Tombfinger fails to do most of its damage

[Mudfam]

I noticed this weapon being extremely inconsistent, occasionally doing great damage, but often barely doing any damage at all. I did some in depth testing in the simulacrum and it turns out it's pretty broken.

It seems the weapon fires a projectile which does puncture and impact damage, and explodes on impact dealing radiation damage in a small AoE. Unfortunately the radiation splash only deals damage some of the time, and not very often.

I tested shooting enemies directly, the environment and nearby enemies. When shooting the environment you can see that it depends on where you shoot, but I couldn't find a pattern, sometimes in front of them works, sometimes to the side, sometimes behind. It's clearly just bugged.

Even when shooting an enemy directly they will very frequently not receive any radiation / splash damage. To test this further I also tried shooting Nova's Antimatter Drop, it is only affected by the radiation portion of the damage about 20% of the time.

[Wandrecanada]

I've seen this issue as well and I think it might be that the weapon has splash and 50% accuracy. I've seen it miss point blank shots and only do the splash damage fairly often.  As if it was impacting in front of an enemy instead of on them (I've seen it only do impact damage on Anitmatter Drop every time).

It's not very reliable as it is currently working (maybe lag issues causes this?).

Note: Projectile looks to me like an orb of energy when I fire it.  Not sure what it's supposed to do since the description for it's effect is terrible.

Edited November 15, 2018 by Wandrecanada

[Mudfam]

It can't have anything to do with accuracy or lag, the splash damage simply fails to register a hit at random.

You can easily verify this by shooting someone at point blank range with paused AI in the simulacrum, or shooting various points right next to their feet. Sometimes the splash damage works, sometimes it doesn't. If shot in a group of enemies, some are affected by the splash damage, some aren't, even if they are closer to it.

[Wandrecanada]

I will have to test it out.  Would probably easier to test if we could mod it with a splash radius increase...

I'm also noticing that you can only seem to get impact damage.

[Wandrecanada]

Just tested a bit.  Seems like the AoE splash only goes side to side and slightly behind the ground hit.  It does not seem to direct AoE splash forwards.

Also still failing to see any puncutre damage register at all.  Splash damage seems to all be radiation and depending on where you hit the target determines splash damage due to the frontal splash failing.

Test shooting in front of grouped enemies, direct hits, past and beside enemies.

Only seems to splash when hitting ground past and behind enemies.

Edited November 16, 2018 by Wandrecanada

[Mudfam]

Hmm, yeah it does seem to mostly direct the splash damage back towards you rather than forward. Though shots to the sides seem somewhat random.

This is how the Astilla works, so I tested that too and I am sometimes getting similar results, but much less often. I looked at damage numbers frame by frame, and with both weapons some shots do not apply the splash damage to the enemy when shot directly. Same with Antimatter Drop. it seems much more common with the Tombfinger though.

While testing I got a bombard stuck in a corner and shooting him repeatedly in the shoulder it never once triggered the splash damage with the Tombfinger. Switching to the Astilla and shooting the same exact spot usually resulted in splash damage.

 

13 hours ago, Wandrecanada said:

I'm also noticing that you can only seem to get impact damage.

The projectile has a guaranteed impact proc, but I'm also seeing the occasional puncture proc, this suggests there's puncture damage involved. I didn't look further into it.