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Hello everyone!

Welcome to a new entry in our Outriders Developer Insights blog. These posts specifically focus on a specific aspect of Outriders and are intended to be a go-to resource for players with questions around the respective topic.

As mentioned a little while ago, we wanted to provide the community with a clearer view on some of the game’s mechanics that influence the damage taken by the player character.

This Developer Insights post includes a look at the core mechanics that interact with incoming damage, but it also goes into systems that are intentionally hidden and working in the background.

Let’s get into it.

INDEX:

• Core Mechanics
  • Resistance
  • Armour
  • Shields
  • Nodes, Mods and Phoenix Mechanics
  • Status Effects
  • Health Regen
  • Weakness & Vulnerability
• Hidden Mechanics
  • Death and Spike Damage Prevention

RESISTANCE

• What does Resistance protect from?
  • Resistance is a mechanic that serves to protect the player character from incoming Anomaly damage.
  • In practice, this means all non-physical attacks by enemies. All enemy non-melee Abilities and Elemental Attacks are counted as Anomaly. The perfect example of such an attack are fire grenades from Shotgunners.
• What does Resistance NOT protect from?
  • Physical damage completely ignores Resistance. Therefore, all Physical attacks will bypass this stat.
• How does Resistance scale?
  • Resistance reduces the incoming Anomaly damage by the given percentage, so 30% Resistance is 30% damage reduction.
  • An in-game example: A Brood Mother uses Anomaly Eruption. It is an area denial ability that forces the character to move.
    • A hit deals 35 941 Anomaly damage on CT15.
    • If the player has 50% Resistance, they will take 17 970 damage from the hit.
    • If the player has 30% Resistance, they will take 25 158 damage from the hit.
• Does Resistance have any cap, above which it will have no further effect?
  • Resistance is capped at 85% incoming damage.

ARMOUR

• What does Armour protect from?
  • Armour is a stat that serves to protect the player character from incoming Physical damage.
  • In general, this means all melee and ranged weapon attacks in the game.
• What does Armour NOT protect from?
  • Anomaly damage completely ignores Armour. Therefore, all Anomaly attacks will bypass this stat.
• How does Armour scale?
  • Armour value is used to determine how much Physical damage should be reduced. It is compared and scales according to the Armour Reference Value during calculation.
    • Reference Value is the expected Armour Value on a certain level, WT or CT.
  • At CT15, a Brood Mother deals around 50K damage with a melee attack. If the player armour is on par with the Reference Value, they will have roughly 30% damage reduction. If the player amour is lower the damage reduction will be lower. Vice versa for higher armour and damage reduction.
• Physical Damage Reduction displayed in your stats screen shows the physical damage reduction against the highest unlocked level enemies. This means that if you progress from one Challenge Tier to the next without adjusting your Armour value, your Physical Damage Reduction may display lower.
• Does Armour have any cap, above which it will have no further effect?
  • Armour does not have an upper cap, but Physical Damage Reduction derived from Armour is capped at 85%.

SHIELD

• What does Shield protect from?
  • Both types of damage are blocked by the Shield. If the damage is Anomaly based, the damage the shield takes will be based on the Resistance stat calculation explained above. If the damage is Physical based, it will use the Armour value.
• How does Shield work?
  • The best way to describe how Shield works would be to treat it as an additional health bar, which absorbs all damage first, until it depletes – and only then damage is reduced from the actual health points.
  • Shields should behave exactly like the HP bar, except that they will deteriorate over time. It will also deteriorate faster when out of combat.
  • The max amount of Shield is equal to your max amount of HP. Increasing your HP will also help increase the max amount of available Shield.
  • Important: As Shield gains are always based on percentages, boosting your HP can have a significant impact on your shield values.
    • Note: Last weeks changes to health granted by armour should therefore also have boosted the max amount of Shields in a similar way.
• Does Shield offer any additional protection?
  • Shield prevents characters from being affected by Knockbacks and Interrupts.
  • The Trickster’s Shield has an additional 5% extra damage reduction that reduces final damage taken. This is a unique effect to this Class and no other Class benefits from it.

DAMAGE REDUCTION NODES & MODS

• Some Skill Tree Nodes and Gear Mods provide an effect that “Reduces incoming damage from [Enemy Type] by X%”. Enemy Type means a certain enemy class here, for example Elites.
• The final damage calculation step is multiplying damage through modifiers and one of them is damage reduction.
• For example, “Reduces incoming damage from Brood Mothers by 30%” will reduce final damage taken from Brood Mothers by 30%.
• “PHOENIX” MECHANICS
• These are optional mechanics that allow the player to ignore death the first time it happens. They are tied to the Pyromancer/Devastator ability tree.

STATUS EFFECTS VS. RESISTANCE, ARMOUR AND SHIELD

• Damaging Status Effects are Anomaly damage based. Therefore, they are moderated by Resistance and not by Armour.
• Damaging Status Effects deal normal damage to the Shield, moderated by Resistance.

HOW DOES HEALING AND HEALTH REGEN INTERACT WITH OTHER MECHANICS?

• The moment that a character’s HP reaches 0, that character dies.
• The chronological order of incoming damage/healing determines if the character will be able to benefit from certain protection effects before hitting 0 HP.
• If there is Healing / Shield / Regen incoming before the next damage instance, it will be taken into account. Once the HP reaches 0 (even if a burst of healing immediately follows), no healing will help the player.

EFFECTS APPLIED BY THE ENEMIES - HOW DO THEY WORK?

• Weakness:
  • Status effect which reduces the outgoing enemy damage by 33%. This effect can be applied to player characters by enemy attacks.
  • These effects are used by enemies on high World Level (above 9) and high Challenge Tiers (above 4).
• Vulnerability:
  • Status effect that increases damage taken by 15%. This effect can be applied to player characters by enemy attacks.
  • These effects are used by enemies on high World Level (above 9) and high Challenge Tiers (above 4).

OTHER SURVIVABILITY MECHANICS:

Primary Death Prevention

• This prevents players from dropping below 30% of health due to incoming damage.
• When triggered, it will block all damage for 1.2 seconds and prevent hit reactions.
• This mechanic has a 120 second cooldown.
• This mechanic will only trigger and go into cooldown when a character reaches 30% HP for the first time while the mechanic is not on cooldown.
• If an attack would take a character below 30% HP, this mechanic’s effect will only take the character to 30% HP and the remaining damage will be disregarded.

Secondary Death Prevention

• This prevents players from dropping below 10% of health due to incoming damage.
• When triggered, it will block all damage and hit reactions for 2.1 seconds.
• This mechanic has a 60 second cooldown.
• This mechanic will only trigger and go into cooldown when a character reaches 10% HP for the first time while the mechanic is not on cooldown.
• If an attack would take a character below 10% HP, this mechanic’s effect will only take the character to 10% HP and the remaining damage will be disregarded.

Spike Damage Protection

• If a single hit takes more than 65% of a player’s max HP, its value is limited to just that 65%.
  • This Spike Protection value increases on high World Levels and Challenge Tiers.
  • It is 65% till Challenge Tier 9 and then scales to 84,5% by Challenge Tier 15.
  • This means that enemies on higher tiers will be able to deal a higher MAX damage per individual hit to players before a Spike Damage protection applies. Don’t forget that the initial damage output of enemies also scales up with each Tier that you progress through.
  • This is intentional as higher tiers are designed to challenge players to:
    • Assemble a complete build that includes adequate protection from damage spikes through Resistance, Armour or both.
    • Master enemy behaviour and attack patterns in order to better dodge their abilities and mitigate damage from them.
• Spike Damage Protection has no cool down, so it counts for every hit. HOWEVER, certain boss attacks can be very deadly regardless of this additional protection mechanic and should therefore be avoided or dodged whenever possible.
  • In-game examples:
    • The Chrysaloid’s breath attacks deal multiple hits per swipe.
    • The Brood Mother’s Anomaly Surge deals damage in quick succession.

These final three mechanics are intentionally hidden in Outriders. As with many other such secret mechanics in games, the original vision behind the designs is for them to subtly help the player while also ensuring that players do not become reliant on these mechanics when playing the game. Making them too obvious would lead to an over-reliance on these features and an under-reliance on the game’s focal survivability mechanics: Resistance, Armour, Shields, Health Regen, Skill Tree Nodes, Gear Mods, CC Abilities and, especially at higher difficulties: learning and understanding enemy spawn waves, behaviours and abilities.

Rather, these mechanics were envisioned as subtle ways of preventing players from feeling like they are unfairly killed while also giving those players a feeling of “almost, but not quite being killed” in extremely dangerous close call battles.

Of course, these mechanics need to be balanced in a certain way: Trigger them too generously and players end up being effectively immortal. Trigger them not often enough and the overall design may feel unfair.

Given our previous issues around damage mitigation, however, we felt the need to talk about these mechanics more openly, as everyone having a better understanding of them may help explain why some enemies may appear to deal inconsistent damage (e.g. individual attacks appearing to deal more/less damage while the Death Preventions are either active or on cooldown).

We feel that a clearer look on the effects of all of the discussed mechanics so far may help to differentiate any issues caused by damage mitigation bugs from the intended difficulty of the game or interactions of effects on the certain builds.

We hope that you enjoyed this first peek under the hood of the Outriders systems – we’ll be back soon with another one.

The Outriders Team

Other Helpful links:

• Outriders Status Page: http://status.outriders.net/
• Square Enix support team: sqex.to/support
• Outriders Discord: Discord.gg/Outriders
• Outriders Known Issues Tracker Thread
• Outriders Reddit Mega Threads Collection
• Outriders FAQ Reddit Thread
• Outriders General FAQ
• Outriders Demo

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