Before you come at me with, “let’s see you walk around after (insert high flesh round) enters your legs!” Or any of that, let me explain myself.
Tarkov is suppose to be as realistic as playable. We can pick and choose where that applies(looking at helmets, specifically altyns and it’s counterparts where it’s been proven that 556 FMJ has 0 issues penning IRL), but it’s overtuned to feel like it does something for playability sake. If helmets are penned through by everything, they would be completely useless. Alright, cool.
Let’s look at “flesh damage” rounds, specifically RIP rounds. Bare minimum it does 102 flesh in the 9×19 caliber. I’ll be the first one to say that getting hit in the chest, unprotected, would more than likely result in death, as that is by the IRL design. You could argue that we have major arteries in our legs that if severed or damaged, high possibility of a bleed out, which in turn makes leg meta a viable method of killing people.
But did you know, wether intentional or not, there is a bug in-game that causes rounds under 20 pen to not fragment? That means these RIP rounds are not fragmenting in the game, despite specifically being designed IRL to fragment. If they ever fix this, TTK on limbs will be extremely quick. Considering 9×18 SP7 rounds with 77 flesh damage can leg you in as little as 4-5 shots, without even fragmenting(not that these rounds are designed to do so)
You might be asking yourself where I’m going with this. Well, here I’ll tell you: as a “meta chad”, I tend to run tier 5/6 quite frequently. I also die from being shot in the arms more often than not. Normally not even from these flesh rounds, as people struggle to pen through my armor. Sure, you can argue, “well if your arms are full of bullet holes, are so you expect to appropriately defend yourself?” This is exactly why we have black arm penalties.
Now another thing I see becoming a problem quickly, armor hit boxes are coming. That will mean that if any of these rounds slip by your plates, that is instant death. RIP rounds aren’t the only exception, as many rounds we have now have high flesh and fragment values, but don’t work correctly due to the bug.
Once these things get fixed/patched in, TTK will be insanely fast. It will also make armor borderline obsolete as “leg meta” will become even stronger. This goes directly against what the community wants, considering many of us likes early wipe due to everyone not having AP rounds, thus creating the feel of longer gunfights.
Sure armor will be realistic, but will it be playable when you are getting one tapped regardless of your armor or your legs effectively being weaker than your thorax?
