in our latest session we were working to repair an orbital relay to survey the planet below more effectively,

our kill team got ambushed by gaunts, but they weren't really doing us any harm we just had to scramble to protect the servitors that were sent with us

as we were fighting them off a warrior appeared down the hall form us so we wanted to hustle through the gaunts, but we managed to close the blast door into the hallway which bought us sometime,

so i took my devastator set him up in cover aiming at the door which the warrior was bashing down, when i declared that was going to take aim as a full action my GM said that you can't take aim with heavy weapons,

is that right?

while i understand that it is the GMs disgression that kind of stuck in my craw as wrong

You can aim with heavy weapons - you can even aim with melee weapons.

I swear I read somehwere you can't aim and use automatic fire, but I appear to be mistaken. You can't aim and do called shots, but it would appear you could aim one round, and use full auto the next.

I'd agree that you can't take aim on a target you can't see (a Tyranid warrior on the other side of a door, for example), but you can definitely aim with any weapon. You can also aim then fire semi- or full-auto.

Charmander said:

You can use aim with any kind of attack. The only things preventing you are:

- How long you have in a round. Alternating a full action aim with semi/full auto fire is probable going to put out less damage than just firing every round.

- Doing anything between the aim and the attack loses the benefit of the aim. Including using a reaction for something like a dodge.

Is using a full action aim to give a bonus to a reaction (ballistic mechadendrite) or free action (MIU weapon interface) attack allowed ?

Howdy!

Some folks confuse the no aim action with no called shots with semi/full auto.

major shultz said:

Aye, I must admit I've done that before. However, I could see a reasoning for houseruling that you can aim with semi-auto, but not with full auto, which would make Semi-Auto much more worth using.

MILLANDSON said:

"Remember: short, controlled bursts." :-)

Alex

Actually... I might do that. I was also tempted to swap the number of DoS needed to get extra hits for Semi-Auto and Full-Auto. That way, you get a better modifier to hit with Full Auto, as you are filling the area with lead, but semi-auto will have more of those extra bullets actually hit.

What do you guys think of that?

MILLANDSON said:

This comes up a lot a TBH, i think it's got more to do with range than anything. At close ranges a training guy should have a chance of hitting with a good number of shots of Full or semi-auto. At long ranges firing more bullets does help (if you are trained in doing so!) but you're firing a lot bullets to catch them with a small percentage rather than swiss cheesing them.

Direach said:

that must have been what he meant, because in hind sight that makes prefect sense

that or he confused the called shot rule with aiming

-cromwell

I must admit, I'm a tad confused. I haven't had the time to plumb the rules in depth yet so perhaps I've missed it, but I haven't noticed any prohibition against using aim with a called shot. Sure, you'd likely be aiming for a full round and then spending your next full round to fire once or maybe taking a half action to move and a half action to aim and then firing on the following round, but outside of the fact that you can't do both in the same action I see nothing in the rules that prevents it in much the same way I see nothing that prevents you from using a full round action to aim and then using your following full round to crack off a full auto burst.

People are confusing matters. You can't call a shot when using full or semi-auto. That's the only restriction I am aware of actually being in the RAW of all those listed above.

Aiming before firing a full auto burst is legal, with the provisios given above and if you can see the target. It's rarely been done in my campaigns since players want as many bursts as possible and aren't going to "waste" actions levelling the gun so a few more rounds hit.

Pointing a gun at a corridor and waiting for an enemy to come is Overwatch and handled a bit differently.