If you want to calculate the damage of single shots/swings of your weapon, have a look at @DeltaPhantom's thread:
If you want to know about weapon stats, here's the thread for that (have a look at the second post by @Neah)
It necessarily gets a bith mathy later, so for those who don't like that, let's start with an overview instead.
Quick Overview
Some damage types are generally less effective, and to compensate they have higher stats (Blast, Gas, Radiation).
Vice versa, weapons with more effective damage types need lower stats to make them fair (Cold, Corrosive, Magnetic & especially Toxin; Puncture to a lesser degree).
The following types are more effective vs. Shields than Health:
Impact
Blast
Cold
Gas
Magnetic
These are better against Health than against Shields:
Puncture
Corrosive
Radiation
Toxin (even bypasses Shields completely)
Viral
A few are about equally effective vs. Shields and Health (balanced):
Slash
Electricity
Heat
Part I: About Damage Types
It's not really obvious how the damage types work in this game, especially if you're new. What is clear is that we have Shields, Health, and an Armour value, and you probably know that Armour only affects Health but not Shields. Another problem is the complexity of the damage system, especially the interaction of the different damage types with armour.
The first part is an attempt to explain how it actually works. If you're not really interested in that you can jump straight to [part II; SoonTM], which will give you a simplified way to compare the different weapons to each other.
Armour
However, before I start explaining damage types, have a look at the armour values of our Warframes in the Conclave. For balance reasons, these are not the same as in PvE:
Note that the chart includes the armour of an imaginare Warframe called {Average}, whose stats are mean values derived from the others (see here for more information on that). Most of the Warframes have a value of 55 and only 7 of 42 Warframes are above 110. That's why the armour value of that {Average} Warframe is 75, which quite a bit lower than what you'd expect to be in the middle of the two extremes ((Min + Max) / 2 = (20 + 200) / 2 = 110). Just keep that in mind when we come back to health damage later.
Damage Type Comparison
When comparing damage types, the easy part is having a look at how they perform against shields. For that we can simply take the multipliers from the wiki:
*) Toxin ignores shields.
Magnetic, Impact and Cold are very good against Shields, most damage types are neutral, Puncture and Radiation are a bit worse. This is exactly as in PvE.
The hard part is comparing damage against health & armour. I'll spare you the calculations as they're explained in depth on the wiki. Just know that both the multipliers against health and armour are used, and that the armour multiplier factors into the formula twice. For IPS values (Impact, Puncture, Slash) it looks like this:
For reference, Neutral is included as well. Neutral means both multipliers against health and armour are 1. As Health and Armour the Tenno have Flesh & Ferrite, therefore Heat & Electricity are completely neutral (even against shields, see above).
The graph shows slopes because higher armour means less damage dealt, so it's a depiction of the absolute damage multipliers of IPS. This is inconvenient because it obscures the fact that certain damage types are more effective against armour than others.
A better way to look at it is to compare all the damage types to neutral damage. To achieve that, we divide all values with their neutral counterparts, which makes neutral damage a line on 1.0 (every value divided by itself is always one[1]) and all the other lines show the relative effectiveness of the IPS damage types:
For convenience, the values of Min (20 A.) Max (200 A.) and {Average} (75 A.) are shown in these graphs. You can read it e.g. like this: "Against Valkyr (who has 200 Armour), Puncture is 1.875 times (+87.5%) more effective than neutral damage."
Now it's also clear to see that Slash is always better than neutral damage, but only slightly - at most +5.3% when up against an enemy with 20 armour.
The same can of course be done with pure elemental types. Note that when looking at health/armour alone, there are more types that count as neutral. However, remember that of those, anything which is not Heat or Electricity has a special multiplier against Shields:
With this we can clearly see that Corrosive and Toxin are incredibly potent against our Ferrite & Flesh defences. On top of that, Toxin also ignores Shields, making it the most powerful damage type against almost all the Warframes (Inaros being the only exception where Corrosive wins).
Gas and Blast on the other hand overall quite weak, as they not only are less effective against health than neutral damage, unlike Impact, they also don't have a bonus against shields. That still makes them relatively more effective against shields - but subpar compared to other damage types. Radiation has the same problem, only it is better against health than shields.
Effective Health/Hit Points (EHP)
This is all nice and well, but there's another problem. Warframes not only have different armour values, they also have different Shield to Health ratios. Now we could go and compare all damage types against each Warframe individually, but that is hardly practical.
Instead, let's just have a look at how well the {Average} Warframe fares against the different types. To do that, imagine you have a weapon with pure damage of a single type[2]. We can determine the EHP by calculating how much damage we have to deal - after applying the modifiers - until that Warframe is dead, which gives us:
*) Toxin ignores shields.
[1] Zero is the exception, never try to divide by zero. ;)
[2] The only exception here is BIPS, which stands of Balanced IPS and means a weapon with 1/3 of each of Impact, Puncture & Slash. It's included for completeness; the bars of BIPS and Neutral correspond to the ones listed in the Warframe EHP reference thread, where {Average} is included as well.
Question
Kontrollo
What this thread is not about:
If you want to calculate the damage of single shots/swings of your weapon, have a look at @DeltaPhantom's thread:
If you want to know about weapon stats, here's the thread for that (have a look at the second post by @Neah)
It necessarily gets a bith mathy later, so for those who don't like that, let's start with an overview instead.
Quick Overview
Part I: About Damage Types
It's not really obvious how the damage types work in this game, especially if you're new. What is clear is that we have Shields, Health, and an Armour value, and you probably know that Armour only affects Health but not Shields. Another problem is the complexity of the damage system, especially the interaction of the different damage types with armour.
The first part is an attempt to explain how it actually works. If you're not really interested in that you can jump straight to [part II; SoonTM], which will give you a simplified way to compare the different weapons to each other.
Armour
However, before I start explaining damage types, have a look at the armour values of our Warframes in the Conclave. For balance reasons, these are not the same as in PvE:
Note that the chart includes the armour of an imaginare Warframe called {Average}, whose stats are mean values derived from the others (see here for more information on that). Most of the Warframes have a value of 55 and only 7 of 42 Warframes are above 110. That's why the armour value of that {Average} Warframe is 75, which quite a bit lower than what you'd expect to be in the middle of the two extremes ((Min + Max) / 2 = (20 + 200) / 2 = 110). Just keep that in mind when we come back to health damage later.
Damage Type Comparison
When comparing damage types, the easy part is having a look at how they perform against shields. For that we can simply take the multipliers from the wiki:
*) Toxin ignores shields.
Magnetic, Impact and Cold are very good against Shields, most damage types are neutral, Puncture and Radiation are a bit worse. This is exactly as in PvE.
The hard part is comparing damage against health & armour. I'll spare you the calculations as they're explained in depth on the wiki. Just know that both the multipliers against health and armour are used, and that the armour multiplier factors into the formula twice. For IPS values (Impact, Puncture, Slash) it looks like this:
For reference, Neutral is included as well. Neutral means both multipliers against health and armour are 1. As Health and Armour the Tenno have Flesh & Ferrite, therefore Heat & Electricity are completely neutral (even against shields, see above).
The graph shows slopes because higher armour means less damage dealt, so it's a depiction of the absolute damage multipliers of IPS. This is inconvenient because it obscures the fact that certain damage types are more effective against armour than others.
A better way to look at it is to compare all the damage types to neutral damage. To achieve that, we divide all values with their neutral counterparts, which makes neutral damage a line on 1.0 (every value divided by itself is always one[1]) and all the other lines show the relative effectiveness of the IPS damage types:
For convenience, the values of Min (20 A.) Max (200 A.) and {Average} (75 A.) are shown in these graphs. You can read it e.g. like this: "Against Valkyr (who has 200 Armour), Puncture is 1.875 times (+87.5%) more effective than neutral damage."
Now it's also clear to see that Slash is always better than neutral damage, but only slightly - at most +5.3% when up against an enemy with 20 armour.
The same can of course be done with pure elemental types. Note that when looking at health/armour alone, there are more types that count as neutral. However, remember that of those, anything which is not Heat or Electricity has a special multiplier against Shields:
With this we can clearly see that Corrosive and Toxin are incredibly potent against our Ferrite & Flesh defences. On top of that, Toxin also ignores Shields, making it the most powerful damage type against almost all the Warframes (Inaros being the only exception where Corrosive wins).
Gas and Blast on the other hand overall quite weak, as they not only are less effective against health than neutral damage, unlike Impact, they also don't have a bonus against shields. That still makes them relatively more effective against shields - but subpar compared to other damage types. Radiation has the same problem, only it is better against health than shields.
Effective Health/Hit Points (EHP)
This is all nice and well, but there's another problem. Warframes not only have different armour values, they also have different Shield to Health ratios. Now we could go and compare all damage types against each Warframe individually, but that is hardly practical.
Instead, let's just have a look at how well the {Average} Warframe fares against the different types. To do that, imagine you have a weapon with pure damage of a single type[2]. We can determine the EHP by calculating how much damage we have to deal - after applying the modifiers - until that Warframe is dead, which gives us:
*) Toxin ignores shields.
[1] Zero is the exception, never try to divide by zero. ;)
Edited by Kontrollo[2] The only exception here is BIPS, which stands of Balanced IPS and means a weapon with 1/3 of each of Impact, Puncture & Slash. It's included for completeness; the bars of BIPS and Neutral correspond to the ones listed in the Warframe EHP reference thread, where {Average} is included as well.
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