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Because the saves already have quality differences built in, a 5+ save doesn't really need to be ignored to have an effect.

If you gave all Guardsmen a 5+ save all the time, then you would only save a third of the wounds anyway. 10 heavy bolter wounds on Guardsmen kills 10 guardsmen. With a 5+ save that reduces to 7 Guardsmen. its pretty underwhelming but at least it gives the player something rather than the demoralising removal of all models all the time.

Imo for the all or nothing of ap to work properly, it should have been an anti armour rule that only some weapons had, with the chance of death being left up to the armour save.

Basically, every army gets the same chance at saving as marines do, and the balance is simply that they are statistically failing their saves more often than not anyway.

The AP system is always going to be somewhat at the mercy of cover and cost. Excellent in planet bowling ball setups or when priced little higher than flamers and stormbolters, not so great at 15-35pts per gun to be shooting into 4+ concealment, especially in 5th onwards where enemy infantry were walking 4+ cover for units behind them and larger number of transports were similarly being used as concealment (rather than outright LoS blockers).

 Hellebore wrote:
Autocannons were in a really weird position, low shots, mid ap, mid s. No one I encountered liked them they'd either go lascannons for AT, or heavy bolters for anti infantry and that was only because of the poor BS being offset by 50% more shots.

They were circumstantially good - the forgeworld autocannon turret for the chimera was 5pts well spent and autocannon teams in 6th were not uncommon. That little extra bite against vehicles when you were at the mercy of damage rolls (5th) or hull points (6th) when dealing with light transports.

 Hellebore wrote:
If you gave all Guardsmen a 5+ save all the time, then you would only save a third of the wounds anyway. 10 heavy bolter wounds on Guardsmen kills 10 guardsmen. With a 5+ save that reduces to 7 Guardsmen. its pretty underwhelming but at least it gives the player something rather than the demoralising removal of all models all the time.

I'd say if you're the sort of player who gets demoralized by not getting armor saves in older editions, you should either (1) make use of cover as intended, or (2) choose not to play as lightly-armored horde infantry. I didn't get demoralized by AP5 because my Guardsmen were dirt cheap and routinely sitting in woods or ruins to get a hard 5+ or 4+ save anyways. It was way lamer in 8th to have more expensive troops in cover but get blown off the board anyways by a million rerolling dice with AP-2, and I don't appreciate that tables need to be choked edge-to-edge with LOS-blocking terrain because they still haven't figured out how to make cover work.

The all-or-nothing system is not something I like in principle, but it had some elegant practical effects that GW didn't recognize when transitioning to AP modifiers in 8th. Light infantry got the most benefit from cover, while heavy infantry were comparatively much tougher than the basic Sv stat implied because they got to use that save against more threats. Marines were hard to kill because high-AP, high-volume weapons were extremely rare or had significant downsides (eg Gets Hot). On the flipside, S4 AP5 was a reasonably effective anti-chaff profile. Cover was a reliable and effective way to mitigate vulnerability, and weapons that ignored cover had obvious utility. Weapons had ideal targets and there was no one statline that was generically good against everything. All of these went out the window with 8th, and two editions later we're still playing catch-up.

You can recreate some of these effects through kludgy rules or stat changes (either under an AP modifier system, or throwing out the AP system entirely as you propose) but the effects are far-reaching and it's more complicated than it looks. Reducing incoming damage by one-third all the time is significant, and if Guardsmen aren't easy to kill, that has implications.

Edit: I also just don't agree that Guardsmen/Orks/Eldar/Gaunts/etc were eternally useless simply because they didn't get a save against bolters. Doesn't track with my experience at all. Yeah, standing in the open trading volleys with Marines was a bad idea- go figure, considering Tacticals were expressly designed to bully light infantry- but light infantry were always useful for their non-combat utility and with cover my Guardsmen could out-shoot Marines point-for-point anyways. It was melee and morale that they were vulnerable to, not shooting.

Yeah. Catbarf makes some good points, and I do think the old AP system was probably more of a problem for armies that were both elite and lightly armored (space elves) than for other factions.

Guardian defenders/storm guardians kind of suffered from being in this weird middleground where they were the *craftworld* version of being guardsmen. Which meant they were kind of intended to be disposable, but also not really. And also their guns were 12", so you frequently had to leave cover or get within flamer range to use most of your guns. (And just using defenders as a heavy weapon squad was too expensive to be worth it.)

Using something like dire avenger was actually pretty okay! You had a 4+ save, so you weren't *instantly* melting vs bolters (although T3 and Sv4+ still died to bolters pretty fast.) A 10-man of avengers with Fortune giving them a defensive boost was *just* hardy enough to sorta kinda work as a basic rifle squad. You were better off taking the move-shoot-move squad of oops-all-heavy-weapons jetbikes once those were a thing, of course, and better off using avengers as a vehicle upgrade before that, but avengers tended to be functional in casual games.

I actually kind of loved how avengers behaved in 7th edition because Battle Focus (move-shoot-move) meant they could use their 18" guns to sort of chip away at enemies while remaining relatively safe, and Sv 4+ meant that they didn't auto-melt to most weapons when they had to bite the bullet and move in for a head-on scrap. When I say that 7th edition was decent if you just agreed to ignore all the most broken stuff, dire avengers are what I picture as the goalpost for flavorful, balanced units.

Eldar have had the perennial problem of being characterized as fragile but hard to hit or pin down, existing in a game system that never had any good way to represent being hard to hit and has you deploying within heavy weapons range for a knock-down-drag-out cage match. The Eldar units that have historically worked best are the ones that look and function like bedazzled Marines.

I'm not sure that that's really an artifact of the AP system so much as just incongruity between background and gameplay. T3/5+ is supposed to be squishy; the issue is assigning that profile to a race that emphasizes minimizing casualties while giving them no other means to mitigate damage.

 catbarf wrote:
Eldar have had the perennial problem of being characterized as fragile but hard to hit or pin down, existing in a game system that never had any good way to represent being hard to hit and has you deploying within heavy weapons range for a knock-down-drag-out cage match. The Eldar units that have historically worked best are the ones that look and function like bedazzled Marines.

I'm not sure that that's really an artifact of the AP system so much as just incongruity between background and gameplay. T3/5+ is supposed to be squishy; the issue is assigning that profile to a race that emphasizes minimizing casualties while giving them no other means to mitigate damage.

Don't forget the nigh unkillable transports and tanks of 6th-7th that felt like they could solo a whole army's shooting for 120 points, or the monstrous creatures that really should have been walkers

I do recall that horde light infantry often sucked, but admittedly that probably had more to do with pieplates being the anti-everything weapon everyone spammed if they were able too, and missions tending to favor killier elite infantry over light one (end of game scoring and VP based secondaries IIRC).

I do feel like, at least in the case of Guardsmen, some people are forgetting that back in 2nd with save modifiers, Guardsmen didn't get a save vs Bolters anyways. Hell, they didn't get a save vs. Lasguns either! Switching to AP actually increased their armor save vs. Lasguns/Autoguns/Ork Shootas (which were Bolters in 2nd), from nothing to 5+. This switch further differentiated between Bolters and many standard light Infantry arms.

When Catbarf mentions "far reaching effects", I think one of the best examples of this is how, now that we have save modifiers again, and there's lot's of AP-1 and -2 around, there came a desire/need to increase the durability of Marines, so they gained an extra wound. Which in turn had the effect that Lasguns, Catapults, etc. Shooting back at Marines became much less effective. As Guard/equivalents, are you really happy to get a 5/6+ save against Bolters with the tradeoff that your Lasgun effectiveness gets chopped in half? Imo that experience sucks.

As for Eldar, I understand how they feel particularly hard hit in the AP system. Their armies often had a mix of armor saves, and some of those 4+ save troops were quite expensive, such as Banshees and in 3rd ed, Dark Reapers. This meant that even having a couple AP 4 weapons around could spell doom for certain high value units, and the opponent could quickly optimize target choices. This made for a very different experience than other armies, such as Tau, who could bring lots of cheaper 4+ save Troops and capitalize on the quantity of them to make those saves count. I remember playing games where an opponent had 40 to 60 Fire Warriors/Equivalents around, and my few AP 4 weapons could only make a scratch against them before coming under effective fire themselves, and the experience was very different.

Imo that 4+ save under the AP system really put them (Fire Warriors) in a different class. Despite being T3 they were literally twice as durable vs. Bolters over Guardsmen. (And they shot back twice as hard, wounding on 3+ rather than 5+). Technically I suppose having a 5+ save over a 6+ save under save mods is "twice as durable", but having a 4+ save vs no save is also "twice as durable". . . Huh, that's a funny linguistic quirk. Hopefully y'all can see what I mean.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

I actually kind of loved how avengers behaved in 7th edition because Battle Focus (move-shoot-move) meant they could use their 18" guns to sort of chip away at enemies while remaining relatively safe, and Sv 4+ meant that they didn't auto-melt to most weapons when they had to bite the bullet and move in for a head-on scrap.

Yeah I agree that Battle Focus rule was one of the best things ever done for Eldar.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I do feel like, at least in the case of Guardsmen, some people are forgetting that back in 2nd with save modifiers, Guardsmen didn't get a save vs Bolters anyways. Hell, they didn't get a save vs. Lasguns either! Switching to AP actually increased their armor save vs. Lasguns/Autoguns/Ork Shootas (which were Bolters in 2nd), from nothing to 5+. This switch further differentiated between Bolters and many standard light Infantry arms.

When Catbarf mentions "far reaching effects", I think one of the best examples of this is how, now that we have save modifiers again, and there's lot's of AP-1 and -2 around, there came a desire/need to increase the durability of Marines, so they gained an extra wound. Which in turn had the effect that Lasguns, Catapults, etc. Shooting back at Marines became much less effective. As Guard/equivalents, are you really happy to get a 5/6+ save against Bolters with the tradeoff that your Lasgun effectiveness gets chopped in half? Imo that experience sucks.

Well, an increased save is better than what my Guard were getting before....
Now would I like my lasguns to be more effective vs Marines? Sure. But here in 10e/2025 my approach to killing Marines is the same as it's been ever since 2e. Hit them with the special & heavy weapons. The guys with lasguns are there to absorb the wounds so those special/heavies can keep firing. If the lasguns chip off wounds? Or kill anything? It's just a bonus - same as in all the previous years.
What sucks/annoys me more is that some genius decided to strip the heavy weapon options from my infantry squads. THAT reduces my odds of killing Marines. It also screws up my collection as every squad was Sgt, Heavy, Special, 7 Lasguns. Especially so for finished squads where everyone has markings/insignia/squad #s/etc. It means I have to paint up extra people, match paint schemes/styles from years to many many years ago, & track down old decal sheets. *^&$ thanks GW.

ccs wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I do feel like, at least in the case of Guardsmen, some people are forgetting that back in 2nd with save modifiers, Guardsmen didn't get a save vs Bolters anyways. Hell, they didn't get a save vs. Lasguns either! Switching to AP actually increased their armor save vs. Lasguns/Autoguns/Ork Shootas (which were Bolters in 2nd), from nothing to 5+. This switch further differentiated between Bolters and many standard light Infantry arms.

When Catbarf mentions "far reaching effects", I think one of the best examples of this is how, now that we have save modifiers again, and there's lot's of AP-1 and -2 around, there came a desire/need to increase the durability of Marines, so they gained an extra wound. Which in turn had the effect that Lasguns, Catapults, etc. Shooting back at Marines became much less effective. As Guard/equivalents, are you really happy to get a 5/6+ save against Bolters with the tradeoff that your Lasgun effectiveness gets chopped in half? Imo that experience sucks.

Well, an increased save is better than what my Guard were getting before....
Now would I like my lasguns to be more effective vs Marines? Sure. But here in 10e/2025 my approach to killing Marines is the same as it's been ever since 2e. Hit them with the special & heavy weapons. The guys with lasguns are there to absorb the wounds so those special/heavies can keep firing. If the lasguns chip off wounds? Or kill anything? It's just a bonus - same as in all the previous years.
What sucks/annoys me more is that some genius decided to strip the heavy weapon options from my infantry squads. THAT reduces my odds of killing Marines. It also screws up my collection as every squad was Sgt, Heavy, Special, 7 Lasguns. Especially so for finished squads where everyone has markings/insignia/squad #s/etc. It means I have to paint up extra people, match paint schemes/styles from years to many many years ago, & track down old decal sheets. *^&$ thanks GW.

I agree to a degree about the Specials and Heavies vs. Lasguns, but Guardsmen here are also a stand-in for other units that might not have those options. Every infantry now finds Marines twice as hard to engage with basic weapons. Cultists, Termagants, Guardians, Fire Warriors . . . Marines. . . etc.

Edit, actually I don't agree. 7 Lasgun shots averaged nearly the same amount of Marine kill as a Lascannon under old AP system, and was not effected by cover, and that's before Rapid Fire.
7x .5 x .333 x .333 = .388
1x.5x.415 = .415

What sucks/annoys me more is that some genius decided to strip the heavy weapon options from my infantry squads.

Wait. . . for reals?

Insectum7 wrote:As for Eldar, I understand how they feel particularly hard hit in the AP system. Their armies often had a mix of armor saves, and some of those 4+ save troops were quite expensive, such as Banshees and in 3rd ed, Dark Reapers. This meant that even having a couple AP 4 weapons around could spell doom for certain high value units, and the opponent could quickly optimize target choices. This made for a very different experience than other armies, such as Tau, who could bring lots of cheaper 4+ save Troops and capitalize on the quantity of them to make those saves count. I remember playing games where an opponent had 40 to 60 Fire Warriors/Equivalents around, and my few AP 4 weapons could only make a scratch against them before coming under effective fire themselves, and the experience was very different.

This was what made Stormtroopers feel very elite within the context of the Guard, too. They didn't have a ton of firepower (until Cruddace decided to make hellguns AP3), but they were the unit you could use aggressively because they didn't need to stick to cover to not get boltered to death.

It was also fun to play regiments like Vostroyans, who in the 3.5Ed Guard doctrines system had carapace armor across the entire army, plus re-rolls of 1 in shooting. IIRC they were also some 10pts per model when default Guardsmen were 6pts, so they certainly paid for it, but it made for a very different experience from usual.

ccs wrote:Well, an increased save is better than what my Guard were getting before....

My Guard were getting a 4+ in ruins. Honest question, did you guys not play with area terrain? Because I could definitely see that having a big impact on perceived durability.

Against Marines I used to get no save in the open and either 4+ or 5+ in cover. Now, against ubiquitous AP-1 I get at best a 6+ in the open and a 5+ in cover. I'd call it a wash- but that's not even getting into how Marines are shooting twice as much as they used to at 13-24", hitting on 2s if stationary, and have access to a whole bunch more force multipliers, so the end result is Guardsmen die a lot faster than they used to.

I mean, obviously a lot has changed about the game in general so a 1:1 comparison isn't really fair. But I can't wrap my head around this idea that Guardsmen stick around longer now or feel less chaffy when it is now entirely normal for a squad of Marines to kill an entire squad of Guardsmen in one shooting attack from maximum range.

catbarf wrote:
I'd say if you're the sort of player who gets demoralized by not getting armor saves in older editions, you should either (1) make use of cover as intended, or (2) choose not to play as lightly-armored horde infantry. I didn't get demoralized by AP5 because my Guardsmen were dirt cheap and routinely sitting in woods or ruins to get a hard 5+ or 4+ save anyways. It was way lamer in 8th to have more expensive troops in cover but get blown off the board anyways by a million rerolling dice with AP-2, and I don't appreciate that tables need to be choked edge-to-edge with LOS-blocking terrain because they still haven't figured out how to make cover work.

But there are two levels there that are being brushed aside. You're already suffering the affects of being lightly armoured just by having light armour. Then add on top the removal of your save by 95% of the guns in the game, you aren't playing a lightly armoured army, you're playing an unarmoured army.

This is where the all or nothing was problematic, because in effect the bell curve is disruptive, an inverse bell curve. The extreme ends are affected, you either get your best armoured dudes saving all the time and your low armoured dudes never saving, or no one is saving.


So what the discussion is actually doin is saying that light armoured troops should have low chances of saving when they can save, and also regularly get no save at all, while heavy armour should get high chances of saving and also almost always get to to save.

That doubling effect skews things a lot more than just low vs high armour.

Insectum7 wrote:I do feel like, at least in the case of Guardsmen, some people are forgetting that back in 2nd with save modifiers, Guardsmen didn't get a save vs Bolters anyways. Hell, they didn't get a save vs. Lasguns either! Switching to AP actually increased their armor save vs. Lasguns/Autoguns/Ork Shootas (which were Bolters in 2nd), from nothing to 5+. This switch further differentiated between Bolters and many standard light Infantry arms.

so this is where you get into a different conversation. Because I agree here, but the problem is the implementation. The ASM system allows you change it so that these issues are not problems, while still having an impact on the game.

the AP system because it's binary, can't be tweaked, it will either be oppressive or ignored. The Skew to ap2 that happened is an example of that playing out. ASM all still have an effect on their targets, so the need to optimise your ASMs is lessened. -1 isn't as good as -3, but it still does something, which means you are less stressed about ensuring you get SOME effect and skew to the bottom at ap2 to ensure it.

You CAN optimise ASM, but the granular effects mean it just isn't as strategically valuable or important as maximising AP2.

You know, it wouldn't be complicated to include a rule with the 3rd-7th AP system that worked like mods.

"High Impact [X]: Subtract X from armor save rolls made due to wounds caused by this weapon."

Autocannons could be High Impact [1], making them a bit better than Heavy Bolters at killing a Marine shot per shot.
Power Swords could be AP3, High Impact [1], so they do significantly more damage to Terminators and MEQ.

50pts of guardsmen to kill 15pts of marines never seemed like much, but then 50pts of marines shooting back would only kill 15pts of guardsmen - and that's before they stood behind a wall or took orders.

The small arms exchanges of oldhammer were not always as unfavourable to the no-saves factions as you would think, they just weren't often decisive.

 Hellebore wrote:

Insectum7 wrote:I do feel like, at least in the case of Guardsmen, some people are forgetting that back in 2nd with save modifiers, Guardsmen didn't get a save vs Bolters anyways. Hell, they didn't get a save vs. Lasguns either! Switching to AP actually increased their armor save vs. Lasguns/Autoguns/Ork Shootas (which were Bolters in 2nd), from nothing to 5+. This switch further differentiated between Bolters and many standard light Infantry arms.

so this is where you get into a different conversation. Because I agree here, but the problem is the implementation. The ASM system allows you change it so that these issues are not problems, while still having an impact on the game.

the AP system because it's binary, can't be tweaked, it will either be oppressive or ignored. The Skew to ap2 that happened is an example of that playing out. ASM all still have an effect on their targets, so the need to optimise your ASMs is lessened. -1 isn't as good as -3, but it still does something, which means you are less stressed about ensuring you get SOME effect and skew to the bottom at ap2 to ensure it.

You CAN optimise ASM, but the granular effects mean it just isn't as strategically valuable or important as maximising AP2.

So, I understand this rubbing point and I think it's definitely the biggest flaw in the system. You have this neat Heavy Bolter, but it turns out to be no better at dealing with Marine armor than a Lasgun. I think an even better example is you have this anti-tank missile with AP 3, but it gives you zero benefit when striking Terminators with a 2+. Yes, you're 100% right that this is a sticking point. I think from a pure game perspective it has merit in creating those differentiations, but it does feel very "unnatural", for sure. I dion't agree that it's an unsolvable problem with the system though, and I believe this is something Mezzmorki addressed in ProHammer with some adjustment to the core AP rules. (though I forget exactly what those adjustments were)

Oh there are definitely ways to address it, see HH 2.0 and 3.0 giving breaching and rending to most high rate of fire heavy weapons in the game (while nerfing plasma but still giving it a very decent breaching roll).

I may even say HH's AP system plus breaching type rules created the best armour save system GW ever made by breaking the binary nature while still keeping its potential for very strong differentiation.

 Tyran wrote:
Oh there are definitely ways to address it, see HH 2.0 and 3.0 giving breaching and rending to most high rate of fire heavy weapons in the game (while nerfing plasma but still giving it a very decent breaching roll).

I may even say HH's AP system plus breaching type rules created the best armour save system GW ever made by breaking the binary nature while still keeping its potential for very strong differentiation.

You mind sharing what the breaching rules are for those of us not willing to play a game even more centered around Space Marines?

I also see some posters claiming that one of the reasons HH works well is because it's mostly Space Marines, and doesn't work as well for non-Marines. . .

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Oh there are definitely ways to address it, see HH 2.0 and 3.0 giving breaching and rending to most high rate of fire heavy weapons in the game (while nerfing plasma but still giving it a very decent breaching roll).

I may even say HH's AP system plus breaching type rules created the best armour save system GW ever made by breaking the binary nature while still keeping its potential for very strong differentiation.

You mind sharing what the breaching rules are for those of us not willing to play a game even more centered around Space Marines?

I also see some posters claiming that one of the reasons HH works well is because it's mostly Space Marines, and doesn't work as well for non-Marines. . .

Breaching was (in 2nd) Rending, but no autowounds.
So Breaching 4+ would mean any already successful wound roll of 4+ is resolved at AP2.

So my metric for 'good' rules, is whether those rules handle themselves without additions. It's not an objective truth, but it's why my thought processes come out the way they do.

If your core mechanic requires additions to resolve its inconsistencies, then there are issues with the core mechanic. How many exceptions you need to create before the core framework is no longer fit for purpose is subjective though.

So yeah, we can see what I would call patches in HH to try and get around the intrinsic design of the AP system to get a less all or nothing system. But IMO, if your patches are working against the basic design, it says you basic design isn't working. All or nothing is the core premise of the AP system, so if you're finding yourself trying to walk it back with patches, then you should be questioning all or nothing as a concept in toto, not trying to retain it and add patches.


@Insectum iirc mezmorki did a two step system, which tried to marry both styles. AP=Sv, -1 to save. AP<save, no save.

And with one additional step of granularity you reduce that need to drive down to ap2 quite as much. But then I would say it is a completely different core mechanic with a different conceit underpinning it, rather than a version of the AP system.

IMO you can balance the core conceit of all or nothing saves but you have to do it without using the AP system at all, as it's just not an appropriate mechanism. Everyone gets a save and some weapons have an ignores save rule. Which to map onto the existing AP system, would be AP2 or 1 weapons.

Weapons that ignore armour are priced higher than normal because it's a rare effect.

Anything that's not ap2 or 1 gives you your basic save and the AP is modelled by their inherent failure rate. So its an inverse approach to the 6th ed melee weapons, rather than model AP onto melee, you're modelling power weapons onto shooting.

All or nothing inside a granular system makes it impractical to balance. But all or nothing inside an all or nothing is much easier. Virtually no one had an issue with the melee save rules.


What I always found odd about this discussion is that it was considered unbalanced if you skewed to ap2 and marines got no saves at all, but when any other army got no saves, that wasn't considered unbalanced. Because for that to be true then they would have to give 4+ or 5+ saves for free, and only 3+ saves were factored into the cost of the unit. If losing your saves is unbalanced, it shouldn't matter who is losing them.>

Hellebore wrote:This is where the all or nothing was problematic, because in effect the bell curve is disruptive, an inverse bell curve. The extreme ends are affected, you either get your best armoured dudes saving all the time and your low armoured dudes never saving, or no one is saving.


So what the discussion is actually doin is saying that light armoured troops should have low chances of saving when they can save, and also regularly get no save at all, while heavy armour should get high chances of saving and also almost always get to to save.

That doubling effect skews things a lot more than just low vs high armour.

Correct. This is a feature, not a bug.

As I already mentioned it's one of the things that the current save modifier system didn't carry forwards, effectively flattening the range of armor saves. In the all-or-nothing system, a 3+ save is more than twice as effective as a 5+ save, because it's less likely to be ignored altogether. In the modifier system, a 3+ save is less than twice as effective as a 5+ save, because any amount of AP reduces its relative efficacy. The advantage of being heavily armored is slimmer, and for factions whose identity hinges on being tough, that's a problem. But you can't just bump up 3+ saves to 2+ without magnifying the effect of AP modifiers, and then AP-1 becomes the obvious breakpoint (double effectiveness) that everything hinges on.

So to get a similar relative effectiveness and range of assignable values, what the designers of 8th should have done is drop Guardsmen (and GEQs) down to a 6+ save, while keeping MEQ at 3+, and then been very sparing about AP modifiers. Instead they went for an approach that involved the least amount of stat reworks, but using those same stats for a completely different mechanic really screwed up the decades-old dynamics between the factions and directly led to the multi-wound stat bloat and associated knock-on effects.

As for Horus Heresy: Yeah, the all-or-nothing AP system does not work as intended when 95% of models in the game have the exact same armor value. I really think the all-or-nothing system would be better regarded in 40K history if MEQs weren't most of the armies you see on the tabletop, or at the very least if there was more variation in armor values within those armies rather than it being a sea of 3+. The more diverse your local meta, the less critical that AP3 breakpoint, and the game in general is much improved when everyone isn't list-tailoring to kill Marines.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Oh there are definitely ways to address it, see HH 2.0 and 3.0 giving breaching and rending to most high rate of fire heavy weapons in the game (while nerfing plasma but still giving it a very decent breaching roll).

I may even say HH's AP system plus breaching type rules created the best armour save system GW ever made by breaking the binary nature while still keeping its potential for very strong differentiation.

You mind sharing what the breaching rules are for those of us not willing to play a game even more centered around Space Marines?

I also see some posters claiming that one of the reasons HH works well is because it's mostly Space Marines, and doesn't work as well for non-Marines. . .

As others said, HH 2.0 has some really good rules for weapon differentiation in the form of breaching, such as the plasma weapons being AP 4 half the time, with it only being AP 2 on a 4+, or Thallax Lightning guns being rending 4+ as opposed to only being on 6's. It's probably the biggest thing I liked about the system.

HH1 is 7th edition without formations and invisibility, a Different standard FOC chart (and compliments), core missions. You could still play 7th ed codexes in it easily, but the red book armies such as legions and mechanicum are highly balanced around the space marine legions baseline.

^Thanks for the replies re: HH. Interesting. Not sure how I feel about that.

Re:Hellebore + Catbarf, I have thoughts but not the time to write them atm.

 catbarf wrote:

Hellebore wrote:This is where the all or nothing was problematic, because in effect the bell curve is disruptive, an inverse bell curve. The extreme ends are affected, you either get your best armoured dudes saving all the time and your low armoured dudes never saving, or no one is saving.


So what the discussion is actually doin is saying that light armoured troops should have low chances of saving when they can save, and also regularly get no save at all, while heavy armour should get high chances of saving and also almost always get to to save.

That doubling effect skews things a lot more than just low vs high armour.

Correct. This is a feature, not a bug.

As I already mentioned it's one of the things that the current save modifier system didn't carry forwards, effectively flattening the range of armor saves. In the all-or-nothing system, a 3+ save is more than twice as effective as a 5+ save, because it's less likely to be ignored altogether. In the modifier system, a 3+ save is less than twice as effective as a 5+ save, because any amount of AP reduces its relative efficacy. The advantage of being heavily armored is slimmer, and for factions whose identity hinges on being tough, that's a problem. But you can't just bump up 3+ saves to 2+ without magnifying the effect of AP modifiers, and then AP-1 becomes the obvious breakpoint (double effectiveness) that everything hinges on.

So to get a similar relative effectiveness and range of assignable values, what the designers of 8th should have done is drop Guardsmen (and GEQs) down to a 6+ save, while keeping MEQ at 3+, and then been very sparing about AP modifiers. Instead they went for an approach that involved the least amount of stat reworks, but using those same stats for a completely different mechanic really screwed up the decades-old dynamics between the factions and directly led to the multi-wound stat bloat and associated knock-on effects.

As for Horus Heresy: Yeah, the all-or-nothing AP system does not work as intended when 95% of models in the game have the exact same armor value. I really think the all-or-nothing system would be better regarded in 40K history if MEQs weren't most of the armies you see on the tabletop, or at the very least if there was more variation in armor values within those armies rather than it being a sea of 3+. The more diverse your local meta, the less critical that AP3 breakpoint, and the game in general is much improved when everyone isn't list-tailoring to kill Marines.

It is a feature of the AP system, but that doesn't make it a good one. There was no inherent necessity for a 3+ save to be doubly effective, nor a 5+ to be half as affective. that's pure power fantasy. A 3+ save is already better than a 5+ save, that's the advantage it grants. The necessity of a bigger advantage is not a self evident truth. That was an (intended or not) consequence of the introduction of AP in 3rd ed. there were 2 editions before that where such a concept didn't exist. And there's now been 3 editions where it went away again. So the 40k game environment has now had a 50/50 split between the usage of ASM and AP in its edition history . But if you look at the way the rules evolved across those eras, what you see is that AP got more and more patches and exceptions to deal with its inherent issues (further extended into HH), while ASM from 8 to 10 simply tweaked the amount of them. Because there's no need to patch the system with an external exception when the core rule has it as part of the mechanism.

Now you may consider it a good feature, but it definitely was only a 'feel good' feature if the army you played happened to have a 3+ save. It sucked if you didn't. No one looked forward to the halving the effectiveness of their armour, it made playing the army harder, it made the only balance mechanism horde, which didn't work for all armies (eldar) which then also made it more expensive. There were no other mechanisms in the game that gave other armies 'fun' to offset this. If you played marines you got to run across battlefields bouncing bullets off your armour and smash with impunity. If you played guard you basically took troops as a tax and relied on tanks. If you played eldar, well there was no fun advantage to being the fast speedy dodgy faction the rules were designed only to model twice the resilience for marines only and nothing for anyone else. And when they tried to introduce stuff it broke the game like the falcon and the army was tarred and feathered for it.

It's not an equitable environment to play an army. That armies still functioned and could win was almost in spite of this, not as a feature of it. the current rules are certainly not magnitudes better and they've reduced the mechanics even more down to features that make marines still get more fun out of the game, to the point where anything that might grant feels good functionality to another army that doesn't rely on T, W or Sv is virtually ignored.

I find the endless obsession of trying to make marines perfectly represented in the rules tiring, because the circular effect of them wanting to defeat the majority marine opponents while also being able defend against the majority marine opponents just makes a never ending carousel of power ups. No other army gets the core rules fixated on their play quality or wellbeing as marines do. The AP system is only defended from the perspective of making marines tougher, like that's the point of the game, ensuring that a 3+ save was twice as good as a 5+ save.

The thematic design of each faction focuses on different aspects of warfare and their 'fun' should be found in doing those things well. But if you put venn diagrams down of each factions themes and the areas of warfare they are good at, overlayed over the core rules, you'll find most armies don't overlap much.

If we spend as much time debating if a marine should be t6 w3 or have additional mechanics to 'truly' reflect their power, on the tau and their high quality ballistic traditions, we'd have super detailed core shooting rules with a range of unique factors that really made choosing your targets, and marker lighting your targets, and coordinating fire etc super satisfying. This isn't balance but a quality of game play thing, which is definitely subjective. But IMO 40k for the last 25 years has gone out of its way to ensure the game aligns with marine fun far easier with less effort than any other faction. I certainly enjoyed playing them more during that time than any other faction because at no point did I feel like I was fighting against the rules AND the opponent to pull off a win.

The one time the eldar got close to actually having the game allow for the type of fun they were suppposed to use, the broken falcon and all it did was make people hate anything that wasn't just head to head smashing each other....


EDIT: something to point out is the 3rd ed rules were designed off the back of Priestley's WW2 game, where everyone wore the same armour and there wouldn't have been the huge range of AP issues, it would be been you either got a save or you didn't and both sides were balanced because the Germans for instance wouldn't have had saves twice as good as the russians. Which is ironically why it works better with HH were the majority of factions use the same armour.

As others have pointed out, Guardsmen had a 6+ save against gunfire in 2nd Ed and due to AP modifiers normally didn't get a save at all. Flak armor offering little protection against most weapons was not an invention of 3rd Ed.

Anyways, I never played Marines, or even MEQs, so I think you're tilting at windmills with the Marine power fantasy stuff. I played Guard and Tyranids, and I actually prefer modifiers in principle (it's the current implementation that bugs me), but I can appreciate elegant design and the all-or-nothing system accomplished a lot of subtle effects through a very simple mechanic. I've already given specific examples of effects that the old system had on the gameplay that I consider beneficial- if your dislike of that mechanic comes down to not liking that Marines were tough and your Guardsmen weren't, that's a valid preference, but from a design standpoint I don't think it's a strong argument, and your repeated assertions about light infantry being worthless do not track at all with my experience.

Edit: Oh, and the notion that anything with a worse save than 3+ was a feels-bad horde unit is outright histrionics. My Tyranid Warriors and Genestealers ate Marines for breakfast.

 Hellebore wrote:
It is a feature of the AP system, but that doesn't make it a good one. There was no inherent necessity for a 3+ save to be doubly effective, nor a 5+ to be half as affective. that's pure power fantasy. A 3+ save is already better than a 5+ save, that's the advantage it grants. The necessity of a bigger advantage is not a self evident truth. That was an (intended or not) consequence of the introduction of AP in 3rd ed. there were 2 editions before that where such a concept didn't exist. And there's now been 3 editions where it went away again. So the 40k game environment has now had a 50/50 split between the usage of ASM and AP in its edition history . But if you look at the way the rules evolved across those eras, what you see is that AP got more and more patches and exceptions to deal with its inherent issues (further extended into HH), while ASM from 8 to 10 simply tweaked the amount of them. Because there's no need to patch the system with an external exception when the core rule has it as part of the mechanism.

Remember in 8th Edition when a Marine took twice as many shots to kill if they had a fence between them and a Lasgun? And how that's no longer a thing, because the core of ASM was changed to not allow Cover bonuses for 3+ armor against AP0 weapons?

A change that happened late 9th, I believe.

 Tiger9gamer wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
Eldar have had the perennial problem of being characterized as fragile but hard to hit or pin down, existing in a game system that never had any good way to represent being hard to hit and has you deploying within heavy weapons range for a knock-down-drag-out cage match. The Eldar units that have historically worked best are the ones that look and function like bedazzled Marines.

I'm not sure that that's really an artifact of the AP system so much as just incongruity between background and gameplay. T3/5+ is supposed to be squishy; the issue is assigning that profile to a race that emphasizes minimizing casualties while giving them no other means to mitigate damage.

Don't forget the nigh unkillable transports and tanks of 6th-7th that felt like they could solo a whole army's shooting for 120 points, or the monstrous creatures that really should have been walkers

Going to push back and defend my space elves a bit here. Those transports *were* very durable, but they were 120ish points in editions where rhinos were something like 35 points. And a lot of that durability came from the cover saves they usually got by either moving so fast that they weren't allowed to shoot or by jinking (which meant they were hitting on 6s). So if you have a unit that costs almost 4 times as much as a typical marine transport and gives up most of its offense to buff its defense, you'd kind of hope/expect that it would be able to tank a few shots before dying!

And as for monstrous creatures (presumably referring to wraith lords here) deserving to be walkers... I guess? The distinction between the two has frequently been kind of arbitrary. Why could you blow the legs off a dreadnaught but not a carnifex, etc.? The wraith lord doesn't have a pilot (unless you count the little gem in its head acting like a hard drive for the ghost commanding its actions), and its wraith bone is capable of self-healing. It's more graceful and quick than something like a dreadnaught. It's a bit iffy on whether its systems are mechanical enough in nature to be especially susceptible to haywire type effects. Poison doesn't seem like it should be effective against them, but the closest comparison to the wraithbone it's made of is *bone*, which is alive and presumably susceptible to poison. So they could have made it a walker, and that would have made basically the same amount of sense, but the need for a distinction between walkers and monsters is kind of questionable in the first place.


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 catbarf wrote:

Edit: Oh, and the notion that anything with a worse save than 3+ was a feels-bad horde unit is outright histrionics. My Tyranid Warriors and Genestealers ate Marines for breakfast.

My warriors never made it into melee because I didn't own a bunch of monsters, and thus they became magnets for every instant-death krak missile and lascannon in the enemy army.

My genestealers had fun ambushing enemies that strayed too close to the edges though. >: D

 Insectum7 wrote:
I think an even better example is you have this anti-tank missile with AP 3, but it gives you zero benefit when striking Terminators with a 2+.

When you look at what had 2+ and AP3 in the original 3rd edition rulebook it does have a more deliberate feel to it.
- Anything AP1 to AP3 was functionally 'ignores all armour'.
- Terminators and meganobz almost uniquely were protected against a specific subset of these weapons - missiles and artillery (aka AP3)

From a 'based in a WW2 system' perspective AP3 was the shelling and 2+ armour were the models that could advance slowly into it alongside the tanks.
In practice AP2 was cheap and common while many of the factions in the game had neither 2+ saves nor AP3 artillery.

I was thinking that the 3rd edition AP system is my preferred one, either get your save or dont, but perhaps some second level might be needed.
My brain keeps thinking of calling it the "hardened armor" system, where like.. if a unit has hardened armor, they still get an armor save against weapons whose AP beats their armor, its just at -1 their normal save. Something like that could work for certain Eldar units.
I know its functionally like an invulnerable save, but I would still have combat weapons that ignore armor be effective against them and allow no save

 Wyldhunt wrote:


My warriors never made it into melee because I didn't own a bunch of monsters, and thus they became magnets for every instant-death krak missile and lascannon in the enemy army.

My genestealers had fun ambushing enemies that strayed too close to the edges though. >: D

They are talking about the 3rd and 4th edition Tyranids in which Synapse gave Eternal Warrior and Warriors could assault 12" with Leaping (and rending worked on hit rolls)
5th to 7th was rough on Tyranids (damn Cruddace).

 Tyran wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:


My warriors never made it into melee because I didn't own a bunch of monsters, and thus they became magnets for every instant-death krak missile and lascannon in the enemy army.

My genestealers had fun ambushing enemies that strayed too close to the edges though. >: D

They are talking about the 3rd and 4th edition Tyranids in which Synapse gave Eternal Warrior and Warriors could assault 12" with Leaping (and rending worked on hit rolls)
5th to 7th was rough on Tyranids (damn Cruddace).

No, in the 3rd edition codex Synapse were not immune to Instant Death