Unit1126PLL wrote: AnomanderRake wrote: Unit1126PLL wrote:Wait so I feel like we're losing the thread.
So what exactly is the problem here? That "elite infantry", which includes everything from Scions to Necron Wraiths, aren't seeing play? Or is there some specific facet of elite infantry that aren't seeing play? Or is elite infantry a smaller category than some posters imply?
I think heavy weapons should absolutely be able to gun down infantry. It's what they're for. So the solution would be to shut down the heavy weapons somehow, or find a way to hide from them, or bring so many infantry that the heavy weapons are inefficient (that's not an answer for some armies, e.g. pure Custodes).
The problem is that the relationship between wounds and damage in 8e as it currently exists makes volume of high-Strength/good
AP fire the most effective answer to vehicles, which means the designers have enabled volume of high-Strength/good
AP fire to exist, which renders heavy infantry irrelevant because guns that can effectively ignore their defenses exist in sufficient quantity to render them kind of pointless.
This is as much a problem with how weak 'tanks' are, how ineffective single-shot anti-tank weapons are, and 'blasts' dealing uniform damage against all targets hit as it is a problem with the durability stats written into heavy infantry.
So here's the question: if anti-tank weapons are rendering your elite infantry useless, what are they shooting at your tanks with? Or do you just bring elite infantry without any tanks?
If the problem is that tanks require so many weapons to kill that these weapons are just everywhere en masse, then presumably an army that runs either all tanks, or elite troopers and tanks, will still overload the enemy's anti-tank capability.
It's funny that this thread exists ("There are so many antitank weapons everywhere how do you survive") in the same meta where "hordes are
OP and we can't kill them!" Of course. Of course if you're spamming anti-tank weapons, hordes are
OP. *rolleyes*
So it could be just a meta problem, and you can wait until people start bringing Heavy Bolter squads. Or not, apparently, as it seems shrieking until conscripts are nerfed into the ground is easier than bringing Heavy Bolter squads.
The problem isn't that anti-tank weapons are rendering elite infantry useless, it's that the anti-tank weapons and the anti-elite-infantry weapons are
the same weapons. The way
GW has been writing tanks and anti-tank weapons in 8th makes anything that's remotely cost-effective at removing tanks more cost-effective at removing heavy infantry.
The problem isn't that tanks require so many heavy weapons to kill, it's that the "dedicated anti-tank weapons" are never actually enough better at killing tanks than the crossover multi-purpose weapons that are good at killing most things. Imagine I have two guns that are identical in every way, except one is firing one
d6 damage shot and the other is firing two 2 damage shots. The gun firing two 2-damage shots is better at killing infantry, because you get two chances to kill a model and can kill two as opposed to just getting to kill one, but it's also better at killing tanks, because on average rolls it's dealing 1/7 (about 14%) more damage and it does damage more reliably.
And
GW has been trying to sell
d6-damage weapons as big scary tank-killers while volume of 2-damage weapons are supposed to be the generalist crossover gun you take if you're not sure what you're going to be fighting, but the volume-of-2-damage shots are just better, so they start to balance things around spamming them rather than doing something about the
d6-damage guns, so what ends up happening is the crossover guns are too good at killing too many things.
It isn't entirely a meta problem, because the way "antitank weapons" are written spamming the crossover weapons is just straight-up better, and the crossover weapons are also the reason why "elite infantry" are irrelevant. It's the exact same one-type-of-gun-is-cost-effective-against-absolutely-everything problem that made scatterbikes such a pain last edition, only it's moved on to things like ordnance and plasma-spam.