For context, I used this exclusively on Heavy class in Absolute difficulty so far.


As for the bug, the perk "Able Reload" does not seem to work. After firing some rounds, the equipped weapon fails to reload upon activating Iron Halo, and after deactivating it.


Regarding the feel of the new Heavy Bolt Rifle (HBR), it feels like a softer hitting, more precise Heavy Bolter (HB). With the HBR, lining up a crowd of minoris and gliding my mouse horizontally across the wave in front of me cleaves through crowds just as effectively as a HB with the penetration and accuracy it offers - and often feels more satisfying - though even with all the headshot perks, it still feels a bit soft on majoris and up. This would be ok if it had the ammo reserves to back it up, but it doesn't have this. It's easy to run dry in Chaos missions like Reliquary, which isn't often a problem with other Heavy weapons. I feel as if an additional reserve magazine would do favours here when leaning into the ammo related perks on the HBR tree and playing around the Magazine Restoraton perk, specifically when paired with the Alpha (ammo) variants of the HBR.

Additionally, I feel the description for Tactical Precision perk is confusing. It says "Headshots deal 20 more Damage. Non-Headshot Damage decreases by 10". It doesn't mention a percentile change, so if this is 20 units of damage, how does this translate to a way the player can understand? Units of damage isn't something you can see in-game AFAIK so I'm not sure if this is a big or small adjustment to damage output.


As it stands, I don't think HBR can do anything the HB with accuracy perks / version cannot do. By taking HBR, you are unable to regenerate contested health effectively in ranged combat, nor can you dispatch extremis and terminus quite like the other Heavy weapons. Majoris are ok to deal with, in short fights. Minoris feel good to fight. I also feel it's a shame that some perks don't translate to HBR, I understand it's fundamentally a weapon that should be usable by more than Heavy, but it would have been cool to see perks like Heavy's Strategic Stand allow for heavy stance on this weapon. With HB + Strategic S. I can go toe-to-toe with a missile terminator and come out unscathed.