A player investigated the current patch 1.0.3 in Anthem and made a strange discovery: You can go completely naked as long as you are wearing a legendary item.
This is the situation in Anthem: Last Saturday, Anthem rolled out patch 1.0.3. Part of the patch was fixing a loot issue.
Players had discovered that a “Level-1” weapon deals the most damage in the game. Therefore, BioWare had to hastily adjust the scaling.
However, the hasty patch 1.0.3 shows new weaknesses in the loot, as a player has now found out.
Build creator wants to know why he is not dealing damage anymore
This was the player’s situation: The player “The Million Damage Ranger” says on reddit that he had a good Ranger build before the patch:
- The build was completely epic, thus it had a low power level
- but it had excellent inscriptions (perks) and dealt strong damage.
However, with the patch, his build completely collapsed. Because his power level did not increase after the patch – those wearing masterwork and legendary items, however, received a higher power level and dealt more damage.
After investing hours into the old build, which has now become completely useless, the Ranger fan wanted to find out what was wrong with his epic build after the patch.
This is what the player has now found out: The player says he researched for three days and three sleepless nights.
His conclusion: “Inscriptions” in Anthem are currently almost irrelevant. The only thing that truly matters is the average “power level” of the gear.
- The low power level 30 has a damage multiplier of 7.4
- The highest power level 75 has a damage multiplier of 22.6
The most important thing is to have a high power level on the gear.
Only the average power level matters
The problem: The game calculates the power level as an average from the gear in each slot. However, if you wear level-1 gear in a slot, then that slot does not count towards the calculation of the average level.
Therefore, you can reach power level 75 and thus maximum damage if you only wear a legendary item and leave the rest empty.
Because there are not legendary items for every slot.
This is what a top Ranger would look like: A Ranger with top items has a power level of 718, but this gets rounded down to 65 – because some slots do not have legendary items.
This Ranger has an average power level of 65 – so far below the maximum of 75.
On the other hand, if one only carries a weapon with power level 75 and leaves the rest empty, they deal maximum damage with certain abilities.
This also explains why players become more powerful when they remove a support item.
This is what other players say: Some others have confirmed the player’s results and removed everything except legendary items and then realized that they were indeed dealing more damage.
BioWare is already working on a solution
This is the problem: The alarming thing is that with this insight, the “builds” of the players actually play almost no role anymore for maximum damage. The property “Max Damage (referring to the Javelin)” should be preferred here.
However, creating builds and collecting items for those builds is an important allure of a game like Anthem.
BioWare has already announced a fix for the support items, which will hopefully address the issues of the Million Damage Ranger as well.
What could be a solution? First, every slot should be counted, even if it includes a level-1 item.
Secondly, BioWare would likely need to revise the inscriptions so that they play a bigger role.
