Why do talents such as Deathknell increase the headshot damage bonus of a weapon instead of just increasing the total damage dealt on headshot? Scaling off of the headshot damage bonus specifically makes them favour certain weapons, and makes others have little to no synergy at all with them. On top of that, it’s confusing for new players, who often think the 50% in Deathknell is much more damage than it really is. Why not just something like increases total damage dealt on headshot by 30%? That would scale more appropriately for more weapons, and would just involve the more accessible damage a weapon does rather than its finesse values.
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I think it is designed to prevent stacking too many bonuses that would be multiplicative.
The way they are now prevents them from going over the top and keeps them in check.
I agree it is absolutely not intuitive though, and there should be some more explaining in-game.
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I’m not following. Can you give me a mathematical example of this? The headshot talents at reduced values, like 30% increased damage on headshot, shouldn’t push anything too far and be equivalent to the damage finesse weapons have with them now, while being a bit better for non-finesse weapons. I’m not great at math or knowledgeable on how the game calculates damage (I just used the Damage Calculator to get the value of 30%), so any explanations are greatly appreciated.
This is purely theoretical and is designed to be explanatory :
Say 10 damage composed of 6 base + 2 crit + 2 headshot
Imagine now applying 100% extra crit damage and 100% extra headshot damage (or double crit damage and double headshot damage).
With the game’s current way of separating bonuses :
6 + (2x2) + (2x2) = 14 damage
Without splitting, additive stacking (meaning you add up everything that applies, and then compute the result, so here +100% + +100% = +200%) :
10 + 2x10 = 30 damage
Without splitting, multiplicative stacking (meaning you apply each bonus as they come) :
10 x 2 x 2 = 40 damage.
The idea behind the design is to stop the stacking of bonuses from becoming a big numbers factory. It become even worse the more bonuses you have - linearly with additive stacking, and exponentially with multiplicative (if str pots doubled damage in this scenario too, the crit headshot would deal 40 damage with additive stacking, 80 with multiplicative ; and so on with HS ult (50/160) etc.).
The numbers in game are lower than that, but the idea remains the same.
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