VladimirHerzog wrote:
same, my characters will almost always shoot their grenades, and if i'm range for a grenade from a squad, i'll shoot one instead of their crappy guns (yes, i play
CSM)
I use them too. I'm just generally left with a sense of, "That's it?" afterwards. Barring a memorable moment where 5 dire avengers cleared out ~10 pox walkers in overwatch, frag/krak/plasma grenades just kind of don't seem worth their ink. Their short range and one-per-unit limitation make them feel like they should be a high-risk-high-reward weapon. You managed to get close to the enemy, so you get to use your powerful grenade weapon, but only with a single model (implying the grenade would be too powerful if thrown en masse.) But then you actually resolve your frag grenade attack, and you realize it's basically just a couple extra lasgun shots. Without crunching the numbers, I feel like an intercessor in the tactical doctrine might actually be breaking even by using his bolt rifle instead of a krak grenade; the bolt rifle has two shots, better
AP, and an unsaved wound will do the same damage as a krak grenade 1/3rd of the time.
Plasma grenades are especially iffy for dire avengers now that the avenger's gun is 3 shots with the same base
AP as the grenade (and a chance to have better
AP). You're only averaging an extra 0.5 shots against small enemy units, and you're giving up your chance to have
AP-3. That's pretty underwhelming for a weapon that you had to get within 6" to use and were only allowed to use with a single model. It's the sort of thing you might opt not to use even if it is statistically a bit better than your normal gun because it's not so much better that it's worth the few extra seconds of your life you'd have to spend resolving it.
So basically, the most common types of grenades are really underwhelming. And that's weird right? In most video games that have them, grenades tend to be really
fun to use. Throw thing. Thing go boom! But you just don't get that out of
40k grenades. They're ineffective enough that I'd be tempted to suggest just straight up removing them from the game. Except I want them in the game. I want to throw thing and clap when thing go boom.
EDIT: Tossing out a probably-bad idea: What if we leaned into grenades having a delay before exploding? So instead of giving the "weak" anti-infantry grenades (frags/plasma/stikk bombs) a normal shooting profile, let players place a grenade marker up to 9" away from the thrower's current position. At the end of the opponent's movement or charge phase, the grenade's player may detonate the grenade token causing it to inflict d3 mortal wounds to all units within 3" of the token. Grenade tokens are removed at the start of their owner's player turn.
So you get bigger, stronger explosions, but it's generally your own fault for leaving a unit in position to get hit by the explosion. This also means taking a bunch of long-ranged grenade launchers would let you spread out a bunch of tokens to discourage your opponent from moving through an area, or you could put a ton of grenades around a single objective. This would also make grenades surprisingly good against units on upper levels of terrain without much horizontal space on the upper levels because they might find it difficult to get out of the grenade's blast radius in a hurry. Plus, you could have your drukhari wyches toss a plasma grenade behind the enemies they're about to charge, then use your No Escape rule to prevent falling back so that they get hit by the grenade in the coming movement phase. Which seems deliciously appropriate.
15k+
Emperor's Spears 2500
Beastmen 10k
