Warframe’s Health Tanking Problem: Why Shield Gating DOMINATES

The armor ehp calculation needs to be adjusted, even when playing frames like Excalibur umbra which they clearly want us to health tank with gets destroyed by even bass sp enemies Even with over 2k armor he is being shredded,

Valkyrs issue wasn’t that 2 of her abilities were awful, her issue was having the worst crowd clear of all the exzalted frames, de put a bunch of side caviots on her 4 in the name of balancing, all de needed to do was remove those. Currently her only use was the fact that she could not die with the correct build now after the rework she is probably going to struggle in the only environment she was useful in, and then why would you use her over someone like baruk, Excalibur, or wukong when all 3 of those frames can clear more enimies an a shorter amount of time.

It's actually been possible to health tank level cap with Citrine for a while now, but it's really annoying to do.

Mod to convert shields into a secondary health bar, allowing it to be affected by armor.

This allows the "shield" to absorb damage before the HP would, but it wont fully absorb the dmg from the warframe. Instead, it would mitigate the total amount of damage the warframe would take.

If Inaros has a 1000 armor bar, for example, and the enemy deals 5000 raw damage, it would have to go through the raw armor-based reductions before DR effects, then finally deal its damage.
90% adaptation and 90% armor DR value means you're looking at 99% of that 5000 damage reduced. It will deal 50 damage from that 1000, then deal 5.5 damage to Inaros' Health directly, because, like I mentioned before, it's not a shield, it's straight off of Inaros' armor.

Once this armor bar breaks, the warframe will have a red version of the shield break visual, and then take no further damage for a second, allowing them to react and heal up or regenerate.

Regenerating the armor bar takes the same regen values as regenerating Health, so any health based regen effects will affect the armor bar.

Shield recharge delay and shield recharge will be set from 0% to 50% of the original values, but will only turn into this armor bar. The Armor bar will never exceed 50% of the shield capacity.

This idea is raw and untested, but I want to hear people's opinions and, preferably, constructive criticism. I want to refine this further if possible, to ensure it works for both sides.

Concept 1: If armor bar breaks, the warframe loses a percent of its total armor.
Concept 2: Instead of using regenerative effects, use Health or Energy orbs to restore armor bar.
Concept 3: Rolling Guard cannot coexist with this "mod" at the same build. (prevents people from treating this as shieldgate with armor to reduce raw enemy dmg values prior)
Concept 4: Completely rewrite the mod concept: Change 100% shield capacity into health, change shield recharge rate to health regen, and disable receiving any amount of shields (but not overguard). Overshields are instead added to the warframe's health (like how Chroma's Heat Ward buff currently works)

primed vitality.

Adding a second health bar made of armor is pretty cool ngl

The fact you can achieve 2k health, with nearly 3k armor and still get 1 shotted, makes shield gating the only way to survive in very high level.

The danger of making health tanking strong right now is that it is binary and non-interactive. If you have the stats to properly health tank, you're effectively invincible; and if you don't have the stats, health tanking is useless.

I think the solution to the problem is to inject some sort of interactive mini-game into health tanking. Right now, shield gating has the 'react to damage' minigame going for it, so I think that should be off the table.

What I would like to see for health tanking's mini-game is some sort of infinite stacking mechanic. Some examples (that I don't think are great, but examples none the less) would be increased DR, that is multiplicative with itself, every time you drop below 50% hp (this could be bad in situations where you can't put yourself in the line of fire because of outside sources like squad mates). Another idea I have is infinite armor stacking through finishers (though this is too melee focused imo).

My idea for armor would be that instead of giving +100% ehp for every 300 armor, it would double the EHP for every 500 armor. That means at lower end armor is less useful but immediately after 300 points you'd get more out of it. earlier 2700 armor would mean 90% dr, now 3000 would be about 98,5%.

They killed Valkyr

We have health tanks. We have shield gating. Let Valk have her thing. IMO i like having a simple frame i dont have to worry about damage/shields i know others do this but she at least had her thing.

ALSO: Its a huge change to her b.c everyone who used her wouldnt have modded her anywhere close to what i think the rework her will, which sucks.

If we can get a Health/Armor buff, then my 2k armor Nidus will become a menace (I did it for the meme.)

I never liked shield gating. I think we need large af health pools.

I completely agree with the sentiment that health and armor tanking needs help. I know shield gating helped a lot of squishy frames survive from being 1 shot killed, but its honestly gotten ridiculous how shield gating is now the only way to survive real endgame content.

My biggest want out of any health tanking changes is for Umbra to get his armor increased because he doesn't have the armor for effective health tanking yet has an entire mod set DEDICATED TO HIM for one of the most effective health tanking methods and not to mention that Arcane Reaper might as well be plastered to him, Adaptation is a given for any health tank build and yet it still isn't enough without extra stuff like companion shield gating and maybe Secondary Fortifier.

It would be nice if Umbra got a bonus for having the entire UMBRA set equipped, like higher stats from the mods or just change the Tau Damage Resistance from the set to a general damage reduction when Umbra has it equipped.

It just doesn't make sense why other frames can make better use of the Umbra set than the Warframe it comes from.

What is the point of the increasing damage past level 300 if the strategy past that level just becomes to nullify damage or die.
Is the game really difficult because you're one shot if you breath, or is this just artificially limiting warframe choice?

With how much they nerfed her healing (50 health per hit from 5% of damage dealt), she will struggle in harder ETA missions.

They should definitely cap the amount of damage enemies can do to players in general.. shield tanking/health tanking is awful because regardless of which you build it gets one shot anyways

Everyone keeps talking about how buffing health tanking would make Nidus's life better, while the dying corpse of Inaros is trying its hardest to smile because better healthtanking would technically be a buff for him

I will say: I began playing less after shield gating as even after many changes it really made the game from okay. Play semi well and you'll die less often to. I don't die if i put minimum effort in. Overgaurd made ut even worse and i have ha dmany rants on why does it make you the player status effect immune nullifying many abilites in the game. All the while armor and HP just get ignored! Tbh. The reason while "gating" worked in borderlands is because it was on your health not your shield. Thus if you didn't react in the breif window you were downed. Not the current state of Waframe where the sheild/overgaurd gating means little as you still have your full hp bar/can just nuke the source anyways.

I think they should buff armor by making it : "The more armor you have , the higher the chances you have to completely mitigate an attack"

Like, "with 1500 armor, you would have something like 75% chance to have the hit bounce off entierely."

Numbers aside, that would make the health still extremely important as you would need to still be able to endure some hits.

(Plus it'd be massively cool to be a Rhino that just stands, with bullets bouncing off of him.)

I hope they will fix it, i love being a tank and only ways to tank in this game now is being
1) Being not able to take damage (revenant and few other)
2) Overguard
3) Shield gating
And all of them are not really being a tank

Armor should be a health pool with its own resistances, like shields, overgaurd, and health.

Also what about rhino where does he fit into this?

I really don’t understand this community.. on one hand everybody shades and acts as if the level cap community doesn’t matter, buuuuut immediately go into complaining how shield gating is king at cap.. no frame in the game should be struggling to survive sub level 300 enemies. At that point it’s a YOU problem.

Nidus has no such issue more then 200k hp just saying😅

I kinda like what they did with armor in Dragon Age, where if you had armor it had to be broken before you took health damage.However that might be too much like what Overguard and shields do but honestly we have to many diffrent systems going on for there not to be a similar thing.

its not even levelcap that exclusively suffers.

even at level 1000, only a FEW frames can pull off heathtanking.

It becomes a problem very quickly in any endurance content the moment you decide to play for more than half an hour.

Video resume only answering the title without watching a single second of it (mr32 exp ahead, no ragebait):

The healt tank problem:
Too expensive, mods, arcanes, grind, and its not good for high (+500) level and beyond, aprox

Why shield-G dominantes?
Cuz its waaay cheaper, easier to achieve, and it works from lvl 1 to 9,999, because its not "tanking", its "evading" damage with a invulnerability time <GATE>

There you got ❤

I think it'd be cool if on top of the normal damage reduction, for every 100 armour you have it stores 10% of damage taken to deal it over time. So if you had 700 armour you'd take 30% of the armour mitigated damage upfront, then take the other 70% over 15 seconds or something giving you a chance to heal through it. They could also add a cap to the damage stored so you don't get nuked by 30 enemies worth of stored damage stacking. Or they could do something crazy like add a % chance based on your armour stat to outright block instances of damage

Add attenuation to health tank frames :)

Part of the problem is that a warframe having high base health/armor values is actually not particularly useful compared to a warframe just having some handy form of DR.

Like, new Valkyr hits ~27.8k effective health with the full Umbral set while Warcry and Hysteria are on. OK, that's a lot of EHP. Cool.

Citrine hits ~38.9k effective health with the full Umbral set while her 2 is on. And she shares her DR with the squad. And her 2 costs substantially less energy/s than Hysteria. (She's also sharing passive healing with the squad, but I'm going to call that a wash with Warcry, since they'll both work at affinity range, now.)

With Blind Rage, Transient Fortitude, and Molt Augmented, you can push Valkyr's EHP up to ~43.3k. If you're willing to use your other Arcane slot on EHP, you can add Arcane Blessing to jump up to ~76.7k. If you want to spend another mod slot on just survival, you can add Adaptation. The actual final damage mitigation of Adaptation is a bit inconsistent, but broadly speaking you tend to get at least 65% out of it if you're taking hits regularly, which would push Valkyr up to ~219k EHP. You could theoretically push that higher with mods like Nira's Hatred or Carnis Carapace, but at this point you only have two mod slots left and you're really gonna want Primed Continuity and Stretch in those.

Meanwhile, Citrine reaches ~80k EHP with just a maxed out Arcane Blessing. No additional mods, just one of her arcane slots. Slap Adaptation on there and she leaps up to 230k. And she'll have a much easier time getting to the max health bonus without assistance from her squadmates.

So, yeah, Citrine needs fewer mods and reaches higher EHP values. Now, sure, Blind Rage and Transient Fortitude are doing more than just adding EHP to Valkyr, but the point is that Citrine is tougher and has more build freedom. Valkyr would literally be better off at each of these comparison points if Hysteria was just 50% DR instead of tripling the armor bonus of Warcry. It's absurd. Armor clearly needs help.

I think the simplest option is to tweak the DR armor formula so that high armor give more DR. I suggest that it should flattens out between 95% and 99% DR instead of the 75%-80%. This may not be enough for level 9999 alone, but subsuming with other DR abilities may be enough for some.

I play Hildryn a fair amount, and she has the same one shot issues in steel path circuit (I don't level cap but I do like to get my incarnons, and those guys scale up FAST!). Once enemies hit a certain level one shot takes her entire shield pool, having the unfortunate side effect of also disabling her abilities and leaving her unable to cast. I have to operator out and run to hide and regen. Not very shieldmain-y.

That's why I think they need to just bite the bullet and rework enemy damage cap. That's the real crux of the issue.

Health tanking and shield gating is as simple as this: Shield gating can be effective with only one mod class, the Augur mods. Health tanking is dependent way more on your Warframe of choice than your mods setup.
You shouldn't be forcing a health tanking setup on say, Mag, for example, but it'll be way better on someone like Grendel.
Inaros and Kullervo are pure health frames and are the best examples of what a health centered Warframe should be: built in health Regen and some way of generating alternative defense options, like even more armor for Inaros or Overguard for Kullervo.
If you're ever confused about whether or not a Warframe should be a shield gater or not, take this advice that I'm paraphrasing from another person, "If they have a lot more base health and armor than shield, they will be better as a health tank, but if they have either a lot of shield or very little shield, you can make them an extremely effective shield tank with specific mods".
Now, early game may be a bit of a struggle because Toxic damage can just outright kill you if you're a shield tanker, because it ignores your shield entirely, but that can be fixed with a resilience mod that reduces DOT effects by 75% or just a straight up Toxic damage resist mod. Do not try and put health and armor on your shield frame, because Toxic doesn't really care about how much armor you have.

On the health tank note. Quick thinking has been in the game for ages. Turning that mechanism into a health gate would be a good fix.
Make the energy drain a fixed amount 50-100 energy, add 1-2 seconds of invulnerability to be able to heal. Adjust rage and hunter adrenalines effectiveness to promote health and armor modding.

Why is the endurance/level cap community always catching shade.
We aren’t that small and all we ask for is reliable mechanics that would make causal gameplay better too.

There’s no much people running high level missions and you can easily health tank deep archemedia. I honestly don’t think there’s reason to live miserable experience of sitting on the mission for 5 hours to see 4digits level number. Functionally 1000lvl = 9999lvl

This probably has something to do with the valk back lash

I don't think health 'gates ' are the answer, but a rolling damage system like earthbound where the damage ticks down slower the higher your armor. That way you can keep up the constant healing to stay alive

The whole game just needs a massive numbers pass.

Why nerf shield gate when u can just buff armor and health tanking making both viable?

It would be nice to at least have some kind of armor indicator, like enemies do. That won't solve the problem, but it'll at least provide some extra awareness for players about how the frame's current damage reduction is being affected.

i think adaptation should be an inherent trait of your health bar

I'd add a health endurance system:
-If you are above a low HP percentage, say 5% of max, you cannot take lethal damage, going to 1% of max HP. If you are suffering DoT effects, you can only take 0.16% max HP per second (die in 6 seconds without healing or status cleanse).
-At baseline 0 armor, you have no endurance, taking up to 100% max HP as damage when hit (the above mechanic keeps you from getting 1-shot).
-Armor both grants DR and endurance, with the same limits. If you have 95% DR from armor, you can only take 5% of max HP per hit. If that is a reasonably achievable number, of course, this would need a lower cap. There is no invulnerability window, it just modifies the damage you can take.

I think the important thing people need to realize is that no amount of changes to health will matter as long as we have the current shield related mods. Shields come before health and shields will always be able to regenerate without abilities. There needs to be serious nerfs that should release simultaneously with any major changes done to health tanking. Im talking like Brief Respite being like 30 percent and Catalyzing shields going from 1.33 to anywhere between 1 and 1.22. You should be forced to invest just as much into shields as you would health.

I mean, as armor is now, it simply reduces your damage taken by a percentage. This being said, 1% of 1,000,000 is still 1,000, which is enough to down most frames since they don't have 1,000 HP, excluding mods. Not every enemy can do that, but with Radiation active, we can do it to each other.

Now, if you go the health percentage route, instead of just reducing damage, This opens up an entirely different ballgame, and makes health tanking much, much more viable. And I feel it would be less complicated than having armor segments that go away and recharge when hit/not hit. And besides, that would just make Armor gating no different than shield gating. That wouldn't be fun.

Really hope DE gives thought on the HP segment idea. I don't like the genre, but my friends play Hunt and that health segment system is SUCH a neat idea to me.

TO be hoenst my problem wiht health taking is that having 99% DR is useless when enemies can one shot you.

If enemy hits you with 1000000 damage 1% of it is still 10000 more that enough to kill most frames, when shield gain is much easier nad you need like 2 mods to be invincible. Not to mention, because overguardm, shield gaining and straight up invincibility makes heal mods and arcanas kinda useless by fact heal wont heal anyone. And of corse most thing that people mention that "new players don't know armor does not affect shields" etc.
Like Valkyr also techincally gain "wukong passive" in form of doing enough melee damage gives her invo for short time to heal up and stuff is fine as mechanic... But it can't be only way to tank.
My take is to completly rework how shields and health/armor works. Some people say "just add extra health bars that have breaking points", for me its just shield gain, but with extra steps and over all shield gain is kinda like band-aid for less tanky frames that also should be rework.
Not to mention some systems with survivability also need to be fixed (like the fact some frames loses they ability Overguard and some don't), but i wont go much further then that, my ideas are... questionable. Specally to add Helmith with extra slots like Railjack (sperated on stats, "aguments"[read something like quick thinking also count] and utility like parry angle and bleed out) or that you can comebine one handed zaws to dual weapons so i will just sit in a corner and watch.

enemy damage scaling seems like the best option to change since current base steel path damage is pretty balanced for health tanking imo.

i’ll tell you why health tanking doesn’t work because you can’t tank 10m+ damage but shield or overguard gating can