Talk:Damage/Cloned Flesh/@comment-24.187.31.194-20131228181630/@comment-24.20.177.107-20140217140953

From my understanding, "armor" and "Ferrite/Alloy Armor" are sort of two different things. "Armor" refers to how much damage the target resists regardless of whether it's ferrite or alloy, while "Ferrite/Alloy Armor" are "health classes" which serve only as a set of damage bonuses/penalties that dictate how much of a damage bonus/penalty you get when using a particular damage type/element.

For example:  If you're hitting a target with Ferrite Armor with 100 corrosive damage, you'll get the +75% bonus for using corrosive damage against the "Ferrite Armor" health class for a total of 175 damage. At this point, you can forget about the whole ferrite/alloy thing. Next, the game reduces that 175 damage by the target's armor value, and the formula for that is, "Damage = modded damage / (1 + (armor / 300)," which comes out to 131 damage unless I mathed dumb. That 131 damage is then removed from the target's health pool. It doesn't matter if it's Alloy Armor or Ferrite Armor, because those are "health types" and, oddly enough, appear to be completely unrelated to the target's actual armor value and are simply there to dictate what resistances/weaknesses a particular target has.

When it comes to the yellow bar you see when you fight most Grineer, that is their armor rating, which you won't see drop unless you're using corrosive damage, which will lower their armor total, which lowers the amount of damage their armor mitigates, which allows for more health damage, etc. etc.

So, if I understand this correctly, all non-machine Grineer take 75% extra damage from Viral no matter where you hit them due all of them having the Cloned Flesh health type, while some of them take 75% extra damage from corrosive because they also have the Ferrite Armor health type and the rest take 75% extra damage from radiation because they use the Alloy Armor health type. So if you're hitting a regular Lancer with heat and corrosive, that Lancer will take 25% extra heat damage and 75% extra corrosive damage, which is then mitigated by their armor value unless they have no helmet and you hit them in the head, at which point you bypass that armor value because that part of their body is "unprotected" and they don't get to apply their armor to that damage (though the damage bonus for the Ferrite Armor health type does still apply, as it was calculated before the armor formula even comes into play and it wouldn't make sense to have corrosive do *less* damage to an unprotected part of the body by removing the damage bonus from hitting a Ferrite Armor target).

All that being said, it seems radiation/viral is the best combination to deal with Grineer, as it gives you a 75% damage boost to your viral damage against all non-machine targets and a 75% boost to both radiation *and* viral against Bombards, Napalms, bosses, etc. etc. since they have both the "Cloned Flesh" and the "Alloy Armor" health types.