Return Fire does not seem to fully work as intended

mazaahaarotto

New member
Preemptive TL;DR:
Return Fire works as the description states in regard to spirit damage. It simply reflects 30% of the damage taken back to the attacker.
Return Fire is affected by resistances. For spirit damage, it's affected by both the user and attacker's resistances, but reflected bullet damage only cares about the attackers resistances.
It does not apply item effects, but the damage it deals can be influenced by things like spirit amplification or Inhibitor.
Return Fire does not work as stated when bullets are concerned. It's the same problem as Ricochet.
RF uses 80% of the attacker's weapon damage when reflecting bullets. -resistances, debuffs (like Fixation), etc. on the RF user are irrelevant to the damage that is reflected to the attacker.
It's possible to dodge/miss the reflected bullet damage from RF
Haze gets auto headshot by RF, making her take more damage from it than intended



Tested out Return Fire a bit after I noticed some weird behavior.

Returning spirit damage works as the descriptions states. You deal 100 spirit damage to someone with RF, you get dealt 30 spirit damage back. However, that's only true when no amps or resistances are involved. If you attack someone with 100% spirit amplification on them with a 100 damage attack, thus dealing 200 damage, you'll only take 30 damage because RF doesn't take the amp into account. Positive and negative resistances work like you'd expect. If the RF user has a bunch of spirit resist, then they take less damage and thus reflect less damage back, with the inverse being true of negative resistances of the RF user. The reflected spirit damage can be boosted if the attacker has negative resists or has spirit amplification debuffs on them.
Reflected damage itself doesn't trigger item effects, so you can't Improved Burst someone with return damage or slow them or something.

Bullet reflection works similarly in most practical situations, with some (unfortunate) exceptions and mechanics behind it.
Return Fire does not take into account Fixation stacks nor does it take into account -resistance on the RF user, both good things for Haze. However, it does take the positive resistances of the attacker into account. Negative resists on the attacker do increase the damage they take.
When bullets are concerned, Return Fire seems to work similarly to Ricochet, by which I mean that the description is lying in the same way. It doesn't return 80% of the damage dealt to you back to the attacker, instead, it shoots a bullet which has 80% of the attacker's weapon damage back to them. This explains the interactions I highlighted in the previous paragraph, because that's also how Ricochet works.
During testing, I noticed that Haze was taking significantly more damage than she should be from reflected damage. I wasn't sure why, but after taking a closer look at the numbers, I remembered something. Mo and Krill used to get automatically headshot during Bullet Dance/with Ricochet and I think the same thing is happening here. I think RF is shooting a bullet at a certain height when returning damage and Haze is unfortunate enough to get headshot by it. Tested this with a few other characters and they were taking damage as you'd expect with the previous info in mind.
To be a bit more specific with the numbers, I think the 80% part of RF is applied last after the headshot bonus. As an example, if Haze bodyshots an RF user with 20 damage, RF will aim back at her with a 20 damage bullet, see that it's a headshot which doubles the damage to 40, then it applies the 80% clause, which leaves a 32 damage bullet flying at her.
 
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