Ok so a few minor questions that need clarification since I don't have my books on me at the moment and haven't seen these addressed.

1. If firing at a minion group of say 3 you hit with a crit 2 weapon and generate 4 advantages. Now normally it says that a crit instantly kills a minion, this said in the above scenario does activating he crit twice actually crit twice (thus killing to minions) since the first activation kills one minion or does it just kill on since normally that'd just be a +10 crit on non minions?

2. In most games AOE works great on minions in this if they're all in one group I'm not sure if it does or doesn't. By this I mean normally a blast weapon hits it's initial target and then the blast quality does damage to other targets engaged with that target. This said when a minion group is bit they have one combined health pool so when struck with a minion group of say four is struck would they take the initial hit +blast x3 for the 3 extra minions in the group or would they only be hit with he initial strike and ignore blast as a single target normally would?

1. According to RAW, you can only activate one crit per weapon per attack--so no, you couldn't activate it twice to kill a second minion. It's just a great crit. That said, minions are supposed to be cannon fodder, and it's not uncommon on the boards for people to talk about doing just that--take out an extra minion for each potential crit.

2. I believe the consensus is that Blast is applied to each member of the minion group, and Soak only applies once--so if you have Blast 6 and a minion group of four with a Soak of 3, the first one would be hit by the initial attack and the other 3 would be hit by the blast. That's 18 damage (6 damage x 3 minions), with 3 damage soaked and 15 damage applied to their WT. Blast can be pretty deadly to minion groups.

Ok I was applying multiple Crits but it's made large groups of minions almost pointless since a few people got crit one weapons so I think I'll change to the proper version then just to make them more than background fodder but still not serious threats. That's also how I figured blast might work, just wanted to clarify since the whole group got struck by the initial blast do to be combined health pool thing

You can hand wave the crit thing on minions if you want imo. They're fodder and can be treated as such.

The only thing I would be aware of with hand-waving multiple crits on minions is that it could potentially devalue the Last One Standing signature ability of the Hired Gun. If you have a HG, you might want to talk to them about how they feel about it.

Beyond that, I'd personally go for it. Minions are often cannon fodder anyway, and I'm of the opinion that the GM should be the characters' biggest fan. If they roll really well, let them do awesome stuff. A lot of times when one of the rolls goes really well or they kill multiple minions, I just stop and ask the player to narrate exactly what happened.

No it won't because you still are limited by the amount of targets you can hit. A group of minions is one target. You'd need Autofire or very dumb minions with Blast or Burn. If someone is pulling the pin on Last One Standing, to me there should be 3 or 4+ groups of minions, and of course the fact you can lay low a couple Rivals automatically with it still sets if very far apart.

The problem with waving it is more that our Wookie with his vibro axe and our outlaw tech jawa with his crit one modded blaster kill groups of 5 every turn without breaking a sweat (when we use this ruling) making other players a bit superfluous in such fights when a low crit rating starts to trump high damage weapons so severely.

Yeah, I think it's needed to limit the Crit to once per weapon per attack, or it could get a bit crazy. You want minions to be disposable, but I think that's a bit much. If they want to be a blender, they can dual wield vibroknives and activate double crits.

1. According to RAW, you can only activate one crit per weapon per attack--so no, you couldn't activate it twice to kill a second minion. It's just a great crit. That said, minions are supposed to be cannon fodder, and it's not uncommon on the boards for people to talk about doing just that--take out an extra minion for each potential crit.

I agree with this. As for if you can buy extra crits against minions or not, do what works for your group. My group originally started with being able to buy extra crits against minions. However, once some of our weapons could crit on 1 advantage, it was way too easy to mow down a group with just advantages. For us, it just wasn't fun. So we went back to RAW of only one crit per attack. However, I'm tempted to use a house rule for fighting minions to see how it works. Only allow 1 crit through advantages, but allow for extra crits for each Triumph rolled. That way it's still possible to mow down a group with crits, but it limits how often that happens.

2. I believe the consensus is that Blast is applied to each member of the minion group, and Soak only applies once--so if you have Blast 6 and a minion group of four with a Soak of 3, the first one would be hit by the initial attack and the other 3 would be hit by the blast. That's 18 damage (6 damage x 3 minions), with 3 damage soaked and 15 damage applied to their WT. Blast can be pretty deadly to minion groups.

I'm going to disagree on this. Sam has ruled that Blast is applied to each member of the minion goup hit by the Blast and Soak is applied for each minion. To modify the example above: Blast 6 and a minion group of four with a Soak of 3 are hit by a blast. Each minion applies the soak to the damage they took. 6 damage - 3 soak = 3 damage. Apply the damage to the minion group WT, which would be: 3 damage each x 4 minions caught in blast = 12 damage applied towards the WT. While not as deadly as above, is still pretty nasty.

My group has a grenade guy and this is how we do it. What usually seems to happen is that if a group of four is hit, usually around three are killed and the last is wounded. Don't forget to apply successes to the Blast damage on a successful hit. Also remember that minions don't have to stay engaged with each other. There is no rule enforcing this, so the GM can spread them out so they don't get blast damage. For ease of play my GM keeps minions engaged with each other.

The Developer Answered Questions thread coveres Minions and Blast. The question and answer can be found here, in the first post under Personal Scale Combat.

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/108101-ffg-developer-answered-questions/

Blast and Minions

Question asked by Darth Pseudonym :

Should a group of minions be treated as a group of individuals who happen to share one wound pool, or as a single entity?

That is to say, if a blast goes off in the middle of a group of minions

-- should each minion, individually, take the blast damage, soak it, and apply the remainder to their shared pool, or

-- does the group as a whole get hit by the blast, take the damage, soak it once, and then apply the remainder (and if so, then does the group being the primary target exclude the group from being affected by the blast)?

Or is there some other methodology?

Answered by Sam Stewart:

The first option would be more thematically appropriate. That being said, if the minions were particularly spread out (if you had a group of four with two each behind two separate barricades, for example), I'd rule that some of the minions couldn't be hit by the blast damage. It does make grenades quite effective against minion groups; but that's sort of the idea in any case.

Question asked by Venthrac :

How does blast damage work against minions?

Answered by Sam Stewart:

How blast damage works against minion groups depends on whether the minions are engaged with each other or not. If a group of minions is spread out across a room, and I throw a grenade at one, then the Blast quality cannot affect the group. In that case, the grenade deals direct damage to the minion group's combined wound threshold (if it deals 9 damage, and the minion has a soak of 3 and wound threshold of 4, then one minion drops, and the group still has two additional damage. This may represent random flying shrapnel, but could just as easily represent the stress of seeing a comrade killed).

If multiple minions are engaged with each other, then the damage from the Blast quality can do damage to as many additional minions as are engaged with the first minion. (Grenade hits a three minion group who are all engaged with each other. The grenade deals 9 damage, plus 7 blast damage, against the same minions as described earlier. Since the blast damage hits each individual separately, they apply their soak to it in every case, but the damage is still enough to wipe out the entire minion group with 2 damage left over).

All in all, grenades are a great way to take out tight clusters of faceless mooks; as they should be.

This is a rare case where even I have to side with RAW.

1 Crit per weapon... but if the Crit Monsters feel slighted I'd allow Triumphs to be spent in laying Minions low (it's not RAW, but it's also not against RAW).