I was wondering how using a Walked Fire shot would work if firing into a melee - specifically regarding the cumulative armor break. Since the rules say that the armor break is reset after “changing target”, how does that interact with the fact that the model hit by the attack might not be the actual target?
Imagine Ack-Ack firing with the minigun into a melee with a mirelurk and a psycho:
Shot 1 she hits, and via random selection hits the mirelurk. So then she has an automatic armor break against the mirelurk
Shot 2 she hits, and gets the mirelurk again. So she applies the -1 armor, and is queued up for a -2 armor break.
In shot 3, if she hits, but then hits the psycho, does she have to take the -2 armor break, or does it reset since it is a new recipient, even though her target didn’t change?
For shot four: If she then hits the mirelurk, does she then get a -3 armor break because she’s had 3 previous successes? Or does it reset again because the damage recipient changed?
Or should they be tracked separately per combatant in the melee?
When you shoot, you need to choose the target, even if it is within the melee, so the 5 shots go to that target (if you don’t change your target with the walked fire weapon obviously).
If you hit your target, you get the armor break bonus, if you miss (hitting another thing or failing) you lose the bonus.
The keyword here is you need to attack to the target, not to the melee
I cannot answer for a official answer but i can give my opinion and logic behind it.
TLDR: I say each track on their own and the last shot would stack on the previous mirelurk hits.
Walked fire is representing the adjustment that such a weapon has. Stray shots can still happen which is why it can hit and miss and then hit again. The armor break as i see it could represent hitting the same general area and getting better penetration, or could be minor adjustments which find gaps. Either way as long as the gun is not moving drastically the effects should continue.
The crux of your issue is confusion of target vs injury. The target has not changed. So i dont see the armor break resetting. However when the stray hits the psycho it has not had the benefit of either better placing or improved accuracy. Because of this the psycho should not have the burden of the previous hits.
So in my opinion the armor break should stack but each model in the melee track their own. So if you get 2 on the psycho and 3 on the mirelurk it would count that way.
So @DK-dark has it correct. You would pick your target and then run through each of the Walked Fire shots. You would be able to stack Armor Reduction Tokens for each consecutive hit you could land on the target but as soon as you hit something else, the running total would reset.
This is because the criteria for attaining the tokens is successive hits. In order to meet that criteria, you need a chain of hits on a single model one after another.