Needler and its ammo is one in the same
No, not really
Nerf the weapon: use AP ammo or nothing
Nerf AP ammo: Player gets to choose between two different ammo types to fill two different roles
Also i really hate how bleed is calculated. Like Smalltime or someone on irc said bleed right now is just another word for hollow point ammo. Bleed should not always be just another multiplier thats applied to the direct damage done.
The reason why it is like this is because of how the Ammo is designed. There are really only 2 ammo archetypes:
1. For almost all weapons there is an AP ammo which has almost no bleed, but armor penetrative properties. This ammo is typically best for fast shot/bursting builds where you need armor penetration because you aren't getting critical bypasses.
2. and a Bleed ammo. An ammo that has low (or no) armor penetrative properties, but big bleed modifiers. This ammo is objectively best for aimed shot crit weapons because those aimed shots have armor bypass potential.
Typically if there is a 3rd or more variant of an ammo, its a neglected, objectively bad ammo.
This however brings to point why the Needler AP ammo was broken. The needler has weapon perks that give bleed coefficient. This bleed damage was completely independent (but additive) to any ammo bleed modifications. Needler AP ammo also happened to have the 2nd best AP mods in the game (second only to the supreme 20 mm EC) with 50% DR and 50% DT reduction, a x1 damage multiplier (some ammo has a .x8 damage meaning 20% less damage), and NO bleed modifier.
Now the amount of bypass is dependent on the stats of the target, but the Needler has 2x Piercing Strike. Piercing strike adds 20% armor bypass on crit bypasses. Now this should be coming to point, but regardless of the targets stats (in ideal circumstance) the needler and its ammo BY DEFAULT are bypassing 90% of the targets armor without even having to roll for bypass severity.
So the needler with AP ammo is completely ignoring the targets armor. The bleed damage is flat multiplicative of the damage done to the target. So the AP ammo actually does MORE bleed than the Bleed ammo because the damage is 100% unmitigated by the target. This is a problem that is already being addressed. But the solution is nerfing both the damage modifier of the AP ammo and the DR/DT modifiers.
If you want weapons doing "flat bleed" damage, you're going to have to create an ammo that has -100% DR and -100% DT modifiers (like 20 mm EC) and x.2-.3 damage multiplier with something like x3-5 damage multipliers. This will cause it to do the weapon damage converted almost entirely to bleed.
That or you give specific aimed shot weapons 3 or 4x Piercing Strike so they just bypass armor entirely.
. Also killing someone with full combat gear (armor, stims, guns, ammo, drugs, epi's) that is worth way more than just a leather jacket and waki blade is completely fair. Ramon can easlily come back in less than 2 minutes cause he doesn't have to worry at all about gear.
