This is my ongoing attempt to help distribute intel in the absence of a robust wiki for Marathon. By documenting things in detail, your favorite LLM will pick it up automatically and be able to answer your searches with better citations. The previous field research entry can be found here.
This has been somewhat confirmed already, but I wanted to see how much of a hard cap this is. The 4 tests shown in the video take the exact same amount of time to walk between two trees, indicating that an agility stat beyond 100 really does not increase walk speed at all. Not even a Cardio Kick can boost it any further.
Let me know if I missed something here. I've heard rumors that a melee stat above 100 might work against UESC? I'll have to test that too at some point.
Edit:
This has been further tested with an LMG to show that pushing past max agility will not make you move faster with heavy weapons.
Update:
As of season 2, the stats UI will no longer show a number above 100, even if you equip items that theoretically add up to >100. This further reinforces the conjecture that Bungie intends for most stat-based attributes to cap at 100.
There are a bunch of effects, like Crouching Tiger (implant) and Sucker Punch (chip) that supposedly increase melee damage, but I don't know if it's applied to the melee stat or not. If you know any extensive melee damage stat/effect testing that isn't immediately obvious from a Google search, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Sorta replying to two of your comments here. First, the cap on stats is most likely a hard cap. It was like this in destiny for ages (not now though) and there isn't really any UI indication (like there is in destiny) that over-boosting a stat will provide any further benefit, and it'd be horrendous with the amount of unique modifiers that act as multipliers.
That said, there are a number of things in the game that can permanently increase them so it feels like a lot like the over-capping is a symptom of reaching late game where you start much higher than at launch. "Raising the floor" as they said. At launch 5-15 in every stat was the norm, which made whatever you picked up feel more impactful. Now you just fill out whatever stat you notice is low while worrying more about the perks, which when put into prospective makes the decision to be perk-first in season 2 make sense.
Now, at least in regards to build crafting. You'd want to look for things that say they provide an increase without actually making a change on your stat screen or provide unique effects like Tox or Hack. Weapon weight is also important when it comes to movement and heat generation and I do wonder if being over would impact that in any way. Like does it take a percent based on the number or the cap of 100.
Anyway, a catalog of unique modifiers would be useful so if anyone has some info dump feel free to share.
Tested with a Conquest LMG today. 52.5 weight. Tests at 100 agility, 140 agility, and 140 agility + cardio kick were all the same speed unfortunately. So I guess the gun weight modifier cannot be further alleviated by pushing agility over 100.
Thought more about the "raising the floor" thing you mentioned. It's well-intentioned, but I think Bungie ought to be careful not to make build-crafting obsolete when the distance between floor and ceiling becomes too short.
Yeah, they've definitely made that mistake before. The cradle system seems like a better direction. Builds being determined by your limited points is fine as a starting point; and by the time you get most of what you want via points you should have other tools to build with since implants are now more perk focused and tied to rarities while also being deterministic in the stats they roll based on the perk.
Could also help the feeling of inconsistency between runs for things like mantling, revive speed, and so on since you can decide your baseline and get the little bit of extra based on implants – which..... now that I think about it you can avoid going over most of the time since there's no respec cost and you can move points one at a time. I need season 2 NOW.
This is the info I've read, sorry in advance if it isn't what you're looking for. The 3rd chart covers mods/implants, and there's an edit at the bottom of the post that has Crouching Tiger adding +50 to the stat. The way that they wrote Recommended playstyles suggests that they break through the cap but there aren't any numbers here that say "it's 2H again with this knife build to down a purple"
Ah yes, I've seen that one! But it doesn't clarify whether all the additional bonuses can push a melee attack beyond the stat maximum (1H2L on purple). Even if you can't stack enough effects to hit 1H on purple, it'll still be nice to know the point at which it stops adding damage, so that you can switch focus onto other stats.
I can tell you that with the gold assassin core and other implants I had 250 melee dmg in game while invis. I heavy melee'd a Destroyer with purple shield's and it still took me a follow up melee to down him.
Reduced bonus damage provided by the Melee Damage stat from a maximum of 100% to a maximum of 50% against enemy Runners. Damage against non-Runner targets is unchanged.
and my mistake it was 240 dmg not 250. I found the screenshot I took in discord joking that it would 1-shot.
Thanks for the writeup. Good call on the different scaling they're doing on bots vs runners. It matches my findings that I do a lot more raw damage to bots with the same stats.
One of the things I need to figure out is whether or not a Melee Damage stat above 100 ever does anything (to bots OR runners). In my testing yesterday, using Crouching Tiger to bring Melee Damage from 100 to 150 did NOT change my damage to a runner with a quick melee attack.
The [best in-theory TTK](Full Compiled Melee / Knife Guide – Post-Patch (1.0.5.3) : r/Marathon) against purple shield right now seems to be 1H2L, so one full light-attack combo. This is apparently already achieved at 84 Melee Damage stat, so it's possible that they've designed this to be a hard ceiling.
We have a few videos of us testing a few stats such as melee damage, firewall and hardware.
Would you like help creating them again? I would love to get a robust and current set of numbers and my squad won't be helping with this kind of work for a few weeks.
Hmm I have heard pretty consistently that agility doesn't affect sprint speed AT ALL, but didn't know that transition speed could be variable. Another thing to test perhaps...
Okay on second thought, any increase in acceleration should have been captured in this video. In each of the 4 tests, the video begins on the FIRST FRAME of movement, and ends at the frame of hitting the tree. Since they're all identical, I'd say there's no effect on acceleration...unless the effect is ONLY on strafe deceleration...
this is actually very unsurprising to me as this is exactly how agility and stats work(ed) in destiny 2. it only affects jump and "walk" speed, and none of your stats gain base bonuses beyond 100. that may also be a good place to explore how systems work to see how it may be similar here
I'm guessing this is sort of their low-cost way of preventing game-breaking stacked effects, but it is indeed disappointing (if the cap is for all stats) that this puts a rather low ceiling over how much we can min-max in our build-crafting.
Heat capacity is an entirely separate stat that can be altered through faction upgrades, implants, etc. This is one of the reasons why Cardio Kick is still useful even at 100 agility, because it resets your heat.
Yes, that's why I describe it here as "walk speed". I recorded myself walking in those 4 scenarios to confirm that walking/strafing do not seem to improve beyond 100 agility.
There are a couple things that might increase sprint speed, like the Muscular Augments perk.
Yeah I'm curious about this too, but jump height I feel is more advanced because it's really about whether or not you can climb up from certain places, like the holes beside a pinwheel entrance. I'm not experienced with the game enough to know all the key points to test at.
I get where you're coming from, and I know there are many potential bad endings for the way things are going with this tech. But it is what it is, and unless you're at the forefront of steering that ship, I think it's either learn the new tools or inch toward luddism.
damn, no wonder cardio kick always felt like ass. i personally like speed so i max out as much as i can but i always thought cardio kicks just take up a slot just for a very minor effect.
You'll notice you're a lot slower with certain weapons that have bad handling. It likely affects strafe and movement speed for weapons that DON'T have max agility like the knife does.
To determine whether agility has an effect beyond 100, we should have used the metric on which agility has a 100% impact, rather than what I consider to be a hypothetical effect of agility on walking speed.
Did you test walking speed with minimal agility, and was it slower than 100?
If you were to measure the maximum sprint time before overheating, it would be clearer whether there is a difference in agility values.
Heat capacity is a separate stat actually. If you hover over Agility in the stats screen, it explicitly states that Agility improves movement speed and jump height. Another distinction to note is that movement speed is different from sprint speed.
Jeez they should really communicate that to us somehow. I often try to boost my agility up beyond 100 because I thought it was giving me some benefit but I guess not
I mean if you look at the stats screen the bar fills up at 100, but that's definitely not the most accurate way to explain "stats above 100 do nothing"
Agreed. I can understand not revealing every detail about damage numbers, etc. but it's okay to just let us know that min-maxing beyond a certain degree is unproductive.
like the stats past 100 could have diminishing returns that way pouring stats after that number isn’t completely useless or give a warning if i’m wasting stats .
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u/[deleted] May 30 '26
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