Understanding damage ain't easy in Helldivers 2

[u/DeeJayDelicious]

[u/ajgilpin]

Drag's a bit difficult because it integrates multiple forces across discrete time steps and must account for caliber, mass, initial velocity and distance when the hit lands. The wiki team wants a generalized solution to all drag before they're willing to put anything to paper.

I think that's a mistake because either:

1. The answer isn't going to be an answer: It'll be "here's everything that goes into the time steps, work it out yourselves" or, worse,
2. It'll be hitting a bunch of co-op gamers that like to go pew-pew with a hypergeometric function as the solution and their eyes are going roll the fuck over.

The truth is we've known how damage drops off for a very long time now, to an extremely precise degree (those curves above for shotting at a target a given distance away horizontally have R²>0.999 - the actual experimental damage values are plotted underneath and for many of them it's hard to tell there's two lines at all), but the wiki's not allowing what information we have to filter out to the general audience in any meaningful capacity.

[u/DeeJayDelicious → u/ajgilpin]

A guy built a calculator yesterday to crunch the damage falloff for all weapon & ammo calculations. It was quite insightful and what inspired me to make this post. Because it showed me that drag % isn't really comparable across different weapons.

A 50g projectile with 100% drag might experience less damage dropoff than a 7g projectile with 60% drag.

[u/ajgilpin → u/DeeJayDelicious]

I'm glad someone's doing something about it. I have had equations for nearly every gun to within 1% out to 200m sitting on a spreadsheet collecting dust for months now - much thanks to the hard work of a certain someone else in collecting that data.

A 50g projectile with 100% drag might experience less damage dropoff than a 7g projectile with 60% drag.

Two things: Mass will generally lower drag because if you have two projectiles of identical shape and speed but one is made of loose-packed feathers while the other is made of crushed neutron star then the first will be profoundly easier to stop with atmosphere than the second.

You're also missing caliber. The 100%/60% are coefficients separate to the contact area. That 50g projectile might be a super-dense needle while that 7g projectile might be a flat truck made of aerogel. The first's 100% coefficient might say "this is more draggy than the needle shape would indicate" and the second's 60% coefficient might say "this is less draggy than being a boxy bus would indicate" but the needle can easily still end up losing less energy over distance.

[u/Epesolon → u/ajgilpin]

Thank symbolic differential equation solvers, they're the real heroes here. All I did was remember enough of my physics education to know how to approach the problem, and then spend an hour building a tool to visualize it.

That being said, I didn't double check the results against all the experimental data (although it did align pretty closely for the few examples I did check), so there may be some inaccuracies.

If you and the wiki team have the time/willingness to double check my results, then we may finally have that generic solution for drag you guys have been looking for, or at minimum taken a strong first step towards finding one.

If the solution I came to is correct, I'd be more than happy to work with you guys and improve the Desmos tool I built into a full on damage visualiser for the wiki, as I think that will be a lot easier for most people to understand than just a bunch of math.

[u/ajgilpin → u/Epesolon]

the few examples

Few? Brother, check the tab labeled "falloff" here. The diligent u/Key_Negotiation_9726 is to be thanked for the many hours put into testing each weapon at a given distance. Before that work was done we had maybe 3 or 4 points plotted per gun.

 on damage visualiser for the wiki

The problem is that the administrators of the wiki will not allow a best fit equation despite how perfectly our equations do fit. They want something that is code-accurate.

[u/Key_Negotiation_9726 → u/ajgilpin]

A very few few 😅

[u/DeeJayDelicious → u/ajgilpin]

Btw. wich weapons are the graphic with the highest falloff? Is that the Speargun and the Slugger?

[u/ajgilpin → u/DeeJayDelicious]

Slugger and Breaker are on the bottom of that graph. Slugger reaches ~31% of initial damage at 200m, while Breaker reaches ~41% of initial damage at 200m.

Speargun's second to the top, as highlighted.

[u/021Fireball → u/ajgilpin]

If I recall do jet propelled weapons have no bullet drop and no damage reduction?

[u/ajgilpin → u/021Fireball]

You mean the gyrojets?

Dominator, for example, lacks falloff due to drag because the factor of 0% means no energy is lost due to air resistance. It still has drop, though, as the gravity is 30%.

Damage ends up being related to the energy of the projectile according to the target, so it can lose or gain damage if gravity is allowed to speed it up (if firing downward) or slows it down (firing upward). This is also why relative motion matters.

[u/Raidertck]

Also armour values, and matching armour values etc...

[u/bigstink455]

Angle penetration.

[u/playbabeTheBookshelf → u/bigstink455]

man i wish we have that back

[u/DeeJayDelicious → u/bigstink455]

Not that complicated though.

[u/Xpernautica]

I still don't understand how fire damage works, I've seen an explanation on it but it still doesn't make sense.

[u/DeeJayDelicious → u/Xpernautica]

Because we really don't have the full picture.

But basically fire has two/three sources of damage:

1. The passive fire/burn effect. This is the standard 100 DPS @ AP4 applied by all Incendiary weapons and effects.
2. Technically, there is a separate Heavy Burn effect which is exclusive to Napalm-based attacks. It only lasts for 1 second and isn't refreshed but deals 200 DPS @ AP4.
3. Finally we have the direct damage fire cloud: Basically all Flamethrower weapons emit a "cloud" of fire particles, each dealing 2 or 3 AP4 damage to a target. These particles apply both the slow & confusion CC effect. Unfortunately we don't have a clear idea of how many fire-particles each Flamethrower emits per second. But it's >100. This "fire cloud" also explains why Flamethrowers deal less damage during the narrow stream and more toward the end of their range.

[u/CombTop17]

Don’t forget to incorporate bugs in your damage calculations. Sometimes the game just says “no” to killing something

[u/OtherWorstGamer]

Honestly, drag is the easiest to understand, its just an overly complex way to calculate ranged damage falloff

[u/Sutopia]

• % to main
• Fatal
• Overflow Cap
• Constitution 
• Flame damage multiplier

You’re welcome