Doom Eternal Precision Bolt isn't as precise anymore following Update 6 & the community is not pleased

The heavy cannon is perhaps one of the most important weapons on Doom Eternal. Our mighty Slayer first stumbles across it in the Hell on Earth level after the second demon encounter.

While the gun is pretty meh when barebones, it turns into a deadly beast capable of taking out all fodder demons with just a single shot when upgraded with the Precision Bolt.

However, the recently released Update 6 has ‘nerfed’ the gun a bit. For the uninitiated, Update 6 was released on June 29 and along with finally adding ray tracing support to Doom Eternal, it also made some under-the-radar changes to patch out a few game-breaking exploits.

So anyway, one of these changes has been to the Precision Bolt weapon mod. Following the update, it is now much harder to quick scope demons which could previously be killed effortlessly even if one’s aim was a bit off.

Due to this change, there has been much discussion [1, 2] within the Doom Community with most concluding that the precision bolt has been broken with the update and some even calling it the ‘Imprecision Bolt.’

Did they make the ballista and precision bolt harder to quickscope with? Playing through the new master level and I swear something feels off about these two. Like shots that would have normally hit are just barely missing.
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I thought something was off. It’s so disorienting when you dump so many hours into a game and something doesn’t feel right after the update. 95% of the shots with the PB that usually kill fodder no longer do that after this update.
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If you are one of such players, then know that you aren’t crazy and that there indeed have been some adjustments done to the Precision Bolt on Doom Eternal. Although they have been done rather quietly and never even made it to the Update 6 patch notes.

Id Software really bamboozled us all with this one!

However, there’s one thing that we have likely gotten wrong here. After hours of toying around with the Precision Bolt by bullying scores of poor Imps, I concluded that the change is deliberate and not actually a bug.

The update has seemingly reduced the size of the hitboxes to almost that of the exact size of the demons. Bullets that previously registered a hit even if the aim was way off now just whiz past all enemies.

You can see this in the following video:

While the change does take the stakes much higher by making the aiming mechanism more realistic, it is ill-suited for the extremely fast gameplay that Doom Eternal is known for.

A quickscope is now much harder to get right resulting in more missed shots than hits. This messes up the flow of the combat since you now have to actually scope in and aim rather than mindlessly taking a shot in an instant.

But there is a silver lining in this as well. You see, large hitboxes may be fun but they are like a bad habit to which if one grows too familiar, can spoil one’s aiming ability on not just Doom Eternal but other games as well.

It’s almost as if the game wants us to be better players.

However, Id Software is known to take feedback seriously, and given the backlash to the Update 6 Precision Bolt changes on Doom Eternal, there is already speculation doing rounds that the adjustments will be reversed.

Still, there doesn’t seem to be any official word from the game studio yet so let’s just hold our horses. Guess we will have to switch to Micro Missiles or simply get used to the update in the meantime.

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