"The highest PvE damage output of any weapon" in Arc Raiders was from the underrated Bettina, dev confirms, and that was before it got buffed

If you're looking for a reliable bot-killer in Arc Raiders, you may want to hold onto the next Bettina you find. Design lead Virgil Watkins of developer Embark Studios says the overlooked epic rifle had "the highest PvE damage output of any weapon" even before its quality-of-life buffs.

In the December 16 update patch notes, Embark dramatically increased the effective durability of the Bettina and moderately bumped up its reload time and magazine size. "Data shows that this weapon is still the highest performing PVE weapon at its rarity (Not counting the Hullcracker)," the studio wrote at the time.

Watkins suggests the difference is even more pronounced. "This is where the data side is fun when compared to the sentiment side," he says. "The Bettina is a good example. We did an adjustment to it, but even before the adjustment, it had the highest PvE damage output of any weapon. It could shred drones very effectively, and then when we tuned it, that only got better. But that's where perception versus practical reality comes in, and then how do we navigate that? Because we obviously have the telemetry on everything to see how it goes."

This was a recurring theme of our interview: data and player sentiment may sometimes conflict, or at least show different perspectives. If something feels bad, but the enormous volume of data Embark collects says it's actually pretty good in its intended circumstances, how do you make it better without weakening game balance?

"I'm not going to pretend it's not tricky," Watkins says of this gap. "Certainly, if something feels bad because it's like, numerically it's doing the right amount of damage, but landing those shots feels bad, or I put all these attachments on it and I can't really perceive how it's mattering, of course we need to look at that. I think it's just where we have to be nuanced in how we look at the feedback of someone saying, 'This is literally useless.' And we can see that, well, when you are landing the shots and it is doing the damage it's performing how we want, but maybe everything surrounding that situation is what needs work.

"I think it's just being a little deliberate in how we take that feedback and try to pick apart what is actually the problem point for that player. I know recently people have been looking at the Aphelion and not really understanding where it sits. 'Well, I can just use my X, Y, Z for that.' OK, do we need to look at adjusting where it sits on that sort of spectrum? Is it too close to another weapon, but costs disparately more? Looking at that, I think it's that whole venn diagram of costs, ease of use, efficacy, and seeing which one of those isn't really overlapping correctly."

Option "X" here would probably be the Hullcracker. As Embark noted in the December patch, the Bettina's relative dominance excluded the Hullcracker, a launcher-type weapon that was famously overpowered when Arc Raiders first launched. The weapon is still a solid bot-murderer today, and much more accessible than Queen and Matriarch core-gated legendary options like the Equalizer (or the Aphelion, which I've personally had a lot of fun by using it to peel big Arc like potatoes), but it's noticeably less absurd. I asked Watkins how it got its reputation and, with some people perceiving that it was over-nerfed, how Embark is monitoring it.

"Pre-nerf, it was a combination of things," he says of the Hullcracker's reputation. "It was a bug, and the damage was too high. The bug was essentially that the damage propagation was maximum at all times. So it didn't matter in any way where you hit the drone, it would just delete it. And it was never the intent with that weapon that by firing, like, two rounds, you were meant to take down a Rocketeer. Whereas now the damage is still very high, but you actually have to land your shots on the precise points.

"If you hit the weak spots, you can kill a Bastion in, I think, eight shots-ish. You could take a Queen's leg off in like 11 if you're landing the shots where they're meant to go. So I guess there's maybe some perception changes we can do in terms of the way the explosion is, or maybe the way we describe it in the tool tip. But it isn't meant to be, 'anything in the explosion radius is now dead.' Think of it more like a directed explosive where it's really gonna damage the point of impact and maybe have a little bit of AoE, but it's not meant to just delete entire huge drones in a couple of hits, which is, I think, what people got used to. You could just saturate the face of a Queen and take it down, because it was doing 100% damage to every single part in the range that it had."

"Cost should not inherently fill a skill gap": Arc Raiders dev admits "we're definitely a bit off on some of the cost to benefit ratios" for guns like the Bobcat and Tempest, but says all weapons have to be usable.