Weapons aren’t the only things you’ll need to look for when you land in The Arena – there’s a variety of gear you’ll want to pick up as well. Helmets, armor, backpacks, medical gear, and more could mean the difference between life and death! Your head is your most valuable weapon, so give yourself some protection from damage with a helmet! You’ve got two choices here, but which one you pick up is entirely up to you – both helmet styles offer you the same level of protection to your head and face, so it’s just a matter of how stylish you want to look. In fact, it’s probably best to pick up a few helmets – you may need another if you get in a firefight, or you can even shred one to help make makeshift armor (more on that below). With the best durability and protection available, laminated armor will help absorb some of those pesky bullets and give you a leg up as you take out your opponents. Both laminated armor and makeshift armor provide full-body coverage, including your precious arms and legs.
While makeshift armor may provide less protection than laminated armor, it’s still leagues better than becoming Swiss cheese. You can craft makeshift armor in the Crafting menu – pick up and shred a spare helmet and military backpack, grab a roll of duct tape, and you’ll have all the ingredients you need. A backpack is the perfect way to tote the supplies you’ll need to claw your way to the top. Pick one up to give yourself a moderate amount of additional carrying capacity, allowing you to bring along more guns, ammo, and medical gear. This is your best option to help you carry everything you need for survival during those long-haul journeys across The Arena. A military backpack adds the greatest amount of additional carrying capacity. Plus, grab an extra one and shred it for some of the ingredients you'll need to craft makeshift armor. Searched high and low, but can’t find any backpacks? Pick up shirts and other fabric items you see lying around and shred them to get enough cloth to make yourself a little satchel.
They’re back in style, we swear! The waist pack is an upgrade from the belt pouch you begin the match with, so pick one up for a small amount of additional carrying capacity. You can wear a waist pack and a backpack at the same time for added storage. You’ll start off with a few bandages already in your inventory, and they’ll help when you’re in a bind. It only takes a short time to apply a bandage (and it’ll help staunch your bleeding), but you’ll only recover a small amount of health. It may also take several bandages to fully stop your bleeding. Want to stock up on more bandages? Find items like shirts, waist packs, and backpacks around The Arena and shred them. Then, use the scraps of cloth you have to craft bandages in the Crafting menu. First aid kits can be your lifeline – literally! While it takes the longest amount of time to use one, they’ll help you recover the largest amount of health and their effects will last the longest. A first aid kit will also stop all levels of bleeding (no matter the severity) right away once applied.
Definitely stock up on these, since they’re your best way to recover after an intense battle. Rare and therefore valuable, procoagulant is the fastest way to stop all levels of bleeding. You can only nab these bad boys in one of two ways – find one in a military crate after an airdrop, or craft one yourself out of field bandages and a first aid kit. This grenade contains disconcerting and dangerous tear gas. Enemies standing in the gas cloud will take damage over time and have difficulty seeing you. Just your typical grenade – pull the pin and throw it at your enemies for a hearty explosion. Toss one of these to deploy a large cloud of smoke that will help obscure your movements – extremely helpful for getting out of a tough situation or giving you a visual leg up on your opponents. While this won’t do any damage, it’ll temporary incapacitate everyone in the area with a blinding flash of light. This should give you enough time to head for cover or nab that headshot.
Fire in a bottle! Lob this at your enemy to catch them and the surrounding area on fire – but don’t stray too close, or you’ll go up in flames too. These are the shoes you’ll start off with in Fort Destiny. Keep it sneaky with this quiet footwear, and your enemies will have a hard time hearing you swoop in for the kill. If speed is your game in King of the Kill, pick up a pair of conveys. When you’re running from area to area looking for the best loot and hunting down other players, you’ll want the added speed boost that this footwear provides. Are you the adventurous type that likes to jump down and startle your enemies for the kill? Equip some workboots for decreased fall damage, but watch out – they'll hear you coming from a mile away.You’ll start the match with a pair of binoculars, so hang on to them – they’ll help you spot enemies from afar, letting you recon and form a better plan of attack or defense. Which gear helps you survive the longest?
Share your thoughts with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Discord!For those that don’t know me, my name is bronstahd (Garrett Fern), and I’m a combat and gameplay designer working on H1Z1: King of the Kill. Tomorrow we are releasing an update we’ve internally termed “the combat update” which is the result of a focused push toward improving combat and related gameplay systems. I wanted to spend some time talking about several of these changes in greater detail to give some insight into what’s changed and why we’re excited about this update’s release. We’ve continued working to improve the consistency of the shotgun. Our goal is that the shotgun should be a powerful, up close threat. This update further tightens the shotgun’s spread of fire, making it more powerful up close. In addition, the shotgun’s damage will fall off over distance, so it isn’t too powerful at range. The feedback we’ve seen has been positive so far, so we’re really looking forward to seeing these changes on the live servers.
Recently, we added Cone of Fire adjustments based on your character's movement state. We did this because, put simply, guns were performing far too accurately when running and jumping. Philosophically, our belief has always been that aiming down sight should be the most accurate method of aiming; this change made sure that's the case. However, it was also possible to aim down sight while jumping, which also allowed for tremendous accuracy in a way that didn't make sense. This update addresses that issue by preventing ADS while jumping or falling. This has also allowed us to ease up on some previous combat restrictions around movement and it will now be possible to shoot and ADS directly from sprint. You'll no longer have to wait for your character to slow down and suffer a delay when trying to shoot. This update also contains a lot of general weapon polish. In no particular order, here's what you should expect to see: • Historically, melee weapons have been underwhelming and of little use.
As a first step toward addressing this, we've increased melee weapon damage across the board. This won't entirely fix melee weapons, but it should be a noticeable improvement: • Since our last change to the AK-47 we've been listening to the community and the feedback has been pretty clear: it's not powerful enough when compared to the AR15. We've been internally testing a faster fire rate for the AK-47 which we'll be rolling out with this update. Here's what you should expect to see: We think this change will create nice some trade-offs between the weapons and make the AK-47 a compelling choice once again. • Increased the damage of the R380 from 15 -> 17 to reduce the number of shots required to kill with it by one. • Decreased the damage of the M9 from 19 -> 18 to allow time to apply healing after taking five shots. Previously it wasn't possible to apply any type of healing before bleeding to death. • We've made some adjustments to the M47 Gas Grenade that should make them far more viable as a thrown weapon option:
• Depending on the weapon, it used to take anywhere between 0.5 seconds to 1 second to change from one weapon to another. This time has been reduced to 0.15 seconds for all weapons. • Weapon slots will always be assigned the same number, regardless of whether or not there are weapons in other slots. We believe that when a player dies it should be very clear to them what killed them. That’s not always the case currently. As a first step towards remedying this, we’ve added a damage log to the death screen that will display how much damage the attack that killed you did and whether or not it was a headshot. Moving forward, the plan is to re-work the death screen so we can display even more information about cause of death. We've also made some changes to the way Armor works that should improve the reliability of body armor: • The entire body (chest, arms, and legs) is protected by Body Armor. • Helmets still protect the head. Hit reaction animations would cause the other character's head moved, often preventing a quick follow-up shot from registering as a headshot when it should.
Other characters will no longer flinch out of the way when shot. We've made a couple of improvements to the reticle. • We’ve added a new element to the reticle that increases in size to display Cone of Fire information based on player movement. • Improved color saturation and added clearer outline which should make seeing the reticle, even small reticles, much easier. • In most cases, projectiles now originate from the camera rather than the weapon model. This change significantly reduces projectile collisions with medium-height cover like fences, rocks, cars, and similar objects and also improves projectile performance when fighting uphill or against players on top of buildings. In some cases, it was possible for one player to have clear line of sight on another player, due to the camera being offset above their head, while actually being obscured from the other player’s view. We felt this would be unfair, and in these cases (generally, when your character is very close to medium-height cover) projectiles will still originate from the weapon model.
We’ve added feedback to the reticle to make it clear when this is happening. In this update we're also adding some new crafting recipes to King of the Kill. We're pretty happy with the current scarcity of Body Armor, and like that finding it feels special. However, the changes to Body Armor outlined above meant that players without Body Armor would be at an even bigger disadvantage than before when fighting against an armored player. For that reason, we've added a new crafted armor, Makeshift Armor, which will block one shot and can be worn as a fall-back to Body Armor. • Motorcycle helmets can be “shredded” to provide armor scrap • Military Backpacks can be “shredded” to provide composite fabric Procoagulant is a quick-use item that can be used to quickly stop bleeding without any additional healing effects. Components: 10 Field Bandages, 1 Tactical First Aid Kit. Obviously, explosive arrows are very powerful, so we'll be keeping a close eye on feedback for this recipe and monitoring its impact on game balance.
Components: 5 M67 Frag Grenades, 5 Wooden Arrows, 1 Duct Tape, 5 12 Gauge Buckshot Shells. • There are some small item spawn changes that support the additions to crafting: With these changes we wanted to create some more interesting choice when selecting footwear. To accomplish this, we're introducing a new type of footwear and making some tweaks to the existing options. Heavy Shoes (boots & variants) Speedy Shoes (conveys & variants) We’ve long had problems with delays in picking up items. It isn’t really a combat related thing, but it was a big enough deal that we wanted to pursue a fix for this update. The time it takes to pick up items, open doors, and perform other interactions has been greatly improved and is now nearly instantaneous. Items should be more consistently highlighted during looting Removed dynamic weapon slot numbers from the UI The team auto-fill button is back and should behave correctly Fixed a bug where hit-markers would occasionally get stuck on