How tough are tenno/warframes in-universe actually?

[Kethus]

Tenno in their own bodies are supposed to be very weak, they have 100 health points, but that still makes them tougher than certain warframes at rank 0, like Mag, in which case a kid in a suit is more durable than something made for war. On the other hand enemy scaling is ridiculous and there can be regular grineer/corpus units that are far tougher than a maximum rank and fully modded warframe, so the only universal advantage warframes really have is their mobility.

If there wasn't any leveling up in the game how much health/armor/shields do you imagine warframes and various enemies would have? The lower health at lower affinity levels could be explained that the tenno is not familiar enough with the specific warframe and transferance can go out of sync much easier. Also in all fanfiction crossovers with Warframe the frames are invulnerable gods, where would you place the health/armor of a modern earth soldier in body armor in the same scenario? They can't be too far from grineer, aren't they using crude archaic technology? That can still beat a warframe.

Edited March 12, 2017 by Kethus

[Nazrethim]

You will notice that in most trailers, enemies never actually touch the warframes. So lorewise their strenght would be that of lvl1s for both WFs and enemies. LvL scaling is there to add progression to the game and to allow endless modes that you can eventually lose. Problem is that enemies don't improve on the skill-requirement side, so you end up facing not stronger enemies, but the same grunts you've been facing from start, just inflated in lvl. Bosses are particularly egregious examples, as they are designed around a specific level range, which makes them broken once you have them in Sorties.

What I mean is: we need to tone down lvl scaling and improve enemy mechanics. Add enemies that see trough invisibility and can dispell it, but without making it an invisible aura so an invisible character can defuse the threat before it can do harm. Something like that.

[Pavelord]

I don´t think you should consider endgame as cannon, there is a lot of gameplay mechanics that just confuse things, as Nazrethim mentions look to the trailers, any warframe is more powerful than any single enemy unit. Warframes come with the strength of the three races, infested flesh, high armor (most of them) and shields, all of that in one single package, how strong are they?, some of them have the power of a tank in the size of a scuba diving suit.

Invulnerable gods is king of an exageration brought about by the meta and the spamming of powers, lore wise, the Lotus has told us that reckless tenno can get their warframes destroyed and we have special units meant to fight and capture the warframes. 

How would the grineer fare against modern equipment, I think much better still, let´s not forget that grineer have replaced most of their bodies with cybernetics bodies, that let them use heavier armor than kevlar and ceramic plates, just by the ingredients we know they use ferrite and alloy, and is still hard to say how much better detonite must be than regular gunpowder

[Minak]

Projectile weapon is not equal to firearm, it can be pneumatic, magnetic or even throwing weapon. However it can use detonite as a 'fuel', to power its mechanism, to 'shot' the bullet,

[Akavakaku]

I think a warframe is way stronger than a grunt, but equal to or weaker than most bosses. We know Zanuka is about equal to a strong warframe. 

Grunts, though, are still probably worth 2 or 3 modern soldiers each, since they have much better technology.