‘Anthem’ Starter Rifle Might Be the Best in the Game, Thanks to a Bug

There’s apparently a new bug in BioWare’s online role-playing game “Anthem” that turns a simple, Level 1 rifle into the best weapon in the game, according to a post on Reddit.

“It seems that the default weapon you get when creating a new loadout is better than any other weapon in the game,” Reddit user “YeetLordSupreme” said. They used a number of different Ranger components for their test, each one increasing weapon damage. They found the Level 1 common Defender rifle did 286 damage with one bullet to a normal Scar trooper. Meanwhile, a Level 45 masterwork Ralner’s Blaze did 1,184 damage with one bullet against the same enemy.

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“Given these numbers, you might (reasonably) assume that the masterwork weapon will kill enemies faster, since it does more damage,” YeetLordSupreme said. “This is NOT the case!
Going back to the Scar troopers, the masterwork rifle takes six bullets to kill our Scar friend. Given the damage numbers, our Level 1 rifle should take around 5x more bullets to do the job. Guess how many it actually takes? Four.”

“I have tested this with various weapons and enemies, and while the numbers vary, the results are always the same: the Level 1 Defender rifle is by far the most effective weapon in my inventory. It melts literally fucking everything,” they added.

Further down the thread, BioWare technical design director Brenon Holmes suggested this is a bug and said the studio needs to investigate it further.

“We’ll need to investigate this, scaling systems are supposed to allow low level players to play with high level players to be effective against high-level enemies,” he said. “This is not intended, something ain’t right there.”

Anthem” launched on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on Feb. 22 and has suffered from a number of problems, including an issue that’s apparently causing some PlayStation 4 consoles to completely shut down in the middle of gameplay.

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