Armor 2.0

[[DE]Momaw]

1. Why current armor is terrible

>> 1.0 Armor doesn't make sense

Enemies with armor on them receive multiplied damage from damage types their armor is vulnerable to, but this damage is not capped at "unmodified"....the end result is that lightly armored units (players included!) take more damage from being armored, than they would if they were not armored at all.  Armor is literally worse than useless unless you have several hundred points of it.

>> 1.1 Armor value scales

On other end, heavy armor is just as problematic. An enemy with armor has a base armor value, which scales based on their level. Hitpoints also scale based on level. A unit's actual health value, divided by the damage reduction value from their armor, gives their "effective hit points". The effective hit points of a heavily armored unit is a much sharper exponential rise than units that do not have armor, because high level armored enemies may take 10% or less of nominal damage from your attacks on top of their already-exponential health.  Fighting such enemies, there is literally nothing else that matters to your team's damage value as much as negating, reducing, or bypassing the armor you are facing.

>> 1.2 Current armor mitigation strategies are not even remotely equal

Presently there are broadly 4 ways to deal with armor.

1. Corrosion status procs can permanently reduce an enemy's armor by 25% each time the status is triggered.  This is a slow and methodical way to remove armor from a single target at a time, and requires a weapon with both high rate of fire and high status chance because corrosion is only truly effective after several stacks of the debuff are applied. It also doesn't work on enemies that cannot take status procs.
2. Bleed status bypasses armor entirely. In order to really be useful this requires weapons with high status chance, a high proportion of slash damage, and ideally strong critical performance (because the bleed magnitude multiplies by crits but does not consider any other damage mods). Thus only a handful of weapons can really leverage this.
3. Strip armor using warframe powers. Obviously limited to the specific warframes that have these powers, and the specific builds that make these powers function well.
4. And lastly, Corrosive Projection. A team fully equipped with this aura makes enemies not be armored anymore, which negates ALL damage reduction and also leaves the team free to mod their weapons to damage types that are strong versus the now-exposed flesh type.  The difference between a team fighting a level 100 grineer heavy without corrosive projection, versus one using corrosive projection and slash+viral weaponry, is a factor of over 10.

Corrosion is slow and clumsy, bypassing with bleed limits your weaponry options to nearly nothing, and armor reduction by frame powers requires specialist builds and are limited in how many enemies can be affected and for how much energy...  Corrosive Projection affects all enemies, immediately, totally, without cost, without effort, and is not only a protection debuff but an implicit damage amplifier. The obvious superiority of Corrosive Projection leads to it being the only real choice for a team that plans to fight high level armored enemies, and lack of choice is boring and frustrating: When there is an objectively best pick, you can't use the aura you want to use for your build and gameplay style.

2. What it should be instead

>> 1.0 Armor doesn't scale

Each enemy unit is assigned an armor rating based on their type and role:

• Rushers, skirmishers: 30% armor
• Grunts: 50% armor
• Heavies: 70% armor
• Eximus units: +20% armor

These values are the same no matter what level the enemy is. Their health points continue to scale exponentially based on level.

>> 1.1 Damage types have bypass rather than multipliers

Instead of taking "more damage" from elements that the armor is weak against, damage vulnerabilities should manifest as bypass values that simply ignore some amount of the armor instead.

• Slash: 0% bypass
• Impact: 10% bypass
• Puncture: 20% bypass
• Radiation: 25% bypass
• etc

These directly modify the damage reduction values of the target. E.g. if you are shooting at a heavy gunner with a 70% armor value, with a Boltor (high Puncture damage), then your Puncture-based damage value is only reduced by 50% because it simply ignores the first 20% of the target's armor.

>> 1.2 The role of Corrosion

Corrosion changed to a status effect that has a brief 2 second duration, and does not stack. Instead: If a target is Corroded, bypass values of attacks against that target are doubled. So, if the heavy gunner from the previous example is Corroded, the Puncture damage bypass value is doubled to 40%, meaning that the heavy gunner's armor only blocks 30% of the attack. This provides immediate, real benefits for a far greater variety of weapons with Corrosion modded onto them, as opposed to the current state of affairs where Corrosion is really only useful for weapons that can rapidly stack multiple instances of Corrosion on a target.

>> 1.3 Enemy armor degrades under fire

To simulate the effects of a barrage of gunfire and to make the situation somewhat more tenable for less than ideal weapon mod loadouts, the enemy's armor value is degraded linearly from 0% at maximum health, to 50% of their starting value at zero health. This can result in especially durable enemies starting out being almost impervious to your attacks, and slowly, tangibly becoming more vulnerable as their health is depleted i.e. as their armor is battered and smashed by your attacks.

>> 1.4 The role of Corrosive Projection

Rather than universally degrading all enemy armor immediately and without cost, Corrosive Projection extends the duration of Corroded status effects on enemies by +50% per instance of CP in the squad. This means a full squad of 4 players with CP will extend the duration of Corroded status by +200% i.e. 6 seconds per proc. This would basically ensure, for most kind of weapons, that targets under fire are constantly suffering from Corroded status and taking vastly increased damage without completely removing their armor or completely changing the target's material type into a more vulnerable configuration.

 

3. In the end...

The goal is to make armored enemies more sensibly and more interactively "armored", to make a wider variety of weaponry viable against armored enemies when modded appropriately, to remove the incredibly easy methods that exist to completely remove armor as a gameplay mechanic, and to make armor more fair to players at higher levels by removing the double-exponential scaling.

Edited June 3, 2016 by Momaw

[Aktriaz]

+1
Occam's Razor should reign supreme.

I have no idea why DE insists on over complicating mechanics that could be so simple and comprehensible.

[YasaiTsume]

Part I don't like:

Wasn't this the entire concept of Armor Ignore from the first version of Armor in Warframe?

It made Armor Ignore Mods (Puncture now) totally broken and wrestle every other damage type out of the game, because Armor Ignore was really huge when dealing with all matter of Armored targets.


If this change were to implemented, other damage types would be kicked off the board again with Puncture already being king, as the only Damage type best standing because it is the best damage type from the IPS category.

(By extension, no longer viable to build Slash and Corrosive together because Slash bypass as yu suggested was 0%, RIP most melee weapons) 

 

Now the good parts that I like : 
I like the idea of peppering enemies to chip off their armor. Very nice idea.
 

Am sure yur able to refine it over time. 

Edited April 18, 2016 by YasaiTsume

[PikeOrShield]

56 minutes ago, Momaw said:

These values are the same no matter what level the enemy is. Their health points continue to scale exponentially based on level.

Yes please.  Infinite scaling armor is the only reason x4 CP is so popular.  If your changes were to happen, I would even be okay with the change to Corrosive Projection you proposed since it will become far less necessary and more optional.  I could finally use an aura other than CP without feeling the hurt in endgame.

Your changes make it a lot simpler which is a great thing, however, I think some the changes to corrosive still favor high rate of fire weapons.  Higher fire rate weapons could take advantage of the momentary corrosive proc more often than slower weapons.  This would be fine though if slower weapons had a better status chance and the corrosive effect was applied to the damage of the bullet that triggered it (ex: a sniper fires bullet A and bullet A procs corrosive.  Bullet A gets the full benefit of the corrosive proc.)

Edited April 18, 2016 by PikeOrShield
Added the second paragraph

[recounted]

nice idea 

[voltocitygel]

Interesting, but I see a few points that stand out.

Eliminating armor scaling: yes. Yes yes yes. Naturally the base armor of most units would have to be a bit stronger than they are now, but it's an excellent idea.

corrosive proc changes: I like corrosive proc the way it is, however the one change I can suggest is it working like actual corrosion: working over time. It could eliminate a set % of the enemies armor per second, indefinitely. Probably something close to 10 or 20%, so it would take 5 - 10 seconds to strip an enemy of their armor completely. 

[Serialkillerwhale]

We don't want a single element being the "best".

Back in 1.0, there was a element called "Serrated Blade"

This damage ignored armor, meaning just about everyone stacked it to kingdom come.

 

Don't bring back certain types of damage being flat-out better than others.

 

To be honest, the solution is just to remove armor scaling with level.

Edited April 22, 2016 by Serialkillerwhale

[taiiat]

but for good reasons.

 

Status being a fixed result for the most part is part of the problem. a Sniper Rifle and a Machine Pistol do the same thing when they trigger most Status Effects.
we can do something about that. it's not unreasonable for say, a Corrosive Status on a Sniper Rifle to be 3-4x as powerful as the Machine Pistol, for example.

while it doesn't quite succeed, DoT Status Effects do achieve this technically, as it applies a Percentage of the Weapons' Damage value as the DoT. so that means a stronger Weapon applies a stronger DoT, Et Cetera.

the reason why i don't really approve of Armor being a Multiplier for EHP, is that it's asking for trouble. but it's also inconsistent with the rest of the game. Shields are a separate Health Type, why isn't Armor? it would be more consistent.
and would mean Shields would benefit Enemies that have Armor more infact, because then they'd have 3 Health Bars, rather than a small one and a huge one.

you did note that you'd be able to Damage Armor, which does help. but we've basically created two different ways of representing the same thing, but weighted differently. my side means you primarily batter the Armor first, while yours means you primarily hit the Health but the Armor degrades.
personally i like my side better, where the Armor is a Health Type of it's own, and each shot Damages the Armor, and then a reduced percentage of that Damage is allowed to hit the Health. i just think it represents better. it also makes Armor the most similar to Shields of the two.

 

i don't mind that Corrosive Status stacks. Status being able to stack means Status Chance matters more than 'just have some'.
more Status Effects should stack, honestly. because that would let both bullet hoses and cannons be good at Status. the cannon applies one really powerful Status, the bullet hose applies many weaker ones.
hell, in that regard, why doesn't every Status Effect stack. such as Radiation. bullet hose confuses for like 1-2sec, cannon confuses for like 10-11sec. bullet hose can apply it more often, cannon gets more out of each instance.

Corrosive Projection extending Corrosive Status, sure. but i'd then just say make Corrosive Status as it works currently, have a limited duration. working the same as any DoT basically, independant timers for each instance. larger Corrosive Status having longer default duration ofcourse.
or, perhaps Corrosive Projection could even be multi-purpose like some Drift Mods, increasing the effectiveness of all Corrosive Status, AND making them last a bit longer.

On 4/22/2016 at 11:07 AM, Serialkillerwhale said:

Back in 1.0, there was a element called "Serrated Blade"

This damage ignored armor, meaning just about everyone stacked it to kingdom come.

it was actually a tossup between Armor Piercing and Serrated Blade. since most people played Infested Defense all day, Serrated Blade was preferred. but Armor Piercing was technically better.
even despite the -50% to Light Infested, my Despair still oneshot Light Infested up to like, Lv400 back in those days. so Serrated Blade? IDGAF.

meanwhile, Armor Piercing Ignored Armor, while ALSO having a 50% Damage Bonus to all Grineer Units except Grineer Commander. the most heavily Armored Faction in the game, and ignoring their Armor with Bonus Damage on top!

but technically any of the 4 Damage Types (Serr. Blade, Poison, Physics Impact(except for Seeker/Commander), Armor Piercing) that Ignored Armor were good, since Ignoring the Armor was the most important part.
and then slapping on Electricty because it fared better than all other Eleemntal Damage Types vs Armor (averaged higher Damage), and an Unranked Ice Mod for the slow.

Edited June 24, 2016 by taiiat