Ablative Plating
What it is
Ablative Plating is a stat-category artifact that procs on a repeating internal timer. Each proc grants the ship two simultaneous timed buffs — a percent-multiplicative boost to incoming damage reduction and a flat additive boost to weapon damage percentage — for a short window. Within the timer-driven burst family it is the defensive-offensive pairing: it shares its trigger shape with the dual-buff fire-rate-and-speed sibling but swaps one of the offensive levers for a defensive one, making it a damage cooldown and a survivability cooldown sharing a single clock.
Identity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Display name | Ablative Plating |
| Category | stat |
| Icon | military helmet |
| Damage tag | none (type-agnostic) |
| Trigger type | timer |
| Trigger repeats | yes |
| Banner on proc | yes |
| Proc audio cue | none defined |
| Primary color | #886644 |
| Secondary color | #664422 |
| Bright color | bbaa88 |
| Passive flat-bonus stat | damage reduction |
| Passive flat-bonus mode | percent |
The trigger is a self-repeating timer keyed off the tier’s interval value. There is no kill-streak condition, no damage-type gate, and no other entry condition beyond the timer firing.
Per-rarity values
Tiers indexed 0 → 3 map to uncommon → rare → epic → legendary. A fifth common tier is prepended at runtime via the engine’s flat-bonus layer and shares the uncommon values record; common-vs-uncommon differentiation comes entirely from the per-tier flat-bonus ramp (10 / 20 / 30 / 40 / 50 percentage points applied to the damage-reduction stat).
| Tier | Rarity | Proc interval (s) | Buff duration (s) | Damage-reduction bonus (×) | Weapon-damage bonus (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Uncommon | 12 | 5 | 0.25 | 35 |
| 1 | Rare | 11 | 5 | 0.40 | 60 |
| 2 | Epic | 10 | 6 | 0.55 | 95 |
| 3 | Legendary | 8 | 6 | 0.70 | 150 |
The proc interval shortens, the buff duration lengthens at the epic step, and both the damage-reduction bonus and the weapon-damage bonus scale with tier. At legendary the buff is active for 6 out of every 8 seconds — three-quarters of run uptime.
The (duration / interval) uptime ratio across tiers is 5/12, 5/11, 6/10, 6/8.
When it triggers
On every timer tick, the artifact fires two stat-modifier actions in the same frame plus a VFX burst and a flash on the artifact icon. A banner is shown on each proc.
| Element | Value |
|---|---|
| Stat 1 modified | damage reduction |
| Stat 1 mode | percent multiplier |
| Stat 1 source tag | artifact:heat_tank:armor |
| Stat 2 modified | weapon damage percentage |
| Stat 2 mode | flat additive percentage |
| Stat 2 source tag | artifact:heat_tank:dmg |
| Buff window (both stats) | tier-defined buff duration |
| VFX type | burst-and-ring |
| VFX particle count | 22 |
| VFX scale | 5.0 |
| VFX lifetime (s) | 0.40 |
| VFX color | bbaa88 |
The damage-reduction buff is applied to the ship’s damage-reduction stat as a percent multiplier (the bonus value is the multiplier delta — e.g. legendary’s 0.70 multiplies the stat by ×1.70) for the buff duration. The weapon-damage buff is applied to the ship’s weapon-damage-percentage stat as a flat additive percentage for the same buff duration. Both buffs share the same duration, the same source artifact, and the same start frame, but are tracked as two independent sources on the stat layer.
There is no kill-streak gate, no damage-type filter, and no proximity or HP threshold. The timer is autonomous from run start.
How it stacks
| Rule | Value |
|---|---|
| Stacking mode (both buffs) | refresh |
| Max stacks (both buffs) | 1 |
Neither buff can accumulate. A second proc landing while the first window is still active resets the remaining duration on both buffs to the full tier-defined window without adding a second stack. Because both buffs share a single source artifact and a single trigger, they always start and end on the same frame.
When the proc interval is greater than the buff duration (tiers 0 and 1 — 12/5 and 11/5) the buffs lapse between procs and the ship spends part of the cycle unboosted. When the proc interval approaches the buff duration (tier 3 — 8/6) the buffs chain with only a short gap. Tier 2 (10/6) sits between these regimes.
Ablative Plating does not share its trigger source with any other artifact; it has its own dedicated timer keyed off the artifact’s own interval. Other timer-trigger artifacts run on their own independent timers. Tier upgrades replace the per-tier values record wholesale. Tier is set at run start by meta-progression and does not change mid-run.
Summary
Ablative Plating is a timer-driven dual-buff artifact: every 12 / 11 / 10 / 8 seconds it grants a paired damage-reduction-multiplier and weapon-damage-percent buff for 5 / 5 / 6 / 6 seconds. Refresh stacking with max stacks = 1 on both buffs, banner and VFX on proc, no kill-streak or damage-type gate. Uptime ratio climbs from 5/12 at uncommon to 6/8 at legendary. Its passive flat-bonus is damage reduction (percent), ramping 10 → 50 percentage points across common → legendary.
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE
- Timer trigger primitive. The self-repeating timer keyed off a tier-defined interval is a generic effect-engine primitive used by any artifact with a self-clocked proc. Same flag as Afterburner and Slipstream. Belongs on a
concepts/effect-engine-triggers.mdpage rather than repeated per artifact. - Refresh stacking with max stacks = 1. Recurring buff-stacking mode across the stat-burst artifact family. Same flag as Afterburner / Frenzy / Aegis / Bloodlust / Salvager / Slipstream. Candidate concept page:
concepts/buff-stacking-modes.md. - Multi-action proc with shared duration. Two stat-modifier actions sharing one duration token but distinct source tags is a reusable pattern for any artifact that buffs multiple stats together. Same flag as Afterburner and Slipstream. Candidate concept page or roll-up section: paired buffs with independent stat-layer tracking.
- Mixed-mode stat actions in one proc. Ablative Plating fires one percent and one flat modifier action in the same frame against two different ship stats. The interaction of these two modes on the stat layer (additive flat vs multiplicative percent) is engine-side and belongs on a
concepts/stat-modifier-modes.mdpage. - Common-tier flat-bonus layer. The runtime adds a 5th common tier that shares the uncommon values record and differentiates only through a per-artifact flat-bonus field. Document once on the artifacts roll-up.
- Per-tier flat-bonus ramp. The 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 / 50 percentage-point ramp across common → legendary is a shared constant, not artifact-specific. Belongs on the artifacts roll-up.
- Damage-reduction stat composition. How the damage-reduction ship stat composes with base mitigation, other multiplicative sources, and incoming-damage pipelines is not specified in the artifact file and belongs on a combat / mitigation-pipeline page.
- Weapon-damage stat composition. How the weapon-damage-percentage ship stat composes with base weapon damage, other flat sources, and per-weapon overrides is not specified in the artifact file and belongs on a combat / weapon-pipeline page.
- Banner, flash, and VFX actions. The on-proc banner, artifact-icon flash, and burst-and-ring VFX recipe are shared UI/VFX primitives across many artifacts; their exact behavior is engine-side and should live on the artifacts roll-up or a VFX-primitives page.
- Uptime ratio as a design lever. The (duration / interval) ratio progression across tiers (5/12 → 5/11 → 6/10 → 6/8) is shared with Afterburner one-for-one and is a deliberate design curve. Candidate for the artifacts roll-up’s tier-scaling discussion, not a per-entity prose paragraph.
- Timer-driven dual-buff family. Ablative Plating, Afterburner, and Slipstream are all self-clocked dual-buff procs with refresh stacking on the same 12/11/10/8 second cadence and 5/5/6/6 second buff windows. The family relationship belongs on the artifacts roll-up or a
concepts/timer-driven-burst-artifacts.mdpage rather than repeated per entity. - Defensive-offensive pairing within the timer family. Within the timer-driven dual-buff family, Ablative Plating is the entry that pairs a defensive lever (damage reduction) with an offensive lever (weapon damage), versus Afterburner’s offensive-mobility pairing. The taxonomy of which stat pairs sit in which family belongs on the artifacts roll-up.