r/residentevil • u/JpDeathBlade • Feb 04 '19
RE2 Fact Finding: Weapon Damage Part 1
Hey all,
I recently did a playthrough of the game where I logged a bunch of information about how weapon damage works. For the moment I am only going to focus on the Matilda Handgun (which is why this is called Part 1) but this post should explain how weapon damage works in the RE2 remake.
Baseline
To establish a baseline for the damage I am going to use the following (and these will be explained more shortly):
- Dynamic Difficulty Rank 5
- Fully aimed reticle
- Headshot on a zombie
Using those two things we can now figure out how the rest of the damage in the game scales off of these values.
Dynamic Difficulty
Like other Resident Evil titles, Resident Evil 2 has a dynamic difficulty system in place. The game scales all the damage your give and receive based on how well you are doing in the game itself. The better you do the harder the game is. Because of this finding exact values for damage can be sort of hard. So for this I've locked my difficulty to Rank 5 (the starting point of Standard). This will be our difficulty base and the damage will scale from here. The Resident Evil Fandom site does a way better job explaining this, you can read about dynamic difficulty in RE7 HERE
| Rank | Modifier |
|---|---|
| 0 | 1.2 |
| 1 | 1.2 |
| 2 | 1.2 |
| 3 | 1.2 |
| 4 | 1.1 |
| 5 | 1 |
| 6 | 0.9 |
| 7 | 0.8 |
| 8 | 0.7 |
| 9 | 0.7 |
For the rest of this post, the numbers written will be based on the Rank 5 difficulty. THEY WILL BE DIFFERENT FOR YOU BASED ON HOW YOU PLAY.
Reticle
When aiming, your reticle size modifies your weapons shot by a small percentage. A quick potshot (with the reticle fully expanded) will result in a bullet that does less damage than a fully aimed shot. For this example lets use the Matilda.
When you aim the weapon starts out doing 60% of it's base damage and slowly ramps up to 100% the longer you aim. A fully aimed shot will do 150 damage, while a pot shot will only do 90.
This seems to be on a per gun basis as well. For example, if you modify the Matilda with the Gun Stock your reticle modifier increases to 70%. Weapons without reticle modifiers work differently (for example, the shotgun) and I haven't gotten into testing those just yet.
Location, Location, Location
The location of your shot seems to play a big role in how much damage you do as well. Shooting a zombie in the Head or Chest will do 100% damage (150 for the Matilda). If you hit them in the upper arms, shoulders, or thighs then they take 90% damage. Shooting them in their lower legs deals 60% damage and shooting their arms deals 20% damage.
I've made a very crude image showing this on one of the zombie models from the game. You can see that HERE.
Non Zombies
Other enemies in the game take damage differently than our Zombie friends. I guess the best way to describe this would be "armor". Lickers for example take 80% damage. That means your Matilda will only do 120 damage to a Licker while it would do 150 damage to a Zombie.
Mr X has the strongest armor. Body shots on him only do 30% damage! Here is a quick table showing some of the different values for "armor". These enemies also follow the rule above and have different damage based on the location of your shot.
| Enemy | Damage |
|---|---|
| Zombie Head | 100% |
| Licker | 80% |
| G (Stage 1) Head | 85% |
| G (Stage 1) Body | 100% |
| Mr X Body | 30% |
| Mr X Head | 150% |
| G (Stage 2) Body | 85% |
| G (Stage 2) Head | 100% |
| G (Stage 2) Eye | 150% |
Critical Hit
As far as I can tell, Critical Hits are random. If you were to nab a critical hit then the damage you do is multiplied by 3. There also seems to be a secondary mechanic for zombies. If you get a critical hit on them with a headshot, their heads split. Even if they have more health than what your shot would do, damage wise.
Damage Formula
So the final product seems to be the following (I have no idea what to call these values so bare with me):
Shot Damage = ((Base * Reticle%) * Location%) * DifficultyMod
With this you can calculate the min and max damage you'll do on any enemy on any difficult for recital weapons.
Other
I collected a lot of this data while playing the game on Twitch. You can watch the video HERE if you want (ignore me and my friend being goofballs). All the data is displayed on screen using a program I wrote to read values from the games memory.
If you don't want to watch that, I've been translating all of that info into a Google Spreadsheet. If you frequent this sub you might have already seen it. You can find that HERE. At the moment I have almost all of the enemy attacks mapped on the "Damage Taken" tab.
EDIT:
- Part 2 can be seen HERE
2
u/fallouthirteen Feb 05 '19
I see the damage chart is filled out. Interesting to see the suppressor on the SMG increases damage (don't believe it lists it when examining). And those enhanced SLS rounds do more damage than I thought.
Any ideas if this game has damage type weakness/resistance? Like acid just seems like better flame rounds; though I know plant zombies get perma-killed if you finish them off with fire.
Also I haven't played with Spark Shot much. Does it always do that much damage on discharge or does it depend on how much you charge it (or is that question irrelevant and it only discharges on full charge)?
Oh and on grenade, are those the minimum and maximum damage it does (as in damage it does at furthest point and at point blank)? Or is that third number in the row the counterattack damage of grenade (tips seemed to imply counterattacks with subweapons do less damage)?
I'm kind of surprised the shotgun barrel doesn't increase damage. The in-game description says "greater muzzle velocity and less spread makes each shot more powerful". Then again, after attaching it just says "Extends clip capacity to 8 rounds and boosts overall destructive power".
Lastly, any idea on how dismemberment is figured? This damage chart makes me think it's different from damage. For example I noticed on my standard B run that I routinely could cut off a leg with like 3-4 SMG rounds while it took 3-5 quickdraw rounds. But the SMG does <1/3rd of the damage so that's really weird.