For fun, I decided to upgrade the Tier-1 wooden bow to match the damage of my upgraded Tier-4 "Lucky Shot" and I got them both to a tasty overkill of 1500 damage.
Only, when taking the wooden bow out for testing it wasn't doing anywhere near that much damage, just 451. Where the Lucky Shot could 1-hit any Tier-3 enemy anywhere on their body, the wooden bow just couldn't match it even after all the effort to bring it up to that insane number. Are there hidden bonus values in each Tier of weapons, or is this some glitch or oversight where the upgrades aren't applying their full damage boost?
But then what's the point of the upgrade system for anything except the last 2 tiers?
It only unlocks when your Workbench is level 3 so by the time you can bring T1 and 2 guns up a notch you can already craft T3 and 4 and the time/materials it takes to push a low rank gun up to max means you're never going to be seeing T1 enemies again. At the start of the game, nerfing the damage makes sense to prevent early Outpost/Expedition farming and to encourage moving up Tiers, but when you're at the end of it all there's no point to keep that in place, especially with no way to fight low rank enemies.