The Energon Pub

Which has more actual bearing on a weapon's effectiveness; Fp/Sk requirements or Damage Range?

There's several examples of what I mean, but I'll use the one I'm looking at now;

Rocket-Propelled Mortar Shells are Fp 10/Sk 7, Light to Incredible, Short Recharge.

Twin Mortar Cannons are Fp 4/Sk 1, Light to Incredible, no recharge.

Now, ignoring any effect the additional Firepower would have on Strafe and things like that, they've both got the same damage range, the Twin Mortar Cannons actually have a better rate-of-fire with no recharge and in terms of experience spent it's actually cheaper which would allow me to put more points into other stats... So, what does going for the more expensive (points and Energon-wise) Rocket Propelled Mortar Shells actually give me over the cheaper but seemingly more effective Twin Mortar Cannons to justify the additional investment?

turbomagnus wrote:Which has more actual bearing on a weapon's effectiveness; Fp/Sk requirements or Damage Range?

There's several examples of what I mean, but I'll use the one I'm looking at now;

Rocket-Propelled Mortar Shells are Fp 10/Sk 7, Light to Incredible, Short Recharge.

Twin Mortar Cannons are Fp 4/Sk 1, Light to Incredible, no recharge.

Now, ignoring any effect the additional Firepower would have on Strafe and things like that, they've both got the same damage range, the Twin Mortar Cannons actually have a better rate-of-fire with no recharge and in terms of experience spent it's actually cheaper which would allow me to put more points into other stats... So, what does going for the more expensive (points and Energon-wise) Rocket Propelled Mortar Shells actually give me over the cheaper but seemingly more effective Twin Mortar Cannons to justify the additional investment?

The weapons are all weighted differently. However the general rule of thumb is this... the more points invested usually the more powerful the weapon. So while both weapons have a chance of doing theoretical damage of 0pts to 100% damage the actual average damage of the weapons are a much larger gap. This is seen in much higher numbers when factor in the opponent's armor and saving throws. The RPMS will have a higher base damage (average) over that of the TMC. If you were fighting a low level character (such as my Shenlong) you would see higher damage with either of the weapons. If you went against a stronger opponent such as Burn's Gore or N_V's Mustard you would see a lower rate of return with the TMC. This isn't to say that the RPMS won't hit for a 1 and the TMC will hit for 25pts of damage, as the random number generator will have an effect on the rolls.

So, and pardon my Warhammer-geek for showing, it's basically along the lines of rolling To Wound on three dice against a higher toughness opponent as compared to two dice?

Sort of. I've never played Warhammer, so let me see if I can break it down to simple base ten numbers

Armor will mitigate basic attacks (weapon/fist/kick) depending upon your armor ranking. Some Armor does do better than others, so for example Duranium reduces damage slightly better than Carbon Fiber.

Either way, no armor would allow for the max damage of the weapon.

If we had weapon a with a min damage of 1 and a max damage of 50 and weapon b with a min damage of 1 and a max damage of 80 they would both be considered light to incredible. The base damage of a however would probably be 15 and the base damage for b would be 25. Again these numbers are made up and used only for example, so don't put weight into what is what.

So this means against an unarmored opponent weapon A has the potential on a roll to miss, or score 1 to 50. The average shots will be around 15. This does not mean you can't get a damage attack of 50 against an armored opponent, but the chance is very low and if you do the damage would be mitigated down to probably around 25 or so against the highest armored opponent.

Hope that helps

A 5/5 will do on average about the same damage as a 10/0 or a 0/10 all other factors aside. the "light to heavy" kibble just describes the damage range. a narrower bnd will produce more consistent damage. you might have a 5/5 that does medium damge, say 5 in this example, or you might have a 10/0 that does light (1) to heavy damage (10) but weapons will on average do 5 damage, but the wider damage range has a far more RNG in its damage sometimes ti will hit very hard, sometimes it will hardly damage at all.



At least to you get to "Incredible" which is about 15 times as vague as the other damage bands.