Reddit user falconbox thoroughly tested a few weapons, and came to a some conclusions about weapon damage and accuracy, and how the weapon attributes affect these things. Click the images below to enlarge.
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Tests
Using two different gun types, guns were tested that had the same Impact Rating but different Attack Ratings.
Not every gun type was tested in this manner, but after testing these two I came to the exact same results, and some of these results also hold true in my next text test as well.
In this next test, pairs of guns were tested to see which is more optimal, having a high Attack Rating or having higher Impact Rating. One gun will have a higher Attack Rating than the other, but will have a lower Impact Rating. Two more weapons from the primary weapons category were tested, and one within the special weapons category just to see if the same patterns emerged. They did.
Conclusions
- Facing a yellow health bar enemy decreases head shot damage by 50%, no effect on body damage. I also noticed that Servitors (the floating mechanical orbs) act as yellow health bar enemies, even though they had red health bars. Critical hits to the “eye” were 50% less effective than typical headshots, while non-critical hits did the same amount of damage as a typical body shot.
- Guns will reach a maximum damage against enemies at or before the level needed to wield the gun.
- Differences in damage done are less noticeable against lower level enemies.
- Damage done to an enemy 1 level higher than the player is reduced by 29% for both head & body. By 3 levels higher, damage is reduced by 50% for both head & body.
And most importantly, when trying to decide between higher impact or higher attack rating:
- If the Attack Ratings are relatively close, IMPACT seems to be more important. In the Scout and Sniper tests, Attack Ratings had a difference of 6 and 5 respectively. The higher impact gun always did more damage.
- If the Attack Ratings have a larger gap, the gun with the higher Attack Rating will do more damage almost every time. As shown in the Hand Cannon test with an 18 point difference in Attack Rating, damage dealt to Level 2 enemies was greater for the high impact gun. However, at Level 3 enemies and above, the higher Attack Rating did more damage.
Thanks again to falconbox for this impressive analysis!