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Ok, so there will be some cases where armies might struggle to deal with tanks if Damage Resistance came into effect.

You say you used to use touch of rust. Perhaps this could be reintroduced, to either reduce DR permanently, until the next phase or during the attack, depending on how powerful these effects are.

There are ways to give armies abilities for this sort of thing. Plague weapons could ignore DR entirely, or reduce it by one. These suggestions are there as a baseline, they do not exist in a vacuum - if it works for 99% of the game but falls down for a few units/armies, we can also fix those units/armies!

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I strongly prefer the 30k approach to Daemons (where you have a set of base profiles and a menu of abilities that you can mix-and-match, then add to a "Daemonic Alignment" if you want to do a Chaos God-specific force) rather than 40k's four rigidly-defined independent sub-codexes. The 30k approach feels much more Chaos-y, the 40k approach feels one-dimensional and unimaginative.

Well before proposing what you are, did you consider possible rewrites and ideas for Nurgle Daemons outside somehow getting an Unclean One in melee (lol good joke you made there) and Soul Grinders and then saying to use the Allies crutch?

...So I shouldn't make broad sweeping suggestions about changes to the core rules without also giving a detailed plan as to exactly how it'll impact every conceivable army build, Mr. "ALTERNATING ACTIVATIONS!"?

AA would have a less drastic effect on balance than your change, yes.

 some bloke wrote:
Ok, so there will be some cases where armies might struggle to deal with tanks if Damage Resistance came into effect.

You say you used to use touch of rust. Perhaps this could be reintroduced, to either reduce DR permanently, until the next phase or during the attack, depending on how powerful these effects are.

There are ways to give armies abilities for this sort of thing. Plague weapons could ignore DR entirely, or reduce it by one. These suggestions are there as a baseline, they do not exist in a vacuum - if it works for 99% of the game but falls down for a few units/armies, we can also fix those units/armies!

That’s pretty fair.

This may be a personal failing but I do like to try and assume every army I'm thinking up rules for is made up of a broad spectrum of units that represents a range of mechanics and can participate in the game on multiple levels. I want a system that doesn't reward or require spamming to participate, but then when you get one-dimensional armies like Daemons or Tau that only do one thing I'd rather adjust them to do a broader set of things than throw up my hands and say "Oh, there are armies that only do one thing, I can't possibly then adjust the system to punish inflexible spammy army builds".

To adjust Nurgle Daemons specifically to work within the DR suggestion I'd introduce some kind of heavy melee upgrade weapon so a unit of Plaguebearers had a couple of brutes with a powerfist-equivalent, give Heralds/Greater Daemons (along with a lot of other psykers) "psychic weapons" that operate as ranged weapons rather than psychic powers to get around the screwiness of 8e's general approach to psychic attacks, and possibly make up some kind of mid-size beast with a longer-ranged vomit attack to put a Nurgle-themed ranged weapon into the room rather than assuming that Nurgle Daemons' current one-dimensional slow melee blob build needs to be how they will always operate.

Yeah-Daemons deserve a lot more units.

As do many other armies.

Thing is we don't really need AV. We just need to use the proper Unlimited Toughness.

Lets look at things.
7th- Light Vehicles (Dark Eldar fex) could be damaged and brought down by bolters, but not lasguns. They were a light vehicle and it made a sort of sense.
8th Lasguns kill super heavies.

Step 1- Use the expanded Charactistic Lines. That means AT weapons grow in S. But all Vehicles grow in T as well. It remains fairly flat and consistent but AT focused weapons (low shots, high S, high D get a buff while non-AT weapons (plasma) remains as it is).
Step-2 Alter the To-Wound table so that 1/3-auto 3x invuln. No more lasguns vs vehicles. Which is reasonable.

The current wound characteristics don't really need to be changed. They were set based on AT weapon damage, not on someone bringing 60 guardsmen with lasguns and 6-ing it down in one turn (super heavy).

As for plasma auto-wounding. YES. Even in the Black Library books space marines that take a plasma hit are wounded, often dead, in one shot, even when their armor holds they cook. Plenty of times a single plasma shot vaporizes a part of a Space Marine. So yeah, plasma auto-wound= reasonable.

What about Poison? Well Poision is the red headed stepchild of the game. It SUCKS, unless its a 2+ wound. In the long old days poison was an S adder. So a weapon that was poisoned was S+1, S+2, etc based on how scary the poison was. Also Nurgle and Dark Eldar both have poisons that effect machines just as well as living things.

Just pointing out, 60 Guardsmen in Rapid Fire Range, with FRFSRF have 222 shots.

Which is 111 hits.
And 18.5 wounds.

Even if your Super Heavy fails EVERY SINGLE SAVE, they'll survive that.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Just pointing out, 60 Guardsmen in Rapid Fire Range, with FRFSRF have 222 shots.

Which is 111 hits.
And 18.5 wounds.

Even if your Super Heavy fails EVERY SINGLE SAVE, they'll survive that.

That's statistical math hammer. In practice that can be much higher and much lower. Point being a hundred guardsmen with their weapons on overcharge should not be capable of damaging a Super Heavy Tank which is designed to take on massive defensive positions, macro-cannons, huge laser batteries and entire companies of tanks.

They just won't hurt it. They shouldn't be able to. I could see them in melee combat being able to make pinpoint hits on vision ports and similar. But at range?

It beggars the suspension of disbelief. I've seen battle reports where a baneblade suffered over 30 wounds in one round. Multiple bat reps where combined with AT fire the plinking guardsmen finished off a Baneblade or similar super heavy.

Right now it's just ridiculous. Super heavies are just not worth their points when I can 6 the crap out of things with massed dice, trusting to LUCK (and dice that are not actually balanced and thus go off from the statistical.. most people have "preferred dice" that roll well).

A thousand guardsmen can shoot at one Knight and it won't do anything except maybe strip the paint. But right now the game favors DICE over TOUGHNESS. More dice is always better. In some ways the 60 guard are going to be tougher at 60 Wounds total, where anything but mortal wounds, be it lascanon, etc will only kill 1 guardsman at a time even if a weapon is a 10 wound weapon, if it isn't mortal then one shot one guardsman, even killing on 2+ and no save. Same thing goes for massed 'nids.. or really, massed anything. Lascannon on 60 guardsmen kills ONE guardsman, 1 wound. A lascannon on the Baneblade... well that's up to six. 60 wounds worth of guardsmen is better statistics because they can plunk down 222 dice per turn. The baneblade cannot even come close to that.
It was an old joke that Orks players used to bring giant Rubbermaid boxes with dice bcause of the ork dice spam. Now its everyone. Even marines with the new rules get bolter dice spam, which really upped their punching power (something that traitors don't get).

Statistically speaking you are more likely to deviate from the mean results than to match them, higher or lower. Most players would gamble on higher with the clean up being handled by a few lascannons or a volley of hellblasters.. or even just some nice bolter spam to put more dice on the table.

Even more what happens when you are shooting at other things.. like Marines. You've got 220 shots per turn worth of dice to throw around. I'd like to see something that matches that which doesn't rely on spamming a cheap unit.

 meatybtz wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Just pointing out, 60 Guardsmen in Rapid Fire Range, with FRFSRF have 222 shots.

Which is 111 hits.
And 18.5 wounds.

Even if your Super Heavy fails EVERY SINGLE SAVE, they'll survive that.

That's statistical math hammer. In practice that can be much higher and much lower. Point being a hundred guardsmen with their weapons on overcharge should not be capable of damaging a Super Heavy Tank which is designed to take on massive defensive positions, macro-cannons, huge laser batteries and entire companies of tanks.

They just won't hurt it. They shouldn't be able to. I could see them in melee combat being able to make pinpoint hits on vision ports and similar. But at range?

It beggars the suspension of disbelief. I've seen battle reports where a baneblade suffered over 30 wounds in one round. Multiple bat reps where combined with AT fire the plinking guardsmen finished off a Baneblade or similar super heavy.

Right now it's just ridiculous. Super heavies are just not worth their points when I can 6 the crap out of things with massed dice, trusting to LUCK (and dice that are not actually balanced and thus go off from the statistical.. most people have "preferred dice" that roll well).

A thousand guardsmen can shoot at one Knight and it won't do anything except maybe strip the paint. But right now the game favors DICE over TOUGHNESS. More dice is always better. In some ways the 60 guard are going to be tougher at 60 Wounds total, where anything but mortal wounds, be it lascanon, etc will only kill 1 guardsman at a time even if a weapon is a 10 wound weapon, if it isn't mortal then one shot one guardsman, even killing on 2+ and no save. Same thing goes for massed 'nids.. or really, massed anything. Lascannon on 60 guardsmen kills ONE guardsman, 1 wound. A lascannon on the Baneblade... well that's up to six. 60 wounds worth of guardsmen is better statistics because they can plunk down 222 dice per turn. The baneblade cannot even come close to that.
It was an old joke that Orks players used to bring giant Rubbermaid boxes with dice bcause of the ork dice spam. Now its everyone. Even marines with the new rules get bolter dice spam, which really upped their punching power (something that traitors don't get).

Statistically speaking you are more likely to deviate from the mean results than to match them, higher or lower. Most players would gamble on higher with the clean up being handled by a few lascannons or a volley of hellblasters.. or even just some nice bolter spam to put more dice on the table.

I don't have preferred dice. Because, you know, I don't cheat.

And you want to know something? It takes 25 shots from Guardsmen with Lasguns to have a 50/50 (technically 50.55/49.45) chance of taking ONE WOUND off a Knight. One wound.

Want some fluff? At full wounds, they're taking off minor sensors and gizmos that are on the outside and are exposed to weaker fire. They're not hurting the core of the Knight (as evidenced by it not suffering any penalties) but they're stripping minor, somewhat important things off. And if it's down to 3 wounds and you get massively lucky? Then the reactor and other very important things got exposed by the Lascannon and Battle Cannon fire.

Edit: Also, the more dice you have, the MORE LIKELY YOU ARE to hit the average. With 222 shots, you have a 5.26% chance of getting 2 or less wounds, and 9.29% chance of getting 10 or more. 6 wounds is the most likely, at 16.25%, which is coincidentally the average. 5 and 7 are pretty close, at 15.72% and 14.32% respectively, but that's a damn near 50% chance (46.29%) of being at the average or within one wound.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 meatybtz wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Just pointing out, 60 Guardsmen in Rapid Fire Range, with FRFSRF have 222 shots.

Which is 111 hits.
And 18.5 wounds.

Even if your Super Heavy fails EVERY SINGLE SAVE, they'll survive that.

That's statistical math hammer. In practice that can be much higher and much lower. Point being a hundred guardsmen with their weapons on overcharge should not be capable of damaging a Super Heavy Tank which is designed to take on massive defensive positions, macro-cannons, huge laser batteries and entire companies of tanks.

They just won't hurt it. They shouldn't be able to. I could see them in melee combat being able to make pinpoint hits on vision ports and similar. But at range?

It beggars the suspension of disbelief. I've seen battle reports where a baneblade suffered over 30 wounds in one round. Multiple bat reps where combined with AT fire the plinking guardsmen finished off a Baneblade or similar super heavy.

Right now it's just ridiculous. Super heavies are just not worth their points when I can 6 the crap out of things with massed dice, trusting to LUCK (and dice that are not actually balanced and thus go off from the statistical.. most people have "preferred dice" that roll well).

A thousand guardsmen can shoot at one Knight and it won't do anything except maybe strip the paint. But right now the game favors DICE over TOUGHNESS. More dice is always better. In some ways the 60 guard are going to be tougher at 60 Wounds total, where anything but mortal wounds, be it lascanon, etc will only kill 1 guardsman at a time even if a weapon is a 10 wound weapon, if it isn't mortal then one shot one guardsman, even killing on 2+ and no save. Same thing goes for massed 'nids.. or really, massed anything. Lascannon on 60 guardsmen kills ONE guardsman, 1 wound. A lascannon on the Baneblade... well that's up to six. 60 wounds worth of guardsmen is better statistics because they can plunk down 222 dice per turn. The baneblade cannot even come close to that.
It was an old joke that Orks players used to bring giant Rubbermaid boxes with dice bcause of the ork dice spam. Now its everyone. Even marines with the new rules get bolter dice spam, which really upped their punching power (something that traitors don't get).

Statistically speaking you are more likely to deviate from the mean results than to match them, higher or lower. Most players would gamble on higher with the clean up being handled by a few lascannons or a volley of hellblasters.. or even just some nice bolter spam to put more dice on the table.

I don't have preferred dice. Because, you know, I don't cheat.

And you want to know something? It takes 25 shots from Guardsmen with Lasguns to have a 50/50 (technically 50.55/49.45) chance of taking ONE WOUND off a Knight. One wound.

Want some fluff? At full wounds, they're taking off minor sensors and gizmos that are on the outside and are exposed to weaker fire. They're not hurting the core of the Knight (as evidenced by it not suffering any penalties) but they're stripping minor, somewhat important things off. And if it's down to 3 wounds and you get massively lucky? Then the reactor and other very important things got exposed by the Lascannon and Battle Cannon fire.

Statistical Math Hammer almost never plays out. That's the problems with relying on a Median or AVERAGE. Average doesn't mean 50% of the time it is true. The opposite is true, it is more likely that you will deviate from the average (higher or lower) than actually match the average except over exceptional long periods of time, even with "fair" dice. Note that none of our dice are actually "fair". It is quite expensive to get statistical dice because of the required precision.

That's the trap of mathhammering. It's a curve of best fit. You can get a curve of best fit that indicates numbers that your actual experiment may never had, simply that they "could" have or "within the range of actual data points gathered".

Go roll some dice and tell me the results. Over an infinite period of time you will achieve the average, presuming perfect dice. However, in real world terms your deviations will exceed your average since you are not rolling perfect dice over an infinite period (or very large sample.. like billions where the deviation becomes small enough to round out).

Roll 220 dice 10x all the way through and tell me the results. Record them on paper and let me know. I already know because youtube is has thousands of WH40K videos that show massive statistical deviation. The sample size though is still SMALL, even at thousands of videos with hundreds of die rolls it is still considered a "small sample" from a mathematics or statistical perspective. Which is why we see major deviation from the average.

What that says is mathematical averages have little actual impact on gameplay. It is why 3+ vs 4+ in practice vastly outperforms what it's statistical difference would suggest.

You have a 46.29% chance of getting within 1 wound of the average (of 6 wounds) against a Knight. With 6 full Guard squads. All with FRFSRF. In 12". Now, this does assume perfectly balanced dice, but given that any predilections towards high results should be balanced by predilections towards low (given you're rolling over 200 dice) it'd be pretty close.

If this was ONE shot (like, say, a BS 3+ Lascannon) then you're right-the average is mostly meaningless. Against a 4++ Knight, you have less than a 4% chance of doing average damage with a BS 3+ Lascannon.

But once you're rolling three digits of dice, the average or near to it becomes increasingly likely.

Even more importantly, this is a highly unrealistic scenario. How are you getting 60 T3 5+ models within 12" of a Knight?

I know, KNOW, this is a weak argument, BUT:

A Lasgun is essentially firing at the temp of a sun. A Hellgun at close range is supposed to be able to punch through most any armor in the fluff.

Same with Gauss rifles, Tesla guns, and the Fusion Blasters.

I think 6+ to wound is the best idea, but then I also feel moving to a d12 system is better.

That being said, I would love to make is so Plasmas aren't better at Anti-tank than Melta guns.

I think damage is a good way to go. If this weapon (normally a D3) is targeting a vehicle or something with T8+, then it becomes just flat 4. Meltas should do max damage of 6.

"A Lasgun is essentially firing at the temp of a sun. "

I doubt that.

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
I know, KNOW, this is a weak argument, BUT:

A Lasgun is essentially firing at the temp of a sun. A Hellgun at close range is supposed to be able to punch through most any armor in the fluff.

Same with Gauss rifles, Tesla guns, and the Fusion Blasters.

I think 6+ to wound is the best idea, but then I also feel moving to a d12 system is better.

That being said, I would love to make is so Plasmas aren't better at Anti-tank than Melta guns.

I think damage is a good way to go. If this weapon (normally a D3) is targeting a vehicle or something with T8+, then it becomes just flat 4. Meltas should do max damage of 6.

The advantage of DR is that it mitigates D2/Dd3-spam without requiring you to then inflate vehicle wound counts too far. Doubling the wound count of most vehicles and increasing Dd6 weapons to d6+3 or so would also make real anti-tank weapons better than just spamming low/mid-power shots, but right now I keep a stock of MTG spindowns in with my 40k stuff because I can track wounds on anything short of a Knight with one die, and if you inflate the wound counts suddenly you need to track 28-wound Wave Serpents.

Looking at the proposals i will first state that i do not like the initial ideas. If vehicles are immune to most weapons outright why play with non vehicles? The current stats on wounding big with little are will enough imo.

I have two interpretations to suggest, both like changing damage to less random.:

1) give anti-vehicle weapons bonus dice vs vehicles. A lasgun could get two hit dice vs a land raider but only 1 vs infantry. This bonus die does not provide bonus damage. This is possibly redundant to the tons of rerolls we get already, but is still fewer rerolls than are provided by higher rof weapons like autocannons and plasma. Usually the downside of AV weapons is the lower rof and risk of low damage roll, this addresses that.

2) give vehicles slower to degrade armor saves. If ap worked at half efficiency vs vehicles we would see a huge reduction in Jack of all weapons. For example ap-1 is 0 for vehicles, ap-2 is 1, ap-3 is 1, ap-4 is 2. Who needs invulnerable saves to even be considered feasible now? 3+ saves will mean something, and non- primaris plasma is still 2 shots with decent wound and some ap but not competing with melta as much. I think profiles may need to be adjusted for this though.

I'd probably go the other way

Have the vehicles have the keyword and allow "Armoured" and "Tanks" and "Superheavy/Titan" to ignore different levels of AP.

Light vehicles would not have the keyword...

apocalypse already solved this issue. All weapons have 2 strengths. 1 vs infantry. 1 vs "tanks" which includes dreads and the like vehicles and monsterous creatures. A lascannon is great vs a landraider and a hive tyrant and gak vs a marine. A bolter is great at killing marines and gak vs a hive tyrant. All are capable, just better vs specific targets. Some sit in the middle being okay but not great vs everything.

 Lance845 wrote:
apocalypse already solved this issue. All weapons have 2 strengths. 1 vs infantry. 1 vs "tanks" which includes dreads and the like vehicles and monsterous creatures. A lascannon is great vs a landraider and a hive tyrant and gak vs a marine. A bolter is great at killing marines and gak vs a hive tyrant. All are capable, just better vs specific targets. Some sit in the middle being okay but not great vs everything.

Yes...and no - its notable that the Apoclypse system works great....partly as you are firing at units of infantry.

Otherwise we get the wierd situtation that a Lascanon will have difficulty killing a single Gretchin.

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
apocalypse already solved this issue. All weapons have 2 strengths. 1 vs infantry. 1 vs "tanks" which includes dreads and the like vehicles and monsterous creatures. A lascannon is great vs a landraider and a hive tyrant and gak vs a marine. A bolter is great at killing marines and gak vs a hive tyrant. All are capable, just better vs specific targets. Some sit in the middle being okay but not great vs everything.

Yes...and no - its notable that the Apoclypse system works great....partly as you are firing at units of infantry.

Otherwise we get the wierd situtation that a Lascanon will have difficulty killing a single Gretchin.

Which can be explained as the lascannon needing a sustained beam on the target. A small gretchin is 1) harder to draw a bead on and 2) not going to stand still and let it happen. Yeah you aimed right, but couldn't sustain the beam on the gretchin long enough to do any real damage so it survived. On the other hand a tank/knight/whatever is a much bigger target and keeping the beam on it longer is easier.

Fixed.

 Lance845 wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
apocalypse already solved this issue. All weapons have 2 strengths. 1 vs infantry. 1 vs "tanks" which includes dreads and the like vehicles and monsterous creatures. A lascannon is great vs a landraider and a hive tyrant and gak vs a marine. A bolter is great at killing marines and gak vs a hive tyrant. All are capable, just better vs specific targets. Some sit in the middle being okay but not great vs everything.

Yes...and no - its notable that the Apoclypse system works great....partly as you are firing at units of infantry.

Otherwise we get the wierd situtation that a Lascanon will have difficulty killing a single Gretchin.

Which can be explained as the lascannon needing a sustained beam on the target. A small gretchin is 1) harder to draw a bead on and 2) not going to stand still and let it happen. Yeah you aimed right, but couldn't sustain the beam on the gretchin long enough to do any real damage so it survived. On the other hand a tank/knight/whatever is a much bigger target and keeping the beam on it longer is easier.

Fixed.

Imo, that is more an issue of the schizophrenic problem that 40k is at atm.
the sizecreep has continualy shifted what was once a Skirmish game and still carries some legacy of that got further pushed out. In a way KT suffers less and APO preciscly because they are not 40k.

Having dual profiles for big things & small things is an option but it will increase referencing. Not to the point of failure, mind you.

The thing is that a lascannon has historically been excellent at killing single models, no matter what the size. It has also always been considered a waste for it to do so to anything other than characters and terminators.

My favourite approach is still to give Damage Resistance, which will reduce as a unit loses wounds.

So an unscathed landraider will be, quite rightly, immune to small arms fire. D3 damage weapons will have to roll well to plink wounds off. After it has been bracketed, it will lose some/all of the damage resistance, and become more susceptible to small arms fire.

A Knight might have DR2, DR1 and DR0 in it's 3 brackets. Meaning that once the armour has been mostly blown away by big guns, small guns can get lucky hits on the exposed bits. An unharmed knight should not fear lasguns.

You will create a situation where it is important to bracket vehicles to make them killable once your big guns are inevitably killed. This will lead to alpha-strikes being more spread out, focussed on making the enemy softer rather than outright killing a few units.

Units with fancy shields and the like can have cool rules, like having DR1 until it takes a wound, then DR0 until it's next turn. Quantum Shielding (don't know how it works now, used to be AV13 until hurt, then AV11) could be DR2 until it takes damage.

I think that this would be more useful and smooth than dual profiles for every weapon. It could be tempered by preventing vehicles from scoring objectives, like it used to be. It's a very effective killing machine, but it's no good at grabbing a datafile out of a dead inquisitor in the rubble of a bunker.

Increase the focus on objectives and stop vehicles from scoring them and you'll have a more balanced game again. Knights may suffer but they should be a support role rather than a whole army, and it's perfectly reasonable to say that their approach should be to keep the enemy off of objectives rather than score them themselves.

Traditionally the game has always been broken in one capacity or another. Making rule changes to fix problems but still trying to adhere to what has happened before is insanity. I want it to be better but still broken? No thank you.

 Lance845 wrote:
Traditionally the game has always been broken in one capacity or another. Making rule changes to fix problems but still trying to adhere to what has happened before is insanity. I want it to be better but still broken? No thank you.

Pondering it further and the issue could be the universal price for everything gimmick. Frankly, putting a lascannon on a tank is better than putting it on an infantry unit. Perhaps it would help with balance to go back to the old points-in-the-entry approach, where a lascannon on a unit of dudes would be cheaper than on a predator.

Honestly though, I think that Vehicles should be immune to small arms but only capable of killing. They gain the ability to inflict damage whilst shrugging off the retaliation, but they lose the ability to score objectives. I also feel that their weapons should be grouped together, so a repulsor with a lascannon and a co-axial gatling gun should have to fire these at the same target.

If vehicles got a universal DR1 for light vehicles and DR2 for tanks, they could reasonably lose some wounds (to make it less of a task to kill them if you have the right equipment) and still be difficult to deal with. Autocannons would be able to hurt light vehicles and murder infantry. Plasmaguns could hurt any vehicle, but less so for heavier ones. Lascannons are your best hope vs big vehicles, so they need 10W at most (min 3 shots from a lascannon to kill at DR2). 12 wounds for landraiders & battlewagons, 18W for superheavies. Meltaguns can ignore DR at 1/2 range, which would be a cool mechanic.

This would make shooting a lascannon at infantry its own punishment - it's literally wasted, as it could be doing a job that small arms fire literally cannot do - shooting a tank.

Presently, to achieve the same average result vs a T7 3+sv tank, a Lascannon is equal to 21 bolter shots. 1 lascannon achieves 1.55 damage on average (assuming it can get 2/3 of a hit, 2/3 of those wound, and other abstract calculations), and to achieve this you need 21 bolter shots with no AP. at AP-1 it's 14 shots, and at AP-2 (bolter doctrine) it's 10.5 shots. Presently a unit of 5 space marines with bolters can achieve the same average firepower as a lascannon against the average vehicle In the game. Against a T7 4+, it gets worse: 5.83 bolter shots will net you the same average wounds as a single lascannon. 3 bolters with AP-2.

The main lethality of 8th is reducing saves. Anti-infantry weapons with any AP tend to kill tanks now. DR would completely fix that issue. removing their ability to score objectives would balance their new survivability. You could win on objectives by clearing the chaff from around the tanks.

Seems to me the issue is AP, not damage.

You can simplify it by doing this:

All units with the vehicle/monster keyword ignore AP.

new special rule: AT. This weapon applies it's AP value to vehicles and monsters.

So now you can decide which weapons inflict AP on vehicles and which don't.


EDIT

Actually after thinking about it, maybe you can combine this with the apocalypse rules concept by using weapon types.

Ie

RAPID FIRE: a weapon of this type does X
AI RAPID FIRE: a weapon of this type does X and only applies AP to non vehicle/monster units


By using the existing rules structure you can avoid special exceptions and as this is a core component of the game, it should be in the core rules.

Hellebore wrote:
Seems to me the issue is AP, not damage.

You can simplify it by doing this:

All units with the vehicle/monster keyword ignore AP.

new special rule: AT. This weapon applies it's AP value to vehicles and monsters.

So now you can decide which weapons inflict AP on vehicles and which don't.


EDIT

Actually after thinking about it, maybe you can combine this with the apocalypse rules concept by using weapon types.

Ie

RAPID FIRE: a weapon of this type does X
AI RAPID FIRE: a weapon of this type does X and only applies AP to non vehicle/monster units


By using the existing rules structure you can avoid special exceptions and as this is a core component of the game, it should be in the core rules.

Not so much, actually. AP is powerful vs vehicles but the main issue is small arms, low AP and 1 damage, but a thousand* shots. If small arms fire couldn't hurt tanks again, then tanks wouldn't need as many wounds, then anti-tank would actually be effective at tank hunting without needing 4 lascannons on a tank for it to have a chance of killing a trukk. I love the idea of a meltagun not only doing D6 damage but also ignoring DR in half range - that's seriously powerful!

However, it doesn't make sense that the armour on a rhino is as easy to punch through as that of power armour, what with it being a lot thicker. it could be worth combining the two.


*exaggeration, please do not take literally