A Possible New Kind of Armor

[Teridax68]

Yay, another armor thread. It's no secret that armor's causing a few issues in the game:

• Its status as a multiplier makes enemy durability shoot up way too hard at high levels: This is the main issue that gets brought up whenever the subject is raised. Because armor multiplies health, if you make both scale linearly, you end up making effective health (i.e. total amount of raw damage before death) scale quadratically, which at high levels (e.g. 80+) makes armored enemies so excessively resilient that corrosive effects far exceed most other kinds of damage. Technically, this could be solved by making armor a constant at all levels and changing health scaling accordingly (which would benefit flat armor removal such as Mag's new Polarize and Shattering Impact), but...
• Armor is difficult to appreciate directly: At a glance, even though you can usually tell whether or not a target has armor, you can't exactly tell how much armor they have. For enemies, this usually translates to shots dealing variable amounts of damage, e.g. 1K damage versus Lancers but only 200 versus Bombards, and for players this means the difference between a 100-health Valkyr, who can still hold up to a lot of punishment, and a 100-health Banshee, who'll keel over at the next passing sneeze. Basically, armor means you can't really get a great read just by looking at a health bar, because the value indicated will always be different from effective health, which is the real number you'd be wanting to look at. A potential solution could be to just make health bars list effective health, i.e. health * armor / 300, rather than just health, which would also allow all damage to be listed uniformly, but...
• Armor has no unique function of its own: All in all, armor exists to justify Puncture and Corrosive damage, as well as give Grineer a health type different from the Infested and Corpus (even though a fair amount of Corpus units have armor now), but really, armor right now is basically identical to health. Shields at least differ by working as an easily damaged, quickly regenerating buffer between your more permanent health resource and most encounters, but armor only really comes into play once a target takes health damage, whereupon it mitigates all incoming non-Finisher damage in the same way health mitigates the amount of damage taken before death. Armor is basically another health stat with less clear or direct interactions, and so needs a proper niche.

While Damage 3.0. might change the way damage and armor works, and therefore affect the above issues, the solution I'd propose, and the TL;DR to this, is: make armor a third health bar that stops physical damage, and physical damage only, after shields. Constructing this armor bar could be as simple as taking armor-generated health (i.e. the additional effective health generated by the armor multiplier) and sticking the number as a yellow health bar on all units with armor: in the above cases of Valkyr and Banshee, for example, Valkyr would have a base of 200 to 600 "armor" (100 * 600 / 300 to 300 * 600 / 300), and Banshee would have a base of 5 to 15 "armor" (100 * 15 / 300 to 300 * 15 / 300), with both having the same base 100 to 300 health. This, obviously, might raise some questions:

• How does this change gameplay? In general terms, this would mean fighting Grineer could call for either Puncture damage, which should still deal bonus damage against armor, much like Impact damage is more effective against shields and Slash against raw health (so each damage type would be assigned its own health bar), or any kind of non-physical damage, which would bypass armor completely. Technically this would make the Tonkor even stronger against Grineer with its primary Blast damage, but let's face it, the Tonkor's problems need to be resolved by changing the Tonkor. Just as Magnetic procs reduce shields and Viral procs reduce health, Corrosive procs would still reduce armor, but this time it would be a visible effect on its own health bar, and generally ability-based burst would be more likely to burst down armored enemies at higher levels (Ember could climb up a few levels in effectiveness, for example). 
• How does this change our warframes, especially armor-based frames? By itself, a change like this would technically be a nerf across the board, since suddenly all frames would no longer have their armor protect them against elemental damage, so that might call for buffs to health and whatnot. For armor-based frames specifically, though, this would make them focused on physical damage resistance, and while there may not be a strong separation right now, that would mean a niche separate from shield-based frames, who tend to be more vulnerable to burst but much better at recovery, and health-based frames (I guess Inaros, Oberon and Saryn kinda count?), which have all-purpose durability at a cost in ability dependence when trying to regenerate lost health. Valkyr technically works by healing her lost health, but that could also be extended to regenerating her armor.
• How would you regenerate armor in missions? There are probably several ways to approach this. The most basic would be to make health pickups also regenerate a portion of armor, as they technically do now (effective health restored is multiplied by armor). A different, more interesting solution could be to make enemies drop armor relatively frequently, which you could then pick up to restore your own: it would make thematic sense, while also encouraging riskier, action-based sustain, as opposed to scrounging for health drops or waiting behind cover to regenerate shields, and could also give melee combat some love. There's also the question of whether armor should regenerate on its own: I personally believe all resources should have some level of baseline regeneration in order to not completely break flow in-between rooms when low, and here the order of regeneration from strongest to weakest should be shields/armor/health, but honestly that's its own debate.
• Wouldn't this make Toxin and Slash procs identical? ... kinda, to some extent. A one-to-one translation would be to make Toxin bypass shields but still start by affecting armor, which would create a clearer difference between all three damage over time effects (Fire ignores nothing, Toxin ignores shields, and Finishing damage goes directly to health, ignoring shields and armor), but really, elemental effects might need a redo with Damage 3.0 as there's a fair amount of overlap, and an occasional lack of clarity.
• What about mods and scaling? Considering Steel Fiber's maximum armor bonus is +110%, whereas Redirection and Vitality both grant a +440% bonus to shields and health, respectively, armor bonuses should just be increased to match the bonuses of their health/shield counterparts, so Steel Fiber's potency should be quadrupled (and, similarly, Armored Agility could have its armor bonus increased to +120% to match Vigor). Each warframe's armor value should triple from level 0 to 30, to match the other two, and you could easily alternate between the three with each level up (so every level 3x+1 would increase health, 3x+2 would increase shields and 3x would increase armor). The formula for enemy armor scaling should also change a bit, but the end result should be an increase in armor to match increases in health and shields, which would make a significant difference at high levels. As for abilities that either scale with armor or increase it, the above translation would lead to similar, if not identical armor values, and so abilities would only need to factor in greater increases through a buffed Steel Fiber.

What are your thoughts on this? How do you think this would affect gameplay and enemy scaling? Would you like to see a third/second health bar on enemies and yourself?

[o.0-]

The main thing that you bring up, that should be done, is to cap the damage reduction value. Maybe set that for enemies at 75% or 80% no matter how high health and armor scales for them, basically allowing 20% to 25% of our damage to still be effective against scaling enemies.

As for a second layer, for Corpus, I'd like to see them have their own variant, which could be a Ceramic Polymer layer. That way Grineer keep their Ferrite and Alloy unique to them.

It would function like a second health after shields and not have any Damage Reduction properties (but still be affected by Armor Class Modifiers), and be displayed RED-YELLOW-BLUE when applied to a Corpus unit. So the other benefit is that the Corpus would have their own armor type that does not share properties of Grineer Ferrite or Alloy Armors.

 

 

It would also be nice to at least see our Effective Health display in the Arsenal - Abilities tab.

 

As for Mod values, such as Vitality and Steel Fiber, I've been wondering if instead having them scale to enemy level could work to sustain relative effectiveness to the enemy. So against Enemies Level 1 to 5, Mods are Rank 0 to 1. Then the mods scale up to their max unlocked rank (so it will still be important to level Mods to Full Rank to reach tougher content). So full Mod strength could be set to Level 100 for example and cap there (so we still get endless missions enemies can still go beyond that). And of course enemies would need tweaks to how they spawn and scale relative to this sort of new framework, with adjusting Armor Damage Reduction being at the top of the list.

[Teridax68]

34 minutes ago, SPARTAN-187.Thanatos said:

The main thing that you bring up, that should be done, is to cap the damage reduction value. Maybe set that for enemies at 75% or 80% no matter how high health and armor scales for them, basically allowing 20% to 25% of our damage to still be effective against scaling enemies.

Fair enough, though my point is also that damage reduction in itself doesn't really need to be a thing, at least not for enemies. Whenever the game lists an armor bonus for enemies, that basically just translates to additional health, plus an increased need for Corrosive Projection. The main difference between damage reduction and a larger health bar is that shooting enemies with high armor just feels really unsatisfying due to how little damage you end up dealing.

34 minutes ago, SPARTAN-187.Thanatos said:

As for a second layer, for Corpus, I'd like to see them have their own variant, which could be a Ceramic Polymer layer. That way Grineer keep their Ferrite and Alloy unique to them.

It would function like a second health after shields and not have any Damage Reduction properties (but still be affected by Armor Class Modifiers), and be displayed RED-YELLOW-BLUE when applied to a Corpus unit. So the other benefit is that the Corpus would have their own armor type that does not share properties of Grineer Ferrite or Alloy Armors.

I personally believe it might be better to just keep things simple and have Corpus be the shield dudes, in contrast to Grineer being the armor dudes and the Infested the health... things, but seeing how there are already armored Corpus units, it might be interesting to have a few more bullet-resistant enemies there too. I'm personally not that big a fan of specific armor/health class modifiers, as it makes for a lot of book-keeping and not the most intuitive gameplay, but in practical terms it would be a great way to encourage players to use more damage types versus certain factions (Gas damage could be made more useful on non-Infested units, assuming the damage type doesn't get canned with Damage 3.0).

34 minutes ago, SPARTAN-187.Thanatos said:

As for Mod values, such as Vitality and Steel Fiber, I've been wondering if instead having them scale to enemy level could work to sustain relative effectiveness to the enemy. So against Enemies Level 1 to 5, Mods are Rank 0 to 1. Then the mods scale up to their max unlocked rank (so it will still be important to level Mods to Full Rank to reach tougher content). So full Mod strength could be set to Level 100 for example and cap there (so we still get endless missions enemies can still go beyond that). And of course enemies would need tweaks to how they spawn and scale relative to this sort of new framework, with adjusting Armor Damage Reduction being at the top of the list.

That sounds pretty interesting, provided there's a cap to mod scaling for players (which I imagine would just be rank 10 for Redirection/Steel Fiber/Vitality). I completely agree that one of the biggest problems right now isn't just that scaling makes enemies too strong (or, at least, strong in the wrong ways) at high levels, but also that player scaling turns low-level enemies into complete pushovers, and completely removes the tension to far too many missions. I feel there might kind of be a chicken-and-egg problem somewhere here, in that both player and enemy scaling are propped up against each other, and matching scaling numbers completely would create this kind of zero-sum effect where you'd deal and take exactly the same relative amount of damage despite growing in power, but if that's what lets players feel like they're making themselves more powerful while still having the game provide more of a challenge, I'm all for it.

Edited June 25, 2016 by Teridax68

[o.0-]

9 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

Fair enough, though my point is also that damage reduction in itself doesn't really need to be a thing, at least not for enemies. Whenever the game lists an armor bonus for enemies, that basically just translates to additional health, plus an increased need for Corrosive Projection. The main difference between damage reduction and a larger health bar is that shooting enemies with high armor just feels really unsatisfying due to how little damage you end up dealing.

What can be a new aspect for Grineer armor is allow it to be dealt damage that depletes it like Shields and Health. That way Corrosive could simply be a faster method with chances to proc with high enough status.

 

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I personally believe it might be better to just keep things simple and have Corpus be the shield dudes, in contrast to Grineer being the armor dudes and the Infested the health... things, but seeing how there are already armored Corpus units, it might be interesting to have a few more bullet-resistant enemies there too. I'm personally not that big a fan of specific armor/health class modifiers, as it makes for a lot of book-keeping and not the most intuitive gameplay, but in practical terms it would be a great way to encourage players to use more damage types versus certain factions (Gas damage could be made more useful on non-Infested units, assuming the damage type doesn't get canned with Damage 3.0).

I was thinking that giving Corpus such a layer can at the very least provide them their own set of Armor Class Modifiers so that Corrosive is no longer a universal damage type to bring. So Oxium Ospreys, Bursa and Bosses at least would make use of this armor type.

It is also a way to express the resistance of Corpus Space Suits, where one of their possible resistances would be to Cold and Toxin, seeing that they have sealed and most likely self-contained Suits, that once breached no longer protect the wearer and open them up to more damage types. This way Flesh can be made less resistant in exchange for improving Shields (Combining regular and Proto) and adding an armor layer that depletes like Health and does not regenerate like Shields can or Health under specific conditions.

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That sounds pretty interesting, provided there's a cap to mod scaling for players (which I imagine would just be rank 10 for Redirection/Steel Fiber/Vitality). I completely agree that one of the biggest problems right now isn't just that scaling makes enemies too strong (or, at least, strong in the wrong ways) at high levels, but also that player scaling turns low-level enemies into complete pushovers, and completely removes the tension to far too many missions. I feel there might kind of be a chicken-and-egg problem somewhere here, in that both player and enemy scaling are propped up against each other, and matching scaling numbers completely would create this kind of zero-sum effect where you'd deal and take exactly the same relative amount of damage despite growing in power, but if that's what lets players feel like they're making themselves more powerful while still having the game provide more of a challenge, I'm all for it.

Part of the idea of providing a more rigid framework is to allow more game modes to make use of fewer tougher enemies in relation to the Tenno.

Rathuum showed that it is possible to setup such encounters, and having mods scale in a predictable manner can allow for some readjustments on what enemies can do.

Part of the problem now, is that it must be incredibly hard to try and balance various aspects of the game for players where a brand new player is going have a very long road to even collecting the necessary mods for effective builds. Compared to an experienced player that is in the process of ranking them up and tweaking builds, to a Veteran that has everything at Max already and has optimized builds already in place.

So if all three cases can have the same relative power when facing the same type of content (for this example, say Mercury missions), then it can be easier to provide new challenges for all three players on Mercury, instead of the devs only being able to add more enemy hordes and rapidly scaling enemies, there can be fewer tougher enemies that could then see increasing scaling, when an endless mission is available.

That's one of the things that bugs me is the shear volume of enemies that we can face in Defense or Survival and barely seeing much in Exterminate, so it's not feeling connected to the lore of Warframe in many cases.

So it may be possible for the Grineer and Infested be the factions where there power is in their numbers; compared to the Corpus and Corrupted, where they could employ better quality troops, but with fewer numbers and supported by their machines.

 

[Teridax68]

3 hours ago, SPARTAN-187.Thanatos said:

What can be a new aspect for Grineer armor is allow it to be dealt damage that depletes it like Shields and Health. That way Corrosive could simply be a faster method with chances to proc with high enough status.

That's pretty much what I was proposing in the OP, by suggesting an armor bar separate from health and shield bars, which would decouple armor from health completely.

3 hours ago, SPARTAN-187.Thanatos said:

I was thinking that giving Corpus such a layer can at the very least provide them their own set of Armor Class Modifiers so that Corrosive is no longer a universal damage type to bring. So Oxium Ospreys, Bursa and Bosses at least would make use of this armor type.

Considering how Corrosive procs are designed to reduce armor, there's a risk that might actually have the opposite effect, since you could then get at least that much more use out of Corrosive damage against Corpus, particularly since Corrosive is currently least effective against most of their units.

3 hours ago, SPARTAN-187.Thanatos said:

Part of the idea of providing a more rigid framework is to allow more game modes to make use of fewer tougher enemies in relation to the Tenno.

Rathuum showed that it is possible to setup such encounters, and having mods scale in a predictable manner can allow for some readjustments on what enemies can do.

Part of the problem now, is that it must be incredibly hard to try and balance various aspects of the game for players where a brand new player is going have a very long road to even collecting the necessary mods for effective builds. Compared to an experienced player that is in the process of ranking them up and tweaking builds, to a Veteran that has everything at Max already and has optimized builds already in place.

So if all three cases can have the same relative power when facing the same type of content (for this example, say Mercury missions), then it can be easier to provide new challenges for all three players on Mercury, instead of the devs only being able to add more enemy hordes and rapidly scaling enemies, there can be fewer tougher enemies that could then see increasing scaling, when an endless mission is available.

I agree, it's difficult for missions in the early parts of the star map to be anything more than light chores right now, due to how quickly enemies there become pushovers. I feel that's a problem with vertical power increases in general, though, since getting more powerful inevitably means whoever you're up against becomes less powerful by comparison, and therefore less challenging. It would be interesting to see what would happen with a fully horizontal progression system, i.e. one where progressing would mean greater access to different options (which you get to some degree with more frames and weapons), rather than increases in power. If gaining power in one aspect inevitably meant trading off just as much power elsewhere, that could potentially make for even more compelling modding opportunities, and would allow difficulty in the game to be done in a completely different manner, one that would no longer rely in pumping up enemy stats to ridiculous amounts.

3 hours ago, SPARTAN-187.Thanatos said:

So it may be possible for the Grineer and Infested be the factions where there power is in their numbers; compared to the Corpus and Corrupted, where they could employ better quality troops, but with fewer numbers and supported by their machines.

I can very much get behind that. I feel the factions need to be readjusted somewhat in order to encourage radically different strategies and approaches, and I think you're pretty correct on how each faction should play with their own numbers. To some degree, the main factions in Warframe have some parallel with those in Starcraft: the Corpus are the Protoss, with a focus on small numbers and an intricate technological network, the Grineer are the Terrans, with an emphasis on army-like formations accompanying medium- to high-priority units, and the Infested are obviously the Zerg, and should be all about swarming the opponent from all sides. The Corrupted are their own mix of those factions, which should create a lot more variation from room to room, and I guess the Sentients are kinda like the Xel'Naga, alien and rare but incredibly powerful. By all rights, we should be taking on Corpus missions with a radically different loadout and approach from, say, Grineer or Infested missions, but right now they all sort of blend into each other to some extent, partially because any loadout can steamroll through low-level missions without much thought or effort.