Hi everyone! WGNA has graciously loaned me a couple of press accounts, so that I may do a variety of tests in training rooms to determine how certain game mechanics work. My primary goal is to determine the penetration RNG distribution. I have the accounts for a short while, so I'm fielding some community requests for other mechanics to test.

Today, I decided to follow up on my previous post and do deeper dive on how exactly burn damage is calculated. I also answer /u/SparkleFunHorse's question on how firefighting works.

If you have your own questions on other game mechanics, feel free to post them in the comments!

Caveat: this is only based on in-game testing, which is always imperfect.

How is fire damage calculated?

Fires are ignited for one of two reasons:

• When your fuel tanks reach 0 hitpoints, a fire is guaranteed to start.
• When your engine takes damage, there's a percent chance it will catch fire.

The fire has a starting damage, which steadily decreases until it hits 0.

Let's say the fire starts doing 100dmg. If the reduction per tick is 10, then next tick it will do 90, then 80, then 70, and so on. If the reduction per tick is 5, then it would go 95, 90, 85, 80, and so on.

Initial Damage

The initial damage has noticeable RNG. I observed a range of ±20% after around 100 samples.

Each vehicle has its own average initial burn damage. It is set on a per-tank basis, but it loosely correlates with tier and hitpoint pool. Firefighting does not affect this.

Reduction Per Tick

The reduction per tick, on the other hand, is very consistent. It can be a decimal value, but damage done is always a whole number, so the actual damage reduction per tick varies by 1. For example, if the true value is 8.5, the actual reduction per tick will be 8 or 9. This leads to a small variation in the total damage taken by a fire.

Each vehicle has its own reduction value. Firefighting does affect this; more on that below.

Total Damage

The total damage dealt can be roughly estimated with this equation:

TotalDamage ≈ InitialDamage² / (ReductionPerTick * 2)

Because the Initital Damage has a wide RNG range and is squared, the Total Damage has a very wide RNG range. One fire you might take 400dmg, the next 700dmg.

Module Damage

While a fire burns, it appears to do steady damage to nearby internal components. Crew members can be knocked out. Modules can be damaged, but it doesn't appear that they can be destroyed.

Firefighting

I performed a limited number of tests on a handful of vehicles, so take this section with a grain of salt. It appears that FF works the same on all vehicles.

Having full firefighting on your crew increases the Reduction Per Tick by ~80%. For example, if the vehicle's base RPT is 5.0, then with full FF it would be 9.0.

The benefit of firefighting appears to be linear; if it's 50% trained on all crew members (or 100% trained on half your crew members), you'll receive half the benefit*.

Approximately. Due to crew skill calculations, in both cases, the crew's overall FF skill isn't exactly 50%.*

Firefighting results in a linear decrease in total damage. With full FF, you'll take about 55% the total damage of a fire, a little over half.

Firefighting has a significant effect on crew and module damage. With FF, those modules/crew members will lose some health, but oftentimes not enough to be damaged/knocked out. Without FF, it is much more likely that they'll be damaged/knocked out. FF can be the difference between damaging 0-1 modules per fire versus 3-5 modules.

Other Observations

Only one fire can be active at a time. They cannot be extended; if you shoot the fuel tanks of an already-burning vehicle, it has no effect on the fire.

Fires can be ignited one after the other. It may be worth mentioning that I managed to get 3 fires in a row many times, but never 4 in a row. This could be a coincidence.