Treyarch’s inclusion of the “Damage Done” statistic to the Call of Duty scoreboard in Black Ops 4 multiplayer allows competitive Call of Duty fans, players, and casters to dive deeper into a player’s production on a map. Prior to Black Ops 4, we could only track a players’ kills within a certain time frame, regardless of their contribution to pick up the kill. Because of this, kills became the “backbone” of traditional first-person shooter statistics, and the only way to measure performance. Although there are three separate game modes with varying objectives in the Call of Duty World League, the primary objective of CoD can be simplified to killing the enemy team. However, with the ability to see the amount of damage a player inflicts, our viewpoint of each player’s contribution might drastically change.

Don’t get me wrong, kills are still a very important statistic because a kill will always result in the opposing player being removed from the map, ultimately surrendering their map position and, possibly, their entire team’s map control. Also, a kill is awarded to the player that ultimately finishes off the enemy, realistically, the necessary goal of the engagement. On the other hand, although dealing damage to an opponent can drastically change the way they play a situation, the opponent will always have the ability to stay on the map through healing. Dealing damage is required for a kill, but a kill is only one possible result of damage. Therefore, damage becomes the most basic statistic afforded to us in terms of output because of how integral it is in the process of securing a kill.

With the addition of damage, I want to highlight some potentially pivotal metrics that could arise and what their implications would be. Here at codstats.gg, we will be aiming to provide each of the following four stats for all tournaments in the upcoming season.

1. Heal Percentage (Heal %) - or the percentage of damage dealt to a team that was healed. This metric is calculated using the following formula:

   Heal % = (Enemy Damage - Enemy Kills*150) / Enemy Damage

   This formula is very straightforward: take all the damage the enemy does and enemy kills as reported at the end of the game and assume each kill required dealing 150 damage; the difference between damage needed for all kills and damage actually done is the damage a team must have healed. This stat allows us to see how efficiently a team stays alive in gunfights through healing. We can expect that a team that is able to withstand a heavy amount of damage from a team through healing is staying alive more, and in turn, maintaining map presence and pressure. The only limitation to this stat is that it would not take into account the healing from Crash’s specialist ability health boost that instantly puts everyone alive on his team to 200 health.

2. Average Damage Per Round (ADR) - a measure of production in Search and Destroy. If you are familiar with CS:GO, this would be exactly the same as their ADR statistic; however, one would need to take into account a player’s ability to heal throughout the round in Black Ops 4. Despite this limitation, ADR will still be a widely used stat throughout the lifetime of this game simply because of how important it is to deal damage in Search and Destroy. Having to heal slows enemies and can ruin a set-play. Additionally, a combination of ADR with Heal % (as mentioned above) would give ADR even more context.

3. Damage Per Kill (DPK) - DPK will allow us to see which players are finishing kills versus those that are not finishing kills. Theoretically, the higher a player’s DPK, the less they are finishing kills. Conversely, the lower a player’s DPK the more they are finishing kills because they are dealing less damage to opponent’s but being awarded the kills. Note that for this stat, we will necessarily use traditional kills rather than EKIA, which would credit assists and kills. DPK is an individual stat that could illuminate the dynamics between players on a team, as in, who are the finishers and who are the players most likely living longer and dealing more dispersed damage.

4. Percentage of Team Damage (PTD) - or the percentage of a team’s total damage was dealt by a given player. Similar to the “Slayer” statistic, or Kills per 10 min. of respawn game modes, you will find that the more aggressive players will top this leaderboard simply because the more engagements a player takes, the more opportunities they have to deal damage. While aggro players will tend to have higher PTD, we believe that the proportion of damage dealt by the AR’s may be even more important. In Overwatch, a similar stat measuring the percentage of a team’s kills a player contributed to (PTK), winstonslab.com found that the PTK of non-aggro, damage-loving players was actually more indicative of successful teams. That is, supporting players being more involved in kills lead to greater success. Likewise, if sub-players have to deal all the damage, a team may struggle.

Here’s an example of how these stats would look like in the context of an actual game, albeit the numbers were taken from a Hardpoint bot match in custom games.

Looking at the stats output, Germogenov and Bianchi led their team in damage (and non-surprisingly, kills) with PTD of 23.02% and 30.27%, respectively. Germogenov, however, had a very low DPK of 135.6 compared to Bianchi at 171.8 (+36.2 DPK). If we take a look at the DPK across the board for both teams, we see that Villasenor of Black Ops had an insanely high DPK of 297.64 compared to his teammates who were all very dispersed, two of which had DPK well below 150. On the other side, the DPK for Mercs were much more even with three players in the 170s, one at 160, and one at 143. The winning team, Black Ops, also had a higher Heal Percentage at 9.51% damage healed compared to the 8.55% healed by Mercs.

With CWL Vegas just a few days away, we are excited to debut these statistics throughout the Black Ops 4 season on our revitalized website, codstats.gg!