19 réponses à ce sujet

[Glowyrm]

How exactly does Warp Ammo "weaken" armor by 25%?

Warp Ammo doesn't have a duration or anything, so I was wondering if anyone knew exactly how it works. I'm guessing there is some hidden duration?

Or possibly once anyone with Armor is hit by Warp Ammo, their Armor bar now takes 25% more damage from all sources until the Armor is gone. That sounds the most likely to me.

Sorry if this was talked about, I searched for a thread on it.

Modifié par Glowyrm, 07 mars 2012 - 10:24 .

[Mr Wiskers]

I would like to know the answer as well

[Glowyrm]

Just realized that Armor-Piercing Ammo has the "weakening" effect as well.

I really hate when things aren't explained clearly in RPGs. It's painful to a min/max personality.

[zeypher]

would like to know the answer to this as well

[JSLfromBx]

cold ammo got a armor weaken effect as well , still unsur at what it does

weapon penetration mod also have a weaken armor property, they really need to explain that one

[Glowyrm]

Yeah I just saw all those other skills with this effect as well.

For Cryo Ammo, it makes sense. As long as a target is chilled or frozen, their armor takes +X% damage.

But like I said earlier, the rest don't have durations of any sort.

I also can't wait to hear about "effective against" damage multipliers on skills, I'm guessing they are different than ME2 a bit.

[rumination888]

JSLfromBx wrote...

cold ammo got a armor weaken effect as well , still unsur at what it does

weapon penetration mod also have a weaken armor property, they really need to explain that one

The mods that reduce damage but weaken armor actually makes your weapon deal more damage against armored targets, despite the larger reduction in base damage. So, we can infer that armored targets have innate damage reduction, and the "weaken armor" effect ignores a portion of it. Ignoring 50% damage reduction out of 75% is a lot different than increasing damage by 50%. The latter increases your damage by 50%, the former increases your damage by 200%(3x more damage).

If Warp Ammo doesn't have a duration, we can assume the armor weakening effect only applies to you.

Modifié par rumination888, 10 mars 2012 - 12:27 .

[Glowyrm]

I'm starting to think it works like the weapon mods, "Piercing X".

They have object penetration and also bypass defenses on armored targets by X%, meaning that X% of your damage goes "through" the armor and hits the health bar.

They had weapon mods that worked just like that in ME1.

After seeing Armor-Piercing Ammo, it has the Penetration Effect and the Armor Weakening effect. Seeing those 2 together looked like the Piercing line of mods (even shares the name) so I have come to believe that "Weaken Armor" actually means "Bypass Armor" by a certain %, like the mods.

For example, you do 100 damage and you have -25% Armor Weakening (from whatever). You do 75 damage to the Armor bar and 25 damage to the health underneath it. Maybe they even changed it for ME3 and made it so you would do 100 damage to Armor and 25 damage to health (instead of splitting it they add X% more, although that sounds overpowered.).

This would also answer how things that have no duration, like Warp Ammo, could have the Weakening effect. What Warp Ammo really does is just have X% of it's damage bypass Armor and hit the health bar.

This is of course all just my theory, I haven't been able to test anything.

Modifié par Glowyrm, 10 mars 2012 - 11:14 .

[Adm Polaras]

Good theory but what about targets that have armor but no health (brute turret atlas)?
Does armor penetration do nothing against them or just cause additional damage to armor?
Did we agree that armor weakening and penetration were in fact different things and weakening simply increases damage to armor HP from all sources?

Update: I've just spent some time at the firing range switching out armor pen mods on a pistol and using different types of ammo powers. 
With no modification, the standard Predator requires 16 shots to destory the armored target.  The other targets required 7 shots to destory reguardless of armor penetration.
With an armor pen mod II installed (35%), the Predator needs 11 shots.
With Armor pen ammo (rank 1, 50%, +12.5 dmg), the Predator needs 8 shots.
With both mod and ammo power, the Predator needs 7 shots.
Cyro ammo (rank 1) appeared to have no effect.

Those last two are interesting, it suggests that some sort of dimishing returns are in effect for this attribute, something more agressive then simple multiplicative stacking.
Also these dummies appear to be immune to status effects caused by cryo ammo.  I'm trying this on an Infiltrator so I had no powers to test though I expect the same no-lingering-effects result.

The experiment was repeated with a Raptor sniper rifle.
With no mods or ammo, 9 shots were needed for the armored target, 5 shots were needed for the others.
With just an armor pen mod II installed (35%), 7 shots on the armored target. (2 bars remained on last shot)
With just armor pen ammo (rank 1, 50%, +12.5% dmg), 6 shots on the armored target. (1 bar remained on last shot)
With both mod and ammo, 5 shots on the armored target.  (2 bars remained on the last shot)

On a hunch, I did it again with the M-90 Indra sniper rifle.
With no mods or ammo, 100 shots were needed for the armored target, 13 shots were needed for the others.
With just an armor pen mod II installed (35%), 83 shots on the armored target.
With just armor pen ammo (rank 1, 50%, +12.5% dmg), 30 shots on the armored target.
With both mod and ammo, only 15 shots on the armored target.

These results seem consistent with the pistol experiment, although there appears to be more complex math going on especialy on weapons with poor performance against armor.  How armor penetration behaves when there is health under the armor is still unknown.  Another thing that requires "field" testing is how well armor weakening and armor penetration effects stack, since they both seem to have the effect of simply increasing damage taken by armor HP.

Also, I discovered that sniper rifiles do "significantly" more damage while scoped.  It vaires per rifle.  This is not something in my skills that I know of.  All shots fired in the above tests were unscoped.

Modifié par Adm Polaras, 13 mars 2012 - 02:12 .

[Glowyrm]

Nice tests, thanks.

Still waiting for the opportunity to test what happens to health under armor myself.

[rumination888]

...is there even such an enemy with health under armor?

[Athenau]

My experiments with armor and low damage weapon suggests that armor works differently in ME2. Instead of certain weapons getting multipliers against armor, it seems that all low damage weapons are uniformly terrible against armor. I think armor now adds a hidden flat damage reduction to your shots, and armor penetration works on that. So if armor's reducing 10 damage per shot, 50% AP would reduce that to 5.

[rumination888]

Athenau wrote...

My experiments with armor and low damage weapon suggests that armor works differently in ME2. Instead of certain weapons getting multipliers against armor, it seems that all low damage weapons are uniformly terrible against armor. I think armor now adds a hidden flat damage reduction to your shots, and armor penetration works on that. So if armor's reducing 10 damage per shot, 50% AP would reduce that to 5.

This makes the most sense. The Geth Pulse Rifle is complete garbage against armored enemies, but add armor-piercing ammo and its damage goes through the roof. Add armor-piercing ammo to an M-98 Widow and you won't really notice an effect.

[termokanden]

I guess I need to see the actual math behind this.

If it favors high damage per hit, it's a bit ridiculuos for SMG users.

Modifié par termokanden, 14 mars 2012 - 10:36 .

[Glowyrm]

If Armor Weakening is simply more damage to armor, I find that kind of lame. Why have an ability than increases damage to armor by X% and decreases armor damage reduction by X% when the end result is the same, more damage done to armor, just in 2 different ways.

Seems like a weird move and a confusing one at that.

[Synthetic Frost]

Glowyrm wrote...

If Armor Weakening is simply more damage to armor, I find that kind of lame. Why have an ability than increases damage to armor by X% and decreases armor damage reduction by X% when the end result is the same, more damage done to armor, just in 2 different ways.

Seems like a weird move and a confusing one at that.

Forgive the analagy, but they do this a lot in other RPGs, Pokemon being the one that comes to mind. By equiping Armor Peircing mods/Ammo, THAT weapon now does more damage to the target. But by weakening the armor, damage from ALL sources (IE: squadmates, powers) is improved for X seconds.

Modifié par Synthetic Frost, 15 mars 2012 - 12:41 .

[Glowyrm]

Synthetic Frost wrote...

Glowyrm wrote...

If Armor Weakening is simply more damage to armor, I find that kind of lame. Why have an ability than increases damage to armor by X% and decreases armor damage reduction by X% when the end result is the same, more damage done to armor, just in 2 different ways.

Seems like a weird move and a confusing one at that.

Forgive the analagy, but they do this a lot in other RPGs, Pokemon being the one that comes to mind. By equiping Armor Peircing mods/Ammo, THAT weapon now does more damage to the target. But by weakening the armor, damage from ALL sources (IE: squadmates, powers) is improved for X seconds.

Makes sense, but it's still weird for something like Armor-Piercing Ammo that increases Damage to Armor AND Weakens it. Since it doesn't have a duration to debuff something for other sources to benefit from the weakening, it's just 2 attributes doing the same thing.

Unless it debuffs the enemy once you shoot them with the ammo once or something.

[Eurhetemec]

rumination888 wrote...

...is there even such an enemy with health under armor?

There are not in ME3, so it's a non-issue. What, I think, some people in this thread do not understand, is that armour IS effectively health, just for particularly badass enemies, and it's a lot harder to get rid of than normal health. Again to be clear, there are NO enemies who have armour where armour is not the "bottom" layer of their defenses.

Modifié par Eurhetemec, 15 mars 2012 - 02:11 .

[Glowyrm]

Eurhetemec wrote...

rumination888 wrote...

...is there even such an enemy with health under armor?

There are not in ME3, so it's a non-issue. What, I think, some people in this thread do not understand, is that armour IS effectively health, just for particularly badass enemies, and it's a lot harder to get rid of than normal health. Again to be clear, there are NO enemies who have armour where armour is not the "bottom" layer of their defenses.

So basically health and armor are the same except that armor has a built in damage reduction mechanic.

Monster 1 has 100 health, if you shoot him for 100 damage he dies.

Monster 2 has 100 armor, if you shoot him for 100 damage it will only do 50 (50% reduction, arbitrary number since we don't know the exact math).

Armor Weakening of -50% against Monster 2 could do 1 of 2 things.

1) It removes the 50% damage reduction resulting in the monster dying in the above example.

2) It reduces the inherent 50% damage reduction by 50% resulting in a final damage reduction of 25%, which means that the 100 damage done to him is 75 instead of 50.

The only thing remaining to be seen is the exact math behind armor damage reduction, I also still think it's weird that armor-piercing ammo / warp ammo has both +damage to armor and armor weakening when they do essentially the same thing in my eyes.

I understand how weaknening helps with other sources of damage doing more to armor, but on an ammo power, it doesn't make much sense since they have no duration.

Why not just have +damage to armor as the only attribute in the game and be done with it instead of putting a vaguely described "weakening" mechanic into the game?

They still could have kept the "debuff" mechanic of weakening by just having something like Warp say "+20% damage to armor" instead of "weakens armor". Warp has a duration so it would have been intuative and made sense to people that armored enemies with Warp on them take more damage.

Sorry, now I'm just venting on how silly it is to have these 2 mechanics especially when 1 of them isn't fully explained. If everything was just +damage to armor, we wouldn never even need an explaination.

Modifié par Glowyrm, 15 mars 2012 - 09:54 .

[Athenau]

Monster 2 has 100 armor, if you shoot him for 100 damage it will only do 50 (50% reduction, arbitrary number since we don't know the exact math).

I think it's a flat reduction, not a %. That's why low damage weapons are so terrible against armor.