Instead of detonating upon being shot, they detonate when they get into explosion range of an enemy. However, they'd have significantly smaller explosion ranges, about melee range for a dox. Keeping the same DPS they'd be ineffective as a whole against tanks. This would also fix the current problem with the Doxen. Additionally, when shot they explode normally, doing no damage. Not only making them genuinely fun to use, they'd have a degree of utility instead of being basically useless.
So I just had a look at the bomb bot. It blows up doing damage when it gets in its weapon range and then self destructs. When they die from external means, they use the same effect, but do no damage.
It would be nice if they were immune to explosion damage, or at the very least their own explosion damage.
If I remember correctly we did something along the same likes for the Inferno in BlackOps(Maybe the Fire Beatle too?) They took reduced damage from other Inferno Deathblasts, this was to encourage using them in larger groups because they couldn't be easily start a chain reaction. As the range closed the chances of a chain reaction happening increased as more units took "chip damage" that eventually brought them into to teh threadhold where a deathblast from a fellow Inferno could take them out, but by that point it was okay because they were firing and doing some nasty AoE and DoT damage. Mike
In the ammo.json they have "splash_damages_allies":false, so in theory, they shouldn't be able to hurt friendly units.
Maybe it's changed, but I would have sworn that in the last patch they did. Sending columns of them at for instance mexes seemed to result in a good ten or fifteen dying all at once as soon at the first one detonated.
banelings are better since they explode on death =P oh and they actually have AoE where as boom has nothing, its all burst damage...should be more like 50 damage with huge AoE.
