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So, ive just recently gotten into Warhammer 40k, I use to play Warmachine a few years back and am use to the full Metal mini's but due to no one playing here i got rid of them. Now getting back into War Gaming again i went with 40k since its the one that i wanted to start in the first place. So i grabbed some boxes of Marines to get familiar again. The tactical marines weren't too bad took me a bit to get use to the spru's and then assembling the models. But when i opened the Space Marine Devastator's i just had to stop and look and say What the hell did i get myself into. Going from the SM: Tact to the Devastators seems like there is a huge jump in level of modeling. Any advice for a new modeler that some of you guys would mind giving out?

Don't worry too much. There's a lot of stuff in there that you don't end up using at first.
The typical Dev unit is 5, and they give you 6 legs and lots of selection for the weapons you want to use.
The legs and body are all interchangeable, but the weapons have specific backpacks, arms/shoulder pads.
The pamphlet in the box helps out a lot.
I posed the legs, and body, then test fitted the gun with both arms. Once i figured out how they best sit glued in place. Then finally the head in a good direction.

How did you test pose them? did you use some sort of pinning or something else?

Small amounts of sticky tack are your best bet for test fitting.

I know some guys that use super glue on the plastics as its easier to break the bonds but IMO its just too messy, I gotta agree blu-tac is the way to go.

I use the glue stick for paper. It can get a bit messy, but put a little dab and then its just sticky enough to hold the plastic together, and comes off pretty good.

You might also try straight-up plastic glue. Harder to break the bonds, but it has a pretty slow dry time (About 15 minutes or so if it stays in place) so you could easily just glue everything, let it sit for 10 seconds, then pose them how you want them to look. You'll have a few minutes of time before the glue completely hardens and becomes useless, but unless you're really particular about getting a model to look a certain way, it's plenty of time to get it into position. I've found it to be really handy for dealing with models that hold one gun in two hands; it can be a serious pain trying to get them to look nice (Without the arms sticking off the torso or the gun hovering just above the left hand).

You don't need any sort of adhesive when you're test fitting. Just hold the model together with your fingers. There's an enclosed instruction booklet in every kit - use that and it'll help a lot. If you're curious about anything else, looking at the box art and the like can give you a hint or two about how the models should look. It all becomes very second nature. Hope that helps!

Also don't worry too much on the look of the arms, because the shoulder pads cover a lot of it up.