The term "Damage Spread" is thrown around, specifically in regards to "vanilla" servers in Team Fortress 2. What does this term mean, and how does it relate to server settings and gameplay?
Damage spread as it relates to Team Fortress 2
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Weapon Spread refers to the random pattern of "spread out" that pellet weapons in TF2 have when fired. As distance increases, each pellet that was fired spreads out.
Some pellet weapons in TF2 include (this is not a full list, more weapons are being added to TF2 pretty quickly recently):
- Shotgun
- Scattergun
- Force-A-Nature
- Frontier Justice
Some servers use a "fixed weapon spread", which means that the pellets still spread out, but do so in a nonrandom fashion, so that each shot is the same.
This is the fixed weapon pattern most commonly used:
This is controlled by the server setting: tf_use_fixed_weaponspreads 1. Some servers like to use this setting because they feel it removes more luck from the competition and makes the outcome of battles more based on skill.
However, one side effect of making this change is that due to the increased accuracy and reliability, pellet weapons become more powerful than they are normally.
Note that server setting does not have an impact on any other weapons than those listed above.
Some other weapons may appear to have weapon spread, but they in fact do not. They do however have inaccurate firing, and/or recoil that effects how straight a shot will go. In terms of TF2, weapon spread only refers to the situation where multiple projectiles are fired from a single shot, and spread out from each other as they travel.
There are several server options that affect weapon damage in Team Fortress 2, and they're often confused:
Weapon Spread -- With this turned on, hitscan weapons, such as shotguns, will have the same non-random pattern of "bullets" each time they are used. Default is ON.
Damage Spread -- Each weapon normally has a minimum and maximum damage. No Damage Spread means that each weapon will do a set, average, damage rather than varying between attacks. Default is ON. (Critical hits always do 3 times damage)
Damage Falloff -- Normally, the damage dealt by a weapon decreases the farther away you are for your target. If this is turned off, A rocket detonating right next to you and a rocket shot from the opposite side of the map will do equivalent damage. Crits are never affected by Damage Falloff. Default is ON.
The default is to have Damage Spread ON. Nodmgspread refers to servers which have turned it OFF.
Best Answer
Damage spread refers to the fact that a weapon has a spread, or range, of damage that it can deal on any given hit. By default, weapons generally have a +/-10% damage spread.
So if a weapon has 100 base damage, it might do as little as 90 (10% less than base) or as much as 110 damage (10% more than base) on hit. This amount of damage dealt is simply a random value from within the "spread".
Originally, the spread was +/-25%, but Valve eventually reduced it to only +/-10%.
Note that this isn't the only thing that affects weapon damage, there is also a damage falloff based on range for most weapons (they do less damage at greater distance).
Some servers disable damage spread because they think it makes the game more "skill-based" and more fair, since damage dealt is more consistent. This is similar to the argument used for disabling critical hits.