My take on the helmets and armor in the game.
In my opinion, the way the helmets work in this game is out of place. I do not like the damage reduction at all because it adds randomness and inconsistency in fights, the "goal" of a competitive game like Apex is to improve after playing over and over so that you learn to master your aim, movements, mechanics, know the map and different legends etc...
But you also learn to know the damages dealt by weapons, how they perform and what they are able to do.
Here comes the problem I have with helmets, like I said earlier it adds randomness and inconsistency, I like the idea of being able to know exactly how many hits I need to down an opponent, it works with body hits as you are able to know what type of armor the opponent has when you shoot him but I think that the damage reduction of helmets makes it more worth to focus on body hits than headshots, Let's say you have a Tier 3 helmet, it will reduce damages by 25% which means that a R301 will deal 21 damages instead of 28 for a headshot, considering that the head is often quite difficult to aim on moving targets, I think the damage reduction makes headshots less rewarding which should not be the case.
I have an idea about the helmets, remove the damage reduction and just make it like body armors, it would add shield bars when you pick a helmet, so instead of having 4 shield bars you would have 8.
Tier 1 Body armor would add 2 Bars Tier 1 Helmet would add 2 Bars
Tier 2 Body armor would add 3 Bars Tier 2 Helmet would add 3 Bars
Tier 3 Body armor would add 4 Bars Tier 3 Helmet would add 4 Bars
What it would do is:
1/ Add more consistency to the weapon damages and maybe even make weapons easier to balance because the damages would always be the same.
2/ Add to the power / progression curve that the devs talked about, you would have to actually look for both Tier 3 armor and helmet to be full shield capacity.
3/ Add new "levels" of maximum shield capacity, right now there is 2, 3 and 4 ( which would be like 4, 6 and 8 with the 8 bars ); with this armor change there would be 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 max armor capacity.
4/ Remove the luck factor of finding a Tier 3 armor right away, because the Tier 3 armor would only give half of what it was giving before since you would need the helmet to complete it.
5/ It would make looting and fighting to get better armors much more important to have better odds for late game.
So basically in order to have the same level of shield capacity that you previously had with just the armor equiped, there you would need both armor and helmet.
The only problem it would cause is the hitmarker armor type indicator, because you could have a Tier 1 armor and a Tier 3 helmet which would mean that you have 2+4=6 Bars, but since you have a white body armor then what color should be displayed when someone is shooting you ? That I do not know.
Edit: Damage reduction is good on games where you can get one shot with some weapons if you do not have a helmet, but Apex is not like this since only the Kraber is able to do so.
