Might not be a buff, after all. (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Sunday, September 15, 2019, 03:36 (1676 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

That first post, at least, didn't do the kind of analysis I was hoping for. Basically we're getting a lot of guns buffed by 30% and then on red bars we're looking at a 50% decrease in precision damage. That might leave a good bit of wiggle room depending on how much damage it actually took to kill a red bar. For instance:

Start with the most extreme example, a high impact Sniper Rifle vs a plain red bar Thrall. You're not doing just barely enough damage to kill that Thrall when you get a headshot, you're doing probably several times more damage than necessary. In this case, you're probably overkilling the target by something crazy like 200% or 500%. A 20% decrease in precision damage just won't matter in this most extreme of examples.

Now, scale it back. There are probably times where you can kill something like a Vandal with one headshot from a heavy Scout Rifle. Again, you probably aren't matching the target's hp with your damage, but you're also not overkilling it by hundreds of percent, either. So... in typical combat, how much do we tend to overkill red bars with things like Bows or other one shot kill primaries? If we typically overkill enemies by 20% or more, then you still won't see a change. I'd guess this will be true of Bows which always seemed pretty powerful shot per shot.

Scale things back again to a worst case scenario. Maybe a light Auto Rifle or SMG takes 10 precision shots to kill a red bar? With this +30 - 50 thing going on, you'd be looking at now having to hit with 12 bullets instead of 10. That's not the end of the world and is on the border of not being noticeable in the heat of combat.

I'm imagining a typical scenario where you've got something like a Hand Cannon vs a red bar Cabal and it takes 3 headshots to kill them right now. Again, you can't just add 20% to the number of shots needed without first looking at how effective you really were before. If those three shots were each doing 40% damage, you'd do a 40%, 80%, 120% overkill and this +30% - 50% thing would again cancel out even where it's not immediately apparent.

Ok... whew... somebody actually started doing some testing...

Decided to test this because I was curious. Numbers from tribute hall, so there may be some inaccuracies, but the difference is pretty massive regardless.
A red-bar thrall in the tribute hall has ~14,000 health, from what I can see. A headshot from a precision frame bow on perfect draw does 66,639 damage, effectively killing it 4 times over. Even without the damage buffs and the removal of the 2x modifier, that's still doing twice the amount of damage as the red-bar. Yes, thralls are some of the weakest of the red-bar enemies, but think bows will do enough damage to one-shot most trash mobs comfortably.

Ran some more tests. Unfortunately, had to use lost sectors since dregs/legionaries/acolytes etc. are all majors in the tribute room for some reason, so the numbers might be off.
Legionaries (lost sector in cistern, nessus): ~1200 total hp, crit w/perfect draw is 3206
Incendiors (same location): ~1600 total hp, same damage on crit
Vandals (The Empty Tank, Tangled Shore): ~4800 total hp, 16,261 crit
Dregs (Same location): ~2400 total hp, 16,261 crit
Acolytes (Wolfship turbine, tangled shore): ~3,800 total hp, 16,261, crit
Knights (Jetsam, Tangled Shore): ~6900 health, 7220 crit

We'll still need to watch this. Partially because Bungie doesn't have the best track record of even making the changes they say they are making. But also because it may be fine for enemies that you are leveled with, but in edge cases like Nightfalls or Raids, you might actually be at enough of a disadvantage that it will take an extra shot even from something as powerful as a bow.