Is roust bugged or I had rolled a 0.000000001 probability?

[Nibelung44]

Perhaps roust tooltip has not been updated and it does 1 damage, period.

Because over several rousts, on 15 non armored target, I always did 1 HP damage. As roust is supposed to do between 1 and 4 damage, I had for each of these events 25% chance to do 1 damage.

And (0.25)^15 = 0.000000001

so, what's going on? Should I play the national lottery now, with all this bad luck stored up?

[Goldenmonkey]

I think, Xwynns complained about roust too, in his videos. Since he is like the master beta tester, I am sure they will look into it.
Out fo experience though, usually when I feel cheated by RNG, I realize later, it was actually legit. Don't trust your memory.

How about, you make a save, bevore every roust and write down the results? That way, you can give a detailed bug report. (I would do it myself, but I am too lazy )

[Saph7]

This annoyed me enough that I actually went and looked it up. The datafiles contain the following:

ROUST_DIRECT_APPLY_CHANCE=20
ROUST_DAMAGE_PENALTY=0.80f ; 20% of normal

In other words, Roust does 20% of the damage of a regular Flamethrower, which is pretty much always going to be 1. Definitely not 1-4.

[KevlinTallfellow]

You're lucky that Roust does any damage at all. Damage is not the primary, secondary, or even tertiary purpose of Roust. The primary purpose is to force a target, usually multiple targets, to change location, typically to force them to trigger overwatch with suppression. The secondary purpose is the extended range, so you can actually use your flamethrower as a control power against things that you can't get close enough to for flanks or regular flamethrower usage. The tertiary purpose would be a small chance to cause burning on target, further controlling them. If Roust didn't do any damage at all, ever, it would still be incredibly useful in the aforementioned situations.

[DerAva]

The secondary purpose is the extended range,

Wait, so Roust has more range than the normal Flamethrower shot? Why isn't that mentioned anywhere in the tooltip then?

[Saph7]

It has a really long range, very low damage, and a very low chance to set enemies on fire.

In practice I mostly end up using Roust to trigger Burnout and finish off enemies on 1 HP. The forced move often hurts as much as it helps since the enemies are free to move to a better position. I'm unsure as to whether it's better than Fire in the Hole, even for a dedicated flamer build.

[Goldenmonkey]

It has a really long range, very low damage, and a very low chance to set enemies on fire.

In practice I mostly end up using Roust to trigger Burnout and finish off enemies on 1 HP. The forced move often hurts as much as it helps since the enemies are free to move to a better position. I'm unsure as to whether it's better than Fire in the Hole, even for a dedicated flamer build.

Don't forget getting rid of overwatches

[Nibelung44]

That's all good indeed, but I also made my choice of Roust because the damages were 1 to 4, not just 1.

So in the end, that's mostly a tooltip update matter.

[trihero]

Well in the base vanilla game, it wasn't equally likely to get all damage points within the range because of the "+1" mechanic, I'll provide a relevant quote, and the full link if you want to see it

It's too inconsistent, so I'll just list it. Note that the way this works, you definitely don't have an even probability of getting 4,5,6 or 7 if the in-game description says 4-7. You can think of it like this: in a range of 4-7, the middle two (5/6) are 33% probability each. The 4 and 7 will split the remaining third of a chance based on the OnePlus stat, biasing either high or low.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/ ... age_works/

My guess is that's what's going on here, you don't have an even chance of getting all the damage within the listed range. Maybe 1 damage is 97% and the others are 1%? I dunno.

[Jadiel]

Based on my experience using it, I would say that it rolls damage as normal, and then divides by five, rounding up. So, if you roll 6 or higher on your flamethrower, you get 2. Otherwise, you get 1. With a Mk3 flamethrower, I guess it's possible to get 3 damage, but I've never seen it happen.

ETA: The +1 from Flame and Steel could possibly apply after the division by 5, which would explain how you might get 1-4 damage. However, I've never taken Flame and Steel, so I'm only guessing.