Have you ever felt like your weapons don’t do enough damage in Anthem, no matter how many damage buffs are attached? Have you ever tried using the default Defender Rifle doled out in the beginning instead? Give it shot – the results may surprise you, much like they surprised YeetLordSupreme and many others on Reddit.
The user discovered that the level 1 Common Defender Rifle actually took less bullets to a kill a Scar Trooper than his level 45 Masterwork Ralner’s Blaze Rifle. Another user, takeshikun chimed in to showcase the difference between a Common Defender and an Epic version that had been crafted. Testing these on the same enemy, he found that the Common Defender took only a handful of bullets to get the kill. Meanwhile, the Epic variant required almost an entire magazine.
What gives? Many believe that in how the game scales enemies’ health pools changing according to the weapon damaging them. While the Common Defender has the damage buffs of various Legendary Components and Epic Support Gear, the enemy’s health still scales to lower levels, thus causing the weapon to be much more effective. Scaling to allow lesser equipped players to stand a chance next to better players isn’t a strange thing.
However, the fact that this scaling is happening in Grandmaster difficulty where anything below Epic tier shouldn’t have any kind of impact is bizarre.
Fortunately, BioWare says a fix will be coming soon. Community manager UNTDrew stated, “I have confirmed with the team that this is in fact bug related specifically to the default items on a loadout in combination with higher level gear you have equipped. It’s not functioning as intended and the team is working on it for an upcoming fix.” Lead producer Ben Irving further confirmed that the fix would arrive on March 12th in a patch containing numerous other changes and improvements. As always, stay tuned for more details.