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To go along with the recent request for FAQs on Swarms, there is this:
"A swarm takes half again as much damage (+50%) from spells or effects that affect an area, such as splash weapons ....."
But some say the direct hit is targeted, this means no swarm damage. And the splash almost always does 1pt, and "half again as much damage (+50%)" of 1 is 1.
So this needs to be FAQed also, methinks. Or just FAQ swarms in general, and do two birds with one stroke of the pen.
Splash weapons are not particularly effective, but it does make Alchemists an effective anti-Swarm class, and gives Martials something to do other than play mouse to the Swarm's cat while the Casters break out their flamethrowers.
Non-magical Splash weapons should work as they aren't spells or effect that target a creature. They are more like weapons: thus they deal 1.5 direct hit and 1.5 splash.
Now, the alchemists splash weapon might be magic and may not work depending.
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It's pretty obvious that the non-magical splash weapons are supposed to deal full damage to swarms if you consider the CR of swarms and the general resources that low-level characters have at their disposal. For example, burning hands does 1d4 damage at level 1. A CR1 swarm would take a minimum of 2 burning hands to disperse (9 hp for a spider swarm). With saves and/or poor rolls, a caster could run out of spells before the swarm runs out of health (assuming that your caster(s) prepared nothing but area spells in case they encountered swarms).
Also, if you rule that splash weapons only do 1 point of damage to swarms, you're sending a clear message to your players that you want them to optimize in such a fashion that they can blast the hell out of anything right off the bat.
Yes, but still, this has been argued. Clearly the rules for swarms need a FAQ or two.