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Their weapons seem pretty pokey. I was rolling some dice and by turn 5 it consistently wipes out 2 whole squads of marines, that are spaced out as far as possible. Or it's taken out an AV13 vehicle and most of a squad. I can see why Demolishers suck - 24" range just doesn't cut it. The only reason I'd see BTs sucking for is sponsons, but it doesn't need them with such a handy main gun.

I might be getting lucky or maybe I'm missing something?

They are excellent at wiping out footslogging heavy infantry such as Marines and Necrons. My friend who plays Marines hates my LRMBTs, because once I pop his Rhinos they're dead men walking.

Now for the downsides:

In the current meta of Gauss, Grav, Destroyer Weapons, and the like, AV14 is not even close what it was.

The loss of the Lumbering Behemoth rule nerfed it. Hard. Tossing a Lascannon on a MBT to give it better odds against AV14 is no longer a viable option.

They're slow, with no option to flat out outside of Tank Commanders.

Overall, MBTs are decent, one of the better Russ options. Compared to the mono-build Punisher or the niche and unreliable Vanquisher, I'd take them any day.

Hmm, thanks for putting it into perspective. That does make sense. And my brother, who plays a drop pod army, would probably just drop right next to it and pop it first turn. Cos he does the cheesy Demi-company drop pod list.
However, I might still take them, just on the off chance I'm not facing a drop pod army in the future

LRBTs suck because they aren't Knight Titans. They basically do the same thing, but people fear the Knights more, so therefore overcompensate, which makes LRBTs easier to deal with in comparison. Yay Meta!

SJ

Indeed, Knights are more expensive, but they more than compensate by being faster, shootier, tougher and even somewhat more dangerous in melee.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Indeed, Knights are more expensive, but they more than compensate by being faster, shootier, tougher and even somewhat more dangerous in melee.

They're less shooty (450 points for two battle cannons that can only shoot one target, or 450 points for three with LRs) but they do eclipse the LRs hard with their melee power.

LRs (and guard in general) can be made work but mostly because guard has the most meat in a single unit out of every army. That means psychic powers beef the whole squad. BS3 just adds to the craziness. Try running IG with Inquisition (psychic power, deep strike defenses, 1D6 scatter dice for all blast weapons and deep strikers near Servo Skulls) or a Librarius Conclave formation from SMs.

Because the Leman Russ is priced as though it where a 5th edition vehicle.

The Leman Russ is slow, most variants could do with being 10% cheaper apart from the Demolisher that could do with losing a good 25 points. The chassis in general needs a buff to the rear armour or some way to survive assaults beyond the unreliable meat shield that is an IG Infantry section. Then there are chassis specific upgrades that need to happen: The Punisher needs to be Strength 6 and have rending, the Executioner needs to lose the Gets Hot rule, the Eradicator could do with a bump to 48 inches of range and the Vanquisher needs to gain the following - +4 on the damage table against vehicles, Instant Death against Monstrous Creatures and Multi Wound models and inflict D6 wounds against Gargantuan Creatures and other units immune to Instant Death and finally it needs to gain some form of HE shell, allowing it to fire regular Battlecannon shells as well. Of course this would require a points buff to 175 points.

They need to regain Lumbering Behemoth.
They need to gain an option to upgrade to BS 4 for something like 10 points and they need an option for coaxial weapons.

Why LRBTs suck (A lot of this can be said of the Demolisher too, btw):

-They received no points decrease when Guard was updated.

-Large Blast Hi S Lo AP cannons just aren't what they used to be. Near constant 4+ cover saves will negate half your wounds right off the bat.

-AP 3 nerf. AP 3 can no longer explode vehicles removing what little versatility the BC had.

-Ordnance. It forces the other weapons to snap fire. One of the LRs main strength is it's ability to mount a ton of guns. Ordnance negates that.

-The predominance of MCs in 7e. MCs pretty much make weapons like the Battle Cannon pants. Sure, you might be able to get one wound off but the LRBT doesn't have the ROF to engage MCs effectively.

Tiberius501 wrote:
Their weapons seem pretty pokey. I was rolling some dice and by turn 5 it consistently wipes out 2 whole squads of marines, that are spaced out as far as possible. Or it's taken out an AV13 vehicle and most of a squad. I can see why Demolishers suck - 24" range just doesn't cut it. The only reason I'd see BTs sucking for is sponsons, but it doesn't need them with such a handy main gun.

I might be getting lucky or maybe I'm missing something?

In a vacuum, that may seem allright, but add cover into the equation, scatter, enemy model dispersion, the fact that it can't use secondary weapons to any good effect, and they just don't look so good anymore.

Other posters summed it up pretty well. There's a bunch of metagame issues in 7E that the LRBT just does not properly address, and the tank fundamentally, like most of the IG codex really, was largely built around a 5E paradigm (where even then the LRBT wasn't an astoundingly impressive unit), even though it came out in 6th mere weeks before 7E came out.

There's also a very large number of extremely capable hardcounters to things like an LRBT, that almost every army has access to and brings fairly routinely. AV14 isn't what it used to be, and there's more abilities out there that simply ignore AV altogether than ever before (Haywire, Grav, Gauss, etc) in greater numbers than were ever previously available. Coupled with the fact that vehicles basically have wounds now, and that they get no save, it makes a slow heavy battle tank (that is reliant on a single mid-power weapon) much less impressive than in previous editions.

The LRBT is priced as if it were an efficient marine-killer. In theory, it's an excellent marine-killer. In practice, the Ordnance rule currently makes any other weapons redundant, and in a table with a healthy dose of terrain it won't be hard for any marine unit to routinely get some 4+/5+ cover saves (or even better) if deployed and used proficiently.

So all in all it's a "marine-killer" tank that will actually struggle to kill marines in anything else than a complete open field. And it's simply useless against the abundant Monstruous Creatures that nowadays roam the battlefields, plus extremely vulnerable against anything that manages to scratch it with a power fist.

As others have said before, its rules and points costs are basically a leftover from 5th edition, in a current environment much less friendly to vehicles than 5ed. was.