A Serious Talk About Corrosive Projection

[Ailia]

Test it ingame if you don't believe me, its pretty damning.

My theory is corrosive is being applied at a late stage in the damage formula as a modified inverse of the armor multiplier, which explains how we end up doing extra damage when past 100% instead of healing the enemies ( healing caused by multiplier being negative due to negative armor). It also explains why immunity happens. Damage post armor is zero, zero times the huge number required to reverse the drop to zero, is still zero.

Clarification: it works exactly how you think it would prior to the point where armor would reduce it to zero

Everything does exactly full damage at 100% corrosive up until that point. Elemental modifiers still apply. (ex. infested take extra fire damage, ect)

Edited August 9, 2013 by Ailia

[Tragixx]

What you're saying makes sense, and I believe you. I just don't see why it suddenly hits a wall, unless that 'feature' is intended to stop corrosive projection.

[Ailia]

I'de assume it was just an unintended effect of the way they coded that part of the damage calculations and not something intended or foreseen. No real intent behind it. They are essentially exceeding the precision limit of the data type they are storing the value in (assumed float), resulting in a "zero times near infinity". The exact circumstances resulting in this are pretty contrived, i wouldn't be surprised if they were using fixed-point calculations instead, which tend to have this issue in much simpler cases.

I don't think corrosive stacking additively was ever meant to happen, at which point this formula breakage couldn't happen. It was multiplicative prior to u9 changing a lot of formulas from multiplicative to additive, this may have been an unintended or at the very least careless change.

Edited August 9, 2013 by Ailia

[Tragixx]

I assume its int, actually, seeing as the decimals look like theyre being truncated on-paper, but still.

 

I'd happily exchange multiplicative stacking on every enemy for what happens now.

[InsomniacOvrLrd]

so the bottom line is, with a full party of corrosive, you can go to level 130 ish, and then the hilarious damage you're doing suddenly disappears, and you go down to doing 0 damage again.

 

Hey de, your game is broken. Corrosive projection was the one, weak defense to the broken armor system you might have had, and it apparently stops working before the close of t3 defense.  With corrosive no longer being that possible loophole through which the armor system wasn't completely fumbled, the answer is as plain as day. Your entire system of armor scaling is broken, and you need to fix it.

 

No one likes playing a game that is widely known to be broken.

[Ailia]

http://www.iforce.co.nz/i/d3b3243i.vz0.png

 

Seems when they cross 2000 armor is when the excrement hits the high speed rotary air circulator. Really in T3 def, its just the ancients that break vs bullet damage. (corpus crewmen break vs fire, elemental modifiers and armor are applied before corrosive). Cant remember the link for grineer and corpus armor charts.

 

AFIK Ancients break wayy early compared to everything else, around wave 25 xini, grineer don't break till quite a bit higher.

Edited August 9, 2013 by Ailia

[Tragixx]

when the excrement hits the high speed rotary air circulator.

 

excellent word choice :D

 

This is what I used to find armor, among other things:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0Au6mBXle3cFtdHBYUzVJaDJfdkIzSEN1cUh5UlRvckE&f=true&noheader=true&gid=11

 

Just go into the faction, get the base stats, then get the formulas (from the formula tab) and plug 'em in. 

 

A Grineer heavy has 50 base armor and a base level of 8, so it won't hit 2000 armor until lv 376. Like you said, much higher.

 

Corpus techs and fusion moas are both base lv 15 and base armor 50, hitting 2000 armor at level 382.

 

However, it's worth noting that other Grineer, such as the Scorch/Lancers have 200 base armor, hitting the "Armor cap" before level 140.

Edited August 9, 2013 by Tragixx

[Ailia]

Yea, aware of that file, just couldn't access it from work.

[Tragixx]

From the August 6th community hot topics:

 

 

5) Armor (Scalability and Difficulty)

Several great posts have emerged that tackle “Armor” and its effectiveness at high levels and how this affects players options when facing high level enemies. This conversation boils down to what kind of changes will Armor undergo, if any? The answer is that Armor is currently working as intended and is unlikely to change, Edit: but now being discussed.

 

I'm updating the OP with most of these findings, etc. feel free to continue discussion, though!

[Ailia]

"This is, for all intents and purposes, a bug. Something goes wrong. The most accepted speculation is that it has to do with corrosive projection stacking additively, and not multiplicatively."

 

This isn't quite right, just how it might have come about. The likely "problem" is that the armor isn't reduced before calculating, but rather compensated after, else everything would work as expected.

[RejectionOfFate]

god, such bad balance after months of beta staggers me more than the lack of endgame content... like doing defense forver? does anyone remember what the insane guy from farcry3 said about insanity?

Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is? Insanity is doing the exact... same thing... over and over again, expecting... it to change. That... is crazy; but the first time somebody told me that...I dunno, I thought they were kidding me, so boom — I shot him. The thing is, okay... He was right. And then I started seeing: everywhere I looked, everywhere I looked, all these people, everywhere I looked, doing the exact same thing... over and over and over and over again thinking: "This time, it's gonna be different; no, no, no, no, no, please... This time it's gonna be different." 

Did I ever tell you the definition... of insanity?

 

Edited for Censorship. This your quote, Captain?

[TacAmore]

x4 corrosives make "minus 20% armor".

this make damage against high level ancients overflowed.(damage=100/(100+minus armor))

and all bullet and elemental damage will be ONLY 1 damage, even if using fully MODed OGRIS.

Edited August 15, 2013 by TacAmore