Make armour strips / bypasses affect DR

[Tyreaus]

From the wiki for Corrosive:

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The status effect of Corrosive damage is Corrosion. It temporarily degrades the armor of the afflicted target by 26% for 8 seconds. Subsequent procs further reduce armor by 6% of the original armor up to 80% armor reduction in total after 10 stacks, each stack having its own duration.

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As with all damage types effective against armor, Corrosive damage's type modifier works in two ways: it ignores a percentage of the target's armor, and increases the damage dealt in the same way as a type modifier against hitpoints. Practically speaking, this means that Corrosive damage is only reduced by 25% of a target's whole Ferrite Armor and the base damage is increased by +75%.

In other words, in the damage reduction formula:

Corrosive degrades and ignores the net armour value.

Instead of that, maybe we should have it degrade and ignore the damage reduction value.

Practically speaking, this would mean armour stripping would put caps on the amount of damage reduction a target can have. 10 stacks of Corrosive would mean the armour can reduce incoming damage by at most 20%. At level 175, a Corrupted Heavy Gunner with 10 Corrosive stacks would have a DR of ~19.4%. At current, a level 175 Corrputed Heavy Gunner with 10 Corrosive stacks has a DR of ~86%. Likewise, Corrosive damage against Ferrite armour would be reduced by at most 25%, before armour removal methods.

The effect of this change is as straightforward as the change itself: it ensures elements that are good against armour stay good against armour. This is like how both Viral and Magnetic increase damage against health and shields (respectively), regardless of the enemy's level. This would give those anti-armour elements more room to breathe at higher levels, where Viral and Slash is the current way to go due to Slash's total ignore of armour. And it would do so without touching Slash's efficacy whatsoever.

 

As a bonus aside: if this is applied to full-armour-stripping abilities as-is, it may allow those abilities to keep the armoured health type (since the armour value is still positive) but still reduce the damage reduction to 0% – as intended by the 100% armour strip. That feature is entirely optional, of course.

[KitMeHarder]

14 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

The effect of this change is as straightforward as the change itself: it ensures elements that are good against armour stay good against armour. This is like how both Viral and Magnetic increase damage against health and shields (respectively)

I mean your claim makes sense, and it doesn't. While it's true that corrosive technically removes a smaller portion of ehp the higher the level of the enemy, that's only because it double scales with health. Likewise, viral gets less effective against health protected by armor in the same way, just view the damage increase as a percent reduction like armor if needed (~76% reduction in health at max stacks).

I do not think that an element that forces all enemies to easily have a max of 75 armor, is healthy in a scaling based game. The logarithmic growth armor now has past level 75, and the ability for something like corrosive to ignore 75% of ferrite armor, is enough IMO. (lot'a 75s there, but each is different.)

And looking at the numbers alone, the balance looks pretty good (80% compared to 76%). But of course, slash ignores the "weakness" of viral on armor, and waaay more enemies have health than armor. So IMO you need to add some way for players to "work" for 100% reduction, at the cost of their damage multiplier; Or you need to add a new mechanic on top of corrosive, like how magnetic also disables shield regen. (This example is just to challenge your idea, I think almost all status effects need a deeper revisit in general.)

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

Ignoring the Net Armor value by 75% and a 1.75x multiplier isn't insignificant. It's the reason why the TTK on a Heavy Gunner is comparable to a Corpus Tech when using Corrosive in Sorties. The real issue is that armor isn't capped. The gentler scaling past level 70 simply reduced Bleed's exponentially increasing effectiveness into a linear one. Things might actually be fine if armor just capped at level 70 and have health scaling be more aggressive after that point.

Just for comparisons sake, consider a level 90 Heavy Gunner with 5950 Ferrite armor which provides 95.2% DR.

100% Neutral will deal 4.8% Damage. 1x Neutral

100% Viral will deal 1.75x Neutral against Cloned Flesh, 8.4% Damage. 1.75x Neutral

100% Puncture will deal 1.5xNeutral while ignoring 50% armor, 13.7% Damage. 2.85x Neutral

100% Corrosive will deal 1.75xNetural while ignoring 75% armor, 29.3% Damage. 6.1x Neutral before any procs

35% True Damage from a Bleed tic will always deals 35% True damage per tic regardless of level as it ignores armor 100%. 7.29x Neutral

DE's logic seemed to be that since armored enemies have an order of magnitude more ehp than everything else, anti-armor types need to have an order of magnitude effectiveness over neutral types to normalize TTK's across factions when using the correct damage types. 

For a more detailed comparison see chart below.

As armor scaling changes at level 70, effectiveness of anti-armor becomes less aggressive beyond that point which is why the True Damage line goes from Exponential to Linear.

Disclaimer:

Of course this is merely just a rough illustration as this does not take into account Corrosive or Viral procs or the fact 2 element mods gives +180% Corrosive, not 100%, or the fact Bleed tics a lot more than once. This is just to highlight the relative power of armor modifiers and true damage over neutral types.

[0_The_F00l]

This would kinda defeat the purpose of enemies having higher level.

The suggestion is too aggressive in favour of making the game easy.