Melee damage when hitting multiple targets.

[Onion]

I've been testing some melee setups and noticed I'm doing significantly less damage when hitting multiple targets at once. I have been unable to find any documentation on this and want to know what is going on here or if it is a bug.
I would assume based on how every other area damage works in the game that there would be a fall off based on distance or just consistent damage to every target. But with melee it seems that the more targets you hit, the less damage they take.
For example with Hate, When hitting a single 115 corrupted heavy gunner with no mods (inactive AI) with a heavy attack, I do 116 damage consistently outside of headshot/crit.
Though when hitting 6 of them at once the damage is anywhere from 116 down to 4.
 

So what is going on here? Is this a "Feature", a bug or what? And if it is intended, why is there no documentation of this?

[Ubarruk]

This is documented on every melee in the game (it used to be hidden) its the follow-through stat

ex: a follow through of 0.6 means target 2 is hit for 60% of the damage

[TheArcSet]

Yep, @Ubarruk Beat me too the punch.

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Melee#Follow_Through

Quote

Proportion of weapon damage = FT^{(n - 1)}

Where n is the order of when an enemy is hit, and FT is the amount of follow-through for the weapon.

Melee damage gets worse the more enemies it goes through.

Though I think there are some cases, like with punch-through where intersecting enemies can count as 1 extra thick body.

 

The one way Exalted melees still beat ordinary weapons is that they have 100% follow-through.