The Armor Conundrum.

[Damagedice]

Lately in the weapon feedback threads, I've seen a running trend... a very worrisome issue floating about.
Underpowered weapons. Underpowered weapons abound, with people naturally posing solutions as to how DE could go about fixing them, improving them, or at least just making them viable.

There's just one problem...

Everyone and their mother seems to simply suggest "Ignore armor" "Armor pierce"
When Sobek was at 40 damage, I'm sure someone reading this might remember, that one of the most popular suggestions was "armor ignore" from the get-go. When it was at 60, and it still sucked, same thing. Just got out of a Seer thread, people saying it's a bit suckish. "How about armor ignore?"

There should not be the idea that every weapon from now and upcoming should ignore or pierce armor. Even if that would make -them- viable, the game wouldn't even make sense. The truth is, armor is an obstacle to be overcome, not everything can ignore it. And realizing this, the devs probably aren't going to grant it (They simply raised sobek's damage, and many of the same people asking for such were perfectly happy.)

Now I've seen one thread, im not sure which user, (heck, im not even sure why this is my favorite section to browse) they suggested that rather than buffing x to meet y, OR nerfing y, why not rework the system that makes x garbage?
Armor scaling becomes pretty sadistic for high enough mobs, when they already get more health.. shields..
Rather than outclass every old weapon by demanding everything ignore armor from hereon out, why not press them to look into and rebalance the system which breaks...

Frost's avalance, Mag's crush, Banshee's Sound quake.. And the majority of weapons in existence. Even melee basic attacks are still struggling to become viable over charge hits because of the armor conundrum. I really think if the community could unite under the banner of making armor.. not nonexistent, but less destructive of regular weapons and abilities.

Now, I have to disclaim here. I know armor can be worked around, and Im not a scrub or a noob saying it's too hard. It's the direction the community's leaning, and the overall balance of the game now. Do we really want every weapon to be a kunai or a despair?

Tl;dr : I had no idea reading was difficult.

Opinions? Discuss?

Edited July 21, 2013 by Damagedice

[PsychedelicSnake]

I agree, the fact a lot of people say that certain things need armour piercing/ignore is unrealistic. Sure, Kunai does it, but that doesn't mean every weapon should, ESPECIALLY a pistol, smg, etc.

 

Tl;dr : I had no idea reading was difficult.

 

^ Lol'd

[Tatersail]

REMOVE armor ignore weapons..

 

 

all weapons are balanced, your not longer FORCED to use AI weapons past level 50 to be effective.

 

atm the Boltor...has terrible stats, 18 damage, 8.8 rof, slow shooting, inaccurate...  but its the best long gun by a long margin, beating out almost all the others with double the "dps" simply because of AI

 

Until acrid, kunai beat all other pistol in the game, hell most rifles Broncs, Afuris, Vipers, Lex....  because they are AI, its simply pointless to make any other weapon, except to grind master for Acrid.

 

 

AI weapons should never have been made, and need to be removed.

Edited July 21, 2013 by Tatersail

[LasersGoPewPew]

armor should have a hard cap comparable to rhino. or Frost with his aurora helmet., if people want a challenge of some form its not giving them god mode like it does when non armor ignore weapons are used against them.

[Dasmir]

REMOVE armor ignore weapons..

 

 

all weapons are balanced, your not longer FORCED to use AI weapons past level 50 to be effective.

 

atm the Boltor...has terrible stats, 18 damage, 8.8 rof, slow shooting, inaccurate...  but its the best long gun by a long margin, beating out almost all the others with double the "dps" simply because of AI

 

Until acrid, kunai beat all other pistol in the game, hell most rifles Broncs, Afuris, Vipers, Lex....  because they are AI, its simply pointless to make any other weapon, except to grind master for Acrid.

 

 

AI weapons should never have been made, and need to be removed.

 

 

Good luck killing a lvl 100 lancer with only normal damage, so maybe thats make you brain to think the problem is the armor scaling and no AI weapons...

 

Also even level 30 lancer reduce yo normal damage at a 40% in headshots....

Edited July 21, 2013 by Dasmir

[DiabolusUrsus]

Good luck killing a lvl 100 lancer with only normal damage, so maybe thats make you brain to think the problem is the armor scaling and no AI weapons...

 

Also even level 30 lancer reduce yo normal damage at a 40% in headshots....

Which is precisely why it was suggested that the armor system and armor scaling for higher leveled mobs be reworked so that armor-ignoring weapons are no longer a necessity. ._.

I am totally on-board with this suggestion. There are other ways to supplement difficulty through increased enemy durability without invalidating the majority of weapons available to the player. Enemy level scaling in general needs a bit of a rework, but armor is currently the most glaring issue. Put a cap on it. Reduce the rate at which it scales. Do SOMETHING so that people aren't limited to weapons that ignore armor when facing off against high level Grineer.

One suggestion I'd like to keep bringing up is introducing static or nearly static enemy resistance values (armor, fire/electric/frost/armor-piercing resistance) - they don't go up, or at least don't go up by much, and substituting decreasing enemy weakness values. To demonstrate what I mean, a level 100 infested charger would take 100% fire damage rather than 300%. This makes it so that using the right type of damage for an enemy ensures that you deal normal levels of damage late-game, without completely invalidating other damage types in the process. Add in increased enemy damage output, and you'll see a very noticeable spike in difficulty, without enemies ever becoming seemingly invulnerable.

Doing something like this would be excellent for improving the ease with which weapons can be balanced, narrowing the gap between normal and charged melee, and providing extra flexibility for future weapon gimmicks and varying stats.

[CY13ERPUNK]

i would have much preferred the sobek stayed a low base dmg but had armor ignore rather than what it turned into

but OP is right that current ingame dmg mechanics are very one-dimensional and don't allow for a lot of wiggle room

this reminds me Diablo 3 and how they overly-simplified their game as compared to Diablo 2 for instance; sidenote Path of Exile seems to have done a much better job with maintaining a complex dmg vs mitigation system in their game

Warframe would benefit from a more complex dmg vs mitigation system ingame, currently it's just too simplistic (stack as much dmg/ice/ap/multi/firerate on all of your weapons, case closed, that will always be the most effective setup)

[LazyKnight]

The easiest fix by far to this armor problem is to change the equation they use.

Armor:
(current_level - base_level)^1.4 * 0.01 * base_armor + base_armor

 

If they removed the exponent on it and just made it so only health/shields scale per level up it would be a weapon equalizer. They could easily adjust the health values to make scaling even. It really isn't hard from a math point of view to make scaling health, it just the armor that is messed up. Armor would still exist and would still require you to hit weak points but it wouldn't scale dramatically until around level 200.

Edited July 21, 2013 by LazyKnight

[Volt_Cruelerz]

As others have said before, just make armor not scale but make health scale harder.

[LazyKnight]

As others have said before, just make armor not scale but make health scale harder.

Its not required to change health scaling values right now. Things like Fusion MOA are hard to kill at level 150+ just because of the sheer amount of health and shields they have. They have a very aggressive scaling on health already and it would cause more problems if it was changed randomly. It would be better to change the base health values of the ancients and of the grineer instead of making scaling harder(would just make a new problem).

Edited July 21, 2013 by LazyKnight

[NexionSE]

maybe cap the max dmg reduction? as some ppl suggested. or add ways to temp reduce armor on targets by mods or skills

or that every shot on a  target reduces its armor by a number or % based on base dmg or a value on the weapon.

new stats for all weapon "armor sundering"? can the system handle something like that?

Edited July 21, 2013 by NexionSE

[Damagedice]

One suggestion I'd like to keep bringing up is introducing static or nearly static enemy resistance values (armor, fire/electric/frost/armor-piercing resistance) - they don't go up, or at least don't go up by much, and substituting decreasing enemy weakness values. To demonstrate what I mean, a level 100 infested charger would take 100% fire damage rather than 300%. This makes it so that using the right type of damage for an enemy ensures that you deal normal levels of damage late-game, without completely invalidating other damage types in the process. Add in increased enemy damage output, and you'll see a very noticeable spike in difficulty, without enemies ever becoming seemingly invulnerable.

^ ^ Awesome Insight. Thanks for the thoughts everybody. So far, This one sounds pretty good. Imagine if at least the enemies' weakness remained effective; nobody would really be weak and actually the weapons with the higher base but without ignore would have more base element, making your hitting of their weakness even better. (That is correct right?) At least in the case of elements, it would help solve the problem while also making the correct setup (or at least some kind of decent setup at all) the key to beating higher mobs of a faction viable, rather than just packing your saryns and despairs and snipetron vandals into the void only.

[VScipii26]

Scale properly.
Higher level enemies gain more and more armor, which means that, no matter what you do, any weapon with armor pierce or armor ignore will push it's usefulness into the next tier.

It' a classic fake difficultly issue.

Edited July 21, 2013 by VScipii26

[LazyKnight]

^ ^ Awesome Insight. Thanks for the thoughts everybody. So far, This one sounds pretty good. Imagine if at least the enemies' weakness remained effective; nobody would really be weak and actually the weapons with the higher base but without ignore would have more base element, making your hitting of their weakness even better. (That is correct right?) At least in the case of elements, it would help solve the problem while also making the correct setup (or at least some kind of decent setup at all) the key to beating higher mobs of a faction viable, rather than just packing your saryns and despairs and snipetron vandals into the void only.

Ai weapon and Ap weapon would only be clearly better on level 200+ This would just make it so a Grineer lancer that start with 200 armor at level 100 wouldn't have 1444.28 armor instead it would be 398. Hitting weak points would still be the best way to kill a NPC and wouldn't require ever using a AI/Ap unless you wanted too.

 

I do not know the exact math they used to calculate the resistance but it is based on a number times armor so would also make elemental useful at much higher levels as well.

 

All numbers have a weird round down when seen in game.

100/(200+100)=.33 or 66% damage reduction, for 200 armor

100/(1444.28+100)=.06 or 94% damage reduction, for 1444.28

100(398+100).20 or 80% damage reduction, for 398 armor

Edited July 21, 2013 by LazyKnight

[taiiat]

Tl;dr : I had no idea reading was difficult.

lol'd - made my morning.

 

 

at any rate, this is far from being the 'original' or 'biggest' thread on this. maybe Istalari will come around and he can link you to all the important threads - since i don't remember them ;)

this isn't bad or anything, there's just other threads that have completely mathed the game out and shown exactly what's wrong, how to fix it, etc.

 

 

'Armor Sundering'

i do like that, though. that sounds like a new idea. and based on title, Sundering Strike could become a 'common' Hybrid mod pretty quickly, increasing AP damage, as well as increasing the armor that you cleave off with strikes. 

and armor reducing over time for any weapon class sounds pretty cool all in all, even if it's not a large amount. the more a target is beat the hell out of, the more damage he'll inevitably take - since only Tenno have a living metallic suit of armor. the key being it's living, so presumably regenerates punctures and other problems.

Edited July 21, 2013 by taiiat

[Winterbraid]

Agreed. I don't really get why armor needs to be a thing in the first place, it just makes it confusing for players as their previously awesome weapon suddenly starts being crap for no apparent reason while the next guy's weapon that didn't seem a whole lot better before still kicks arse, and gives more work to the developers. Every other game simply balances weapons around effective range, availability, ammo efficiency, added effects, skill factors such as recoil, projectile travel speed and pattern, risk to self...

 

Basically your typical action shooter game balances weapons like this:

 

1. Choose the "default" weapon that you want to balance other weapons around. (In the case of Warframe it'd probably be Braton.)

2. Slower firing weapon = proportionally higher damage, and some extra damage on top of that because slow rate by itself is a disadvantage.

3. Reduced accuracy or range (shotguns, machine guns) = higher damage.

4. Slow moving projectile and/or travel arc (bolt/arrow/thrown weapons) = higher damage.

5. Extra gimmicks (charge time, wind-up time...) = higher damage.

6. Explosive weapon with risk to self = higher damage.

7. Reduced weapon and/or ammo availability = higher damage.

 

Not exactly rocket science, is it? Sadly, instead of going through the list one by one and giving us a wide selection of unique yet viable weapons, Warframe just seems to jump straight to point 4 - bolt weapons (and to an extent 6 in the case of Ogris) and make them effectively twice as powerful as anything else or more (because they have the innate damage in addition to the respective AP mod). As such, everyone ends up running around with more or less the same weapon type.

 

But if we really need that one extra number to describe enemies, then it shouldn't be the single most influential number.

 

Either stop scaling it up at some point (around the current level 40-50 would be a good idea in my opinion, or don't allow resistance to elemental weaknesses like others have suggested), or give us some other means to bypass it besides innate armor bypassing weapons. Such as:

- Consecutive headshots reduce armor.

- Decreased armor on attacks from behind or when crowd-controlled.

- Stealth attacks bypass armor (and allow a degree of stealth in combat).

- Puncture mods add a % of innate AP damage.

Edited July 21, 2013 by Winterbraid

[Davoodoo]

I find it pretty funny that low kinetic energy bolts or throwing blades can pierce armor yet faster arrows from dread cant, not to mention actual bullets.

 

As for solution i can understand that devs want enemies to have more armor at higher lvls.

 

Why not give enemies tiers.

t1 lancer will absorb 30% dmg

t2 will absorb 50%

t3 will absorb 70% 

and they wont scale any further.

Edited July 21, 2013 by Davoodoo

[Winterbraid]

I find it pretty funny that low kinetic energy bolts or throwing blades can pierce armor yet faster arrows from dread cant, not to mention actual bullets.

 

As for solution i can understand that devs want enemies to have more armor at higher lvls.

 

Why not give enemies tiers.

t1 lancer will absorb 30% dmg

t2 will absorb 50%

t3 will absorb 70% 

and they wont scale any further.

 

I've actually been thinking about enemy tiers the other day, but I'd rather have them gain more special abilities than grow in armor.

[Vaskadar]

Yeah, resistance scaling is a no-no in game balance, especially here. Armor scaling only serves to unbalance the weapon selection in the game, really. This was made even more apparent with the recent change to the enemies, having enemies that sit at levels close to 60 within the solar system.

Edited July 21, 2013 by Vaskadar

[Volt_Cruelerz]

Its not required to change health scaling values right now. Things like Fusion MOA are hard to kill at level 150+ just because of the sheer amount of health and shields they have. They have a very aggressive scaling on health already and it would cause more problems if it was changed randomly. It would be better to change the base health values of the ancients and of the grineer instead of making scaling harder(would just make a new problem).

I didn't say to make it scale way harder.  I think it's something like 5% per level right now or some such thing?  Bump it to 6.5% or so.  Small bump.

[LazyKnight]

I didn't say to make it scale way harder.  I think it's something like 5% per level right now or some such thing?  Bump it to 6.5% or so.  Small bump.

That is what it currently uses, it all based on the base health.

HP:

(current_level - base_level)^1.75 * 0.01 * base_hp + base_hp

 

 It would only need the grineer and the ancients to have higher HP to start with to make it scale smoothly. I do not want to have to make an excel table to figure out the effective health for all NPC and the exponent required to make it even. It currently makes a fusion MOA at level range 150-200 just a bullet sponge on this system alone they only need base to be beefier.

Edited July 21, 2013 by LazyKnight

[aTaVaX]

its silly that most enemies have armor all over their bodies, like medieval knights or something. An equal amount of armor too. Even in current societies'a soldiers, we only have armor for the upper torso and part of the head. And we have an extreme value for human life and we have the capability of equipping our soldiers with more armor than that if we felt appropriate. 

 

I would like to see all enemies have multiple spots with no armor. You could even have varying degrees of armor on a single enemy. I would like to see the majority of an enemy having no or light armor. Armor should be something to try to shoot to avoid, right now its well you shoot the guy anywhere and if he has high armor and you don't have armor penetration, you're screwed.  Also, ideally i think armor ignore shouldn't completely ignore armor but maybe halve its total effectiveness. That why even people with armor ignore are encouraged to shoot at areas not covered in armor, its simply more forgiving when you shoot at armored spots.

Edited July 21, 2013 by aTaVaX

[LazyKnight]

its silly that most enemies have armor all over their bodies, like medieval knights or something. An equal amount of armor too. Even in current societies'a soldiers, we only have armor for the upper torso and part of the head. And we have an extreme value for human life and we have the capability of equipping our soldiers with more armor than that if we felt appropriate. 

 

I would like to see all enemies have multiple spots with no armor. You could even have varying degrees of armor on a single enemy. I would like to see the majority of an enemy having no or light armor. Armor should be something to try to shoot to avoid, right now its well you shoot the guy anywhere and if he has high armor and you don't have armor penetration, you're screwed. 

If they left the value of armor at base values and have health only scale and it would give you what you want. Effective life of the NPC would still scale of the base mitigation amount so NPC would get harder but your guns would never stop working.

Edited July 21, 2013 by LazyKnight

[eateroftime]

Now I have a bit of a crazy idea here, so bare with me...

 

What if, just what if, the armor piercing mod.. actually pierced armored?

 

Just throwing that out there.

[Damagedice]

Now I have a bit of a crazy idea here, so bare with me...

 

What if, just what if, the armor piercing mod.. actually pierced armored?

 

Just throwing that out there.

Mad helpful dawg yeeyuh