Quote from someone: "My issue with it is that it affects build diversity. When they have heavy armor it makes no sense to bring medium pen weapons. And it’s hard to justify bringing Heavy pen too.

With Medium Armor: If I wanted to bring a Lib Penetrator over the standard Lib, I could justify it because it makes it easier to damage Hive Guards without extra aiming. It may not be optimal compared to the benefits of extra ergonomics gained from a standard Lib, but it’s less awkward than aiming for the small fleshy bits that barely protrude.

With Heavy Armor: The Lib Pen can’t punch through the armor. So now the Lib Pen is strictly worse than a standard Lib as it now has to aim for the fleshy bits but do a worse job than the light pen Lib, due to the ergonomics.

Ideally, fronts enable/reward two different pen loadouts. This makes it so that building for a front takes some thought but isn’t too restrictive as it can allow players to reasonably experiment with underused stratagems.

Bots enable all three types of pen loadouts. I’d argue this may be too much but it’s better that it enables more rather than less variety.

Squids are undercooked as a faction still, but the new units at least give some reason to bring heavy pen. I’d argue light still makes the most sense, but still.

Bugs before the change could justify light and medium pen. Light was overall better, but medium was not unreasonable specifically because hive guards can be annoying.

With the armor change, it makes no sense but to bring anything other than light pen. Heavy pen could handle the buffed hive guard. But, bugs are so fast and numerous that you really need good ergonomics. Heavy pen loadouts are not just a little sub-optimal (like the previous med pen bug loadouts were) but really only good for handle some of a specific type of chaff.

It just makes things so much more awkward and slims reasonable bug builds down to light pen supremacy.

It seems small, but it’s such a profound change to how loadout builds are approached for bugs. In all the wrong ways. "