I don't play it, as I despise these generic looter shooters that have no soul, and are just there for the dick waggers, but this dev post is really fucking clueless;
"However, as mentioned above and observed in a few discussions recently, these mechanics are not 100% clear and, in some cases (e.g. spike damage protection/death protection & invincibility), are “secret” mechanics with hidden cooldowns. Understanding these mechanics is a key aspect of understanding damage mitigation or one-shot kill instances and related issues."
Secret mechanics? And then "Understanding these mechanics is a key aspect of understanding.... etc."
How do you understand something that's secret?
You built a game for the type of people that need every detail to do the math to be the best, like WoW raiders back in the day, but you have 'secret' and 'hidden' things?
Those are known as bugs. Their game is dead and they know it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/outriders/comments/nmc4vg/outriders_latest_news_and_known_issues_mayjune/
I don't play the game either, but from what they are saying it sounds like in-game mechanics to prevent you from being 1-shotted by NPC's - i.e. damage that would instantly kill you instead drops you to a very low health . But it's on a cooldown, so it's going to save you someimes, but not all the time. These type of mechanics may get suspended on boss fights as well, depending on the type on encounter it is.
I assume they want to keep the exact workings hidden from the player to prevent players from exploting it.
The Division had something similar in place - it was more like a 'you just fucked up, but we're giving you another chance' thing, but didn't work against certains NPC's like the hunters who would one-shot melee you if you got too close.
I agree, this sounds fine. It's like offering bad-luck protection for loot - you're not meant to be optimising it, it's just there to make sure you aren't the one unlucky bastard who fails an unbiased 1-in-10 roll at a legendary 100 times in a row.