*IMO* Bungie really misplayed the RPG elements of Destiny (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, March 12, 2015, 22:51 (3779 days ago) @ Cody Miller

But you missed the part where I had enemy health rebalanced to make damage from the weapons match the crucible. So if you shot a level 30 thrall and did 40 damage, you'd say, "wow, that thrall only has 50 health." Then you could shoot a level 30 Cabal and do 40 damage, and say "oh, jeez, this guy has like 300 health." See how that works? You'd have a MUCH better understanding of what it took to kill each enemy, as well as how your weapons were performing.

Again, it won't work. The game is set up such that you do much less damage to lower level enemies, in order to allow a high level player to either play with a low level player and not one shot bosses, or to not completely wreck public events in low level areas. A gun that does a fixed amount of damage completely negates this.

No matter what, there is no way to currently have a representative numerical value for how much exact damage a bullet will do. This is why the bar exists: it is telling you in relative terms how much damage your gun will do.

Actually that's not how the game is set up at all. Here's the detailed post in Reddit. Basically, in the current game, guns do X damage to enemies at or below their attack value. So if I shoot a level 33 guy with my 331 attack gun and do 10 damage, and then shoot a level 1 guy, I'll still do 10 damage to him. You only do less damage to enemies that are higher level than your attack value is scaled for. Enemies, near as I can tell, have the same health for the same type of enemy, regardless of level, so a level 1 dreg has X health and a level 30 dreg also has X health. The different types (Elder, etc.) have different base amounts of health, but enemies of the same type, regardless of level, take the same number of shots to kill as long as your gun is at or above the required attack value to deal full damage to them.

In my desired set up, the theroy of doing X damage to enemies at or below your level doesn't change. You do less damage to higher level enemies, and do the same damage to all enemies at or below your current attack value. That number, however, is much smaller than it is today in the game, because it matches the damage number in the crucible, and enemy health values are adjusted accordingly.

And it's trivial to have a representative numerical value for how much exact damage a bullet will do. That's how we know that high RoF ARs do 11 damage per shot in the crucible, compared to low RoF ARs that do 19. Here's a reddit post that links to a spreadsheet with all the data for you.

Also, that bar *is* a value, it's just not a number. Maybe it's 183/255 pixels or whatever, but it's still a quantifiable value, and I'd prefer the number to the bar, because I don't need to count pixels in a number to know the value of it.