Another Armor Rant (For The People Who Love Stats)

[Lichformed]

So I did some research in the Simulacrum

Note: My builds are not 100% the best, not even close, but I do run sorties and lvl100 content regularly

So the thing I was testing is how much armor actually affects my own gameplay, I've heard numerous times from YouTubers and whatnot that armor is a problem, always bypass armor etc. I was always thinking that it isn't that big of a deal, but alas.

So I also heard that Corrupted Bombards are weak to Radiation but the most effective element against them is Corrosive, what? So I went to test my favorite weapons in the Simulacrum with Ash (I usually run a Phoenix Renewal Oberon for healing and support). The idea was to test the weapons with and without armor, so here are the stats:

Enemy: lvl100 Corrupted Bombard

Invincibility: On

AI: On

Some Numbers Are Rounded Up And Calculated By Average because Of Random Incomes

Burston Prime:

- With armor = 84 shots

- Without armor = 27 shots

Lenz:

- With armor = Anything from 10 to 1 shot. But the one shot is inconsistent, as it needs to be an Orange Head Crit with a proc from Hunter Munitions

- Without armor = 1 shot

Panthera:

- With armor = UNUSABLE

- Without armor = From 3 to 20 shots, actually feels balanced, not even a full build though, might be able to one shot consistently

Secondary Fire

- With armor = About 13 seconds

- Without armor = 2-3 seconds

Sobek:

- With armor = 25 shots

- Without armor = 3 SHOTS

Stradavar (Riven with +226.6% Damage, +122.9% Status Chance -51.9% Multishot Negated with Split Chamber):

- With Armor = 120 shots

- Without Armor = 20 shots

Secondary Fire

- With Armor = 30 shots

- Without Armor = 5 shots, average, sometimes 3 sometimes 7 etc. But still...

Sybaris Prime:

- With Armor = 20 shots, 10 bursts, one clip.

- Without Armor = 4 shots, 2 bursts

 

So yes, these are the results from my favourite weapons, and the only ones I have full builds are the Stradavar, Sybaris and the Lenz. My point is not to show that without armor the game would be better, absolutely not, I think lvl100-lvl150 is a good roundup for the engame, and no armor would make it boring, and I even stated that the Panthera felt balanced without armor, so If I could get that result with armor I would be quite satisfied.

Also it is a fact that Prime Weapons should feel and be more powerful than the basic versions, but they should not be the clear engame weapons. Warframe is about choice, and to be able to bring any weapon into sorties and do successful would be cool. So I would love to see armor get tweaked with health, so that building other things than Corrosive would be nice, maybe even use the intended weakness for some enemies.

So lastly my biggest gripe is that there's a too big of a difference with armor and no armor. And it making certain weapons incredibly weak, unusable even. My biggest fear is that I'm getting forced to play Ash with Tigris Prime in end game, or something like that in the future.

[Lichformed]

I didn't bother with Secondary and Melee lists because I only use the Fusilai, Mara Detron and Vaykor Marolok in Secondary and in Melee I use the Guandao.

[ViolettaFoxx]

When Damage 2.0 was in development I made a suggestion in one of the Developer's threads on it. Since armor is scaled exponentially, this is why we see these innate problems with armor scaling ridiculously even in Sorties and enemies up to level 150, most prominently with heavy Grineer units. Instead of exponential armor scaling, why not logarithmic? It technically still scales to infinity but not as stupidly as exponential functions tied to armor-versus-level. Just as a visual reference to my simple solution;

Edited November 28, 2017 by ViolettaFoxx

[ShiraHagane]

20 hours ago, ViolettaFoxx said:

When Damage 2.0 was in development I made a suggestion in one of the Developer's threads on it. Since armor is scaled exponentially, this is why we see these innate problems with armor scaling ridiculously even in Sorties and enemies up to level 150, most prominently with heavy Grineer units. Instead of exponential armor scaling, why not logarithmic? It technically still scales to infinity but not as stupidly as exponential functions tied to armor-versus-level. Just as a visual reference to my simple solution;

I would prefer linear armor scaling personally

[A-Midnight-Shanking]

I don't have an issue with armor the way it is currently. I have an issue with armor and enemy HP not taking each other into consideration. Take a look at the stat scalings for HP, Shields, and Armor:

Current Health = Base Health × ( 1 + ( Current Level − Base Level )² × 0.015 )

Current Shield = Base Shield × ( 1 + ( Current Level − Base Level )² × 0.0075 )

Current Armor = Base Armor × ( 1 + ( Current Level − Base Level )^1.75 × 0.005 )

Now, take into consideration that Armor will yield a %Damage Reduciton on HP, whereas shields acts as a buffer following a similar scaling method.

 

Meaning while shields can offer a flat boost to HP, very likely never to exceed more than a 3x boost in hp (depending on base hp/shield ratio),  armor acts as a multiplier. capable of offering over a 50x increase in effective health. And unlike shields, there is no way to bypass this effect.

IMO, this could be solved by allowing a weapons IPS puncture % to cause damage done to ignore a portion of an enemy's armor. Countering a % with a %

Edited November 29, 2017 by A-Midnight-Shanking

[ljmadruga]

This is why the grineer and armored units are more annoying to kill.

Corpus are annoying in a more mechanical sense, but I’m pretty sure people can readily take down a lv 100 Corpus tech vs. a lv 100 Bombard. Nullifiers are annoying sure, but they can be easily taken down.

Heavy gunners and bombards sport one of the highest effective hp’s in the entire game. The also have the highest dps. It’s impossible to get close to them without crowd control because of their ground slams that allow them to finish you off before you can get up.

Armor scaling is the reason I don’t even bother with half the weapons in the game. Armor is the reason I never bring Mag, Saryn, or Atlas to anything over lv 50

[ShiraHagane]

37 minutes ago, A-Midnight-Shanking said:

there is no way to bypass this effect.

Slash prices and stealth finishers bypass armor

[(XBOX)dude1286]

1 hour ago, ljmadruga said:

Armor scaling is the reason I don’t even bother with half the weapons in the game. Armor is the reason I never bring Mag, Saryn, or Atlas to anything over lv 50

Mag can remove armor and uses the stripped armor as damage with one her abilities. Saryn's spores proc viral which is great against any enemy type.

I have a bigger problem with damage scaling than armor scaling. I don't mind fighting bullet sponges as long as they can't one-shot me. Though the logarithmic type of scaling could work if implemented correctly (for both armor and damage).

[Ardhanarishvara]

7 minutes ago, (Xbox One)dude1286 said:

I have a bigger problem with damage scaling than armor scaling. I don't mind fighting bullet sponges as long as they can't one-shot me. Though the logarithmic type of scaling could work if implemented correctly (for both armor and damage).

Unfortunately the whole point of enemies being able to one-shot you is to oust you out of the mission. You are not supposed to stay for that long, and DE never balances around content going significantly over level 150. The idea is to force in a soft cap to tell you "dude you gotta go, this is getting insane". You trying to stick around beyond that is your problem, not the game's. It's not nice to say and would certainly offend many people, but that's the short of it. People are testing themselves against content that wasn't designed to exist in the first place.

2 hours ago, ljmadruga said:

This is why the grineer and armored units are more annoying to kill.

Corpus are annoying in a more mechanical sense, but I’m pretty sure people can readily take down a lv 100 Corpus tech vs. a lv 100 Bombard. Nullifiers are annoying sure, but they can be easily taken down.

Heavy gunners and bombards sport one of the highest effective hp’s in the entire game. The also have the highest dps. It’s impossible to get close to them without crowd control because of their ground slams that allow them to finish you off before you can get up.

Armor scaling is the reason I don’t even bother with half the weapons in the game. Armor is the reason I never bring Mag, Saryn, or Atlas to anything over lv 50

Rather, I find that armour is the reason that I find Grineer more interesting to kill. It forces me to find solutions to a problem, which is what games should be about, not that I mind more zen musou gameplay on rare occasions. Finishers, slash procs, armour sundering, armour ignore. It's all so interesting to me.

Other factions have their own issues that people treat as being unbalanced or broken but that's just the problem you need to find a solution to. Corpus have ludicrous area control with sapper ospreys, anti-moas and nullifiers (Scrambus need to be reworked bad though, that's just unfair). Infested have so much in the way of DoT and utterly obliterate your energy reserves unless you can find ways to get around that.

Personally speaking, I think a large issue with the game's community is they expect all content to be equally viable against all other content, when that's simply not the case, nor should it be. It's just that the more immediate thing that everyone notices is that Grineer are slower to be killed than other factions using the standard methods. The majority of their problem is very simple - they're sturdier than everyone else. We've always had the tools to deal with that though, and are getting more with each update, it's just that people aren't used to using or thinking about those tools due to how inconsequential they are against the other factions, making it a more specialized strategy to fight with Grineer.

[Cpl_Facehugger]

12 minutes ago, Ardhanarishvara said:

Unfortunately the whole point of enemies being able to one-shot you is to oust you out of the mission. You are not supposed to stay for that long, and DE never balances around content going significantly over level 150. The idea is to force in a soft cap to tell you "dude you gotta go, this is getting insane". You trying to stick around beyond that is your problem, not the game's. It's not nice to say and would certainly offend many people, but that's the short of it. People are testing themselves against content that wasn't designed to exist in the first place.

Rather, I find that armour is the reason that I find Grineer more interesting to kill. It forces me to find solutions to a problem, which is what games should be about, not that I mind more zen musou gameplay on rare occasions. Finishers, slash procs, armour sundering, armour ignore. It's all so interesting to me.

Other factions have their own issues that people treat as being unbalanced or broken but that's just the problem you need to find a solution to. Corpus have ludicrous area control with sapper ospreys, anti-moas and nullifiers (Scrambus need to be reworked bad though, that's just unfair). Infested have so much in the way of DoT and utterly obliterate your energy reserves unless you can find ways to get around that.

Personally speaking, I think a large issue with the game's community is they expect all content to be equally viable against all other content, when that's simply not the case, nor should it be. It's just that the more immediate thing that everyone notices is that Grineer are slower to be killed than other factions using the standard methods. The majority of their problem is very simple - they're sturdier than everyone else. We've always had the tools to deal with that though, and are getting more with each update, it's just that people aren't used to using or thinking about those tools due to how inconsequential they are against the other factions, making it a more specialized strategy to fight with Grineer.

I don't mind grineer being sturdier than everyone else because heavy armor is the grineer's hat, but there's a difference between "sturdier than everyone else" and "fifty times more durable." 

The way armor scales right now, we have a stat screen that lies to us - if you scan a bombard you'd think "okay, alloy armor, super weak versus radiation, so I should bring radiation on my gun to deal with bombards on this storie." But you're going to be more effective with corrosive because corrosive removes the armor, and the armor scales so much in higher levels that it's quicker to strip it with status procs than shoot through it normally. This leads to corrosive being the de facto meta damage for everything but corpus (since infested have ancients who are vulnerable to corrosive and it screws over grineer too due to procs), and encouraging one build to rule them all isn't very good.

We had a similar problem in damage 1.0 with how infested are supposed to be vulnerable to fire but armor scaled so much that only armor piercing damage did any damage at all. At least it's not quite that bad, but it would be a lot nicer if the armor had an upper limit so that grineer are more durable but not "corrosive/CP or go home kthnxbai" durable. I mean, it's pretty telling that the solutions to armor in this game basically mean "circumvent it with slash procs or take away the armor with corrosive/CP."

Edited November 29, 2017 by Cpl_Facehugger

[Ardhanarishvara]

4 minutes ago, Cpl_Facehugger said:

I don't mind grineer being sturdier than everyone else because heavy armor is the grineer's hat, but there's a difference between "sturdier than everyone else" and "fifty times more durable." 

The way armor scales right now, we have a stat screen that lies to us - if you scan a bombard you'd think "okay, alloy armor, super weak versus radiation, so I should bring radiation on my gun to deal with bombards on this storie." But you're going to be more effective with corrosive because corrosive removes the armor, and the armor scales so much in higher levels that it's quicker to strip it with status procs than shoot through it normally. This leads to corrosive being the de facto meta damage for everything but corpus (since infested have ancients who are vulnerable to corrosive and it screws over grineer too due to procs), and encouraging one build to rule them all isn't very good.

See, that's interesting of you to say, because any time I test Titania against Level 135 Kuva Napalms, Razorwing with Radiation+Viral tends to beat out Corrosive+Blast, with the former taking only a single magazine to achieve and the latter taking two. This is because the Radiation isn't just getting a damage bonus, but also innate armour-ignore. It ignores 75% of alloy armour, so it's going to be doing like triple or quadruple the damage expected. Then again maybe it's the slash procs providing the difference alongside viral.

As for "fifty times more durable", that's the problem to overcome. And I think it's a perfectly okay problem. We have literal instant kill mods and any number of weapons and general functions that have the innate ability to bypass that added durability with ease, as well as damage types that also bypass it.

Edited November 29, 2017 by Ardhanarishvara

[Cpl_Facehugger]

1 minute ago, Ardhanarishvara said:

See, that's interesting of you to say, because any time I test Titania against Level 135 Kuva Napalms, Razorwing with Radiation+Viral tends to beat out Corrosive+Blast, with the former taking only a single magazine to achieve and the latter taking two.

I suppose if your threshold for "more effective" is "exalted weapon that scales off weapon and frame mods can do this" then you're right. Similarly, an exalted blade or peacemaker or possibly Ivara's exalted bow can get through armor with raw brute force too, with the right builds.

But not a whole lot of frames have exalted weapons, so it seems to me that bringing up something like razorwing as a counter just highlights the issue. 

[(PSN)thefallenloser]

2 hours ago, ljmadruga said:

Armor scaling is the reason I don’t even bother with half the weapons in the game. Armor is the reason I never bring Mag, Saryn, or Atlas to anything over lv 50

Why did I have to see this...?

Mag -

Magnetize, enough said.

Saryn -

Saryn is really good for weakening the enemy, and is viable for level 100+ content. A lack of understanding on Saryn will mislead you in how she can help though.

Atlas - 

Good for CC, aggro and damage against lighter armor. He isn't just all damage like you think.

[(PSN)thefallenloser]

21 minutes ago, Ardhanarishvara said:

See, that's interesting of you to say, because any time I test Titania against Level 135 Kuva Napalms, Razorwing with Radiation+Viral tends to beat out Corrosive+Blast, with the former taking only a single magazine to achieve and the latter taking two.

Corrosive Blast? Isn't the Corrosive Heat combo better though?

[Ardhanarishvara]

2 minutes ago, (PS4)ArtPrince17 said:

Corrosive Blast? Isn't the Corrosive Heat combo better though?

For alloy armour? I don't see why it would. Blast does more damage due to having the weighting of two elemental mods and on top of that applies AoE CC to boot. Are you making reference to the panic function to keep a single enemy locked down for greater aim at headshots? Because knockdown isn't that difficult to account for.

[(PSN)thefallenloser]

6 minutes ago, Ardhanarishvara said:

For alloy armour? I don't see why it would. Blast does more damage due to having the weighting of two elemental mods and on top of that applies AoE CC to boot. Are you making reference to the panic function to keep a single enemy locked down for greater aim at headshots? Because knockdown isn't that difficult to account for.

I don't know, Corrosive Heat seems to do more damage with the constant damage over time, especially after armor strip or with a Condition Overload.

[Ardhanarishvara]

11 minutes ago, (PS4)ArtPrince17 said:

I don't know, Corrosive Heat seems to do more damage with the constant damage over time, especially after armor strip or with a Condition Overload.

Ah, okay, heat's bonus damage against cloned flesh. Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense.

Except I always seem to kill the Napalms before their armour runs out even with corrosive.

[Terrornaut]

43 minutes ago, Ardhanarishvara said:

You trying to stick around beyond that is your problem, not the game's. It's not nice to say and would certainly offend many people, but that's the short of it.

I wish game devs and businesses in general would just be more up front. Like we all know this, but, to say it would somehow be revolutionary or terrible in some ridiculous peoples' eyes...which, shouldn't be the case.

3 hours ago, ljmadruga said:

This is why the grineer and armored units are more annoying to kill.

Corpus are annoying in a more mechanical sense, but I’m pretty sure people can readily take down a lv 100 Corpus tech vs. a lv 100 Bombard. Nullifiers are annoying sure, but they can be easily taken down.

Heavy gunners and bombards sport one of the highest effective hp’s in the entire game. The also have the highest dps. It’s impossible to get close to them without crowd control because of their ground slams that allow them to finish you off before you can get up.

Armor scaling is the reason I don’t even bother with half the weapons in the game. Armor is the reason I never bring Mag, Saryn, or Atlas to anything over lv 50

As an Ember main, the Grineer are my favorite faction to deal with, corpus least.  Level 100+ units go down in a few shots/strikes most of the time, with certain guilds/teammates doing things of course.  As far as the crowd control goes, you just roll up to them and its fine.  Or block.  I usually run a Silva & Aegis so at high levels I'm rolling bullet jumping and block-running everywhere.  Their CC is usually not a problem and I'm far from a sturdy frame.

4 minutes ago, (PS4)ArtPrince17 said:

I don't know, Corrosive Heat seems to do more damage with the constant damage over time, especially after armor strip or with a Condition Overload.

I also feel like this, but then again, I typically multiply heat by around 8x while using corrosive status weapons to strip so its always faster for me than running rad and viral in some cases.  It would probably be most effective to run rad with some corrosive stripping and not strip all armor though, kind of like for the eidolons.  Only in my case, I need heat to get its bonus so I want that armor gone.

[A-Midnight-Shanking]

5 hours ago, ShiraHagane said:

Slash prices and stealth finishers bypass armor

Slash I find to be an unintended effect, likely to be nerfed in some manner come Damage 3.0. I mean the damage type itself is at a disadvantage against armor, why should it be the one that is allowed to bypass it via a proc?

[Eirshy]

Infinite scaling armor was the reason Damage 1.0 had issues. All Grineer and Infested Ancients all had >95% DR (the magical 20x EHP) by like lv49, and back then the star chart went to lv100.

My thread discussing this being the problem was mentioned in a sticky way back in those days, unfortunately DE didn't actually take heed of what that mod rightfully thought was important.

They did at least make it less absurd- we only hit 100 in sorties and intentional endless, and armor lost a full 1/3 of its effectiveness (used to be the standard 1 = 1% EHP formula, now it's 3 = 1%).

But in exchange they took away the easy full-bypass techniques. Slash procs are decent for it, sure, but they are even more restrictive than needing an armor-bypassing damage type. AP (which became Puncture, sort of) was addable to all weapons, and allowed for a good crit weapon to be usable (with cold added as well to make up for the ancient "shields can't be critted"... bugfeature?). Additionally, they're less powerful without a proc forcing method (stances, Hunter Munitions), as they only scale to slash damage otherwise.

Alternatively you can strip armor via corrosive procs or, if you're crazy, Shattering Impact. SI needs a slight buff (I'd say cap it at 10-12 per strike), but coro procs are actually rather good.
 

Anyways, this situation is why all super-endgame-tier builds are proc-based and either:
- Viral Slash: the viral proc halves max and current health so the slash DoTs have half the work
- Corrosive Cold: Corrosive reduces armor and Cold helps with ProtoShields (the only thing that resists Corrosive)
- Corrosive Heat: Corrosive reduces armor and Heat helps with Grineer Health (which massively helps with TTK on them)

There's a few weapons that are pure Radiation, Corrosive, or Viral which can do fancy things like CoroRad for 75% bypass on both armor types (doesn't scale forever though), or CoroVi for an advanced form of CoroHot. These are even more rare than the standard sets, however.

Hunter Munitions may bring back the Crit build as super-endgame-tier, as it lets you get forced slash procs with 35% of full damage, as well as crit multipliers to make up for the *max* 30% proc chance. I know the Baza is a beast with it, and has just enough status chance to make a Viral build with Hunter for Slash count.

 

EDIT: I notice some people saying Radi+Viral is kinda worse than expected. That's because it is a rather bad combo.
Radiation damage is actually a really poor damage type outside of the things it's specifically good against: Bombards, Napalms, and Teralysts. It's also downright usless against the Infested outside of a radi proc on healers- but you could always just kill the healer with corrosive instead. Because of this, you're leaning on Viral itself, which also struggles against light infested, but at least gets major boons against Grineer/Corpus flesh and has a damn good health compression proc.

 

6 hours ago, A-Midnight-Shanking said:

IMO, this could be solved by allowing a weapons IPS puncture % to cause damage done to ignore a portion of an enemy's armor. Countering a % with a %

It does already, kinda.
Damage Effectiveness against Armor is applied twice; once as a reduction to their effective armor against the strike, and once as a multiplier to damage.

100 puncture damage hitting 600 ferrite armor has +50% effectiveness, dealing 100 + 50% damage against 600 - 50% armor, or 150 vs 300, or 75.

This is why Corrosive and Radiation attacks melt Ferrite and Alloy enemies so quickly, and why Radiation damage is so absurdly good against the Teralyst who has Alloy (+75%) on top of Robotic (+25%).

Edited November 29, 2017 by TheBlueJelly
added an edit about RadiVi sucking

[A-Midnight-Shanking]

28 minutes ago, TheBlueJelly said:

It does already, kinda.
Damage Effectiveness against Armor is applied twice; once as a reduction to their effective armor against the strike, and once as a multiplier to damage.

Where do you get this information? I was under the impression that it was just a simple calculation:

Inflicted Damage = Base Damage × (1 + Hitpoint Modifier) (From Wiki)

I would love it to be what you assume it is: reduction to their effective armor against the strike. But I don't think that's how it works currently.

 

Edit: nevermind, found it (Armor, Wiki)

Edited November 29, 2017 by A-Midnight-Shanking

[Eirshy]

On the topic of Corrosive + X for killing things....

Blast is universally the worst TTK choice, as it moves the headshot marker. Advantage though, it's the only status to provide aoe knockdown, so it opens ground finishers and prevents enemies in the area of the hit from attacking. Great for when your TTK will be garbage anyways, and great when you don't need to actually kill things. Damage-wise, it has some. I don't think I've ever run blast for damage, so I'd actually have to look up what it has.

Cold covers for Corrosive's only weakness- Proto Shields on Corpus Techs- and also provides a strong, animation-less CC effect. Side benefit, Cold also has +25% effectiveness against Alloy armor, giving you a bit more raw bypass damage against it before your Corrosive strips it away. Nowhere near the 75% Corrosive nets against Ferrite, but it's something.

Heat provides bonus damage against grineer flesh, meaning it has the better TTK than Cold against Ferrite grineer, and deals significantly more than cold (+50% instead of +0%) once you fully strip the armor.
 

I personally prefer CoroCo on primaries (due to Primed Cryo) and CoroHot on secondaries (due to Primed Heated). Melee I'll usually go either CoroCo or CoroBlast, as the melee multipliers deal with Grineer flesh well enough and I'm more concerned about universality / utility.

Hunter Munitions is making me like straight viral on some guns now, too.... not sure if it'll stick though. I made a flamebait rant about the Acrid back in Damage 1.0 being trash because it was backloaded damage. I still find that sentiment to be accurate, Hunter Munitions just makes for an endgame-viable option for crit/s weapons that have low status. Like the Baza, which feels really nice minus that glitchy reload, btw.
 

26 minutes ago, A-Midnight-Shanking said:

Where do you get this information? I was under the impression that it was just a simple calculation:

Inflicted Damage = Base Damage × (1 + Hitpoint Modifier) (From Wiki)

I would love it to be what you assume it is: reduction to their effective armor against the strike. But I don't think that's how it works currently.

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Armor

The Armor Class Modifier is the same as the damage type effectiveness against the armor. The wiki is a bit misleading in presentation though, as it should be - not + since they didn't flip the percentages on the "charts".

Edited November 29, 2017 by TheBlueJelly
Added note about Hunter Munitions to what I use

[A-Midnight-Shanking]

@TheBlueJelly

I see. After looking at it the real problem lies in the edge-cases where armor is stacked so high that even a 75% armor reduction still results in 95% Damage Reduction. On top of Health still scaling alongside. Perhaps this could be solved by having certain damage types bypass the DR calculation attained with armor values?

[Eirshy]

31 minutes ago, A-Midnight-Shanking said:

I see. After looking at it the real problem lies in the edge-cases where armor is stacked so high that even a 75% armor reduction still results in 95% Damage Reduction. On top of Health still scaling alongside. Perhaps this could be solved by having certain damage types bypass the DR calculation attained with armor values?

That was how 1.0 worked. Armor Piercing (Snipetron, Despair, No Return mods, etc), Physics Impact (Boltor, Gremlins, etc), Serrated Blade (Lanka, charge melee, etc), Toxin (Acrid, etc), and..... Finisher? all completely ignored armor.

Nowadays we still partly have that with Finisher damage. Beyond non-ground-finishers (iirc gf doesn't get finisher typing), you can also get it with Slash procs. The issue then is getting good slash procs. Hunter Munitions helps with this since it lets crits get full-35% procs (instead of the normal 35% of slash) without needing status chance or good slash damage... but they still rely on a DoT effect. Additionally, some melee stances (such as Rapier's Vulpine Mask) have forced slash procs as well (which are also at full-35%), and some (also Vulpine Mask) have finisher openings built-in. Top of the latter heap is the new dagger mod with Covert Lethality, as it gives effectively instakills every time the stance triggers a finisher.

 

I'd honestly need to figure more out about Damage 2.0's edge interactions work (100 cold versus 100 shield 100 health, how much health damage does it take; same situation 66.7 cold 66.7 corrosive for damage, same but proto-shields, etc) to be really comfortable offering ideas on what to do.

Will give one, thought... giving Puncture procs a 10-20% bypass (as in makes that percentage of your pre-armor damage total goes through without considering reduction from armor) would make Puncture a lot more reliable, but would tie it to procs still, which is kinda the problem. Would open us for a second Hunter Munitions crit-force-proc style mod, and I'd actually be all over one that isn't backloaded even if the raw DPS is lower- I hate backloaded DPS.

Actually, Puncture getting armor bypass if it procs on armored targets, and punch-through if it procs on unarmored targets would both be entertainingly realistic (introducing overpen but in a fun way) and rather comfy.

 

Realtalk though I'd actually wanna revamp IPS as a whole. Elements, Magnetic is really the only one that needs some major revamping. IPS though.... Hammers were traditionally used against heavy armor for a reason, and that's because heavy armor turns slash into impact, and piercing that isn't strong enough to go through into impact, but concussive impact itself is transferred to the flesh underneath. Hammers are designed around impact and thus were significantly less weakened by heavy armor. The catch was simply that hammers and flails and similar were somewhat unwieldy, so polearms' reach and swords' balance tended to win out. Having Puncture turned into more of a pierce rating, Impact into scaling against armor and shield, and Slashing into the actual damage could be cool, but doesn't work for melee like at all, and I really don't wanna have two separate damage systems for guns and melee.

Edited November 30, 2017 by TheBlueJelly