Reaper Change: Less Pellets, more damage per-pellet

[Gaze-11763]

Right now, Reaper fires 20 pellets in each shot, with each pellet having the potential to deal 2-7 damage (based on damage falloff). He can do a grand total of 140 damage per shot, if he lands all of his pellets on the body at point-blank range.

However, there is a problem; each individual pellet gets reduced by armor, halving his damage against an armored target. The “tank buster” DPS has his damage output halved when shooting armor, which is present on almost every tank.

Now, one possible solution is to simply give Reaper a passive that ignores armor. While this would definitely solve the issue, slapping passives onto heroes doesn’t seem to be something the devs are keen on doing.

What I propose is to do the opposite of a somewhat-recent change that came to Doomfist: Halve Reaper’s pellets-per-shot, double his damage-per-pellet, and adjust his spread algorithm to accommodate the new number of pellets.

If he shot 10 pellets that each did 2-14 damage, his damage-per-shot on an unarmored target would be the same: 140. What this change does for Reaper is increase the damage he would be doing to armor from 70 per shot to 90 per shot. This is roughly a 30% increase to his damage output against an armored target, letting him chunk down armor slightly faster and get at the health of tanks underneath.

An important part of this change is altering his spread algorithm. If it was left the same, then RNG would have an even bigger effect on his damage output, since his shots could be clustered all over his wide spread. Therefore, I propose that a minimum pellet distance be implemented for Reaper. Whenever he fired his guns, the pellets would come out at fixed angles away from each other, creating a spread pattern that is still semi-randomized, but clusters of pellets would disappear. Basically, this would reduce RNG and make his shotgun have a much more consistent spread.

Overall, Reaper would have much more consistent damage output and would deal better damage against armored tanks, all without increasing his damage output against non-tanks.

[TeamChevy86-1857]

I liked what they did to Doomfist’s primary.
They would need to fix how Reaper’s headshots work too. It’s unnecessarily spikey because either all the pellets are headshots, or none of them are. Reaper gets the shaft pretty hard with his hitscan spread weapons…

Reaper vs Armor (Math)

A lot of people say armor punishes Reaper too much, but let me show you why Armor doesn’t do much to stop him. Reaper shoots 20 pellets at 7 damage each for a total of 140 damage for a body shot. A headshot turns this into 280. Now the way armor works is if you do less than 10 damage that attack will have its damage nerfed by 50% if you do more than 10 damage then the attack will be reduced by a flat 5 less damage. Reaper does 7 damage per pellet, so that is reduced to 3.5 per pellet by armor…

[HanzoMaker-2631]

less pellets with same spread? That would be hilarious

[DeadlyAztec-1521]

The sixth paragraph deals with your concern.

[jokerpenguin-2763]

An important part of this change is altering his spread algorithm. If it was left the same, then RNG would have an even bigger effect on his damage output, since his shots could be clustered all over his wide spread. Therefore, I propose that a minimum pellet distance be implemented for Reaper. Whenever he fired his guns, the pellets would come out at fixed angles away from each other, creating a spread pattern that is still semi-randomized, but clusters of pellets would disappear. Basically, this would reduce RNG and make his shotgun have a much more consistent spread.

Same change fpr Roadhog and Bastion, please