It seems like vs. non-armored it will go through enemies and deal no damage half the time, other times it explodes and deals damage. I don’t understand what causes one behavior vs. the other. It’s especially noticeable with Berserkers for some reason, is it something to do with them being hard to stagger?
Vs. Chaos Warriors it seems to do literally zero damage other than a very minor DoT when I test it with mods, but then when I join games and experience in actual gameplay I rack up a fairly reasonable amount of kills with it. Far more than I’d expect getting 2 damage ticks on a 250 HP CW. Is this one of the weapons that doesn’t function properly in a modded keep? Or is it one of those attacks that functions differently whether you are the host or not the host?
So its been a LONG time since i used it but if i am not mistaken, the fireball does indeed pierce most unarmored targets (except monsters?) and it actually does rather good damage and it applies a fire DOT for even more damage to everything it goes through or hits with the explosion. It´s kinda like Sienna´s javelin if you will, but with a significantly bigger hitbox and worse against armor.
And on the topic of armor, like the Javelin,the balls do not pierce armor, nor shields i think, and just stops(or explodes in this case) on those.
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As for effectiveness against chaos warriors, might be like the elf hagbane in how the weapon usually does very little against them but works well or at least decently against everything else.
I can definitely say that it doesn’t do “good damage” consistently to unarmored. Berserkers for example take ~6-10 uncharged fireballs, testing with my Pyromancer build on Cata (this is with ride the fire, enhanced power, on the precipice and barrage going). And the fact that its so random makes me think that its a bug. I can definitely see with the damage numbers mod that the actual fireball strike sometimes displays a number and sometimes displays nothing, so unless the mod is bugged it must be that the fireball randomly does no damage sometimes to unarmored enemies. You can also tell there’s a problem because the primary direct shot attack does always hit properly and consistently kills them in 3 hits.
re: CWs, I’m saying that its actually seeming to do decent damage when I use it in games, but seems weak whenever I test it using mods. So I think it might be some kind of bug with how damage or DoT is registered, either based on mods or based on whether you are host or not. Fireball is actually significantly weaker than Hagbane in the keep (esp with str pot, ~4 hagbane shots to take down a CW vs. ~7 fireballs), but in real gameplay seems significantly stronger and I score regular kills even without str pot.
Ok, did some further tests and it seems to be a very simple fact: non-critical fireballs do no impact damage to berserkers, ever. Crits do deal damage. The DoT is always applied. I think fireball staff works properly vs infantry type armor, it’s just berserkers that have the passthrough bug.
Still no idea about the CWs, if its actually some weirdness that only is seen in actual gameplay or depends on being a client rather than host then it’d be hard for me to test. Could just be me getting really lucky and scoring the final 1% of damage to kill multiple CWs with a 2 DPS DoT over several games I suppose, but still feels weird.
Bugs aside for the moment, is the damage not any good against rotblood infantry+mauler hordes or even skaven + stormvermin ones? I wana recall something like 3-5 semi or fully charged fireballs tearing lines straight through even hyperdense hordes.
As for the bug, might as well report it again if you care to, it might just help.
Fireball damage is definitely good against hordes. I thought originally that the reason was that even if it bugged passing through one unit, it’d hit something nearby and splash it. But apparently the only problem is with berserkers, and that splash may still help kill Berserkers that are in dense hordes. Fireball shreds even stormvermin pretty quickly too, though that’s with like +70-100% power vs. them stacked along with Pyromancer crit rates since I’m trying to maximize ability to get armored specials at long range.
fireball staff is your go-to horde clear, with the light attack being primarily used for specials and berserkers (unarmored in the face area).
Fully charged attacks are the way to go with horde to incinerate. The dmg does seem funky but I don’t really test dmg and numbers, I just do the attacks that work. What works is light attack headshots on unarmored and fully charged attacks for horde.