Splash Damage

Attack areas, not targets.

Don't you hate it when your opponent decides to rush you with a horde of mooks so that you have to aim and take out each and every one while they swarm you? That's what good old Splash Damage is for! Their swarms of disposable mooks are no match for a well placed artillery shell blowing them all to pieces.

Most weapons have to hit their target directly to be effective — but some lucky few merely have to hit near the target since damage occurs in an area around their impact point. This Splash Damage usually represents explosives; it commonly applies to rockets and bombs, but can (and surprisingly frequently does) show up on more exotic and powerful weapons like BFGs and Energy Weapons.

Splash Damage is typically distance dependent: the closer you are to the hit, the greater the pain. Usually, such a weapon will also do a fixed amount of additional damage if it scores a direct hit. However, some weapons (such as grenades) deal out splash damage exclusively.

In contrast, an Area of Effect weapon has equal distribution of its damage/effects over its footprint.

This quality usually makes a unit very valuable in RTS games, where even very weak attacks can be highly effective in the right circumstances or in sufficient numbers, because a particular unit or tactic involves tightly bunching up a cluster of units, meaning that even a weak attack does that damage to every single unit in the cluster, making it a rather powerful attack. Examples of such weapons usually have an Arbitrary Weapon Range, so that you don't hit yourself or your own men. A limiting factor of Splash Damage is the fact that the commonly explosive nature of this trope normally causes friendly fire if allies are within the area thus mandating strategic positioning and planning if one hopes to prevent loss or injuries of friendly units. As such it this trope is rarely combined with Friendly Fireproof, although it is usually a tremendous boon when the two do meet.

Related tropes include: Cluster Bomb, Area of Effect, Spread Shot, Hit Box Dissonance, Splash Damage Abuse. Frequently an effect of the BFG and Wave-Motion Gun. Sometimes allows players to Rocket Jump. Often used for a Herd-Hitting Attack or when Shooting the Swarm. Contrast Convection, Schmonvection, one example where damage that should have a splash effect does not.

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Examples

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons in all its editions, and Pathfinder (basically D&D 3.75), both feature "grenade-like weapons" or "splash weapons" depending on the edition. These weapons are usually a case of the useless useful weapon, as their effects are often available by other means at lower cost and with more impressive effects. Direct hits did more damage. Pathfinder introduces the Alchemist class, which specializes in dealing devastating damage with these weapons. Some spells, such as various editions of Meteor Swarm, had a similar mechanic where a direct hit may disallow a saving throw or do more damage.
• Many games use a mechanic like this for actual grenades or other explosive weapons, with a diminishing amount of splash damage based on distance to the blast. Notable in Shadowrun, The World of Darkness games, Paranoia, Deadlands, and dozens of others.
• Warhammer 40,000 uses Blast Templates for weapons like rocket launchers, Ordinance, and certain Psyker spells. The templates have a small hole in the center, which is placed over the intended target. Against Infantry, a direct hit and a splash damage hit deal the same damage. However, as of Fifth edition, splash damage against Vehicles is half the Strength of a direct hit. The way damage against vehicles is calculated, this means a splash damage hit will do absolutely nothing to a vehicle 99 times out of 100.
• In Warmachine/Hordes, some attacks can cause splash damage. When such an attack is aimed at a main target, it'll do full damage to said main target and reduced damage (called blast damage) to everything else in range if the attack hits, but if the attack misses, the AOE will fly off elsewhere while still doing blast damage. This fly-off-elsewhere rule can be used to "extend" the distance of the attack.
• The Energy Explosion power works like this in Hero Clix. It acts like a normal ranged attack, but anyone next to a target is also dealt damage equal to the number of targets the attack could have had.
• BattleTech has relatively few weapons that cause splash damage, but they tend to be pretty effective. The most commonly used one is artillery, plus there are fighter-dropped bombs, mech mortars, capital weapons (when used by orbiting warships to attack ground targets), and nuclear warheads. With all weapons, the effect does max damage on the hex it strikes, with reduced damage the further from impact you get. With nukes and capital weapons, said damage breakdown tends to be "target is most definitely dead, target is almost certainly dead, target is extremely likely to be dead..." out to "target's going to die of cancer about a year from now."

Video Games

• Tower Defense Games: this is one of the common anti-swarming-mook towers.
• Age Of Empires has catapults and juggernauts, while the sequel introduces mangonels, onagers, bombard cannons and cannon galleons. However, said Splash Damage is very dangerous as it can damage your own soldiers en masse. On the other hand, in I, it can be used to exploit a weakness of the AI: if you directly target a unit, they get an alert as soon as you fire, giving them time to dodge and counterattack, but if you target the ground nearby and catch them in the blast radius, they won't get the alert until they're actually hit.
• Classified: The Sentinel Crisis have this happening when using exploding projectiles, and you can only use the Grenade Launcher in outdoor environments. Trying to use said weapon in one stage inside a cramped cable car ends badly for you.
• Battle Fury in Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars is an item that gives melee heroes splash damage to their autoattacks. On carries who lack good AoE skills to kill creeps with, it's essential for them to buy one as soon as possible so they can accelerate their Gold per minute and get the rest of their core items.
  • Exploited with Kunkka from Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars. One of his skill, Tidebringer, periodically makes his next attack deal splash damage equal to 100% of his attack damage in a large radius. Splash damage in Warcraft III had a quirk where it ignored the enemy's armor value, so the splash damage ended up dealing more damage than the primary target. This bug was intentionally kept in Dota 2 specifically for Tidebringer for a while, until it was changed to check armor values, but made the splash damage have larger attack scaling anyway.
• Doom: The rocket launcher has this effect when the projectiles explode. Interestingly, splash damage in the Doom engine is an infinitely-tall cube rather than a sphere.
• Empire Earth employs splash damage with its siege weapons, as well as bomber planes (especially atomic bombers) and one the Pandora, an anti-infantry cyber. The sequel gives splash damage to nukes, ships, artillery and light infantry (although light artillery only gets it once it evolves into cannon and infantry into grenadiers).
• Endless Sky: Missiles typically have a blast radius, which can occasionally be useful for hitting enemies who are cloaked or otherwise can't be directly targeted.
• Etrian Odyssey does this with the basic fire rune, dealing fire damage to both the selected target and any adjacent targets on the same row.
• The Fallout series has the standard splash damage on explosives/grenades, but in Fallout 4, the effects of this splash damage are greatly magnified in a Good Bad Bug interacting with its Limb Damage system: The game registers a separate attack for every limb hit by the explosion, so a shot that hits all six body parts will do 6x normal damage.
• For the King: Splash attacks do full damage to the target and half damage to adjacent enemies, in contrast to Area of Effect damage that affects everyone equally. Since a battle has at most three enemies standing side by side, they can damage all three by targeting the central one. "Splash" is usually a trait of specific attacks, but the Woodcutter's passive ability has a chance to apply it to any two-handed melee weapon attack.
• Freeciv has Nuclear (missile) units. It may be very expensive and require much research on the Tech Tree but its attack destroys all units within a 3x3 radius. It is most often used to clear out cities containing large numbers of defending units but becomes even more legendary when they can nuke up to 4 cities with one blast, provided you detonate the nuke between the 4 cities and those cities are all located within a 3x3 area. To discourage liberal use of nukes, nuclear winter will start if enough of the world has been hit by nukes. Its only weakness is that if your enemies have SDI defense buildings or AEGIS cruisers near your intended detonation sites, in which case your nuclear unit is shot down and disappears into thin air.
• The Halo series has everything from small grenade launchers like the Concussion Rifle and Brute Shot, to the master of all splash damage, Halo 4's version of the Incineration Cannon, which has a blast radius that's larger than the effective range of the game's shotgun. Many vehicles also pack powerful explosive weapons with wide splash damage too, making splash damage a very prominent component of the series's gameplay.
• Iji: Splash damage is the main exception of Friendly Fire Proof - which comes in very handy in a Pacifist Run.
• If a jubeat cabinet is malfunctioning, hitting one panel may cause adjacent panels to set off as well. This is a bad thing because this can result in nearby notes being hit too early, resulting in potential misses.
• Left 4 Dead 2
  • The game has the Grenade Launcher do this. Direct impacts will heavily damage zombies and anyone else caught in the radius will be damaged as well. This is amplified with incendiary ammo where the splash damage will set anything on fire as long as they get hit.
  • Explosive ammo makes your gun have splash damage capabilities. allowing you to shred common infected as long as the splash damage area hits them. Shotguns are extremely powerful with this ammo since a clustered group of zombies can be killed in a single shot. However, explosive ammo can harm you as well if you are too close and if you get too close to your explosive shots with a shotgun, you will stumble backwards.
• In Mega Man 4, to defeat Dr. Wily you have to use Drill Bombs. However, the bombs themselves bounce off his ship. To win you must detonate the bomb before it hits so that the Splash Damage of the explosion hits his weak spot.
• Onmyōji (2016): All of Ibaraki-dōji's skills are this. That, and coupled with the fact that he's abnormally strong compared to other attainable shikigami, he can easily become a Game-Breaker for players fortunate enough to summon him.
• Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, using Etrian Odyssey IV's engine, uses this for Zen's Fire Spray skill and the enemy-exclusive Fire Dance.
  Ibaraki-dōji: Marvel before my strength!
• Plants vs. Zombies has the Melon-pult, which lobs melons at Zombies, dealing the most damage to the main target while hitting those around it with less damage. The Winter-melon upgrade also slows them down by freezing them.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Black and White: A handful of moves were introduced that, in double and triple battles, deal normal damage to their target, as well as a smaller amount of damage to opponents next to the target.
  • In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, the attack Splash has the user splash to an adjacent square and if they hit someone, it does five damage to both the user and the victim. Splash averts this in the main series by doing no damage.
• A necessity in [PROTOTYPE] where, short of the most powerful ground vehicle in the game, you are your most reliable source of splash damage once the game starts throwing AT YOU waves of mooks, Elite Mooks, as well as the beyond-elite mooks that will make you call out the Spiteful A.I.!
• Quake series: the rocket launcher. Against fast targets, it's actually more effective to aim at the ground near rather than trying to hit directly.
• Resident Evil 4 departs from previous games by including splash damage with all explosive-based weapons. The rocket launcher can now wipe out an entire horde of enemies rather than a single target.
• In Save the Light, Amethyst's basic attack range is changed from all enemies on the field in the previous game to a limited number of enemies within a highlighted area, but it can be upgraded so that those outside of range receive half the damage.
• Sipho: The starting weapon of the Vagorian breed, the Burstopod, launches a slow moving projectile that explode and causes splash damage after a short while.
• Splatoon:
  • Blasters are a weapon class based heavily around the use of splash damage. These weapons fire explosive ink rounds that will briefly travel through the air before they explode like fireworks, dealing splash damage to anyone caught within their range. Rather unusually, hitting an enemy directly with one of these shots will actually cancel out the splash damage — not that it matters much, as a direct hit from most Blasters deals enough damage for a One-Hit Kill.
  • Splatoon 2:
    • The game alters the Rainmaker, the Purposely Overpowered weapon featured in the eponymous Rainmaker mode, into one of these. Where it's Charged Attack would previously unleash a large vertical column of ink, here it fires a single arcing shot that sticks to surfaces and explodes after a short delay. Anyone hit by the projectile or caught within the ensuing explosion will be splatted instantly.
    • Splatoon 2 also introduced the Explosher, an unorthodox addition to the Slosher weapon class that shoots arcing, explosive projectiles that explode immediately on contact with a solid surface. Unlike Blaster shots, these projectiles will pass through enemies until they hit a surface, meaning it's possible to hit someone directly and deal additional splash damage.
• StarCraft features various units in both one and two, not including the powerful AOE spells.
  • Terran: Siege Tanks (only when in siege mode), Firebats, Raven's Hunter Seeker Missile, and nukes.
  • Protoss: Archons, Reavers, and Corsairs.
  • Zerg: Ultralisks and Lurkers.
• Super Smash Bros.: alongside the various explosives there are some attacks that have hitboxes that extend farther than what you'd expect, and are capable of hitting multiple opponents. King Dedede's and Yoshi's ground-pound moves, for example, deal damage to people standing close enough to the point of impact, not just the ones that you land directly on top of.
• In Team Fortress 2, the Soldier's Black Box and standard rocket launcher both deal impressive splash damage - the Direct Hit, however, is geared so as to eliminate it almost completely (except in relation to the Soldier himself for the purposes of Rocket Jumping). Splash damage is also the Demoman's bread and butter depending on his setup; stickies from the standard sticky launcher or Scottish Resistance and grenades from the grenade launcher or Loch'n'Load have impressive blast radii.
• The Tribes series, being a game where players are zipping across the map on Jet Packs at 400kph, relies primarily on explosive weapons to deal damage. The famous Spinfusor - a weapon that shoots what are essentially exploding blue frisbees, is the staple bread-and-butter weapon that almost all players carry with them. Regular 'ol projectile-based guns are sidelined and used mostly just for killing flying players.
• Unreal series:
  • Rocket launcher, flak cannon, bio-rifle, shock combo.
  • Unreal Tournament 2004: the Paladin's weapon normally fires an explosive shell but if fired while the Paladin's shield is up, the tank will release a fairly powerful shockwave that deals damage to and knocks back anyone nearby.
• Valkyria Chronicles: Grenades deal splash damage, which makes them one of the only weapons that can easily hit more than one target. Their main use, however, is taking out sandbags so you can get headshots on the exposed troops.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: The capstone Thaumaturgy power "Blood Boil" deals massive damage to the target; if it kills them, they explode, damaging everything nearby.
• Water Warfare's buckets and water bombs—along with its bazookas and launchers—provide a very literal example.
• Wing Commander:
  • Wing Commander II and Wing Commander IV have the Mace, a tactical nuclear missile that can be used to take out groups of sufficiently close targets, detonated either by shooting the missile (WC2) or on command (WC4).
  • Wing Commander IV also has the Starburst and Coneburst missiles, which effectively act like player-controlled grenades. As the names suggest, the Starburst's shrapnel field is omnidirectional, while the Coneburst's damage is aimed forward in a conical pattern. Unlike with the Mace, though, the damage is constant within the damage area.
• High-Explosive shells in World of Tanks do splash damage, though most tanks use ammunition with a very short radius of effect and relatively low damage. SPGs (Self-Propelled Guns aka artillery), however, can do significant damage with a near miss and even knock out crew members or damage tank modules. Being splashed by an SPG will also cause a stun effect to the tank's crew, reducing their effectiveness for a few seconds. Some regular tanks and tank destroyers also have large-caliber guns with powerful HE shells, which can have similarly large splash damage radius (such guns are popularly known as "Derp Guns" by players), but the stun effect is exclusive to artillery.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The fire specialization Mage has the aptly named Living Bomb ability, which spreads fire from one enemy to more enemies upon exploding. The fire damage on the secondary enemies is less than the damage to the initial enemy: but the fire debuff lingers on them for a while. Other fire spells for the mage also have splash damage. Shadow specialization Priests also have splash damage on many of their spells, and one baseline Priest spell called Penance also does splash damage OR healing (WoW is strictly Friendly Fire Proof, but it has a small number of spells that either do damage or heal depending on the target).
  • Warcraft III has units and heroes that can do splash damage. The Orb of Fire also grants any hero using it splash damage.
    • Humans: Mountain King, Mortar Team, Gryphon Rider
    • Orcs: Tauren Chieftain, Tauren, Catapult/Demolisher
    • Undead: Lich, Meat Wagon, Frost Wyrm, Destroyer
    • Night Elf: Warden, Chimera Ballista/Glaive Thrower
• Explosive weapons in XCOM games work this way, though damage from the most powerful bombs just cut off at a certain (quite large) distance rather than continuing to fade. Aside from hitting friendly units, a misplaced grenade may also destroy valuable loot or stunned prisoners or trigger Exploding Barrels.

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