Would Armor Play Better If It Behaved More Like A Health Bar?

[[DE]Momaw]

So we have enemies and warframes with "armor" that reduces incoming damage. But the damage you do/take isn't solely based on the armor, it's also affected by your flesh. So....You take a bullet and the armor only kinda-sorta protects you because you can still be on fire/bleeding/poisoned.  Kind of strange.

 

Would it make the game play a little nicer and more transparently if armor functioned more like a health or shield bar, with a specific quantity of armor present which could be depleted by attacks? So damage types which are super effective versus armor remain super effective until that enemy's armor is destroyed (blasted/melted/scoured/dissolved) and then that enemy starts taking damage to health so damage types which are good against health come to the front. It would allow for more obvious interplay between damage types and maybe even promote some diversity in our loadouts;  maybe your primary weapon is rigged with Corrosion and Radiation to obliterate armor while your secondary weapon is rigged with fire to eliminate the meat inside once exposed. Teamwork potential is obvious here.

 

If you wanted to make it more believable than requiring players to melt off all armor before the target stopped being "armored", you could instead introduce the concept of "armor coverage". A unit starts out with X points of armor that is 100% effective, but the more of it that is damaged, the higher the chance that an incoming attack will hit an area of their body where the armor is ineffective and allows that attack through to their health.  So if an enemy unit had 1000 points of armor to start, and has had 250 points of it blasted off (25%), now there is a 25% chance of attacks against them ignoring the armor (and soak and damage type modifiers) and hitting the health pool.

 

Discuss?

[ThePredicament]

Effective health just needs to be explained a bit better.

 

Also, aren't you talking about corrosive procs against the yellow bar exposing the red bar?

[Arcane_Intelligence]

Reminds me of Mass Effect 2.

[HackShield]

uhm you know the frame so your armour is a ORGANIC one like infested o.o so for sure it can burn but gives the same time protection or can be poisened... 

 

 

just say`in

[trieuazn0]

i don't quiet understand, would it be like, duration on armour where you take maybe 1/3 damage while armour has its own hp/armor shield thingy based on duration, and ones the duration runs out the armour would break??

SImiler to how Rhino's iron skin works but still taking reduced damage?

[wolf96781]

Fun Fact: Armor was never meant to totally eliminate damage. Even knights in full suits of armor still took damage from a swing, or an arrow shot. Even today we have armor to REDUCE damage caused by a bullet, very rarely does  a vest protect from penetration, and even then you'll have a few broken ribs

Edited October 1, 2014 by wolf96781

[Escantell]

Im just imagining that it would end up with endless missions where your armor is destroyed in the first five minutes and then you are pretty much screwed the rest of the mission.

Edited October 1, 2014 by Escantell

[SIDESTRE4M]

Armor scales bad,... well at least for us.

 

So personally I would be happier having my 10point armor mod impact on other frames aside vom valkyr.

 

We have shields and a health bar. Not sure we need another bar.

[Lost_Cartographer]

Maybe if armor acted as a second regenerative layer of shielding, only it mitigated, instead of cold stopped damage like shielding does.  We'll call this the armor-mesh.

 

And idea I've had about working regenerative armor into warframe, either via a specific new warframe, onto Valkyr/tank frames, or even as a shield changing mod, we that mitigation quality would be based on the amount of remaining armor-shielding.  Like at 100%, it has 2700 armor.  at 50%, 1350.  10%, 270 armor.

 

A frame with 15 "armor" would have 2700 armor, but for essentially only one shot, while a frame with 65 might get away with mitigating a few shots.

 

It works like this:

 

100 health

100 armor-mesh (100 = 100%)

100% armor-mesh = 2700 armor as we know it now.

 

A player takes a 100 damage round.

 

That 100 damage is mitigated by the armor-mesh's 2700 armor, totaling about 10 damage after mitigation.  The armor-mesh and health take 10 damage.  The armor mesh is now at 90 points (90% of 2700 is 2430 armor.)

 

The next 100 damage round will do 11 damage then.  And the next one 12 points, because at 79 shielding, it's only 2133 effective armor.

 

More armor = better long term mitigation.  Less armor = shorter long term mitigation.  In both scenarios, even 1 lousy point of armor out of a max of 1 lousy point of armor still equals 2700 effective armor, but only for that ONE hit it can take before requiring regeneration.  Finally, steel fiber and armor buff abilities do not effect the effective armor, just the armor-mesh quantity.

 

My only gripe with this is that it works in an initial burst, but under long term fire, which our current tank frames are intended to endure, they go from very tanky to incredibly squishy if they don't work in a period of recovery between skirmishes, which is why I'd prefer this to be an alternate take on shielding than outright replace armor.  Another thing to consider: it might be more fun to fight Grineer using this type of regenerative armor as opposed to just flat out mitigation.

 

In an actual shielding replacement scenario, the formula for damage would be damage -> armor mesh -> mitigated damage to armor mesh -> mitigated damage -> health armor -> further mitigated damage to health.  So a frame would have their armor-mesh in place of a shield, which takes damage after it mitigates it, then sends a copy of that damage on to health, which is further mitigated by the frame's innate armor.  All in all, the idea is that this armor-mesh makes frames more durable than those with plain shielding, but frames with the armor-mesh will constantly need healing between skirmishes, since they can't rely on a regenerative hard while to keep their health safe.  It's a difference between burst durability and sustained durability.

[xkillo32]

Effective health just needs to be explained a bit better.

 

Also, aren't you talking about corrosive procs against the yellow bar exposing the red bar?

except corrosive can never make armor 0

it acts like this:

75%-56.25-42.1875-31.640625 and so on

only corrosive projection stacks additively.

[shut]

The first part of your post basically sounds identical to the Shields system under a new name (and new color for the health bar). It's because of this similarity that armor is a multiplier, not a health bar.

 

I think that it would be pretty cool if armored enemies (specifically Grineer) had different armor values applied on different body parts. So, of course, the faces would be the most vulnerable (0 armor if no mask is being worn), while the torso would be easier to hit but more heavily protected.

It would also be cool if the armor (as you suggested in the OP) sort of depleted as it took damage-- except by each individual body part's armor value, rather than the entire enemy at once. (So if you shot a Heavy Gunner in the chest enough times and it happened to survive, its chest-armor value would be very close to zero while the armor on the arms, thighs, and face remains unaffected).

[Spacetimer]

except corrosive can never make armor 0

it acts like this:

75%-56.25-42.1875-31.640625 and so on

only corrosive projection stacks additively.

 

It can bring it below 0.5 though, at which point the game treats it as 0. Takes a while but it happens.

 

On a related note, what if armor reduction didn't converge to 100%, but something like 75%?

[Tyreuzs]

that's indeed a great idea.. :D!