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Pretty simple this one, 5th edition has been out for some time now and I've been playing consistently with all my old armies, but obviously making new lists from my codex, as have all my friends.

Here comes the odd bit though, a few days ago while going through some older 40K stuff I was getting rid of, I found a cache of lists written by most of my gaming friends and I from back in 4th edition and I noticed one striking difference - back then we used a hell of a lot more blast marker weapons, more specifically small blasts. Several lists showed this, there were a lot more plasma cannons for a start, devastator sqauds used them, dreadnoughts were armed with them, the Eldar player took the Dark Reaper small blasts, I took Havoc launchers on many of my Chaos vehicles and used the Cannons from my Obliterators, etc.

It seems since the transition to the new "Scatter" rules for blast marker weapons, they just aren't getting used, I asked my friends about this and the consensus seems to be that anything other than the large blast just isn't reliable enough under the new rules. I can see the point really, an old squad of devastators with Plasma Cannons could effectively drop a Terminator squad quite quickly, but these days are lucky to even hit a couple of them let alone kill them, either that or we're just ridiculously unfortunate with our use of them.

So, are we alone in this, or has anyone else found a drop off in the use of these weapons? Are we just imagining the inferiority of the small blast now or is it technically better than the old BS method and we just haven't noticed?

I'm curious to hear what you all think about this.

Prefer the new system, as you had some blasts which scattered and some which just disappeared if you "missed"

the new mechanic makes a lot more sense.

yeah, same

Not familiar with old mechanic.

Old mechanic was that you used BS when firing small blasts on infantry, so you could miss and the shot would just disappear.

I preferred the old system for blast weapons, purely because it now seems that there is a greater chance the shot doing nothing. However, it does come in handy, when I want my Wraithlord with an EML to shoot his BL at a tank, and kill a few surrounding infantry

A BS3 infnatry blast in the old rules had a 1/2 chance of doing nothing.

Now it has a 1/3 chance of hitting directly, a 1/12 chance of hitting via scatter being 2 - 3 inches for 5/12 total of hitting exactly. If it then scatters 4-5 inches you will still hit some of a unit (assuming not shooting blasts at lone models on small bases) for a further 8/36

So actually a BS3 guardsman is more likely to do SOME damage than before.

The only change I'd make is fixing max scatter to be 1/2 the firing distance. It is absurd that I have to be paranoid about firing blast templates at 8" because they could deviate back on top of me.

Low BS armies don't mind the change so much. BS2 actually experiences improved accuracy. Having to roll scatter a bunch of times does slow things down a little, which can be a pain since I bring grenade launchers.