Viral Vs Grineer

[Ketec]

so its 75% vs flesh - but basically all of them has armor as well. how does it work - will it bypass armor or what'?

[Noble_Cactus]

I'll let someone else expand upon this with actual numbers, but from what I understand the basics are that because armor resists elements to varying degrees, your primary choice against Grineer should still be Radiation for the Napalms/Bombards, etc. Even with the Viral debuff, you will get greater returns out of radiation (especially since Viral doesn't stack anymore from what I've read; haven't tested it yet though). If you have room for two elements, your best combo will be Radiation + Toxin or Radiation + Viral.

Edited February 28, 2014 by Noble_Cactus

[NyghttheClassy]

I don't believe is does bypass. the big strength of viral ahs always been it's proc- slashing a huge fraction of hp off.

 

Personally, I find better results in using either corrosives or radiation, in conjunction with straight high quantities of puncture + slash.

[Riccoshot]

I believe Viral is resisted by armor, but it still halves HP on proc (=faster kill cause of less HP) though.

[Kamal965]

I still find Viral to be the most useful damage type, often combining it with Radiation for +150% total damage vs. Heavy Grineer (Napalms, Bombards, Elites and bosses).

 

I find Viral to be the most useful due to the fact it flat out removes 50% of their total hp, instead of reducing their armor. Results in less hits needed to be used.

[Paradoxbomb]

Like Noble_Catcus said, radiation should be your primary element for the Grineer, but I find viral is a pretty good all-rounder kind of element. The only enemy that has heavy resistance against it is light infested, and although it is affected by armor there's no penalties against it (if I'm not mistaken) and if your weapon's proc chance is decent enough reducing the enemies health really comes in handy.

 

It makes a great secondary element for the Void IMO.

[Ketec]

so the 75% bonus is a kind of a lie... is there any grineer at all that doesn't have armor already.

[xicx]

get  corrosive projection aura, if all your team including you have this aura on , viral will pass through but make sure your teams aura add up to 100

 

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Corrosive_Projection

[Ketec]

the aura doesnt add up like that. first one is 30%, 2nd one will ad to the already reduced value and so on - so

1000 - 300 = 700

  700 - 210 = 490

  490 - 147 = 343

  343 - 103 = 240

~76% reduction

 

 

But the whole resistance is  messy - with shields its easy - it would apply when shields are depleted.. .but u cant deplete armor - so no actual clue how much armor reduces damage before it hits health.

 

Tho it should apply regardless.

if i did 1000 viral damage and armor lowered it by 900 (90%), id do 100 to health.

But the viral damage would be amplified by 75% so i would actually do 175?

 

But if its corrosive 1000, vs armor 75% makes it 1750, -90% = again 175 damage.

 

So in a way... isnt viral actually better? It would apply to both ferrite and alloy armor, instead of just one of them.

[(PSN)LUCKY_JOEL]

I wouldn't bother with Viral anyways. Although it does have a neat max health reduction. I would rather stick to Radiation and Toxic for that all-round effectiveness since your bigger worries are the bigger Grineer units.

[Ragewalker]

As others have mentioned, Radiation + Viral works quite well.
Viral's main attraction is the proc, that health reduction is beautiful.

[Noble_Cactus]

From what I've been reading, Gas might also be a good alternative to Viral if your weapon has a high proc chance or has high shot-per-damage. The DoT scales with headshot and crit damage, and Gas procs can stack. Naturally this doesn't play as large a role in early levels as it does against much tougher enemies (namely because the proc effect wears off on target death), but it's something that needs looking into.

Edited March 1, 2014 by Noble_Cactus

[Baysick]

I use Radiation + Viral on all types of enemies

[Acebaur]

so the 75% bonus is a kind of a lie... is there any grineer at all that doesn't have armor already.

 

No it's not a lie. Viral still gets a 75% bonus of the base damage to health. With armor it works kind of like this. You deal X damage to a grineer. His armor reduces it by Y leaving you with Z.  Z damage is applied to his health. Viral deals an additional 75% of Z. So you still get the bonus, but the base damage is reduced by armor

[Ragnus4]

Technically Viral is the best damage type versus all Grineer enemies EXCEPT Rollers. But honestly, who cares about rollers? They die in one shot almost always anyway. Go with Viral. If not, at least get Radiation.

[(PSN)Dean_Harvey]

Dont forget blast on high procures keeps them on floor which is great for heavies

[Ketec]

No it's not a lie. Viral still gets a 75% bonus of the base damage to health. With armor it works kind of like this. You deal X damage to a grineer. His armor reduces it by Y leaving you with Z.  Z damage is applied to his health. Viral deals an additional 75% of Z. So you still get the bonus, but the base damage is reduced by armor

yeah, read my next replay, some calculations show that viral beats corrosive/radiation mathematically at least even without proc.

[Darzk]

Uhhh no.

 

At higher levels, the armor reduction from Corrosive is far better than the -50% health reduction as it stacks and is still valuable even if it doesnt proc right off the bat.

 

If we're using a low proc weapon, the damage amp from Rad is far superior to the buff from Viral, just only applies to some units.

 

Neat thing about Rad is you can use Viral too for help with other enemy types and still some bonus against Alloy.

[Ketec]

im not talking about proc at all. Rather the damage bonus vs HP.

:

if i did 1000 viral damage and armor lowered it by 900 (90%), id do 100 to health.

But the viral damage would be amplified by 75% so i would actually do 175?

 

But if its corrosive 1000, vs armor 75% makes it 1750, -90% = again 175 damage.

 

 

ether way the end damage even at 90% armor reduction seems to be the same. The advantage is that all flesh based grineer take the 75% bonus - instead of only alloy or ferrite.

[Darzk]

It does not work like that. The amplification is not equal.

 

The best way I've had it explained, and the way it seems to work ingame, is that the multiplier is based on the armor:flesh ratio.

 

For example, most units have a 1/5th health, 4/5th armor ratio. This means, 20% health 80% armor. You then multiply the multiplier by these values. Note: We dont actually have empirical values for the ratio, we have to guess.

 

 

So Radiation does 0.2*1.0 + 0.8*1.75 to alloy armored enemies with that hp/armor ratio; 0.2+1.4 = 1.6 = +60% 

And Viral will do 0.2*1.75 + 0.8*1 = 1.15 = +15% to all Grineer enemies.

 

The damage is then mitigated by armor, a separate value from the armor/health ratio.

 

 

It does seem to work out in game that most Grineer take 10-20% bonus damage from viral over base, and ~60% bonus damage from Corrosive/Rad based on their armor type.

 

 

 

Truth be told I'm not 100% sure how it works, but I'm absolutely positive in game that Rad/Corrosive have a far higher damage amplification than Viral for their respective armor types.

[Krymanol]

Ok, here's a formula for applying damage. I assume it's still valid unless DE has changed something in the past couple of weeks.

 

So lets start by using a level 25 bombard. 

 

Base armor = 500

Spawn Level = 4 (this is the level that bombard's first start spawning).

 

So a level 4 bombard would have 500 armor, but we need to find the armor for a level 25 bombard.

 

ModifiedBaseArmor = baseArmor + baseArmor x 0.005 x (currentLevel - spawnLevel) ^ 1.75

1015 = 500 + 500 * 0.005 x (25 - 4) ^ 1.75

 

So a level 25 bombard would have 1015 base armor.  Now to find out the actual armor reduction modifier.

 

ArmorReductionMultiplier  = 1 - ModifiedBaseArmor x (1 - ArmorModifier) / [ModifiedBaseArmor x (1 - ArmorModifier) + 300 ]

0.22813688 = 1 - 1015 * (1 - 0) / [1015 * (1 - 0) + 300]

 

NOTE: ArmorModifier is the value listed in the appropriate armor column (ferrite or alloy) as seen on the wiki page Damage 2.0 Modifier Table.  In this case the bombard has alloy armor and we are using viral damage.  There is no penalty or bonus for viral damage against alloy armor and so the value for ArmorModifier  would be a big fat zero.  If there would have been a positive value in the alloy column for viral, it would reduce the effectiveness of the bombards armor against viral damage.  If there would have been a negative value in the alloy column for viral, it would improve the effectiveness of the bombards armor against viral damage.

 

So the level 25 bombard's armor modifier would be 0.22813688.  

 

Next we have to figure out the modified damage our weapon will do.  Lets assume our weapon does only viral damage at a value of 500.   We then apply the bonus or penalty for cloned flesh.

 

ModifiedBaseDamage = WeaponBaseDamage * (1 + ClonedFlesh)

875 = 500 * (1 + 0.75)

 

So our weapon does 875 damage to cloned flesh.  Next we apply the armor reduction.

 

FinalDamage = ModifiedBaseDamage * ModifiedArmorReduction

199.61977 = 875 * 0.22813688

 

So our viral weapon would do 199 damage per shot to the level 25 bombard.   I think the game rounds damage up though so it may be 200 damage done in this situation. 

 

 

 

Now as for the viral proc it gets tricky.  To my understanding, DE has recently changed it so that viral proc no longer stacks.  Testing I did a couple weeks ago showed that you could keep stacking the viral proc, thus keep reducing the current max health of the target indefinitely.  DE apparently felt this was a bit OP because you could take a weapon with a very high status chance and keep applying the viral proc.   That meant you could face a enemy with 5000 health and if you landed 5 viral procs quick enough, the targets health would be reduced to about 156.  So you wouldn't even need very high damage on the weapon to kill the target fast, just a very high status chance so you could keep viral proc stacked up.  It worked well with the acrid as you could get viral + the innate toxin/poison DOT stacking up damage.   This worked well against all factions and especially corpus because toxin bypassed shields while viral lowered the max health regardless of amount of shields (corpus) or armor (grineer)...so you could kill enemies much faster with viral + toxin combo.  Unfortunately only a couple weapons can get such a combination.

 

 

Now I believe DE has changed it so that the viral proc can only apply once on a target and further procs simply refreshes the 6 second duration of the proc instead of reducing the health even further.  Overall the viral proc is no longer a powerful proc, especially against armored enemies.  So in my opinion the viral damage and proc are now one of the worst damage types and procs to have on a weapon.  

 

The reason I say that is because if you had an enemy with 5000 health, 1 viral proc only reduces it to 2500 health for 6 seconds.   That might seem good, but the problem is most weapons can't have either pure or very high viral damage and a very high status chance at the same time.   That means you'll have a tough time keeping the proc applied with only a 6 second window of opportunity.   So it will only be good if you can kill the target at 2500 health in 6 seconds or less.  If you could do that, then you could have easily killed it with 5000 health just as fast anyway.   So again the viral proc seems useless to me as there are better combinations to use against grineer now that viral proc has been nerfed. 

Edited March 1, 2014 by Krymanol

[Darzk]

So our viral weapon would do 199 damage per shot to the level 25 bombard.   I think the game rounds damage up though so it may be 200 damage done in this situation. 

 

No. See, you did the same thing everyone's mistakenly doing. Viral does not apply a +75% damage modifier. Its far smaller than that. If it was exactly the same as Rad/Corrosive it'd do the same damage.

[(NSW)Omgwtfl9lbbl]

Holy S#&$, I was typing a bunch, accidentally hit tab instead of Q, and backspaced.... a S#&$ton of typing, gone. Fantastical.

 

What Krymanol is doing is using some sort of modified version of Gogge's (DPSFrame) armor mitigation formula. No idea if he's the one who came up with it, but his DPSFrame thread is the only place where I could find good versions of the formula. It can be simplified to the following form:

 

Mitigation = 1 / (1 + (Armor * (1 - Armor Modifier) / 300))

Damage = (Raw Damage) * (1 + Health Modifier) * (Mitigation) * (1 + Armor Modifier)

 

Where Armor is the targets current armor value, Armor Modifier would be 0/-.5/.75 for Viral/Slash/Radiation respectively against Alloy armored units, Health Modifier would be .75/.25/0 for Cloned Flesh, and Raw Damage would be the damage value per projectile of that type only (in his example, 500 Viral). This would give

 

Mitigation = 1 / (1 + (1015 * (1 - 0) / 300)) = .22813

Damage = (500) * (1 + .75) + (.22813) + (1 + 0) = ~199

 

which checks out against what he has.

 

The reason that this does not contradict the way Radiation/Corrosion/etc. work when it comes to armored targets is the fact that armor modifiers are also used in the Mitigation calculation, not just the damage. For example, if we now used 500 Radiation damage instead of Viral, we'd have

 

Mitigation = 1 / (1 + (1015 * (1 - .75) / 300)) = .54176

Damage = (500) * (1 + 0) + (.54176) + (1 + .75) = ~474

 

which supports the idea that Radiation is superior to Viral in terms of flat damage dealt to Alloy targets.

 

I have not personally tested Gogge's formula in game myself, but I have taken some damage testing done by others and ran it through the formulas, and it seems to check out. So if you're willing to accept this method of calculation, then you can see that Viral itself is not bad, but Radiation or Corrosive against their respective types are far more powerful. The higher the armor of the target, the more powerful using the respective element will be over using Viral (though all damage types will hit for less regardless as armor increases).

 

Also interesting is that, according to this, using Toxic or Cold for Ferrite and Alloy is never ideal for pure damage, assuming you could get 2 of either element, as using Viral instead will always provide a higher benefit. In order for Toxic or Cold to deal superior flat damage, you would require an armor of -2400. As you increase armor from 0, Viral becomes relatively less powerful compared to Toxic and Cold, but should never be overtaken.

 

I'm also currently looking over Gottfraust's code (whose DPS chart and calculator are also thrown around quite a bit here - especially when Latron Prime was buffed). His method of calculation when it comes to TTK stuff (ex. in particular, time to kill a level 100 Heavy Gunner) seems to be a fair bit different, and honestly I think incorrect at that. This is easily tested in his calculator by setting a weapon to have a very high elemental base damage with absolutely no mods input. For example, same damage, same rate of fire, same mag count, no status chance/reload/criticals, but change between a a neutral element and elements that affect either type.

 

For instance, when it comes to Heavy Gunner, they have both Cloned Flesh and Ferrite. So for my elementals I chose Magnetic (neutral), Viral (Cloned Flesh), and Corrosive (Ferrite). I created a gun with 15,000 damage of whatever element, no mods, 1 projectile, 1 RoF, 100000 round mag, and 0 for everything else (they have no effect or I don't want them to have any effect). Corrosive returns a 3 second TTK which is the fastest (as expected), but Magnetic and Viral both return the same TTK of 1.133 minutes, which makes no sense as Viral should most definitely kill faster than Magnetic.

 

This is because (from what I'm able to follow from his code), his relevant TTK logic goes somewhat like:

 

1) Read stats of enemy (level 100 Gunner stats). This includes health amount, armor amount, and Ferrite armor type, but NOT Cloned Flesh type. For our purposes, let's use our own stats from the Napalm above, and do this for Viral, and Radiation.

 

Now, for each shot:

 

2) Check if corrosive procs (status proc chance set to 0 in our case)

3) Calculate armorReduction = 1 - ((armor * .0035) /  (1 + (armor * .0035))) - subbing in a value of 1015, this equals .21965 (we'll say .22).

4) If armor > 0, for each damage type, set a "local" damage multiplier for it equal to armorReduction value in (3)

5) To each respective "local" multiplier, add its respective multiplier against the armor type. Simply put, this is .22 + 0 for Viral, .22 + .75  = .97 for Radiation.

6) Remove damage done by this type from current health. The damage done is essentially (Raw Damage) * ("local" multiplier (from 5)), add in faction mod if necessary. In other words, we'd get (500) * (.22) for Viral and (500) * (.97) for Corrosive.

 

Checking this math manually, this seems to match up. There is a small amount of error, but I believe that's probably due to the heavy number of iterations that the code runs through when doing TTK calculations (it simulates by millisecond intervals, to give an idea).

 

If you sub in Magnetic for Viral, you will see that according to his calculator, there is absolutely no change in damage dealt. This is because he doesn't account for Cloned Flesh at all. His damage calculations are completely different.

[Darzk]

Holy S#&$, I was typing a bunch, accidentally hit tab instead of Q, and backspaced.... a S#&$ton of typing, gone. Fantastical.

 

 

Hate it when that happens. And its such useful information too.

 

So basically what you're saying is that Rad/Corrosive has an innate 75% armor reduction and yet the same multiplier as Viral?

 

Hrm, makes me think that the Corrosive proc then will barely or never catch up to the innate armor ignore and damage dealt to Alloy by Rad. I could swear I'd done and seen some testing that high proc Corrosive was better than straight Rad at high levels.

Edited March 2, 2014 by Darzk

[(NSW)Omgwtfl9lbbl]

Assuming Gogge's formulas are right, and assuming that Corrosive reduces armor to 75% of the target's current armor and can stack without limit, it would be able to overcome given enough stacks at a speed dependent on the armor.

 

For Radiation, the damage dealt is basically boiled down to

 

(1.75) * (1 /  (1 + (.25 * Armor / 300))

 

while Corrosive would be

 

1 / (1 + ((.75 ^ #procs) * Armor / 300)

 

Theoretically, the Corrosive damage would be able to overtake the Radiation damage at starting at 7 procs if the target had an initial armor of ~13.7k armor. If you go out to 8 procs, you break even if you started from ~3k, and 9 procs starting from ~1.9k. Of course, that is a ridiculous amount of procs.

 

However, this obviously isn't the whole story. The advantage of Corrosive procs is that in increases all of the damage that you deal, not just the Radiation damage specifically. If you imagine that your Corrosive/Radiation is made from 2 +90% elementals, another random +90% elemental, and all of your damage hits completely neutral to Alloy and Cloned Flesh (yeah right, but for convenience's sake), then your Corrosive/Radiation damage only makes up for 18/37 of your total raw damage. In Radiation's case, while the Radiation damage obviously deals a far greater amount of damage than the Corrosive damage, the rest of the damage types you deal (which account for 19/37 of your total damage) do not benefit.

 

So for this example (2x 90% elementals for the combo, 1x random 90% elemental, all damage other than radiation is neutral to Cloned Flesh/Alloy), let's still use the Radiation/Corrosive damage as our baseline, but factor in the other damage types. You would instead have for Radiation

 

(18 / 37) * (1.75) * (1 /  (1 + (.25 * Armor / 300)) + (19/37) * (1 / (1 + (Armor / 300))

 

And for Corrosive this would still be

 

1 / (1 + ((.75 ^ #procs) * Armor / 300)

 

with Corrosive not changing because all damage types benefit equally.

 

This would make Corrosive and the rest of your damage catch up in 5 Corrosive procs assuming an initial armor of ~1.9k (and faster if you increase the initial armor).

 

If you start stacking up bonuses and stuff on the rest of your damage (say, you have a Puncture heavy weapon and 90% Cold for the extra elemental), then the Corrosive procs start looking more attractive, but honestly I don't feel like doing the maths on that. How much more, I don't know either, just that... it would lmao.

 

Again, I've never done any personal testing on the armor damage stuff to verify if these formulas are accurate. This uses the formulas posted by Gogge, which while his weapon comparisons fall short in terms of proc calculation and proper handling of certain unique weapons, his site (DPSFrame) is generally accepted and linked here. I would not say anything 100% myself though unless I actually went through and proved it myself. Assuming that the formulas and my assumptions about Corrosive procs hold true, this should be accurate... lol.

Edited March 2, 2014 by omgwtflolbbl

[Riccoshot]

That means you'll have a tough time keeping the proc applied with only a 6 second window of opportunity.   So it will only be good if you can kill the target at 2500 health in 6 seconds or less.

From my yesterdays Nuovo 1h27min survival run (with a party without any debuffs (Roar, M. Prime you know)), i quoted exactly this sentence.

Viral proc is effective if you can finish the enemy within 6 sec window. Pretty much the point where Viral still can be useful depends on the weapon itself.

 

Edit: but yes, this is not the best way for proc to work, DE need to make Viral to stay permanently at least, it already do not stacks, and 6 seconds window is nothing on high level with ridiculous % of Grineer armor resist.

Edited March 2, 2014 by Riccoshot