It's been ̶o̶n̶e̶ zero days since Anthem's last hilarious, game-breaking bug—only this time players have discovered two. It's a double feature! Over on the Anthem subreddit, two of the more popular threads today involve a pair of bugs. One involves some bad math on the way Anthem calculates how much damage your abilities do, while the other lets your Storm javelin have infinite health.
After Anthem's 1.0.3 patch on Saturday—which players are already angry about because it fixed a bug that made loot drops far more common—redditor Gaidax discovered that unequipping low level gear somehow makes you more powerful. In their post, Gaidax explains that the new patch scales the damage of your abilities and melee hits based on the average level of all your items, which makes a certain amount of sense. The problem is that if you remove an item and leave that slot empty, the game doesn't count that as a zero and instead just removes that item from the calculation altogether.
So if I have two level 40 items and a level 20 item and I remove that level 20 item, my damage wouldn't scale as if my overall item level was 33.3. Instead, Anthem would mistakenly believe my item level is 40—a big boost in power.
This is only really feasible with Anthem's support gear: items equipped in component or ability slots are necessary to stay alive and attack enemies. But if you have a low level support item, you can freely ditch it and enjoy a much bigger boost in damage to your ultimate ability, combo damage, and melee attacks. Theoretically, you could even ditch all your items and just equip your most powerful Legendary and do insane damage, though you'll be sorely lacking in HP.
The second bug, which provides an infinite supply health, is even easier to exploit and far more game-breaking. "I abused the crap out of it and didn’t tell anyone, because I wanted to abuse it to farm gear," explains redditor 'MustacheSwagBag.' "I don’t play Anthem anymore, though, so those of you masochists out there still playing... Enjoy!"
How it works is simple: When playing the Storm javelin, all you have to do is swap your weapon a split second after triggering your ultimate ability. Yes, this will cancel your ultimate, but it'll also restore your shields and health to full, and reset the cooldown on your jetpack. You can do this multiple times, as long as your ultimate meter is fully charged. Sure, it means you can't use an ultimate, but hey, any time your health dips you can quickly perform this trick and be back in fighting shape. No more waiting for your teammates to revive you.
I tried the glitch to see how easy it was to pull off and, well, it's very easy. You don't need particularly good timing. You can watch the video below to see it in action.
Understandably, this double-helping of bugs has commentors in both threads a little exasperated. This comes just after players discovered the level-one starter rifle was the most powerful weapon in the game and a host of smaller, but equally baffling bugs. In particular, players are pissed about how stingy Anthem's endgame loot drops are and have even organized a boycott hoping to prompt a response from BioWare.
