I agree on almost everything you said.
I think that there is a different problem with + weakspot damage and + crit damage, than just their low values.
Both these stats work in an unintuirive way that makes them not only hard to understand, but also almost completely worthless with the numbers they currently have.
But even if their numbers were inflated, the effect of these bonuses would still be highly weapon dependent, because of the way they are calculated.
If you get a bonus of +10% to crit damage, or to headshot damage, you would expect to deal 10% more damage on a crit/headshot, than without that 10% bonus.
But this is not how these bonuses work.
They increase only the additional damage that you dealt because it was a crit or a headshot by 10%.
Click here to see detailed explanation and calculations that show how it works
I will explain with the example of headshot damage (crit damage works identically).
Let’s say
- you do 100 dmg on a regular hit
- you do 150 dmg on a headshot (100 base dmg +50 headshot bonus)
Because you dealt a headshot, you dealt not only the 100 base damage, but additional 50 headshot damage. A % bonus to headshot damage will only increase the “additional x headshot damage” of an attack.
This means that the + 10% headshot dmg
- will not grant you (100% +10%) x 150 → 15 extra damage
- will not grant you 50% +10% = 60% headshot bonus → 10 extra damage
- will grant you (100% +10%) x 50 → 5 extra damage (+3.3% damage on headshots).
Not only does this mean that the real damage increase from this stat is always much smaller than expected, but this also means that the bonus damage is potentially different against every enemy health type, since the damage bonuses that different weapons get from crits and headshots, can vary between all of the enemy health types.
Crit damage bonuses and headshot damage bonuses should be changed to increase the entire damage of the hit by that %.
This would make the effects easier to understand as well as theoretically being useful for any type of weapon, not only for those with already massive crit dmg and headshot dmg multipliers.
As it is right now, a weapon (mk XII infantry lasgun) that deals ~2x damage on headshots, would only gain 5% dmg output on headshots from this 10% bonus.
A weapon (shredder auto pistol) with ~1.1x damage on headshots, would only gain +0.9% dmg output on headshots from this 10% bonus.
Click here to see the proof that this is how it works
Mk XII infantry lasgun on zealot (no feats or passives that affect ranged damage, elite dmg, weakspot dmg, or anything like that).
Weapon info displays dmg vs unyielding: 276 dmg on bodyshot and 442 dmg on headshot → 1.6x dmg on headshot.
This is the weakspot dmg against a reaper from 3 meters without 10% weakspot dmg perk.
443 headshot dmg according to meatgrinder.
442 headshot dmg according to stats board.
Rounding error.
Since the headshot dmg multiplier is 1.6 according to the ingame weapon damage stats, we would expect the following numbers for headshot damage with +10% headshot dmg perk:
If it increased the overall dmg of the headshot by 10%, we would expect:
276 x 1.6 x 1.1 = 487 dmg
If it increases only the damage that was dealt due to the hit being a headshot, we would expect:
276 x (1 + 0.6 x 1.1) = 458±1 dmg (an effective increase of 3.6%)
Here is the same test as above, but with 10% weakspot dmg perk.
As you can see, the 10% only applies to the additional damage that was dealt due to the hit being a headshot, which means that the 10% bonus dmg is actually only 3.6% bonus dmg.
