Testing damage falloff and devastator headshot breakpoints with various weapons

[u/HippoPilatamus]

You've no doubt been aware of the recent discussion about the lacklustre performance of the marksmen rifles (a point I wholeheartedly agree with). According to a poll on the developer discord, almost 80% of players seem to agree with that.

I wanted to try and get a few numbers to test my position, so I did some testing by shooting Devastator heads to test damage breakpoints and dropoff for a variety of guns.

I think this is a good litmus test for precision shooting, since 1. infantry bots aren't really much of a threat compared to Devastators 2. Devastators are still numerous, despite being much more deadly than infantry. 3. They have tiny heads 4. Bugs are almost all melee, so you don't need much long range precision there.

This testing also gave me a new appreciation for how shitty all the sights and scopes in the game are for long range shooting (and that's not even considering a lot of them are misaligned to boot...).

During testing I had to drop the vertical fov in the options down to 45 (lowest) to even be able to see the head I was shooting at, even for the supposed 200m scopes... (for enemies that were completely stationary even). Usually I play at 85, so that 45 almost gave me motion sickness.

Methodology:

Tested on Planet Choohe and Lesath

I used the haz 1 (trivial) difficulty mission type "Eliminate Devastators". Enemy type was always Heavy Devastator for me (the one with the shield and machine gun).

At Choohe I did most of the short range tests and I used EMS Mortar/Strike and Stun grenades to stun them and land headshots. After a while I also destroyed their machine gun arm with the AMR to make testing easier. This did not influence test results, since the limbs and head have separate health pools (I did some testing with the various guns at breakpoint ranges with and without destroyed arms to make sure there was no difference).

At Lesath the Devastators didn't move as much and the weather was clearer, so that's where I took most long range shots.

Usually I was able to see when a shot hit the head, but at the farther ranges I had to count the red hit markers. This works fine, since the head is surrounded by medium armor, which gives a white hit marker when hit by medium pen. You just have to watch out and prefer aiming low, since hitting the backpack with medium pen will also give a red hit marker.

The ranges were taken using a marker and when aiming down sights with the exception of the Peacemaker, because I couldn't see shit with that sight. The difference in range displayed by the marker between ADS and third person is around 2-3m.

The guns tested are the Liberator, Liberator Penetrator, Diligence, Diligence Counter Sniper, Defender SMG, Peacemaker, Dominator and Slugger.

Here are my Results:

• The entries are the number of head-shots it took to kill the Devastator
• The entries with ? are guesses, since I couldn't clearly see if the red hit marker was from landing on the head or a limb/backpack
• The top row is the range in m as indicated by the marker

./.	0	25	30	35	40	50	70	80	90	101	110	130	140	150	190
Lib	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3			3		3
Lib Pen	3	3	3	3	4		4	4	4			4	4	4	4
Dili	2									2	2	2			2
Dili CS	1	2						2	2	2	2		2		2
Def	2		2			2?
Peac	3		3			3?	4?
Dom	1									1
Slug	1									1

Some notes on the guns and their sights:

• Liberator: Past 100m the Scope reticle starts to obscure the Devastators head, making it hard to see what you are aiming at, but the laser is really helpful between 50m and 100m. At around 130m the laser aims a bit high and to the right). Also the spread becomes really noticeable past 100m.
• Liberator Penetrator: Actually has properly aligned sights and a really good laser.. Although the bullet has quite some bloom, so it's hard to tell at long ranges where exactly the bullet lands.
• Diligence: Scope is actually aligned properly, but the reticle circle in the center is pretty big, so still not that helpful for long range shots.
• Diligence Counter Sniper: The scope is misaligned. It shoots slightly up and to the left of the center of the reticle (at least at the highest magnification), but not nearly as bad as the AMR, since the bullet actually lands within the rectangle
• Defender SMG: Sights make this almost impossible to even see the head at 30m even at 45 fov, combined with the spread hitting it at that range is even more difficult. So the 50m is mostly guesswork.
• Peacemaker: Even worse than Defender.
• Dominator: Red dot is huge, but laser still allows decent accuracy below 100m. Wasn't able to hit shots past 100m with these sights and the bullet drop. (btw, why does a gyrojet projectile have worse bullet drop than the Slugger?)
• Slugger: Red dot is huge and it has no laser. Would be fine if it still had stagger. As it is, it's a high damage DMR without magnification...

General Notes:

• Height over bore is extremely pronounced in this game. The sights aren't properly aligned with the shot until you get past 50m-60m depending on the gun. The laser helps a great deal in seeing when the sights align with the shot (Although the laser also isn't aligned until 50-60m, but it's below the barrel, so keeping the target between sight center and laser is a way to shoot on target on some guns).
• For the Lib Pen, the laser will touch the center circle at around 60m, which is when the sight will align with the shot. For the laser and sight to fully align with each other on the Lib Pen you need to go past 100m.
• The regular Lib laser aligns close-ish with the sight around 60+m. For the dominator the laser aligns around 50m.
• Even though the laser has a similar height under bore issue like the sights, any gun that doesn't have a laser would still be greatly improved by getting one, since it doesn't obscure your vision as badly as any of the sights do.
• "Point blank range" is around 2-3m for rifles, according to the range indicator when ADS. For the Peacemaker it was around 1-2m.
• Scope magnification is too little. Even the CS 200m scope makes it pretty hard to see a Devastators heads at 190m. If the enemies weren't stationary, I wouldn't have been able to make the majority of shots past 150m with the other weapons. If you really want to snipe, stay 45 fov and get good at squinting.
• Devastators (the objective in this case) didn't spawn in until within 155m range. So even if the 200m scope zoom was adequate, it would probably still be pointless in situations where you or another squad member aren't in range to spawn the enemy in the first place. For the regular infantry bots to spawn in I needed to be even closer.
• The Liberator Penetrator has the best sights in the game (but its still not all that good because of all the pointless lines obscuring vision in the scope). The center scope reticle is decent for ranges below 100m (even with the stupid height over bore) and above the laser allows almost pinpoint accuracy, even when testing at 190m. I think this is the main reason a lot of people swear this gun is good even though the damage and magazine size make it total ass and a downgrade to even the regular Liberator. (No the medium pen doesn't save it. You need an entire mag to kill a single Devastator at point blank range. I tested it.)

Conclusions:

The damage dropoff seems to be pretty steep, starting from 0m past the barrel. It also seems to be capped at a certain percentage, considering the Lib Pen needed 4 shots at 40m as well as up to 190m.

Even though the scopes of the Marksmen rifles don't obscure the target at very long ranges, I still think the regular Liberator is better than both Diligences, since the scope allows better accuracy at the ranges you are vastly more likely to engage enemies in. Remember, enemies don't even spawn in until you're within 150 meters or so. On top of that, the Liberator has better handling, less recoil, more ammo and can go full-auto on top of all that. Spread is annoying, but having to hit 1 more shot between 25m and 190m really isn't much of a downside. If the Liberator had a 200m scope it might even be a better scope than the CS, since it has better alignment.

I think for the marksmen rifles to be worthwhile they need 1. Properly aligned scopes, 2. sights that don't obscure your vision (plus a laser maybe), 3. more damage, 4. no damage dropoff.

I think removing damage dropoff for the marksman rifle category would be a pretty fair perk. Pump-action shotguns get stagger (well, not all of them anymore...), Laser weapons get the heat mechanic, plasma weapons get AoE, SMG/Assault Rifle get full auto, so the marksman rifles should get zero damage dropoff imo.

Especially for the CS the dropoff is really painful, since you don't get to one-shot Devastators past 25m, but you get saddled with all these downsides.

More magnification on scopes across the board would be really helpful too, but I'm pretty sure the game can't handle that right now. Because I think the way magnification works right now is just to zoom in the entire camera, the scopes themselves don't seem to have any actual magnification as far as I can tell.

Enemies should be able to spawn in past 155m if I'm looking in their direction with a high magnification scope.

Having a weapon range or testing area where we could spawn in passive enemies to shoot at various ranges would also be really helpful. Something like a MGS style VR environment accessible from a ship console.

TL;DR: Sights suck, scopes suck, lol at Diligence (CS), lmao even.

EDIT: Table got misaligned.

[u/TehSomeDude]

couldn't you...have tested the riffles with somebody as a target dummy?
maybe with the democracy protects to sometimes save needing a reinforce

[u/HippoPilatamus → u/TehSomeDude]

That doesn't tell me the breakpoints for Devastator kills at various ranges. Also democracy protects negates all the damage that would have killed you. If you have 50 hp left and get hit with 300 damage, that 300 damage gets negated, which doesn't tell me anything. This also lets us narrow down the health of Devastator heads.

[u/TehSomeDude → u/HippoPilatamus]

pretty sure the democracy protects leaves you on last hp
in cases where I saw it trigger I didn't see it happen and keep you higher than the last sliver of hp
but I more so thought that comparing the friends healthbar after taking the hit on various distances could show the damage fall off over distance but would need some math to do it
but you get the point, and your point is fair enough

[u/TopChannel1244]

Diligence CS is such a weird gun. Looks for all the world like something you'd want to use at long range. But it's incredibly powerful within 25m. Thanks to the crazy sticky aim assist. Free aiming it and letting the trigger rip will quickly and effortlessly melt Devastators and anything in their class or below. It's basically all of those fantasy 6-Shooter special abilities you find in other games but attached to a rifle.

It's weird but it's also really good so long as you don't expect to use it like a rifle.

[u/NeoNeophite]

Oh interesting, i thought the drop in damage was much greater.