Strike Force Heroes: Gadgets Guide

A very simple gadget to start out, but with plenty to talk about. Bull’s Burger raises your max health by 30.
Which may not seem impressive or even like a lot to some, but the fact that it’s a flat boost comes with its own benefits and drawbacks, firstly that this makes it proportionately better for squishier classes than Kevlar. An assassin will get nearly a 20% health increase while tanks are just shy of 10%. This not only potentially raises kill thresholds and ttks but also increases the regen speed of the player as it is based on the max health of the user, which also plays in part of making it particularly useful for a health regen build on medic. Not to mention this also increases the health regained from pickups. Commando and Tank do not benefit from it nearly as much because of their larger health pools, as even with the improved regen, the effective health damage resist grants actually makes healing more effective with damage resist than having more raw health to regen more.

Power Cell increases the duration of abilities by 75%, and is not nearly as conditional as some may think, there are some you obviously shouldn’t use it on, like instants, which are actually less than useless because they increase the delay before you can get charge on your abilities again as a form of “duration.” Ricochet is a pretty solid choice for this even for the short duration, although it may be preferable on ricochet but worse true tank. A great side option for abilities with longer durations as you get more bang for your buck, especially commando with ammo wizard or tear gas as it’s reverse maximum overdrive but a lot easier to charge, so oppressing the enemy longer is a huge leg up over them. However, bear in mind as of v1.11 power cell is bugged and doesn’t give increased duration on drone but dismisses it around the normal time, while also not allowing you to charge until the modified duration.

Kevlar’s definitely a gadget you won’t want to get until it scales to be something worth anything. Kevlar grants the player 15% damage reduction. This makes it a superior option for Tank and Commando overall and allow tank to mitigate large sums of damage stacked ontop of other damage reduction is an effective way to lengthen your survivability to an infuriating degree as an aggressive adrenaline shotgun tank, a Heavy Armor shield tank, or anything in between.

Personally, I think the best of the survivability options in SFHR: EM Shield reduces damage from a single source by 40% if it would take more than half your max health. This thing is a life saver, a hard gate on getting one shot by a lot of weapons, I only think it’s not particularly useful on tank because they basically have one built in and can’t make use of it if you’re playing the class… Tanky.
But this ends up being a good choice for tanky and squishy classes alike depending on the circumstance, assassins can use it to turn what should be an instakill into a free blur, medics and commandos can eat an extra rocket or particularly strong magnum round, and unlike iron will, it has no cooldown and procs specifically against burst, which is usually what will kill you in this game. Just be wary you are far less able to benefit from this at low health than any of the other options.

Tactical Holster is something you’ll see being used by someone with some sort of devious plan, and you may not know what yet. This gadget lets the player equip a second primary instead of a secondary at a -10% damage penalty. One of the more common usages you may see of this is the assassin melee sidearm, as the other hidden drawback of this build is you no longer have an unlimited ammo alternative, and the good melee options are strong even at -10% damage, and provide mobility. It also has some legitimacy as a tank shield sidearm, or a tank using melee to close the distance and finish an enemy off with the shotgun. Obviously the possibilities don’t end there, but this gadget pretty much expands your class’ potential at the cost of a gadget slot, and a sidearm, and it’s really up to you whether or not its worth it in a scenario.

Hard Hat. Look, I think Hard Hat is an okay starting gadget, but that’s about it, it has a high base bonus, and scales pretty well for what it does, but before I get too deep into it, the details. Hard Hat reduces the bonus damage from crits and headshots by 75%. Now read that carefully, the *bonus* damage of crits and headshots, both of which will still be doing their normal damage along with an admittedly reduced bonus. What I think makes hard hat weak is that it is dependent on headshot and crit bonuses to deny damage. Sure, EM Shield is dependent on burst to reduce damage, but burst isn’t uncommon, meanwhile there are two classes in the game that have basically no dependency on crits nor headshots. And the only things that can crit to any reliable degree are melee weapons, and they don’t need crits when they’re dealing a bit over 100 damage at level 30, and there’s still a good chance they don’t crit, meaning you potentially mitigate no damage.

We are going to briefly address that this was probably supposed to be a star badge that says “xp” on it like in sfh3 and not the credit card as they’re two different things but have been merged together, and now that we have, we are going to move on. Novice badge grants the user +15% xp and cash while equipped.

Tactical Reload is definitely one of those “Universally Good” options, if you don’t know what to do with a loadout and it’s not melee/minigun, you can’t go wrong slapping a tactical reload on your gadget slot. Tactical Reload increases reload speed by 90% when you reload an empty mag. This makes long reload animations substantially shorter, and pretty much increases the attack speed of single-fire weapons such as the crossbow, and nearly all the explosives, and stacking that on top of weapon specialist on commando allows you to rapid fire those options.

A very circumstantial gadget, but I would be hard-pressed to call a bad one. The bipod improves recoil and accuracy by 30% whenever crouching. This gadget is very much dependent on you having a weapon with a good amount of range, as increasing accuracy and reducing recoil are both things that don’t increase your range but raise your effective range, basically meaning the threshold where you can reliably hit enemies center-mass or with headshots. It can be pretty strong on some sniper rifles, and makes absolute precision redundant, which is actually a good thing as it means it frees up your space for some of assassin’s other passives, all of which can provide things a gadget never could. It also allows you to have laser accuracy with the fal while crouching, especially if you’re utilizing jack of all trades’ recoil reduction as well. The obvious drawback is that you are limited to crouching while utilizing its effects, leaving you vulnerable to anyone who can close in on you or retaliate from your range. It’s a very positioning-dependent gadget, and has more uses on some maps over others.

Full Auto is the direct inverse of bipod in playstyle, but is also a circumstantial pick. Full Auto gives thhe user +15% fire rate, and makes all weapons equipped automatic. This means if you hold down m1, semi auto guns will keep firing until you stop or they have to reload. Honestly, the difference in fire rate in regards of an assault rifle is in my opinion not as substantial as being able to have your ammo refilled faster like tactical reload, there are few weapons that I want fully automatic that are semi, because the increased headshot modifier of those weapons are naturally going to make you want to take measures to offset all the recoil to make sure your damage isn’t actually being reduced. Instead, I think the primary effect is much more worth commenting on. The fire rate increase can be pretty useful for weapons that don’t mind low accuracy or recoil to begin with but also have a plentiful mag size, complimenting a more up-close aggressive playstyle on lmgs, melee weapons, and pump action shotguns, als since you can still tap fire, this gadget can be one of the few offensive ones that have some use in gun game no matter the weapon, so don’t dismiss this gadget. And who knows? Having a fully auto 50 cal just might be what you need in certain scenarios.

If you do any multiplayer, Hollow Point is one you’ll see ran frequently, and… Well, for good reason. Hollow Point increases damage against enemies with full hp by 30%. This pretty much makes it the perfect option for snipers, melee, most explosives, and harder hitting magnums. Enemies that aren’t full health typically are injured enough burst options will dispose of them quickly, so this contests one of the more common obstacles. Just be wary of iron will tanks and EM Shields.

Actually not as bad as you might think, but again, a niche option. respawn flare decreases respawn time by 50%. Some people might misconstrue this as halving the respawn process, although that’s a bit deceptive, the respawning animation is still the same speed so that delay should be accounted for, but halving the countdown drops the amount of time waiting for said animation to a couple seconds. Usually you don’t want to plan around your death, but in pretty much any mode other than death matches this can come in clutch for maintaining map control or objective relevance by returning significantly faster than normal. Think about it, coming back immediately after losing juggernaut raises the chances of stealing a juggernaut kill from someone else, it makes you able to return into gun game sooner, it means on death you’ll be much quicker to respond to a cap attempt in ctf. But most importantly, respawn flare halves charge loss on death. In most scenarios, it’s better to take an offensive or survivability option over respawn flare, but in scenarios you expect to die often and have a longer charging ability, respawn flare can shine where others would be ineffective.

A pretty good option that may seem redundant at first glance. Bayonet executes enemies damaged below 8% max hp. This gives a window into executing enemies in clutch moments where the difference in ttk could be frame-by-frame, some people probably would just prefer the sheer damage of hollow point, or the increased DPS for auto weapons full auto gives, or even kevlar to potentially raise the gap of survivability, but bayonet still has its purposes, namely finishing off a shield opponent, or maybe you got a blur assassin *just* above the threshold of death and this may seal the deal for your less bursty weapons. Definitely not the best offensive option, but it does have its benefits. All of this is under the pretense that bayonet works. Because it currently doesn’t.

This is just worse Respawn Flare. No, I genuinely mean that, I can’t think of any redeeming trait this has over respawn flare. With tactical radio, you no longer lose charge on death, but abilities charge 25% slower. If that 25% slower charge wasn’t a dealbreaker, bear in mind respawn flare already reduces charge loss on death, it doesn’t prevent it, sure, but it also gets you back on the field faster, and doesn’t reduce your charge rate in the process. The only way tactical radio could outdo respawn flare is if you’re dying so often you’re only getting small increments of charge, and if that’s the case, I promise there are more effective ways to tackle 18-2.

A personal favorite of mine, not necessarily a survivability option, but it rewards a player’s long life span if used correctly. Simple, but elegant. Ammo Pouches increases spare ammo by 100%. Essentially doubling your backup ammo for your primary, this may seem like a small thing but I can’t emphasize enough how little ammo you carry in remastered, most weapons carry 2 mags worth of spare ammo, and depending on the length of the match, that can bottleneck you into playing around riskier areas with ammo pickups, just look at caves, the ammo is up top where most of the spawning is with no health pack in sight. Or Missile, which currently has no ammo pickups at all! For maps that do have ammo pickups, spare ammo comes with another benefit: spare ammo increases the amount you get from ammo pickups. This means when you pick up a small ammo pack, you’ll get two magazines of rifles rounds instead of one, this is probably my personal favorite gadget to run in campaign and some challenge modes because of how much freedom it gives you as an extension of the ammo you now carry.

That’s all the gadgets covered as of v1.11 in detail, hopefully they’ll release binoculars soon so I can talk about those. Hope this helped.