When are Enemies Considered to be 'Inside' a Power Effect?

This has been a longstanding question of mine. When a power has a radius of x feet, how exactly does it figure out which enemies are inside versus outside the area of effect?

- Does the enemy get hit if any part of the collision model is inside the radius?
- Does the enemy get hit if the foot registry point is inside the radius?
- Does the enemy get hit if an arbitrary center point is inside the radius?
- Something else?

There are actually some potentially significant combat implications depending on which is true, especially if this also applies to players. In particular, does resizing your character model to be smaller mean you take up less area and are thus less likely to get caught in AoEs, but also need to stay closer to teammates in order to be aided?

I do know that the /loc command appears to use the locations of the character's feet to determine your location.

Related to all of this is the question: when you throw a targeted AoE at an enemy, what is the height of the center point of the resulting sphere? The feet of the target you throw it at? A centerpoint? The reason this is significant is that if it's the centerpoint, it means throwing a Fireball, for example, at a very tall target standing near shorter ones actually reduces the size of the damage area. In fact, if it applies to players, to a very limited extent most Tankers would want to make their characters very tall so any AoEs that hit them register slightly higher off the ground and are less likely to catch teammates at the sidelines.

I know that model size doesn't make a difference, but I can't speak for the other questions.

Attacks definitely don't just hit anything they barely touch... you'll notice that with some large enemies you can't catch two at once with Shadow Maul or similar melee cone attacks because their center points are too far apart... the cone area definitely overlaps part of the second enemy's body but not their center. My guess is that the actual point used for targeting purposes is three feet off the ground (or above the feet, if flying) in the center of the character's collision radius... basically the center of mass on a standard 6-foot character.

One way to test it would be to set up an arena match... take a character with a PBAoE damage aura and Hover and have them fight a team of three characters: one default sized, one as small as you can make them, and one as large as you can make them. Then have the character with the damage aura hover above the tallest opponent just low enough to barely hit them with the aura, and then have the small and medium characters each swap places with the tall one while the flier holds still. If all of them get hit, and all of them don't get hit if the flier rises up slightly and they repeat the test, then it will prove the target point is fixed regardless of size. If they do get hit at different points then it is probably using the true center point of the character, but I'm about 90% sure it doesn't do that.

As far as i know. Model size doesnt affect how much "space" you take up so being taller or shorter shouldnt affect anything.

But my guess is that it would use a center point. If it's anything like collisions into a wall it is around the waste for taller toons and head for shorter toons.

The whole idea of CoH is that your characters appearance doesn’t affect your strength in anyway.