Unairu Stone Skin

[The_Polish]

With Focus 2.0 Stone Skin got changed drastically, instead of giving a percentage increase to armour, instead it gives a set armour buff. While low armour frames such as Trinity benefit from the new system a lot more than the old, the already tanky Warframes like Valkyr don't benefit at all, as 60 extra armour is nothing compared to 1700. A way to make both low armour frames and high armour frames benefit from this is to combine the old version and the new version into one; giving a flat armour boost, and a percentage increase. Frames like Trinity will increase their armour supply drastically, while tanky frames like Valkyr will gain a decent amount of armour increasing further their survivability.

Edited January 27, 2018 by The_Polish

[Fishyflakes]

I don't see why not

[Birdframe_Prime]

31 minutes ago, The_Polish said:

60 extra armour is nothing compared to 1700.

Heh, while I can understand your opinion my friend... I took some time when the change was made and did the equations for armour and damage reduction.

You'd be surprised, because new Unairu is only worse on a few frames.

60 armour isn't just 60 on top of the total armour from your mods, it's 60 base armour. Previously it was 20% on the Modded armour, which in some cases made things better, in others it made it a lot worse. Overall, however, what you're missing is that Armour is a damage reduction Curve where 0 means no damage reduction and you can never, ever get to 100% damage reduction.

The more armour you have, the less that extra armour actually does. If you already have 2000 armour from all your mods, adding 400 (20%) does next to nothing. The actual values for damage reduction means that 2000 armour would give you 86.96% damage reduction, while 2400 armour would give you 88.89% reduction. You're not even breaking the 90% range at that point, it's kind of crazy.

This is why Oberon was changed to give a flat number with Iron Renewal, rather than a percentage.

Here's the comparison, I'll put it in the spoiler to save space:

Spoiler

 

Valkyr has 600 armour. If you put on a maxed Steel Fibre, you get to an armour value of 1260. This equates to a damage reduction of 80.77%

With the current Unairu buff you start with 660 armour, so a Steel Fibre gives you 1386 armour which is a damage reduction of 82.21%

With the previous Unairu percentage change you got 20% increase on modded armour so it was the 1260 with Steel Fibre plus 20% which ended up at 1512. Great, right? Better? The damage reduction of that, however, is only 83.44%.

Your damage reduction from the old Unairu was only 1.23% better than the new one. (If you used just a Steel Fibre.)

Even if you max out the potential, let's go for an absolute max armour build from mods, that's Steel Fibre, Armoured Agility and Gladiator Aegis, which at base gives you a max armour of 1800 (Woo!) and a damage reduction of... Oh... 85.71%. Not a lot better, really.

Add on the Old Unairu 20% buff for her and it's 2160 which is 87.8% damage reduction. Amazing. You've managed to put on three extra mods and you've still only raised your damage reduction by 7.03% over just having a Steel Fibre.

With New Unairu you have a modded armour value of 1980, which... oh, it's better than the 1800 you got before, but not quite as good as the 2160, but still grants a damage reduction of 86.84%.

Your damage reduction from the old Unairu was only 0.96% better than the new one on the second most heavily armoured frame in the game.

(On Valkyr Prime, the highest base armour frame in the game at 700 the difference is 88.19% versus the new 88.37% which means it's actually better for Valkyr Prime with the new version).

 

But...

What about low armour warframes, the ones you don't mod for armour? Here's some math in the next spoiler:

Spoiler

 

A warframe with 15% armour, like Zephyr or Banshee or Trinity, would only at base get a reduction of 4.76%, you wouldn't mod them for armour because of that. They're nearly taking full damage with every hit, so you use skills that make them not get hit. That's fair, right?

Add 20% to that from old Unairu and you get 18 Armour and only 5.66% reduction in damage.

Add 60 base armour from the new Unairu and you get 75 armour and a 20% damage reduction. You almost quadruple the damage reduction on squishy frames by adding base armour.

Let's add max armour mods, so a 15 armour frame goes up to a 45 armour frame, and add old Unairu, you get effectively 48 Armour and only 13.79% damage reduction, it's worse than the current Unairu by a significant hit already.

Mod for max armour with the new Unairu and you get 225 total armour and a damage reduction of 42.86%

Basically with the new Unairu the squishy frames are 29.06% better with the new one, if you mod for the max armour.

 

So with these two considered, adding 60 armour to the base of the frame, before modding, is almost as good for a high armour warframe as 20% on the modded value, but on the other side it's significantly better for any low armour frame than before.

It makes Unairu a better buff across the board. Before you only got better result from 20% on frames with 350 armour and above. You got a worse result on frames with 200 armour and below, and you get about the same either way on frames between 225 and 250.

But... counting primes, there's only 4 frames above 350 armour, and there's only 13 total frames above 225. On the flip side there's 39 frames total below 200 armour who all benefit more from the 60 base than the 20%

So yeah, tl;dr the change makes sense to me.

[The_Polish]

I understand how the damage reduction works with armour, although I greatly appreciate the math to put it into context. I never said to go back to the original just combine the two. And I know that most of the frames in the game are relatively low armour which giving them a flat armour buff makes sense rather than it being a percentage increase.

 

Also I wasn't aware that it buffed base armour.

 

Nonetheless thank you for your insight

[Birdframe_Prime]

6 minutes ago, The_Polish said:

Nonetheless thank you for your insight

Well, you took that better than most people did in the other threads ^^

That said, the combination of both old and new formats wouldn't really do much either... I mean, even if you do that, you're still barely ever going to break the 90% damage reduction range, it's an almost infinite curve. The math for 500,000 Armour gives you 97.94% while 1,000,000 Armour gives you 99.97% reduction.

When it comes down to it, here's the question that I meant to ask while explaining the differences: If all it's going to give you, even if you combine them, is an extra 1-3% damage reduction, if you're still going to be taking about the same amount of damage, and if you're still going to get one-shot by enemies at around the same level as before... why would it really improve the ability?

As it stands the better option, in my point of view, would always be to balance the skill on the actual 'tank' to 'crowd control' scale. Because to me, the best kind of damage reduction is to stop them dealing damage in the first place.

Maybe add in the function that Mesa's Shatter Shield augment has, where the base Void Spines reflects damage, meaning that the Stone Skin reduces what you're taking and one of them also staggers enemies when damage is dealt back to them. In short, if you're not getting one-shot, the moment you get hit, that enemy is now staggered giving you a few moments where you can react.

[(PSN)JimsonWeeder]

6 hours ago, Thaylien said:

60 armour isn't just 60 on top of the total armour from your mods, it's 60 base armour.

Wait this adds to your base armor? hell yeah!

[OvisCaedo]

5 hours ago, Thaylien said:

Well, you took that better than most people did in the other threads ^^

That said, the combination of both old and new formats wouldn't really do much either... I mean, even if you do that, you're still barely ever going to break the 90% damage reduction range, it's an almost infinite curve. The math for 500,000 Armour gives you 97.94% while 1,000,000 Armour gives you 99.97% reduction.

Which is actually VASTLY stronger. Or maybe would be if there wasn't likely a minimum damage of 1. Not that the numbers can get anywhere near that example.

Still, I didn't even realize the old unairu's 20% buff was applied as a final multiplier to other armor buffs.

Edited January 27, 2018 by OvisCaedo

[The_Polish]

6 hours ago, Thaylien said:

Well, you took that better than most people did in the other threads ^^

Show adequate evidence disproving my point and all I have left is to comply. There's no point arguing a point that is lost, especially when you don't bother to do the math yourself.

 

6 hours ago, Thaylien said:

Maybe add in the function that Mesa's Shatter Shield augment has, where the base Void Spines reflects damage, meaning that the Stone Skin reduces what you're taking and one of them also staggers enemies when damage is dealt back to them. In short, if you're not getting one-shot, the moment you get hit, that enemy is now staggered giving you a few moments where you can react.

That being said Void spine reflects max 100% damage, which is actually almost nothing (looking at grineer) when you factor in their armour at the levels where they actually deal damage. It would make sense for the ability to somewhat amplify the damage. It would still take me the same amount of shots to kill an enemy. Which just makes me sigh whenever I look at it. Your improvement would make sense, only if it'd be a ~25% chance, because imagine a crowd of enemies getting staggered by just shooting you (like Banshee's 3 but after being shot at), just a whole room staggered. But I like the idea of adding a crowd control element to the tanky frames.

[Misgenesis]

Its too low even if it adds to base armor. Zenurik gets to keep its power spam enabling passive but somehow giving frames a higher armor buff outside modding is not okay?