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Lascannons strip off HP from AV12 at the same speed as lascannons. Then they also have a much, much better chance of stripping off several HP simultaneously (by exploding).

Really, if for whatever strange reason, you ONLY want to look at things by no other metric than HP, then that's what vehicle explosions are. A lascannon hitting a chimera has a 2 in 3 chance of ripping off one HP, and a 1 in 6 chance of ripping off three HP. An autocannon hitting a chimera has a 2 in 3 chance of ripping off one HP, and only a 1 in 20 chance of ripping off 3.

And that's looking at things in an incredibly narrow way. If you look at things more broadly, go-for-stripping weapons don't get to take advantage of things like Ap, open-topped status of target, non-explosion damage on the pen chart, or vehicle explosions, which kill bad guys and causes them to take pinning and morale tests. And going for stripping does have to deal with things like squad shenanigans, techpriest repairs, and caring how many HP the target has. Anyone who has ever tried to glance a necron lord on a barge to death will know what I mean by that last one.

Only by looking though one tiny lens does going for stripping look good, compared to going for the kill straight away.

I think it all depends on your army composition. If you can spam lascannons like guard, then go for that. If you can spam glancing like necrons, then go for that.

However, for everything in between, I think glancing is better for 1 main reason - you can take more glancing weapons because they tend to be cheaper. The advantage of this is twofold; your anti tank is also good against infantry because those weapons that can glance usually have a higher rate of fire and those higher rate of fire weapons are better against fliers because they get more chances to roll a 6.

IMO, the high rate of fire glancing weapons fit better in all comers lists which are now harder to build in 6th edition with the advent of fliers.

 TheCaptain wrote:
I'm a fan of "Reliable HP Stripping with good odds to blow up."

Never liked banking on the explosion; but if I bring enough AP2 guns that will reliably pen; then I'll have 1/3 chance to explode, and even if I don't, the HP's will at least be stripped.

Lascannons, baby. Big fan.

QFT

 Peregrine wrote:

The lascannon is invariably going to be more expensive

And this is exactly the problem. An equal point value of ACs has a high chance of killing AV 12 faster than the LCs, so if you want AV 12 dead you bring ACs.

But surely we're going to run into problems if we use AV12 as our standard for vehicles? I mean, we can't just spam missile launchers and autocannons and think the jobs done, because then an IG player can roll up with 3+ Leman Russ, or a SM player with two Landraiders, and we're in a lot of trouble. And the math changes totally when we consider different armour values.

Although to be fair, as a GK player I read Autocannon and think S8

I think it depends on the vehicle

if it is a transport, then you might want to try and blow it up outright to kill some of the squad.
Now against terminators and plague marines it hardly matters but against DE it really makes a difference.

When I play my DE army and something goes down to hull point strip, I am happy. I knew they were going to die, this way the squad is still at full strength, instead of 35%.

Right, and a vehicle explosion being only one of the things you get from rolling on the pen chart. The low strength and high Ap of HP-strippers misses other benefits as well.

For example, a meltagun or a lascannon is much more likely to get a weapon destroyed result. If said results is on a helldrake, or a doomsday ark, or on a vindicator, or on any other vehicles that basically have one good gun, and either 1 or 0 backup weapons, then a weapon destroyed result is basically as good as a vehicle destroyed result.

If we're talking about something that doesn't have good ranged weapons, like a triarch stalker, or an ironclad dread, then an immobilized result may be just as good. Literally so against flat-out skimmers. Also, immobilizing a transport really defeats the purpose of a transport. Add in the fact that a second immobilized result automatically rolls over into a vehicle wrecked due to HP, and you're now talking about even greater effectiveness.

And think about it this way. People were upset with the idea that HP made vehicles more fragile, but were consoled by the fact that they can't be stun-locked anymore, so they get to move and shoot more while they're on the table. Going for multi-shot low-strength weapons means that, in fact, you're not stun-locking things, while with vehicles that go for penetrating results, you still easily can, thus negating the one advantage that vehicles gained from the new 6th ed damage system.

As CSM, I prefer to wreck vehicles. It leaves the passengers nicley bunched up to be eaten by plasma cannons, vindicator blasts and bale flamers.

For my DE, I try to blow them up. It adds casualties to give you pain tokesn faster, the crater slows them down and there's less crap blocking my LoF.

With my Eldar, I take what I can get. Glancing is good, but I usually try and go for the pen.