Destiny 2 player cracks enemy scaling wide open "using just 3 bullets"

Destiny 2 theory crafters have worked out a way to reliably measure enemy HP across multiple difficulties using a forgotten Exotic helmet.

New findings from Reddit user LegoWitch, who previously helped collate the exact figures for weapon damage in Destiny 2's many Power brackets, outline a method "to measure any enemy’s HP using just 3 bullets." 

It all comes down to the Exotic Hunter helmet Foetracer, which buffs your damage against low-health enemies. As LegoWitch points out, Foetracer's buff scales up as enemy health drops below 30%. If the enemy has 25% health left, you get a 5% buff; if they're at 15% health, you get a 15% buff, and so on. 

"Importantly, this buff seems to be very precise in how it measures HP, so if an enemy has 24.55% health left, the game will give you a 5.45% buff," they add, citing findings from the Massive Breakdowns Destiny Discord channel. This is where the three-bullet damage calculations come in. 

By shooting an enemy at full health and comparing that shot's damage to two Foetracer-buffed shots, you can calculate the total HP of that enemy. Basically, the first shot gives you a baseline, and the ratio between the second and third shots will tell you how much the enemy HP changed against the 30% threshold. You could use figures from more Foetracer shots if you wanted to, but you technically only need two to math out how much the second shot was buffed compared to the third, and then extrapolate that to the enemy's entire health bar. 

This gets interesting – and more practical – when you start applying it to the same enemies in different activities of varying difficulties. A Fallen Captain has wildly different HP values in a normal Lost Sector compared to a Grandmaster Nightfall, for example, but this method lets you reliably determine how many shots or abilities you'd need to take them out in any mode.  

"It opens up some interesting theory-crafting options when you know both the HP of enemies and the damage of your weapons and abilities," LegoWitch explains. "It’d be pretty handy to know off-hand how many shots of some gun it’ll take to kill a Champion. If you have a build that regens abilities on a kill, it’s useful to know what enemies you can one-shot with that ability. On top of that, this gives an opportunity to get accurate HP values for different raid and dungeon bosses, and theory-craft one-phase kills."

This is the kind of thing that only hardcore theory crafters will spend a lot of time on, but with how Destiny 2 obscures exact damage and scaling values, it's fascinating to see a largely ignored Exotic become the keystone of a reverse-engineering project. 

LegoWitch is crowdsourcing data to fill out a spreadsheet of enemy HP values across a range of activities, and with how nerdy the Destiny community can be (source: I'm part of the Destiny community), it probably won't be long before the whole enemy roster has been calculated. 

A big Destiny 2 showcase is coming August 23, seemingly with the new Lightfall expansion up front.