Enemy health changes do not resolve Damage and Status imbalances

[Stormandreas]

Greetings Tenno

I have been reading through the Dev Workshop post about the damage, health and status changes, and I don't quite understand what DE is trying to achieve long term with the changes to enemy health specifically.
We've had the same damage system for over 10 years and has been praised numerous times for its (relative) diversity.

The damage changes to factions/health though, has never been an issue, except that's being changed.
From a strictly damage standpoint:

Against Grineer, we want

• Viral
• Corrosive
• Radiation
• Blast
  Though typically just run Viral+heat or Corrosive+heat.

Against Infested, we want:

• Gas
• Corrosive
• Radiation
  Though we use typically Viral+heat or Corrosive+heat (Exceptions below)

Against corpus, we want:

• Toxin/Viral
• Magnetic
• Corrosive
• Radiation
• Electic
  Though we typically use Viral+heat or Toxin+Magnetic

In certain scenarios we'd take more Radiation and Corrosive vs Corpus cause of the robots or Blast+Corrosive vs Infested.
Plague star for example we wanna use Blast+corrosive because of the hemocyte, instead of Viral+heat or Corrosive+heat. The problem is the status effects effectiveness (Viral), not the damage distributions necessarily.

Murmur and Corrupted are even better examples!
Murmur want:

• Radiation
• Corrosive
• Blast
  3 Damage types we typically wouldn't use for damage anyway... except, we just use Viral+heat or Corrosive+heat.

Corrupted want a variation of damage based on the unit itself you're shooting, which can make for some interesting dynamics... if it weren't for the power of Viral+heat...

 

Are you seeing a pattern here?

 

The issue isn't with the number of health types and the damage each element does vs them. Quite the opposite, this system has, as said before, been praised a lot for having this sheer amount of variation, and Murmur too were also praised for using health/armour types that are in opposition to the typical Slash+Viral/Viral+Heat damage types used. (remember, we're talking about pure damage for this, not necessarily the status effects. That's comes in just below).

The issue, is with the sheer power of certain status effects over others. Namely, Viral.

Viral effects ALL Factions health types. It provides an incredibly power +325% damage bonus to ALL health types in the game at 10 stacks.
This includes:

• Cloned Flesh
• Machinery
• Flesh
• Robotic
• Infested
• Infested Flesh
• Fossilized
• Tenno Flesh
• Indifferent Facade

This is a LOT of things that Viral effects, and I think we can all agree that a +325% damage boost > 75% damage boost any day, and massively trumps a -75% damage reduction by a whopping +250%.

Corrosive effects ALL armour types in the game as well.

Heat is also an infinitely stacking and theoretically infinite duration DoT with how it works, while also dealing bonus damage against 3 health types and only doing less damge vs Proto Shields. It is so insanely versatile that it's a no brainer to use it.
Electric has a similar issue, though does not stack the same way that Heat does, which directly stops it stacking to theoretical infinite duration on a single DoT, making it more of a toss up option in certain scenarios.

Slash then also, ignores armour on it's Procs. This already makes it insanely powerful, and to top that off, gets a damage bonus from viral procs too!

 

I am a little sad to see our health/defence variation regress back to basically how it was in Damage 1.0, and I honestly, don't see this as being a good long term change for the game.
Damage 2.0 has lasted as long as it has because of how varied it is, minus the absurd power of the 4 main Status effects we utilize.

 

TL;DR:
The issue isn't that we have a bunch of enemy defense types that require varied damages to be most effective against, it is how much power Slash, Viral, Corrosive and Heat status effects hold, which just trump the damage modifiers per health/armour type.

EDIT:
I want to add here, that the changes to the Health/armour/shield types, and reduction in enemy armour (with a cap), is going to only further compound this problem.

It feels like the update is trying to seperate Elemental Damage and Elemental Status effects as being 2 different things, that happen seperately and have no bearing on the power of the other, but this couldn't be further from the truth, as we see with Viral, Corrosive, Heat and slash.

By lowering enemy armour and capping it, we are boosting Corrosives effectiveness even further, by making it's Status effects have a much much bigger impact on our damage.

By lowering enemy armour, Viral is going to have even more of an effect against Armoured targets, as the damage reduction they recieve isn't going to offset Viral procs bonuses anywhere near as much as it does now.

By increasing enemy health, Viral is going to become much more effective both as a damage type and status effect. More health = more reason to cause more damage to health = more viral usage.

I do not see how making these health/armour/shield changes is going to give us any real reason to swap from using the big 4 (outside of specific scenarios).
Viral still provides a far bigger bonus than any other element.
Corrosive will have an even bigger effect due to lower armour.
Heat will also have a bigger effect due to lower armour and still trumps other DoTs due to its stacking.
Slash will actually get a tiny bit weaker due to higher health pools, but still be an exceptionally powerful "element" due to the procs ignoring armour and the damage they throw out.

Honestly, DE needs to remember that Elemental Damage and Elemental Status are 2 sides of the same coin. Have either one of those on a single element be vastly more powerful and useful than any of the other elements, and it'll overtake everything.
This update does not solve this.

Edited April 27 by Stormandreas
Added some extra thoughts at the end. Changed title to better reflect the post.

[Mr.Holyroller]

It's being changed so its easier to digest and understand. 
I thought that was pretty clear.
The game does a horrible job of overwhelming  new players with information or just completely not mentioning information about game mechanics and systems to new players.

I don't think there's anything to be "praised" about the damage type vs enemy flesh/armor system when everyone is just running a mix of Viral, Corrosive, Heat, or Slash/Mods that trigger slash.

I've been playing since open beta and i've never felt like there was much customization with elements. Its also the same reason why a lot of players always have Grineer/corrupted bane mods slotted into their weapons.

You can almost completely ignore the elemental weaknesses the murmur have and just brute force them with heat and slash.
I only went to go check their weaknesses when I was trying to figure out why the disruption lab targets are so beefy.
It's also nice for 60 eyes and EDA assassination, but that's like one situation out of the entirety of the game where i decided to change my elements in years.

Im looking forward to all the future changes with enemy weaknesses and how corrosive/armor reduction will end up working

Edited April 26 by Mr.Holyroller

[sunderthefirmament]

59 minutes ago, Mr.Holyroller said:

Im looking forward to all the future changes with enemy weaknesses and how corrosive/armor reduction will end up working

I'm looking forward to that as well, but I have some doubts about damage/status changes.  I mean, not to be excessively pessimistic, but I see two realistic outcomes:

1. We end up just brute-forcing things with viral slash (or its replacement) like usual, because damage is king, even after any changes.
2. We end up fiddling around with mods and our arsenal more and more between missions to match damage types to defense types because it's no longer viable to brute-force our way through.

 

Of those two possibilities, I think I'd prefer the first one simply because it results in more time in mission and less time fiddling around with things on the back end.  But who knows?  Maybe DE will surprise me and create a system where swapping mods out to maximize my damage depending on the enemy faction I'm facing feels rewarding and worthwhile.

[Mr.Holyroller]

56 minutes ago, sunderthefirmament said:

I'm looking forward to that as well, but I have some doubts about damage/status changes.  I mean, not to be excessively pessimistic, but I see two realistic outcomes:

1. We end up just brute-forcing things with viral slash (or its replacement) like usual, because damage is king, even after any changes.
2. We end up fiddling around with mods and our arsenal more and more between missions to match damage types to defense types because it's no longer viable to brute-force our way through.

 

Of those two possibilities, I think I'd prefer the first one simply because it results in more time in mission and less time fiddling around with things on the back end.  But who knows?  Maybe DE will surprise me and create a system where swapping mods out to maximize my damage depending on the enemy faction I'm facing feels rewarding and worthwhile.

Odds are any veteran player isnt going to be changing their damage types even with new changes.
I think more than anything its to help new players understand and learn damage type weaknesses.
It's also more relevant for them because they're not going to have all the mods veterans have

He said the goal is just to get more people to engage with element types. not to nerf viral/heat/slash

[EpicIndianGamer]

20 minutes ago, Mr.Holyroller said:

Odds are any veteran player isnt going to be changing their damage types even with new changes.
I think more than anything its to help new players understand and learn damage type weaknesses.
It's also more relevant for them because they're not going to have all the mods veterans have

He said the goal is just to get more people to engage with element types. not to nerf viral/heat/slash

I mean yeah I agree with you I doubt for most people in endgame besides people min-maxxing their builds to the absolute extreme this will really matter for them. Could be wrong of course. I see the change to the cold status as a really good move for that status where it has always felt the weakest of the core 4 to me, so I feel like this will just be a move towards rewarding you for engaging with different element types and mixing up your arsenal rather than punishing you for not taking certain elements for certain missions. Again big speculation on my part but we shall see. 

[Joezone619]

I fail to see how lowering armor and increasing health is gonna do much durability wise, but this is definitely one of those updates we gotta wait around and find out.

[Stormandreas]

11 hours ago, Mr.Holyroller said:

It's being changed so its easier to digest and understand. 
I thought that was pretty clear.
The game does a horrible job of overwhelming  new players with information or just completely not mentioning information about game mechanics and systems to new players.

I don't think there's anything to be "praised" about the damage type vs enemy flesh/armor system when everyone is just running a mix of Viral, Corrosive, Heat, or Slash/Mods that trigger slash.

I've been playing since open beta and i've never felt like there was much customization with elements. Its also the same reason why a lot of players always have Grineer/corrupted bane mods slotted into their weapons.

You can almost completely ignore the elemental weaknesses the murmur have and just brute force them with heat and slash.
I only went to go check their weaknesses when I was trying to figure out why the disruption lab targets are so beefy.
It's also nice for 60 eyes and EDA assassination, but that's like one situation out of the entirety of the game where i decided to change my elements in years.

Im looking forward to all the future changes with enemy weaknesses and how corrosive/armor reduction will end up working

I can understand trying to make it easier to digest, though there are far better ways than reverting back to parts of Damage 1.0

For example, the game could make it far more obvious what factions use what health/armour/shield types, and then then make it obvious what the bonuses are for those elements vs those health types.
While this is very vaugly done, it requires codex scanning enemies, and then check in the codex for an arbitrary "+" symbol that could mean anything. It's just not protrayed well ingame currently which is one of the major issues.
As you said yourself, the game does a horrible job at overwhelming new players, and this is one of the reasons. Extremely poor communication about core mechanics.

The system is praised for its diversity. The reason we run Viral, Corrosive, Heat or Slash, is for their status effects, because those status effects trump the damage bonuses we would get from running more optimal damage types.
This is the problem.

While status effects do need power to make them feel like they do something, those 4 status effects have so much power, that there's not really much reason to consider anything else outside of niche scenarios.

You even said this yourself aswell, you can almost completely ignore elemental weaknesses to murmur and just brute force them using heat, slash, viral, and also that using specific elements is situational. This is precisely what I was highlighting.
The health weaknesses aren't the issue there. It's the status effects.

 

Changing the health/armour/shield weaknesses does not solve this problem in the slightest. It just ignores the problem and dulls down a system that has stood for over 10 years because of its diversity.
I recall back before we figured out that the big 4 were so powerful, we used to run Radiation weapons to deal with Bombards, we had Magnetic for shields. This used to be a thing players did... and then we discovered the 4 big status effects just invalidate taking more optimal damage types (again outside of niche scenarios).

9 hours ago, Mr.Holyroller said:

He said the goal is just to get more people to engage with element types. not to nerf viral/heat/slash

The thing is... this is entirely the problem.

The status effects of these damage types overrules the bonus we get from using "optimal" damage types, and that's what needs looked at. Instead, DE are doing big sweeping changes without pinpointing the exact issue, of which, will still be there, and still be far more optimal than running Cold or Blast just because they have a slightly better status effect than they used to.

The caviat would be if they removed Viral and Corrosive effects from affecting all Health and armour types in the game, limiting them to specific ones (please god no), and having slash only ignore certain armour types (again... please god no).
Doing that would nearly kill those damage types and their status effects depending on how it's done, and be an absolute nightmare to interact with, so I hope they don't ever go down that route.

Edited April 27 by Stormandreas

[Stormandreas]

8 hours ago, Joezone619 said:

I fail to see how lowering armor and increasing health is gonna do much durability wise, but this is definitely one of those updates we gotta wait around and find out.

Armour can reduce our damage to up to 99.99%, and when it's at ridiculously high values, even stripping 50% of that doesn't then equate to a 49.99% reduction, it's then a 99.93%.

Armour damage reduction isn't linear. If it was, reducing by 50% would be really really damn good, cause then that 99.99% reduciton is now just a 49% reduction instead of a 99.93%.

So if armour is then low enough that it's only doing say... a 80% reduction at 1200 armour. If we reduce that armour by 50%, now the reduction is 66.67% as now the armour is 600.

The effect of lowering armour is much much greater at lower levels of armour, which makes things like Steel path and enemy levels into the thousands, obnoxious to deal with without a 100% armour strip effect somewhere.

However, reducing armour then means lower EHP (Effective Health Pool). Because armour is reducing damage, it's increasing the Effective health something has. To use our example above with 1200 armour, at 1200 armour, something has effectively, 5x the amount of health it actually has.
This means if you have 100 health, and 1200 armour, you effectively have 500 health.
When that armour is reduced to 600, that multiplier is now at 3x, so you now have effectively 300 health.

By lowering the armour, we reduce the EHP enemies have, making them much squishier. To compensate, increasing the health pools is a natural shift. More health = Less multiplier needed for the same values.

To use our example again, to reach the 500 health we had at 1200 armour, but now we only have 600, we need 166.6666... health.
At 167 health, multiply that by 3, and we get, 500 health. Now we have the same EHP, but less damage reduction being applied. This means raw damage is going to feel more effective against armoured targets.
However, throw status effects into play and that shifts.
Less armour means Corrosive and Heat will play an even bigger role at boosting damage
More health means Viral is more of a necessity to churn through bigger health pools.

[Digital-Dreams]

I don't see how they can sit there and say that Gas is fine how it is. I guess if you are using it against the Infested it is fine since they are weak to it, but that doesn't matter since they have so little health that any damage type can kill them in seconds. Why would I ever engage with using Gas when I can just use Viral, Corrosive, Heat, or Slash with an AOE weapon? Infested being resistant to Viral is practically nonexistent since they are pure health, with bigger infested not even being resistant to it at all. If they really want people to only use Gas on Infested, cool but it still is outclassed by other statuses. Even if they decided to make the Infested immune to Viral, that way people would use Gas, it still wouldn't matter because I can just run Corrosive and nuke them all the same.

Gas is not weak due to visuals... it is just weak

[Fred_Avant_2019]

il y a 22 minutes, Digital-Dreams a dit :

I don't see how they can sit there and say that Gas is fine how it is. I guess if you are using it against the Infested it is fine since they are weak to it, but that doesn't matter since they have so little health that any damage type can kill them in seconds. Why would I ever engage with using Gas when I can just use Viral, Corrosive, Heat, or Slash with an AOE weapon? Infested being resistant to Viral is practically nonexistent since they are pure health, with bigger infested not even being resistant to it at all. If they really want people to only use Gas on Infested, cool but it still is outclassed by other statuses. Even if they decided to make the Infested immune to Viral, that way people would use Gas, it still wouldn't matter because I can just run Corrosive and nuke them all the same.

Gas is not weak due to visuals... it is just weak

Gas is "fine" hurt my feelings for one single reason : it doesn't take into modded damage to calculate the proc damage. You want increased toxin, heat or electric DoTs ? You can add more mods of that element to increase the DoT's damage output. In the case of Gas, that does not work. Reb calling it "toxin clouds" hurt even more, considering they deal Gas damage, not Toxin damage. With all the issues of base Gas damage being bad overall that won't be resolved.

Gas is powerful if you have easy access to armor strip, otherwise, it's underwhelming. You wouldn't go out of your way to mod for it, except on Melee weapons now that Melee Influence is a thing and Gas+Electric is a thing that works thanks to high status application. If you do not run a gas specific setup, you can just obliterate anything with good old viral slash/corrosive heat without bothering with defense stripping.

[Mr.Holyroller]

10 hours ago, Stormandreas said:

I can understand trying to make it easier to digest, though there are far better ways than reverting back to parts of Damage 1.0

For example, the game could make it far more obvious what factions use what health/armour/shield types, and then then make it obvious what the bonuses are for those elements vs those health types.
While this is very vaugly done, it requires codex scanning enemies, and then check in the codex for an arbitrary "+" symbol that could mean anything. It's just not protrayed well ingame currently which is one of the major issues.
As you said yourself, the game does a horrible job at overwhelming new players, and this is one of the reasons. Extremely poor communication about core mechanics.

The system is praised for its diversity. The reason we run Viral, Corrosive, Heat or Slash, is for their status effects, because those status effects trump the damage bonuses we would get from running more optimal damage types.
This is the problem.

While status effects do need power to make them feel like they do something, those 4 status effects have so much power, that there's not really much reason to consider anything else outside of niche scenarios.

You even said this yourself aswell, you can almost completely ignore elemental weaknesses to murmur and just brute force them using heat, slash, viral, and also that using specific elements is situational. This is precisely what I was highlighting.
The health weaknesses aren't the issue there. It's the status effects.

 

Changing the health/armour/shield weaknesses does not solve this problem in the slightest. It just ignores the problem and dulls down a system that has stood for over 10 years because of its diversity.
I recall back before we figured out that the big 4 were so powerful, we used to run Radiation weapons to deal with Bombards, we had Magnetic for shields. This used to be a thing players did... and then we discovered the 4 big status effects just invalidate taking more optimal damage types (again outside of niche scenarios).

The thing is... this is entirely the problem.

The status effects of these damage types overrules the bonus we get from using "optimal" damage types, and that's what needs looked at. Instead, DE are doing big sweeping changes without pinpointing the exact issue, of which, will still be there, and still be far more optimal than running Cold or Blast just because they have a slightly better status effect than they used to.

The caviat would be if they removed Viral and Corrosive effects from affecting all Health and armour types in the game, limiting them to specific ones (please god no), and having slash only ignore certain armour types (again... please god no).
Doing that would nearly kill those damage types and their status effects depending on how it's done, and be an absolute nightmare to interact with, so I hope they don't ever go down that route.

Again, I dont understand how you can say that anyone is praising this game for its damage type diversity when people only stick to viral slash heat and sometimes corrosive.

Also, they're working on improving status effects so I'm kind of confused with what your issue is. They even addressed how flawed the armor system and partial armor stripping is.

You're jumping to a lot of conclusions before the changes are even in effect.
Give them time to test out the cold changes, the damage that blast will end up doing, and if we're going to get any substantial changes to magnetic.
Changing corpus shields could also change up the game if its aggressive enough.

I've been playing since like update 8 and I dont ever recall this:
"I recall back before we figured out that the big 4 were so powerful, we used to run Radiation weapons to deal with Bombards, we had Magnetic for shields. This used to be a thing players did... and then we discovered the 4 big status effects just invalidate taking more optimal damage types (again outside of niche scenarios)."

The game has changed substantially depending on what version of element damage we're talking about and what access to mods we had at the time.
Feel free to correct me if im wrong, but when we got damage 2.0 it was Viral+Rad for grineer, Gas+ele/Mag+toxin for Corpus, and Corrosive+Heat for infested. I think most of us were aware how strong slash was once we didnt have weapons that just had 100% armor ignore and it got even stronger with hunter munitions being an option for primaries.

Overall, the biggest issue is armor dominates the game and corpus/infested feeling substantially squishier than grineer.
They are addressing this while also making the new player optics much better.


 

Edited April 27 by Mr.Holyroller

[Stormandreas]

1 hour ago, Mr.Holyroller said:

Again, I dont understand how you can say that anyone is praising this game for its damage type diversity when people only stick to viral slash heat and sometimes corrosive.

Also, they're working on improving status effects so I'm kind of confused with what your issue is. They even addressed how flawed the armor system and partial armor stripping is.

You're jumping to a lot of conclusions before the changes are even in effect.
Give them time to test out the cold changes, the damage that blast will end up doing, and if we're going to get any substantial changes to magnetic.
Changing corpus shields could also change up the game if its aggressive enough.

I've been playing since like update 8 and I dont ever recall this:
"I recall back before we figured out that the big 4 were so powerful, we used to run Radiation weapons to deal with Bombards, we had Magnetic for shields. This used to be a thing players did... and then we discovered the 4 big status effects just invalidate taking more optimal damage types (again outside of niche scenarios)."

The game has changed substantially depending on what version of element damage we're talking about and what access to mods we had at the time.
Feel free to correct me if im wrong, but when we got damage 2.0 it was Viral+Rad for grineer, Gas+ele/Mag+toxin for Corpus, and Corrosive+Heat for infested. I think most of us were aware how strong slash was once we didnt have weapons that just had 100% armor ignore and it got even stronger with hunter munitions being an option for primaries.

Overall, the biggest issue is armor dominates the game and corpus/infested feeling substantially squishier than grineer.
They are addressing this while also making the new player optics much better.


 

I said praised. Past tense. It was praised. We no longer interact with it because of the power of Viral/slash, viral/heat, corrosive/heat.

They are improving some status effects yes. I don't see how you're confused at "+325% bonus damage trumps any other damage type". 

It stands to reason that, still, no damage type will beat "+325% bonus damage" unless the status effects are absolutely bonkers, which from what we've read, they aren't.
Colds +CD is, currently, cute, in comparison. Doubling that CD still doesn't reach the same bonus Viral provides.
Blast would have to do absolutely crazily high amounts of damage, or do scaling damage in order to compete.
Magnetic they've said they aren't looking at any major changes (which it desperately needs)

I have been here since update 6, and I very much do. This is the praising I was talking about. Damage 2.0 was at first disdained because we could no longer freeze and burn enemies at the same time, but very very quickly garnered a lot of support.

You are correct yes.
Viral Rad and Corrosive for grineer
Mag/Toxin/Elec/Rad for corpus
Corrosive/Heat/Blast for infested.
This is exactly as I said in my original post for the elements the enemies want for specifically raw damage.
This is also what we used to use most of the time.
Slash then grew in popularity quite quickly because of it's procs ignoring armour, albiet, wasn't overly accessable at the time as we didn't really have status weapons back then. Status was actually quite hard to obtain until they did a bunch of passes and released a bunch of weapons that were much more capable of doing them. Viral also reduced enemies max health rather than increasing our damage to the health as well back then

Edited April 27 by Stormandreas