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For infantry, If you had to decide between high toughness a good save or something else etc what would you want your highest stat to be?

What keeps you alive the most?

Probably high toughness, as not being wounded in the first place is preferable to having to rely on a decent save.

Plus, even mediocre saves can be increased or reinforced with Cover or Abilities, whereas outright Toughness boosts seem much rarer.

Just choosing in a vacuum, Toughness.

Damage. In modern 40k most of the time you're either behind LOS blocking terrain or dead, and the most important stat is having enough damage to trade with a sufficiently valuable enemy unit that you come out ahead on the exchange. Defensive stats can increase your trade value to some degree but there are very few situations where it's worth having defense at the expense of offense.

Save is an insane stat at the best levels, toughness can quadruple durability, but in reality the difference is really only double because of the Toughness and Strength bands in the game, but Sv can sextuple the durability of a unit against certain targets and will very rarely dip below the double which is the more or less the maximum for Infantry.

 vict0988 wrote:
Save is an insane stat at the best levels, toughness can quadruple durability, but in reality the difference is really only double because of the Toughness and Strength bands in the game, but Sv can sextuple the durability of a unit against certain targets and will very rarely dip below the double which is the more or less the maximum for Infantry.

counter-arguement: armour piercing abilities that reduce your save are common, but toughness reduction abilities are comparatively rare. Ergo, a higher toughness is generally going to be "useful" more often, and all other things being equal, a bottleneck earlier in the attack sequence has a greater effect than one later in the sequence.

OTOH, 2+ saves are much more common that 6s to wound on infantry, so getting high armour is easier than high toughness infantry.

Movement is pretty essential. A unit with 3" move would rarely be picked unless they have a cheap and good gun.

not sure there is a single "most essential", it will vary by what you want a unit to do in a given situation

e.g. a scouting/recon/spotter type unit probably needs speed above all else initially, maybe swapping to toughness or save later when in position

ditto toughness is very important on units with rubbish armour, good armour and/or good invulnerable save cares less about toughness

I guess though if I had to pick a single stat that mattered most to me its "points cost"

I'd say Damage as well.

Toughness stopped being that important when Laspistols gained the ability to wound Warlord Titans on a roll of a 6.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I'd say Damage as well.

Toughness stopped being that important when Laspistols gained the ability to wound Warlord Titans on a roll of a 6.

lol... golden BB to the reactor core. ok so we'll throw a whole box of bb's

i wonder if anyone has ever created a math hammer damage output per unit chart?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I'd say Damage as well.

Toughness stopped being that important when Laspistols gained the ability to wound Warlord Titans on a roll of a 6.

Not sure I agree that “everything can sound everything” stopped Toughness being that important.

Before, a given unit’s Toughness stat was the single best way to judge its…erm…toughness. Get above T8, and you were completely immune to the majority of weapons in the game. To the point it being matched to a decent 3+ Save was very almost irrelevant. I say that as if I wanted to take down a marauding Wraithlord, I’d be targeting it with Lascannons and Krak Missiles, which wouldn’t care about its save. And I’d do that because the All Or Nothing approach if 3-7 Ed saves meant my Heavy Bolter and Autocannon were just better off blatting pretty much anything else in the Eldar army.

But now? A unit’s overall resilience is a mix of Toughness, Save, Wounds and even model size. And Toughness remains key. T4, W2, 2+ Sv remains Not As Good As T5, W2, 2+ Sv. Sure multiple damage weapons mean the difference still isn’t as pronounced in 3rd-7th Ed, but it is still there, especially when we keep in mind stuff like Terminators now have more wounds than they used to, making them markedly more resilient to small arms fire, as well as a higher toughness when many small arms haven’t seen much in the way of a change to their stats.

And I'd say that Save, Wounds and Damage are all more important, as Toughness caps out at a point.

You should check some of the old creature feature creator thingies, someone did one for his homebrew edition as well. See which option costs the most in each of them to explore the concept.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
And I'd say that Save, Wounds and Damage are all more important, as Toughness caps out at a point.

Yet a solid Toughness can prevent you from worrying about those other factors entirely. Nowhere near the same degree it used as covered. But it’s still a unit’s first line of defence once hit.

Toughness can't prevent anything. Anything wounds everything on a 6.

Well…it can.

S5 weapons affect T4, 5 and 6 very differently. No Toughness doesn’t entirely prevent anything, but nor do your other stats.

It’s also one of the stats your opponent can’t really affect. Methods of course exist, but in far fewer numbers than a higher Dam stat, or simple Save Modifiers.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Well…it can.

It literally cannot prevent damage. You could be T1m, and a S1 weapon still wounds you on a 6.

This is why it's not as important as Damage.

its ok guys... i see the point both of you are making.
i had another thread sort of along the lines of damage that i wish went a little better.

i was trying so see who had the best basic gun.

we can add that in here if anyone wants... best damage output but id like to keep it to non-vehicle...

Howay and don’t be daft.

If a Toughness increase means most small arms go from a 4+ to wound to a 5+? It’s absolutely preventing damage in its tracks, because you’re going to be successfully wounded less often, regardless of the associated weapon’s Dam stat.

Heck, even knocking something hefty from a 2+ to a 3+ to wound is a doubling of your chance of not being wounded in the first place.

Toughness matters, but on a sliding scale

e.g. going from T3 -> T4 is good, to T5 is good, to T6 is good, increases above that however rapidly tail off. once you start getting to T12 it starts to matter, then T13, maybe T14, and again above that drops off again

essentially it tracks the strength of whats likely shooting at you, once its in the 6 to wound more matters nothing

as I noted before, comes down to what the units actual role is meant to be, for something cheap toughness hardly matters

Cheeky because it's not a stat, but Special Rules.

Cadians are better than Catachans, but not because their T3 is better than Catachans T3.

You could have a m1 bs0 ws0 s1 t1 sv- unit, and give it a good enough special rule, it can vastly outclass a m50, bs 1+, s90 t900 Sv 2+ unit

I'd say Save is more important than T, but it also depends.

Obviously T10 3+ is better than T3 2+, but that doesn't feel like a fair comparison.

More fair would be say T9 2+ vs T10 3+ (various vehicles) or T5 2+ vs. T6 3+ (Terminator Armour vs. Gravis Armour), and in all these circumstances I'd prefer the better save over the better T.
(Heck, I'd prefer T8 2+/T4 2+ over T10 3+/T6 3+.)

T is one of those stats that you either want "a lot of" (enough to make a difference) or it doesn't really matter. T6 was really high once, now in 10th it's "good" but not nearly as awesome as it once was, while a 2+ save has never been better due to the AP overall being reduced and there being saves everywhere that improves it to a 1+.

leopard wrote:
Toughness matters, but on a sliding scale

e.g. going from T3 -> T4 is good, to T5 is good, to T6 is good, increases above that however rapidly tail off. once you start getting to T12 it starts to matter, then T13, maybe T14, and again above that drops off again

essentially it tracks the strength of whats likely shooting at you, once its in the 6 to wound more matters nothing

as I noted before, comes down to what the units actual role is meant to be, for something cheap toughness hardly matters

I agree with this except the last sentence.
The issue with T is that its a niche bonus. Going from T6 to T7 only helps vs S6 and S7 attacks.
By contrast, going from say 3+ to 2+ save, helps vs everything except AP-5 (not exactly common) and Mortal Wounds (sadly everywhere).

Saying everything can be wounded on a 6 so T doesn't matter is I feel missing the issue. Like saying save doesn't matter because you could always roll a 1. Or damage doesn't matter, because you could always just miss/fail to wound.

But T is still helpful on cheap chaff. Imagine if say guardsmen were just T5 for the same/1 point a model more. Suddenly you'd need (on average) twice as much "low value" attacks to kill them. Going from "I'm almost certain to wipe those with some of my own chaff" to "I need to dedicate more serious firepower to clear them - and a bad roll might leave them still up" is a significant impact during a game.

The issue as you said, is what you are getting for the points. Higher Toughness, better Saves and more wounds are all useful defensive tools. But what matters is efficiency.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Toughness can't prevent anything. Anything wounds everything on a 6.

I cant do anything about the general 1s always fail/6s always succeed rule.
But i'll happily take a Toughness score high enough to reduce your odds of wounding to that 1/6.
If you get lucky? Then you get lucky.

Best stat for survivability IMO is movement. Not getting shot at all is way more valuable then some extra toughness or save.

 Carnage43 wrote:
Best stat for survivability IMO is movement. Not getting shot at all is way more valuable then some extra toughness or save.

and at least we now finally have some level of sense with terrain rules that allow shooting in/out but not through so actually hiding, or at least forcing your enemy to move to see you, is somewhat viable

 Carnage43 wrote:
Best stat for survivability IMO is movement. Not getting shot at all is way more valuable then some extra toughness or save.

Nah movment is only a stats that matters, if you have great offensive stats. Be their melee or ranged. My dudes have the movment range of "The Table 9" outside opponent and objectives", but they have attrocious offensive abilities. Better yet it is not hard to imagine an army with bad movment to do great. If marines had more units like desolators (long range, LoS ignoring, highly efficient range units) they could make armies that work, even if they were really slow infantry.

The top stats are the over the top stats, that make it hard for other units to interact with. Double the normal wounds, running around with t16 or more. If those are on under priced platform they can make or break the game played. The second level of stats are the offensive stats, in which almost always number of shots beats out a single shot weapon. At least the way GW designes most of their rules. A high strenght gun with with flat 6 wounds, can over perform when outside effects are buffing the weapon in question.

Rate of Fire.
Guardsmen with RF A20 S3 AP0 D1 guns would be one of the deadliest things on the board - and they're guardsmen, who cares if they die, you've got a hundred of em.

Look at the units getting pushed/complained about. Desolators with something like 10 shots a model, Aggressors with 6 and layering in Lethal/Sustained Hits. Quantity has a qualtiy all its own - especially when you're constrained by a D6 Random Number Generator.

Flood the 1's to save.

Breton wrote:
Rate of Fire.
Aggressors with 6 and layering in Lethal/Sustained Hits. Quantity has a qualtiy all its own - especially when you're constrained by a D6 Random Number Generator.

To be fair, massed S4 might be quantity, but when you add in stuff like Sustained, Lethal and AP1-2... when does it stop being quantity and start being quality... in high quanity?

When t he dmg on the weapon is 3-4 per unsaved wound.