Clockwork Soldier Oil Tank Bug?

[Tony]

Hey. I'm playing as Emily on hard, I'm in the Grand Palace, and for the first time I tried taking down Clockwork Soldiers by destroying their whale oil tank. Before, I just jumped on them from above, fried them with stun mines, or used grenades. Now I found that these oil tanks seem completely indestructible. I tried this on two soldiers already: I shoot the head off with a crossbow bolt, then shoot of the backplate. Then, no matter how much damage I throw at the oil tank (with a single blow), it won't burst, and the soldier will instead retaliate. I tried normal bolts, incendiary bolts, pistol shots, charged sword swings, normal sword swings, it just won't do anything. I even tried lowering the difficulty but that did not seem to have an effect. Is this a bug that just happened to occur twice in a row or am I overlooking something?

Is knocking off the backplate with a hardened crossbow bolt and then striking the tank from closely behind the soldier with a charged sword strike aimed directly at the tank not enough? The Dishonored 2 Wiki states that "Clockwork Soldiers can be killed by a single blow from any weapon to the whale oil tank in the back." That is clearly not the case for me, and others have posted that they strike the exposed oil tank "a few times", which also seems to contradict that statement. It just seems odd that something is marked so clearly as a weak spot and then seems like it eats damage.

[Zekiran]

On hard, it might be slightly different than normal?

Also, do you have the Hardened bolts? That may be the key for this.

[Tony]

Unfortunately I have no save to give it another try right now, but I might simply have missed my sword strikes, as they seem to not strike at the center, instead I may have actually hit the side of the soldier. However, I don't see how I would know how close I'd have to be for this to work, since this pretty much relies on getting it on the first try. I've maxed out the crossbow upgrade-wise, and changed the difficulty, to no avail. I'll just try to get it to work with the next soldier I come across, for now, it's just too much of a coincidence to be a bug. Thanks for the reply, though!

[Zekiran]

Don't forget you also can upgrade the gun to have magnetized bullets which do things to them too. I think I've used my gun like... half a dozen times, I keep forgetting it lol.

[Tony]

Solved it. It is indeed a bug, but a very curious one. The central whale oil tank of a clockwork soldier does indeed die to any blow by any weapon, but ONLY if the backplate was taken off by any means OTHER THAN through a crossbow bolt. If hardened is a necessary condition I cannot tell. I've tried everything now, both in destroying the backplate and in then attacking the whale oil tank. Any combination of weapons for both jobs works perfectly fine, but only when you dismantle the backplate with a crossbow bolt does the whale oil tank become completely indestructible as a result, no matter which weapon you then choose to attack it with. Very minor bug, but extremely strange. :D

[Zekiran]

Huh, weird.

I think for my part I usually just knock the head off and make sure it can't sense me, and jump it.

Or blow each arm and leg off and watch it explode, which is also awesome.

[Tony]

Yeah, I guess the reason why this has not surfaced anywhere else is that it's a contrived situation to begin with. If you try to be stealthy, there's much more effective and fun ways to go about it. If you're trying to kill them without being seen, which is the only reason one would ever pull out a crossbow, then you'd not go for their oil tank. I find them fun enemies as well, there's so many ways to go about it. I like to compare them to Thief 2's Children of Karras, who really only had one way to get rid of them, they were scary, but annoying. These, however, are both powerful and fun. Amazing game.