A Comprehensive Guide on Gadgets

This guide should help with understanding the value of each attachment overall as well as what classes and weapons they excel with, the gadgets will be measured on a level 30 scale, but I will also mention ones worth using early game when it comes up.

Bull's Burger

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. There is a rare occasion where I find this really useful on tank, however, and that's the final level of the campaign and challenge mode, since both consist of an enemy with a high fire rate weapon with low raw damage, having 30 more health is actually a lot better than more damage resist because you can't drop damage past 1.

Power Cell

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

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 on top 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. Remember that Kevlar calculates after your shield DR, so it actually reduces more damage from impact than heavy armor does.

EM Shield

Personally, I think the best of the survivability options in SFHR for pvp: 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.
Warning: EM Shield is far more useful in pvp than pve due to bots often doing heavily reduced damage that doesn't proc it.

Tactical Holster

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

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, thus you won't use it in most campaign and challenge modes, but burst isn't uncommon in the pvp and that's where the hard hat should shine as well due to high crit chance modifiers and enemies more prone at aiming for hte head. 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. If you're ever going to take this, I highly recommend it on Tank when you already have enough damage resist on shotgun. As this gadget is basically unbreakable but better, that opens up your passive options (Though Unbreakable was the worst option among them, none of them are particularly bad.) and if you do take unbreakable, you can really minimize the horror of a 50 cal straight to the skull. You can also use it on shield, I guess, but it's only really going to be useful for platform jumps and other times you stand up as you're already immune to headshots while blocking.

Novice Badge

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

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 75% 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.

Bipod

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

Full Auto is the direct inverse of bipod in playstyle, but is also a circumstantial pick. Full Auto gives the 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, also 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.

Hollow Point

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 20%. This pretty much makes it the perfect option for snipers, dash 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. It's also worth noting you continue to do +20% damage to armor if the enemy is full health, so this can be effective against the kevlar ability, the kevlar challenges, and especially juggernauts who heal to full health and automatically gain armor.

Defibilator

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.

Bayonet

A pretty good option that may seem redundant at first glance. Bayonet executes enemies damaged below 15% 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 and glass cannon gives, or even kevlar to potentially raise the gap of survivability, but bayonet still has its purposes, and it's better not to neglect them.
Bayonet is the holy grail for modes where you need to secure kills, if you're trying to 3 star certain missions, especially Gun Game, or trying to finish off juggernaut, this is especially useful with a weapon that deals rapid damage as you need to deal damage while they're at 15% to actually execute. Might be a dealbreaker for some, but remember bots get a lot tankier on insane difficulty, and as of v1.26, this gadget works on bosses, so if you're running multiple people and making the boss' health scale like crazy, you can automatically invalidate 15% of it by having one person arrive with bayonet. It also procs on damage over time, so bleed and burn can also become a ton more dangerous, oh, and one other thing... Self-damage can execute yourself, and any V.I.P you're protecting like The Scientist or Toad. So careful with those incendiary grenades.

Tactical Radio

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.

Ammo Pouches

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.

Kinetic Boots

Moving onto the DLC addition of this guide, the ninja DLC gadgets are a bit more out-there, as you'll probably notice with Kinetic Boots which increases movement speed while on the ground by 12%. Being completely honest, pretty unimpressive on paper... But in practice, it's very okay.
The movement speed boost allows you to close the distance with non-dash melees and shotguns more effectively and to reposition when an enemy is coming around a platform more effectively. Just because it's exclusively when on the ground doesn't mean that gap can't make a huge difference, remember, they're not getting away when you're midair, they're just keeping up.
Because of that, I think it's an effective gap closer option for Shotgun and melee Tank. It also unfortunately means some non-dash options are a lot more difficult to play with against enemies that are using this gadget. The other option I think this is good on is overclock medic, you have a quick charge, and a lot of medic's good weapons (.500 and G6) depend on a sense of keeping enemies in your effective range, and that stacked on top of boots can be an effective way to maintain a control of range and blitz through the field.

Glass Cannon

I think we have yet to fully comprehend the consequences of putting this gadget into the game, at least they knew well enough to not make it a raw damage boost. Glass cannon increases attack speed by 25%, but inversely reduces health by 25%. This is one of those double-edged sword gadgets much like radio, except this will have use far beyond a 20-player cluster while using slow charge abilities. With this, you'll be bumping your DPS up to a substantial degree, with the obvious drawback of less health, meaning you'll not only die faster, more weapons will be able to one shot you, and you'll benefit less from max hp healing such as regen, adrenaline, medpack, and self-revive, and it will also be more difficult to trigger blur. But, if you're willing to shoulder these downsides, the attack speed boost is pretty big for certain weapons and will be sure to compliment ones with great mod rolls, and you have higher DPS, and, in theory, faster charge times. My recommendations are to try this on an assassin with the .50 cal, SVD, or any of the magnums, as his vital sight and precision perks both compliment a glassy playstyle at only the cost of 40 max hp. This gadget can also be great for boss rushing if you're feeling especially spicy, throw it on a nunchucks ninja+Vengeance or conditioning and Tiger and you'll be able to dish out some insane high risk high reward DPS, it also works very well on Commandos with Ammo Wizard, just make sure to bring weapon specialist instead of ammo feed if you're using a shotgun, defeats the point to take an attack speed penalty, especially for a ammo wizard jackhammer.

Phoshporus Core

I long for the day when I have to come back to this guide and edit out the phrase "This is just better bayonet, but that's not a compliment." Unlike Bayonet, this gadget works, and I can give it that. Phosphorus Core has a 10-50% chance of lighting enemies on fire on hit, the chance scales up with slower weapons. Anyone who remembers the second flash game of Strike Force Heroes might remember that DoT (Damage Over Time) in games like these tend to hit a crossroad between ineffectual and killing you 6 seconds after you had won the fight. Core is the former, dealing seemingly around 30 damage over 2 seconds, damage ticks seem to vary with damage resist, which is really odd because you'd think DoT would ignore that, it's typically part of the gimmick. Although I prefer it to be weaker than annoyingly strong, it means it's in a sort of weird spot, if you want a slight consistent damage boost, you'd just use full auto, if you want something to finish off enemies, hollow point. It's a little extra damage on top of your current damage assuming the enemy stays alive long enough for the proc to take effect. The most I can give it is that it can help secure kills while bayonet isn't working, and sometimes it can help finish off a self revive medic.
The Weapon I suppose I recommend this on is non-auto shotguns, because I'm pretty sure it rolls for each pellet, and the low attack speed means it's pretty much guaranteed to proc fire when hitting someone. Even if it's weak, you might as well be getting the most bang for your buck, and maybe this can make a suitable offensive alternative for shotgun tank.

That's it.

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.

[Niz]

I wish I could say for certain, but I doubt it. Binoculars used to be an item that increases crit chance per hit until you get a crit then resets the chance, but it got ditched pretty early in development and has shown no sign of returning.

[Zorro]

Awesome, tyvm. Also, do you know if there's plans for more gadgets (like those binoculars which i assume would just increase vision range and maybe weapon range for a small %), cause imo the game is lacking a gadget that removes the moving/jumping inaccuracy

[Niz]

Aight

[Zorro]

Think you could add the DLC gadgets?

[zy]

Amazing

[All talk and no fight]

Excellent write up.