Information on How Dark Swarm Works

Quoting an iCCup forum post by PlaguedArchon:

1. All ranged units miss when firing upon units under the dark swarm. The exceptions are as follows, firebat, lurker, reaver.

2. All melee units do full damage under a dark swarm. The exception is workers who do no damage under the dark swarm.

3. All magic […] works 100% under the dark swarm.

4. Splash still works under the dark swarm. If it is delivered in a line (firebat, lurker) there is no change to the damage. If it delivered by a missile the missile will land 0.5 matrices before the target unit, i.e. between the attacker and the attackee. The splash will the do full damage according to what it usually does in the new area it landed.

The upshot of rule 4 is that units that do splash damage delivered in a missile form (tanks, archons) do less damage to units under dark swarm since the splash is not in an ideal location.

The upshot of the upshot is the special case lurkers. When they are unburrowed inside a dark swarm the tank shot misses them but still does damage as their hit box is large enough to be hit by the splash. However when they burrow the lurker hit box shrinks in size. This should still be fine for tanks as tank splash is bigger than 0.5 matrices.

Now for the weird stuff. The lurker actually does not take damage. Whether this is intentional or a bug i do not know. What happens is the hit box for the lurker shrinks as it burrows, however the tanks still miss according to the old lurker hit box. When the reduced hit box is combined with the 0.5 miss of the dark swarm the lurker actually takes no damage WHEN THE TANK IS SHOOTING DIRECTLY AT IT. If the tank is shooting at something behind the lurker it might still do damage to it and kill it.

I hope there will be no more confusion about dark swarm mechanics.

Post edit: I feel i should include a couple more things to be complete.

-Dark swarm has absolutely no affect on building other than making them miss shooting units under the dark swarm (cannons, bunkers)

-The dark swarm is actually a square occupying a 6x6 matrix area.

-It has a casting range of 9 which means that when added to the area of the dark swarm defilers can cast it out of range of everything including siege tanks.

[…]

-Reaver splash is not delivered in a line or by a missile. Rather it is delivered by a unit, the scarab. It applies full damage and splash when fired under a dark swarm. It has a damage of 100(125 upgraded), a range of 8, and a splash range just short of ludicrous.

Technical details (can be accessed with DatEdit):

• 1 matrix = 32 pixels
• Lurker size: 32x32
• Siege Tank splash radius: 10-25-40
• Reaver Scarab splash radius: 20-40-60
• Archon splash radius: 3-15-30

(Splash radius is listed in the order of 100%-50%-25% damage)

Just for laughs, quoting the same post:

-dark swarm has indeed been verified to be 'completely imba"

[…]

Reavers have been verified to be even more imba then dark swarm when "the stupid AI works" which is never.

Edit: experiment reveals that the strange behavior of splash radii is caused, not because of DS, but because of Burrow. Burrowed units seem to be immune from the 50%-damage and 25%-damage radii, being affected only by the 100%-damage radius.