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Hunters,
In our Harvest of Ghosts update we introduced some changes to wall penetration of weapons and have seen some player feedback asking for greater insight into the changes. So today we’re hoping to share some more details and hopefully bring more clarity on the adjustments we added.
When we first introduced bullet penetration to the game, we identified an issue that caused the first layer of wall penetration to be ignored in damage calculations. This resulted in shots being more effective through walls than we originally designed, and as an added side effect, long ammo was especially more potent at downing players through walls than other ammo types.
Fixing this bug that damage was never reduced on the first successful wall penetration required more resources than we could spare at that time as it took some refactoring of our projectile system.
Weapon Tuning with Scorched Earth
With our August Release, one of the complaints we wanted to begin addressing is the long ammo meta that is dominant in the game:
- We added ballistics to the game that gave Compact and Medium bullets a slight edge in drop curves while also ensuring long ammo is still effective at range.
- We adjusted the minimum damage of bullet impacts over distance. Compact ammo has benefited the most from these distance changes through a flat trajectory and enforcing a 25-damage minimum for an upper torso hit even at long distance. This also increased successful wall penetrations at distance where the bullets would have failed to penetrate before.
- We re-tuned headshots to be always lethal at any distance regardless of projectile type.
- We reduced the damage of the Uppercut and the Haymaker, reserving the 125+ damage threshold for only the Sparks pistol and other larger weapons.
These changes have greatly increased the diversity of loadouts we see in the game. While making these other changes, we were finally able to dedicate the resources to fixing the bug causing bullets to ignore the first wall penetration. We deployed this fix with Harvest of Ghosts, as highlighted in the patch notes.
The primary focus in making these fixes in Harvest of Ghosts was to ensure the first wall penetration was counted in damage calculation. Now that we have confirmed the system is using first wall penetration with our bullet refactor, we will deploy additional tuning in the next major update to address some of the shortcomings we have identified.
Specifically, recent damage adjustments lead to some weapons no longer being able to penetrate materials, like weaker long ammo weapons being unable to penetrate metal sheets or doing too low of damage when penetrating multiple walls.
It is also important to understand that any penetration through metal and other hard surface types counts as four penetration steps, and consequently a much lower multiplier is used for the damage calculation as we want metal to be more reliable as hard cover even for bullets designed to excel at punching through obstacles.
More Bullet Penetration Adjustments Coming
With the tuning coming after Harvest of Ghosts, all long ammo bullets will again be able to penetrate one layer of sheet metal with more damage being retained after each successful penetration. FMJ can penetrate multiple, thin layers of metal as usual, and Spitzer can penetrate through multiple enemies again. Similar issues around Slugs will also be corrected, where too much damage was lost when penetrating any material.
The first successful wall penetration of any weapon will still result in overall reduced damage, however, as the first pen will now be taken into account properly. The damage reduction for a single penetration is not meant to be a lot as you can see from our chart below, usually 10-20% depending on type, but it does have an impact now, where every shot was retaining 100% damage in the past.
It’s important to understand that the system applies the multiplier for the respective penetration step and does not add one after the other for successive penetrations. Hitting a Hunter with a long ammo weapon through three thin walls would consequently reduce the damage to 40%.
When it comes to Nitro, it has more pens than other weapons, so the values look like this:
We hope this clears up the confusion and gives you more context for the intent behind the design. Correcting this legacy bug is just one more tool we can use for our weapon balance moving forward instead of having to try to balance around technical limitations.
Thanks!
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