The rules don't mention the soak, all it says is minions suffer damage as a group. Does that mean if someone hits a group of stormtroopers for, say, 15 damage (just saying), then the soak soaks 5, and 2 troopers die (if they each had 5 Health)?

Or does the soak value soak up 5, 5 damage goes through and kills a trooper, then the 2nd 5 soak soaks up the last 5 damage? You would assume the soak would stack in some way if health stacks, otherwise the soak for a group would be VERY weak since additional guys technically drop with 0 soak to defend with.

The devs have clarified in interviews on the Order 66 podcast that soak only applies once per attack on a minion group. It doesn't 'roll over' to the next minion in the stack if one goes down.

This is intentional, as it's meant to keep the math light and the action fast.

It seems, having read the minion section, that since it doesn't SAY their soak is pooled, it isn't. Minions appear to be cluster mobs - zerg if you will. Their skills and attacks all combine. The group gets a unified soak threshhold. The wounds per minion is, I imagine, just to make it easier to create variable sizes of groups based on how many PCs you have.

I'd also say, looking at the stats on nemeses, rivals and minions, minions's soak skews high compared to nemeses and rivals. This may be the intent.

'd.

Nope, Minion Soak does not stack.

Instead, a Minion Group has a combined Wound Threshold equal to that of all the minions in the group, but the group is considered a single entity, and thus only gets to apply its Soak Value once per hit.

So if you dealt 15 damage to a minion group of three stormtroopers, 5 points would be absorbed by the group's Soak Value, leaving 10 points, which is enough to take down two of the stormtroopers (5 Wounds each).

And yes, this makes weapons with Pierce or Breach very nasty against minion groups.

Yeah there was a rather lengthy discussion about this in the Beta forums. Soak only once per turn. The easiest way to think of the overall rules for minions is they do NOTHING individually.

Well minions can be ran as individual NPCs if you want lower powered adversaries, but yes if ran as a group then soak only counts once per turn.

So if you dealt 15 damage to a minion group of three stormtroopers, 5 points would be absorbed by the group's Soak Value, leaving 10 points, which is enough to take down two of the stormtroopers (5 Wounds each).

I read on another post that the wounds must exceed the threshold multiple. So to drop one trooper, you need 6 wounds, for 2 troopers 11 wounds, 3 needs 16. So it is always wound threshold +1 in wounds to drop a minion.

To put down a character you have to deal more wounds than his wound threshold.

If you hit for 15 damage against the Stormtrooper with soak 5, you deal 10 wounds, killing one Stormtrooper only.

I think that there is an official FAQ that clarifies this.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/StarWarsRPG/edge-of-the-empire/support/SWE02_FAQ_LowRes.pdf