So Armor.

[Kyte]

I have not a clue what you mean as to stunlock mechanics unless you mean rollers? Also It would not discourage it any more then It is already. Like I said your effective health would be much greater. Your not looking at the mechanic as a whole and instead are simply seeing "I will lose my shield."

Rollers, basically every Infested, all heavy Grineers, Shockwave Moas, Grineer Scorpions. Staggerlocks and stunlocks. Be unlucky once and you'll be eating bullets or getting swarmed.

 

And whereas now you can at least run away and wait for your shields to regen, your proposal eliminates the regenerating part of your survivability.

 

To put it simply, it does nothing to fix the death-spiral situation you can currently get caught in and makes the death spiral peak even faster due to the slippery slope, while at the same time eliminating the current safety mechanism (shields).

 

It doesn't matter if your health is greater, because health doesn't scale or regenerate. You can't risk getting into a firefight because you're hurt and you can't heal without getting into a firefight. Thus we get Gears of Warframe.

Edited July 22, 2013 by Kyte

[Oizen]

@Oizen

What if there was a mod that gave a flat increase to armor, but it wasn't as useful for warframes that have a lot to start with.

Using Frost and Ember again with maxed Steel Fiber (110%)

Frost starts at 150 and goes up to 315.

Ember starts at 10 and goes up to 21.

Now, the new mod would just add 5 or 10 per level and have just as many levels as Steel Fiber (10, 11 if you count level 0 as the "first" level).

This would have the mod giving a bonus of 55 or 110 at max level. For the tankier frames, it would obviously be the worse choice since they aren't getting as much of an increase (205/260 as opposed to 315), but less tanky frames are getting a much better mod (65/120).

Granted, there is an extremely persuasive argument to be made that less tanky frames are not supposed to be tanky. I'm more in that camp and I don't want to play my Ember/Mag/Loki like I play my Rhino/Frost. I would like more male frames to be less tanky and at least 2 to 4 female tanks to compete with the two male tanks.

Frost and Rhino would still have more armor by a longshot. Thus making them tankier. An Easy fix to this would be for the Armor mod to give

 

+X (flat ammount) armor or +X% (Precentile) armor. The mod would give whichever one of these numbers were greater.

 

Solving the crisis mentioned, while keeping tank frames tanky.

 

But....

Thats only the begining of the problems with armor though.

 

Since it doesnt affect sheild damage. A lot of people wouldn't even bother with it.

 

I dont remember the last time my Frost's shield went down. And even if it does, large hp pools are easy to get. Just hide behind something or cloak and full sheild recovery.

Edited July 22, 2013 by Oizen

[Exodia-Doomsong]

Wouldn't be space ninjas if we all had to hide behind cover

[Saenol]

 

Most frames have no real way to up armor at all. Its only really increasable on frames who already have a lot to begin with.

 

I see nothing wrong with this.

 

A frame built to support massive armor should be able to handle a proportional increase in armor as easily as a lighter frame.

 

It's like applying an armor kit to a fighting vehicle. You can add way more extra armor protection to an MBT than you can a small support vehicle.

[Aizeol]

Frost and Rhino would still have more armor by a longshot. Thus making them tankier. An Easy fix to this would be for the Armor mod to give

 

+X (flat ammount) armor or +X% (Precentile) armor. The mod would give whichever one of these numbers were greater.

 

Solving the crisis mentioned, while keeping tank frames tanky.

 

But....

Thats only the begining of the problems with armor though.

 

Since it doesnt affect sheild damage. A lot of people wouldn't even bother with it.

 

I dont remember the last time my Frost's shield went down. And even if it does, large hp pools are easy to get. Just hide behind something or cloak and full sheild recovery.

That's fine. In my opinion, Tankier frames should always be tankier. My proposal would allow less tanky frames to become a bit less fragile, but the same mod wouldn't work as well for the already beefy frames.

The biggest question I have is, why do you want Ember/Nyx/Loki/Banshee/Trinity to be a tank when they just aren't and weren't designed to be? I agree that they need to have some way to get some survivability without just adding shields and health, but making them as tanky as Frost or Rhino isn't the way to go.

They aren't tanks, and I think it benefits the game to have warframes that can't be played the same way.

[Lumireaver]

Geez, great constructive feedback guys.

 

Kitsu, I see what your intentions are. You want to address the situational usefulness/uselessness of the armor stat by effectively turning into a kind of damage buffer which affects all incoming damage. (IE: Shields)

 

You kind of scared some people away when you said "get rid of shields," when in reality you're just repurposing/rebalancing them. Currently they're too tanky, and no one needs to rely on their health or armor unless they're two seconds away from death.

 

The reason DE removed armoured shields was because they gave players too much effective health, but if you got rid of Redirection and gave players a lot more health, (as you've suggested) you could strike a balance. (Also you'd make Fast Deflection a lot better.) You might not need to add any new bars, either.

 

Interesting suggestion.

[RaianStar]

I like the idea of armour weakening as you take damage, but the initial idea is a little too harsh in my opinion. The shield and health mechanic provides a decent balance and the armour helps to further enforce this.

Nice to see people thinking outside of the box though.

[ArmaMalum]

I personally applaud new suggestions and I like the idea you have presented. However, gameplay wise it would not work based on how I have come to understand enemy targeting works. Subtracting the occasional missile there is no way to 'dodge' bullets aside from getting behind cover. When you are in an enemy's range a diceroll decides whether you are hit or not and by how many bullets as long as they can physically hit you. Using the system you presented it would punish someone staying and taking fire by exponential damage for sustained 'tanking'. Essentially it would accomplish the same thing that the shield system does, punish those who take fire for a long time except the current system gives a flat rate of decrease with burst provided by the enemy attacks. Your system would add another factor to keep track of to know how long you can expose yourself which would more than likely not fly well with the average gamer. Your system would be ideal for a game that has consistent damage per stage and relatively identical enemy attacks, think a bulletstorm or flyer.

 

Still though, new ideas are never bad. Keep at it and don't let naysayers get your creativity down.

 

tl;dr

An exponentially increasing damage modifier would be a little too much to keep track of in addition with tracking enemy attacks and types.

Edited July 22, 2013 by ArmaMalum

[KitsuAccalia]

-snipped for size-

 

tl;dr

An exponentially increasing damage modifier would be a little too much to keep track of in addition with tracking enemy attacks and types.

I agree in a way but also remember this system would promote the "tanking" you mentioned because Rhino under the situation would take much less damage. So the Loki's and Ember's will think twice about engaging in a face tank fire fight. Where as the Rhino won't unless he was previously injured in which case he will back down and rely on his abilities a bit more.

 

The health sphere's would also heal a large amount making jumping in and out of battle both quick and simple.

 

Not to mention the burst damage of the game would not change in anyway, It would simply allow you to stay in the heat of battle for longer but force you to scavenge a bit as you move on.

 

Also you can make the Shield/Armor Visible (Bar, Number etc etc) so it wouldn't take much to keep track, simply give it a glance and you will know your standing.

Edited July 22, 2013 by KitsuAccalia

[Tsukinoki]

@Lumireaver

Its not just repurposing/rebalancing from what I understand from various posts the OP has made, its a complete rework.

How the OP is stating it is that under their system it would work like this:

You have a larger HP pool and no shields. Instead of shields you have an "armor" pool. The armor does not completely negate damage, it only blocks X% of damage that goes down as the armor is damaged.

So say at max armor a theoretical frame would have 80% damage blocking. They get hit for 200 damage. They only take 40 damage to their health while their armor goes down a certain number of points. The next hit allows more damage through to your health, such as only blocking 40% now, meaning that the next hit will take your health down 120 and lower your armor further. When your armor hits 0 you're taking the full damage from each of the attacks.

Pretty much this is like the Unreal Tournament/Quake armor system. You pick up an armor pickup that absorbs damage at various rates and has various armor pools. The main difference being here that the armor will regenerate over time and absorbs less and less damage as you get hurt as opposed to absorbing the same % regardless of the state of the armor.

The problem I see with this?

Health doesn't recharge.

So as you take damage, you take more damage which means you take more damage which means...and it goes on in a downward spiral till you are dead. That would very quickly turn the game into a cover based shooter because instead of having something which negates damage at the most it will only block a small portion of the damage. And once you get to the higher levels blocking 80% of the damage from an attack will still get you instantly killed, instead of blocking 100% and just removing your shields and some health.

And then it further turns frames that are already glass cannons into even more fragile frames. Which limits their usefulness. Further it makes Melee even worse of an option than it is at medium to high levels.

Also it makes disrupters more powerful. IF they strip away all of your armor pool you are then suffering 100% damage from attacks, even if you're a rhino with maxed steel fiber.

Currently a Rhino that gets hit by a disrupter has a chance of surviving the ensuing attacks due to his high armor that negates a large portion of the damage. If he instead suffered 100% of damage because his shields were gone...he wouldn't last at all.

Those are the reasons I am against it. It punishes a player far too much. They get pinged once and the attack damage from the enemies just continually goes up and up until you are dead.

The way I would improve this idea, and even then I would still be against it, is this:

Your frame has a certain % of damage that its armor absorbs, which is determined solely by your frame choice and maybe a mod that DE releases.

Your armor pool is affected by steel fiber and is a base value determined by your frame.

Your armor absorb never goes down, meaning if your frame has 80% damage absorb, until your armor is completely depleted it will absorb 80% of the damage that you would suffer. What this means is that if an attack would hit you fro 100 damage your armor absorbs 80 points and your health suffers 20. Another attack of 100 points will lead to the same outcome, your armor is now down by a total of 160 points while your health is down by 40.

Even then DE would need to massively buff everyones health pools to a few thousand at the very *least* to be viable at the higher end of gameplay for any length of time without turning the game into a cover based shooter. Next they would need to make health orbs drop a hell of a lot more than they currently do because now you dont have something that negates damage, only lowers it by a certain percentage.

And you'll still have attacks that even with 80% of the damage blocked will insta-gib you where with shields you would have survived that attack.

While this would make armor and armor/health mods more important...it would ultimately punish the players majorly for the trivial mistake of sticking their heads out of cover and getting hit by something ONCE. And in T3 missions think of a caster frame which much more shields than health. If the shields only blocked a % of the damage and not all of it you would see them dieing well *before* their armor was ever depleted.

Edited July 22, 2013 by Tsukinoki

[MJ12]

I see nothing wrong with this.

 

A frame built to support massive armor should be able to handle a proportional increase in armor as easily as a lighter frame.

 

It's like applying an armor kit to a fighting vehicle. You can add way more extra armor protection to an MBT than you can a small support vehicle.

 

That'd be fine if the cost didn't stay the same. Games don't have to be perfectly realistic.

 

If Steel Fiber didn't take up a mod slot and only cost 0.1x its normal mod energy cost on a light Warframe, I'd be fine with it giving minor increases to armor. But it does, so it should be at least viablly effective.

 

Also, health spheres are the problem here, not 'armor', the game needs some way where combat is how you get health regeneration, not a method to make scavenging even more important.

[ArmaMalum]

I agree in a way but also remember this system would promote the "tanking" you mentioned because Rhino under the situation would take much less damage. So the Loki's and Ember's will think twice about engaging in a face tank fire fight. Where as the Rhino won't unless he was previously injured in which case he will back down and rely on his abilities a bit more.

 

The health sphere's would also heal a large amount making jumping in and out of battle both quick and simple.

 

Not to mention the burst damage of the game would not change in anyway, It would simply allow you to stay in the heat of battle for longer but force you to scavenge a bit as you move on.

 

Also you can make the Shield/Armor Visible (Bar, Number etc etc) so it wouldn't take much to keep track, simply give it a glance and you will know your standing.

I do like the idea of being more reliant on the orb drops, and I also like the idea of being a lot less reliant on the unavoidable overpowered nature of shields. Really my only problem with this suggestion is the exponential damage. Scaled right it could indeed make the full-->half health area a lot more tanky and make you you more conscious of your own health, but you need a relatively linear decrease in health with the occasional huge burst in PvE games like this because it makes you focus more on the enemies that orginate the burst damage. In other words, makes you turn your weapons towards the biggest threat first or suffer the consequences. I'm not saying you system would make that less the case it just wouldn't make it as noticeable. Nothing says 'threat' quite like 'shields are down'.

 

As much as I am bringing this idea down, I would rather offer this as critique and continue to poke this idea. What would this system do if poison was to come into play? Would it be a simple damage over time? or just ignore the armor?

 

Another another question, how would boss fights play? You have a naturally long engagement that, minus the occasional small mob, is lacking in orbs to bring you back up. So unless you have a decoy ability or a tank rotation' someone is going to go down because someone has to be taking the damage. How would your system accommodate that? or would it?

Edited July 22, 2013 by ArmaMalum

[MJ12]

I do like the idea of being more reliant on the orb drops, and I also like the idea of being a lot less reliant on the unavoidable overpowered nature of shields. Really my only problem with this suggestion is the exponential damage. Scaled right it could indeed make the full-->half health area a lot more tanky and make you you more conscious of your own health, but you need a relatively linear decrease in health with the occasional huge burst in PvE games like this because it makes you focus more on the enemies that orginate the burst damage. In other words, makes you turn your weapons towards the biggest threat first or suffer the consequences. I'm not saying you system would make that less the case it just wouldn't make it as noticeable. Nothing says 'threat' quite like 'shields are down'.

 

As much as I am bringing this idea down, I would rather offer this as critique and continue to poke this idea. What would this system do if poison was to come into play? Would it be a simple damage over time? or just ignore the armor?

 

How exactly are shields 'unavoidably overpowered'? Seriously?

 

And why is making the game more reliant on going around and opening lockers going to make it better?

Edited July 22, 2013 by MJ12

[Tsukinoki]

Another another question, how would boss fights play? You have a naturally long engagement that, minus the occasional small mob, is lacking in orbs to bring you back up. So unless you have a decoy ability or a tank rotation' someone is going to go down because someone has to be taking the damage. How would your system accommodate that? or would it?

This is another valid point against the system.

ANY protracted battle is going to be a big no-go if there aren't mobs spawning and rushing in like crazy, and they had best be utter trash mobs, or as some games would put it, "extras" that exist to die very quickly so that you can get some health orbs to stay alive.

In a lot of boss battles you *have* to have someone sitting there and tanking the damage in order to keep its shields down and be able to hurt it and finish the battle. And it would be a big negative if you were pretty much *forced* to bring along a certain set of frames.

Currently 4 Loki's or Nova's or Nyx's or any frames can take out any boss in the game.

Under your system you *need* to bring a tank or two or you just wont stand a chance.

That would be a huge draw back to your idea.

[ArmaMalum]

How exactly are shields 'unavoidably overpowered'? Seriously?

 

And why is making the game more reliant on going around and opening lockers going to make it better?

Shields, by their nature, allow you to poke in and out, killing a static number of enemies without any punishment whatsoever. As long as your shields don't go down you will havea  perfect game. This is only exacerbated by the fact redirection can be maxed to a decently absurd level. This isn't a QQ or "plz nerf" comment, it's just how shields work naturally. I actually think it's a necessary evil for solo players but in groups a decently leveled redirection eliminates almost any challenge in runs.

 

Secondly, read the OP. Orb drop rate will be altered in this hypothetical system. Imo the intent is that it will make you reliant on orb drops from enemies specifically and that reliance will be the thing that will force you out of cover, increasing the challenge and forcing you to have teamwork.

[RealityMachina]

Shields, by their nature, allow you to poke in and out, killing a static number of enemies without any punishment whatsoever. As long as your shields don't go down you will havea  perfect game. This is only exacerbated by the fact redirection can be maxed to a decently absurd level. This isn't a QQ or "plz nerf" comment, it's just how shields work naturally.

...

 

Ok, quick question: What's the date you have on your computer?

 

Because you seem to be talking about Warframe as though it was in its pre 5.3 update state.

[Leyden]

Since even greener have shield...

[MJ12]

Shields, by their nature, allow you to poke in and out, killing a static number of enemies without any punishment whatsoever. As long as your shields don't go down you will havea  perfect game. This is only exacerbated by the fact redirection can be maxed to a decently absurd level. This isn't a QQ or "plz nerf" comment, it's just how shields work naturally. I actually think it's a necessary evil for solo players but in groups a decently leveled redirection eliminates almost any challenge in runs.

 

So you're saying a replenishable buffer against damage to a limited, non-regenerating resource allows you to avoid using that limited, non-regenerating resource? I think the term used for this is "working as intended". Not "inevitably overpowered".

 

Secondly, read the OP. Orb drop rate will be altered in this hypothetical system. Imo the intent is that it will make you reliant on orb drops from enemies specifically and that reliance will be the thing that will force you out of cover, increasing the challenge and forcing you to have teamwork.

 

It's really easy doing teamwork with a team of 1, you know. I have perfect battlefield coordination with all other team members. My team has meshed so well as to be able to read the thoughts of every other teammate. Anyways, being 'reliant on orb drops' doesn't increase the challenge, it just makes the difficulty even more variable and arbitrary. Being reliant on random health pickups was old when Doom came out.

 

There's a reason games with random map generation generally always give you some form of regenerating not-die-barrier, whether it's health or shields.

[Tyrael2k3]

what about a system like "Eve - Online" have?

 

I didn't play it much, so feel free to correct me if i am wrong.

The ships had 3 health bars in eve: shield, hull(?) and structure. (Names have to be adjusted to WF ofc!)

 

Let's make shields vulnerable against electric and ice dmg but strong against fire and piercing, but hull strong against ice and electric while weak against fire and pirecing. Shields and hull regenerate, where shield would go up faster than the hull. structure shouldn't have weaknesses nor benefits.

 

Even the mobs all should have all 3 kind if health-bars, but each one another balancing (infested more "structure", less shield ect..).

Every new player would be able to easiely spot the weakness of each mob. Since the +Elemental Mods would say "good against shields, bad againt hull".

 

You would be able to push more on shield/regen like now, but also on "hull" (+Armor)/hull-regen. But even the players focusing on bigger hull-points (something like health now, but with non-orb regen) would have another health-pool left that doesn't regen. Shields should still have the best regenrate, while hull should have something like half the regen-rate but a bigger pool than shields.

 

I guess this could create way more diversity in Healthpoint management and may force the player to make (hopefully) more intresting choices in the arsenal screen.

 

 

still a raw idea, feel free to criticize (even my bad english..)

[Tyrael2k3]

what about a system like "Eve - Online" have?

 

I didn't play it much, so feel free to correct me if i am wrong.

The ships had 3 health bars in eve: shield, hull(?) and structure. (Names have to be adjusted to WF ofc!)

 

You were able to boost you shield point pool and/or hull point pool. The regeneration came from some rapair-units you had to equipp to your ship.

 

Even the mobs all should have all 3 kind if health-bars, but each one another balancing (infested more "structure", less shield ect..).

Every new player would be able to easiely spot the weakness of each mob. Since the +Elemental Mods would say "good against shields, bad againt hull".

 

two examples:

 

Mob A (corpus):

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII  Shield: (500/500)

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII  Hull: (350/350)

IIIIIIIIIIIIIII  Health: (150/150)

 

Mob B (grineer):

IIIII  Shield (100/100)

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII  Hull (1000/1000)

IIIIIIIIIIIIIII  Health: (300/300)