News - Fennec/vaznev/minibak All Nerfed Season 2. How Bad Is It. Warzone 2
Intro/what changed
So season two brought a lot of changes as far as weapon balancing goes, but today we're going to cover three specific SMGs, and those are going to be the vasnav and the mini back and the fenik 45. Let's start off really quickly with a quick overview of what exactly happened between all three of these SMGs.
So, we have the Vasniv 9K, and they reduced the mid- to long-range damage, and then we got the mini block with the reduced damage ranges. Reduced lower-torso damage at close range reduce lower body damage at mid-to-close range and add minimum damage against armor, so this one's pretty interesting to me because as soon as I read reduce lower torso damage.
As far as I'm concerned, most of the weapons in the game pretty much have the same damage profiles, or amount of shots it takes to kill, as far as the entire torso goes, so the fact that they're splitting the torso between the lower and the upper says a lot; they probably did something there, and for the fennec, it decreased.
Damage overall decreased with headshot damage, and minimum damage against armor was added, but as far as these two things go, they do seem significant when you read them off the paper. I mean, the FedEx 45 is the most beloved SMG. A lot of people love it; it's so popular, and, of course, they're going to go ahead and Nerf it.
One thing I do have to say really quick before we get into the testing results is the mini block is like in my opinion man I was pretty sad about this because the mini block is one of my favorite SMGs it may not be the best overall you know as far as time to kill or meta or whatever it's, just such a good gun still in my opinion it's really fun to use and. The fact that they reduce the damage ranges and all this kind of stuff really just confines you to a certain playstyle, but anyway, let's go ahead and get into the testing.
Vaznev changes / test results
Results First things first, we have the Vasnav 9K; this is pre-season 2 versus season 2, all right, so what are we looking for here?
Remember, in the patch notes, it says reduced mid- to long-range damage. I did test pretty much every range, especially what's practical in real-life situations, obviously. I'm not going out to, like, 45, 50, and beyond meters because it's just pretty much impractical to use an SMG at those ranges anyway, and as you can see, the farther we go into damage ranges, the less effective the gun pretty much is.
You might as well be using an assault rifle at that point if that's your playstyle. They said that they reduced the damage ranges, so the only changes that we saw to the torso were that it went from 0 to 10 meters, which is a three-shot kill, and now it's going to be zero to nine meters. You know, really, that's not a big deal.
I mean, that's really nothing at all. That's something you're not going to notice in the game, and then, from a four, the shot kill now is at 10 to 17 meters, so it's the same exact thing; they just reduced it by one meter. Importantly, the number of shots it takes to kill is still going to remain the same.
Therefore, your ttk should be the same as well, so we don't have anything to worry about. The only real difference right here in this third range is that it's reduced from 18 meters to 24, so instead of 19, it's now 18. So like I said, not a big deal here; nothing to be alarmed about now as for the limbs, it's pretty much the same exact story except for something interesting here.
So up to 18 meters, you can only get a five-shot kill, and now it's reduced from 11 to 8. 18 meters only, so up to 18 meters you can only get a five-shot kill. Remember, this is just for the limbs, so you know what the chances are you're going to be shooting someone in the limbs because the torso is the largest target, pretty much the character models, so you just have a higher percentage chance of hitting the torso.
In a practical sense, you know you're not really going to be aiming at his like leg right here, so this limb reduction to the damage range is not really anything to be alarmed about, and I have here a verdict slap on the wrist: basically just keep your engagements close. The ttk remains unchanged, and the ranges are only slightly reduced, so yeah, and one thing I do want to clarify is that these values that you see here on the character model are pretty much just the closer range value, so as you can see, headshots are three, so that's why I put three. Let's go ahead and move on to the mini box, all right.
Minibak changes / test results
So here we have the mini-block as a refresher. The patch notes stated reduced damage ranges and reduced lower torso damage at close range, reduced lower body damage at mid-to-close range, and added minimum damage against armor, so the armor stuff isn't something we need to worry too much about when I go into testing again.
I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't being messed around with here by any stealth changes or surprises or anything like that, but it is true in the patch notes that they did reduce lower torso damage now. Interestingly. Enough, like I was saying in the beginning, typically. You know that the upper and lower torsos do have the same exact damage profiles, so we have a three-shot kill.
Here and now, we are opposed. It's a three-shot obviously to the upper torso and then a four-shot to the lower torso, so just moving along step by step here for the head shots. The range was reduced by one meter, so now you can get a three-shot kill up to 18 meters only, and then beyond that it's going to be a four-shot kill, obviously.
The ranges can go on longer than that, but like I said, I didn't even bother testing those super-long ranges, especially for headshots, because that's just not realistic. At all, the story remains the same; they did reduce the damage range, but it's not by much, and there's really nothing to worry about with uppers.
The torso wasn't changed at all; we still have the same exact values for the upper torso, so that's a plus right there now for the lower torso. This is the main thing here that is just confusing me. Why would you want to divide the upper and lower torsos now? Like, what were the reasons behind this?
That's what I'm trying to figure out, especially on the mini bike, where it wasn't even really that overpowered to begin with. This is now going to take four, five, six, and seven shots instead of three, so pretty much the damage was reduced, especially for the lower torso, as well as adding in that new damage profile and the ranges too.
It does kind of suck here for the lower torso, and now for the lower body, we do have a reduction to our damage profile, so the ranges remain the same okay, but it's going to take one more shot just to be able to kill your opponent, so instead of four now it's five, instead of five now it's six, and now instead of six it's seven, so yeah, pretty significant.
