Damage

Damage (ver. 2.0) is a system that determines the damage done to a certain target by a given attacker. Damage results are modified by several mechanics – type modifiers (main content of this article), armor, critical hit bonuses, stealth bonuses, Warframe ability debuffs, body part modifiers, faction modifiers – which are discussed below and on their respective pages.

The main feature of the Damage 2.0 system is that all damage dealt by any weapon or ability belongs to a certain damage type, and every target has specific resistances and vulnerabilities to different damage types. Exploiting enemy vulnerabilities and avoiding resistances by means of weapon selection and mod installation may significantly improve players' damage output.

Damage Display
Damage dealt from players to enemies is displayed on the HUD as numbers near the point of impact on an enemy. Damage dealt from enemies to players is displayed on the HUD both as a bent strip to indicate its direction of origin and as a reduction in shield or health hitpoints to indicate its quantity.

Each individual projectile or melee attack will display a single damage number. Weapon with multiple projectiles like shotguns or rifles with Multishot will display a damage number for each individual projectile. Weapons which fire continuously will display a damage number at a constant rate of one tenth of a second.

Damage indicators are color coded using the following system:
 * Damage appears by default in white.
 * Critical hits and stealth attacks are in yellow.
 * Orange crits, appear in orange color. These are stronger than yellow crits.
 * Red crits, as their name suggests, appear in red. These are stronger than orange crits.
 * Damage against shields appear in blue, regardless of other factors.
 * Damage against overshields appear in purple.
 * Damage against an invulnerable enemy appear in grey.

Overview Table
Grineer =
 * -| Corpus =
 * -| Infested =
 * -| Corrupted =
 * -| Tenno =
 * -| All =

Physical Damage
Most weapons' base damage is made up of a combination of three physical damage types:, , and. The overall physical damage of any given weapon is the sum of Impact, Puncture, and Slash damage.

Most weapons have varying proportions of, , and.

Some weapons do however replace physical damage with either an elemental or combo elemental damage type. These do not have physical damage and are not affected by, , or mods.

Mods will affect damage types as decided by the player's loadout. General damage increasing mods, such as Serration, affect all the damage types of a weapon. However, specific physical damage type mods increase effectiveness only against certain health and armor types. Rupture increases only the damage; which is more helpful against Corpus than Infested, for example. Faction damage mods, such as Expel Grineer, also increase each type of damage against the faction in question.

Elemental Damage
In addition to the three base damage types, Elemental Damage can be applied on top of a weapon’s base damage depending on what Elemental Mods are applied. There are four primary Elemental Damage types:,, , and.

Certain weapons will deal only Elemental Damage, having no innate Physical Damage.

A single primary Elemental Damage type can be applied alone, but if a second primary Elemental Damage type is introduced they will combine into a secondary Elemental Damage type.

Combined Elemental Types
To create these combined elements requires mixing two primary elements together.

Elemental Damage is applied in addition to a weapon’s physical damage types. Weapon Damage = ( + + ) + (Elemental).

Elemental Damage Combinations are made by following a mod placement hierarchy. This hierarchy is from closest to top left (first to be considered) to closest to bottom right (last to be considered) on the mod layout. Innate weapon elemental damages are considered the last in the hierarchy. However, you can force it to be in a different position in the hierarchy if you use a mod of the same element as the innate element (e.g. putting Stormbringer on the top left slot of Synapse will change the position of its innate electric damage from last in hierarchy to first in hierarchy). Also, if using multiple mods with the same element, the first position is defining when they get combined.



As an example: If you're using an standalone weapon such as Prova or Lecta, then adding, , and  in 1, 2 and 3 respectively get:  ( + ) and  ( + ).

Combinations can sum additional damage from the basic elemental damages, as long as the combination follows first before other elementals can be attached to the specified weapon.

Weapons with innate Combination Elements such as Ogris, Penta , Stug , Nukor and Detron will always have that damage type, regardless of mods used. Therefore, on weapons like this, consider the elemental damage separate from your elemental mods, as they do not combine with the weapon's already combined damage type.



Status Effect
A Status Effect, also known as proc, is an additional effect which may be triggered at random by a hit from a weapon, while Status Chance is the probability that a hit will inflict a Status Effect. Each damage type has a unique Status Effect associated with it.

A weapon will always (with every shot) deal any elemental and physical damage installed, regardless of the corresponding status triggering or not.

Damage Calculation
The following explains how a certain amount of damage of one type turns into actual inflicted damage to a target, considering type modifiers and armor. Faction modifiers, body part modifiers, critical hit and stealth modifiers as well as Warframe debuffs are disregarded for now, since all of these are independent of damage types.

Unarmored
Against unarmored hit points or applying Finisher Damage, the formula is simply:


 * Inflicted Damage (ID) is the final damage result.
 * Base Damage (BD) is the initial damage value.
 * Hitpoint Modifier (HM) is the damage type modifier against that hitpoint type (may be shield or health).

To make it independent from the amount of base damage:


 * Damage Modifier (DM) is the total damage modifier. An amount of damage of that type (BD) against that enemy will then always be multiplied with this factor (DM).

Armored
Against armored hit points, the formula is: Where additionally to the previous definitions, AM is the damage type modifier against the armor type and AR is the target's armor after all reductions from debuffs (including Corrosive Projection, Corrosive procs and Terrify).

It's important to note that type modifiers against armor work in two ways here: they mitigate a percentage of the target's armor, and increase the damage dealt in the same way as a type modifier against the hitpoints would do. Practically speaking, this means that damage is only reduced by 25% of a target's whole Ferrite Armor and the base damage is increased by +75%. Thus having the damage type with the highest appropriate bonus is far more important against armored than unarmored targets. The formula causes a massive difference between a medium and a large reduction: 75% reduction (¼ original armor) is essentially twice more than 50% reduction (½ original armor).

Because of the twofold reduction, a simple (1 + HM) (1 + AM) calculation yields incorrect results. The following damage type pairings deviate from that simplified calculation:
 * Against ferrite-armored cloned flesh,
 * always surpasses.
 * surpasses above 120 armor.
 * always surpasses ; but never surpasses.
 * Against alloy-armored cloned flesh,
 * always surpasses.
 * surpasses above 342 armor.
 * always surpasses.
 * However, neither nor  ever surpass.

This just shows that one can't easily compare damage type modifiers against an armor class to those against hitpoint classes, and those against armor are, at similar values, considerably more effective especially when fighting high level enemies (since armor scales with level). The relative damage bonus due to a damage type's armor modifier against armored health compared to no modifier can be quantified using the upper expression on the right. This is only defined for armor values greater than 0, because at 0, the armor type of the target is lost, such that the effect of the damage type's armor modifier is lost as well. Hence, the benefit (relative damage bonus) of the armor modifier at 0 armor is always 0. An interesting property of this benefit function is that, while one would intuitively assume the benefit of the armor modifier gets always greater the greater the target's armor, this benefit actually converges against a limit as armor approaches infinity if the armor modifier is smaller than one (which is true for all damage types against all armor types with the sole exception of finishing damage). Since this limit is only determined by the armor modifier of the damage type itself, it is a practical metric to gauge the relative effectiveness of damage types for long endless missions. The formula for the limit is the lower one given on the right. Below is a table of the actual values for all currently implemented armor modifiers. This illustrates the growing returns of greater armor modifiers, which may be compared to the behavior of Corrosive Projection aura stacking.

General
A generalized version of the aforementioned formula is: AR is still the target's armor after all debuffs (Corrosive Projection, Corrosive procs and Terrify) have been applied, how these debuffs work is subject of the armor article. AM is the damage type modifier against the armor class. M🇮🇳 for all indices i are all modifiers that take effect, these can be damage type modifiers against armor and hitpoint type, the crit modifier (on average: chance damage multiplier), stealth bonus (only normal auto attacks, the special stealth attacks are classified as Finisher damage type and disregard armor), enemy body part/hit zone modifiers and damage multipliers from Warframe abilities like Molecular Prime, Roar, Sonar or Eclipse. The term following the large pi operator (&Pi;) simply means that this is a product, so all these bonuses stack multiplicatively. The notation replaces (1 + M🇮🇳) (1 + M🇮🇳)  ... .

In case of enemies who have both shields and armor, damage to shield hitpoints is not mitigated by armor. Lastly, when or Finisher damage is applied to a shielded target, the damage is applied directly to its health, not shield hitpoints – it bypasses shields.

Eximus
Eximus enemies were buffed on update (?) which increased the damage resistance of these enemy types to an additive 50% Reduction, in addition to already boosted stats. Not all Eximus Units gain this damage resistance however, shown in the image below. While an Arctic Eximus Bombard will resist all damage by +50%, leaving only and  as its weaknesses at 25%(vs. a regular bombard being vulnerable to a +75% Damage Bonus), an Eximus Heavy Gunner retains the same damage vulnerabilities as its regular counterpart, but instead gains a significant increase in health of +200% at base. Some eximus even have both defensive scaling and damage resistance, for example, an Arctic Eximus will nullify all cold damage done in its aura vicinity, as well as its damage resistance, thus damages that don't fare well against the eximus' regular counterpart and are made up of the eximus' element type, such as Magnetic Damage against a Bombard, would fair MUCH worse against the arctic eximus variant.

Individual Damage Tutorials
Schaden 2.0