Enemy Energy Pool/Abilities & Enemy Armor w/ Weight

[-Krux-]

Around the discussions of armor, I wanted to toss my input into this void of which nothing happens in result. Also, ideas around energy involving enemy units.

ENERGY:

Thinking back to when eximus enemies were introduced to WF, and I found my first parasitic enemy. The sucker was draining my whole team's energy for a minute, we were dry. I thought to myself, "damn, it's time to get that energy back so we can get back into it..", and I killed this thing and to my surprise - it dropped NO ENERGY. ??? Where did all our energy go?

I think all enemies that perform some kind of 'ability', this goes double for eximus enemies, they should drop AT LEAST 1 energy orb. Energy should essentially be a 'constant' in the game. Parasitics especially should drop energy, more energy depending on how much it drained.

As a constant, this should carry over to things like magnetic procs. If you can keep an enemy proc'd with magnetic, it should hurt (not necessarily halt) their ability to "cast". A fire eximus with magnetic proc shouldn't be able to comfortably cast his fire blast. We, as tenno, follow those rules - every other unit in the game should too (to an extent). Specifics: If this fire eximus isn't getting outright "halted" from casting as that would be OP of magnetic procs - perhaps the strength of it and/or the range of it should be lessened if he's proc'd & he drops NO energy for the team to grab. Parasitic enemies should drain energy at a slower rate, maybe also a ~2 second pause after receiving magnetic proc where it is not draining energy before leeching the lessened rate until the proc wears off. This would be the nature of things, I think the point comes across..

ARMOR:

Sooo... lots of chatter on what armor should become, limits to armor cap, etc.. Yes, armored enemies can be quite tanky. I can outright list changes I'd like to see in general that would allow armor to not be so pesky and they're pretty simple (at first).

1. Puncture actually punctures armor. Meaning armor stripping. Puncture damage does a SMALL AMOUNT of armor stripping. You know, kinda like how you'd imagine "puncture" ought to work.
2. Blast shouldn't be lessened against armor, it should (as a dmg type) deal increased damage. Also - knockdown should be brought back, differently. And this is where "weight" comes in. We are going to balance knockdown, knockback, and stagger.

This is where it gets more interesting - Melee is seeing something of a nerf very soon (update 30 hasn't dropped just yet) and we know comments were made on dev stream about melee causing stagger too easily. So this would address that issue as well as fix others, it's beautiful:

An unarmored, smaller enemy, has a low weight stat. As a lightweight enemy, it can get knock backed (ragdoll), if dealt the right dmg type (impact, blast). But cannot be staggered by stagger dmg types (puncture, gas). You like how these less common dmg types are getting love in the process AND make sense? Nice, right? Oh, and lighter weight enemies are faster both in movement and melee. Should make infested less of a joke in the process. Damn, it's like weight stats on enemies are fixing everything.

As armor gets added, enemies are not as fast. Don't think "slower than they are now", instead "still a little faster than they are now but not quite as fast as unarmored" 😉. But now they have some amount of resistance to knockback (ragdoll). It would then take more blast and certainly more impact to see a knockback, maybe you'll at least see a knockdown (no ragdoll, but fallen). But what's this now - they get up from being knocked down pretty fast! Whoa! Guess they don't weight enough for getting up to be a problem for them! Stagger starts to work better with some armor on them (puncture and gas).

More armor! Knockback is getting impossible, knockdown is very difficult to accomplish. But with enough blast bombarding them, they get knocked down and take much longer to get back up. Gee, that's a lot of weight they need to lift to get themselves off the ground now. Stagger is working great, they can't balance all that weight on them. They also seem to move and melee much slower now than the lighter weighted enemies!

 

That's all for now. I've screamed into the void. Upvote to see no actual in-game changes. Scream back at me to also see no changes. GG