Anthem’s starting rifle may be the strongest gun in the game right now

Anthem’s loot scaling has never felt quite right. No matter how much more powerful higher level gear is, it never feels like you’re getting noticably stronger. Reddit user, YeetLordSupreme may have cracked the reason why.

According to YeetLordSupreme and their experiments, Anthem appears to scale damage and enemy health based on the weapon you are using to shoot each enemy. So, a max-level Masterwork weapon might say it’s doing more damage than a lower level gun, but the reality is that it takes fewer bullets from a level one gun to kill the same enemy.

In this case, YeetLordSupreme tried out the Level 45 Masterwork Ralner’s Blaze and a level one Common Defender rifle. While the game seems to indicate that the Ralner’s does more damage, via the numbers that appear when you shoot enemies, it takes six bullets to kill the enemy. Meanwhile the same type of enemy only took four bullets from the level one Defender rifle. Several other users popped into the thread with similar experiments and found the same results: using a lower level weapon was actually killing enemies quicker than high level weapons.

The thread immediately drew the attention of BioWare which responded with a message from technical design director, Brenon Holmes. “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. This is not intended, something ain’t right there ...” Holmes said in a comment.

This is a problem that BioWare is likely to address sometime in the near future. For now it seems that the best way to play Anthem may be with starting weapons.