A21 Question: Perception Skill "Penetrator" - What All Actually Benefits From It?

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

Just a quick question in A21 regarding the Perception skill "Penetrator".

The brief description of the skill as a whole says that it allows spears, archery, and specialized ammo to find weak spots in a targets armor.

The descriptions for the individual level advancements talk about allowing "firearms" and archery to ignore a certain amount of a targets armor and allowing specific rifles to pierce through a number of targets and block hitpoints.

So my question overall is... what all does the skill ACTUALLY work with?
More specifically...

1 - Does it work with spears as the initial description says despite spears never being mentioned in the individual ranks?
1a - If it does work with spears what benefits do they get from the skill and its ranks?

2 - When the individual skill ranks mention "firearms" does it mean ALL firearms (like handguns, shotguns, machine guns, etc) or does it only count with the actual perception firearms which would be the rifles?

Thanks in advance for any information you can provide!

[aY227]

1 - no, spears have it's own penetration defined by book - vol. 6 and armor reduction defined by tier (30% for stone / 40% for iron and 50% for steel)
It's confusing af because in xml it looks like that:
https://imgur.com/a/lSJze8l
And I have no idea what Spears are doing there...

2 - yes, all - for armor reduction. But for penetration is as it says - perc guns.

(It's a bit confusing, so I can be wrong here)

[daggaz]

IzPrebuilt is doing an A21 spear run with penetrator and it DOES work.

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

Awesome! I really appreciate the information.

From the sound of the skill is damn handy if you use a spear then and with the armor penetration part affecting all guns that's even better. The skill is definitely better than its description makes it sound.

I wonder if they just left the extra details out of the skill rank descriptions to save text space or if it was just something they overlooked with all the changes they were making.

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

That was a big part of why I was confused about it. I knew there was a spear perk that did that already and the skill only mentioned spears in the overall description but not in the details of each skill rank.

[daggaz]

I'm loving the spear, BTW. Can't beat that range though you have to get gud with your aim. My only problem so far is with the murderburds as they are a bit easy to miss.