Jade Shadows - Dev Workshop: Enemy Resistances and Status Rework

Howdy, Tenno!

As we continue our pursuit of Quality of Life changes, we believe the time has come to revisit how we handle Enemy Health Types, Resistances and Weaknesses, and a few Status Effects! 

Let’s get into it! Please keep in mind that much of this is a concept and prone to further changes as we near the Jade Shadows Update.

Right now, your enemies in Warframe boasts 13 Unique Health Types. In addition, players can explore 13 Damage Types and Statuses, achieved largely through Mods or are intrinsic to your weapon. 

Now, each Health Type is resistant to a few Status Damage Types and weak to another few.  

For the players that don’t know, we have the following Health Types:

And for Statuses:

As you can see, there are a lot of potential combinations. These all have different interactions with Enemy Health Types, and none are easily presented in-game, creating confusion as to what hurts (or doesn't) what.

Our design goal for this rework is to address the overly complex enemy Resistance and Armor systems so players have more freedom while building their loadouts.

This rework addresses 3 core issues we frequently see when it comes to Status Effects and Resistances:

1. Damage Types and Status Effects currently encourage a meta that favors a select few Effects.
    
2. Enemy Resistances are incredibly expansive, with little presentation to show what affects what.
    
3. Armor has an overwhelming impact limiting Builds to deal with Armor.

We aim to streamline Faction Health types and Defenses, such as Armor and Shields, to promote more accessible Player Loadout building.

As well, several Status Effects will receive additional changes, namely: Blast, Cold, Gas and Magnetic.

Let’s get into it! 

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New Health Types and Faction Resistances 

An example

Let’s create an example: you bring a loadout of pure Viral/Slash if you’re fighting the Grineer on Earth. The Slash status activating Bleed is amplified by Viral status, and Bleed bypasses Armor to destroy your foes.

But, Slash Damage does less damage to both Ferrite and Alloy Armor and has no beneficial difference to Machinery. In order to maximize damage against Grineer, you’d think to stock your loadout with Puncture, Corrosive, and Radiation. Blast is also especially effective against Machinery.

Clearly, there are far too many things to juggle here, ultimately resulting in the one-stop-shop of Viral/Slash.

Streamlining Enemy Health

So, let’s simplify the system: Health, Armor, and Shields. All Flesh types become Health, Alloy or Ferrite becomes just Armor, and the difference between Protoshields fold into Shields.

Instead of 13 Enemy Health types to juggle, we can work with 3 to better develop Faction Resistances and Weaknesses and create a more approachable system.

The Star Chart

So, Resistances then become more about the Faction. We can then recommend appropriate per-Faction Resistances which will then universally affect that specific Enemy group.

As such, The Star Chart will show recommended Faction Resistances per planet. Aligned with the present Faction, there will be listed Weaknesses and Resistances to communicate the recommended options for Damage against any specific Faction or location.

 

If multiple Factions exist on a planet, such as the Murmur or Infested on Deimos, then those separate Factions will have their own Resistances and Weaknesses, which will be communicated.

And regardless of specialized Resistances, Status Effects will continue to work the same, even if the Enemy is resistant to that Damage Type. If enemies are present with Shields, but the node dictates resistance to Magnetic damage, the Status Effect will still hinder the effectiveness of Shields themselves.

As well, Damage Resistances won’t change just because an Enemy’s Armor or Shields are removed; since they’re set per Faction, those Weaknesses (or Resistances) will continue to affect whatever Health Type they have equally.

Resistance Variance

Within a Faction, the Status Type Resistances and Weaknesses can vary based on Location. For example, regular Grineer may have different Resistances and Weaknesses than Kuva Grineer.

This may not always be needed, but we believe it can add some flavour and variety!

Example resumed

For demonstrative purposes, let’s say the Grineer on Earth are weak to Corrosive and Heat. You bring Corrosive and Heat doing increased damage to all present enemies within that respective Faction.

Then, your chosen Status Effects will continue to work independently as expected, so maybe you’d swap Corrosive for Viral or bring Viral via a Secondary. Viral’s Status Effect will then affect your weapon with Corrosive or Heat massively to all present foes.

Now, instead of having your Status being effective against a few enemies and neutral to many others, your chosen Damage type becomes more universally effective while being able to lean into your tried-and-true Status Effects.

With this, Status juggling between 13 unseen Health/Defensive Types has been reduced, enabling you to build easily for a Faction through two Statuses and your own preferred playstyle. 

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New Armor Adjustments
Armor is king, most applicably on Grineer. Grineer EHP, also known as Effective Hit Points, is the amount of actual Health an Enemy has, including Damage Resistance (DR).

For example,

A non-Steel Path Heavy Gunner at Level 200 has 104,805 HP. Then, they have 10,815 Ferrite Armor, creating a 97% Damage Reduction, ultimately leading to 3,883,359 EHP. That’s a big jump from 104,805 off of just DR.

Approaching the Issue

So, it’s no secret that Grineer Armor scales their EHP to often crazy numbers—making Armor Strip that much more important. 

And without Armor Strip, players rely on Viral/Slash and Heat to work around this, as Corrosive struggles to reduce Damage Reduction to a level that feels useful to players (at 10 Corrosive stacks, the Heavy Gunner retains 87% of their Damage Reduction).

 

To address this issue, we aim to do the following:

1. Enemy Armor will cap out at a certain percentage to give Corrosive Armor-reducing stacks more of an active impact.
    
2. The Armor scaling curve will aim to be a bit more spread out, as opposed to being bottom-heavy. Partial strip from the top end will allow for more consistent damage gains, as opposed to needing to have a total Armor Strip.
    
3. Have a minimum threshold of any Enemy Armor.
         a. No armor-accessing Enemy will have below a certain minimum, Armor shouldn’t feel unimpactful. 
    
4. Health scaling of Grineer enemies will be re-aligned, to an extent, to help compensate for the loss in Damage Reduction and to try and maintain a similar time-to-kill feel.

This should reduce the feeling for necessary total Armor Strip, while making partial Armor Strip more impactful.

Players’ Armor is to be untouched.

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New Shield Adjustments
The Grineer are tankier by design, but the Corpus try to make the difference through their Shields. However, Corpus Effective Hit Points is significantly lower, making them often trivial to deal with.

Our goal is to reduce the discrepancy between Grineer and Corpus time-to-kill (TTK) through their Shields by making Corpus Shields a bit more challenging and interesting to fight. 

Here, our goal is to provide some scaling factors to Shield Regeneration and Delay, designed to create a more perceivable benefit of affecting Status Effects, particularly at a higher level. 

Such scaling factors may look like:

• Enemy Shields having a shorter Regeneration Delay when depleted.
• Enemy Shields having a shorter Regeneration Delay when hit.
• Enemy Shields Regenerating faster.

Players early in the game and at lower levels in general will still be able to power through Shields, as the factoring, like other stats, will be less noticeable. However, the impact of Status Effects like Magnetic will be much more perceivable at higher levels.

Players’ Shields are to be untouched.

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Enemy EHP Scaling
Notably, enemies starting from levels closer to 100 will see faster rates in which they gain stats—Health, Shields, etc.

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Status Effect Changes
With a slew of new Resistance changes, Armor adjustments, and Health changes, we wanted to revisit the Status Effects that are generally less used in the community! Again, everything is prone to changes as we lead into Jade Shadows!

Blast
The blast is blasting! More to come! Our concepts and ideas with Blast are rapidly changing; no specifics will be made as of right now while we continue to work on the Status!

Cold
Our goal with Cold is to emphasize the effectiveness of the fantasy of slowing and freezing your enemies.

Cold now has a new effect where you freeze your enemies upon reaching the new Cold stack maximum.

• Cold has a new stack cap!
  • Freezes enemies for a few seconds after inflicting full Cold stacks.
• While Frozen, Critical Damage is greatly increased.
  • How do Frozen enemies deal with additional damage?
    • Do not regenerate Shields.
    • Weapons and Warframes that deal Cold will be updated to reflect this new behaviour.
    • Freeze may synergize with other Status Effects, such as Bleed.
• VIP enemies (Acolytes, Bosses, etc.) cannot be completely frozen; they’ll also be immune to the frozen-inflicted Critical Damage increase, naturally.

Gas
Gas often lacks effective readability, making it difficult to distinguish its presence from the Enemy or yourself. It’s important to introduce enhanced visuals for the Gas Status so its presence is noticeably present. 

Some ideas we had were to, which are very prone to change:

• Extends the range of the Gas Cloud FX based on the range of the Status (caps at 6m at 10 stacks).
• Additional FX added to affected enemies to communicate Status activity.
• Gas FX having billowy volume to better present presence.
• Gas FX having additional floating particles around the smoke.
• Enemy Gas FX having additional red coloring to communicate threat to player.

Magnetic
While Magnetic won’t be getting dramatic changes, our goal is to make the Status a stronger pick against Corpus and Shielded enemies. 

As mentioned, Magnetic aims to have an updated Status Effect behaviour that’ll affect the Regeneration Delay, the Regeneration Rate and Reset Delay of Enemy Shields!

Additionally, we’re interested in the idea that the Magnetic Damage Type will have improved effectiveness against Nullifier Bubbles! Currently, this would look like:

Increased minimum damage against Nullifier Bubbles.
Increased maximum damage against Nullifier Bubbles.

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Thanks, Tenno! We look forward to reading your feedback!