Molotovs and Incendiary grenades used to deal different amounts of damage if the victim
was wearing Kevlar.
I did a video about this WAYYYY back in 2014 and it was recently topic of HOT debate on
Reddit since the Molotov damage appears to have changed since then, now ignoring armour
completely!
It even got a mention over on pcgamesn where they kindly referenced me, 3kluksphilip.
What’s going on?
To put it simply: both fire grenades now ignore Kevlar completely.
My first thought was ‘maybe I made a mistake in my original video’, since back then I
set fire to myself, when normally it’s affecting somebody else, on the other team.
Hopefully.
…but no, I set fire to myself again and it still didn’t do damage to the Kevlar.
Turns out that self-immolation is a reliable method of testing.
Nice one, younger Philip!
But this result means, with 100% certainty, that sometime between 2014 and now, both grenades
have been changed!
And I couldn’t find anything in the patchnotes about it.
If only somebody had tested it during this time…
…thanks, Summit.
And contrary to popular belief, he died to an incendiary, NOT a Molotov.
But we can go further and pinpoint the exact date that the fire grenades were changed!
In this match from January 22nd, armour is still affected.
But on the 29th you can see that it isn’t.
And then another member of Splyce burns to death from it, as seems to be tradition.
So the change occurred HERE, on the 27th of January.
This update fixed a bug with grenades, which would occasionally ignore armour.
And although it says ‘HE grenades’ specifically, the issue is oddly similar to the problems
we’re seeing with fire.
I can’t take credit for these discoveries.
Slothsquadron painstakingly found the matches from 2016 and pinpointed the January update
as the turning point.
And Dinoswarleafs made a video about the fire-kevlar issue last year!
Unfortunately, he felt he had got something wrong and quickly unlisted it again.
What confused him were examples from 2015, some ignoring Kevlar while others didn’t.
He couldn’t find an explanation for this, but it’s possible that he accidentally stumbled
across the issue that Valve patched the following January…
only in these cases, they affected fire rather than explosions!
Congratulations to Dinoswarleafs for suspecting that something was wrong first, long before
the rest of us cottoned on.
He has now listed the video again should you like to take a look.
Since my 2014 testing, the way fire does damage as it’s igniting has changed as well: in
my old test the player started taking damage the MOMENT the flames started, whereas now
there seems to be a bit of a delay.
And although the damage used to start sooner, it still took longer to kill since it also
began a lot less damaging, nibbling away at the armour a bit before moving more onto the
health.
With hindsight, setting fire to the ground below me doesn’t show the full picture since
it’s when the flames first ignite that they do the least damage.
Although you’d hope this would be the case for most people who take damage from fire
before moving to safety, there will always be the odd case where somebody runs into it
later on during the burn, where upon which they’d take the full 40 damage per second
straight away, in chunks of 8 damage.
So you know what?
I’m not too disappointed in Summit for this mistake if he was assuming the damage would
start slow and then build.
But it’s still an awesome clip.
So, what now?
Although this whole situation sounds like a total mess, in a way it’s solved itself.
Both grenades are now identical in function and potency.
The only question is whether it’s a mistake that wearing armour doesn’t reduce fire
damage.
If you don’t think it should then how the grenades are right now is totally fine.
One thing’s for sure though: it’s about time I redid my video on fire grenades.
To stop misinformation before it SPREADS.
Like… flames do.