our DPS like if it was part-Sentient, but at least Sentients give a visual indicator that they are adapting to our damage.

Maybe make Critical Damage and Viral additive with Base Damage?

4.0x Critical Multiplier just adds +400% Base Damage on Critical Hit.

Viral just adds +100% Base damage against Health on 1st proc. 

That would surely end the 7 year long complaint about "mandatory" Base Damage mods.

[Leqesai]

On 2020-12-01 at 11:28 PM, BahamutKaiser said:

They already fixed armor, the problem is that Steel Path forgot why it was fixed. 

True that. They should have just bumped HP not armor values. Bump health 3x to compensate but the beefed up armor values invalidate the damage potential of a lot of builds.

[TKDancer]

3 hours ago, ShortCat said:

The virtue of armor being mechanically different allows new ways for implmentation

it doesnt tho? its just DR that goes up as levels go up, its not complex or deep, whats a new way its been implemented? none come to mind

 

3 hours ago, ShortCat said:

We also had a discussion about the exponential stacking and how eHP is a deceptive stat.

wouldnt call being insulted for no reason a discussion, but i still dont see where the deception lies

3 hours ago, ShortCat said:

I oppose your idea due to its proximity to shield mechanic

okay, thats a very valid complaint, i still think armor can only work as DR if the level-scaling aspect is completely removed from it, which would also just be a small step in a larger process as our dmg would still have to tweaked for a good balance of dmg that is neither too high nor too low and to bring up non-scaling stuff(mainly abilities) to be usable in higher levels, then statuses would have be to changed too... as you definitely already understand, any substantial change will require others

 

this way armor remains 'different' but is no longer a problem

cause even if we follow your idea of armor, 10 armor equating to 1% DR up to a cap of 99.9% nothing is fixed really, besides making the calculations easier

even if we were to super buff the health and shields of other units that wouldnt fix the issues with the game, it'd just make them even more apparent as our *raw* dmg output, least from weapons, would still be deal with that faster than it would deal with armored enemies, even using non-optimal elements

2 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

If Armor was a flat, unchanging value, then the early damage balance would simply carry over, but that would also require them to flatten player damage scaling, as armored units are the only ones that can tank that damage and player damage should be flattened because I don't want more boss fights with invincibility phases or "throw the thing" because we do "too much" damage for DE to balance.

this is exactly what i mean, and dont forget the arbitrary "DPS caps"

 

1 hour ago, Leqesai said:

but the beefed up armor values invalidate the damage potential of a lot of builds.

yes... thats the whole point of this thread? that current armor is bad for the game's balance

[Leqesai]

3 hours ago, TKDancer said:

yes... thats the whole point of this thread? that current armor is bad for the game's balance

[ShortCat]

6 hours ago, TKDancer said:

whats a new way its been implemented? none come to mind

An enemy with low armor value and high HP pool would be susceptive to more damage types, as long as its armor is not stripped away. As a result this health type composition allows for weapons with low status chance but favorable damage type against armor being effective the entire time. This scenario is not possible with your design. 

6 hours ago, TKDancer said:

i still dont see where the deception lies

An enemy with 999 999 999 shields and 10HP has an eHP value of 999 999 999 +10, a relly big total number. Does it mean this enemy is hard to kill? No, because a Lato with just one Toxin mod will 1HKO it. This hypothetical example shows that simply focusing on eHP is misleading.
Before you say such an enemy doesn't exist, again, which is irrelevant for the case itself, i have a more grounded example. Here is an infamous YTuber talking about eHP.

He calculated 34830 HP & 1083010 eHP; so this Lancer has 31 times more eHP than health. Yet, I kill this unit with just one Dread arrow, not because it deals over 1million damage, but because I go directly for its health.

[ShortCat]

10 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

The issue I have with armor scaling is how it breaks IPS balance...

11 hours ago, ShortCat said:

This is a non-argument, since fixing scaling issues or damage calculations for players is inherent in case of a faulty system.

 

[Teridax68]

1 hour ago, ShortCat said:

An enemy with low armor value and high HP pool would be susceptive to more damage types, as long as its armor is not stripped away. As a result this health type composition allows for weapons with low status chance but favorable damage type against armor being effective the entire time. This scenario is not possible with your design. 

This fundamentally misunderstands the function of armor, which is to multiply health and do little else. Given the system we have, the enemy in question will just be really vulnerable to Viral status, and the higher the armor value, the more potent status effects like Slash or Corrosive become. This is also one of the reasons why IPS willl never be truly balanced, because the additional quadratic scaling of armored enemy EHP means anti-armor status inevitably ends up taking priority over the rest past a certain level threshold. When armor values aren't too high, however, armored health functions pretty much like regular health, with no substantial difference in how one goes about killing those enemies. It also doesn't help that DE has been haphazardly giving enemies armor regardless of faction, muddying the waters even further and making armor more of a means of making enemy EHP scale harder than adding any other meaningful distinction to gameplay.

[TKDancer]

2 hours ago, ShortCat said:

An enemy with low armor value and high HP pool would be susceptive to more damage types, as long as its armor is not stripped away. As a result this health type composition allows for weapons with low status chance but favorable damage type against armor being effective the entire time. This scenario is not possible with your design.

in this scenario would one still be encouraged to use the tried and true viral+heat combo, while it would lack the armor-ignoring factor of corrosive/radiation the viral multipliers and limited armor strip would be enough to remain the strongest most universal option to bring to missions with such enemies, this without mentioning the limited CC potential of heat procs

 

in my suggested model the importance would shift from ungodly dmg numbers to reasonable ones to better match enemies not having eHP values bloated by ridiculous values of damage resistance

therefore matching dmg types would be considerably more important, instead of everything is blown away effortlessly through high raw dmg, only mobs remain like so, while making heavies of *all* factions be more than wet noodles

2 hours ago, ShortCat said:

He calculated 34830 HP & 1083010 eHP; so this Lancer has 31 times more eHP than health. Yet, I kill this unit with just one Dread arrow, not because it deals over 1million damage, but because I go directly for its health.

none of this indicates eHP being misleading but it does indicate to armor being a bad system to me

if their damage resistance can be bypassed so easily by one dmg type, why should we ever bother using anything but weapons with viral + high slash status chance? slash doesnt bypass shields anymore but since those enemies wont have DR it doesnt matter, who needs 13+2 dmg types when 2 are enough

honestly makes me rethink my suggested changes to statuses to instead fully remove the complete barrier bypassing nature of toxic and slash procs, making them just do bonus dmg to shield and armor respectively

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

22 minutes ago, TKDancer said:

in this scenario would one still be encouraged to use the tried and true viral+heat combo, while it would lack the armor-ignoring factor of corrosive/radiation the viral multipliers and limited armor strip would be enough to remain the strongest most universal option to bring to missions with such enemies, this without mentioning the limited CC potential of heat procs

 

in my suggested model the importance would shift from ungodly dmg numbers to reasonable ones to better match enemies not having eHP values bloated by ridiculous values of damage resistance

therefore matching dmg types would be considerably more important, instead of everything is blown away effortlessly through high raw dmg, only mobs remain like so, while making heavies of *all* factions be more than wet noodles

none of this indicates eHP being misleading but it does indicate to armor being a bad system to me

if their damage resistance can be bypassed so easily by one dmg type, why should we ever bother using anything but weapons with viral + high slash status chance? slash doesnt bypass shields anymore but since those enemies wont have DR it doesnt matter, who needs 13+2 dmg types when 2 are enough

honestly makes me rethink my suggested changes to statuses to instead fully remove the complete barrier bypassing nature of toxic and slash procs, making them just do bonus dmg to shield and armor respectively

Honestly, I think it's weird how DE capped Corrosive with the explanation that they didn't want a damage type to have 100% efficacy on an an enemy defensive stat, yet Bleed still bypassed armor 100%.

Did they fear backlash from nerfing Slash, but not Corrosive and Gas?

 

[ShortCat]

21 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

This fundamentally misunderstands the function of armor, which is to multiply health and do little else. Given the system we have, the enemy in question will just be really vulnerable to Viral status, and the higher the armor value, the more potent status effects like Slash or Corrosive become.

20 hours ago, TKDancer said:

in this scenario would one still be encouraged to use the tried and true viral+heat combo, while it would lack the armor-ignoring factor of corrosive/radiation the viral multipliers and limited armor strip would be enough to remain the strongest most universal option to bring to missions with such enemies, this without mentioning the limited CC potential of heat procs

Why is it so hard for you guys to separate hypothetical scenarios, like the one you refer to, from imbalanced real ones? In an ideal world Viral, an anti flesh damage type, would not outperform anti armor damage types against heavely armored targets.
This hypothetical unit would be succeptible to Viral, not because Viral is as broken as in the live version atm, but because it is primerely a fleshy unit. Additionally, this unit would be vulnerable to whatever damage type its armor is succeptible to, without the need to actually strip or ignore said armor. On the contrary, armor-strip or ignore would be ineffective against such unit.

Persistent armor allows additional health modifiers over the entire life span of a unit with the possibility to remove those modifiers if necessary via armor-strip. This interaction is not possible with "yellow shields". Therefore, armor is not just a health multiplier @Teridax68 to which it would be truly reduced with a yellow bar.

 

On 2020-12-07 at 1:59 PM, TKDancer said:

in my suggested model the importance would shift from ungodly dmg numbers to reasonable ones

But I litterally showed that you do not need unreasonable damage numbers here...

On 2020-12-07 at 11:09 AM, ShortCat said:

He calculated 34830 HP & 1083010 eHP; so this Lancer has 31 times more eHP than health. Yet, I kill this unit with just one Dread arrow, not because it deals over 1million damage, but because I go directly for its health.

You just need the right ones! Thus I said earlier there is no armor problem, but a build problem.

On 2020-12-07 at 1:59 PM, TKDancer said:

if their damage resistance can be bypassed so easily by one dmg type, why should we ever bother using anything but weapons with viral + high slash status chance?

That's the whole point! You should not use unfavored/wrong damage type against a health type! This is the reason I sound like a broken record when I say Corpus are not working because they can be killed by anything. In a system build around multiple damage types & multiple health types the idea that everything should be equally good against anything defeats the whole purpose of multiple damage types & multiple health types.
If you think there are hardly any options to deal with armor you are absolutely right. Status revisit earlier this year killed armor-strip builds by capping Corrosive procs; it also killed brute force Gas builds. Instead, busted Viral can now brute force armor and Viral is also part of armor-ignore builds. Thus, Viral is all you see nowadays.

 

On 2020-12-07 at 1:00 PM, Teridax68 said:

This is also one of the reasons why IPS willl never be truly balanced, because the additional quadratic scaling of armored enemy EHP means anti-armor status inevitably ends up taking priority over the rest past a certain level threshold.

That's the whole point! You should not use unfavored/wrong damage type against a health type!  eHP is an artificial barrier to punish wrong damage type choices and hardly means anything for a prepared build.