APR Stealth Nerf? Or Bug. Interaction with Haze Fixation Stacks

[brandon.mecg]

With the introduction of the shop rework on 5/8 came the vitality item Plated Armor (PA) with the following stats:

• Item Description: Gain a chance to either deflect incoming bullets, preventing all weapon damage or prevent all on-hit effects from bullets.
• 30% Deflection Chance
• 60% On-Hit Prevention Chance

The 30% deflection chance was tough but commensurate to the item cost and what other heros would have to give up in terms of itemization to properly deal with M1 heros. The 60% on-hit prevention was a bit over tuned but brought down to a more manageable 50%, however for Haze, it's absolutely game breaking for her to play against with no viable counter play due to the majority of her damage coming from fixation stacks.

A thing to note before I continue: Assuming T3 Fixation, Haze's base gun damage is only (roughly) 20% of her actual potential damage output.

Just buy Armor Piercing Rounds (APR)

This is where the potential bug comes into play.

From 5/8 to the 5/19 update, APR had no effect against the on-hit prevention portion of PA. This caused APR to be a dead buy for Haze as it's cost ineffective to spend 6200 souls on only a 19.5% damage increase. 19.5% sounds like a lot, but remember our note from before that Haze's base gun damage is only 20% of her actual potential damage output, so spending 6200 to increase her initial base damage made zero sense (and I'm not even factoring in resists into this either which only compounds the problem).

During this period, stacking fire rate to brute force the on-hit prevention didn't work either.

Here is a sample of 5 runs on how long it takes to get to 80 fixation stacks with a mag of 142



Notes from these tests

• Stationary target with PA
• No resists
• Assumed 20% HS% (roughly an Eternus 6 rate)
• 108% effective fire rate
• Itemization (33.6k item value)
  • Active Reload (not proc'd), Swift Striker, QSR (proc'd), burst fire (proc'd), APR, Titanic Mag, Bullet Vest, Escalating Rescilience, Boundless Spirit, Rico

Not a typical Haze build. I wanted enough ammo (142) to reach 80 fix stacks in one go to showcase that even in the most ideal scenario on a stationary target with an impossibly unrealistic amount of ammo, it takes roughly 8 seconds to reach full fixation stacks. You can easily double, even triple these timings in actual game scenarios as you're constantly switching targets, other heros can use debuff remover to cleanse the fix stacks, enemy heros can move, HS% fluctuates, and not to mention typical engagement lengths (most aren't 24s+).

Now, you rarely need 80 fixation stacks to put out serious damage against other carry characters, but when it comes to even trying to do any damage to frontliners like Abrams, Yamato, etc. with the above considerations, Haze was essentially bricked.

During this period, if an enemy hero bought PA I could literally do or buy nothing to even try to deal with it and my game play consisted of ignoring that character. Doing roughly only 20-40% of your potential damage throughout the entirety of a fight because of a single item? Oppressive. One item essentially made the game a 5v6 with no ability to counter play with no counter itemization option (not the game design philosophy Deadlock has in mind I hope).

The 5/19 Update
When the 5/19 update rolled around and APRs proc chance was reduced to 60% while PAs On-hit Reduction was nerfed to 50% I decided to go through another round of testing.



Notes from these tests:

1. Mag Round of 25
2. 50 trials totaling 1250 total rounds shot
3. (Ignore the 'wAPR 44.9%' of the above picture, that was regarding a mag size to 80 stacks test and not related to fix proc rate)

What wasn't listed within the patch notes and I assumed was a bug fix was that the 60% proc chance on APR finally proc'd against the 50% on-hit prevention. Buying APR against PA, I'd expect around a 70% proc rate on my fixation stacks (.6 * .5 = .3) and testing corroborated that. This made sense to me as the item description was "Gain a chance to either deflect incoming bullets, preventing all weapon damage OR prevent all on-hit effects from bullets."

The "or" being the keyword here. It never made sense to me before the 5/19 update why APR worked against the bullet deflection part of the item but never the on-hit prevention.

Finally for Haze, there was the possibility of counter itemization. I could deal decent damage to PA buyers while PA buyers were still happy as it did still significantly reduced m1 damage. Haze wasn't totally bricked and could still function as as hero and the only thing I could blame for not outputting damage on all PA buyers was myself. Balanced, as all things should be.

Sometime in the last Week

Anecdotally, I noticed I wasn't doing the same amount of damage to PA buyers. I didn't see anything in the patch notes so I ran through another round of tests:



Notes from these tests:

• Last entry in the above table are the sums

It seems as though there was a stealth nerf to APR not listed in any of the patch notes and the 60% proc chance of APR no longer works against the 50% on-hit prevention of PA. Haze no longer gets the roughly 70% expected fixation stack proc rate when buying APR. I am not sure if this was intended or it's a bug, but either way, we're back to the pre-5/19 game play where Haze is essentially bricked with no counter play or counter itemization options against PA buyers.

If there are any questions please feel free to ask but I believe I've laid out everything.

 

[winniesnyz]

Yoshi please fix