Health vs Shields vs Armor, and the problem with Viral

[NezuHimeSama]

Currently, in Warframe, there are three measures of defense factions can use besides (bugged) elemental damage reduction from eximus or other special units; Health, Shields, and Armor.

 

Let's start with Shields, the easiest to mitigate. You can reduce it by up to 100% with auras, completely bypass it with toxin(should probably be changed so that only 50% of toxin damage hits health or something, tbh) or True(bypasses shields) damage or you can reduce it to 0 with Magnetic, making it more or less a bit of a joke, so corpus get lots of high damage weapons, game-breaking units, and HP tanks. Probably, shields should be buffed, but that's not actually the point of this topic.

 

Next up, armor. This is the one with the most solutions, and the biggest problem. There's no widely accessible way to bypass armor(imo, 50% of heat damage should bypass armor, just to balance it out with shields), but you can reduce it by up to 100% with auras, reduce it by 50% per proc with corrosive, reduce it by a fixed value with polarize, or reduce it's base value by a fixed value with shattering impact, or use an ability that deals direct True damage. Two of these are pretty meta and valuable solutions to what is the highest EHP scaling enemies in the game, the Grineer. Armor reduction is currently at the core of the Warframe meta, due to the fact that, at higher levels, Grineer are far and away the faction with the hardest units to down without it.

For those confused as to why I didn't list Slash's True damage proc, that's because, while the tick isn't further reduced by armor like Toxin and Heat(all dot procs should probably be switched to True for this reason), the initial Slash damage is, meaning you're not actually bypassing armor, you're just not getting hit by it on two separate calculations.

 

The final, and most problematic measure of defense is HP. Originally, this was the Infested faction's strength, but over time, other factions have adopted this for one simple reason: There cannot be an effective means to bypass pure health. This means that units that need to survive(units DE wants you to feel special about, like Corpus Techs, Bursas, Hyekka Masters) wind up as HP tanks in any faction. However, ultimately, this was supposed to be the Infested's specialty.

Originally, the way to bypass Health was to use Viral, which would reduce max health by 50% each proc, making it essentially better than Corrosive in literally every way, as Armour only divides damage to HP, or multiplies EHP, so reducing armour by 50% can never surpass reducing health by 50%. It's obvious why this was nerfed, it was the best proc in the game, and if anyone wanted to deal damage to high level units, it was a must have. However, in it's current state, it only reduces health by up to 50%, on the first proc, and no longer stacks, meaning that, at best, you've only actually bypassed half of a health tank's defenses, compared to Corrosive, which bypasses up to 50% per proc, and can easily bypass 90% or more of an armour tank's defenses, or Magnetic, which reduces a Shield Tank's defenses to only whatever base HP it has, or Toxin which skips shields and hits base HP directly.

This means there is no legitimate damage strategy to downing health tanks quickly. Just "do more damage". On top of that, Viral is still more effective on the first proc against an Armour tank than Corrosive is, meaning that the core of the issue wasn't fully resolved.

 

What Do?

Well, the obvious solution is to change the HP damage reduction of Viral to something more modest, like 5% or 10%. However, there's one other issue with viral; the proc is applied after damage, meaning that your attack damage is effectively being reduced by Viral as well. This isn't an issue for corrosive, though it is an issue for magnetic. However, magnetic is one proc to completely strip shields from the enemy.

So, as an additional proposal, the Viral proc would instead <i>ignore</i> the damage of the dealt attack(by proccing viral afterwords still, and not doing fancy math on current HP), and reduce enemy HP by 10%+the attack's damage, not to exceed the targets previous max HP, for 5 seconds, each viral proc applying to the current max HP and not the base max HP, and all viral procs ending when the timer of the first proc ends.

In other words, MHP reduction would peak at 0.95^procs over 5 seconds + DPS*5. Let's say you proc 3 times per second and have a DPS of 2500, against an enemy with 300,000 ehp. The effective health reduction dealt would be 54%(~80% for 10%ehr) of EHP + 12500 over 5 seconds. Health would not be restored unless healed, and max health could not drop below 10% by this method.

This allows Viral to be reintroduced as a viable proc to put on a weapon for effective damage against HP tanks, without making it better than corrosive for armor tanks, or magnetic for shield tanks, and finally providing a genuine strategy to dealing with HP tanks besides "shoot them longer" or "have more dps".

It also wouldn't be OP on current meta Saryn, as her Miasma only ticks once per second, resulting in a EHR of 23%+miasma tick *5, which is actually less than it currently provides. At 10% EHR per proc, it would cap out at 59%+miasma tick *5, which could arguably be better than 50%+miasma tick*(ticks-1)

[Voltage]

I am confused. You claim there is no way to effectively bypass armor, but you can completely bypass armor with 4 Corrosive Projection or a mixture of Corrosive Projection and Coaction Drift. That mod is highly accessible.

In my opinion, we should take a look at Magnetic and Blast damage and make it worth while. Viral, Corrosive, and Radiation are the most viable because the rest are utterly useless. The way to make things interesting is giving people a reason to run Magnetic (and/or Blast) damage instead of punishing you for choosing Viral. Viral is already viable due to the combination with Slash damage.

Basically, don't change Viral, just buff Magnetic and Blast damage.

Edited June 6, 2018 by --Q--Voltage

[NezuHimeSama]

Corrosive Projection doesn't bypass armour, it removes it.

Viral is pretty useless, since it only stacks once, and you can get it from frame powers, or just double damage with frame powers for a more effective result. It's actually one of the worst procs in the game for this reason. Gas and Elec spread damage over an area, Toxin, Heat, and Slash deal damage over time, Magnetic removes shields, Corrosive reduces armor, Radiation... Kinda sometimes makes enemies shoot eachother and sometimes not? But it lets you kill teammates, so let's keep it that way. Cold reduces enemy movement speed, allowing animation based CC to effectively increase in duration, including panic, blast, elec, or impact procs. Impact staggers enemies. Puncture reduces damage by a little I guess, but it should really stack.

If Viral were 10%+damage dealt, though, it would actually be far, far more effective on builds that actually prioritize procs instead of a gimpy temporary damage booster.