Make 50% headshot damage translate into True damage?

[Tyreaus]

That is, on headshot: Total Damage = (Damage / 2) + ((Damage / 2) * armour damage reduction). (Alternatively: Total Damage = (Damage * n%) + ((Damage * (1-n)%) * armour DR) for a given value 0 < n < 100, whatever balances best)

This would mean that a headshot dealing 100 damage would guarantee dealing 50 damage, then an additional 50 damage reduced by the target's armour. Given that headshots are typically 2x multipliers, this would mean a headshot would guarantee a body shot's worth of damage to an unshielded target's health.

The main reason isn't because armour is some massive problem, because it certainly isn't like it used to be prior to enemy scaling changes. It's just to follow pace with shields and shield gating. Against shield gating, players have several options - they can build in Magnetic or Toxin to disable or bypass it, they can use an automatic weapon to lower the impact of shield gating, or they can aim for headshots. By contrast, dealing with armour is limited to builds. There isn't much of a way to handle armour in a firefight: you either have anti-armour tools, like a Slash-based weapon or Seeking Shuriken or any number of other armour strips, or you deal with the damage reduction as-is. All this suggestion does is provide a non-build way to play around armour the same way we can play around shield gating.

Also it gives a bit of extra sense to Grineer having massive head-covering armour.

[Zahnny]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Headshots already use whatever your crit dmg multi is (without the need for crit chance)

[(PSN)Ozymandias-13-]

As someone that primary aims for heads usually (I'm loving Athodai btw), i wouldn't say no to this. 

[Dracus_Dakkrius]

One of the mechanics from Payday that I like is that headshot damage scales with difficulty. So if enemies have 4x health, they also take 4x damage from headshots compared to normal difficulty. Thus, the number of headshots required to kill an enemy doesn't change much as the difficulty goes up.

I'd like to suggest a modification to your idea. Instead of dealing half damage in true damage, a headshot deals extra true damage unaffected by mods or abilities, but modified by enemy level scaling multipliers.

On 2020-08-07 at 6:34 PM, Zahnny said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Headshots already use whatever your crit dmg multi is (without the need for crit chance)

There is no such thing, unfortunately. Headshots get a damage multiplier depending on the enemy (2x in most cases) and an additional 2x multiplier if you crit. So if you have a 2x critical damage multiplier and score a critical headshot, you deal 8x damage. This has the practical effect of the opposite of what you said. Instead of being able to forgo critical chance for headshot builds, critical chance instead becomes one of the most important stats for headshot builds.

[Zahnny]

1 hour ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

There is no such thing, unfortunately. Headshots get a damage multiplier depending on the enemy (2x in most cases) and an additional 2x multiplier if you crit. So if you have a 2x critical damage multiplier and score a critical headshot, you deal 8x damage. This has the practical effect of the opposite of what you said. Instead of being able to forgo critical chance for headshot builds, critical chance instead becomes one of the most important stats for headshot builds.

Boy have I been barking up the wrong tree.

[Andele3025]

2 hours ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

One of the mechanics from Payday that I like is that headshot damage scales with difficulty. So if enemies have 4x health, they also take 4x damage from headshots compared to normal difficulty. Thus, the number of headshots required to kill an enemy doesn't change much as the difficulty goes up.

I'd like to suggest a modification to your idea. Instead of dealing half damage in true damage, a headshot deals extra true damage unaffected by mods or abilities, but modified by enemy level scaling multipliers.

2 hours ago, Dracus_Dakkrius said:

There is no such thing, unfortunately. Headshots get a damage multiplier depending on the enemy (2x in most cases) and an additional 2x multiplier if you crit. So if you have a 2x critical damage multiplier and score a critical headshot, you deal 8x damage. This has the practical effect of the opposite of what you said. Instead of being able to forgo critical chance for headshot builds, critical chance instead becomes one of the most important stats for headshot builds.

Which is IMO the part to alter more instead of headshot bonus damage, make weakspots count as headshots for all such bonuses instead of only actual "head" of a creature (which means stuff like a vulkar focused on headshots dealing less damage on headshot than bodyshot because a bodypart had 3x multi while head was 0.25x) while altering headcrits to have vigilante/+1 crit level (and possibly adding status weakspot/headshots to something like refreshing all stacks or adding double the status procs). On enemy effects actually influence "true" damage so for guns it would go from crit headshot focus to raw fire rate focus and further the divide between well designed enemies, generic enemies and S#&amp;&#036;ty enemies that rely on taking away most of the game mechanics.