Make headshots bypass armour DR?

[Tyreaus]

_{(Note: "bypass armour DR" is basically "bypass armour" but keeping the modifiers from the armour type.)}

There would likely need to be other tweaks (some of which, like Corrosive, probably need an update anyway), but I can think of a few benefits.

• It helps with the (either perceived or actual) melee / gun imbalance a bit. Doesn't fix it outright, but melee weapons aren't exactly renowned for getting headshots the same way rifles can.
• It adds in some optional mechanical skill. Instead of needing to build for armour - which you still can - you can just land headshots and go.
• It pairs nicely with the shield headshot mechanic under a "headshot to get past the enemy's best defense" philosophy.
• It'd be a point around which Viral and Corrosive could compete - if Corrosive were tweaked some in values, it could be the element to use when you can't land headshots, while Viral is when you can.
• It adds some extra sense behind Grineer having massive head-covering shoulder-gear.
• It softens the armour scaling issue a little bit - I won't claim it's a fix, but it does make things more manageable.
• It could shake the current meta a little bit, but without changing how effective the current meta is.
• It'll make rollers the most dangerous enemy because they don't have heads. _{Probably not but Cressa Tal can dream.}

Or, in short: it just makes armour more dynamic and puts a little more emphasis on the action gameplay than the build screen, and does so without compromising how people currently play.

EDIT: An alternative may be to bypass a portion of the armour's damage resistance, effectively allowing a partial bypass. E.g., if an enemy has armour that generates a 95% damage reduction, and headshots bypass half the target's damage resistance, headshots are reduced by 42.5% instead.

[Zeddypanda]

I was always confused it didn't work that way. Then again, even grineer dogs have armor somehow.

[Steel_Rook]

I don't know. Not a fan, personally.

 

11 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

It adds in some optional mechanical skill. Instead of needing to build for armour - which you still can - you can just land headshots and go.

I don't think it really does that. The game is already "headshots or GTFO" due to the absurd way headshots stack with 100%+ critical hit chance, and all you're doing is making Viral even more of a superior choice relative to corrosive.

 

12 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

It pairs nicely with the shield headshot mechanic under a "headshot to get past the enemy's best defense" philosophy.

I would argue that's a point against the proposal. Armour needs to behave fundamentally different from shields, else you're just designing a colour-matching minigame. In fact, I'd go as far as to argue that headshots bypassing the shield gate are themselves a cop-out DE implemented in order to placate people's reaction to it. They should have simply left it at "some small amount of damage bleedthrough" and otherwise just use more rapid-fire weapons.

I'm of the opinion that armour itself ought to be redesigned to work opposite of shields. That is to say, heavily resist rapid-fire weapons, but resist slower-firing weapons less or even not at all. That would actually give armour its own unique mechanic, rather than being "shields, but with different resistance scaling."

 

15 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

It adds some extra sense behind Grineer having massive head-covering shoulder-gear.

Not all of them do. Moreover, you're further exasperating an existing problem with their design - Grineer are weakest from the front, because it's hard to get headshots on them from behind. That may be realistic, but it makes for rotten gameplay because only the player they're attacking can reasonably damage them, short of brute-forcing their way through Grineer armour. It's entirely counter-intuitive that sneaking behind an enemy makes them more resistant to you, not less. Destiny already had this problem solved by giving the Cabal weak points on their backs. The Grineer don't have that.

 

17 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

It softens the armour scaling issue a little bit - I won't claim it's a fix, but it does make things more manageable.

I think you're drastically underselling the impact of your proposed change there. This doesn't "soften" armour scaling, but entirely renders it irrelevant. A level 100 Grineer Heavy Gunner has 6,441.15 Ferrite armour, equating to about 95.5% damage resistance, or ~22.5 the EHP relative to their HP. If so much as headshotting a Heavy Gunner skipped all of her armour, then headshots would do naturally 22 times more damage, on top of doing 2 times more damage, on top of criticals doing something like 8 times more damage on top of headshot crits doing*2 more damage at least, on top of both Corrosive and Viral doing 1.75 more damage, and all of this multiples together. In other words, you have an enemy who's going to take roughly 1200 TIMES more damage in the head than in the body on a headshot crit. Compare this with just roighly 56 times more damage on critical headshot when armour is considered.

I'm of the opinion that the only way to really balance armour and turn it into a meaningful mechanic is to DRASTICALLY reduce it scope, possibly redesign its backend mechanic, drastically reduce the impact of damage type and criticials and maybe then we'll have some sort of balance. As it stands right now, though, letting us bypass armour in any way instantly makes that way super-meta. That's why Slash reigned supreme against armour for so long, and still does. I don't think there's an "easy" solution to armour, because any time you let people bypass it, you're creating a niche meta that's going to funnel everyone into the same damage type, weapon or playstyle.

 

I don't disagree with your core premise - NPC armour as it stands right now constitutes a terrible system which balloons EHP needlessly, creates a massive divide between anything with armour and anything without, make NPC vs. NPC combat basically pointless and cascades absolute stat values into ridiculous ranges. However, I feel the problem is too fundamental for any "quick fix patch" to really address it properly.

[Artekkor]

Would make crit-based weapon even more OP if this was the case. I don't know about bypassing armor completely, but maybe having less of it on the head would make more sense, but even then... The headshot damage multiplier already supposed to represent hitting a weak spot,

[Zahnny]

There was something Payday 2 did that I quite liked.

As enemy difficulty increased, headshot multiplyer would also increase.

So you are rewarded more for headshots, and punished more for bodyshots.

[Yasha-7HS]

36 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

It helps with the (either perceived or actual) melee / gun imbalance a bit. Doesn't fix it outright, but melee weapons aren't exactly renowned for getting headshots the same way rifles can.

I don't think you're sure about that. Melee weapons hit headshots all the time, especially with over-arching strikes like on the Kronen Prime, Glaives, or just straight up gun melees like Redeemer and Stropha. 

38 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

It adds in some optional mechanical skill. Instead of needing to build for armour - which you still can - you can just land headshots and go.

Except if it's keeping the multipliers for armor you... Still build for armor? It still makes Corrosive builds do more damage against armored targets. 

39 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

It'd be a point around which Viral and Corrosive could compete - if Corrosive were tweaked some in values, it could be the element to use when you can't land headshots, while Viral is when you can.

No, that's not how the math would work out. 

40 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

It softens the armour scaling issue a little bit - I won't claim it's a fix, but it does make things more manageable.

Ignoring what armor is actually supposed to do just ruins scaling more. The game already has too many options that destroy the highest level relevant enemies without effort. 

43 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

It could shake the current meta a little bit, but without changing how effective the current meta is

No, it doesn't. It just pushes non-crit viable weapons further into the trashbin than they already are. 

17 minutes ago, Zeddypanda said:

I was always confused it didn't work that way.

Because helmets are armor? 

17 minutes ago, Zeddypanda said:

Then again, even grineer dogs have armor somehow.

DNA manipulation, we can make up some space magic reason. I mean, consider Honey Badgers being extremely tough even against big cats, it's not insane to think they have elephant hide and loose skin somehow. 

 

In all, this end up making a game world where Grineer are as weak as Corpus are, except Magnetic also just boosts damage against their health by a lot more for... No reason. Weapons that can't critically hit aren't even used anymore unless they have absurd damage, and Ignis Wraith becomes such a steamroll that people question why other guns are even in the game. Orthos Prime and Kronen have such a field day that equipping them in missions might as well just teleport you to the Mission Rewards screen. Eidolons are killed by Lato Vandal in three shots. 

 

[SpicyDinosaur]

I'm confused, I get waaay more headshots using a longer reach weapon than I do, say a sniper or even a semiauto. Then you have automatic weapons which accrue quite a few headshots on their own.

 

Aiming is for chumps.

[Traumtulpe]

How about a compromise - armor stays as is, but gets destroyed with repeated hits to the same body part (slower weapons need to break more armor per hit, obviously). This protects enemies from oneshots (to some extend), while not wasting the players time with unkillable 99.99% DR sponges (using suboptimal equipment).

[Tyreaus]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I don't think it really does that. The game is already "headshots or GTFO" due to the absurd way headshots stack with 100%+ critical hit chance, and all you're doing is making Viral even more of a superior choice relative to corrosive.

As I wrote later on: values for Corrosive (and, though unsaid, Viral) could be tweaked to alter that relationship. This is largely around AoE / non-AoE weapons, the former of which aren't as reliable at hitting headshots as the latter.

I do agree one could probably drop the 2x weakpoint multiplier for armoured enemies, though. That probably makes things go a touch too overkill.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Armour needs to behave fundamentally different from shields, else you're just designing a colour-matching minigame.

Huh? How does this concept make it more of a "colour-matching minigame", especially than we already have, and especially when you mention earlier about how it would make Viral more prominent? I would think it'd make it more of an "aim for the head" kind of game but, being a shooter and all, that seems like a beneficial point.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

Not all of them do. Moreover, you're further exasperating an existing problem with their design - Grineer are weakest from the front, because it's hard to get headshots on them from behind. That may be realistic, but it makes for rotten gameplay because only the player they're attacking can reasonably damage them, short of brute-forcing their way through Grineer armour. It's entirely counter-intuitive that sneaking behind an enemy makes them more resistant to you, not less. Destiny already had this problem solved by giving the Cabal weak points on their backs. The Grineer don't have that.

Not all of them do, true.

That said, it's counter-intuitive only a-priori. If you were to take a random, hypothetical person, you would figure that punching them in the back could deal some serious damage, given you're able to harm their spinal cord. If you discover they're wearing a backpack, you're likely to intuit that that initial assessment isn't quite as accurate. But it would be kind of silly to say that the added backpack is counter-intuitive. It's counter-assumptive - it counters an initial assessment - but intuition is what led to both assessments, the difference being a change of input.

The armour on Grineer is like the backpack. Before seeing a Grineer, of course one would intuit that they're vulnerable from the back. Upon seeing them, it may be evident it's quite the opposite. Intuition works alongside the visual cues.

I won't say the hitbox couldn't use some adjustments regardless - I've had more than enough shots that should have counted, yet didn't. Nor will I say that something like a weakpoint in the back on the body level wouldn't also be welcome. It'd be something a little different than straightforward "aim for the head". But that aside, I find it hard to see how it's counter-intuitive. Especially when, if we're going to lean on the "best to attack from the back" intuition, dealing damage from the back outside of headshots does diddly squat.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'm of the opinion that armour itself ought to be redesigned to work opposite of shields. That is to say, heavily resist rapid-fire weapons, but resist slower-firing weapons less or even not at all. That would actually give armour its own unique mechanic, rather than being "shields, but with different resistance scaling."

I don't see why that couldn't be implemented as well.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I think you're drastically underselling the impact of your proposed change there. This doesn't "soften" armour scaling, but entirely renders it irrelevant. A level 100 Grineer Heavy Gunner has 6,441.15 Ferrite armour, equating to about 95.5% damage resistance, or ~22.5 the EHP relative to their HP. If so much as headshotting a Heavy Gunner skipped all of her armour, then headshots would do naturally 22 times more damage, on top of doing 2 times more damage, on top of criticals doing something like 8 times more damage on top of headshot crits doing*2 more damage at least, on top of both Corrosive and Viral doing 1.75 more damage, and all of this multiples together. In other words, you have an enemy who's going to take roughly 1200 TIMES more damage in the head than in the body on a headshot crit. Compare this with just roighly 56 times more damage on critical headshot when armour is considered.

Does it help to, instead, bypass a portion of the damage resistance on headshot? E.g., if headshots have DR values reduced by half, then the max damage reduction on headshot is a theoretical 50%. Rather than the initial proposition of 0%. That, if coupled with reduction or elimination of headshot multipliers, should keep numbers in line while maintaining the concept.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

I don't disagree with your core premise

I don't know if you get the core premise. The core premise is "we handle armour entirely in the arsenal screen". There are, of course, other ways to tweak it - things like non-scaling armour values. But the as-is issue is that it either makes armour borderline if not actually irrelevant (in terms of armour stripping and such - with our extant damage numbers, even a 50% damage reduction isn't going to really matter) or continues to leave it at a point where building for it is a necessity.

We're in an action game. We should have a way to work around it that doesn't boil down to the colours of cards on a gun.

1 hour ago, ShichiseitenYasha said:

I don't think you're sure about that. Melee weapons hit headshots all the time, especially with over-arching strikes like on the Kronen Prime, Glaives, or just straight up gun melees like Redeemer and Stropha. 

Admittedly I don't use a ton for melee but in my experience, headshots - not impossible - aren't quite so frequent with most melee weapons. Not with the same rate of frequency as, say, a Baza, I mean.

1 hour ago, ShichiseitenYasha said:

Except if it's keeping the multipliers for armor you... Still build for armor? It still makes Corrosive builds do more damage against armored targets. 

Well, currently, I'm building more for Viral than Corrosive. But yes - the point is that anti-armour builds still do better, but that they're not quite as required. I highlighted "need" for a reason.

I don't see what's wrong with having an anti-armour build do well against armour. It's the exclusivity that's the point of contention.

1 hour ago, ShichiseitenYasha said:

No, that's not how the math would work out. 

As current, no. But as I said, it makes it possible to organize things that way.

1 hour ago, ShichiseitenYasha said:

Ignoring what armor is actually supposed to do just ruins scaling more. The game already has too many options that destroy the highest level relevant enemies without effort. 

I believe I did mention armour scaling. That is, how armoured EHP balloons exponentially due to two scaling factors multiplying with one another. That the player is stupidly overpowered is true but a separate thing.

1 hour ago, ShichiseitenYasha said:

No, it doesn't. It just pushes non-crit viable weapons further into the trashbin than they already are. 

If non-crit weapons are already in the trash bin, then perhaps they need some other kind of change to get out of there?

Also, I did say a little bit, mostly in terms of AoE / non-AoE. Didn't say it'd be some kind of paradigm shift. Or some kind of panacea for the crit / status divide.

1 hour ago, ShichiseitenYasha said:

In all, this end up making a game world where Grineer are as weak as Corpus are, except Magnetic also just boosts damage against their health by a lot more for... No reason.

There's a little bit of back and forth that's going on and is a little bewildering. I don't know if it's a phrasing or my misunderstanding, but we started with Corrosive being great, then Magnetic boosting damage...somehow? I'm lost.

1 hour ago, ShichiseitenYasha said:

Weapons that can't critically hit aren't even used anymore unless they have absurd damage, and Ignis Wraith becomes such a steamroll that people question why other guns are even in the game. Orthos Prime and Kronen have such a field day that equipping them in missions might as well just teleport you to the Mission Rewards screen. Eidolons are killed by Lato Vandal in three shots. 

Besides the fact that, as you mentioned with status weapons by and large already being in the trash bin, we're already in the middle of this sort of era; and besides the apparent fact that Eidolons have innate damage resistance atop the armour (going off the wiki on that one, admittedly); what's the alternative? Continue playing the game from the arsenal screen? Armour tends to be the most impactful enemy, if not gameplay, element and it is dealt with via the arsenal screen solely. Unless a player's loadout is made in a particular way (though I admit that has a lot of options accrued over the years), there exists no means by which a player can operate against a 99% enemy damage reduction. It makes the gameplay a little too chore-like when success or failure is so contingent on the build screen.

58 minutes ago, Traumtulpe said:

How about a compromise - armor stays as is, but gets destroyed with repeated hits to the same body part (slower weapons need to break more armor per hit, obviously). This protects enemies from oneshots (to some extend), while not wasting the players time with unkillable 99.99% DR sponges (using suboptimal equipment).

Alternatively having damage count toward the armour first, so that something that deals 1,000 damage would lower the armour by 1,000 (or a good percent thereof) for subsequent hits. Perhaps with an added multiplier when the armour breaks. At least that'd be something, even if I'd prefer something a little bit more mechanically demanding.

[taiiat]

the game used to be this way, sortof. early on, all Enemies had Armor, but, their Weakpoints had reduced Armor. not zero, but reduced.

 

3 hours ago, Zeddypanda said:

I was always confused it didn't work that way. Then again, even grineer dogs have armor somehow.

i mean, Drahks do have a sort of Chitinous exterior, that's probably why they have Armor.

Kavats is the more strange one - they miiiiiiiight have a Scaled sort of exterior but i'm not sure about that.

[Yamazuki]

Or, DE could go with the lazy route and just actually fix armor scaling, and just cut ties with "endlessly" scaling enemies. Armor should be providing around the same level of protection as shields do for Corpus. Without the "endlessly" scaling enemies, it also means DE doesn't have to worry about a significantly small portion of the player base complaining x weapon kills certain level enemies [that almost no one sees] too slow. With a max level ranges it would make it easier to balance weapons, what ever "balance" is for DE at least.

Endless missions are already a joke that involve 0 difficulty as it is anyways.

If DE's solution is trying to give non-slash weapons more slash, then clearly the issue is armor and enemy scaling.

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

That said, it's counter-intuitive only a-priori. If you were to take a random, hypothetical person, you would figure that punching them in the back could deal some serious damage, given you're able to harm their spinal cord. If you discover they're wearing a backpack, you're likely to intuit that that initial assessment isn't quite as accurate. But it would be kind of silly to say that the added backpack is counter-intuitive. It's counter-assumptive - it counters an initial assessment - but intuition is what led to both assessments, the difference being a change of input.

Bundling a few responses here, but - you seem to have missed my point. I call this counter-intuitive from a game design perspective because it penalises team play. An enemy who can only be damaged from the front can only be damaged by the player that enemy is engaging. All other players can do is either sit on their hands or go stick their own heads in the enemy's gunfire to get a chance at damaging them. This can cause a single player to inadvertently "hog" an enemy and prevent other players from pitching in. This is precisely the issue that the Payday 2 SWAT Turret has. It can only be damaged in a glass lens in the front and is best fought by circle-strafing it (as a player can usually sidestep faster than it traverses), meaning a single player can turn it around and leave the other three unable to interact with the fight.

Clever game design should allow one player to distract an enemy, causing another to exploit a weakness of that enemy not normally available in a head-to-head fight - some kind of weakness on the back. I'm not arguing from the perspective of realism, but rather from the perspective of game design. Allowing two players to cooperate in taking down a tough enemy in ways that each one on their own would struggle to pull off is simply good enemy design. Inversely, allowing one player block another from fighting an enemy is not good game design, because it causes players to get in each other's way, rather than helping each other.

All of that is not to say that enemies should be invulnerable from the front, merely that they should be more vulnerable or at least as vulnerable from behind as they are from the front. Focusing entirely on "just aim for the head" doesn't do this, especially against the Grineer. I'd argue that headshots are easily the least compelling source of complexity in combat, both because they're cliche and because they limit multiplayer interactions.

 

2 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

Does it help to, instead, bypass a portion of the damage resistance on headshot? E.g., if headshots have DR values reduced by half, then the max damage reduction on headshot is a theoretical 50%. Rather than the initial proposition of 0%. That, if coupled with reduction or elimination of headshot multipliers, should keep numbers in line while maintaining the concept.

It would help, yes. Damage resistance from armour is SO stupidly high that allowing players to bypass all of it is always going to cause drastic, dramatic issues of balance. Bypassing some armour (specifically armour, not damage resistance) could be a compromise. Critical headshots are still a problem, though. I agree with you in "reducing or eliminating" it, but unfortunately it's not as simple as that. The way critical headshots work can potentially give players a MASSIVE damage bonus already, especially with red crits or even Tier 4-5 crits, if attained. The numbers I cited above are for a yellow crit, but plenty of people build for red Tier 3 critical hits. That can go into 60-100 times damage, off-memory. If you start messing with critical headshot damage, you run the risk of giving players with super-crtiguns actually lower damage while still heavily penalising players with more standard yellow-critguns.

There's also a separate mechanical issue. Critical headshots only apply to the HEAD, for whatever Byzantine reason DE decided to code it like that. Even for enemies with massive weak points (like Moa fanny packs), even for enemies with no bonus headshot damage (like Corpus Crewmen), only the head counts. This means that if you add a weak point to the backs of Grineer backpacks, that's probably not going to count as a "headshot." Now mind you, I'd personally want ALL weak points to count as headshots, thus removing the distinction between "headshot" and "weak point hit" entirely, so this may be a moot point.

In this case, though, I think we should be bolder. One of Warframe's most significant sources of power creep is multiplicatively stacking damage buffs, and no buffs stack as over-the-top as critical hits. I would personally just roll ALL damage buffs from ALL sources into the same additive combined damage buff. That right there should put enough of a crimp on massive power creep to keep damage numbers sane. Between ignoring armour only partially and dealing only additive damage, headshots under your proposed system could potentially work well. I'd still like to redesign the armour system, but this would be a compromise I'm willing to accept.

Unfortunately, that's a compromise which will get both of us excommunicated :) The moment you propose turning currently multiplicative buffs into additive buffs, you're basically proposing civil war. It needs to happen, but people WILL fight you over it.

 

3 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

The core premise is "we handle armour entirely in the arsenal screen". There are, of course, other ways to tweak it - things like non-scaling armour values. But the as-is issue is that it either makes armour borderline if not actually irrelevant (in terms of armour stripping and such - with our extant damage numbers, even a 50% damage reduction isn't going to really matter) or continues to leave it at a point where building for it is a necessity. We're in an action game. We should have a way to work around it that doesn't boil down to the colours of cards on a gun.

In principle, I agree. My problem - and I touched on this before - is that "just aim for the head" really isn't much of an improvement. Yes, it's a slightly more gameplay-sided approach, but it's also a one-size-fits-all solution. Enemy too tough? Shoot the smaller target for more damage. I don't think this is so much a failure of Warframe's armour system as it's a failure of Warframe's enemy design. I will never stop bringing up Division 2's enemy design because it really is a high water mark for the industry in general and damn underappreciated. If you want to make weakpoint hits matter, learn from that game. In fact, I'll give a few examples.

In that game, damn near every enemy has a grenade pouch or an ammo bag or a fuel tank or comms station somewhere on their body. Yes, shooting those will sometimes damage the enemy, but they'll usually have far more complex effects. These could be something as simple as the grenade back exploding when shot, setting all enemies in range on fire and hitting them with a short-term crowd control, but it can do so much more. Most enemies will lose abilities and alter their behaviour when weak points are shot. Grenade tossers lose the ability to throw grenades when their grenade bag is shot off. Flamethrower soldiers lose the ability to fire their flamethrowers when their tanks are shot off, switching to much weaker pistols. Heavy machinegunners lose their belts when the gun is shot up, forcing them into a slow reload. Medics can't revive, bosses take off their armoured helmets, gadgets switch allegiance and more. THAT is what it would take for weak point hits to matter - when weak point hits do more than just applying a damage multiplier by proxy.

And if you want to go one better - Division 2 does armour better as well. Armoured bosses don't have more "health" or "damage resistance" than others. In fact, they typically have less, but it's hidden under a layer of ablative armour. Shoot the armour enough and it breaks, stumbling the boss and uncovering an unprotected part. That's where good enemy design kicks in. You can break their helmets and shoot them in the head for massive damage... But the helmets are typically much tougher than any other piece of armour. You can break their chest armour because it's easy to hit, but their stance puts their left arm in front of their chest. You may end up having to break both. You can break their leg armour since it's weak, but their legs are skinny and hard to hit. And best of all - multiple players can coordinate and focus fire on the same body part, rather than each shooting a different piece.

I know all of this sounds like it's well outside the scope of Warframe, but there's no reason it should be. Yes, it would be a lot of work, but DE have already done some of this work. The Sentient Aerolyst can't be damaged (which is bullS#&$ - should be damage resistance) until his suicide vest of cannisters is destroyed. The Infested Juggernaut takes heavily reduced damage, but must expose its weak points to attack. The Nox is heavily resistant to damage outside their armoured helmet, but breaking that helmet causes them to leak a constant Toxin damage aura. Hell, even a simple Moa enemy has their weak point on their back, but drooping down such that accurate players can hit it by threading shots between the Moa's legs. And on the subject of breakable armour - Both the Nox and Sargus Ruk work like this. Warframe is absolutely capable of this. DE just need the stomach to redesign their enemy factions, rather than just creating new and equally dirt simple enemies for us to fight.

Take Deimos, for instnace. The Saxum? That's a good albeit simple enemy. Shoot it in the shoulders until they break. The Jugulus? Hell no, who the hell came up with that? It's a literal "sandbag with a gun" and absolutely no complexity. I get that "we work with what we have." I just sincerely hope we can do better than just "standard headshots."

 

3 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

I believe I did mention armour scaling. That is, how armoured EHP balloons exponentially due to two scaling factors multiplying with one another. That the player is stupidly overpowered is true but a separate thing.

As a parting thought - I believe armour shouldn't scale. Like, AT ALL. Give Grineer enemies a fixed amount of armour regardless of level. Say a Heavy Gunner has 600 armour. She'll have 600 armour at level 8, at level 80 at level 800, etc. Her armour would not change. Want to change her EHP? Her HEALTH would scale with level, instead - just health, not armour. 600 armour gives her ~67% damage resistance, that's enough. Let's compare this to a Corpus Tech. At level 15 (lowest they appear), the Tech has 700 health, 250 shield. Due to shield damage resistance, the Tech has 25% damage resistance across ~26% of his health bar. That's still much, much less durability so a Heavy Gunner will still remain relatively much tougher. Just not nearly 100 times tougher.

I know this proposal in itself is a major cop-out of my more ambitions proposals for a complete armour redesign, but this is a change that DE could do RIGHT NOW, with fairly minimal rebalance necessary. It would drastically reduce the reliance on anti-armour, drastically reduce the EHP difference between Corpus and Grineer and drastically reduce the extremity of enemy EHP scaling with level. Actual enemy EHP can still be recalculated by rejiggering health values and probably actually make Grineer tougher overall (as Radiation and Corrosive don't turn them into absolute jokes), and all of this can happen with an iota of additional programming required.

At that point - sure. Ignore some or all of a Grineer's armour on headshot. It's not going to make such as MASSIVE difference as it would now anyway, so why not?