One thing that I’ve noticed is that headshots against carapace armor don’t deal damage (technically they do 1-2 damage, but whatever) if the base attack wouldn’t have dealt damage.
This has a few odd implications, none of which are particularly obvious in-game:
- if you’re shooting maulers with most ranged weapons, you should always go for body shots. Maulers have flak-armored bodies and carapace-armored heads. I see people go for heads on maulers all the time with lasguns, and it does tickle damage.
- you shouldn’t shoot crushers at all with most ranged weapons. I also see people go for their heads all the time with lasguns, and it also does tickle damage.
- the thunder hammer’s first two light attacks are absolutely horrible against maulers because they do vertical chops, so you literally can’t avoid hitting their heads. This is mostly fine and only a QoL problem because the thunder hammer has other options, but there’s no feedback at all that this is happening unless you test it in the meat grinder, since the attacks still stagger the maulers, they just deal no damage. (The thunder hammer also has the exact same moveset as the greathammer in VT2, which does deal damage to super-armored enemy heads perfectly fine, which only adds to the confusion.)
I think that headshots on carapace should either always do damage, or there needs to be some kind of visual indicator, like VT2 had, that your attack is doing basically zero damage.