[2023] Crucis Mk II Thunder Hammer Cannot Cleave

Hey all, just to clarify things in this thread.

The values shown in the stat screen define the hit mass you can get through and not the number of targets. Each enemy has their own hit mass value, and hitting an enemy will subtract their hit mass value from the remaining hit mass “budget” for the attack - as soon as this reaches 0 or less, then the attack is stopped.

The Thunder Hammer, being a tank gestalt weapon, will allow you to hit a lot of targets but will only damage a few. So as mentioned above, damaging three targets is correct in this case, as the Thunder Hammer can only deal health damage to the first three targets it hits, but it can still keep going and knock further targets back.

Cleave and Power bonuses do increase the amount of hit mass you can get through, but do not change the damage settings for the weapon.

Cleave though shown seperately from Damage and Stagger will always be the same value.

Absolutely! Our designers actively monitor and discuss feedback posted on these forums

I relayed this to one of our designers just now, and received this response:

Those are separate systems and tweakable values per weapon, which in the end works together.

A blessing that increases cleave will allow you to hit more targets, and if the weapon considers every target damagable you will damage more targets, but it won’t shift the “damage indices”. Similarly increased power blessings will increase the overall base power of the the attack, including maximum cleavable hit mass and the base value used to calculate health and impact damage.

There’s currently no features that allows shifting of these damage indices, as which targets in an attack receive what distribution of health and impact damage is integral to the gestalts of the weapons.

Hello, combat team programmer here!
I’m gonna try and answer #3 as well as possible without going into absolutely every detail and making it too much of a wall of text.

First off, there is actually two cleave values behind the scenes, one for attack (dev term for Damage) and impact (dev term for Impact).
But this is mostly for legacy reasons from early implementations, and in actuality the highest of these values are used for the hit mass budget calculation. (And both, and therefore the final, value should be influenced by buffs and other bonuses.)

The absolutely shortest answer to #3 is that the calculation for the which enemies can be staggered are done the same way as for damage. But we should always apply some kind of stagger or hit reaction as long as the weapon haven’t been stopped in its sweep.

The more technical answer is along these lines:
All hit mass decide is “will this target stop the attack, or let me cleave through to the next one in line?”. Then the damage profile for the weapon can define (somewhat simplified) that “target 1-4 will take diminishing health damage and target 5+ no health damage, and target 1-6 will receive diminishing staggers, and target 7-infinity will take a step back”.
Almost all weapons will continue to lightly stagger or make enemies flinch as long as the sweep can continue, and then trigger what we call a hitstop animation when your hit mass runs out (regardless of damage or stagger being inflicted). This animation however can be somewhat subtle depending on weapons. For example the Devil’s Claw sword first heavy attack hitstop animation is a slight catching/stopping of the weapon and then a bit more downwards continuation of the sweep.

Regarding presentation of all this data and stats, personally I’d love to improve it and show more in depth stats. But that of course hinges on the wider focus, plans, etc. of the teams and company. (And I want to stress that this is just my wish, and shouldn’t be taken as a promise.)

Exactly. As long as the sweep continues you will (read: should) make some effect on the enemies in range.
Carapace armour will normally always stops an attack, regardless of hit mass budget left, but a few traits, Brutal Momentum included, ignores that and uses normal hit mass calculation.
But to be honest, I can’t actually recollect that actual interaction between that trait and the bulwarks off the top of my head. If I get the time I can try and verify the actual behaviour (both actual and intended) some time during the week.

This specific one might actually be too subtle IMO. And I actually had to go into our test levels to verify what I was saying when typing of my first reply.
The designers especially reads a lot on the forums and reddit, so if there’s a general consensus about a few of the hitstops being hard to read they might be tweaked to be a bit more obvious looking.

Yes.

Yes and no.
Currently that’s how it works. But there’s nothing technical to prevent us from modifying which target index is being used and how much hit mass is consumed. This is more of a question that falls into the design space and the rules, decisions, and constraints set up there. But that is a spot I’m not 100% comfortable with making certain statements in.

Nevertheless, to give a hypothetical example: A blessing could to effectively ignore target index if a target is killed by a headshot, thereby “extending” the amount of damaged targets.
So first target gets damage as if it’s the first target, if it was killed by a headshot, that hit mass gets refunded and the second target gets damage as if it was the first target. If that target was also killed by a headshot, the third target in line will take damage as if it was the first target, etc.