Numbers are way too small/obfuscated to feel significant

Hi, working my way up the Psyker and Veteran ranks here, and I’m wondering exactly what matters in terms of gameplay? Things are explained in bars and symbols, and the few things that aren’t are described with single-digit percentages. Actually bothering to go into the Meat Grinder feels like it doesn’t really elucidate the problems with bars, and honestly feels like it creates more questions than it answers.

Feats so far have given extremely marginal bonuses. A psyker feat that stacks 7dps for some number of seconds on enemies that have 150+ HP if you pop an elite next to them? A feat that adds 15% force weapon damage when at high peril, so I can increase my weapon damage from 54 to 59, maybe eventually leading to situations where it takes 2 swings instead of 3 to kill one weak dude?

Meanwhile, my starting heavy lasgun is dropping guys faster than my 201 autopistol with way better bars. Unloading a clip-and-a-half into an elite to kill it, vs less than a clip with the heavy las, is a pretty significant difference. I guess the autopistol can stagger a crowd faster, but with the reload time being what it is, it’s kind of moot when I have to melee the crowd anyways.

It’s hard to quantify what 15% is, and it’s going to be dependent on the scale of numbers you’re using. Is 15% DPS boost good against a horde of enemies? Is it good against something with 100 HP? Is it good against something with 1000 HP? How far do you have to scale the numbers up before 15% goes from one fewer hit, to multiple fewer hits, to dozens of fewer hits?

Meanwhile, what’s the use of armor penetration and heavy attacks? A 183 Dueling Sword, and a 200 MkV Combat Axe with lower penetration get into a fight with an armored cultist. The axe does 150 per hit, and only 190 when heavy swinging. The sword hits for 18 normally, 84 heavy. Against an unarmored target, the axe still only does 155 normal and 203 heavy, while the sword does 40 normal, 94 heavy. Given how much slower it is to swing a heavy strike, is the only true purpose of it to get weapons to pierce better? And if that’s the case, why is my high penetration sword worse at penetrating than my axe unless I heavy strike? Hell, the axe against carapace does full damage still, while the sword does reduced!

I even managed to compare two different axes, and the one with a bigger “damage” bar had less damage per hit and roughly equal DPS. Is it because the rarity was lower? Is it because it doesn’t count critical rate (which for some reason was larger on the less-damaging axe?) And, to make things worse, it’s impossible to actually test weapons properly in Meat Grinder because if you kill a guy in two swings with two different axes, even if one axe does 200 damage per swing and one does 150 per swing, as long as they only have 300 HP it’ll still list the DPS as the exact same for both weapons.

I think a lot of sentiment I’ve been seeing on the forums has been “why is everything so obfuscated” and “why does everything feel like it sucks when I’m playing the way I’m intended in order to make it work?” A lot of it goes to how the numbers feel, and the numbers just feel bad. Enemies generally don’t have enough HP to make small percentiles feel good, and weapon upgrades feel hardly more useful than just using whatever craps out damage the most efficiently. We aren’t MOBA characters who can scale hundreds-to-thousands of HP and small percentiles become huge differences. We need more than “15% if a lot of arbitrary conditions are met,” and we need a bit more explanation than “you get a bleed stack! You get a soulblaze stack! You get extra stagger percentage!” These don’t mean anything, and when I test them, sometimes they really just don’t mean anything, or at least nothing substantial.

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