Jade Shadows - Dev Workshop: Enemy Resistances and Status Rework (Updated with May Devstream!)

[Twilight053]

5 hours ago, -HoB-KurtOn said:

Soooo, how does all this stop me from still using viral/slash? Like, cool story whatever. Also, why make enemies weaker lol?

Slash's primary strength has been to bypass armor damage reduction. By capping damage reduction from enemy armor as well as bumping up HP scaling of the enemies, slash procs no longer expontentially scales in effectiveness and now plateaus at a certain point.

Edited April 27 by Twilight053

[DSAUSAGE]

Nah just make random elements setting for each level, if you dont use the setting element then reduce all damage to 1%

 

random things are so fun and we all loving it, right?

[Hitical-Crit]

While I think simplifying the health types is great idea, I think this might be too far of a swing in the pendulum.

Maybe on top of health/armor/shield you have something like humanoid/robotic/infested added in? (not really sure where to throw in sentients, fragments and a few others atm)

I feel the thing that confuses new players and aggravates the older ones the most is when, for example, you have heavy gunners and bombards: both are grineer, both are humanoid, but each one uses a different armor type. And you can't tell which is which in the middle of a mission, only with prior knowledge.

 

So maybe cutting down on a few health types and setting a few ground rules to stick by would make things more intuitive without over simplifying things? Like all humanoids, across all factions, use ferrite armor and anything robotic would use alloy armor.

[Orokin]

 

9 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

And without Armor Strip, players rely on Viral/Slash and Heat to work around this, as Corrosive struggles to reduce Damage Reduction to a level that feels useful to players (at 10 Corrosive stacks, the Heavy Gunner retains 87% of their Damage Reduction).

This is one of the most common misconceptions about armor, I am very surprised that this is being used as a justification. EHP scales linearly with armor, the change in the percent number is not an intuitive number to look at.

 

9 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

Enemy Armor will cap out at a certain percentage to give Corrosive Armor-reducing stacks more of an active impact.

EHP scales linearly with armor, what does 'active impact' even mean?

9 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

The Armor scaling curve will aim to be a bit more spread out, as opposed to being bottom-heavy. Partial strip from the top end will allow for more consistent damage gains, as opposed to needing to have a total Armor Strip.

EHP scales linearly with armor, there is nothing bottom heavy about it.

9 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

Have a minimum threshold of any Enemy Armor.
      a. No armor-accessing Enemy will have below a certain minimum, Armor shouldn’t feel unimpactful. 

What is more important is that armor stripping feels impactful. All forms of armor strip have an opportunity cost. If you want to kill the slash meta, this is not how you do it. What will happen to emerald shards?

 

9 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

VIP enemies (Acolytes, Bosses, etc.) cannot be completely frozen; they’ll also be immune to the frozen-inflicted Critical Damage increase, naturally.

So the only time that the crit bonus would be useful? You need high status and crit to make use of this new mechanic, not very useful since fodder are already easy to kill, but sure.

9 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

Gas

Gas was weirdly overstated in its effectiveness in the devstream. And it will be even worse because of the health increases. I would rather the functionality completely changed rather than only be ok in some hyper specific grouping + aoe weapon setup.

 

you should

• Normalize faction EHP, scrap the convoluted mechanics like shield regen, or infested deal more damage. EHP has to be normalized
• Weakpoints on all enemies
  • Right now only grineer have good weakpoints
• Armor should be fixed value, and be fully strippable using the same mechanisms we have now
  • Health needs to be boosted massively to compensate - maybe even revert to old scaling
  • Slash procs are nerfed by proxy
• Viral needs to be changed, you can't have these changes to damage type vulnerability mean anything when viral procs are so much better than the measly 50% bonus damage

[-Zellion-]

Personally, I don't like the idea of dismissing versatility of the 13 Unique Health Types, and I think that would be a great loss. However, I admit that a thorough overhaul is necessary.
From my point of view, which dates from version 11.0, damage by health type was only used against very big bosses (Raid, Teralyst, released boss, etc.), but 99% of the time they are useless.

My logic would be to remove the damage bonuses and penalties and give it a twist to 13 Unique Health Types.
EX :
Flesh  : Radiation, reduces the maximum number of max Radiation statuses by 5 (10 base) and reduces the duration of Radiation status by 10s (12s base)
Infested  : Viral, reduces the number of max Viral status applications by 7 (10 base)
Cloned Flesh  : Gas, reduces the number of applications of max Gas status by 5 (10 base) + other effect
Machinery  : Toxin, reduces the duration of Toxin status by 4s (6s base)
Robotic  : Slash, reduces the duration of Slash status by 4s (6s base)
Infested Flesh  : Blast, reduces the number of applications of Blast max status by 5 (10 base) + other effect
Fossilized  : Electricity, only stuns for 1s (3s base) and only inflicts 25% damage around the target (50% base)
Indifferent Facade  : All, reduces the number of max status applications by 20% (2 for those at 10 and 1 for those at 5) and for Heat, Slash, Toxin, reduces their status duration by 2s (6s base )
Shield  : Cold, only reduces attack and movement speed by 10% (50% base) and reduces the number of applications of the max Cold status by 5 (9 base)
Proto Shield  : Magnetic, reduces the number of applications of max Magnetic status by 7 (10 base)
Ferrite Armor  : Heat, only reduces armor by 25% (50% base) and reduces the duration of Heat status by 3s (6s base)
Alloy Armor  : Puncture, reduces the number of applications of the maximum Puncture status by 2 (5 base) and reduces the enemy damage penalty by 50% 20% on the first stack and 5% per stack.
Infested Sinew  : Corrosive, reduces the number of applications of max Corrosive status by 7 (10 base)

Here is some idea, which would bring the 13 Unique Health Types and the faction specialties up to date without removing them.
Additionally, for me, I really like the harmonious side of the enemies, who use units with a bit of versatility in their combat.
Without spamming weak units against Heat, against a player with Heat weapons.

Edited April 27 by -Zellion-

[Somnia]

None of the proposed changes to Magnetic would encourage me to use it at all.
Magnetic's core problem is that it only affects shields, which Toxin & Slash bypasses outright.

(Gas used to be a preferred option against the Corpus because in the past it applied Toxin procs, too.)

Perhaps Magnetic should have an additional CC effect? Mag, superconductors, & metals in MRI machines come to mind.

Edited April 27 by Somnia

[MasterControl]

Honestly, at this point? I would just scrap magnetic and viral. Replace void status with combined version of their effects, making enemies more vulnerable to all incoming damage. Now your operator is a primer, reinforcing their combat utility role and making status amps worth using. I'm not sure what would replace mag and viral's effects, but they could stand to be more interesting - grouping for mag, maybe?

 

I don't know if I agree with increasing the survivability of corpus. They have always made up for their lack of survivability by being more disruptive to gameplay, via nullifiers, scrambus, etc. If their ehp is similar to Grineer, they will just be overall less fun. The intention seems to be to get us to switch off of viral/slash for them, but honestly, I don't want to switch my entire build every time I fight a new faction. I feel like pushing magnetic, viral or even corrosive as nearly vital to fight their respective ehp types is a key problem of the status system overall, and the primary contributor to limiting build variety. I believe status effects should be generally useful across all enemy types, and provide new and unique ways to build, as opposed to requiring corrosive to deal with armor, or magnetic to deal with shields. If magnetic has no effect against unshielded enemies, I will never put it on my gun, because I play varied content and I don't want to build to deal with only a third of it.

Edited April 27 by MasterControl

[Tiltskillet]

Just now, Somnia said:

Magnetic's core problem is that it only affects shields, which Toxin & Slash bypass outright.

I agree on Magnetic's core problem, but neither Slash nor its bleed status effect bypass shields.  Bleeds used to do so several years ago, if that's what you're thinking of.

[Azalea_m]

Dear DE, 

There are two things that I hope will be looked into in regards to Enemy scaling and Status effect rework:

1. Enemy Damage scaling

I noticed one of the foreseeable changes being enemies will receive stats at a faster rate starting from roughly level 100, and felt immediate concerns as to whether that included damage numbers. One very prevalent factor that most players will have to consider, should they attempt to remain in a high level mission for hours on end, is a method to keep themselves alive. More often than not, the methods used are shield gating, invisibility, and invulnerability. 

While there isn't anything in particular wrong with the methods currently available to us players, it is important to note they are all some form of Damage negation, instead of reduction; Meaning, there is no amount of Damage reduction that can allow you to tank anything on extremely high level contents, which is very build limiting. 

One notorious example being Inaros, who doesn't have any Shields and struggles greatly the longer he remains on a mission, as any stray bullets become more and more capable of incapacitating him instantly. 

2. Magnetic Status Effect

I believe there is a misconception as to why you think magnetic is underused, so allow me to provide you my own thought process as a Player with why I won't use magnetic, even for Corpus:

First, Corpus is the only hostile faction we have in the whole of Warframe, that is commonly equipped with shields. As magnetic is only effective against 1 faction out of the many, and more factions to come, it is little wonder as to why it sees so little usage. Viral on the other hand, while it and magnetic are similar in concept, the difference in usage comes from the fact that all enemies in Warframe can have health without shield, but they can't have shield without health. 

Second, Toxin effectively eliminates any need for Magnetic. In the case of an enemy with an overwhelming amount of shield, while Magnetic can clear through the EHP provided by shield quickly, Toxin can ignore it and deal damage to Health immediately, which I feel the need to remind, will also have to be dealt with by Magnetic when it is done with the shield. To put it simply: Effectively 0 Shield EHP will always be better than 0.235x(1/4.25) Shield EHP. 

 

[Somnia]

19 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

I agree on Magnetic's core problem, but neither Slash nor its bleed status effect bypass shields.  Bleeds used to do so several years ago, if that's what you're thinking of.

Ooh, fair, I haven't used a slash build in some time. Viral, heat, toxin, and rad are my usual go-to.

[Modus-Pwnens]

This seems extremely positive, but there is one big issue I see: you are adding a chore to the mission flow. Worse, it is the same chore that people already say they dislike.

Aiming to make certain elements more clearly ideal for each faction means that you are effectively making all elemental mods into semi-Faction Damage mods. And it raises the exact same issue that Faction Damage mods already have: people have said, loud and clear for years, that they hate the chore of swapping their builds around to match the different factions.

So now you will be even more incentivized to do the thing that everyone says they find annoying to do, that makes the game less fun. The wonky multipliers on the Faction Damage Mods are probably also going to become a bigger balance issue as their use is going to rise a lot if you're more heavily incentivized to switch builds to match factions anyway.

One thing that would help enormously is the ability to tie loadouts to enemy factions. Give me a very simple, accessible UI in the loadout screen that lets me tie a loadout to an enemy faction.

The UI should just be a list of factions and which loadout is tied to each one. It should not be icons added to loadouts. I.e., it should be faction->loadout, not loadout->faction. I want to be able to click a button and see the list so I can sit down to play some Warframe and think "okay, today I want to bring this loadout against grineer, this one against corpus, this one against infested, etc.". It should feel like this is a very temporary decision that I might change often, not a deep feature of the loadout itself. It should work like picking a party in a gacha game, and the slots are factions filled with loadouts.

There should probably be a popup dialogue when I select a mission that says "You are fighting the Grineer. Would you like to change to your [Anti-Grineer Gauss] loadout?" (and maybe an option in settings to disable the dialogue and just always switch).

Use a similar popup dialogue for multi-enemy missions: "Would you like to use your [Anti-Grineer Gauss] loadout or your [Corpus Cleaner Chroma] loadout?". (If you happen to have all the mission's factions tied to one loadout, you get the regular dialogue, and the auto-select setting applies.)

That would do a huge amount to help, and would also encourage more diverse and more builds per player in general.

Edited April 27 by Modus-Pwnens

[DrivaMain]

8 hours ago, BalaDeSilver said:

Gas has one gigantic mechanical issue: its stacks are replaceable. For example, if I fill its 10 stacks with an extremely high damage weapon, it'll have 10 very strong gas procs, but then a teammate who modded their weapons with gas happens to proc 10 shotgun shells on that enemy with a barely modded weapon, and all of a sudden, all those 10 procs get their damage reduced to pretty much nothing. 

You guys need to either make gas procs selective to the ones with the higher damage, or you completely uncap gas and make it like Heat, where it only strips armor on the first stack, but Gas would only grow the bubble with the first 10 stacks, all other ones are just damage. Really, gas can be a pain in the clem in some instances specifically because of this quirk of it. Gas may be misunderstood and very strong in some cases, but this one is the absolute worst offender and needs changing.

Agreed, this is why the gas changes back on Warframe Revised utterly destroyed gas-focused builds on high RoF weapons. Another change is the lack of elemental damage mod scaling on its DoT damage calculation. Why do toxin, electric, and heat damage get this benefit while gas doesn't? 

[(PSN)rexis12]

Also I just want to say, the biggest issue is that Armor has two, yes TWO DR, that If I recall is Multiplicative of each other. And while yes it's weakness are also the same the DR inherent still reduces damage by 70-80% even after both the 75% Armor Ignore and 10 Corrosive Procs, a level 150 Heavy Gunner has 1309 Armor. 

Thats 80% DR, even at best circumstances. That's insane, even with the damage increase from Corrosive, a 10k bullet will dealdeal 3750 only. 

And it keeps scaling up. 

You know how much armour a level 200 Heavy Gunner has after both the Corrosive Procs and Corrosive Damage? 1622 armour. That's 85% DR. 

That's a 10k bullet dealing a measly 2625.

And I haven't even doubled the Armor from Steel Path yet.

If you wanna know Viral + Slash is so used, maybe don't have it so that even with the optimal Element to 'Counter' Armor, it still blocks EIGHTY PERCENT OF YOUR DAMAGE. 

[legendarysidekicksteve]

Will there be any consideration for a method of allowing elemental mods to not combine with other elements?

There are two major reasons for why this should be considered.

1) Certain combination of elements and therefore status effects are impossible to mod for, unless the weapon has an innate element. For example, you cannot mod for both blast and heat

2) This limits enemy weaknesses because if you make a faction weak to both blast and heat, players cannot take advantage of both elements and have to choose one over the other.

Perhaps a system that only allows elements to be combine if they are adjacent to each other in the mod configuration could achieve this. Or an easier Band-aid implementation could be elemental mods that specify that they do not combine with other elements. 

There can still be a limit on maximum number of unique elements in a build (e.g. the current max is 2, not counting for innate damage types), if we want to avoid the very old Update 10ish (?) meta with rainbow elements. (Note: I can't believe I've played WF for this many years)

[Traumtulpe]

The 10 proc cap on Gas has to go, and realistically you should have it scale with elemental mods (both Heat and Toxin) for consistency.

The reduction in armor will necessitate a *huge* increase in health for Grineer; This will severely nerf Slash. Which is likely partially intended, but still you should probably rebalance *all* physical damage types in this pass.

I forsee Heat/Viral or Heat/Magnetic (depending on shield changes) to become the new meta. Since 100% armor removal will no longer be necessary, Heat's 50% in combination with the stacking damage will be sufficient to kill anything. You might want to account for this.

Any changes to "faction damage mods"? If you're simplifying damage resistances (and thus the modding players have to do), these seem like some leftover relic. Realistically they are only ever used to increase DoT damage, so maybe replace them with a "+150% damage from status effects" mod or something? Of course you'd have to offer refunds in regards to these mods.

Will Cold status freeze Eximus units?

Will the double standart in damage resistances/vulnerabilities remain? I'm talking about them being applied twice to armor types (damage bonus *and* partial armor ignore).

[HunterDigi]

13 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

Cold has a new stack cap!

Reminder that there's a legendary arcane that increase damage taken per cold stack, a cold stack cap would make that arcane no longer worth its tier.
Is it really that big a deal to have uncapped stacks for cold? The freezing logic can work with it to keep it the way you guys want without it being capped.

EDIT: There's also primary weapon arcane that gain multishot&CD per cold status, I sure hope that at least doesn't break from capping cold stacks 👀

 

13 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

Players’ Armor is to be untouched.

Players’ Shields are to be untouched.

What about allies? Most importantly ones we have to protect or mission fails.

Edited April 27 by HunterDigi

[(PSN)rexis12]

11 minutes ago, HunterDigi said:

Reminder that there's a legendary arcane that increase damage taken per cold stack, a cold stack cap would make that arcane no longer worth its tier.
Is it really that big a deal to have uncapped stacks for cold? The freezing logic can work with it to keep it the way you guys want without it being capped.

Lmao that's also one of worser Legendary Arcanes to.

So it's funny to nerf that of all things

[Aphyllorchis]

Oh god please Dont!

I like the Ideas for Buffing cold, explosive, gas and magnetic status effects a lot but please don't go through with anything else you described here.

 

First:

Unified Damage Resistances. This seems counterproductive, as it takes away  a lot of the fun complexity from this game. right now there are countless interesting ways to make weapons stronger, the Unified Damage Resistance will most likely remove a lot of the Nuances and lower the usefullnes of scanning enemys or bringing Helios by a lot, as well as reduce the amount of viable elemental combinations, especially ones that work relatively universally like Corrosive-Cold or Magnetism-Fire (for the one person wo has a bigger problem with shields than with armor), without affecting the Viral/Heat/Slash meta at all. And if there is one thing that is less fun that figthing Bosses in Warframe, it is beeing forced to switch loadouts. Adding to that Damage Resistance (DR) should always be for whatever you are shooting it makes no sense that the flesh of a Grineer Lancer with no armor left ist suceptible to acid rounds but the flesh of a Corpus Crewman with no shields left is resistant

I belive that it would be way more beneficial to explain Status effects to newer players, maybe with fun cutscenes interjected during the Beginner Quests at strategic times (i.e. no frontloading, no one wants to start a game and wait through ~20min of meaningless video before they can go jump around and shoot people). My personal idea would be to split it into 3 seperate cutscenes perhaps an ancient DAX/Tenno training video where a disgruntlet Cephalon explains physical elements, with "practical visual aids" (i.e. someone getting shot) , then a bit later you intercept a Grineer transmission explaining to the troops how simple elements work and what type of element to use aigainst which enemy, preverably with lots of pathos and propaganda (Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer style) and just before you finish the beginning campaing a sleazy Corpus with mayor used car salesman energy sends you spam a commercial showcasing the great potential of their new Combined elemental weapons.

PS: "practical visual aids" are still welcome for the Grineer and Corpus video.

Having suggested elements is also a good idea.

 

Second:

Armor reduction. Taking away the ability to 100% Armor strip is super mean, so please don't.

Additionaly i think you overlooked something in your armor comparison whilst it is true that the difference in DR between 10815 armor and 2163 armor is only 10%, because of how armor works the Effective Health Points (EHP) of the enemy with 2163 armor are almost 80% lower than the one from the one with 10815, so the 80% armor strip from Corrosive does exactly what one should expect: reduce the EHP of an enemy by ~80%. If you feel like that is not enough to compete with full armor Strip then i would suggest increasing the amount of armor that Corrosive can strip, perhaps to 90%?

EHP 100% armor = 1664175

EHP 20% armor = 368769 

368769 * 100 / 1664175 = 22,16

For those of you who are wondering why that is, the Warframe Wiki explains it pretty well (but i still don't really get it) something about the DR beeing none linear but the increase in EHP is Linear .

So i really don't get why you want to shuffle armor, health and armor strip around, especially if you plan on keeping the TTK the same. Capping the maximum armor an enemy can have could be interesting, however i fear that this could lead to situations in wich Lancers are almost as though as Bombards and Heavy gunners wich would feel strange, but then that would probably be far after lvl300 Steel Path so Irellevant for ~99% of the Playerbase. Capping the Minimum amount of Armor however is just mean and compleatly unneccesary.

 

Thank you for reading and sorry for my inability to scale importet pictures.

Edited April 27 by Aphyllorchis
Typo

[MoonSlippers]

Love the Cold change, people have wanted freeze for a long time.

I don't know if you are accepting ideas, but suggest that Blast damage should inflict a 'charged' status. When enemies are charged, there is a brief delay, then the enemy is inflicted with a rebound blast, dealing a portion of the original damage in a small radius. This blast staggers the enemies it hits and can inflict the charged status onto others, creating a chain reaction. Each stack of 'charge' can increase the % of the original damage the rebound blast inflicts and increase the blast radius, up to a cap. So it's kind of like a gas/electric/fire hybrid.

As for magnetic, unless you remove Toxin's ability to bypass shields, using magnetic is completely pointless despite these changes you plan to make. 

As for Gas visual effects, I think something similar to the Dual Ichor incarnon effect would be great. But if you want that to stay distinct, a transparent, billowy cloud-like effect would be good. My one concern is the radius should match the radius of the AOE or people will be confused/upset when enemies in the area of the graphics aren't being effected.

I think you're guys idea to do these kinds of changes is great. Not only does it simplify and make more visible a confusing system, but if new players are able to master this easier, it will help them learn modding as well, which has long been one of the most difficult mechanics for now players to learn.

[(PSN)OmegaSlayer]

@[DE]Pablo

What about elemental explosions?

Do you remember a certain spacegame trilogy (don't want to make names, but it's the best space themed trilogy around) that had a PvE multiplayer in the third game?

That game had tech and biotic explosions

One player could prime an enemy with a type of damage, then another player (or the same player but that was slower in terms of game pacing) could combine a new type of damage to create an explosion that affected enemies in range

Example in Warframe, one player applies 10 stacks of fire status on an enemy, another player applies 10 stacks of toxin and as soon as the 10th stack is applied, you get a gas explosion affecting x range

It could be also reversed like one player applies 10 stacks of gas status on an enemy, another player applies 10 stacks of toxin and as soon as the 10th stack is applied, you get a fir explosion affecting x range

Obviously one player could also do it by himself with 2 weapons, weapons and power and whatever

I think it might add new depth to the status system

[Traumtulpe]

1 hour ago, HunterDigi said:

Reminder that there's a legendary arcane that increase damage taken per cold stack, a cold stack cap would make that arcane no longer worth its tier.
Is it really that big a deal to have uncapped stacks for cold? The freezing logic can work with it to keep it the way you guys want without it being capped.

EDIT: There's also primary weapon arcane that gain multishot&CD per cold status, I sure hope that at least doesn't break from capping cold stacks 👀

Cold procs already have a cap, the legendary Arcane you speak of is *completely* useless trash already (lower base damage than other Arcanes, on a per enemy basis rather than a buff that remains on the player, doesn't work at all with AoE damage), and the primary Arcane is completely unaffected either way.

Edited April 27 by Traumtulpe

[Nakti]

7 hours ago, FatherNeb said:

TL;DR Nerf Viral/Slash and buff enemies to make sure using these different elemental loadouts is more than just roleplaying.

It's what they exactly doing, isn't it? Enemies will have higher raw HP, so slash wouldn't eat through them that fast. And armored units get less ehp, so loadouts that don't bypass/remove armor have actually some chance against them.

Of course, those loadouts that can now deal with grineer without ignoring or removing armor (that breeze through other factions) will still tear all enemies into pieces, but good for them I suppose. Is this a popular approach though?

[RobWasHere]

I just hope inflating enemy hp won't cause nerf to all %hp explosion mods for weapons.

[Biohazard_xPRx]

So by lowering the impact of armor and increasing overall health points, does that mean that enemies will be tankier in the update after full armor strip?

Could it also mean that leaving 1% of the armor unstripped + the current Corrossive 75% buff/armor “bypass” is better than full strip even at level cap? 

[German]

Honestly, if you just removed the oddities like grineer having 2 armor types or corpus having 2 shield types, then it would be perfectly fine. Just have grineer armor, grineer health, corpus shield, corpus health, machinery health etc. If you just gave factions straight up weaknesses regardless of if youre shooting shield or health, you would make the damage system way too boring. Please dont f- this up.