[Heresy] Change The Way Iron Skin Works?

[SquirmyBurrito]

If he didn't think Rhino was immortal, why in Ruk's name would he have said what he did? I mean, seriously, Rhino isn't immortal above level 20. He's tough - as literally everything about him says he should be - but if you screw up you can very easily get downed.

Right now, Rhino isn't immortal. Therefore, saying "I like the idea of rhino not being immortal so I think these changes are a great idea" is meaningless because he's not immortal now.

 

I don't know, maybe it was a reference to the fact that most suggestions for Iron Skin buffs want to make Rhino invincible. Seriously. The majority of the ones I've seen are begging for the return of his duration based invincibility.

[Toom1275]

Well.   If you put a maxed Redirection on Rhino, he has 1110 shields.  That's 11 seconds of direct exposure to any amount of enemy fire before he starts taking health damage. And then you have the sentinel power Guardian, that instantly zaps your shields up to full if they fail, so now you're up to 22 seconds of wading through hell before you take any health damage.

 

If anything, 100 hp is too low of a cap. I just threw it out there for the sake of illustration. :)

Thanks for the info on redirection + rhino. Mine is still kitted out for the old Nightmare modes, where no shields + no energy was common, so I never really put a Redirection on mine, focusing more on health, armor, regen, and rage. With this comment, 100 does sound pretty reasonable, despite being arbitrary just to illustrate your point.

 

Probably most likely is what I mentioned in my previous comment, where an initial value would be chosen for the start, with tweaks to refine that number coming out in later hotfix updates depending on the (valid) complaints on the forums lead it.

[BloodArmoredApostle]

So I got my Rhino Prime. And there's kind of an issue with iron skin, I think.  The issue is that it's a magnitude based ability. At low levels, iron skin makes you invincible because nothing can do enough damage fast enough to kill you in the brief times between you having it active.  Then you go to super high level content, and iron skin lasts all of two seconds because enemies just do way too much damage to tank, and the ability becomes just a way to run through a doorway without getting knocked down.

 

So I'm trying to think of a way to make this situation better, and I would like to propose this:

 

1* Iron Skin makes you immune to knockdown, control effects, stuns, etc, all the things it currently does

 

2* It will last some duration regardless of how much damage it takes

 

3* It works by throttling or limiting incoming damage. You take damage while iron skin is active, but you can never take more than some amount. Let's say hypothetically 100 damage per second, before resistances. Any damage higher than 100 will simply be shrugged off and ignored.  This means that Rhino can still be injured and killed while he has iron skin active...eventually.  Because your rate of damage taken is limited, your survivability under fire is enormous without becoming absolute invulnerability.

 

 

Thoughts?

 

 

Well, this whole thought is rather idk...meh i feel. Good thought though. The main issue as you already mentioned is...you are trying to make it vary on levels of enemies. Why? This game is based on progression. Thus, enemy level 1-9 are supposed to be sorta easy. It is like you would like abilities not to scale. So, what would be the difference in facing different enemy levels then only to be burnt to a literal crisp on harder missions? Oh, and I guess we forgot about Tier 4 void keys possibly being released. Oh boy, just watch the forums crawl with a need to scale up abilities. Another tier of enemies, kinda want this to happen. That way, alot of threads can be rethought more.

[dasimBaa]

yea....... implement that and he is complete garbage.

[VaricBreem]

jesus  you  people alreday had Frost nerfed into the ground now your trying to make one of the only other  tanks garbage  too? why dont you target obvious frames with Godmode , Like I dunno  VALKYR  , instead of  griping  about a frame  thats defensive  ability scales  like crap  how  bout you target the frame that  IS actually Invulnerable...  You people wont be happy till everythhing is  spam  4 , Or they remove skills from the game entirely...

Edited March 23, 2014 by VaricBreem

[Toom1275]

Well, this whole thought is rather idk...meh i feel. Good thought though. The main issue as you already mentioned is...you are trying to make it vary on levels of enemies. Why? This game is based on progression. Thus, enemy level 1-9 are supposed to be sorta easy. It is like you would like abilities not to scale. So, what would be the difference in facing different enemy levels then only to be burnt to a literal crisp on harder missions? Oh, and I guess we forgot about Tier 4 void keys possibly being released. Oh boy, just watch the forums crawl with a need to scale up abilities. Another tier of enemies, kinda want this to happen. That way, alot of threads can be rethought more.

They way I read OP, he's trying to do the opposite. He never mentioned anything about making its power vary depending on enemy level.

 

The first part of the post, where he mentions IS's effectiveness varying by level, is how it CURRENTLY is - the more damage enemies can do to you, the quicker your IS evaporates.

 

His proposal is NOT

the old iron skin, where it was just invulnerability for time

the current iron skin, that only absorbs a set amount of total damage before evaporating

the first change to iron skin, that let in a damage percentage

 

His change, as I read it, is to have Iron Skin provide a flat cap on incoming damage rate. 100dps max incoming damage for level 1 enemies, 100dps max incoming damage for level 100 enemies. Isn't this exactly what it means to have powers scale well?

 

It lets lower amounts of damage come in, but when incoming damage gets too high, the excess damage gets cut off.

Timer is reinstated to go with the change.

This way, one cast of IS won't just let Rhino coast through an entire low-level mission without thought to incoming damage. While a Rhino will still barely notice the damage coming while surrounded by a bunch of low-level grineer, being able to shrug off damage depends on more his shields than IS.

With the cutoff-form, Iron Skin will be more useful into the way-high levels though, rather than turning to smoke in >5 seconds like it does now. As OP said in response to my comment, with a redirection, a 100-dps cap on incoming damage can let Rhino tank heavy fire for ~11 seconds before seeing his health drop. With current iron skin, he would be downed in less than half the time.

 

tl;dr

OP's suggestion makes IS not godmode in lower levels, while making it not worthless in high levels, unlike it is now.