+Rending and Thunderous not acting consistently vs unyielding and maniac

[Rainman]

Issue Description:
I was testing out how +rending and thunderous interact with each other after learning that they’re essentially the same thing (which btw could stand for a clarity pass, perhaps renaming +rending into brittleness to avoid confusion, which most people are). In short, melee damage is static and doesn’t ramp vs unyielding but still applies stacks; ranged damage still ramps. The inverse happens with maniacs, where ranged damage is static yet still applies stacks, and melee damage ramps.

There also appears to be very inconsistent damage bonuses concerning brittleness stacks. It can be as low as 15%, and go up to 230% but that’s another deal.

Steps to Reproduce:
I have a thunderhammer with tier 3 thunderous, which should apply 3 stacks of brittleness each hit, to some unknown maximum (another clarification there would be nice) and a bolter with shattering impact, which applies + rending. For most armor classes (some enemy types couldn’t be tested effectively), damage increases on successive hits, up to four hits, for either weapon- except for unyielding and maniac armor types. Hitting a maniac with the hammer will behave normally, and ramp up damage, but using the bolter will always have the same damage. The inverse happens with unyielding, with the bolter increasing damage up to the fourth hit, but melee damage doesn’t change.

Specific values (weapons are comparable in stats):

vs unyielding (damage varies between monsters and ogryns, so both listed):

• Hammer without thunderous blessing: 204 (ogryn backside), 123 (beast of nurgle front body) - static

• with blessing: 224 (ogryn), 122 (beast) - static
  (found base damage discrepancy to ogryn to be the +10% vs elites on hammer w/blessing)

• Bolter without shattering impact: 446 (ogryn), 156 (beast) - static

• with: 443-526 (ogryn), 155-224 (beast) - ramping

vs maniac (damage doesn’t change vs enemy type)

• hammer without blessing: 306 - static

• with: 305-427 - ramping

• bolter without blessing: 496 - static

• with: 492 - static

Additionally, while the bolter with the blessing doesn’t ramp in damage (not unique to the bolter; the hammer does the same with unyielding), it is still in fact applying stacks of brittleness, because swapping to either hammer (after four hits from the bolter) deals 427 with vs 428 without blessing. Same thing, inversely, happens for unyielding, where melee hits can apply stacks but don’t increase damage, but ranged damage still increases from the melee hits applying the brittle debuff.

Mission Name (If Applicable):
psykhanium

Platform:
[Steam]

Player ID:
[SteamID Triggerhappy]

Approx. Time of Issue & Timezone:
[03/02/2023, 12:30/AM] [pst / -8gmt]

Reproduction Rate:
Constant (100%)

[CommanderJ]

Check each weapon to see if maybe one doesn’t have 100% damage to unyielding and the other 100% damage to maniac. Brittleness/rending only helps if the weapon is doing less than full damage - it will never increase damage above the weapon baseline 100%.

This is for instance why rending on Trauma is 99% worthless for the staff itself, since it has 100% damage against all but one armor type, thus only being helpful if your allies are also doing damage to the target (and their weapons have less than 100% against the armor type)

[Rainman]

I don’t think that’s the issue here. There are also no modifiers for unyielding or maniac for either weapon, at least not listed.

It’s really that damage isn’t ramping damage across the board- only to the specific weapon that’s applying the debuff, and all other damage is static/unchanging from its base value.

It appears that it’s being treated as rending and not brittleness, even though the stacks from one carry over to the other. It might be a bug between their “+rending” and “+brittle” being the same but different.

Hitting a crusher, for instance, with the hammer makes it so an autogun does damage to it during the duration of the debuff. It won’t do that for maniacs or unyielding, but the hammer will increase its own damage to maniacs as if it were stacking rending, like the bolter will stack its own damage as if it were rending on unyielding. I don’t have any other weapons with +rending or brittle to test out, but this is definitely odd behavior.

[Guendolin]

Rending end brittleness remove armor mods from an attack. The benefit of brittleness and rending is dependent on the armor mod of the attack.

So if an attack had 50% armor mod normaly (remove 50% of base damage) and the enemy have total 40% brittleness (max brittleness is 40%) that means that we remove 40% of the armor mod applied. That results in an end armor mod of 70%. (40% of 50% is 20%, 50% +20% = 70%.

If we instead hava a base armor mod of 80% and 40% brittleness we get a new armor mod of 88%. (40% of 20% is 8%, 80%+8% = 88%)

If we had an original armor mod of 0% (you make 0 damage) and brittleness of 40% you would get a new armor mod of 40% (40% out of 100% is 40%, 0% + 40% = 40%)

In this way different weapons (or even attacks on the same weapon) will benefit differently depending on the original armor mod.

Also Rending and Brittleness stacks ontop of eachother, even above brittleness limit of 40%. So if you have 40% brittleness on an enemy and you havea buff that gives 20% rending, the final overall rending/brittleness value is 60%.

I agree that we don’t explain this properly in game. New text for “+Rending” is on its way.

Hope that helps explaining things.
/Guen