Enemy armor scaling may need a new calculation

[Godmode_Ash]

13 hours ago, Tyreaus said:

Or maybe armour just shouldn't scale at all.

If armour doesn't scale, DE will just take more scaling from HP which will be worse bullet-sponging. Or worse, DE will put time gate on normal enemies like Jackle boss fight... that would be a nightmare.

Either way there needs to be some sort of scaling between low and high level enemies, and because stats is the easiest thing for DE to alter. I wish DE could make high level enemies "smarter" so that the difference between low vs high level enemies are the behavior. But you know that's not going to happen.

[(XBOX)TheWayOfWisdom]

Kinda half-baked, but lets go.

Armor level is static, with there being 3 armor "levels". Steel Path's armor modifier is removed.

1. Light-Weight class - 300-600 armor (2-3x multiplier to HP)
   1. Units like Butchers, Scorpions, Shield Lancers, Ballistas, and Hellions get put into this class.
2. Medium-Weight class - 900-1500 armor (4-6x multiplier to HP)
   1. Troopers, (Elite) Lancers, Evicerators, Seekers, Drahk/Hyekka Masters, and Elite Shield Lancers go here.
3. Heavy-Weight class - 1800-2700 armor (7-10x multiplier to HP)
   1. Bombards, Napalms, Heavy Gunners, and Nox go here

Health Scaling is given power scaling with an exponent >1. Unit base health is rebalanced to fit into the classes (Something like Light - 100 HP, Medium - 200 HP, Heavy - 400 HP perhaps)
Corrosive gets buffed to a 90-95% strip at 10 procs, viral gets nerfed to 3.3x damage at 10 procs.

If you want some extra spice, tie a speed modifier to base armor level so light-weights can move faster, but heavy-weights move slower.

 

[Loza03]

1 hour ago, Godmode_Ash said:

If armour doesn't scale, DE will just take more scaling from HP which will be worse bullet-sponging. Or worse, DE will put time gate on normal enemies like Jackle boss fight... that would be a nightmare.

Either way there needs to be some sort of scaling between low and high level enemies, and because stats is the easiest thing for DE to alter. I wish DE could make high level enemies "smarter" so that the difference between low vs high level enemies are the behavior. But you know that's not going to happen.

This isn't really true. I can say this with complete faith, because Corpus and Infested use HP scaling, and they're way weaker.

Even if you were to buff Grineer base HP to compensate, making all the enemies behave by the same rules goes a hell of a long way to making more weapons and playstyle than the present meta viable, because now all the level ranges have an equivilent EHP range - rather than it is right now, where at the same level range, two different enemies have a huge disparity in durability.

 

Edit: To demonstrate, taking three roughly-equivilent enemies from each faction, the Charger, the Elite Crewman and the Elite Lancer. At level 75 the Charger has 6,800 effective health, the Crewman has 8,600 effective health, and the Lancer has 49,300 effective health.

The Crewman and the Charger are clearly comparable - the Charger being a melee unit that comes in swarms, so it has less overall health than the Crewman. But they're about a fifth of the durability of the Lancer

[Godmode_Ash]

38 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

This isn't really true. I can say this with complete faith, because Corpus and Infested use HP scaling, and they're way weaker.

Even if you were to buff Grineer base HP to compensate, making all the enemies behave by the same rules goes a hell of a long way to making more weapons and playstyle than the present meta viable, because now all the level ranges have an equivilent EHP range - rather than it is right now, where at the same level range, two different enemies have a huge disparity in durability.

Corpus scale more from shield than HP. Corpus still weak because shield has low reduction(25%?) and toxic just bypass them. Infest has always been weak because in DE's idea, they were suppose to be horde type enemies. Weak but make up with numbers. That's why infest also give lowest EXP per mob in average.

When I said "If armour doesn't scale, DE will just take more scaling from HP which will be worse bullet-sponging," I was referring to something like high level Lephantis... It has no armor, but still takes a while to kill because of 120 millions EHP. I was implying if DE doesn't use armor to scale, DE will just add something equivalent to armor to increase time to kill, maybe something even more ridiculous.

 

 

[0_The_F00l]

I personally feel Armor should not provide pure DR , it should have its own health pool and dynamic DR on top of it.

So a freshly polished and maintained Armor on a freshly cloned grineer has let's say 1000 Armor and 1000 health ( for the sake of easy calculations) 

So near 77% DR on first hit , 

Assuming a steady damage of 100 by a weapon.

First damage would do full 100 damage on Armor and 23 damage on health.

You now have 900 Armor and 977 health.

You now have 75% DR on this enemy.

Second hit will do 100 damage to Armor and 25 damage to health.

So now 800 Armor and 952 health with 72% DR and so on , 

There could also be mechanisms by which the enemy could restore Armor (special units / depoyables) 

This way the gap between shields and Armor is reduced but not completely removed.

Weak points could have similar effects of shields where you could bypass the DR.

Corrosive /puncture could do bonus damage to Armor and the proc could help bypass some Armor as well. 

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

31 minutes ago, Godmode_Ash said:

Corpus scale more from shield than HP. Corpus still weak because shield has low reduction(25%?) and toxic just bypass them. Infest has always been weak because in DE's idea, they were suppose to be horde type enemies. Weak but make up with numbers. That's why infest also give lowest EXP per mob in average.

When I said "If armour doesn't scale, DE will just take more scaling from HP which will be worse bullet-sponging," I was referring to something like high level Lephantis... It has no armor, but still takes a while to kill because of 120 millions EHP. I was implying if DE doesn't use armor to scale, DE will just add something equivalent to armor to increase time to kill, maybe something even more ridiculous.

They already do with damage caps, status immunity and DPS based damage reduction. The other side of the issue is player damage scaling.

Just like how enemy EHP is all over the place due to armor scaling, potential player damage is also all over the place when unconditional damage multipliers are so plentiful.

Base Damage and Crits change nothing about how a weapon feels, except bigger numbers. Multi-shot is even worse as it's multiplicative with both damage and status chance.

Conditional multipliers like Fire Rate that has a negative impact on ammo economy or Faction Damage that only works on certain enemies should be stronger due to drawbacks, but they are not.

The very fact that a single min maxed player in a squad of 4 can output over 90% of the squads damage really hampers the co-op experience as much as the dominance of armor scaling.

A min maxed veteran should rightfully do a lot more damage than a new player, but not +10X more than everyone else in the squad combined. Before DE added commas to numbers, most players probably weren't even aware of how much damage they were actually doing anyways.

If DE really wanted parity, they would do away with excessive multipliers on both sides.

1. Armor wouldn't scale and thus Slash procs would be on the same level as other DOTs.
2. Critical Damage and Viral procs would only be additive with Base Damage. A 4.4x Crit Multiplier = +340% Base Damage and 10 Viral procs = +325% Base Damage.
3. Elements would scale only with a weapon's unmodified Base Damage before all other boosts, making it additive with Base Damage. This would make building both Crit and Status on the same weapon counter productive instead of multiplicative as high Crit would hamper a weapon's ability to proc elementals. A weapon's IPS would also matter more as Elemental damage wouldn't scale with Crit.
4. All Multi-shot mods would have a downside like -%accuracy like Split Flights, so Multi-shot isn't simply a better version of Fire Rate as it is right now.

[Loza03]

26 minutes ago, Godmode_Ash said:

Corpus scale more from shield than HP. Corpus still weak because shield has low reduction(25%?) and toxic just bypass them. Infest has always been weak because in DE's idea, they were suppose to be horde type enemies. Weak but make up with numbers. That's why infest also give lowest EXP per mob in average.

When I said "If armour doesn't scale, DE will just take more scaling from HP which will be worse bullet-sponging," I was referring to something like high level Lephantis... It has no armor, but still takes a while to kill because of 120 millions EHP. I was implying if DE doesn't use armor to scale, DE will just add something equivalent to armor to increase time to kill, maybe something even more ridiculous.

 

 

What you're failing to get is that the problem with armour isn't how much effective health armored enemies have, it's how much they have compared to everything else.

As I demonstrated, whilst Corpus units do have more health on average than Infested units, the difference is not that much. But a single Grineer at the same level can be worth five or six Corpus or Infested in terms of health. This means that the standards for that's an 'acceptable' level of damage need to be set around Grineer standards of EHP, and that when you build anti-Grineer weapons or abilities, everything else is easy to kill, because a weapon that takes 5 hits to kill a Grineer can kill a Corpus equivalent in 1.

However, if things are in proportion to each other - for example, with Infested and Corpus having similar EHP to each other - then that problem no longer exists. So, even if you were to massively buff Corpus, Infested and Grineer up to the levels that Grineer used to be at (5 hits to kill, lets say), then it doesn't matter, because DE can now design around that set standard. They can even make damage types mean a damn again, because now some damage types might, for example kill a Corpus in 2 hits, an Infested in 5, and a Grineer in 7, whilst a Jack of All Trades type like Viral might be able to kill them all in 4.

[LillyRaccune]

45 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

whilst a Jack of All Trades type like Viral might be able to kill them all in 4.

I agree with you. This is why build diversity isn't true diversity. I basically mod most of my weapons for viral and fire, that shreds most enemies (unless I'm in SP).

If Corpus and Infested had equivalent eHP, I would need to adapt my builds. I might even make use of different loadouts.

Regarding the Infested, I think there was an update to them within the last 12-18 months. Megan and/or Rebbecca suggested that infested are supposed to be low HP and easy to kill, but in exchange they increased their melee damage to make them more lethal. (But I could be remembering wrong.)

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

17 minutes ago, LillyRaccune said:

I agree with you. This is why build diversity isn't true diversity. I basically mod most of my weapons for viral and fire, that shreds most enemies (unless I'm in SP).

If Corpus and Infested had equivalent eHP, I would need to adapt my builds. I might even make use of different loadouts.

Regarding the Infested, I think there was an update to them within the last 12-18 months. Megan and/or Rebbecca suggested that infested are supposed to be low HP and easy to kill, but in exchange they increased their melee damage to make them more lethal. (But I could be remembering wrong.)

The theory behind some damage types are fine. 

Gas damage trades single target damage for AOE, which makes it good for clearing out chaff theoretically.

Radiation disrupts auras.

They provide benefits, but they aren't mandatory. Players can still play around the enemies, but there is no playing around armor without modding for it. 

You bring an anti-Grineer set up to a Corpus or Infested mission and still do fine.

If you bring an anti-Corpus or anti-Infested setup to a Grineer mission, just abort.

So players are incentivized to just bring anti-Grineer set-ups all the time to avoid annoying others with Host Migrations.

[Loza03]

1 hour ago, LillyRaccune said:

I agree with you. This is why build diversity isn't true diversity. I basically mod most of my weapons for viral and fire, that shreds most enemies (unless I'm in SP).

If Corpus and Infested had equivalent eHP, I would need to adapt my builds. I might even make use of different loadouts.

Possibly. I still think that there's value in a viral-like 'decent at everything' damage type. Viral's issue is that it's almost as good at corrosive at armour from sheer damage increase, and that means that it's insanely good at everything else.

A good Jack-of-all-trades should probably be as much worse than the best damage type as it is better than the worst damage type across everything, whereas specialist damage types should have very clear strengths and weaknesses. That way you facilitate both convenient builds and min-maxing. And everything needs to be on the same scale and playing field as each other for that to happen.

[Corvid]

22 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Possibly. I still think that there's value in a viral-like 'decent at everything' damage type. Viral's issue is that it's almost as good at corrosive at armour from sheer damage increase, and that means that it's insanely good at everything else.

A good Jack-of-all-trades should probably be as much worse than the best damage type as it is better than the worst damage type across everything, whereas specialist damage types should have very clear strengths and weaknesses. That way you facilitate both convenient builds and min-maxing. And everything needs to be on the same scale and playing field as each other for that to happen.

The idea I had a while back was that the Physical damage types would be the jacks of all trades, while base and combination elements would be used for moderate and extreme specialisation, respectively (with a potential implementation of the elemental conversion functions of the PvP mods, rather than elements being additive to your damage as they are now).

My reasoning being that for an elemental damage system to truly be balanced, "none of the above" has to be a viable option. With the current system there is pretty much never a situation in which going pure physical is the best option.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

14 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

 Viral's issue is that it's almost as good at corrosive at armour from sheer damage increase, and that means that it's insanely good at everything else.

Viral is better than Corrosive full stop.

Up to Sortie level armor, Viral procs alone provide a greater damage boost than Corrosive procs before we even throw Slash procs into the mix.

Before Sorties, Corrosive damage itself has a head start over Viral against Ferrite armor due to the +75% Ferrite that also mitigates 75% of the armor value, but is neutral against Alloy which the bulk of Grineer units.

Viral however has +75% against Cloned Flesh which Grineer almost universally have.

After we throw in Slash procs, Viral is uncontested.

Flat resistances stop mattering in the face of ever scaling armor which is the argument why armor shouldn't scale in the first place.

The only reason to ever use Corrosive is:

• Weapon cannot be built for Bleed
• Enemy is immune to Status but has Ferrite armor

[--END--Rikutatis]

8 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

They already do with damage caps, status immunity and DPS based damage reduction. The other side of the issue is player damage scaling.

...

1. Armor wouldn't scale and thus Slash procs would be on the same level as other DOTs.
2. Critical Damage and Viral procs would only be additive with Base Damage. A 4.4x Crit Multiplier = +340% Base Damage and 10 Viral procs = +325% Base Damage.
3. Elements would scale only with a weapon's unmodified Base Damage before all other boosts, making it additive with Base Damage. This would make building both Crit and Status on the same weapon counter productive instead of multiplicative as high Crit would hamper a weapon's ability to proc elementals. A weapon's IPS would also matter more as Elemental damage wouldn't scale with Crit.
4. All Multi-shot mods would have a downside like -%accuracy like Split Flights, so Multi-shot isn't simply a better version of Fire Rate as it is right now.

This is really important and what I feel most people miss when they ask for armor to stop scaling. Armor isn't just a grineer thing anymore by now. Field bosses, special enemies (of all factions), event and world bosses - all of those have different layers of protection: armor at the base, but also damage reduction on top of it and some even go as far as having status immunities or protections. All of those layers of damage mitigation are needed because our damage is completely broken and off the charts. Due to all those multiplicative damage types stacking on top of each other and reaching millions if not billions of damage (you didn't even mention other modifiers like finishers, headshots, etc). And even with all that armor, damage reduction and immunities, we still stack enough modifiers to one shot them anyways. It's kinda ridiculous and completely broken. The entire damage formula would need to be reworked like you said along with an armor rework. At this point I keep insisting a Warframe 2 would just be the best solution to this, I'm not even sure they can change everything that needs to be changed in the existing system.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

6 hours ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

This is really important and what I feel most people miss when they ask for armor to stop scaling. Armor isn't just a grineer thing anymore by now. Field bosses, special enemies (of all factions), event and world bosses - all of those have different layers of protection: armor at the base, but also damage reduction on top of it and some even go as far as having status immunities or protections. All of those layers of damage mitigation are needed because our damage is completely broken and off the charts. Due to all those multiplicative damage types stacking on top of each other and reaching millions if not billions of damage (you didn't even mention other modifiers like finishers, headshots, etc). And even with all that armor, damage reduction and immunities, we still stack enough modifiers to one shot them anyways. It's kinda ridiculous and completely broken. The entire damage formula would need to be reworked like you said along with an armor rework. At this point I keep insisting a Warframe 2 would just be the best solution to this, I'm not even sure they can change everything that needs to be changed in the existing system.

DE was able to rework Condition Overload from an extra multiplier that was exponential with itself into something additive with Pressure Point so it is definitely possible for them to rein in excessive multipliers. Warframe definitely has multiplier bloat when mod descriptions aren't even clear where on the damage equation a mod applies itself. Case and point: "+30% Damage to Grineer" versus "+165% Damage". Like with the update that added commas to numbers making them easier to make out, DE should specify which layer of the damage equation a multiplier is applied by describing damage as Damage¹, Damage², and etc, but maybe with trademark-able Warframe symbols.

The only obstacle to this is the potential backlash due to the massive numbers nerf whenever a multiplier is contested, but DE has removed multipliers in the past. Condition Overload became additive with PP,  Corrosive is capped, Corrosive Projection Nerfed, Combo Multiplier no longer multiplies light attacks, Blood rush Crit Bonus no longer multiplicative with other Crit mods, etc....

Gas used to triple dip into stealth multipliers for x8³ or X512 Damage that allowed it to shred pre-nerfed Grineer with just pure damage. Would need 153,300 armor to break even. 

Getting rid of excessive multipliers and having defined limits of how many multipliers should exist in game would only serve to simplify the damage system making it easier to balance in the future. I can't imagine doing that would be any harder than whatever they did with the Damage Reduction on Deimos enemies that scales off weapon DPS.

[ShortCat]

23 hours ago, Loza03 said:

Edit: To demonstrate, taking three roughly-equivilent enemies from each faction, the Charger, the Elite Crewman and the Elite Lancer. At level 75 the Charger has 6,800 effective health, the Crewman has 8,600 effective health, and the Lancer has 49,300 effective health.

eHP is a deceptive stat and reflects very little how actually durable an enemy is. A hypothetical Corpus unit with 999999 shields and 5 hp would have 999999+5 eHP, yet it would die to a Lato moded with just a toxin mod after 1 shot. Same is true for armor.

[Loza03]

2 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

eHP is a deceptive stat and reflects very little how actually durable an enemy is. A hypothetical Corpus unit with 999999 shields and 5 hp would have 999999+5 eHP, yet it would die to a Lato moded with just a toxin mod after 1 shot. Same is true for armor.

Also true! However, under that condition, the Elite Crewman has about 3,100 health, as opposed to the 6,800 health of a Charger.

Assuming a standard damage of 2,000, that means a weapon modded for a hypothetical neutral damage type would kill the Charger in four shots and the Crewman in five, but for toxin, it'd kill the crewman in two shots and the charger in four. Building a weapon for gas, however, would kill the Charger in two shots whilst the Crewman still in five. This is ignoring status effects, but if I'm being honest, I kind of feel like Status Effects on Damage types kind of muddy the system.

[Tyreaus]

On 2021-07-03 at 9:07 AM, Godmode_Ash said:

If armour doesn't scale, DE will just take more scaling from HP which will be worse bullet-sponging.

There exists no obligation for DE to make enemies as spongy as their current, out-of-control-armour-scaling counterparts are. It's entirely possible to bring armoured enemies down to the level of their nearest counterpart. And if that's too weak, then maybe their nearest counterpart needs to be stronger.

EDIT: And in cases where more durability is required - bosses, e.g. - they are totally able to just set higher-than-average armour values for them. A lack of scaling doesn't mean armour can never creep past 500.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

46 minutes ago, ShortCat said:

eHP is a deceptive stat and reflects very little how actually durable an enemy is. A hypothetical Corpus unit with 999999 shields and 5 hp would have 999999+5 eHP, yet it would die to a Lato moded with just a toxin mod after 1 shot. Same is true for armor.

Another way to think of damage is in terms of effective damage.

Against an enemy with 50% DR, True Damage is 2xNeutral.

Against an enemy with 75% DR, True Damage is 4xNeutral.

Against an enemy with 95% DR, True Damage is 20xNeutral.

It may be true that using the ideal damage types against an armored enemy results in a similar TTK to using ideal damage types against a shielded enemy, the disparity lies in the penalty associated with using the wrong type especially when all factions use armor. 

Against shields, the difference in effective damage between the best and worst types against them is small enough for players to reasonably surmount through brute force if needed. This difference in effective damage is largely fixed even as levels scale as resistances remain flat.

Against armor, the difference in effective damage between the worst and best types against it becomes ever more insurmountable as armor scales higher. Armored enemies practically have damage immunity at higher levels when not using the correct damage type and forces a gear check. Armor scales so high that the damage types with flat bonuses against it (Puncture, Corrosive, Radiation) which DE intended to be the correct choices fall off way too soon in favor of Bleed.

The meta is formed by players who gravitate to the path of least resistance. Damage types that face practical damage immunity from an entire faction in the game which is almost all of them are objectively less valuable than the one that isn't. 

One perspective is that Bleed and armor is fine scaling, eHP is misleading with the issue being everything else. That other damage types don't have scaling ways to deal with scaling armor or that the other types of enemy defenses aren't meaningful enough as armor to mod against.

The popular perspective is that Bleed and armor scaling is the outlier that should be stamped out to be in line with everything else. It's fine to have an enemy be outright immune to 1 or even 2 damage types, but Warframe takes it too far.

 

 

[ShortCat]

16 hours ago, Loza03 said:

Also true! However, under that condition, the Elite Crewman has about 3,100 health, as opposed to the 6,800 health of a Charger.

Assuming a standard damage of 2,000, that means a weapon modded for a hypothetical neutral damage type would kill the Charger in four shots and the Crewman in five, but for toxin, it'd kill the crewman in two shots and the charger in four. Building a weapon for gas, however, would kill the Charger in two shots whilst the Crewman still in five. This is ignoring status effects, but if I'm being honest, I kind of feel like Status Effects on Damage types kind of muddy the system.

Now you are doing it right, by bringing context to the numbers. Same principle also applies to armored targets, if you use the right elemetns; whereas wrong elements are punished harder.
I am not saying amror is fine, because it is not fine. However, using eHP difference as the sole driving factor behind changes would be fatal.

 

16 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

It may be true that using the ideal damage types against an armored enemy results in a similar TTK to using ideal damage types against a shielded enemy, the disparity lies in the penalty associated with using the wrong type especially when all factions use armor. 

I may be the odd one, but I do not see this as a negativ. Heavy lean on damage type vulnerabilities may enable different weapons in diffirent situation (agaisnt different factions). Otherwise the massive amount of overkill damage would make moding moot.

16 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

One perspective is that Bleed and armor is fine scaling, eHP is misleading with the issue being everything else. That other damage types don't have scaling ways to deal with scaling armor or that the other types of enemy defenses aren't meaningful enough as armor to mod against.

I would say, not all damage types should deal with armor. However, the ones that do should be competitive with each other, which is not the case atm, since Corrosive was killed with unnecessary strip cap (a child of misguided community feadback btw). 

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

6 hours ago, ShortCat said:

I would say, not all damage types should deal with armor. However, the ones that do should be competitive with each other, which is not the case atm, since Corrosive was killed with unnecessary strip cap (a child of misguided community feadback btw). 

The current Corrosive strips up to 80% armor at full stacks, while its innate bonus grants a 1.75x bonus against Ferrite while mitigating another 75% of Ferrite's armor value.

Against 4500 Ferrite armor, the capped Corrosive breaks even against a full strip and gets progressively worse than the old Corrosive at higher armor values. ~4500 armor is what a level ~74 Heavy Gunner sports, which is also where the gentler S-curve scaling kicks in.

DE's intent was for these two changes to balance out, while making it so that Corrosive being neutral against Alloy would never surpass Radiation's innate bonus, so armor types actually matter. With gentler scaling, Radiation remains relevant at Sortie level.

Of course, these considerations were thrown completely out the window when Steel Path dropped with extra armor multipliers for the enemies.

DE also intended for Viral's buff to be balanced out by the removal of the 4xIPS weighting on Slash. Of course, these did not balance out as Hunter Munitions and Forced Slash procs on stances remained unchanged, so builds that used these only got stronger.

The biggest issue I have with armor scaling is that the penalty for using the wrong type of damage against armor becomes even greater as armor scales higher approaching full immunity, whereas penalties associated with using the wrong type against Shields or Flesh remain consistent with lower levels.

Bleed circumvents armor scaling 100%, so the gap between it and other anti-armor damage types (Puncture, Corrosive, Radiation) simply grows. Against Bleed armor types don't even matter. Forget Corrosive on Ferrite or Radiation on Alloy unless the enemy is a Sentient.

The disparity is not unlike what 100% status chance shotguns were like before.

Anything less than 100%, is not even worth considering to build at high enough levels.

[ShortCat]

22 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

DE's intent was for these two changes to balance out, while making it so that Corrosive being neutral against Alloy would never surpass Radiation's innate bonus, so armor types actually matter. With gentler scaling, Radiation remains relevant at Sortie level.

Of course, these considerations were thrown completely out the window when Steel Path dropped with extra armor multipliers for the enemies.

I see what you are saying here. Unfortunately this idea would never work, becasue Radiation still remians inferior anti-armor type since it cannot deal with ferrite.

22 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

DE also intended for Viral's buff to be balanced out by the removal of the 4xIPS weighting on Slash. Of course, these did not balance out as Hunter Munitions and Forced Slash procs on stances remained unchanged, so builds that used these only got stronger.

This is an interesting assertion and I certainly see the logic behind it. In case it really happened like you say, the design team is inept.

22 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

The biggest issue I have with armor scaling is that the penalty for using the wrong type of damage against armor becomes even greater as armor scales higher approaching full immunity, whereas penalties associated with using the wrong type against Shields or Flesh remain consistent with lower levels.

True, however, if you view it from the other side TTK between factions remains camparable with the use of appropriate elements. It used to be like it even before armor/status changes.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

3 hours ago, ShortCat said:

I see what you are saying here. Unfortunately this idea would never work, becasue Radiation still remians inferior anti-armor type since it cannot deal with ferrite.

That's the point!

Armor types should matter.

A single damage type shouldn't be the answer to all armor let alone be the best answer.

Corrosive is strictly worse than Radiation against Alloy.

1.75x multiplier and 75% armor mitigation against Alloy at 0 stacks is superior to 80% strip at 10 with neutral Corrosive.

On paper, players should bring both Corrosive and Radiation against Grineer. Corrosive shreds the Ferrite, but struggles against Alloy. Corrosive can be used to soften up Alloy before switching to Radiation.

Except, Bleed circumvents armor scaling completely. No need to switch weapons around.

Armor scaling is more important than resistances and that is the core issue.