https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=99917&find=unread
I'm going to try to keep this edition of the 'Perfecting the Roles' series as brief as possible because it's honestly not as in depth as some of my previous posts.
That doesn't make it any less important however and honestly I feel that this edition is the most important article I've written to date and I'm actually very intrigued to see what CCP Wolfman and Remnant have to say about it.
This all started as a rumor I heard among my corporation that Mass Drivers did full damage no matter what range as long as it was within the splash radius. Essentially what this meant is that one meter away or five meters away, it was still going to do the full amount of damage.
Well, to that end I have some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that this myth isn't true - there is an escalation toward damage as the round lands closer and closer to the target.
The bad news, and this is very important, is that splash damage completely ignores the rules of damage application to shields and armor. That being said, the damage application peak is pretty steep. From our testing we've found that at the very edge of it's splash radius it will do very little damage but it shoots straight up to it's full damage potential at around half of it's splash radius.
So let's talk a little more about the damage application toward tanking style and why this is important.
According to the laws of Weapon Efficiency vs Shield/Armor that the game sets forth, a standard Mass Driver with no skills (I.E, me) will do 242 direct damage and 116 splash damage at it's base. Now, being as it is an explosive weapon it's supposed to do less damage to shields and more damage to armor.
This is where we run into our first problem.
- The efficiency of the weapon isn't the same as is listed on the dev blog:
https://web.ccpgamescdn.com/dust/news.control/64862/1/damageprofiles.jpg
As we can see here, the listed damage is -20% to shields and +20% to armor. It's actually something like -30% on shields and we're not sure what the efficiency is on armor because we weren't brave enough to go that far.
Now the second (and most important) problem.
- Splash damage is not affected by the reduced efficiency and will do normal damage.
We conducted the test by setting up a Nanohive as our staging point and having the target (in this case a Proto Heavy) stand 4m away. All skills considered on my end, the maximum splash radius on the Mass Driver is 4.2m. At approximately 2m, the weapon starts to dish out full splash damage. In this range we found a running average of 115.6 damage - right about what it's supposed to do without reduced efficiency.
Direct damage does have the application of reduced damage to shields, however, with direct rounds landing 170 damage consistently (reduced from 242, according to basic mathematics it's supposed to do 169.4, so this is right around what it's supposed to). Headshots are consistent as well, so the only discrepancy is the splash damage not being affected by these numbers.
That being said we tried some other weapons out to see how they were affected and whether or not this was localized just to the Mass Driver.
What we discovered is that there is definitely something odd going on with the weapons as the Forge Gun did a whopping 300 damage (splash damage for the militia is 231) and the Plasma Cannon did 323 (with my skills it was supposed to do 302 - though this is consistent with increased damage to shields). Unfortunately the testing site at this point was being harassed by other players who refused to acknowledge that we were testing for the sake of easy(ier?) kills.
So, what we do know is that there is some outside interference with Splash Damage. Something is occurring with it to increase the amount of damage beyond what is being listed on 'Show Info'. We don't know what it is yet but you can bet that we're going to be conducted further tests until we figure out exactly what it is.
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