In the last month there has been a lot of talk about changes that have been made over the last couple of years that have negatively impacted the game. Some of those conversations have been incredibly impactful and have caused BSG to take another look things like recoil. That has led to a ton of great progress IMO. However, one of the biggest changes that BSG has made to Tarkov since I started playing way back when was when the "fixed" a bug that was causing damage to be improperly applied to the rest of the body when someone got shot in a blacked out limb.
Without going into all of the math or how it changed (you can find plenty of contemporaneous YouTube videos discussing the change if you want an exact breakdown) the end result is that PMCs are now much easier to kill by shooting them in the limbs than they used to be. I'm not going to say that this has completely negated any benefits provided by armor, but it has definitely contributed to a meta where armor and helmets are seen as complete wastes of money. Back when the only efficient way to kill somebody was to shoot them in the thorax or head armor meant everything. Sure, there was still ammo that could pen even the best armor, but having good armor felt like it made a big difference more often than not. Unfortunately with current balancing and damage propagation it's usually easier to just shoot people in the legs than it is to shoot them in the chest. This is just silly.
I don't want to go back to a period when it took 19 shots from an M4 to kill a hatchling, but it would really be nice to find a middle ground where combat could play out in a more realistic way. One easy solution that could be implemented would be to remove the damage modifiers on legs and stomachs. Legs have a 1.5x damage multiplier for spillover damage and stomachs have a 2x multiplier. Getting rid of that would mean PMC's might be able to survive an extra 1 or 2 shots at most. That could be the difference between getting to cover and engaging in an actual firefight or just falling over dead as soon as you peak an angle.
That's all. I think this change has been completely overlooked by the portion of the community that are pining for the golden days of Tarkov where fights felt like they lasted a little big longer. Toning down the "leg meta" by just a bit would probably do more to bring us back to that period than anything else IMO. Convincing people to run more than a t4 rig and a shotgun would make PVP much more engaging. Thanks for reading, good luck out there.
