Make Elemental Weakness Based On Unit Type Not Faction

[Oishii]

One of the problem elemental warframes face like volt and ember face is that they only truely shine against one faction. It is also difficult to balance them to be useful against without them being totally OP against another faction. A much better design for elemental damage would be to make elemental damage useful against certain types of units within a faction.

 

Example: fire does bonus elemental damage against lightly armored targets while electricity deals bonus damage to heavies.

 

Frames like volt and ember would be useful against every faction this way. Ember for clearing hoards of units and volt for clearing heavies. Frost would still be the defensive warframe and ideally saryn would be the warframe that is not ideal against either heavies or light armored units but decent against both. Also hopefully we would see more variation in primaries and secondaries. People could add mods to make their primary excel against a certain type of unit such as heavies, while making their secondary great against another type of unit. Instead of the current end game situation where people tend to have an artillery primary and the finger of death for their secondary (point at a target and it dies do to stupidly OP pistol mods and weapons like the kunai, despair, and acrid).

[Trollin4ThePrimes]

Maybe, could see it working either way, but the way we have now makes most sense to me.

[Scheifen]

I scoffed when I first read the title, but your explanatory paragraph actually makes it sound like a very good idea.

 

I have to digest this idea and see how it might play out now, I shall return to this thread later. 

[Scherhardt]

U10.

[Tyrian3k]

For Warframe abilities it would be desirable, but not for elements on weapons. There it would be more than just a bit annoying to need multiple elements for a single faction.

[SmokeBraid]

For Warframe abilities it would be desirable, but not for elements on weapons. There it would be more than just a bit annoying to need multiple elements for a single faction.

You have Bane/Cleanse/Expel/Smite for doing damage to a single faction.

[Lord.Finster]

I agree with OP. Volt and Ember should be desirable to use in every scenario.

 

That might mean that Corpus Crewmen should lose their electric vulnerability but some Grineer (Rollers and Seekers especially) will become vulnerable.

 

Fire on the other hand should be more effective on Scorpions, Ballistas and heavy gunners and less effective on regular Grineer and Bombards/Napalms; however, Corpus robot units might be more resilient to this type of damage.

 

This in turn might also mean that Fireball and Shock might be desirable and effective to use against vulnerable key targets instead of wasting your ultimate on resilient troops. But then again you might simply wanna use your guns against those.