but that already happens in the system they have if you have 160 toughness and 80 pen you dont get the same % drop in damage reduction as you do if they have 120 toughness because toughness HAS DIMINISHING RETURNS it means in reverse when you pen it YOU GET DIMINISHING RETURNS which is retarded .....

AND in the system i proposed ... you add a better peice of ammo that increases the flat damage by one and the RoF weapon gains in damage .... you are forgetting mods ..... and forgetting that the amount of damage dropping off per shot is small ....heres the thing weapons that have a high single shot damage have much lower RoF and are harder to hit with since they put less lead in the air... it all comes out to similar ttk with the variance being closer than you think ... my examples were for showing the system doesnt work they werent hard and fast numbers for what each gun should be .... the difference between a bolter and heavy bolter could be one damage per shot and one ap with a higher RoF..... and you are saying single shot weapons should suck ? look at the present sniper weapons in the system we have they are terrible because they lose so much damage per shot while high RoF weapons where rounding is a thing have stages where they do more damage then they should....

actually with the current system they would both do the same damage entirely ...... and as far as ttk health and armor are the same exact thing HP.

Instead of mitigation.
It'd be simpler just to have flat hp.

For example, space marines have 100hp/100armor, a terminator 300/300 (armor regen rate is still the same though) tanks 500hp (or just armor?) etc etc.
Yaknow, just simple maths, no mitigation no extra code, just straight up HP and Armor.

Since only heavy weapons can deal damage to tanks, tankHP doesn't need to be very high, they're pretty damn stronk at the moment as well so not being so high would be fine.
Plasma cannons do about 100hp/armor damage anyways, so 2-3 shots would be ok, probs raise it upto 700 if needed.

I was referring to the system he proposed, which wouldn't offer diminishing returns.

"He" was me ... and it still does offer diminishing returns if you buy pen over the armor rating of your target .... AkA not as worth it to use a Las cannon vs infantry it will still "kill" them but that bullet was needed for shooting tanks and quad guns hopefully you used it on a very "important" infantry in a dangerously powerful position or about to liquidate 5 friendly's ...

to mention nothing of the fact that my system would allow nuance to defeating larger armor .... you could increase the damage per shot .... you could increase the armor pen, you could give a weapon a "poison" tag or "flaming" tag or "tearing"(think bleed from Dark souls). the present system has almost no nuance everything immediately gets hard boiled down to dps and thrown against a mitigation percentage a mitigation percentage that doesnt act appropriately at wierd cresting values between weapon tiers, and where rounding can have a scary impact like if your damage reduction percentage isnt enough to round off a shuriken pistols damage by one it still does the same damage and its a LOW PEN WEAPON it shouldn't be doing full damage through toughness. .... it makes it very hard to make weapons unique in strategy or effect.

you presently have to have 15 More toughness than the guy with the shuriken pistol to reduce its damage by 1/shot at 14 toughness you take full damage at 15 more you take drastically less ..... 10/shot X 3 X RoF is a drastic change in the shots per clip and dps totals .... but up until that point your toughness does nothing for you. When you compare the same formula to the bolt pistol thats single fire its damage is more one big pool rounds up faster and gets gets mitigated more smoothly and immediately so the bolt pistol until certain exact values is penalized more by toughness than the equal class weapon of the eldar up until the exact number the eldar gun finally roles down a digit in damage per shot at which point they are equal again until toughness increases again then the bolt pistol once again gets the short end of the stick ...

its the entire reason why the entire way through development you had situations where buying toughness had NO effect on your ttk .... it has in many cases during balance not been enough to break through tiers of rounding on HW i wouldnt be surprised if thats the case right now with the shuriken cannon and the Heavy bolter that the percentage difference bewtween the toughness mitigation bonus and the pen isnt enough to round down the base damage and so you essentially still take full damage from these weapons as if no mitigation was there at all .... Its why chaos had such an early advantage ... rank 2 MoN is 35 toughness just enough to guarantee being above the 15 toughness even with in game buffs in most cases(embolden probably outdoes this) so they always get thier mitigation at least at the first lowering tier against everyone else i be if you studied the difference in the loyalists equipping the basic armor, the loyalists equiping the artificer and the chaos equipping MoN you would see that the basic armor would be the test it would take full damage, the loyalist artificer would sometimes take full damage sometimes take less depending on the pen of the wepaon attacking them and its rounding and the chaos mark would show at leats the first tier of damage rolldown but may actually lose efficiency from 15 over not quite making it another 15 against some smaller base damage weapons they wouldnt mitigate nay more from tier 1-2

Whereas with a dual linear balance system you can tweak ANYTHING on the heavy bolter like playing with a stereo to get the right sound ... you can drop the damage per shot by one, or give it one more or less pen, you can hand the armor 1 more toughness or armor .... theres like 5-7 metrics on how every weapon interacts so you have a better feel for how to save the balance of one weapon without screwing up everything else.

you also get the advantage of if you want to add a new weapon you just start with the stats of the closest weapon and ask yourelf how is this weapon different .... so lets say you start with the bolter and you are adding the heavy bolter .... you copy paste the bolters stats and you ask yourself what do i change ? .... ok its supposed to have slightly higher caliber and fire faster .... and a little more pen so you add one damage, add one pen and you give it the RoF you are looking for you go test run it ... if its under perfroming you have several metrics to fix it and you can fine tune it at basest level how the integers will react to each other instead of abstractly through percentages .... you can say i want it to feel more slow and powerful so you add that caliber damage another 1 and test it again ... you don't have silly testing situations where you go well he died too fast lets add more toughness to the armor .... oh that didn't do anything ... weird ... i wonder why ... Its essentially reversing the outlook instead of trying to tweak from the perspectives of the percentages control from the integers and let the percentages create themselves .... its amuch more responsive system for correcting mistakes.

you can also in relation to my other thread assign a LP value to each type of metric and how much lp its worth so you dont wind up with 600LP items that add some of the smallest TTL bonuses in the game ... and are outperformed by rank 2 250 LP items.

another interesting point is you could also use non integer values... allowing say 11.2 damage per hit .... just a thought ..

You are still lumping armor and toughness together in 1 mitigation table. Armor should do 1 step of mitigation resulting in an intermediate damage and then toughness mitigates that damage by another amount. Your calculation does not account for armor. Even if you are saying that armor is the yellow rechargeable bar. then the formula should be modified so that when you are taking down the armor bar, it uses penetration as the form of mitigation and then once the damage moves over to the actual hp then the mitigation transfers over to toughness. that should be simple enough to do in the programming world. use 1 formula for 1 bar and the second formula for the other bar. Let penetration be a buff that increases the rate that the armor bar is depleted and then ignore it once you get to the HP bar and only use toughness to mitigate HP reduction.

I think we are on the same page here. They choose a very complicated damage formula when it could be simplified. Give tanks very high armor but somewhat normal Hit points (maybe lower). That way high pen on weapons to take out tanks but when used against infantry, not so effective.

right im doing that on purpose ..... one is the higher LP cost "non lose able mitigation" the other is the "lower priced lose able mitigation" im specifically targeting the REMOVAL of the yellow "shield" bar .... to number one increase the usefulness of having a support and dependence upon them ... this will reduce naturally the amount of lone wolfing because each hit counts on you. This way if ttl goes up slightly you still have the "nickel and dime effect" on someone so even if they live a few longer they then actually seriously need to think if they can continue and maybe make medkits only restore 200 of the 300 possible base HP like they do now so you don't always get filled up to max by one.

Im also making it simple and straight forward when someone is modding a gun how it will effect their damage output against any target its much easier for them to craft and target a certain ttk on offense or defense, or say .. "i need 15 pen for me to hit tanks with this weapon ... lets see how i can get that". the values are directly linearly compared to one another and then subtracted off the damage (minimum of 0) and you get your final damage(also minumum of 0 though very hard to obtain and would take a lot of an LP loadout to barely do this to lowest tier wepaons). .... im essentially modding the tabletop RPG system which works quite well and adapting it to the video game so it can still be fast paced and do "300 damage" in a reasonable amount of time.

you could also with this build much easier introduce "Autosanguine" type defensive items that regenerate a few hp every 3 seconds .... in every WH property penetration is there to negate armor and in TT armor is a "chance to not get hit" well .. that doesn't work very well in a skill focused MMO shooter ....however the TT RPG uses both toughness and armor to flat mitigate incoming damage and its already a base 10 system ... ours is a base 100 system ... see why that is so easy to copy ?
Toughness is much harder to come by in the rpg but cant be taken away from the defender any other way than the "felling" trait but its not a necessity here to have that if we only let toughness go to the 2/3 or 3/4 height armor can and we base top armor on just barely completely blocking minimum damage tier in the game. so toughness will be handy if you are trying to be an uber tank but if you are in the middle somewhere armor will be your go to LP efficiency so we will only likely see toughness on GA, TAC, etc. people who have to slog through the bullet storm to get their job done ... make it harder to get through rarity for devastators, and the like.

More percentage based top down formulas will continue to have the same problem ... problems like the shuriken pistol where you cannot mitigate its damage but only at certain tiers or levels of mitigation since >10% isnt enough to tip its base damage a number. regardless if you have 2 bad formulas you will just have their health reacting different and badly under the same or different stimulai ... you would in fact make it MORE esoteric and illegible to the layman.

No actually im saying let tanks have high hp and armor but maybe make them take movement penalties at certain armor and toughness levels for carrying all that heavy gear so they can be kited or are susceptible to high end target removers like las cannon or weird mechanics like poison ... and in general through rarity keep it to the units that are supposed to be walking juggernauts .... don't let the squishies have as much access ... make it specific classes that have enough to block small arms fire like the GA, CGA, DR,shield toting ork.

when balancing factions since armor and penetration and technically damage have the same exact value LP wise as well as hp in a shot for shot basis lets say you are working with the eldar ... there is no longer a need to have them have "different hp" but you can or you could just let them have less access to toughness and armor but more access to pen and damage upgrades by an amount that is equal to the percentage you want them to on average take more in damage .... thus the eldar look at their weapons and armor and they are on the same logical linear scale and they have an easy way to compare with their performance vs said other factions.

Yep, I am in favor of the linear damage reduction. By TT RPG I assume you mean games like Dark Heresy and Deathwatch. You have incoming damage with a couple ways to reduce it and then you take damage, very straight forward. That is what I was trying to convey with my very simple equation that started this conversation. No sure if we are going to change anything now but it is a good idea.