Health/Shield/Armor rework idea + Lite Damage Rework

[FeralKuja]

Here's an idea for Health/Shields/Armor to be reworked to make enemies less "Spongy" and create incentives for more diverse damage type emphasis.

Health, Armor, and Shields will be arranged in "Layers", which are typically depleted in order of Shields>Armor>Health. This means an enemy would not typically take damage to armor until shields are depleted, and not to health until armor is depleted. This can be adapted for both warframes and enemies, by giving Warframes an "Armor" bar that would surround/encase the Health bar. For Warframes, Armor would also be segmented into percentages that would gate damage once a segment is broken, giving frames like Nidus and Inaros some wiggle room via "Armor Gating" that they lack due to no way to "Shield-gate" damage.

To go hand in hand with this, a rework to puncture and impact damage would be necessary.

Puncture damage would do a small amount of bleed-through from the armor layer to the health layer (Similar to how Toxin bypasses shields), and Puncture Procs would cause a larger portion of all damage taken to bypass armor.

Impact Damage would cause status effect vulnerability and critical vulnerability, adding a multiplier to the chance and damage of status effects and critical hits.

Players would find incentives to utilize Puncture and Impact more liberally and centrally for various factions.

The "Shattering Impact" mod could be slightly reworked to allow for other effects tied to Impact damage or status procs on armored targets or to continue to strip armor more effectively (Though obviously since Armor will be another form of Over-Health it would need a big rebalance).

[lukinu_u]

This is an interesting, but outside of the status effect and order or depletion, it just make them less unique.

In the current situation, two bar :

• Shield differ from health by having innate regeneration
• Health differ from shield by having damage reduction based on armor

If you want to make 3 distinct bars, they would need to each work differently to be interesting but in your proposed rework, health and armor would work the same asside from status that affect them. I think you would need to make each bar unique to really make the idea interesting.

Here is one example :

• Health :
  The most basic bar.
  Is healed at normal 100% efficiency.
  Weakspot damage double the damages.
  When depleted, trigger bleedout, with duration proportional to your health.
   
• Armor :
  Have innate 50% damage reduction from AoE and half the falloff range (to mimic the heavy armor, without being as boring % reduction).
  Is healed at only 20% efficiency.
  Weakspot damage deal 50% damage on health directly (effective 1.5x damage with armor + health).
  When depleted trigger heavy damage reduction on health proportional to armor, decaying over 10s.
   
• Shield :
  Recharge after not taking damage for a set amount of time.
  Cannot be healed.
  Weakspot damage prevent recharge for 10s.
  When depleted trigger short invincibility with duration proportional to your amount of shield.

So, with is example, we can sumarise the diffences as :

• Health is healed much faster that armor and increase bleedout time.
• Armor have innate resistance at longer range, but is harder to heal and can be bypassed by headshots.
• Shield cannot be healed, but recharge automatically.

This is just a rough example, but I think we really need something in these lines, to get 3 distincts bars that sounds interesting to play with, both for enemy and self.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

Or, armor just doesn't scale at all.

An Elite Lancer with 300 Base Armor will have 300 armor at level 1 to 9999.

300 armor = 50% Damage Reduction = 2xehp Multiplier

This is equal to a Corpus Unit having a 1:1 Health to Shield Ratio with the caveat that armored units are still vulnerable to health weaknesses as armor merely provides Damage Reduction and doesn't substitute health like Shields do. 

As armor doesn't scale, Bleed that ignores armor won't scale in effectiveness like it does right now.

35% Base Damage as True Damage, would remain equivocal to 70% effective Damage against Elite Lancers from level 1 to 9999, making it more in line with other Damage procs. 

Right now, due to armor scaling, 95% DR = 20xehp Multiplier at 6000 armor means that Bleed that ignores it deals 700% effective damage from 35% Base Damage.

Of course, armor scaling has always been a band-aid to the elephant in the room which is player damage scaling. Outside of invincibility phases, shield gating, damage caps, status immunity and damage attenuation, armor scaling was the OG way for DE to design enemies that didn't get one-tapped from a half-decent build.

If armor scaling is to go away, Grineer health scaling would need to be more aggressive to compensate, but it would be easier for DE to manage. Instead of finely adjusting an armor scaling dial and a health scaling dial, they would just need to finely tune the health scaling dial.

As the double dipping armor modifier mechanic would be less significant, there would be even less reason to use Corrosive over Viral, so Viral would probably need to get nerfed, by changing the +75% against Cloned Flesh to -50% or something. That way, Corrosive = Raw Damage, Viral = debuffing.