Why Is Armor Ignore And Piercing Everything?

[Keetsune]

I think you didn't get the problem the OP showed you.

 

If you have any weapon with armor piercing damage you deal X damage. It takes you healthpool/X hits to kill that target.

Higher level enemies have higher healthpools, thus, you need more hits to kill them.

When it then comes to weapons without armor piercing damage it is still the same. Higher level enemies take more hits due to higher healthpool but:

They take even more hits because their armor is going up aswell.

 

So lets take a toxic ancient ~60.

Let's assume 200 damage per hit armor piercing damage.

~5000 health so 5000/200 damage = 25 hits.

 

Now use a bullet weapon, and because it is affected by armor, DE decided to give the weapon 50% more damage, making it 300 damage (50% is a massive increase)

You also have ~1000 armor on the enemy target.

So damage per hit will be 300*100/1000 = ~30

So to kill the same ancient you will just need a nice little amount of 5000/30 = 166 hits.

 

It is not about making this game easier.

Nobody wants these weapons to be better than armor ignore. Just equal. So the game wouldn't become easier.

Here my calculation: 3xCorrosive Projection(5) +1xCorrosive Projection(1) = 100% armor reduction, what mean ALL MOBS AT ANY LVL HAVE 0 ARMOR. And you want to make this Aura useless? Cool story.

[Jhonrock]

Here my calculation: 3xCorrosive Projection(5) +1xCorrosive Projection(1) = 100% armor reduction, what mean ALL MOBS AT ANY LVL HAVE 0 ARMOR. And you want to make this Aura useless? Cool story.

 

So, i have to team up with other three corrosive projection owners to play in high level missions?

What happen if i can't find others owners? What happen if i don't have that aura? Only players with that aura can play that content? That doesn't seems to be a good solution...

Edited July 25, 2013 by Jhonrock

[theangelbelow88]

Here my calculation: 3xCorrosive Projection(5) +1xCorrosive Projection(1) = 100% armor reduction, what mean ALL MOBS AT ANY LVL HAVE 0 ARMOR. And you want to make this Aura useless? Cool story.

The problem with this is that not everyone has corrosive projection and it limits players on what items are a must, also its hard to get everyone to use a specific item when you join a random game, this might work with your clan/friends but its not very reliable outside of that.

Edited July 25, 2013 by theangelbelow88

[Varonth]

Here my calculation: 3xCorrosive Projection(5) +1xCorrosive Projection(1) = 100% armor reduction, what mean ALL MOBS AT ANY LVL HAVE 0 ARMOR. And you want to make this Aura useless? Cool story.

 

So A, this is sadly wrong:

You are assuming Corrosive Projection (you linked the wikia article, please read it yourself as everything I will now write is also written in that article) is additive. It is multiplicative.

So 1 rank 5 Corrosive Projection would reduce those 1000 armor to 700: 1000*(1-0.3) = 700

2 rank 5 Corrosive Projection would reduce those to: 1000*(1-0.3)*(1-0.3) = 490

Just for the fun of it, 10 rank 5 Corrosive Projection would be: 1000*(1-0.3)^10 = 28,24. Just the enemy would still have some armor even if you would have 10 times that aura.

 

Besides, it would still not solve the problem. It would shift it to another problem, because you cannot place auras into weapons. So yeah, your weapon might become just as usefull as an armor piercing weapon, if all players are using that aura. But you lose stuff like AMP auras or Energy Siphon, just so your weapons are equal to armor piercing.

[theangelbelow88]

So A, this is sadly wrong:

You are assuming Corrosive Projection (you linked the wikia article, please read it yourself as everything I will now write is also written in that article) is additive. It is multiplicative.

So 1 rank 5 Corrosive Projection would reduce those 1000 armor to 700: 1000*(1-0.3) = 700

2 rank 5 Corrosive Projection would reduce those to: 1000*(1-0.3)*(1-0.3) = 490

Just for the fun of it, 10 rank 5 Corrosive Projection would be: 1000*(1-0.3)^10 = 28,24. Just the enemy would still have some armor even if you would have 10 times that aura.

 

Besides, it would still not solve the problem. It would shift it to another problem, because you cannot place auras into weapons. So yeah, your weapon might become just as usefull as an armor piercing weapon, if all players are using that aura. But you lose stuff like AMP auras or Energy Siphon, just so your weapons are equal to armor piercing.

Yes, I agree its still has the problem of liming players to a very specific type of item in order to do good on higher level content.

Edited July 25, 2013 by theangelbelow88

[Kyte]

Do things still get elemental resistance scaling? I thought they took that out.

 

Such a thing never existed. There was elemental multipliers and armor scaling.

[MJ12]

Yeah, DE, go make warframe more closer to another casual sh`t game in endless bunch of them.

 

Remind me how this is going to make it a 'casual' game?

 

"Oh no, a Braton retains its relative effectiveness compared to a Boltor over 100% of the level range! THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY AWFUL L2P NOOB".

 

Because the literal only change is that people might use guns that don't ignore armor. The high-tier weapons, i.e. the weapons anyone who is claiming the game is too easy already use, will have exactly the same effectiveness.

Edited July 25, 2013 by MJ12

[theangelbelow88]

Remind me how this is going to make it a 'casual' game?

 

"Oh no, a Braton retains its relative effectiveness compared to a Boltor over 100% of the level range! THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY AWFUL L2P NOOB".

 

Because the literal only change is that people might use guns that don't ignore armor. The high-tier weapons, i.e. the weapons anyone who is claiming the game is too easy already use, will have exactly the same effectiveness.

Yes, I agree, its not about making the game easier but about addressing an issue that requires attention and action.

[Gonzalito]

Just shoot them in their feet for complete damage.

[Keetsune]

So A, this is sadly wrong:

You are assuming Corrosive Projection (you linked the wikia article, please read it yourself as everything I will now write is also written in that article) is additive. It is multiplicative.

No it's not. Stop reading useless Wiki with lot of incorrect & outdated data, go and test it by yourself like a did. Since "Artifacts" become "Auras" they not multiplicative anymore. And it sad to watch like two other ignoramus victim's of the wiki is upvoting posts of ppls like you and spreading incorrect info in minds of innocents.

Edited July 26, 2013 by Keetsune

[theangelbelow88]

No it's not. Stop reading useless Wiki with lot of incorrect & outdated data, go and test it by yourself like a did. Since "Artifacts" become "Auras" they not multiplicative anymore. And it sad to watch like two other ignoramus victim's of the wiki is upvoting posts of ppls like you and spreading incorrect info in minds of innocents.

Are you not the one that brought up the wiki in the first place...

[Aedwynn]

No it's not. Stop reading useless Wiki with lot of incorrect & outdated data, go and test it by yourself like a did. Since "Artifacts" become "Auras" they not multiplicative anymore. And it sad to watch like two other ignoramus victim's of the wiki is upvoting posts of ppls like you and spreading incorrect info in minds of innocents.

Sigh. Again, it's a problem of weapon-to-weapon balancing, not a difficulty issue. Weapon choice is limited when going versus high-level content and that wasn't intended by design. Fact is, you need to bring Corrosive aura to make most weapons viable in high-end, while AP weapons do not require such. Your corrosive aura is not a valid argument.

First, you implied it's player skill issue, second, you brought in corrosion which is not an answer. Stop being ignorant S#&$.

Edited July 26, 2013 by Aedwynn

[Keetsune]

While i agree that this game dificulty should be increased by improving AI, unique mechanic of some mobs and etc, i still hope that DE will ignore moaning of unskilled noobs on this thread.

[Campaigner]

Here my calculation: 3xCorrosive Projection(5) +1xCorrosive Projection(1) = 100% armor reduction, what mean ALL MOBS AT ANY LVL HAVE 0 ARMOR. And you want to make this Aura useless? Cool story.

It already is useless.

 

What's the point in using normal weapons and stacking Corrosive Projection when you can just use armor ignore/armor piercing weapons and stack Rifle Amp?

[Keetsune]

What's the point in using normal weapons and stacking Corrosive Projection

Snipertron Vandal with 4x AMP aura stacked, maxed Piercing Hit:

 

125*2,08 + 125*2,08*0.6 = 416

 

Snipertron Vandal with 100% corrosion stacked, maxed Piercing Hit/Cryo Rounds/Hellfire/Stormbringer/Wildfire

 

125 + 125*0,6 + 125*0,6 + 125*0,9 + 125*0,9 + 125*0,9= 612,5

 

So there is 47% damage difference to make the "POINT" + no dependence on base weapon damage type + it work for all source of damage not just rifles. And this not even including enemy weaknes to elements. Even vs greeners in case of 0 armor Helfire & Stormbringer does more damage to medium grineers than Piercing Hit:

 

Hellfire/Stormbringer on medium grineer: 90%*1,25=112,5%

Piercing Hit on medium grineer: 60*1,5=90%.

Edited July 26, 2013 by Keetsune

[RealityMachina]

Uh, doesn't Snipetron Vandal deal armor piercing damage by default?

[Aedwynn]

Snipertron Vandal with 4x AMP aura stacked, maxed Piercing Hit:

 

125*2,08 + 125*2,08*0.6 = 416

 

Snipertron Vandal with 100% corrosion stacked, maxed Piercing Hit/Cryo Rounds/Hellfire/Stormbringer/Wildfire

 

125 + 125*0,6 + 125*0,6 + 125*0,9 + 125*0,9 + 125*0,9= 612,5

 

So there is 47% damage difference to make the "POINT" + no dependence on base weapon damage type + it work for all source of damage not just rifles. And this not even including enemy weaknes to elements. Even vs greeners in case of 0 armor Helfire & Stormbringer does more damage to medium grineers than Piercing Hit:

 

Hellfire/Stormbringer on medium grineer: 90%*1,25=112,5%

Piercing Hit on medium grineer: 60*1,5=90%.

And why you did not calculate elemental dmg for first case? Armor can never make them 0, you know.

upd1.

To put it simply, in case 1) you deal 416 dmg, in case 2) (with same mod) you deal 125+125*.60 = 200.

so, point is, at what armor value rest elemental mods will compensate for it?

upd2.

my calculation says its ~336 armor. With top ancients having around~3000 that means unless all 4 bring maxed Corrosion it will hardly make any difference.

Edited July 26, 2013 by Aedwynn

[Tatersail]

This is not an OLD issue.. there are literally 100s of posts about the armor system..

 

DE hasn't .... said anything?

Shotguns got an AP Elemental mod, Melee got an AP Elemental mod

 

Its a MASSIVE change that would require the entire games balance to be adjusted, it Think its just too much work at the moment.

[3XT3RM1NATUS]

While i agree that this game dificulty should be increased by improving AI, unique mechanic of some mobs and etc, i still hope that DE will ignore moaning of unskilled noobs on this thread.

This is... just wow. Explain how teaming up with 3 other players who have Corrosive Protection (which by no means requiers skill to obtain, only pure luck) to make 90% of weapons usable at higher levels considered skill? Bloody poser.

[Katsuni]

It's always been the way in game design; if you have two stats which go up at the same time, which effectively do the same thing, then all you're doing is making the game harder to balance.

 

Case in point: Armour and health has been a consistent issue with poor design for years, since at least the early starcraft 1 days when many tower defense map makers would have the levels increase in both armour and health, but wouldn't add any armour ignoring tower choices to counteract such. All this meant was that the # shots to kill a target went up faster than intended, and became difficult to predict without wasting vast amounts of extra time on damage calculations or play testing. WC3 was even worse for this since armour was now a % based decrease that was poorly understood by most players, rather than the flat damage reduction in SC1. 10 armour would be equivilent to +60% effective health, for example, assuming the armour constant wasn't altered in the process.

 

Other games have had a similar issue; things like combining attack speed and damage on weapons that don't have to reload, or reducing the damage of an enemy and increasing the resistances of an ally at the same time. This can be seen all throughout amateur game design, mostly in mods or fan-based works, because it's quite literally just a time sink that a company which has to actually pay it's employees can't afford. If they're hourly, waste of time, if they're salary, you're still pushing back the release date which can cost even more money in the long term.

 

Again, if you scale two stats which do the same thing, it's simply annoying to deal with. Sure, it's possible to create a large spreadsheet which calculates out everything, but again, it takes time to build the spreadsheet and then review it for content compared to fairly linear increases due to a single stat adjustment.

 

The other issue, is when you apply things like armour in particular; either you don't have armour piercing options, in which case the increase to armour is largely pointless as it exists only as a further health increase, or you have armour piercing options, in which case anything but those options are now a moot point.

 

At high end play, it will invariably become that the top end players will 98% of the time use armour ignoring weapons, because if they use literally anything else, then they have to waste mod slots which could otherwise be put to better use.

 

Sacrificing things like energy regeneration or raw damage for armour piercing is a poor trade off if you could have had both.

 

This isn't "difficulty", it's just poor design, as the top players will simply use the AP weapons, and eventually everyone else will read about it in the wiki and everyone else will use the AP weapons as well, meaning why would you even bother making any new weapon content which isn't AP?

 

This, in turn, restricts the development choices of the devteam so that they're now trapped in an endless loop; non-AP weapons are useless, so we have to create new AP weapons or they'll never be used and we'll have to listen to complaints any time we release anything. Creating only AP weapons means higher level new enemies now need more health or new mechanics to negate the AP effects, reducing their effectiveness, which further impacts against non-AP weapons, further emphasizing their uselessness.

 

Round and round you go, continually compounding the problem until you're left with anything non-AP being so completely useless that no one in the game uses them any longer, not even the newbies, and at that point you need to overhaul the whole system, but that means a TON of work in trying to replace all of the items, all of the damage formulas, and all of the armour values on higher end enemies.

 

The longer you leave it, the more work it becomes, and any changes made will piss off large groups of players who will quit the game once it's live. As long as it's still in beta, you can at least use the pitiful "well, it's just a beta" excuse, which will at least placate most of the populace so that it doesn't compound the problem further.

 

In short... you either fix the problem relatively soon, or it'll be too much work to fix, and you'll have dug your own grave in the process.

 

About the only place where armour scaling of this nature matters, is in PvP games where players may choose to go health OR damage reduction, and it becomes a matter of countering your opponent's build, and again, that only really works if you have the capacity to counter-build in relation to such as you see them gaining gear towards that end. This would be something like a MOBA game, where the stats reset at the end of each mission and you can predict their stat growth as the game progresses.

 

For a PvE game, stat stacking is really never the answer, nor is spamming out more enemies (unless you're talking about something like Serious Sam, then go right ahead =P ). Generally, your ideal choice is to aim for more complex and interesting enemies, with new abilities or effects that alter how a fight progresses. Give one or two tenno-class skills to an enemy, and see how the battlefield shifts significantly; give it specific hit boxes that are easy to see but have to be systematically removed like armour clasps on a grineer that have to be shot off to remove the heavy slabs of plating, or multiple gun turrets on some kind of corpus walker.

 

Regardless, the point is using two stats which perform the same function, such as "makes me harder to kill", in such a way that they are multiplictive rather than defending against different types of attacks, is always going to eventually equate to more trouble than it's worth.

 

You don't put armour on an enemy that reduces it's damage taken by X% and an ability where it reduces the damage of all enemies it fights by X% as well. One or the other, never both.

 

To this end, armour and health are the same thing. One or the other scales; you can have some armour, so long as the armour piercing variant doesn't do as much damage as the non-piercing variant, and so long as the armour reduction options make the two relatively on par with one another. This simply means the player now has a personal choice of which they prefer, so long as the margin of difference is within ~5% or so. Much more than that, and it becomes too big of an impact to be worth taking personal preference over effectiveness and we're stuck back with the same situation again.

[WildNerdAppears]

If your weapon can't kill things you have 2 choices:

 

1: Use a weapon that is better for those missions. I can tell you from using EVERY weapon in the game, they are all viable with the right set up for different tasks. (if your "pet" gun doesn't work use something else, basic common sense)

2: CORROSIVE PROJECTION

 

We don't need another game ruined because of people crying on the forums rather then finding an in game answer (they ARE there)

Edited July 26, 2013 by Damers

[DiabolusUrsus]

 

If your weapon can't kill things you have 2 choices:

 

1: Use a weapon that is better for those missions. I can tell you from using EVERY weapon in the game, they are all viable with the right set up for different tasks. (if your "pet" gun doesn't work use something else, basic common sense)

2: CORROSIVE PROJECTION

 

We don't need another game ruined because of people crying on the forums rather then finding an in game answer (they ARE there)

 

Once again, people keep missing the point.

1. Warframe is a game that is centered around giving players a wide selection of cool equipment to play with while they slaughter their way through hordes of enemies as awesome space ninjas. In simpler terms, it's about having a good time. Of course some weapons are going to be more effective than other weapons, but it's bad game design to have weapons that are outright ineffective when freedom of weapon choice is central. If that doesn't make sense to you, ask yourself this: would DE really make 80% or so of their weapons with the intention of them not being viable choices past mid-game difficulty? Having armor ignore be necessary for decent damage to high end enemies just doesn't make sense.

2. NO. They just changed Auras to adding mod points instead of depleting them. WHY? Because they wanted to see people start using a wider array of passive group bonuses rather than everyone running around with the one or two artifacts that were originally useful. Now people have a reason to use something other than Energy Siphon or Rifle Amp. Not a good enough reason yet, but the point is that DE is openly trying to encourage diversity of aura selection. Making it so that stacking a full party of Corrosive Projection is necessary for dealing viable amounts of damage to endgame enemies limits player choice of aura to just one. Factor in that not everybody has that aura, and fewer people have it maxed, and it should be apparent that this is just you being self-entitled because you're further along in the game than most players, and that you're infatuated with the image of being a 'hardcore' gamer.

What's more, is that Corrosive Projection coupled with a non-armor ignoring weapon is always going to have inferior damage ouptut to Rifle Amp or Steel Charge coupled with an Armor Ignoring weapon.

The game isn't going to be ruined by changing how enemy armor scales and evening out the change by introducing a larger overall health pool. It just means that people don't have to use only armor-ignoring weapons to deal decent damage. It will still take just as long to kill higher-level mobs, people will simply have a wider choice of weapon and mod loadouts when accomplishing that task. Diversity is a good thing, it keeps the game interesting.

[Katsuni]

I was going to say something, but DiabolusUrsus beat me to it with a succiently worded post compared to what I would've used =P

[MattHarrigan]

Two words:

Corrosive Projection

 

P.S. Leave it as it is.

 

[MJ12]

 

If your weapon can't kill things you have 2 choices:

 

1: Use a weapon that is better for those missions. I can tell you from using EVERY weapon in the game, they are all viable with the right set up for different tasks. (if your "pet" gun doesn't work use something else, basic common sense)

2: CORROSIVE PROJECTION

 

We don't need another game ruined because of people crying on the forums rather then finding an in game answer (they ARE there)

 

 

So why do we even have the other guns? Armor-ignore weapons are no worse than non-ignore weapons in killing non-armored enemies, every faction has fairly common armored units (Corpus crewmen, Grineer everything, Infested Chargers and Ancients), and Armor Piercing outside of shotguns (Acc. Blast and Flechette give you a max of +150% AP) is too limited to provide a counterpoint.

 

Your argument is literally "two thirds of the weapons and 90% of the auras in the game should not exist."

 

This is a stupid argument.