The ‘Shooter’ type enemies (and the ‘Non-Shooter’ type Marauders) holding up their arms in front of their bodies when aiming their weapons acts like a shield, effectively reducing the damage that they take from shots to center mass, since arms take drastically reduced damage from most ranged weapons. This creates wildly inconsistant performance of the players weapons and reduces the reliability of killing enemies. This only serves to frustrate the player as shots that should kill certain enemies sometimes simply don’t.
This is especially noticable on weapons like the Stub Revolver that normally can and will kill multiple Shooters with a single shot, but sometimes it just doesn’t, because the bullet hit the Shooter’s arm first (dealing reduced damage), before passing through his torso (dealing no damage).
Now, this problem can be fixed quite easily; simply make arms the same damage zones as bodies for ranged weapons. There really isn’t any reason that they shouldn’t be in a game like this. In fact, this change has already been implimented for the Plasma Gun (which was already able to deal with this issue better than the Revolver), so why not for any of the other guns?
Edit: I forgot to mention that this is already how melee weapons work, so this change will simply be bringing ranged weapon function in line with melee weapon function.
I experienced the same thing with the Boltgun. The guy in front survives while the shell goes through him and kills the guy behind. Makes no sense to me.
technically the plasma gun just outright ignores damage modifiers now, but I do agree that ranged weapons need a look-over so penetration actually inflicts more damage. If it goes through the arm entirely to hit the chest on the way through it should deal multiple hits worth of damage tbh.
I’d rather arms acted as the first instance of mass, so weapons with low cleave like an autopistol would be more affected than something like a helbore or bolter (which is a change they already did with the plasrifle, but for whatever reason didn’t change for other weapons).
Gotta agree arm hitboxes in general feel pretty anti fun to me, and do indeed disproportionately cuck weapons like revolver that want to make every shot count.
In a more sensible world arm hitboxes would at least be a much more minor damage reduction like 5-10% so they might narrowly make you miss breakpoints (could be avoided by slightly over stacking damage) rather than guaranteed to screw your breakpoints, or even better it would count a shot that penetrates the arm then hits the body as a body shot.
As it is this mechanic rarely does anything other than detract from game feel. I hope they scrap it.
I thought it was super interesting that shooters actively shield their heads with their arms when being shot at, but the problem is that they don’t treat this as a form of suppression—given that suppression itself doesn’t consistently work right now.
Seeing reactive behavior like that makes it a lot more interesting to deal with threats, but you are right. This is a horde shooter game and inconsistent damage makes horde shooters a lot more frustrating to play (see: Back 4 Blood).
Yeah this feels pretty gratuitous. But I will contend that 0.5 flak mods make a lot of weapons feel worse for shooters considering the number of shooters with flak.
Arm hitboxes are fine if the enemy is shot while they’re standing directly in front of the player with their arms out to their side. If the arm is in the way of the chest or head, nearly every shot type should penetrate the arm and nail the hitzone behind it.
Again, this is pretty damn standard in most modern shooters. Darktide is a weird ass exception.
Not that realism is necessarily the best defense, but I think we should also keep in mind that virtually any rifle round will penetrate a human hand like it’s not even there.
I’m not a 40K lore guy by any means, but please explain how a Boltgun round is stopped by an unarmoured guy’s forearm. I’m waiting.
Ideally, that’s how we’d want it to work, but I think more realistically to what we can expect is that they simply remove the arm damage reduction, which fixes all the associated problems.
Well, your typical Boltgun fires mass-reactive shells that detonates a split-second after impact. The idea is to penetrate the target and explode inside.
It’s possible that the projectile goes through the arm and explode beyond it. In fact, it’s designed to work that way when fired point blank to prevent users from blowing themselves apart.
As for an arm protecting you from the bolt, I don’t think that’s possible.
While not instantly Lethal wielding weapons becomes nearly impossible - thus you‘re nevertheless instantly out of combat.
And especially hits in the upper arm have a high chance to inflict lethal bleeding.
While we are facing crazy nurgle cultists they still aren’t daemons and their bodies still have to work for them to fight. And we are using mostly pretty destructive stuff. Our autoguns are of higher calibre then contemporary assault rifles, lasguns are known to regularly cut off limbs - and bolters and plasma guns offer a level of firepower we nowerdays expect from vehicle mounted weapons…
Long Story Short - using the same damage modifier for arms as for chest would be way more plausible then the current system.