First up I do want to say that NFAM's work is great and inspired me to understand more about the game. However, after learning a bunch of stuff I've come to the conclusion that NFAM's chart is a little misleading. For starters, I think many people take the chart as a measure of how effective an ammo is which is a misreading, the chart is only a measure of the penetration ability of the round. This is important because it doesn't account for many other important factors in the whole thing of doing damage to a target, be it their armour or their health pool. I'll put a tl;dr at the bottom of this post, don't worry! Let’s look into those factors:
Penetration: Sets what you can penetrate, how likely that is, contributes to how much blunt damage pass-through you will do, how much armor damage you will do and how much damage you will do after damage mitigation.
Damage: The base damage for a bullet which will either be turned into blunt damage on blocks, and on a penetration will be reduced by armor mitigation, if any. Has nothing at all to do with armor damage.
Blunt damage: How much damage you get from a hit that is blocked, depends on the armor class, bluntThroughput stat of the armor, the current durability of the armor, the base damage of the bullet, and the penetration of the bullet.
Penetration damage: How much damage you get from a hit that goes through, this depends on the armor class, armor durability, bullet damage and penetration. Essentially the base damage minus the mitigation factor. Example: 5.45BT will do 32 damage through a fresh 6B13 if it penetrates, 10 less than base (42). Igolnik will do the full 37 damage.
Armor damage: First take the bullet penetration and times it by the armor damage percent, this is your “base armor damage”. Next get the ArmorDamageMultiplier as per my video here. (). Finally, multiply these two things with the armor destructibility and a round up adjustment and you’ll have how much durability damage an armor item takes on a hit.
So why do we need to know all these things? If we have just the penetration and the armor class, we can know how likely we are to penetrate a vest, like with the BattleBuddy app, but we won’t know how likely the next shot is to penetrate as we don’t know how much durability we lost on the first hit aside from manual testing. We also need the durability to know how much damage later hits will do too, as it isn’t a flat amount for pens vs blocks.
However, if we do know all these things what we can do now is simulate the whole chain of interaction over a series of hits, so that after each hit we can know the amount of damage done to the armor, how likely a block or a penetration was, how much blunt or penetration damage was dealt, how much damage was done on average and even the probability of that hit being a fatal hit. You can see this for yourself here:
Next, we can then boil down an ammo vs armor comparison to “expected shots to kill”, which when grouped by first armor class, and then protection zone (thorax or head) can show us how effective a projectile will be against a given class of armor or helmet. You can see this either from the ammo or the armor perspective here:
We also need to distinguish between vests and helmets because the target HP pool is different. 85 vs 35. This is important because it can lead to situations where a round would deliver a good chance to kill in 3 hits vs a thorax, but might take two hits, even on penetrations, to kill on a helmet. An example of this is 5.45BT, which will kill on 3 hits to the thorax vs a rat rig with 75% confidence, but against an LShZ-2DTM face shield, you’ll only do 32.16 damage on the first penetration, requiring two hits to kill which is not great if you’re going for headshots.
For this reason, I’ve made a chart which takes the shots to kill vs a class of vest or helmet, categorizes them according to how many shots it takes (category 0 to 5 vs chest, A, B and C for helmets) in combination for a kill. For example, against class 5 armor, 7.62BP is rated as “1.A” as it takes on average 2 hits to kill on thorax and 1 on a headshot, 5.45 BS is rated as “2.B” as it takes on average 3 hits on thorax and 2 head shots to kill.
A disclaimer, the results of these calculations have been checked against a big dataset of manual testing, so they should be very accurate to what you experience in game.
At the moment I don’t account for distance yet, as distance does reduce the damage and penetration of a bullet, or bullets with less than 20 penetration, but I think these numbers are quite good for most people’s usual engagements in Tarkov, so come check it out in the link at the end. A special thanks to GigaBeef and CZTL and others for their prior work and their help along the way with this project. If I’ve made a mistake, please let me know and if you’ve found something really surprising from looking at some calculations yourself, post a comment below about it!
tl;dr: When comparing bullets in Tarkov what you really want to know is how many shots to kill it will take, vs thorax and head, and to do this you need to fully model the interaction and not just look at the base stats. Lucky for you I’ve made a simple to read chart that you can look this up on at my website:
