I am very new to starfinder but I cant find anything regarding overcharging Automatic weapons, either your own or a team mates. If you can overcharge them, would it only apply to the first shot fired? Or would it completely disable automatic fire? Thanks
|
Right so, couple things..
Firstly, the weapon must meet the criteria "a ranged energy weapon or a melee weapon with the powered special property" and "a weapon with a battery or power cell".
If you are wielding the weapon, you cannot utilize the automatic property as overcharge is a standard action and automatic is a full-round action.
You can however overcharge an ally's weapon that meets the criteria. However, do note that overcharge uses up 3x normal usage. This, plus the 2x usage of the automatic property essentially means that for every 6 usage, you can hit 1 target in the area.
As far as the extra damage, it should work.
Now, I can see it ruled either way by a GM. Either the first shot of the automatic is overcharged and uses the 6x usage while the rest of the shots use the 2x usage. Or, the whole auto is overcharged. The text is not overly clear and therefore is in GM ruling territory.
Would overcharging an ally not fall into the old "double doubling" math that results in adding the multiplayers-1 since it's the base that is multiplied.
So for triple and double it'd technically be each shot consumes 4 times the usage.
3 for overcharges triple and then 1 for the "double" from automatic (and only 1 since the base 1 is already being added and there's no double jeopardy in this convoluted math exercise).
I may be wrong here though so someone please tell me if that's the case lol
Most of what you said was how I had figured it would work. I would also make the suggestion of following the Supercharge weapon technomancer spell and apply half the buff on all targets. Rounded down of coarse. That would put a max of 3d6 extra damage on all shots. But ultimately its up to the GM, as you said.
Overcharge conveniently doesn't have that less damage on AoE line so it'd still do regular damage. Same as if you overcharge an explode weapon. Or a blast/line/etc for that matter
Everything I've read agrees that Line and Blast cannot benefit from overcharge. As stated in both blast and line "A line/blast weapon doesn’t benefit from feats or abilities that increase the damage of a single attack (such as the operative’s trick attack)." So while it can still buff explosion, the issue was that it doesn't specify anything in regards to automatic, but I can see it being deemed too powerful to stack 7d6's onto every enemy hit. Or for that matter, even illogical. This ability functions, as far as I can tell, almost identically to boost. If a GM would accept half damage to all targets it would be better than just doing full buff damage to only the first. If they would accept full buff damage then great, but the suggestion was a compromise for the GM's who would not.
Ironically, like you mentioned, the ability functions almost identically to boost. That is the logic I myself used and the same logic that makes the ability work with line and blast.
Long story short, there are a line of boost line weapons, see the Acid Lancers from alien archive . Line and blast share the same text about boosting damage. Therefore if boost works on one, it technically would work on the other. Following that train, if overcharge is nearly identical to boost, and boost works... Well you can see where this is headed lol.
All that said I may be wrong and it may be an error entirely. The alien archive has errata and an faq for it though, of course neither of these can be expected to cover everything, but my point is they have addressed issues within the book and at the time at least, this wasn't deemed an issue.