Removing Anthem Javelin gear makes you more powerful
In what's becoming a weekly occurrence, Anthem players have discovered another bizarre scaling bug.
Following the release of Anthem's 1.03 patch, players have discovered another inconsistent scaling problem. Reddit user Gaidax found that removing your support item massively increases melee, combo, and ultimate damage.
In the patch, BioWare made a change to scaling in Anthem in response to a different problem that caused players with level one weapons to do more damage than those using end-game loot. With this change, Anthem now uses the average level of items you have equipped to scale the damage of your ultimate ability, melee, and combo.
This is all well and good, but the problem is that the game doesn't account for missing components. Instead, it just removes the empty slot from the equation. In other words, you can trick the game into thinking you have high-level items when you actually have a mix. By leaving slots empty, and only equipping high-level items, the game will massively increase your damage output.
As the user notes, you could technically also equip one powerful component or ability - if it's the most powerful you have - to achieve a similar result, but this will greatly impact your health and armour, since component items typically come with bonuses to these stats.
The easiest way to achieve this is to take out your low-level support item. That way, you'll continue to keep the health, and shield bonuses that come with components, while tricking the game into only taking your most powerful items into account.
In other Anthem news, players are organising a week-long boycott to voice their disdain for loot drop rates in the game, especially at the highest levels.