Stormtrooper hellguns seem to hit secondary targets

[Oddnerd]

Hi all,

I've been incorporating stormtroopers into my builds recently, and when I send them to bash the enemies generators I notice that generators which lie close to the primary target also seem to take a certain amount of damage (although less than the one I am targeting).

How does this happen? I don't see any information in the codex that explains how some of their damage seems to spill over onto nearby targets.

[The_Convertant]

Almost every unit will missfire.
Try putting your sentinel in front of your guardmen when they are shooting. He will always complain there are traitors hitting his arse.

[Torpid]

Firstly, this applies to absolutely all non-aoe ranged weapons. You notice it a lot more with stormtroopers over guardsmen due to the fact that stormtrooper's dps fires in bursts and is quite a bit higher so they basically make hp go down much quicker in a shorter period of time, so visibly you can see the hp going down on multiple things at once.

I can't recall the exact nature of it but it isn't mis-fire as such, as that would suggest they shoot and hit nothing - if an enemy target is alone, your sentinel will hit it very consistently, as will the ST. This 'misfiring' is the phenomena in dawn of war of "fall off damage".

Essentially if any (enemy/neutral unit) is near another (enemy/neutral) unit some of the damage will 'fall off' to the nearby unit instead of the one that you are targetting. You aren't doing less dps overall. You aren't doing more. It is just being distributed between multiple squads. No idea why it happens, just a weird dow phenomena. Oh and I mention neutral because I believe this might affect garrisons, I know it affects neutral generators.

Perhaps this fall off damage does affect allies too but there is a hidden modifier somewhere to make it do 0 damage because you can't do friendly fire to allies, or perhaps it does hurt allies and this effect is so insignificant that we haven't noticed. I doubt either is true though since you can hurt allies with manticore barrages/grenades/nukes etc, and actually I find this effect to be fairly significant at times, so I think I would have noticed if it was affected allied squads.

I'm almost certain that guardsmen do not hurt sentinels with their lasguns though. Only turrets and heavy bolters seem capable of that. So normally this fall off damage for range only affects enemy units - if you have sluggas in melee with banshees and shootas firing at the shees, the sluggas will not take some of the damage (although the banshees will still take reduced ranged damage because there is a hidden modifier in the game in which units in melee take what I believe is 40% less ranged damage, the statistic might be wrong, but basically any unit in melee gets a significant ranged damage resistance [this has a few exceptions but for the most part applies to everything including tacs - it is the real reason you see people meleeing down generators rather than tacs apparently having higher melee dps, they don't, but meleeing the gen gives the ranged resistance so 1 shoota boy firing on them can pretty much be ignored])

If however you are shooting at two banshees very close together running at you then yes, the damage will be somewhat distributed between the two in sptie of your efforts no doubt to focus down one to force it off quicker as one shee squad is a lot less dps than two!!!

So, there's two things to take away from this - you want to blob up your squads as much as possible when your opponent lacks AOE when you are fighting ranged forces. This is especially important with units that are likely to be focused down - don't just have your weirdboy stood out on his own, put him inbetween two shoota boy w/ nob leader squads. It makes him a lot tankier to precisely the sort of thing such as hellgun assassinations.

Secondly, To exploit this to your best advantage if your opponent is blobbing up use aoe. Otherwise bait him out so that his squads split up and you can focus them down when they are not in close proximity so all your dps goes on one squad and either forces them off sooner or kills models sooner.

[Oddnerd]

Thanks Torpid, I was also unaware of the RDR for units in melee - I assumed melee did more damage to buildings and that was why I saw people punching the crap out of gens.

I assume the damage spread was done to make ranged combat more realistic. If you have two banshee squads blobbed together and charging a firing line, realistically you can't expect a bunch of guys firing on them to only hit the one half of the blob that has been virtually designated as a squad - all 10 banshees are gonna take hits. I actually like it. This also explains why I find it difficult to bleed humongous blobs late game without aoe.

[Arbit]

Torpid, I seem to recall that what you're calling "falloff" is actually a property called "scatter". I think the way it works is if there are two enemy units in a line, then targeting the unit in front will cause a certain percentage of fire to scatter to the rear-most squad. So

tacs ------> sluggas -----> shootas

if the tacs target the sluggas, some of the damage will be distributed to the shootas. If they target the shootas, the sluggas don't take any damage - it only scatters to units behind the targeted squad. This is why, say, if your heavy bolter devs are shooting at some shootas at max range and some sluggas run inbetween, oftentimes the sluggas will not get suppressed, but if you redirect your fire to the sluggas, then both the sluggas and the shootas (and everything else behind the sluggas) will get suppressed.

I recall back in retail that there was quite a bit of outrage that all units initially had the same scatter values, so certain units like tacs were given low scatter and units like guardsmen and shootas remained at a higher scatter value. It's pretty significant... it can be 20% or more of your damage. I don't know how much is still around in Elite, but it sounds like it's definitely still there.

Here's a link to an old relicnews discussion

http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread. ... amage-Labs

You can't use the replays obviously but the discussion is interesting.

[Torpid]

Your right, I just could not remember the name and just made one up lol.

Thanks Arbit.

[Cyris]

Just to put a bow on what everyone else here is saying: scatter essentially allows soft squad combination. DoW1 had hard combination, where an independent unit could attach or detach from squads. With scatter, standing a low health Inquisitor in the middle of 2 GM squads makes her functionally join the squads for the pourposes of assigning ranged damage. I used this extensively when playing as IG.

I also seem to recall Cael discussing this early in ELITE per Arbits comment, and specifically making tacs/CSM have lower scatter (which is better).

[Codex]

Wow scatter isn't a well understood mechanic? It's most obvious to see when you're playing on something like Typhon Arena at the bottom and you all focus fire one squad, and other squads blobbed up around that one target also takes some damage. Prevents said target being eviscerated in about 10 seconds flat.

It's not a mechanic you can exploit often but there have been times I've used scatter to try to mitigate some damage on an Apo, especially a retreating one or a frontlining one.

[KanKrusha]

Does it still work if you put your squad in front of a power node and gens to scatter some of the received damage?

There are a couple of discussions on the community site dow3 forum about whether RNG like this should be in. I think this is just the sort of cool feature that adds character to the game and even creates novel tactics. However, on the opposite side it is also a poorly documented effect that can make the game appear too random for good competitive play.

[Broodwich]

If memory serves it is the angle behind the targeted model that your weapon will get another chance to hit something if it misses. Accuracy applies to the targeted model, scatter the width of the field where you get a re roll

[Deflaktor]

There was one funny situation where I have seen the effects of scatter and how stupid it can be.

A low on health leman russ was getting away. It only needed one shot to be killed. So I sent my fire prism forward but it was too slow, even with guide it would not be able to reach the leman russ. But then I saw some friendly beamy defgun lootas which I thought, if guided they could reach the leman russ. So I guided them but it was still just about out of reach. In the mean time my fire prism came in front of those lootas still chasing that leman russ and just then some guards men came out of the fog of war. So the beamy defgun lootas tried to shoot those guardsmen but missed. Instead the shot hit my fire prism, dealing rear armor damage and one-shotting it because they were still guided. I have been laughing for like a minute straight of how absurd that was.

[egewithin]

There was one funny situation where I have seen the effects of scatter and how stupid it can be.

A low on health leman russ was getting away. It only needed one shot to be killed. So I sent my fire prism forward but it was too slow, even with guide it would not be able to reach the leman russ. But then I saw some friendly beamy defgun lootas which I thought, if guided they could reach the leman russ. So I guided them but it was still just about out of reach. In the mean time my fire prism came in front of those lootas still chasing that leman russ and just then some guards men came out of the fog of war. So the beamy defgun lootas tried to shoot those guardsmen but missed. Instead the shot hit my fire prism, dealing rear armor damage and one-shotting it because they were still guided. I have been laughing for like a minute straight of how absurd that was.

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