Since the newest update, the voidstrike staff can no longer reliably reach the breakpoint for 1-shotting dreg gunners unless you fulfill certain skill/perk conditions. This feels unintentional, since the voidstrike’s purpose has always primarily been chaff killing.
Staff used in all examples (80% damage, no perks affecting gunners):
Eg3.: To reliably kill with “Warp Siphon” keystone, while making full use of the cross-spec’d Warp Rider buff, you require at least 2 warp charges, increasing to 3 with low peril.
All examples have been made with the damage boost of Kinetic Presence further up the skill tree.
Eg3. has also been attempted without using Kinetic Presence, this bumps up the required warp charges to +1 in both scenarios (high peril vs low peril).
Dreg Gunner is an elite enemy, with more HP than every specialist except the mutant…this is obviously intended, voidstrike is still completely overpowered anyway.
It’s also some pretty asanine design when a unit (dreg gunners) is of a lighter armour type than it’s contemporary (scab gunners) and is given a significantly larger health pool to compensate. It’s an awful feeling way to balance against armour piercing weapons because enemies that are effectively naked survive hits that would core something like a crusher.
Yes but he is unarmored, unlike many specialists.
If they have trouble to balance voidstrike, then they should just revert it to pre-#13 and balance things from there, because it was conceptually much more reasonable before. Strong vs unarmored, weak vs Armor (+ Maniac). Now it’s strengths and weaknesses feel all over the place, with the +flak damage perk I now one-shot all Scab and infested commons with partial charges, but even normal unarmored fodder gets back up if I don’t do a perfect 100% charge.
Because it cleaves enemies, the single target focused weapon is the surge. In spite of this the Voidstrike remains absurdly strong. Also as a general design for the game the enemies with resistances have lower HP, because they have resistances to a lot of attacks. The dreg gunner doesn’t have anything near as gravy as blocking a third to half of incoming damage to certain weapon types like his scab equivalent does.
