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 Signet-Powers wrote:
Personally, I don't mind the Lasguns sucking as Guardsmen are supposed to be the meatshields to the heavy weapons, tanks and artillery.

No, that's just the role they're stuck in because their rules suck.

 vipoid wrote:

 Signet-Powers wrote:
Personally, I don't mind the Lasguns sucking as Guardsmen are supposed to be the meatshields to the heavy weapons, tanks and artillery.

No, that's just the role they're stuck in because their rules suck.

Exactly

 master of ordinance wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 Signet-Powers wrote:
Personally, I don't mind the Lasguns sucking as Guardsmen are supposed to be the meatshields to the heavy weapons, tanks and artillery.

No, that's just the role they're stuck in because their rules suck.

Exactly

I agree, I'm just saying I don't mind as I'd rather the other units were improved.

But, if they do improve the Lasguns, I'd say they should be given pinning. That way they stay weak and don't lose their identity, but at the same time they can keep Marines from getting into CC. Make them assault as well.

 Signet-Powers wrote:

 master of ordinance wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 Signet-Powers wrote:
Personally, I don't mind the Lasguns sucking as Guardsmen are supposed to be the meatshields to the heavy weapons, tanks and artillery.

No, that's just the role they're stuck in because their rules suck.

Exactly

I agree, I'm just saying I don't mind as I'd rather the other units were improved.

But, if they do improve the Lasguns, I'd say they should be given pinning. That way they stay weak and don't lose their identity, but at the same time they can keep Marines from getting into CC. Make them assault as well.

The problem there is that pinning forces an LD check. At base highest LD in the squad. Marines have LD 8/9. I have never seen Marines fail a pinning check once

You also have to cause casualties to force pinning tests, meaning the lasgun is back to square one.

Guardsmen suck, but Renegades kick ass. Why's this? Renegades are:
-Cheaper
-Get artillery (cheaper and more durable than vehicles)
-Get formations allowing them to respawn and flood the board in bodies
-Get actual long-range anti-tank in the form of Laser Destroyers

Guardsmen don't really have any firepower to speak of. In the fluff you read about their artillery bombarding the field, then in the codex you have some AV12 vehicles with mediocre damage output. Wyverns are the only thing they have going for them.
Lascannon/Autocannon teams? Too expensive and too fragile.
Leman Russes? Only Pask actually does damage and he is one pricy guy.
etc.

So if you run a melee imperial army, say SW or something, and you want to add some long-ranged fire support, fluff-wise the Guard would be just the guys for the job, but on the tabletop they are just a bunch of overpriced and taxed units with mediocre firepower and no mobility. There's nothing you can't have regular Space Marines/Tau/Eldar/Mechanicus do better.

What if guard can fire into cc? On. 3+ you hit the designated target on a fail you hit yourself, also blast scatter as normal.

This could be a special order from a commissar, LC or even a ccs

The Lasgun is almost just fine the way it is without adding all these crazy rules to make it an Uberloller.
I mean, the majority of guard battle reports I've read have had a the guard winning even with the crappy Lasgun than we got now.
You guys want change? Make it AP6.
That way, it is the gun that is SUPPOSED to be better than ballistic slugs and autoguns, and doesn't up it so much that it becomes something more than what a Lasgun is supposed to be. Like, c'mon, we all know how much crappier our laser rifles are compared to the weapons of other species, but we also know that it's capable of blowing off lime at its highest setting, just like a bolt gun, which is only strength 4, and we all know thay the Lasgun has better penetration power than automatically, yet there is nothing in the rules that makes that fluff cone to life.
You can change the Lasgun to have:
A) S4 ap-. But hotshot weapons and laspistols would also need to changed accordingly, OR
B) make it AP6. A small change that makes total sense, obviously isn't game break, and isn't such a change that through Lasgun becomes the only thing you ever need, but it makes fluffy sense.

God did someone say special weapon and heavy weapon squads were good?

God look how expensive they are compared to other armies, linked with the fact we lost the two model rule for HWS years ago and it made them so much more fragile!!

123ply wrote:
The Lasgun is almost just fine the way it is without adding all these crazy rules to make it an Uberloller.
I mean, the majority of guard battle reports I've read have had a the guard winning even with the crappy Lasgun than we got now.
You guys want change? Make it AP6.
That way, it is the gun that is SUPPOSED to be better than ballistic slugs and autoguns, and doesn't up it so much that it becomes something more than what a Lasgun is supposed to be. Like, c'mon, we all know how much crappier our laser rifles are compared to the weapons of other species, but we also know that it's capable of blowing off lime at its highest setting, just like a bolt gun, which is only strength 4, and we all know thay the Lasgun has better penetration power than automatically, yet there is nothing in the rules that makes that fluff cone to life.
You can change the Lasgun to have:
A) S4 ap-. But hotshot weapons and laspistols would also need to changed accordingly, OR
B) make it AP6. A small change that makes total sense, obviously isn't game break, and isn't such a change that through Lasgun becomes the only thing you ever need, but it makes fluffy sense.

Oh fer god's sake! It's more than the gakking lasgun!

A list of points:

-Ap6 is fething useless. The lasgun would be exactly the same as before against 99.999% of targets.
-Str 4 is for automatic armour peircing grenade launchers
-The GUARDSMAN himself is half the issue
-Our upgrades NO NOT make up for the weakness of everything else
-Our upgrades cost the same as (or more) than their equivalents in other armies, despite the lower model stats and reduced durability

123ply wrote:
The Lasgun is almost just fine the way it is without adding all these crazy rules to make it an Uberloller.
I mean, the majority of guard battle reports I've read have had a the guard winning even with the crappy Lasgun than we got now.
You guys want change? Make it AP6.

Oh for crying out loud, what is with this AP6 nonsense?

You might as well let lasguns dispense radishes, it would be about as useful.

 vipoid wrote:

123ply wrote:
The Lasgun is almost just fine the way it is without adding all these crazy rules to make it an Uberloller.
I mean, the majority of guard battle reports I've read have had a the guard winning even with the crappy Lasgun than we got now.
You guys want change? Make it AP6.

Oh for crying out loud, what is with this AP6 nonsense?

You might as well let lasguns dispense radishes, it would be about as useful.

At least with radishes, our troops would be well fed, and have a standard-issue melee weapon.

AP 6? What units, outside of Orks, have a 6+ save these days?

Nids troops, when you don't deal with a zoo.

Wait, Tyranids have things smaller than massive monsters?

 vipoid wrote:

123ply wrote:
The Lasgun is almost just fine the way it is without adding all these crazy rules to make it an Uberloller.
I mean, the majority of guard battle reports I've read have had a the guard winning even with the crappy Lasgun than we got now.
You guys want change? Make it AP6.

Oh for crying out loud, what is with this AP6 nonsense?

You might as well let lasguns dispense radishes, it would be about as useful.

At first I thought that this said dispensing raditzes as in the DBZ character.

"That's right he was literally so weak we are growing raditzes with lasguns"

You probably could - after all the average Lasgun is about as powerful as a sunlamp

I feel like a Chapter Tactics-like doctrines system would go a long ways towards making Guardsmen viable again.

Again, I think fundamentally the game has just shifted so far away from what guardsmen really can be compared against that there's very little that can be done without changing the level of granularity of the game.

Quite simply, even a couple of years ago, Guardsmne were considered pretty useless, and that was before Eldar Jetbikes were BS4 and could take 4 shot S6 36" range weapons on every model in a Troops unit, and before 13pt Necron Warriors could rival Terminators or Plague Marines for resiliency.

When those sorts of things are basic Troops, how cheap does an "all 3's" model like a Guardsmen have to be to be competitive, and at what point does that simply become unwieldy on the board? I think we've already passed that state in the case of the latter issue.

I don't know if there's a particularly great answer that doesn't involve a fundamental rebalancing of the entire game and likely another 3E style reboot.

 Signet-Powers wrote:
Personally, I don't mind the Lasguns sucking as Guardsmen are supposed to be the meatshields to the heavy weapons, tanks and artillery.

The REAL problem is that the heavy weapons, tanks and artillery all suck. Yeah, they're better than the other armies, but not by enough.

Light infantry, and more specifically in my case, a Long Range Penetration Force/ Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, relies on the ability of its infantry to engage and destroy enemy assets without traditional battlefield support. The infantry are meant to raid enemy supply lines, harass outposts, and when needed may be called upon to support a conventional offensive action by attacking from the rear. The infantry are the core of the entire element. They are not there to provide support for the tanks, or the artillery, instead those things are to provide support for them. Long range penetration forces/ reconnaissance patrols operate behind enemy lines and are purposefully devoid of any heavy support as the inclusion of them would render the unit incapable of actually stealthily penetrating enemy lines. Heavy weapon compensation is provided by long range fire support primarily located at fire bases. An artillery coordinator converses with the fire base and a volley is shot toward the given coordinates. Similarly aircraft are in contact with a ground coordinator that calls in the locations of needed airstrikes or CAS. These support elements are there to support the ground operations that the LRRPS are carrying out. The problem is that the guardsman is so weak that there is no support strong enough to compensate his impotency. The foundation of the guard (the guardsman) is broken so either we choose a new site for the bridge (revamp the game), or we reinforce the foundation (buff). If neither is done, the bridge is just going to sink into the ground.

The guard is not defined by its tanks, but rather by its guardsman. It is the humanizing factor of a man in a universe filled with inhumanity that makes the guard special. Without the guardsman you lose the very thing that makes the guard awesome.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Again, I think fundamentally the game has just shifted so far away from what guardsmen really can be compared against that there's very little that can be done without changing the level of granularity of the game.

Quite simply, even a couple of years ago, Guardsmne were considered pretty useless, and that was before Eldar Jetbikes were BS4 and could take 4 shot S6 36" range weapons on every model in a Troops unit, and before 13pt Necron Warriors could rival Terminators or Plague Marines for resiliency.

When those sorts of things are basic Troops, how cheap does an "all 3's" model like a Guardsmen have to be to be competitive, and at what point does that simply become unwieldy on the board? I think we've already passed that state in the case of the latter issue.

I don't know if there's a particularly great answer that doesn't involve a fundamental rebalancing of the entire game and likely another 3E style reboot.

IOW, the game has painted itself into a corner where it just doesn't work anymore, and repairing it is very difficult to do without breaking it somewhere else.

Which is very true.

Guardsmen are as good as they can realistically get without becoming silly and elevating the power creep in the game.

Something more productive would be to fix special weapon/heavy weapon squads so that platoons have more fire-power.

The Lasgun is fine, players are intentionally abusing the greater freedom of list-building in 7th to obsolete conventional troops choices and their baseline weapons.

That's why you're having these issues.

Yoyoyo wrote:
The Lasgun is fine, players are intentionally abusing the greater freedom of list-building in 7th to obsolete conventional troops choices and their baseline weapons.

That's why you're having these issues.

Translation: The lasgun was fine in 5th edition, but we've now had two editions of massive power creep.

Well, I don't think it was fine even in 5th (one will notice IG armies generally weren't built around infantry then), but things weren't quite as crazy as they are now.

I don't think the problem can be blamed on list-building shennanigans either. The fact that there are armies which are just all superheavies, or where basic troops are either as resistant to small arms weaponry as terminators or plague marines at fraction of the cost, or are tossing out dozens of S6 shots a turn, has nothing to do with list building shennanigans, and that sort of thing very much does defeat the purpose of the basic lasgun.

The Imperial Knights codex is the top tournament codex by winrate, higher even than Eldar (they have 80% or something of the like) and what good is a lasgun there?

Of course, what good is a bolter there, too?

S6/S7 is always going to be useful because it can actually harm an IK.

What you can't kill with lasgun shots won't really die to 1/3rd as many boltgun shots, either.

 Ashiraya wrote:
The Imperial Knights codex is the top tournament codex by winrate, higher even than Eldar (they have 80% or something of the like) and what good is a lasgun there?
Of course, what good is a bolter there, too?
S6/S7 is always going to be useful because it can actually harm an IK.
What you can't kill with lasgun shots won't really die to 1/3rd as many boltgun shots, either.

Sure, things like Knights won't die to Lasguns or Bolters--but you know what they will die to?

Drop Podded Sternguard Squads with combi weapons or huge amounts of Grav shots, etc.
Guard have access to none of those, except for Allies, and in order to take anti-armor/anti-monster weaponry Guard are paying the exact same price as a Space Marine for the weapon to go on a far less durable/mobile platform.

 Ignatius wrote:

 Sledgehammer wrote:

UrsoerTheSquid wrote:


But that being said, I'd like to see some sort of special rule where if a platoon. or squad gets wiped out on the next turn an equal sized squad enters from the players table edge to really emulate the never ending numbers.

That does nothing to alleviate the lack of character. That is a mechanic that replaces the dead guardsmen in a squad with a carbon copy of the now dead. What that does is it makes the guardsman faceless, and replaceable. There is no character in carbon copy schmucks. Furthermore there is no real utility value in that mechanic; it makes the unit more "resilient", but there really isn't a point in targeting them if they are unable to do any significant damage and come back ad-infinitum. This works great for conscripts, and kreigsmen as it gives character to the force. The difference here is distinguishing the characteristics of the force from those of the guardsman.

Okay I'll bite. You must have some idea how to achieve this "re-characterization". How do you think it can be done?

I add character by adding pieces of equipment and posing. For example a few guardsmen may have an inordinate amount of grenades, another few will sling their rifles and be dual wielding trench knives, another few will be swinging swords, their backpacks will have different equipment placements etc. etc. to the point where the guys just holding their rifles are in the minority.

Exactly! All you need is a bit of imagination.

If someone can't attach character to models then frankly I'm not sure why they're playing a tabletop game in the first place. Besides, I thought that guardsmen being numberless, expendable red-shirt rifle platforms were part of their character. If you want loads of chatacters with a backstory behind each one then play something like Space Wolves (or Guants Ghosts, if the latest Codex still has that).

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
The Imperial Knights codex is the top tournament codex by winrate, higher even than Eldar (they have 80% or something of the like) and what good is a lasgun there?
Of course, what good is a bolter there, too?
S6/S7 is always going to be useful because it can actually harm an IK.
What you can't kill with lasgun shots won't really die to 1/3rd as many boltgun shots, either.

Sure, things like Knights won't die to Lasguns or Bolters--but you know what they will die to?

Drop Podded Sternguard Squads with combi weapons or huge amounts of Grav shots, etc.
Guard have access to none of those, except for Allies, and in order to take anti-armor/anti-monster weaponry Guard are paying the exact same price as a Space Marine for the weapon to go on a far less durable/mobile platform.

And giving IG Sternguard equivalents would not fix guardsmen, not any more than their existence makes Tactical Marines any less bad.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
The Imperial Knights codex is the top tournament codex by winrate, higher even than Eldar (they have 80% or something of the like) and what good is a lasgun there?
Of course, what good is a bolter there, too?
S6/S7 is always going to be useful because it can actually harm an IK.
What you can't kill with lasgun shots won't really die to 1/3rd as many boltgun shots, either.

Sure, things like Knights won't die to Lasguns or Bolters--but you know what they will die to?

Drop Podded Sternguard Squads with combi weapons or huge amounts of Grav shots, etc.
Guard have access to none of those, except for Allies, and in order to take anti-armor/anti-monster weaponry Guard are paying the exact same price as a Space Marine for the weapon to go on a far less durable/mobile platform.

And giving IG Sternguard equivalents would not fix guardsmen, not any more than their existence makes Tactical Marines any less bad.

The point.
You missed it.

In no way, shape, or form should Guard be paying Space Marine prices for equipment with the statlines that Guard have.

Oh yeah, and while we're at it?
It's ridiculous that a Special Weapons Squad or Heavy Weapons Squad can take less of each option than the Marine equivalent and be less survivable.
Special Weapons Squads should be 6 models with Special Weapons and Heavy Weapons Squads should be 6 teams.

Oh, and as an additional point?
It's silly how expensive Guard transports are compared to Marine transports.