Have I Missed Something Or Is Armor Worthless?

[wgrant]

Armour is inherently more useful than health because health refills are constant. A health orb refills 25 or 50 hit points. If you take 50 damage that's refilled by 1 health orb but if you take 100 damage you'll need two health orbs to be able to take another one of those hits.

 

For this reason, armour is balanced out to be less effective than health assuming no health refills are dropped at all.

 

This is not saying that vitality is not currently better than steel fiber, that depends a lot on just how abundant sources of health regeneration are, but it is a factor I have not seen you consider one bit.

 

that means each red orb restores more % of your HP.

 

It seems that I did miss something. While I can't exactly crunch numbers around random drops it is a consideration that hadn't occurred to me. 

 

Though thinking about it the counterargument is that, using the current mods and the attainable damage reduction, having a lower total hit point total leaves you more likely to be one-shot meaning you can't look for red orbs anyway and of course the fact that armor could potentially be pierced (I don't know if anything enemies do is armor piercing currently... does poison damage get reduced by armor?).  Not sure I agree with "inherently more useful" as a blanket statement but that's just my opinion.

 

Frost/rhino are defensive in abilities, you get ripped to shreds pretty quickly if you stand still in the open no matter what your ehp is.

 

When i first read the thread and looked at the chart, I admit, my 2 warframes, frost and rhino, which I was lead to believe were the tankiest are fighting for 3rd place.  I felt really gypped to know that those two warframes who were designed to be tanky/tanks (as far as I was informed) are not.

 

The post script about Saryn/Ash vs. Frost/Rhino was more of a joke.  Frost/Rhino are tanks not because of innate effective life, but because of active abilities.  While they will take more damage than the caster and stealth guy that is only true until they start casting abilities that ignore damage and then they get really tanky really fast.

 

 

 

There is a big flaw.

You can use BOTH mods at the same time.

So vitality vs Steelfiber is quite useless.

 

The main question is: Is Steelfiber worth using.

And the answere to that is easy.

Doing it without math: If u have enough base armor, yes it is :)

 

 Not sure if troll?

 

I know you can take both... I ran those numbers, presented them, and talked about the effect.  It is the third and bottom case in the table.

 

So as far as I can figure your argument for Steel Fiber is... "Math is dumb and it's better because yes!"  You sir have hurt my brain and my faith in humanity, I earnestly hope you are a troll.

[Zinn]

Steel Fiber has been useless ever since the game began. The only time they DID make it useful, it turned out to be so powerful that nobody bothered with shields at all (this was back in closed beta with skill trees and mod stacking). Basically, a decent armor meant that you'd just stack a mountain of vitality so you'd be permanently immune to everything in the game, rather than stack shield and be temporarily immune to most things and be careful around toxics. They dropped it just as quickly as they did percentage-based shields (glorious 20.000+ shields - Did I mention that stacking is OP?).

 

They should honestly just drop the armor entirely, IMO.

[Brane_Ded]

The really silly aspect of the current system is that every frame should take vitality, even Loki & Mag. (unless you like dying to poison a lot)

 

Equally every frame should take redirection, regardless of their base shield.

 

It really stifles build diversity when 2 of your not-ability mod slots are already predetermined. (4 if you assume flow & streamline)

 

Agreed if you have a tough time avoiding poison.   Remember that poison damage ignores armor, even base armor.  So the Vitality mod is far more useful than the Steel Fiber mod.

[Buddlschlumpf]

Actually, with most frames, you can entirely skip vitality. 300-450 HP is more than enough for the little poison damage you might receive. At a certain point, you don't receive any at all anymore (unless you are greedy or leveling up crap weapons).

[FluffyBunnySlippers]

As mentioned by a previous poster high armour makes health orbs more efficient at healing a percentage level of damage. Given health orbs are not reliable or constant how about Rejuvenation/ Trinity (assuming there is one in your group) or purchased health packs?

 

I'd guess that in any case where there is a reasonably reliable source of healing( or absolutely reliable in rejuvenation's case) high armour would increase the efficiency of those healing sources. As long as you had enough hitpoints to survive any predictable one-shotting, greater healing efficiency would be beneficial in the long run surely?

 

Personally I run solo a lot, so I'm not sure how reliable the healing from a Trinity actually is. Maybe it's not that good at the moment to make investing in high armour worthwhile. If/ when the position of team healer becomes more important/ viable you'll find more people investing in armour.

[Guest]

so steel fiber is more or less useless right now then?

 

more space for other mods i guess then

[ASH_PRIME]

The really silly aspect of the current system is that every frame should take vitality, even Loki & Mag. (unless you like dying to poison a lot)

 

Equally every frame should take redirection, regardless of their base shield.

 

It really stifles build diversity when 2 of your not-ability mod slots are already predetermined. (4 if you assume flow & streamline)

Very important statement IMO, main way around this is we need MORE of the V and -- Warframe mod cards! 

currently only TWO V warframe mods is really limiting, and continuity is literally useless for some Warframes

[OnlyUseMeGunAndBlade]

BTW, I played with Mag since the beginning of the game, and I swear that his base armor is 150 at level 1, so correct me if there is some kind of tweak or twirk changing Mag's armor at lvl 1

[SolluxCaptorTA]

"His"?

 

You sure you played Mag?

 

And not sure how much use Trinity is related to armor, since her big healing move, Bless, is a full heal.

[timster7]

(Disclaimer: All stats and equations are from warframe.wikia.com)

 

The first time I found a Steel Fiber mod I thought “Wait, I can increase my hit points AND  my damage reduction? I wonder how they balanced that”.  Well as far as I can tell they didn’t.

 

So to talk about damage reduction and hit points at the same time you need to understand effective life.  If you don’t know what that means lets go through an example made up of two cases:

Case 1: You have 100 hit points and 50% damage reduction.  You are about to take 100 damage.  Now that damage is reduced by 50% so you only take 50 out of your 100 hit points, you have lost half (50%) of your effective life.

Case 2: You have 200 hit points and 0% damage reduction.  You are about to take 100 damage. Now that damage is not reduced, you take 100 out of your 200 hit points, you have lost half (50%) of your effective life.

 

Using effective life, there is no difference between halving damage or doubling your hit points.

 

Using this principle I threw together a table of every warframe (at level 30) comparing their effective life with, maxed Vitality and no Steel Fiber, no Vitality and maxed Steel Fiber, and maxed Vitality and maxed Steel Fiber.  The results can be seen below.

 

 

Looking at the table you will see that you lose almost twice as much effective life if you are built with Steel Fiber versus being built with Vitality…  So building 14 points of Steel Fiber gets you twice as hurt as if you built 12 points of Vitality?  That doesn’t seem right.  On top of that stacking Steel Fiber on top of Vitality only cuts your damage around 5% of your max hit points, so stacking them isn’t even viable…

 

Have I missed something or is there just no value in Steel Fiber past fusing it to level up your Vitality mod.

 

 

P.S.  You will also notice that Saryn always takes the least damage and Vitality-built-Ash takes the second least.  So Saryn is the tankiest and Vitality-built-Ash is the second... but good effort Frost/Rhino, good effort.

OOO I love spreadsheet math I like the time you put on this. If You made a point I would take your decision and saying buff steel fiber mods if that is what you are looking for. 

 

I don't understand where you guys got the numbers from natural hp from different numbers on  top of the chart of base HP.

But lets say You forgot to add something like the ability that rhinos has at there disposal which is iron skin and if that ability stacks with steel fiber. Would that change the numbers you will be looking at ?

 

*Mumbles* I think someone is trying to slip the frost and rhino some steroid in the competition of tanking.* Mumbles* 

[SolluxCaptorTA]

Iron Skin is total invincibility.

[timster7]

Honestly to debate this topic is to watch a couple events happen in the future and that is buffing the 2 warframe to titan status, and nerfing them again for being to over power in str. All the warframe are balance  and the Rhinos doesn't have a crowd control ability unless it would like to swap out with my loki's  Decoy,. and even so if they did change it that would just mean weaker shield. 

 

Plus Ash is suppose to be a rare set vs the Rhino and I can't even find any mod cards for ability 2-4 because they just don't drop at all.

[Brane_Ded]

Actually, with most frames, you can entirely skip vitality. 300-450 HP is more than enough for the little poison damage you might receive. At a certain point, you don't receive any at all anymore (unless you are greedy or leveling up crap weapons).

 

Tell that to the level 100+ Toxics, they will kill any base hp frame in 3 seconds flat if they don't have an invincibility ability running.  If you want to know how much damage a toxic's cloud will tick every second, it's approximately equal to the Toxic's level, i.e. level 50 is ~50 per tick, 100 is ~100 per tick, etc... entirely through armor and straight to hp.

[Davoodoo]

Tell that to the level 100+ Toxics, they will kill any base hp frame in 3 seconds flat if they don't have an invincibility ability running.  If you want to know how much damage a toxic's cloud will tick every second, it's approximately equal to the Toxic's level, i.e. level 50 is ~50 per tick, 100 is ~100 per tick, etc... entirely through armor and straight to hp.

Never seen anyone dying from living toxic ancient. Yet i seen many dying trying to pick up loot. If you can get to 30 wave on defense you should already know that hugging them isnt good idea.

[Buddlschlumpf]

Tell that to the level 100+ Toxics, they will kill any base hp frame in 3 seconds flat if they don't have an invincibility ability running.  If you want to know how much damage a toxic's cloud will tick every second, it's approximately equal to the Toxic's level, i.e. level 50 is ~50 per tick, 100 is ~100 per tick, etc... entirely through armor and straight to hp.

Then don't get hugged by them. And playing against lvl100 toxics is pointless. They take ages to kill, give only little more XP than lower level ones doe and they dont drop better loot.

 

But if you get up to lvl100 ancients, you shouldn't have any problems not getting hit by the toxic cloud at all.

 

And aside from the (pretty irrelevant) case of high level defense mission ancients, you don't need vitality.

[Brane_Ded]

The point of killing high level Toxics is not for the loot/xp, it's the challenge.  I set up a series of charts to record defense waves one by one to determine the best loot drops for the effort/time and everything peaks by wave 15 and does off significantly after that.  The only reason to push past wave 15 is to see how far you can go before you lose because it's inefficient for both loot and xp to go beyond wave 15.

 

The only ways I've seen players die, who aren't playing stupid, to high level Toxics is from being knocked into their clouds or Rhinos/Trinitys being just a click too slow on their invincibilities while going melee crazy.  By the time the Toxics reach level 150, they will kill any player not using Vitality in 2 ticks.

 

Tangents aside, Vitality is still much more useful than Steel Fiber if only one or the other can be selected.

[Tetsmeha]

Jebus.... folks are doing spreadsheets for a video game...

I hope you guys have the same dedication at work or school.

 

Oh wow this is the first post to a good thread and it's extremely embarrassing to even read.

 

Good job OP on the info though. It's definitely great that some people decide to find what's most efficient even though the devs are lacking in giving us some numbers.

[Namacyst]

Agreed if you have a tough time avoiding poison.   Remember that poison damage ignores armor, even base armor.  So the Vitality mod is far more useful than the Steel Fiber mod.

 This... and the fact that with a Sentinel and proper playstyle your health is ONLY touched by poison... that's why i don't play Rhino anymore... no need for Iron Skin because now every Warframe can be immortal all the time.

[BETAOPTICS]

Does Steel Fiber affect shileds and if it does, how much it does?

What I find rather odd is that how useless Steel Fiber is and it is more rare than Vitality and that Frost and Rhino aren't tankiest ones even when Rhino is designed to be a tank though his abilities help a bit. Also Trinity seems surprisingly weak but then again she can heal all the time so maybe it is for balance reasons. Then there is Ash, a super warframe on paper. A damage dealer who can be still tank and on paper has almost no weaknesses but then again they are all balanced if you have even a slight clue how to play with that certain style.

[Dawnseeker_Ch]

Steel fiber so far has not been known to affect shields, only health damage.  That's part of the reason why after realizing this i'm frustrated that I rushed to get frost and rhino as my first warframes (outside of excalibur my starter) to make and now the tank role I want to play has its most tanky aspect nearly worthless.  I don't want to be invincible, like others have said you still need to play smart, but if someone on my group is downed, its going to be me who stands in the middle of fire if need be in order to res them precisely because i'm tankier.  this made it such a moot point i'm very disappointed in armor. 

[Belpharon]

Is it just me - or is this a good point? 

 

Except for when you face something that bypasses shield and armor like say a Toxic Ancient,

[Belpharon]

Steel fiber so far has not been known to affect shields, only health damage.  That's part of the reason why after realizing this i'm frustrated that I rushed to get frost and rhino as my first warframes (outside of excalibur my starter) to make and now the tank role I want to play has its most tanky aspect nearly worthless.  I don't want to be invincible, like others have said you still need to play smart, but if someone on my group is downed, its going to be me who stands in the middle of fire if need be in order to res them precisely because i'm tankier.  this made it such a moot point i'm very disappointed in armor. 

 

You have 15 seconds of complete invulnerability in a Rhino + the ability to have huge amounts of shield and health.  Frost has Snow Globe which prevents all fire and slows down anything close to a crawl.  Those are your suvivabilty tools.  Armor is just icing on the cake that gives you a few more seconds of like when you need it. 

 

I guess I don't see a major problem with 5-10% more damage reduction once 1000+ shields are gone than other frames because you maxed armor.

[Renan.Ruivo]

Jebus.... folks are doing spreadsheets for a video game...

I hope you guys have the same dedication at work or school.

 

www.eveonline.com

 

Come on Mak, don't be such a noob about the internets. It's not like EVE has been here for three months.

[Mak_Gohae]

www.eveonline.com

 

Come on Mak, don't be such a noob about the internets. It's not like EVE has been here for three months.

 

Businessman: The Game is slightly different than IMA SPACE NINJAAAAAA!

[Renan.Ruivo]

Businessman: The Game is slightly different than IMA SPACE NINJAAAAAA!

 

Well, yeah.. but there's a lot of people from there playing Warframe (including yours truly as you might know), and the spreadsheet thing is not easely forgotten.