Me and my irls have been going a little bit crazy the past few days, and we've gotten a lot of really good progress done - specifically on cards, but a little but on figures too! I wanna ramble about this so that's damn well what I'm gonna do.

And this story involves mechanics and how RNG weapon design can take those mechanics and break the game. But first, background:

1: Fl4k has a first tier skill in the Hunter tree called Leave No Trace. On a 0.3 second cooldown, it gives you a 12/24/36% chance to return one bullet to your magazine

2: Leave No Trace works on a Per Projectile basis. This means that if your shot has two projectiles, it is a 36% chance applied to each projectile. Having more projectiles per shot increases your chances of it proccing and returning one bullet to your magazine beyond 36%, with diminishing returns.

3: Non-unique and non-Eridian-muzzle Torgue weapons fire gyrojets that either explode on contact, or stick to an enemy and detonate either on weapon reload or after ten seconds have passed since the last hit on that enemy. Each projectile stuck in an enemy increases damage to that enemy by varying amounts, but I don’t know if it’s additively or multiplicatively so I’m just going to assume additively.

4: I recently found a non-unique Torgue shotgun that shoots 18 projectiles per trigger pull, which is exceptionally high for any shotgun in the game, but especially Torgue shotguns since they’ve been balanced with the explosive damage in mind. Each stuck projectile increases damage dealt by 4%.

5: said Torgue shotgun consumes two ammo per shot, and has a magazine size of two, meaning that on Sticky fire mode, it has been balanced to immediately have all stuck projectiles detonate for the full intended damage output immediately after one shot. This is because when you empty your magazine, the game automatically has you reload your weapon, which, as per point 3, triggers all stuck projectiles to detonate.

6: However, Leave No Trace kicks in, and assuming that the spread is wide enough that on average I only manage to get half of the 18 projectiles to critically hit, at 36% chance per each of the 9 projectiles, this results in a 98.19856% actual chance for the skill to proc. Therefore it is almost guaranteed that on each properly aimed shot, one round of ammunition is returned to my magazine.

7: It should be noted that this is not “unlimited” ammo as each shot requires two rounds, and Leave No Trace only returns one to the magazine. This is resolved on the next trigger pull by consuming the one round currently in the magazine, as well as a second one from the ammo pool. However, the important buried lede is that this allows me to pull the trigger a second time without reloading. Which also has a 98.19856% chance to return one round to my magazine and prevent a forced reload, allowing me to pull the trigger a third time. You get the picture.

8: Now that I have pulled the trigger thrice and stuck 27 gyrojets into the enemy, each and every one of those gyrojets has had its explosion damage increased by 108%. Which is further still boosted by the fact that they still count as critical hits.

9: I don’t even need to stop at three trigger pulls, and can go on as long as my skill allows. After six or seven shots, there are too many stuck gyrojets for the game to bother detonating one-by-one, as is intended. Instead it just blows them up batch-by-batch. This is endgame-levels of damage at level 44 out of 72.

Done. Game broken. RIP any damage parsing software