A player in MP has a grand total of 115 hit points (to adopt a common term.) 45 of these are body hit points, 70 are shield hit points. For reference, a single AR bullet does 7.5 points of damage, and a BR bullet does 6. A melee attack does 70 for most weapons, with some weapons (notably the Brute weapons) doing 72.
When entering a melee contest, the combined body and shield hit points are compared. If the difference is above a threshold, then one player is determined to have won decisively and is protected from death. After testing with a variety of weapons, we settled on a threshold of 26.5 hit points (slightly rounded.) This translates into 4+ AR bullets worth of damage to decisively win a melee contest, instead of simply having 1 more hit point than the other guy.
There is one more wrinkle to this: your invisible body hit points do recharge, but at a different rate from your shields. While ordinarily this is a non-issue (we’ve always made this largely transparent), it can affect the outcome of a contest. For those of you keeping score, body hit points start regenerating 10 seconds after last taking damage, at a rate of 9 hp/sec. So if your shields are up but you’re fresh from taking a beating, you could still be in trouble in a contest.
When entering a melee contest, the combined body and shield hit points are compared. If the difference is above a threshold, then one player is determined to have won decisively and is protected from death. After testing with a variety of weapons, we settled on a threshold of 26.5 hit points (slightly rounded.) This translates into 4+ AR bullets worth of damage to decisively win a melee contest, instead of simply having 1 more hit point than the other guy.
There is one more wrinkle to this: your invisible body hit points do recharge, but at a different rate from your shields. While ordinarily this is a non-issue (we’ve always made this largely transparent), it can affect the outcome of a contest. For those of you keeping score, body hit points start regenerating 10 seconds after last taking damage, at a rate of 9 hp/sec. So if your shields are up but you’re fresh from taking a beating, you could still be in trouble in a contest.
