Hypothetical armor issues if TTK remains the same.

[Snowbluff]

Ok so math isn't magic, and if they mean that HP will be buffed to keep the TTK about the same as before, I think that enemies will be tough, armor strip will still be necessary, and the meta will basically remain the same.


Firstly, take a level 200 gunner with 100k HP, 97% armor DR, about 4,000k in effective HP. If you remove the armor, they have 100k HP, the same as their HP. Change the armor DR to 90%, the EHP is now 1,000k. Now, compensate for this change in HP and now the gunner has 400k HP.


So what has happened here? EHP is the same, so the literal TTK is identical. Gas or electricity or bullets will have bigger numbers, but they will be hitting something with more HP so that washes out. Furthermore, the gunner is now stronger when the armor is gone. An armor strip is still a 10x bonus effective damage bonus, but if you do strip it it'll will be stronger underneath. If anything slash, the savior of the meta, the part of the game that keeps us from being forced into armor stripping, will be nerfed because it does effectively a quarter of the damage against this enemy.

So what's the next best thing? It's still viral. Viral will increase your damage output against the remaining HP. They would have to buff the other statuses massively for this not to be the case.


Now I hope there isn't a 1:1 TTK adjustment after these changes. I would rather that in general enemies become less bloated, but I think the meta would more or less remain the same. 90% DR is still a lot so I won't be removing my green shards or armor strips any time soon.

[Stormandreas]

This is exactly what I've been saying too.

All the armour changes are going to do is make Viral even more of a requirement to munch through enemy health.

Nothing is being resolved here from a damage perspective, as Viral effects are still far superiour to taking "optimal" damage types (and there's toxin for ignoring shields), and builds that armour strip will still be much stronger than those that don't.

The Big 4 as I call them, dwarf all other Damage Types due to their status effects. Those being Viral, Corrosive, Heat and Slash.
Unless they make all other elemental damage equal these in damage output, give them absolutely insane status effects, or nerf the Big 4, nothing will end up changing.

Changing damage weaknesses to faction based as well, is just regressing our damage system rather than improving it. Damage 1.0 had a very very similar concept.
Corpus are weak to electric
Grineer to bullets
Infested to fire and slashing.

It wasn't overly interesting and we just took 1 weapon per faction and called it a day.

 

 

Edited April 27 by Stormandreas

[-ShadowRadiance-]

47 minutes ago, Stormandreas said:

All the armour changes are going to do is make Viral even more of a requirement to munch through enemy health.

Nothing is being resolved here from a damage perspective, as Viral effects are still far superiour to taking "optimal" damage types (and there's toxin for ignoring shields), and builds that armour strip will still be much stronger than those that don't.

So correct me if im wrong.

But dont this mean a weapon modded for corrosive, along with 2 archon shards to achive full strip on shield units that does have armor underneath on a heavy multi weapon like the phantasma. Along with nourish to weaken said hp value.

Solve 3/4 of these and all you need is a source of toxin to bypass shields? <.<

 

[0_The_F00l]

5 minutes ago, -ShadowRadiance- said:

So correct me if im wrong.

But dont this mean a weapon modded for corrosive, along with 2 archon shards to achive full strip on shield units that does have armor underneath on a heavy multi weapon like the phantasma. Along with nourish to weaken said hp value.

Solve 3/4 of these and all you need is a source of toxin to bypass shields? <.<

 

While what you say isnt wrong thats a very very niche loadout and will be counter to improving diversity in the game.

As to the OP, what you say is true in the context lmited to just armor and HP , but lets not forget that we dont have confirmation of how shields will behave and how armor will actually scale ,

whether toxin will actually bypass shields or not and how armor stripping will behave ,currently DR to armor is not linear , it has diminishing returns , Pablo did say they will be making the DR scaling more linear.

And i have a gut feeling that DE hasnt really said everything they actually plan to do with this and there will be a few "minor" things that will be introduced that may look subtle but have a significant impact..

[Snowbluff]

1 hour ago, 0_The_F00l said:

 

As to the OP, what you say is true in the context lmited to just armor and HP , but lets not forget that we dont have confirmation of how shields will behave and how armor will actually scale ,

whether toxin will actually bypass shields or not and how armor stripping will behave ,currently DR to armor is not linear , it has diminishing returns , Pablo did say they will be making the DR scaling more linear.

 

Like I said, math isn't magic. There are predictable effects of what would happen based on what is said. 4 million effective HP takes the same amount of time to brute force (without any effects or status) whether or the base HP is 100,000 or 400,000.


It's not really important how the armor curve will change if the TTK value is not going to change. If 90% isn't the amount of armor at level 200, that just means that the gunner example will have more than 400k HP to compensate for the TTK.

[kadlis12]

To OP: As I understood, it was more about the difference between a full armor strip and a partial armor strip/no armor strip.

ATM if you strip 99% of the armor, your damage is still reduced significantly - even if you use a proper counter-element. The goal of the change is to introduce a wider range where a proper counter-element is "good enough" or even a proper solution for the situation.

[PublikDomain]

It's a concern I have as well. Reducing the percentage of EHP that comes from Armor means increasing the percentage that comes from Health. If DE is going to buff Grineer Health so their EHP doesn't change much then we still have one damage type that gives everyone 4.25x more damage to that now-larger Health pool. Reducing EHP from Armor is a good thing on its own, but it could turn into a problem because DE doesn't want to touch Viral.

There's a similar sort of issue with Shields. Making Shields more interactive is a good thing on its own, but armored enemies at high levels have dozens (or hundreds) of times more EHP than Shielded enemies. For example, lvl150 SP Tech has 260k EHP and a lvl150 SP Heavy Gunner has 7.1M EHP. If Armor changes are being offset by Health buffs then that Heavy Gunner will still have 27x more EHP than the Tech. If Shield Regen is expected to make up for that much of a gap it's going to need to be very, very quick. And the faster and more impactful they make Shield Regen, the more they're going to push players into a different one-note meta to defeat it. Either the Shield Regen isn't strong enough to make a difference, or it is strong enough to make a difference and they've just built a new meta. Currently that'd be a Toxin meta to bypass Shields directly, or if that's addressed then a Magnetic meta.

And even if they add in "Resistance Variance", like in their example where Grineer on Earth are weak to Corrosive/Heat and Grineer on another planet are presumably weak to IE Radiation/Cold, because status effects can be so powerful on their own they're going to continue to dwarf the meager resistance/weakness benefits.

By pushing everything to an extreme like this, DE's not fixing this:

23 hours ago, [DE]Sam said:

Damage Types and Status Effects currently encourage a meta that favors a select few Effects.

They're potentially making it worse. Instead of all status types being equally valuable and you use whatever status type you prefer, they're moving even more towards one or two types being a defined best that you're supposed to use.

[Snowbluff]

2 minutes ago, kadlis12 said:

To OP: As I understood, it was more about the difference between a full armor strip and a partial armor strip/no armor strip.

ATM if you strip 99% of the armor, your damage is still reduced significantly - even if you use a proper counter-element. The goal of the change is to introduce a wider range where a proper counter-element is "good enough" or even a proper solution for the situation.

Indeed, this is sounded more like it wasn't meant to upset the "meta." However, I think there is potential to make enemies tankier, which is the opposite of what some people seem to think is happening.

[kadlis12]

2 minutes ago, Snowbluff said:

Indeed, this is sounded more like it wasn't meant to upset the "meta." However, I think there is potential to make enemies tankier, which is the opposite of what some people seem to think is happening.

I think so - especially people who were fully armor stripping will face a significant rise in HP. Because, yes, the change effectively claimed that part of the tankiness hidden in armor shall be transferred to HP pool.

[0_The_F00l]

12 minutes ago, Snowbluff said:

Like I said, math isn't magic. There are predictable effects of what would happen based on what is said. 4 million effective HP takes the same amount of time to brute force (without any effects or status) whether or the base HP is 100,000 or 400,000.


It's not really important how the armor curve will change if the TTK value is not going to change. If 90% isn't the amount of armor at level 200, that just means that the gunner example will have more than 400k HP to compensate for the TTK.

Math isn't magic if you know the underlying principles which i think are currently not known to us,

As of now we know every 300 armor increases EHP by 100% of base HP additively, and there are formulas for HP and armor itself scaling based on enemy type and level (that i am too lazy to search for right now),

We dont know what will happen with the new plan,

I wouldn't take DEs claims of trying to keep TTK similar as complete information, as they did not specify at what level they want to keep the TTK similar,

Level 200 seems to be a good place as they already gave examples of that,

but will they do it for steel path? or just regular star chart? what about levels after 400?

I expect some linear scaling and then exponential scaling where DE draws a line in the sand and says, "ok thats enough"

 

 

[(PSN)rexis12]

From what I understand. They want to make Grineer easier to kill, and make the Infested and Corpus harder to kill. The TTK is probably going to be in the middle of a Grineer Unit and a Corpus/Infested Unit. 

So you'd be killing them faster, with the reduction of Armor making it so that Corrosive gets value with Partial Strip and the damage bonus, meaning you could kill theoretically a bit more faster than if you had full stripped them and killed them that way. 

 

Alternatively you could also Armor Strip and Viral Kill them, which... Is perfectly fine because the idea is that it's two different playstyles.

Not dunpstering one time make the other better. 

[Stormandreas]

4 hours ago, -ShadowRadiance- said:

So correct me if im wrong.

But dont this mean a weapon modded for corrosive, along with 2 archon shards to achive full strip on shield units that does have armor underneath on a heavy multi weapon like the phantasma. Along with nourish to weaken said hp value.

Solve 3/4 of these and all you need is a source of toxin to bypass shields? <.<

 

What you're describing is basically just Saryn with Nourish, which is very very powerful currently.

Venom dose = Corrosive
Toxic Lash = Toxin
Nourish = Viral

You're welcome.

The power of that btw, would not change at all with these new changes.

[-ShadowRadiance-]

31 minutes ago, Stormandreas said:

What you're describing is basically just Saryn with Nourish, which is very very powerful currently.

Venom dose = Corrosive
Toxic Lash = Toxin
Nourish = Viral

You're welcome.

The power of that btw, would not change at all with these new changes.

I was describing my main loadout for any frame.

Corrosive heat phantasma with the archon shards for full strip.

The impact "helps" with shields and energy regen with the arcane that procs of impact.

Venka prime with toxin and high slash with 100.8 cc and melee duplicate.

Viral ala nourish.

[ECCHOSIERRA]

7 hours ago, Snowbluff said:

Ok so math isn't magic, and if they mean that HP will be buffed to keep the TTK about the same as before, I think that enemies will be tough, armor strip will still be necessary, and the meta will basically remain the same.


Firstly, take a level 200 gunner with 100k HP, 97% armor DR, about 4,000k in effective HP. If you remove the armor, they have 100k HP, the same as their HP. Change the armor DR to 90%, the EHP is now 1,000k. Now, compensate for this change in HP and now the gunner has 400k HP.


So what has happened here? EHP is the same, so the literal TTK is identical. Gas or electricity or bullets will have bigger numbers, but they will be hitting something with more HP so that washes out. Furthermore, the gunner is now stronger when the armor is gone. An armor strip is still a 10x bonus effective damage bonus, but if you do strip it it'll will be stronger underneath. If anything slash, the savior of the meta, the part of the game that keeps us from being forced into armor stripping, will be nerfed because it does effectively a quarter of the damage against this enemy.

So what's the next best thing? It's still viral. Viral will increase your damage output against the remaining HP. They would have to buff the other statuses massively for this not to be the case.


Now I hope there isn't a 1:1 TTK adjustment after these changes. I would rather that in general enemies become less bloated, but I think the meta would more or less remain the same. 90% DR is still a lot so I won't be removing my green shards or armor strips any time soon.

My thoughts exactly.

We dont know to what extent health is getting buffed. Presumably enough to "feel similar" like they said and if thats the case viral is gonna be even more important than it already is.

6 hours ago, Stormandreas said:

This is exactly what I've been saying too.

All the armour changes are going to do is make Viral even more of a requirement to munch through enemy health.

Nothing is being resolved here from a damage perspective, as Viral effects are still far superiour to taking "optimal" damage types (and there's toxin for ignoring shields), and builds that armour strip will still be much stronger than those that don't.

The Big 4 as I call them, dwarf all other Damage Types due to their status effects. Those being Viral, Corrosive, Heat and Slash.
Unless they make all other elemental damage equal these in damage output, give them absolutely insane status effects, or nerf the Big 4, nothing will end up changing.

Changing damage weaknesses to faction based as well, is just regressing our damage system rather than improving it. Damage 1.0 had a very very similar concept.
Corpus are weak to electric
Grineer to bullets
Infested to fire and slashing.

It wasn't overly interesting and we just took 1 weapon per faction and called it a day.

 

 

I dont know if i *want* "the "optimal" damage types per faction to be pushed down our throats. Micromanaging 3 different weapons per mission is annoying.

3 hours ago, Snowbluff said:

Like I said, math isn't magic. There are predictable effects of what would happen based on what is said. 4 million effective HP takes the same amount of time to brute force (without any effects or status) whether or the base HP is 100,000 or 400,000.


It's not really important how the armor curve will change if the TTK value is not going to change. If 90% isn't the amount of armor at level 200, that just means that the gunner example will have more than 400k HP to compensate for the TTK.

It seems like they wanna nerf slash procs without causing a huge backlash.

[(PSN)slightconfuzzled]

"and if they mean that HP will be buffed to keep the TTK about the same as before"

Is that what they mean? To clarify I mean that sincerely, Devstream happens for me at around 6 am, but I am not a morning person, and I was half asleep the whole way through. What I noticed and remembered from it, isn't going to be great. So upfront, I acknowledge that, but the small bits I do remember was that Pablo said (well I will paraphrase based on memory) that health would be readjusted because of the armour changes, but not to even out or match EHP, and then he said something like because that would be silly or ridiculous. Like I said though, I was half asleep and happy to be corrected, if missed something. I also don't think they gave enough specifics in what they actually mean by that "adjusting other values" so enemies won't be a complete push over. 

So for me, its a bit like the Saint Ives riddle. Math would be helpful, but only if we know the man we met is travelling with all that extra stuff, and the question is whether he is the one travelling to Saint Ives.