Greetings!

I have been reading and re-reading the talents as well as the two-weapon fighting rules in the BC book. And, from what it seems you can hit an insane amount of times. The two-weapon wielder talent specifically states that you can do a Standard attack, Swift attack or Lightning attack with both weapons. So far so good, 2 Lightning attacks per round, that works.

Now, if you look at the Furious assault talent, where you can use your reaction to make an additional attack, things get interesting. As far as I can tell, you can do a Lightning attack with that additional attack, and combine this with Two-weapon wielder. The only "combat talent" I have found, wich specificaly states that it can not be combined with Swift attack, Lightning attack or Two-weapon wielder, is Counter Attack.

Now, hopefully I have missed something, since I think that 4 lightning attacks per round, admittedly with no chance to dodge/parry, will be extremely devestating.

Furious Assault requires you take the All Out Attack, which precludes swift/lightning attack.

Also, its currently unknown whether you can actually do 2 x lightning attack. Sure the two-weapon wielder rules say you can, but the text for Swift Attack (which uses Lightning Attack in its description) says you can not.

Two-weapon wielder merely reduces penalties for off-hand weapon usage, and in previous game systems at least, the off hand merely allows 1 extra attack as part of a Multi-attack action such as All-Out-Attack (ie anything requiring a full round). I'd presume in that case that Lightning attack would mean 1 hit, +1 per degree of success, +1 for offhand.

As a GM I still haven't decided just how dual wielding is gonna work in my games. Mainly 'cause none of my players have done so yet. But. I'd say that you can only Lightning Attack once per round. So. Your Offhand attack has to be a single or a Swift Attack. At least, that's how I'm going to rule it.

Dual Firearms are gonna be along the same route.

Crate said:

That is indeed true, after looking at it again. Seems wierd though, the book seems unable to make up its mind regarding lightning attacks. The section at page 244 indicates you can use lightning with both attacks, the talent says only one. The talent also only excludes Unwieldy weapons from using lightning attacks, but I know I read somewhere that Unbalanced weapons could also not use lightning attacks. I also belive it was somewhere mentioned that you actually needed a Balanced weapon to do it. **** this is confusing.

Now, if you look at the Furious assault talent, where you can use your reaction to make an additional attack, things get interesting. As far as I can tell, you can do a Lightning attack with that additional attack

I don't think you can, as "make an attack" generally translates to "make a single attack".

Cifer said:

Then why the need for the clarification on Counter-Attack?
But as said above, swift/lightning attack cant be combined with Furious assault, as that can only be used in an All out attack, wich is one of the three types of attack (Standard, Swift/Lightning and All out) The question on wheter you can do 2x Lightning attacks with Two-weapon wielder is still up for debate though.

So long as some rules state you can't, you simply do not want to allow 2x Lightning Attack. Do you really want PCs unloading 30+ attacks a round, each? Hell, a party with that stuff could probably wipe out an entire First Company in one round.

Deinos said:

Since the max number of extra hits is capped att your Weapon Skill bonus, and I dont see that many situations where someone has an effective weapon skill of 150, that aint gonna happen to often. A maxed out CSM, with say, 50 starting ws and 4 advances, making a total of 70 ws, will on avarage get maybe...5-7 hits a round. It's a lot, yes, but right now I dont see that many situations where it will spiral out of all control. Well, psykers maybe, but they have a tendancy to mess up everything.

It's quite easy to get that many hits. An unaligned CSM Sorcerer with Warptime, Precog Strike, and Lightning Attack. I have a 17k xp Sorcerer at the moment who, with PR6, 61WS, can boost his WS bonus to 12. Add in Precog Strike bonus from a free action test to boost that to 91WS, bonus of 15. Since the WS counts as an UC from Warptime, I add half his WS bonus to my degrees of success if I succeed my roll. So as long as I roll 90 on %, I get at least 9 hits. If I get 30 or less on my roll, I get the full 15 hits from my weapon. And all of this is with a force weapon. With his WP of 75, have fun on opposed WP rolls to see if I nuke you from just the first of those 9-15 hits. Can easily tear up pretty much anything in game unless it has resistance to the Force weapon's attack or has enough armour/toughness to avoid getting damage by it in the first place. And this is with a character that is equivalent to a Rank 2 DW PC.

ozzie347 said:

And, as I said, Psykers (or in this case, Sorcerers) have a tendancy to mess up everything. They haven't been "balanced" in any rule system as of yet.

Even a regular CSM can get out of hand with certain mutations, like the one that lets you take an UC and they take WS. They'd add an extra 4 automatic hits on every success roll, pretty much guaranteeing their hit cap every attack. Maybe the example of taking out a First Company in a turn is a little beyond a PC party's scope, but doing that many hits with dual Lightning Claws equipped quickly gets out of hand, because those bonus UC WS degrees count towards the extra dmg the claws do, even if the degrees surpass the amount of total hits. Basically anything short of a Greater Daemon can be taken out in a turn. From a GM perspective it's hard to balance cause you then have to throw a Master level enemy per PC in the group for the fight to end up what an Elite level fight should be.

What you are saying is, if you get the same mutation 4 times, it gets annoying. Hmmm, more annoying then having permanent Fear 4? That can happen aswell. And unless i remember incorrectly, UC adds one degree of succes for everyother UC you have, so a UC of 4 on weapon skill, would mean 2 additional degrees of succes. Use that with a weapon skill of 70, and you get an "average of 4-6 hits per lightning attack. Its still a lot, but it's nowhere near the carnage a psyker can cause. And considering how powerfull some of the ranged weapons are, lika a multilaser or a Reaper Autocannon, I don really see that big of an issue here.

Lightning claws I haven't looked at really, anything special with them?

UC adds 1 degree for every 2 points of bonus you have, regardless if they are UC or not, so a character with 70WS and UC WS+1 would get 4 extra degrees (WS bonus 8/2=4) of success on every successful WS roll. So no, you don't need to get the same mutation 4 times, even getting the mutation once throws that out of whack. So a character rolling a 69 there would still get 5 degrees of success, meaning 5 hits on a target. Degrees of success also changed with BC where they now start at 1 below your characteristic, rather than 10 below.

Lightning claws are 1d10+6, Pen 8, Proven 4, Power Field, and a special rule of +1dmg per degree of success and if you have a pair of them that bonus is improved to +2 per degree. Most melee characters will bump up their strength to at least 50+, so an average CSM with UC WS+1 will do AT LEAST 1d10(min of 4)+23 per hit. And that is a single hit with one degree of success. Say they have a WS of 70 and roll a 09 on a Lightning Attack. That becomes 7 degrees of success, so 7 hits, plus 4 DoS from UC WS. The attacks still cap at 7, but each one doing 1d10(min4)+37 with a Pen 8 weapon. Without factoring in dodge/parry (so this number will be slightly skewed) that's 287-329 damage before toughness reduction, not factoring in Zealous Hatred. Unless the target gets a really good dodge/parry roll, that can kill anything shy of a Greater Daemon in one turn.

"In addition, whenever someone with an Unnatural Characteristic succeeds on a test utilizing that Characteristic, they gain a number of bonus Degrees of Success equal to half their Unnatural Characteristic." In this case, the Unnatural Characteristic is the +x given to the normal Characteristic Bonus. So your Warptime which gives Unnatural Weapon Skill (+6) only yields 3 bonus Degrees of Success.

cis013 said:

Ah, my mistake on the UC bonus there. Regardless, the modified damage for that is then 231-273 before toughness on a good roll.

So, not to hijack a thread or anything, this seems related;

But assuming we do allow two weapon wielding to be able to allow 2x lightning attacks (1 for main hand, one for offhand) in a round, does this count as a full round action, or is it still a half round action? Nothing I've read with two weapon wielder makes the off hand attack use an actual action. Still, it seems implicit that it would, and it makes sense to me.

And really, even if its just Lightning attack/standard attack with two weapon wielding, is that also not a full round action?

KommissarK said: