I have been a long time watcher of this forum and it has answered many questions for my gaming group. This is the first time I've actually found something that hasn't already been covered before so I thought I'd jump in and ask.

A Frag Missiles is Blast (5) Devasting (1): If it hits a horde it should do 11 magnitude damage.
5 hits due to the blast quality, each hit doing 2 magnitutde damage due to the devastating quality, plus the 1 for explosive damage that I do not think is increased by devastating.

A Cyclone Launcher is S/2/-: With the right roll I can hit a horde 3 times doing a total of 33 damage and, since I would be in tactical dreadnought armor and have the auto-stabilised trait, I could repeat that attack possibly doing 66 total damage in a single round.

Does Storm of Iron apply to the Cyclone Missile Launcher? Page 127 of the core book says when using a flamer or semi or full auto burst against an enemy with the horde trait you double any magnitude damage. It does not specify what type of weapon the semi or full auto burst is fired from.

How do you hit 3 times with the Cyclone missile launcher? It only has RoF 2 in semi-auto. That means two hits max. And as far as I am aware, Auto-Stablised doesn't allow you to break the rule of only carrying out one "Attack" action each turn.

However, as you describe it, it would seem Storm of Iron does indeed apply to the Cyclone Missile Launcher if fired semi-auto… However, I suspect the intention was not for that particular interaction.

Auto-Stabilised (Page 130): "may fire on semi or full auto as a half action" thus you can fire two semi auto bursts in a round.

Semi-Auto Burst (Page 242): "If he succeeds, the attack scores a hit normally. Furthermore, every 2 degress of success score an extra hit. The number of extra hits scored in this manner cannot exceed the weapon's semi-automatic rate of fire." Thus with a good enough roll you can score three hits with the missile launcher.

I've never seen anything about being limited to a single "attack" action type in a round, please provide a page reference in the book.

I did just find something we had never found with Half Actions: "A character cannot take the same half action twice in the same turn."

I would not be able to fire the Cyclone Missile Launcher twice since it would be the same half action.

I believe it has been clarified via rule gurus e-mails, a character can not take two attack sub-type actions in a single turn.

It is also infered from a section from the psychic powers Errata, "“If the power targets an opponent or does damage to an opponent, the power gains the Attack Subtype (see page 237), and thus cannot be combined with other Attack Subtype actions (such as Full-Auto Burst or Semi-Auto Burst, and so on)."

The above statement directly infers a character can not use two Attack Subtype actions in a single turn.

Borithan was correct on all statements.

Additional clarification. Weapons with devastating still 'technically' require damage rolls for their hits, only the "extra magnitude" damage from the devastating causes automatic magnitude damage. 6 in the case of a frag missile: 5 hits from blast + 1 hit for X = 6 hits, each hit deals an extra mag damage so 6 auto mag damage, the first 6 hits still by RAW need to have their damage rolled. Of course calculating if minimum damage will cause magnitude damage is always a good way to speed up the rolling.

Herichimo: Thanks for the reference to that. Based on what Borithan had said, I finally actually read the "half action" text. My group and I have always just assumed that meant you could do 2 half actions with no restrictions. That helped clarify most of what I initially posted about.

It is the Semi Auto part I'm still stuck on. The text says the extra hits cannot exceed the semi/full auto rate of fire. The second example under semi auto on page 242 even says he had enough degress of success to hit a third time but could only score 2 extra hits.

Reading the examples makes it clear that the number in the weapon stat block is the actual number of shots fired, hence the maximum number of hits unless there are other special rules in effect like scatter.

Silencer39 said:

Yes those quotes and examples and the rule itself being badly written have been brought up by my players before. The phrase "extra hits" is where confusion arises.

Long story short, absent a talent like Bolter Drill, RoF S/2/- is max 2 rounds hitting. Not 3. 2 means 2. Even with 8 DoS on the roll to hit.