Monster rounds does more than double damage to lane guardians

[sickboy]

headshots vs body shots doesn't matter. tested wraith and bebop. buying only monster rounds does more than double damage to single lane guardians.
damage seems to be the expected 35% (and 9%) increase on walkers/double guardians/shrines/patron

 

[Theos]

You're right. Makes no sense that a 35% damage increase makes each bullet go from 3/4 damage to 7/8. Oh wow, thats why playing with Monster Rounds always felt so good, it melts everything.

Does this happen with troopers as well?

 

[sickboy]

You're right. Makes no sense that a 35% damage increase makes each bullet go from 3/4 damage to 7/8. Oh wow, thats why playing with Monster Rounds always felt so good, it melts everything.

Does this happen with troopers as well?

nope, seems to only be bugged for lane guardians specifically

 

[Time-Girl™]

For some reason it's more accurate without headshots, but still does too much damage. It's 29 vs 46 on a four round burst with Wraith at max level, whereas it should mathematically be ~41.5 (29*1.06*1.35) for the latter number.

 

[sickboy]

again, headshots or not doesn't matter here. the clips I posted initially were just headshots because that's where I'm going to shoot normally anyway, and it doesn't change anything.
and I'm doing full mag dumps so random crits can't swing the data as much

here's Bebop doing body shots 122 vs 266. changed teams and did it again with the exact same numbers.
View attachment Deadlock 2024-09-23 01-30-41.mp4

 

[stuart.b.personal]

Monster rounds is Broken: Confirmed

 

[Time-Girl™]

Pretty sure I figured this out.
The counterintuitive thing here is how Guardian armor works. It's not mere Bullet Resist, it's more akin to how armor tends to work in video games.

Examples:

• Warden with 100dbp (damage per bullet) does ~87 to a Guardian, but Warden with ~20dbp does ~7 to a Guardian, flat decrease of ~13.
• Bebop with ~5.3 per bullet hits a Guardian for ~1.85, but Bebop ~22.2dbp hits a Guardian for ~18.75, flat decrease of ~3.45.
• Grey Talon ~23dbp, hits Guardian for ~8, but Grey Talon with ~46dbp hits a Guardian for ~31, flat decrease of ~15.

Mathematically this is equivalent to taking ~65% (or possibly 2/3, the game doesn't give you super accurate numbers in the UI) of your starting damage and always subtracting that, no matter how high your damage grows. This obviously means that larger damage > less relative reduction.

So the reason the damage seems odd is because it adds the 35% from Monster Rounds to your initial damage and then subtracts the flat armor. So for example for Grey Talon you end up with 23*1.35=31.05, remove 15 from that, you end up with 16 rather than the 8 from the example above. That's also the reason why in my example with Wraith at max level, the relative increase is far smaller, due to the flat armor having way less impact at the larger damage numbers.

In your example showing the level 1 Bebop with Monster Rounds your damage per bullet is 5.62. Add 35% from Monster Rounds, remove the flat ~3.45 and multiply by 66 bullets: (5.62*1.35-3.45)*66=273, which—barring minor inaccuracies from me being too lazy to use infinitely long decimals—is essentially the damage you did.


So I guess it isn't buggy behaviour, just obscure mechanics we didn't know about.

 

[sickboy]

Pretty sure I figured this out.
The counterintuitive thing here is how Guardian Armor works. It's not mere Bullet Resist, it's more akin to how armor tends to work in video games.

Examples:

• Warden with 100dbp (damage per bullet) does ~87 to a Guardian, but Warden with ~20dbp does ~7 to a Guardian, flat decrease of ~13.
• Bebop with ~5.3 per bullet hits a Guardian for ~1.85, but Bebop ~22.2dbp hits a Guardian for ~18.75, flat decrease of ~3.45.
• Grey Talon ~23dbp, hits Guardian for ~8, but Grey Talon with ~46dbp hits a Guardian for ~31, flat decrease of ~15.

Mathematically this is equivalent to taking ~65% (or possibly 2/3, the game doesn't give you super accurate numbers in the UI) of your starting damage and always subtracting that, no mater how high your damage grows. This obviously means that larger damage > less relative reduction.

So the reason the damage seems odd is because it adds the 35% from Monster Rounds to your initial damage and then subtracts the flat armor. So for example for Grey Talon you end up with 23*1.35=31.05, remove 15 from that, you end up with 16. That's also the reason why in my example with Wraith at max level, the relative increase is far smaller, due to the flat armor having way less impact at the larger damage numbers.

In your example showing the level 1 Bebop with Monster Rounds your damage per bullet is 5.62. Add 35% from Monster Rounds, remove the flat ~3.45 and multiply by 66 bullets: (5.62*1.35-3.45)*66=273, which—barring minor inaccuracies from me being too lazy to use infinitely long decimals—is essentially the damage you did.


So I guess it isn't buggy behaviour, just obscure mechanics we didn't know about.

I hit max level before testing, so that theory's not exactly on the money either. I'm just not buying any weapon damage upgrades other than monster rounds to not pollute the data.

I did try it with rapid rounds on it only increased as much per magazine as you'd expect it to (the nearly double monster rounds, and another 9%)

 

[Time-Girl™]

I hit max level before testing, so that theory's not exactly on the money either.

You are definitely at starting level. Your video shows "400 Souls to next" under the health bar, which is the amount of Souls required for the first few level ups, and even your HP is the 650 starting HP.
There's no correlation between upgrading Skills and getting Power Increases, the latter just come from level ups. Max level Bebop does 393 damage to a Guardian without any items:

View attachment mlbebop.mp4

 

[sickboy]

You are definitely at starting level. Your video shows "400 Souls to next" under the health bar, which is the amount of Souls required for the first few level ups, and even your HP is the 650 starting HP.
There's no correlation between upgrading Skills and getting Power Increases, the latter just come from level ups. Max level Bebop does 393 damage to a Guardian without any items:

View attachment 19845

I'm not talking about any individual clip. I have tested it all at level 1 and at max level and it's giving me these results with both of them.
You're focusing on minutiae and not that monster rounds is broken on lane guardians.

Just tested it again on Wraith and it's still doing way more than 35% increased damage. I can concede that I forgot to press max level multiple times after doing "all perks" (which resets your level for some reason) but it's still doing too much damage to the guardian.

 

[Time-Girl™]

Just tested it again on Wraith and it's still doing way more than 35% increased damage.

Yes, but the reason is not that Monster Rounds isn't working correctly. It works exactly the same with any other source of damage increase.
Monster Rounds essentially gives you 41% damage against Guardians, 35% from the damage against NPCs and 6% because it's a Tier1 Weapon Item. Instead of Monster Rounds we could just buy Leech and Slowing Bullets and end up at the same 41%. They both lead to Wraith dealing 604 damage to a Guardian:

View attachment w604.mp4


The reason you are doing more than the stated 35% (or rather 41%) damage is that subtracting a small number from a small number has considerably higher impact than subtracting a small number from a big number. Removing 9 from 12 leaves you with 3. Removing 9 from 100 leaves you with 91. One of those is a 75% reduction and one is a 9% reduction.


Wraith has 5.5 Bullet Damage at the start. 65% of that is ~3.6. That ~3.6 is what is removed when shooting a Guardian. Always. It doesn't matter whether you have 6 Bullet Damage or 69 Bullet Damage, it will always remove ~3.6 when you shoot a Guardian.

At max level Wraith without items has 10.8 Bullet Damage. You remove the 3.6 from that, you deal 7.2 damage with a shot, a ~33% decrease to your damage from the Guardian armor.
With the 41% increase from Monster Rounds (or _any_ other items) however, Wraith effectively has 15.2 Bullet Damage at max level. Remove 3.6 from that, and you deal 11.6, only a 23% decrease to your damage from the Guardian armor. You're sorta "double-dipping" in a relative sense here, because not only did you gain 41% extra damage from your item(s), but you also get to keep a larger relative amount of it after the reduction is handled.

Monster Rounds doesn't make you deal more damage to Guardians than any other form of 41% damage increase. It's just that the damage increase itself leads to the number that is removed by the Guardian armor becoming considerably less significant, because that's a flat number and not a percentage.

 

[sickboy]

I understand, and have understood, your explanation of *why* this happens. I'm reporting it because it feels like a bug that it's so much more effective on one thing than anything else.
If they intended this interaction because of the weird flat number "armor" on the lane guardians then they'll keep it. If not, it'll get patched.
In the meantime everyone else gets to learn that monster rounds is a bigger value pickup in lane than they thought.

 

[Tickles the Mighty]

As mentioned earlier, this is not something specific to Monster Rounds. Any equivalent source of Weapon Damage (35% + 6% in this case) would give you the same results. And the impact will vary wildly by character. You can test with Abrams to see an extreme example on the opposite end of the spectrum.