Armour/Weapon Test - Feb. 27th Auroracode

[Carver]

Quick addition: Laser Rifles were nerfed as of about March 8th, so their numbers here are outdated. I won't be doing another test for a while because this whole thing took some hours, but be aware that as of March 9th only Slugs, Buckshot and 45lethal remain accurate test-wise (excluding against the hardsuits bugged at the time of the test)... and Tachyons I guess, but you'll never see those unless Rooster is meming with events.

I saw a lot of people talking about the lethality of various Security weapons and how they're having issues against them, so I decided to put some of the most common weapons to the test against a variety of armours utilized by primarily Mercenaries (and for the Banshee/Revenant, occasionally enterprising Traitors) and against Security's own beloved high-ends. Results are compiled and categorized in the following:

armourtesting-feb27code.zip

Some curious notes:

• As of Feb. 27th, Hardsuits are broken and do not apply their protective values. Alberyk may have fixed this, as I noted the issue mid-testing. This means that the tests are not remotely indicative of how they should be acting, I'll consider another review of solely those suits later. Potentially patched, will test later.
• The Syndicate Voidsuit takes full damage from Disruptor Lethals, but minimal damage from Laser Rifles. If I had to guess, Disruptor Lethals are protected by Energy values and not Laser values? This means you're better fighting default-suited Mercenaries with your Disruptors than with Laser Rifles. Patched by MattAtlas.
• The Syndicate Voidsuit is the best all-around voidsuit for Mercenaries - in many tested cases matching the protection of Heavy Armour. Unsurprisingly, Heavy Armour is the best all-around non-vacuum-resistant protection for antagonists.
• Gimmick Voidsuits besides the Banshee on the other hand show rather sad results, failing almost across the board against the beloved Laser Rifle.
• Sol Marine Fatigues offer a non-marginal boost to protection from ballistics when layered beneath a good voidsuit. If you can get them for free, they're better than your Tactleneck.
• Ablative Armour is the best all-around protection for Security if facing multiple damage types, with a modest amount of ballistic protection.
• The Head of Security's Voidsuit is absolutely pathetic protection despite not being bugged, showing worse results in nearly all categories compared to the other tested suits.
• In most cases, Disruptors are now quite superior to .45s, given that rubbers do 0 damage to all non-bugged armours in this test and lethals are fairly reduced in damage by most of the rest. As mentioned earlier, Disruptor Lethals were patched.

I also tested Tachyon Rifles per Roostercat's request. They just do a flat 25 burn, ignoring all armour.

Edited March 9, 2021 by Carver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89F5fpvwPr0

[WickedCybs]

Believe the HoS voidsuit just has identical resistances to the standard security voidsuit, which isn't very protective except against melee damage.

[Carver]

An addition to my thoughts: As shown by testing, a lot of the flavour/'gimmick' voidsuits that are based on factions absolutely suffered in testing. On investigation, it's that their very middleground armour values - which would have been acceptable under the old armour system - are now very weak due to armour being based on thresholds instead of percentage reductions. I really hope these sets might get reworks given this information, as I'd hate to see them fall into disfavour.

[Cnaym]

That lines up with my experiences recently. Laser rifles will just delete all sorts of antags really, it seems that even if the damage does not go a long way, the amount of las rifle hits you can output does -> Pain, Burn, Infection, Blood loss

Another very odd behavior I experienced was getting hit by a plasma shotgun and starting to bleed. This was in a security voidsuit and bleed/ shrappnel was not what I expected at all.

The armor rework seems to heavily favor security who are able to hold their ground far too long right now while antags can be focused down by a third of a las rifle mag in my experience.

Security and HoS voidsuit have always been on the lowest end of things, but unathi and tajara now have access to gloves and boots which introduced a lot of new issues. Another massive issue is that while having the weakest voidsuits, the abillity to have multiple officers with full nightvision (Taj, Vaurca) has shifted the balance of EVA operations heavily to the side with more whitelisted players. Expedition and AI turrets as well are completly helpless against nightvision since you can lure them out and then safely destroy them from a darkened spot of the map without having to fear any response from them, this works best by just flipping the light on and off. 

G2s in full riot or balistic armor are honestly a sight to behold. Maybe introducing cooling requirements for those types of armor in combination with IPCs could balance the issue a bit.