Unmatched Ferocity cap?

By False God, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

I've been looking around and can't seem to find an answer, is there a cap to how many attacks can be made with Unmatched Ferocity?

If the default melee check is PP, do I read "to a maximum difficulty of PPPPP" as "You can keep making attacks until you hit that difficulty."? or "You can make as many attacks as it takes but the difficulty doesn't go higher than that."?

Also, how does this work with abilities that upgrade/increase the difficulty of attacks like Dodge or Adversary? If the starting difficulty is say, RRP, does that mean Unmatched Ferocity only gives you 2 bonus attacks? RRPP and RRPPP?

If the effect ends when you reach the cap (which is only 3 bonus attacks) that answers my final question, if it doesn't, where does it end? Assuming you have the whole tree you can switch targets, so...when you run out of Engaged targets?

Edited by False God
11 hours ago, False God said:

I've been looking around and can't seem to find an answer, is there a cap to how many attacks can be made with Unmatched Ferocity?

If the default melee check is PP, do I read "to a maximum difficulty of PPPPP" as "You can keep making attacks until you hit that difficulty."? or "You can make as many attacks as it takes but the difficulty doesn't go higher than that."?

Also, how does this work with abilities that upgrade/increase the difficulty of attacks like Dodge or Adversary? If the starting difficulty is say, RRP, does that mean Unmatched Ferocity only gives you 2 bonus attacks? RRPP and RRPPP?

If the effect ends when you reach the cap (which is only 3 bonus attacks) that answers my final question, if it doesn't, where does it end? Assuming you have the whole tree you can switch targets, so...when you run out of Engaged targets?

First, a disclaimer: I do not have access to the long text of the talent. This is drawing on what I can see and on my experience with the system.

It increases the difficulty to a max of Formidable simply means that the difficulty does not become Impossible. If it were to become Impossible difficulty, it would require a Destiny Point flip and GM approval. It does not mean that the player cannot make more attacks. As for limits:

You take Strain and Conflict each time you trigger that extra attack, and you must be successful on the attack to trigger another one. So while there is technically no limit, you can't continue indefinitely because you will fail sooner or later. Even if you have a pool of YYYYY, you only have a roughly 70% chance of success at PPPPP, if I remember my numbers right. That means you have only a 49% chance of succeeding twice, and only a 34% chance of succeeding thrice once you get to that level .

And that's without Adversary or other abilities that upgrade the difficulty.

Adversary 3 upgrades the difficulty. You increase the difficulty before you upgrade, so with Adversary 3, it doesn't go from RRP to RRPP, it goes to RRR.

Let's go with that full pool against Adversary 3, that's ~75% at Hard, ~65% at Daunting, and ~60% at Formidable. That's before Boost and Setback, but that gets more complicated. I rounded some here, but that gets us to a ~50% chance of reaching Formidable, and only a ~30% chance of getting a second Formidable check.

If you take a more reasonable pool of YYYG against Adversary 2, that's ~60% at Hard, ~50% at Daunting, and ~40% at Formidable. I rounded down a little so I'll round up a little here, but that gets us to a 33% chance of reaching Formidable and only a 15% chance of reaching a second Formidable check.

It's also worth noting that you only get the one target. Most are going to go down far faster than this, and those that don't are going to have a high Adversary and likely Defense rating. Further, Threat and Despair can be spent for Improved Parry, which can't be Parried in turn. With Adversary 3, we're talking a 16% chance at Average, 23% at Hard, Daunting, and Formidable (besides Threat). So if you make it that far, it's only a 38% chance that you won't generate at least 1 Despair.