My psyker recently picked up this power, and i passed it by the ref, and the other players as well (they like to know what i might throw at them by mistake, other than some 9's that is) and is it just us, or is there a couple of lines missing from the powers descriptor?

We've gone over the various Erratas but to no avail..

Is the power meant to be targetable at more than one person? It acts as per force with the exception of generating More bolts, which mean either over kill on one person, or a kind of full auto with the mental bullets. Also for every 5pts of overbleed you get an additional bolt.

So, as per Bolt, doing +1 damage for every 5 pts of over bleed AND +1 bolt for every 5 points of overbleed AND (WP Bonus amount of initial bolts)...

Over kill on one target (unless its say a demon or some one with some form of psy armour) or spread over a number of different targets?

I think i just became our groups Heavy Weapon...

I don't think you're supposed to get both kinds of overbleed - otherwise, the power would also have two thresholds and need two full actions to manifest. The "functions as force bolt" is most likely only supposed to refer to the effect text of the power.

Further, I don't think it's that much overkill... without overbleed you get around 5 bolts dealing 1D10+5 impact damage each. Half of those hit. Your common enemy has around 8 points of soak (armour 4 + toughness 4). Thus, you deal about three times 1D10-3 wounds, with every ten points of overbleed raising that by one missile. Not quite heavy artillery, is it?

In general, though, I'd consider it acceptable to fire off the bolts at multiple targets since they seem to be considered singular attacks.

Lol, Cifer you know how to shoot a mad (well, not Perfectly Sane, but whats a point or two here or there..) Psyker down when he's had dreams of granduer...

As far as I can tell, you are restricted to a single target. Force Barrage functions as Force Bolt, with the exception of having a different overbleed and generating multiple bolts. And Force Bolt specifies a single target. So, as Force Bolt, you attack your target with a blast of force, except you may generate multiple bolts rather than one, and your overbleed enhances the number of bolts rather than the force of the individual bolt. Similar powers always specify if you may choose additional targets, meanwhile.

Also, that ability needs some sort of weakness, so I'd just go with limiting it to a single target

Hodgepodge said:

Ah this gives me visions fo graneur once more of being a walking talking peice of feild artillery....

Between that and Force Weapons (woo 1d10 with no mitigation per degree of success on top of four potential melee hits), actual artillery looks kinda second rate.

Hodgepodge said:

That does depend entirely on the kind of artillery you're talking about. Using rough comparisons from the tabletop game (comparing like-for-like weapon profiles with guns that do have a profile in DH), the Earthshaker Cannon that forms the bulk of all Imperial Guard artillery batteries would have stats somewhere in the region of 3,750m range (for a maximum range of 15km, noted in Imperial Armour 1), dealing 5d10+10 X damage, Pen 8, with Blast 12 (as a conservative guess).

Of course, it's unlikely to be particularly accurate (-30 to hit for firing at unseen target), but with a blast that big, scatter isn't a huge issue, especially when you're firing barrages from several Earthshakers at once (and why wouldn't you, were the option available?)

And that's not even getting to the heavy artillery...

The Artillery of the Imperial Guard: Smiting the Emperor's enemies for ten millennia.

Hahah, yeah. Although I don't think they thought higher scale stuff through much, though. I mean, could the Osdex as stated really take a Baneblade? I guess those must have be the really huge ones hinted at or something.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Compared to a psyker using Force Barrage...

(and to quote Cifers 1st post as i dont have my Cha-Sheet to hand to say what my lil warphead would be capable of doing on an unprepared unfocused attack)

"without overbleed you get around 5 bolts dealing 1D10+5 impact damage each. Half of those hit."

Pretty close to the mark really i'd say. Human sized Small feild artillery

Velvetears said:

Assuming 4 hit (high estimate, for illustrative purposes), against an Imperial Guard Stormtrooper (TB4, 6AP, 13 wounds, for the sake of argument), you'll be dealing very few wounds... that same Stormtrooper would be dead nearly three times over from a single Earthshaker shell.

Hardly comparable. One large hit against tough and well-armoured adversaries is far more effective than several small hits, because the target benefits multiple times from toughness and armour.

A potent psyker with Force Barrage is more comparable to a machine gun than an artillery piece.

A more powerful psyker changes that somewhat, admittedly. An Unbound Daemonhost (WP 91, Psy Rating 8, fundamental immunity to Psychic Phenomena) with that power can expect the following assuming all 8 dice used and an average roll (53 including WP bonus of 9): 15 bolts, each dealing 1d10+9 damage, of which 13 are likely to hit. Of course, compared to the 1d10+72 damage hit inflicted by that same Daemon using Fling, or the 8d10+5 damage in a 6m radius it can deal with Fire Storm, a volley of 1d10+9 damage bolts isn't all that impressive.