Is it time to rework Armor for enemies yet?

[Tyreaus]

1 hour ago, TKDancer said:

feels like what you really want is just to remove complete barrier bypass, which is a valid idea

No, I meant what I said.

I haven't read the entire thread but from what I've gleaned, there's a concern that armour in this proposition could end up going the way of shields, which are generally seldom modded for in favour of Viral (which can stack up while up-front damage deals with the shields). If a unit's entire health bar is shields, however, then Viral has nothing to act on, and Magnetic takes its place instantly. The same would apply to the proposed armour tweak and Corrosive. Neither of which would make Magnetic or Corrosive required as, unlike current armour, up-front damage can still burn through both health types. But it would mean those elements still have favour.

(That also doesn't mean everything in the game sticks to one health type: bosses and Tenno are ready exceptions where the original idea of healthbar-atop-healthbar can work just fine. It also doesn't mean every unit of a given faction has the same health type: some Grineer may come unarmoured, some rare ones like Prosecuters may have shields.)

[TKDancer]

3 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

No, I meant what I said.

I haven't read the entire thread but from what I've gleaned, there's a concern that armour in this proposition could end up going the way of shields, which are generally seldom modded for in favour of Viral (which can stack up while up-front damage deals with the shields). If a unit's entire health bar is shields, however, then Viral has nothing to act on, and Magnetic takes its place instantly. The same would apply to the proposed armour tweak and Corrosive. Neither of which would make Magnetic or Corrosive required as, unlike current armour, up-front damage can still burn through both health types. But it would mean those elements still have favour.

yes, but i also think after dealing with armor our weapon dmg output should be addressed so all heavies accross faction act as heavies but mobs continue to act as mobs in a horde game, shifting emphasis from raw dmg, multipliers and armor strip to matching correct elements

yes, an enemy with most shields or mostly 'yellow shields' would mean viral would be not as good, but i also believe now that this would also require changing toxic/slash full bypass of defenses, cause if left as is, corrosive would be worthless compared to slash, magnetic even worse compared to toxic

 

3 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

(That also doesn't mean everything in the game sticks to one health type: bosses and Tenno are ready exceptions where the original idea of healthbar-atop-healthbar can work just fine. It also doesn't mean every unit of a given faction has the same health type: some Grineer may come unarmoured, some rare ones like Prosecuters may have shields.)

yup, after getting our dmg numbers under control DE would be able to replace awful DPS caps, arbritrary damage resistances that are applied on TOP of existing armor damage resistance for simple unique health types as they did for tenno/railjacks

[Birdframe_Prime]

9 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

That also doesn't mean everything in the game sticks to one health type

True, but it does definitely mean that DE can stop doing absolutely stupid ideas like giving the Deimos Jugulus 'DPS based' damage resistance (which means that it calculates your damage on your weapon, before Crits, and reduces it proportionally. This leads to situations where a weapon with lower damage could kill them faster as long as it has better crit stats than a weapon with higher damage, which is no different than the stupid false-scaling in Destiny).

I see no real downside to bringing in a system that will allow us to keep all our big stuff, but then tune our victims enemies to that damage so that we have to use more options based on where we're going and what we're facing. We can still be just as powerful, but the difference is that we have to think about it.

[Tyreaus]

17 hours ago, TKDancer said:

yes, but i also think after dealing with armor our weapon dmg output should be addressed so all heavies accross faction act as heavies but mobs continue to act as mobs in a horde game, shifting emphasis from raw dmg, multipliers and armor strip to matching correct elements

Agreed.

17 hours ago, TKDancer said:

yes, an enemy with most shields or mostly 'yellow shields' would mean viral would be not as good, but i also believe now that this would also require changing toxic/slash full bypass of defenses, cause if left as is, corrosive would be worthless compared to slash, magnetic even worse compared to toxic

At a certain point there's a question of "why go through the fuss of multiple health types on a single unit?" As you say, if you give a unit enough protection and remove bypass possibilities, it'll be more effective to use Corrosive or Magnetic instead of Viral, true. But then you're giving that unit a comparatively small amount of vanilla health because...reasons? To make it harder to tell if a unit deserves Corrosive or Viral? Likewise for putting small amounts of armour on health-leaning units.

Consider, for example, the Granum coin carriers: they have such a disproportionate amount of shields and shield DR (especially on SP) that once their shield depletes, they die. The sliver of red health they have doesn't do anything. The point where Magnetic and Corrosive become ideal is probably at a similar point, where the base health is so small it's borderline inconsequential.

11 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

True, but it does definitely mean that DE can stop doing absolutely stupid ideas like giving the Deimos Jugulus 'DPS based' damage resistance (which means that it calculates your damage on your weapon, before Crits, and reduces it proportionally. This leads to situations where a weapon with lower damage could kill them faster as long as it has better crit stats than a weapon with higher damage, which is no different than the stupid false-scaling in Destiny).

I see no real downside to bringing in a system that will allow us to keep all our big stuff, but then tune our victims enemies to that damage so that we have to use more options based on where we're going and what we're facing. We can still be just as powerful, but the difference is that we have to think about it.

Also agreed. TBH I think the more straightforward things are for players (up to a point), the better things can be balanced by developers. There's "having to think about it" and "having to write a mathematical dissertation". The formula they now use for armour scaling, for example, just looks like a nightmare. And that kind of back-end complexity translates to...slightly more reasonable scaling. Woo.

[MJ12]

So my question here is - if we're reworking armor to be a second health bar... why even have armor at all?

Why not just have health + shields, with various factions having different health/shields resistances?

The current armor implementation has problems, but the OP suggestion seems like it might as well just kill the sacred cow of 'armor' being a thing entirely, since it provides very little benefit for the additional complexity.

What I'd ask instead is - first determine what you want armor to do and then build an implementation of that that would hold up, rather than going 'armor is a thing, we need to keep it' and then building a system which basically just keeps 'armor' but doesn't do anything with it.

[TKDancer]

On 2020-12-15 at 5:32 PM, MJ12 said:

So my question here is - if we're reworking armor to be a second health bar... why even have armor at all?

variety, armor wouldnt regen, it would have different resistances

i dont think armor should just be changed and call it a day, i also think player dmg needs changes so we arent dealing millions of dmg to enemies with a few thousand health(which can only be done once we fully remove exponentially scaling damage resistance from armored enemies, which maybe would also allow the removal of arbitrary DPS caps on certain enemies/bosses), this would in turn put some more emphasis on using the appropriate elements for each health type, and i am of the opinion slash and toxic should not fully bypass their respective health types

On 2020-12-15 at 5:32 PM, MJ12 said:

The current armor implementation has problems, but the OP suggestion seems like it might as well just kill the sacred cow of 'armor' being a thing entirely, since it provides very little benefit for the additional complexity.

i do very much want to completely kill what armor currently is, yes, because exponentially increasing DR is bad

 

On 2020-12-15 at 5:32 PM, MJ12 said:

What I'd ask instead is - first determine what you want armor to do and then build an implementation of that that would hold up, rather than going 'armor is a thing, we need to keep it' and then building a system which basically just keeps 'armor' but doesn't do anything with it.

i did already determine what i want it to do, to be an alternative type of shield/health bar, with different weaknesses and resistances, that goes on top of the health of enemies, but below their shields

basically i simply think its in the game's best interest to make armor act like it belongs in the same game as red health and shields

[(PSN)Frost_Nephilim]

On 2020-11-27 at 11:51 PM, prodi1600 said:

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

Sp really brings to light how the game is literally designed to be cheesed instead of use any skills

"Players always find a way to cheese stuff" 

Like no, you added a kavat that can revive its owner with 20% health and gave us easy ways to heal the kavat back up and gave us tek assault

Its not some magical reason as to why im walking through your missions with ease. You gave us this stuff and your game actually becomes unplayable if i dont use it since you gave all of your enemies ridiculously high hitscan damage with no way of avoiding the damage 😃😃😃

The people who are okay with this type of content, i cant understand with good reason. That reason is because defending an objective against enemies at 2000ehp with a 200dps weapon, is the same as fighting a 1000ehp enemies with a 100dps weapon. It will still take you 10 seconds to kill the enemy, meaning it will feel like its of the same tankiness

Its like getting stronger only to find out your not strong, and repeat. Might as well just keep making a new account if you love the feeling of starting over.

To those who actually enjoy a sense of progression in whether it be skill, story, cosemtics, etc... this type of content is horrible

[Joezone619]

already happened not too long ago, DE isn't touching it for at least another 5 years

[CephalonCarnage]

On 2020-11-27 at 9:12 PM, TKDancer said:

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

Perhaps its time to alter damage scaling. Right now its almost linear, if they made it logarithmic, so that more damage values did less actual damage, the system would not need the arms-race of armour (and shield) scaling that is only there to compensate.

[Loza03]

9 hours ago, gbjbaanb said:

Perhaps its time to alter damage scaling. Right now its almost linear, if they made it logarithmic, so that more damage values did less actual damage, the system would not need the arms-race of armour (and shield) scaling that is only there to compensate.

Scaling needs a lot of work. In addition to the above point, there's also the fact that Armour and Shields don't scale at the same rate (which means that enemies with shields and those without wind up on different orders of magnitude different EHP meaning that it's near impossible for a weapon or ability to do reasonable damage across all factions), and player damage doesn't scale... sometimes, and never by the same rules as enemies scale, meaning either it drops off anyway or it overwhelms scaling. You have some mods and the like which scale on health, others which scale on status effects (which are really kind of just linear damage boosts with extra steps) and a whole load of abilities which plain don't work beyond a certain point because they deal set damage. Not to mention that player health scaling is functionally optional, so it's not like we have any idea about how tough a player 'should' be going into certain content. This last point was even worse before shield gating. 

 

In summary - Warframe's scaling is not only using a linear system, causing the arms-race problem you cite, but it's not even using the same linear system for everything, so said arms race isn't even a fair race.

[TKDancer]

On 2021-01-08 at 8:19 AM, Loza03 said:

In summary - Warframe's scaling is not only using a linear system, causing the arms-race problem you cite, but it's not even using the same linear system for everything, so said arms race isn't even a fair race.

yup, this is the core of the issue, total inconsistency caused by power creep caused by specific factions and their scaling damage resistance

 

On 2021-01-07 at 1:12 AM, Joezone619 said:

already happened not too long ago

no, it didnt, i need you to read more than the title before posting, also this ridiculous take has also been done and replied to in this thread before, there was never any rework of armor, there was an adjustment of how armor scaled through the levels, they didnt remove the curve in favor of a better system, they bent the curve a bit

[TheGrimCorsair]

Yeah, it's time for them buff armor and make it so Slash procs no longer bypass it and not bringing a variety of elements and abilities to deal with a variety of health and armor types means you can just exit mission 'cause you're dead weight.

Same for shields and toxin damage.

[TKDancer]

4 hours ago, TheGrimCorsair said:

Yeah, it's time for them buff armor and make it so Slash procs no longer bypass it and not bringing a variety of elements and abilities to deal with a variety of health and armor types means you can just exit mission 'cause you're dead weight.

Same for shields and toxin damage.

your mind is in the right place but ur idea of how problems should be fixed would only hurt balance more and add more power creep, 'buffing armor' will just widen the eHP gap and lead to more power creep, bringing armor down or reworking it into normal a normal 'barrier' in front of health and then re-balancing tenno dmg output would be a better path that is more future-proof

tho i do agree that maybe slash procs/toxic shouldnt fully bypass armor/shields and make corrosive/magnetic "useless" while doing so