Armor segmentation and damage concept

[Fallen_Echo]

Hello there, Tenno!

I came with an idea what could fix atleast some of armor scaling problems and damage useability.

The idea born after i read throught how Gara's glass wall has segments what can be broken up if the enemy concentrates on them.

After i watched how that works i wondered why cant we use that here on the enemies and while we are at fixing scaling why shouldnt we go and do something with the damage system aswell.

 

First of all some UI update.

Something like this or 3/2 different bar (3 if we are talking about shielded, armored corpus) on each enemies, to show how much armor and health they have separetely preferably with numbers.

The point of this is that each enemy would gain 5 segment of armor on their body. Head, torso front, torso back, limbs upper and limbs lower.

This is important because the enemies would now have their armor separated and connected to each parts effectively decreasing the total armor they have.

Each mobs armor now grants universal DR to each part with active armor but that decreases as the armor gets removed from those parts.

Depending on the enemy type the way the armor is spil up can be 20% on each or 50% on torso front and 20% on head, and 10% on the remaining parts.

As you damage each part the UI on the enemy would show a part of the armor line slowly decreasing and turning red to identicate when that part is fully vulnerable.

 

Lets say for example you fight against a bombard, because you are a nimble warrior you continously attack the back of the said bombard. When his armor breaks on his back he uses a twitch animation with some blood releasing from his back indicating that the armor is gone while the armor bar on him turned red at one of its part. As you damaged continously his back the DR he had continously decreased till it was gone but only on his back.

The point of this is to moderate the absurd ehp scaling the armored mobs have in a way that does not necessearly make the game "too easy". Even if you remove all armor from the head of an enemy shooting his torso or legs would still have X DR like the first time you met him.

 

Each part where an enemy could be damaged creates addditional effects when the armor is gone. These effects are there to make it worth using precision but not invalidate aoe tactics.

Removing armor on parts have the following effects:

1. Head: The enemy is permanently inaccurate from now on, all shots lose 15% accuracy. Because accuracy seems to scale this effect is higher with each level.
2. Upper limbs: Burst inaccuracy and chance of being unable to fire. When you damage the hands hard enough your enemy can lose 50% accuracy for short bursts or become unable to pull the trigger from the pain. This effect triggers randomly for every 5-20 seconds.
3. Lower limbs: The enemy is permanenetly losing 5% movement speed and randomly has to stop from the pain every 10-30 seconds.
4. Torso front: The enemy is pushed back and suffers 1 second stun, but no other effect here. The torso is naturally more resistant to damage so removing the armor only creates this effect.
5. Torso back: Attacking the back now grants 5% bonus damage. While the back is naturally resistant the attack also come from a direction what they cant see.

For armor stripping abilitites and such, these effects wont trigger at all because the armor technically got removed and not destroyed. These effects only work for weapons and armor stripping keeps working on like it does normally.

When fully stripped by an ability enemies gain a small DR as non-armored resistance or cloth armor resistance, this cannot be removed and wont exceed 10%.

One of the most important thing here is that DR should be hard capped at 90% while armor can increase continously to make stripping away harder.

 

 

Next up the damage types gets tweaked (unless wrote down the other stats of the damage types stay the same😞

Slash damage deals 50% less damage to both armor types and 10% less damage to shields. (shields stay universal as currently), against flesh slash now deals universally +30% damage.

Slash proc keeps working as it is currently.

Impact damage gains 15% damage bonus against ferrite armor and 5% bonus against alloy but otherwise stays the same.

Impact procs now have different effects related to enemy health types. Mostly armored targets suffer knockback and lose 5 armor permanently as the force fractured their defenses, shielded targets lose shields temporarly but it will come back after some time (similar to viral), flesh targets suffer from bone fractures what forces them to move slower.

Puncture deals 50% less damage to both shields and 10% less damage against flesh but now it deals +25% damag against alloy armor.

Puncture procs now grant a percentage of the puncture damage to directly attack the targets health pool in a single proc, if the target has shields the puncture proc permanently remove a portion of shields, flesh targets become suspectible for elemental status effects.

 

Elementals get the following changes:

Cold damage deals +25% damage against all armor types and +25% damage against all shields.

Electricity deals +25% damage against ferrite, -50% against alloy, +25% against shield -50% against proto shields. Chain damage decreases with each jump but gains more damage against health types what resist electricity.

Heat deals +50% damage against flesh. Heat procs now stack but lose damage for each stack.

Toxin deals +25% damage against flesh and +10% against both armors, toxin procs bypass both armor and shields.

Void deals +10% damage against all health types and ignores 25% shield and armor.

 

Combo elemental changes:

Blast damage deals +25% damage against shields and +10% damage against armor. Blast procs have a chance to temporarly decrease armor efficiency and shields.

Corrosive deals +25% damage against alloy but its proc removes 5% less alloy armor. Against shields corrosive deals 10% less damage.

Gas now has gas damage procs, it no longer uses toxin procs. Gas bypasses shields and armor but the ticks are only active in the cloud it creates. Deals equal damage against all health types.

Magnetic deals -25% damage against ferrite and +50% damage against alloy armor. When procced an armored target magnetic procs decrease the targets accuracy by 25% for a low duration.

Radiation deals +50% damage against armor, +25% damage against standard flesh but deals -75% against shields and -50% damage against infested targets.

Viral deals +75% damage against standard flesh but -50% damage against the infested. Viral procs on the infested decrease max health by 25% but also deactivate eximus and ancient auras in a 5 meter range.

 

For aoes the following changes should happen.

Aoe strikes count as non-targeted attacks meaning that regarding to armor stripping they attack all parts at the same time so the enemy armor work similarly to the current sceniario.

Each enemy has a small chance to use a block animation like our frames giving them a small time where their DR is increased regardless of their current armor stats, this effect mostly happens against aoe strikes what would directly hit them (like an ogris rocket aimed at their torso or whip strike, but not against attacks aiming next to them), also this block is useless against skills as no faction can defend reliably against void powers.

Aoe strikes only count as targeted attacks if the projectile directly hit a target part and even in that case its armor stripping effect works differently by granting only +5% armor stripping to that part from the total 100%.

 

Enemies at high level should never be able to oneshot targets. To fix this we need to introduce a scaling damage system where the enemies progressively become harder.

Each enemy gets separated into 4 categories.

1.) Fodder, the lowest level. These mobs should never be able to kill you in less than 5 shots. To allivate things becoming too easy more fodder type units should be able to shoot simultenously.

2.) General units, just above bottom. These guys at max can kill a tenno in 4 shots, just as above to make sure things are not too easy more of them can shot simultenously.

3) Elites, almost at the top these guys need atleast 3 shots to kill a tenno.

4) Small scale bosses. These are the big guys, bombards, noxes, napalms, eximus units, bursas everything what has aoe strikes and such. These units at max need 2 shots to kill a tenno.

 

As the levels raise, the standard units needs to get more advanced weaponary and ways to defend themselves. Blocking melee attacks, lower cc effect durations, added elemental damage and soo on should be mixed into the gameplay to not make the whole thing dull. Additionally elemental enemies should be resistant to their elemental types, for example a Slashing butcher should take 50% less damage from slash damage and slash procs.

 

Now this is it, all my current ideas to fix the current problems. Feel free to discuss, suggest or disagree with it.

 

 

[Senguash]

33 minutes ago, Fallen_Echo said:

I came with an idea what could fix atleast some of armor scaling problems and damage useability.

What are these problems again?

[Tsukinoki]

The biggest problem with all of your ideas:
Please tell me what enemies would actually last long enough for any part of your idea to actually come into play?
Seriously.

Even at levels 150+ the heavy enemies still go down in under 5 seconds, and that's without armor stripping at all, so who cares if you can remove the armor from an enemies legs and cause them to stagger every "10 to 30 seconds" when absolutely no enemy will last anywhere near that long.
Hek, even for new Tenno at the beginning of the game enemies don't take anywhere near 30 seconds to defeat.

And if you're trying to suggest "Well, each enemy should take around 1 minute of TTK to kill them..." then this idea is a no go from the start.  Warfame is a high paced horde shooter, not a game that's supposed to take an excessively long amount of time to kill each and every fodder enemy that you come across.  The game simply isn't suited for that type of play and it would slow down missions to an absolute crawl that would be an unfun slog.
After all, do you really want to spend 60-120 minutes in a single exterminate slowly going through the 120+ enemies in the map?
And good luck ever being able to do survival or defense.
But the thing is that unless enemies actually can survive that long absolutely no one would even know that your ideas were implemented.

Most of your ideas would work fine if Warframe was a slow paced cover shooter where every single enemy encountered was a fight and you only expected to run across maybe a dozen enemies at the most in any mission...but that simply isn't Warframe.

1 hour ago, Fallen_Echo said:

Enemies at high level should never be able to oneshot targets. To fix this we need to introduce a scaling damage system where the enemies progressively become harder.

Each enemy gets separated into 4 categories.

1.) Fodder, the lowest level. These mobs should never be able to kill you in less than 5 shots. To allivate things becoming too easy more fodder type units should be able to shoot simultenously.

2.) General units, just above bottom. These guys at max can kill a tenno in 4 shots, just as above to make sure things are not too easy more of them can shot simultenously.

3) Elites, almost at the top these guys need atleast 3 shots to kill a tenno.

4) Small scale bosses. These are the big guys, bombards, noxes, napalms, eximus units, bursas everything what has aoe strikes and such. These units at max need 2 shots to kill a tenno.

Again, the problem is that we fight way too many enemies at any one time for this to be noticed.
Who would notice if say an Elite Lancer needs 5 shots to kill you when you have 15+ surrounding you and all firing at the same time in burst fire?
What would honestly be the difference with how things are now?

They can already shoot at you en masse, and  ifa  bombard can remove half of your health in a single shot then the dozen or so bullets from everyone else in the room essentially means that the player is killed in a single shot for all they really care about or notice.

This idea might work if we fought small groups of enemies at a time, but again that isn't warframe.  We fight large enough hordes that this idea wouldn't make any difference at all if it was implemented.

Not going to talk much about your elemental changes as those are harder to immediately see the effects of, but a quick look through reveals that they are mostly nerfs for no real reason other than to nerf and change stuff, especially gas losing its sole purpose of damaging infested units for no real reason...

[Fallen_Echo]

17 minutes ago, Tsukinoki said:

The biggest problem with all of your ideas:
Please tell me what enemies would actually last long enough for any part of your idea to actually come into play?
Seriously.

Even at levels 150+ the heavy enemies still go down in under 5 seconds, and that's without armor stripping at all, so who cares if you can remove the armor from an enemies legs and cause them to stagger every "10 to 30 seconds" when absolutely no enemy will last anywhere near that long.
Hek, even for new Tenno at the beginning of the game enemies don't take anywhere near 30 seconds to defeat.

And if you're trying to suggest "Well, each enemy should take around 1 minute of TTK to kill them..." then this idea is a no go from the start.  Warfame is a high paced horde shooter, not a game that's supposed to take an excessively long amount of time to kill each and every fodder enemy that you come across.  The game simply isn't suited for that type of play and it would slow down missions to an absolute crawl that would be an unfun slog.
After all, do you really want to spend 60-120 minutes in a single exterminate slowly going through the 120+ enemies in the map?
And good luck ever being able to do survival or defense.
But the thing is that unless enemies actually can survive that long absolutely no one would even know that your ideas were implemented.

Most of your ideas would work fine if Warframe was a slow paced cover shooter where every single enemy encountered was a fight and you only expected to run across maybe a dozen enemies at the most in any mission...but that simply isn't Warframe.

Before you go and read the rest of this, can you show me a weapon build what takes down a lv150 bombard without armor stripping in 5 seconds? I know that there are frames capatable of insane feats but take into account that not everybody is running around with the hardest meta you can get.

 

Now back to the main point.

Which enemies would last long enough to make this noticable? Well the high level one (as with the current numbers lv100 is no longer high level) and every one who fight against less geared players. While the stagger effect is obviously not noticable on a lv150 grunt but im sure as hell you will see it on a lv150 corrupted heavy gunner.

 

17 minutes ago, Tsukinoki said:

Again, the problem is that we fight way too many enemies at any one time for this to be noticed.
Who would notice if say an Elite Lancer needs 5 shots to kill you when you have 15+ surrounding you and all firing at the same time in burst fire?
What would honestly be the difference with how things are now?

They can already shoot at you en masse, and  ifa  bombard can remove half of your health in a single shot then the dozen or so bullets from everyone else in the room essentially means that the player is killed in a single shot for all they really care about or notice.

This idea might work if we fought small groups of enemies at a time, but again that isn't warframe.  We fight large enough hordes that this idea wouldn't make any difference at all if it was implemented.

Please notice that the players dont complain about running into a room and getting gunned down by 20 guys but complain about running into a room and getting 1 shotted by some fodder.

Currently at max if i remember correctly 7 enemies can shoot at you in the same time and that artifically makes the game easier.

17 minutes ago, Tsukinoki said:

Not going to talk much about your elemental changes as those are harder to immediately see the effects of, but a quick look through reveals that they are mostly nerfs for no real reason other than to nerf and change stuff, especially gas losing its sole purpose of damaging infested units for no real reason...

Gas was changed that now it deals equal damage to all health types, so its no longer an infested only effect. It also got buffed by the removal of the toxin procs as the ancient with this can no longer completely block the damage type. Because it deals purely gas damage its procs are notably stronger as now it takes into account both heat and toxin mods not just toxin.