Hello everyone!

Ok, so I'm fairly certain this has been discussed before, but the search engine hates me (I actually think it was trying to kill me). After some manual searching (with no luck) I have decided to start this topic!

So, my Salamander player decided to get his hands on a Stormbolter; an awesome weapon all around! To do some more damage vs. hordes and to complement our Lascannon totting Devastator, the Salamander decided to requisition some Metal Storm Rounds.

Now, during their next battle the Salamander decided to fire his Storm Bolter at a rather large horde of charging Ork boyz, and did significant damage to them with his first volley. We were all pretty amazed! However, I wanted to make sure we did it right, because it seems very powerful vs. hordes (which, I guess, is the meaning of Metal Storm Rounds).

The Salamander's BS is 44, and with some additional bonuses goes up to 64. He fires semi-auto, adding a additional +10%. The Orks are 70 meters away, so no modifiers for range. The horde is Massive, giving a +30% to the roll. The horde ran in the previous turn, giving the Salamander a -20% penalty. The total BS adds up to 84%.

The Salamander rolls his dice and gets 40, giving him three hits (40, 60, 80). The Stormbolter counts all hits as two hits (due to the storm ability), making the hit total go up to six. The metal storm rounds adds Blast (2) to all hits, bascially doubling all hits (vs. hordes)and makes them go up to 12. At the end, the explosive damage adds +1 magnitude damage to the horde (not affected by Blast or Storm). This adds up to 13 damage.

Is my thinking correct? Did I miss anything or got anything mixed up?

Thanks in advance!

David

I don't have my book with me, but it looks like you got the modifiers right, the total hits right, the Storm mechanic right, the X damage right, and the blast/Metal Storm interaction right.

Just wait till the player gets Storm of Iron.

To be fair, the players are arriving at a point where hordes are there as cinematic speed bumps to display the awesomeness of space marines. Also, he has consumed some of his ammo.

Double checked with the rulebook and errata and your math is indeed correct.

Your marine should have inflicted a total of 13 hits to the horde.

Reclusiarch said:

Yep. Looks right to me and we just had a thread on this in another thread about the Librarian being overpowered. Librarian powers pale in comparison to someone with Storm of Iron and a Storm Bolter with Metal Storm rounds. It came out the same way, they are pretty bad ass against hordes.
 

We too have run into the silly amount of magnitude damage a Storm bolter with the right ammo (Metal Storm) and talents (Storm of Iron) can do and decided to house rule this using the "doubling a double" convention used for instance by Power fists.

In essence we treat each "double" as "add again the base number". So in the Power fist example a character with a Strength bonus of 5 and Unnatural Strength (doubling the characters strengthbonus) and the power fists special rules that also doubles the characters Str bonus we would calculate it as 5+5+5 instead of 5x2x2 resulting in a score of 15 instead of 20. This is, I believe, how the rules are intended to be and how this forums have agreed upon (correct me if I am wrong).

We have applied this to the Storm Bolter to lessen its effect.

So per RAW a Storm bolter with the above ammo and talent would inflict hits as follows:
(In order: Maximum nuber of hits, Doubling for Storm weapon quality, additional hits for Blast(2) quality, Storm of Iron talent, Explosive extra hit)
4x2x2x2+1= 33 magnitude damage.

Per our house rule (same order):
4+4+4+4+1=17 magnitude damage.

We think this gives a more appropriate amount of damage. Just a thought for GMs with the same "problem".
 

Sometimes, weapons designed to be very effective and devestating against a specific type of target are actually very effective and devestating against that specific type of enemy.

Just because something which is designed to work well against something does so, doesn't mean we should decrease its effectiveness to be closer to other things which aren't designed for the same purpose.

Played with a certain GM once and used my character's parry->counterattack->assassin strike combo to get out of a dangerous situation. He started to state it was 'unfair' I could evade enemies by using several thousands of XP worth of talents in conjunction like that. I told him my character was built for skill-based survival, had I not evaded out of combat, a single hit (imagine a power klaw, fist, or some other rare weapon being carried by every single enemy character…) would have hurt me significantly. Not being able to use the abilities I paid good XP for would get my character killed. He saw the light and relented.

The way I read it and we run it in our games is, 3 hits, doubled for storm is 6, plus 2 hits for blast is 8 plus 1 hit for explosive shells.

try heavy flamer 1d5 + 8 (1/4 range rounded up), with clense and purify (1d5 hits) plus storm of iron, 20-28 damage per round to a horde.

Damaging a Horde

• Each hit that causes any amount of damage reduces a Horde’s Magnitude by one. Therefore, an attack that, after accounting for armour and Toughness Bonus, causes 15 points of damage reduces the Horde’s Magnitude by 1. The deliberate consequence of this is that sustained fire and blast weapons are much more effective against Hordes than weapons which fire only one shot; a lascannon is a weapon for destroying tanks not mowing down large numbers of infantry.

Damaging a Horde (page 359):  (+1 hit)

The sentence “Weapons that inflict Explosive Damage (X) gain a bonus against Hordes, and count as having inflicted one additional Hit”

should be changed to

“Weapons that inflict Explosive Damage (X) gain a bonus against Hordes, and count as having inflicted one additional Hit per Attack after all other Hits have been applied.”

Blast Weapons (+2 hits)

A Blast weapon that hits a Horde hits a number of times equalto its Blast value. So a grenade with Blast (4) will automatically hit four times if successfully lobbed into the Horde.