The June update made a change where “Environmental gas no longer incorrectly causes damage to machines.”
I preferred when it did myself.
the gas masks, especially when combined with the gas makes it hard to see and offers so little protection without the skill. under these conditions, it’s difficult trying to hit the runners and ticks swarming me while also constantly poping health packs to heal the gas damage. I used to be able to concentrate on the health packs and dodge the attacks until the gas took care of the machines.
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It was a problem that the gas caused damage to the machines, as machines dont have lungs.
Though it is indeed a bit hectic if you are blind and maintain your live while healing and shooting.
I agree that they do not have lungs but as many have pointed out, the gas mask doesn’t fully protect us because it also hurts our skin.
the gas being strong enough to also damage the machine components made sense
In the mission “Another Castle”
Dr. Sköld reports some info about the gas
My preliminary observations suggest that the gas is toxic, albeit not lethal and seems to quickly induce a deep comatose state that we haven’t been able to reverse at this stage.
Which indicates that the gas does not hurt components, but is instead something only harmful to living beings.
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how am I supposed to get things my way if you use facts from the game to prove me wrong? 
seriously though I get it. I may not like it and will still irrationally whine about it. but I get it
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So it’s some kind of knockout gas, perhaps intended for riot control.
Though it should be said, fully functional gas masks in real life give you quite the protection. There are some gases that still are harmful to a degree to breath thru a filter (for example CO), but this is a game.
This mysterious gas seems to be very toxic but for the sake of gameplay it shouldn’t, in my opinion, harm you to the extent it does. With the gas mask equipped, that is.
I mean, as @kakarron said it’s not easy moving around and keeping track of the machines thru the dirty glass, which could be seen as a counter to the protection it gives.
The perfect setting to me would be that the gas harms you just a few points, 2-3 maybe, per second with the gas mask equipped.
Except for two things people seem to constantly be forgetting:
- This is the late 80’s, gas masks were not as good then as they are today.
- The gas could still be absorbed through or directly damage the skin. Gas masks only protect your face, eyes, and respiratory tract. A good real life example of this is vessicants like mustard gas, you definately want your face protected, but they will still cause nasty blisters on exposed skin.
didn’t forget that, mentioned it above already. unfortunately the machine parts are not made of skin
Chlorine gas can react with metals, oxidize and cause. A type of rust. With Iron it can cause a violent reaction. But for that to happen The Iron has to be heated to about 150 C. That could happen when you fire at a tank. And chlorine could damage non metal parts on a robot.
Sarin gas can penetrate skin. So theoretically it could kill you that way.
Chlorine gas can also effect The skin. Give chemical burns.
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But in the 80s they wouldn’t use chlorine. There was way more lethal gases.
Ok you’re all very true. Game wise, or GZ wise specifically, we get exposed to the gas partly as an attack from Tanks and Hunters (and Harvesters?) and partly in a few rooms in bunkers, mainly.
You may not agree with me on this one but with the gas attacks our goal is to kill the machine. For the most times we can avoid the gas by moving around the gas cloud to continue our “counter attack”. Unless we’re fighting a smaller horde and get surrounded. Which is mostly the case for me, to be honest 
With the rooms, on the other hand, our goal is to get something from inside the room. Often during missions. Which means we have to move within the gas and therefore get exposed. The way I see it, here lay the main struggle with all the med packs and blindness and “ambushes”. So this is the big reason why I would want to get the gas masks tweaked 
And yeah, the gas could be of a horribly toxic kind and therefore the gas mask does just a little help. Maybe a hazmat suit would do the trick
it was having to try to turn power on in a bunker that started my whining
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They were pretty good by '76, never mind 80s. We sat in a bunker literally filled with CS gas (they weren’t allowed to kill us, even in training) for about 15 minutes and not so much as a sniffle. Then we had to take off the gasmask for 30 seconds before they let us out. Oh, my word, what a difference! No, they worked just fine, and may not be much better now.
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It depends on what you’re trying to protect against though. Particulates and solid aerosols are easy to deal with, and were largely ‘solved’ long before even WWII. Liquid aerosols are trickier, but were still well protected against by the 80’s provided they weren’t destructive to the gas mask itself (which is one area the protection has gotten significantly better these days). Actual gasses though are still an issue even today (though we’ve gotten better), especially if they’re mostly chemically non-reactive.
Keep in mind also though that protection against known threats has always been better than protection against unknown threats. The gas in-game is unknown to even some of the military doctors, so it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that existing countermeasures would not provide reliable protection against it (and the further back you go historically, the worse protection against unknown chemical weapons was).
Yeah, okay, I accept that - but don’t write off the eighties - it wasn’t the forties! For most of the players, they may be as distant, but they’re not really…
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these are good points as to why the gas masks do not fully protect us but the original reason for my post was to complain about it not hurting the machines’s anymore. They have been upgraded to withstand it and i don’t like it.
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Haha yeah, I don’t like it either. I’m all for the machines taking damage to their own gas attacks
Or any of their own attacks, for that matter. Don’t you just love it when you nail that sticky flare on a Hunter and all the other Hunters and Runners “empty their mags” on it
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My favorite is still tanks wiping out their own ticks with their mortars… Fought a FNIX tank at F32 Överby earlier today and never had to deal with a single tick from it, the poor sods kept getting hit with the tank’s mortar rounds or incendiary grenades.
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