Kelvin doesn't have a head hitbox from behind at some specific angles

He still has a head hitbox. The reason you are not hitting his head from those angles is that your bullets can't just infinitely penetrate other elements of the hitbox for headshots to register. The limit is just one as far as I'm aware. You are mostly hitting the mesh for his totem (white) and the chest mesh (green) before your bullet can connect to the head (red) from those odd angles where the headshots don't register:

kelv.jpg



If you hit his head just through the totem or just through the chest, you can headshot him just fine:

heads.png



It works the same for other characters. Paradox through the tank for example vs through the tank and the shoulder:

paradox.jpg


If you think this system is questionable, just imagine some of the things that would happen if it wasn't in place and bullets potentially traveling through the head hitbox at any point would always register as headshots:
  • Shooting Vindicta from the ground while she is in the air above you would headshot her trough her legs
  • Shooting a Seven who is slightly above you would headshot him from practically any angle due to his head size
  • Chasing someone who is climbing up a rope and shooting at their little tippy toes from below would headshot them
  • Shooting Mo&Krill in the butt would headshot them
 
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Gotcha, those cases kind of make sense. I will say, though, this is a balance issue for warden- I ended up experimenting with this because I had managed to trap a kelvin with my 3 in game, but he was faced away from me- so I couldn't shoot him in the head at the angle I was at. Maybe a slight tweak on kelvin's model would be in order?
 
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Gotcha, those cases kind of make sense. I will say, though, this is a balance issue for warden- I ended up experimenting with this because I had managed to trap a kelvin with my 3 in game, but he was faced away from me- so I couldn't shoot him in the head at the angle I was at. Maybe a slight tweak on kelvin's model would be in order?
The whole point of having varied shapes of characters and having corresponding hitboxes is that some of them are easier to hit (or land a headshot on) than others, and it will inevitably translate to whatever advantage they have in performance and will be accounted for in balance.

Why not allow the guy with a huge thing on his back and overall one of the very large and boxy hitboxes have the slight advantage of being hard/impossible to headshot from behind?
 
I mean in the end, it's a choice the player makes. Kelvin gives up being able to shoot back. I'd see this more like someone turning around when they're about to be flashbanged in Counter-Strike. Especially for Kelvin, who'd only eat between 36% and 60% of your headshots by pulling out Arctic Beam.

The more elegant tweak might be to just give Kelvin a higher headshot multiplier, similar to how Seven currently has a lower headshot multipler due to how easy it is to hit when he isn't actively staring at the floor.

I personally see things like this as a form of intentional dynamism. While I doubt anyone foresaw the exact scenario here, whoever decided that Kelvin carries around that massive totem all the time was certainly aware it would somewhat protect or at least obscure his head from the back. There's a bunch of little diverse quirks like that with characters that people will eventually figure out and keep in mind. (Seven animation while staring at the floor, Lady Geist peeking with her entire head due to being left-handed, Dynamo having his gyrostatically stable chicken-head that's just way easier to hit during movement than anyone else's, etc.)
 
Fair enough. As a warden player I'd like to see it changed but even in the same game I was dealing with it by strafing ahead of him where I could when I had him trapped.
 
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