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Would making jump pack infantry be able to assault flyers break the game?

Sort of kind of not really. Flyers are theoretically paying a lot of points to significantly reduce the effectiveness of any enemies that aren't also paying a premium to have skyfire. Look at a crimson hunter It hits pretty hard, but it's still about as durable as a dark eldar raider if you take away its resistance to most attacks.


For any flyer with low AV on at least its rear armor, letting jump packers assault them makes them extremely vulnerable. Again, a crimson hunter has a good chance of dying to a single assault by assault marines.

The issue gets a bit more complicated though. Swooping hawks (theoretically) already pay for their special rule that lets them "assault" flyers, so that's a consideration. Scourges can't generally do much against flyers even if they can assault them. Hellions can potentially hurt flyers with rear AV 10 (especially with the right drugs and furious charge), but the armies that will generally be benefitting from such a change will be marines and chaos marines.

At the same time, imperial flyers tend to be the ones that are relatively resistant to assault (AV12 all around) while xenos flyers are the ones that would suffer more.

So what you're looking at is a change that benefits imperial jump packers (who arguably could use the boost) and detriments xenos flyers (who arguably don't need the nerf). So it's a change that strongly favors certain factions over others.

What do you seek to get out of this change? Is there a particular situation or unit that's giving you trouble, or do you just like the mental image of assault marines grabbing an enemy flyer?

Also, note that assaulting flyers gets messy if we're talking about FMCs because then you have to worry about how being "locked into combat" works.

Wyldhunt wrote:

At the same time, imperial flyers tend to be the ones that are relatively resistant to assault (AV12 all around) while xenos flyers are the ones that would suffer more.

This is wrong. SPACE MARINE flyers are usually AV12 all around.

Non space marine imperial flyers (such as imperial guard) have AV 10 rear armour almost universally AFAIK.

On topic, I don't think it would break the game but basically every flyer would need to be cheaper, or all jump infantry would need to be more expensive.

I personally wouldn't like it. It would make most flyers a liability against any army with a lot of jump infantry, and I honestly don't think it makes sense. If any fixed wing aircraft is flying fast enough to keep itself airborne there is no way any dude hopping around with a jump is going to have time to plant bombs on it or even strike it at all except with his face, and that would probably be lethal to the dude while most 40k aircraft are built like tanks and so wouldn't even notice.

I would be ok with sacrificing some stormboyz as kamikazes but otherwise I'm not in favor of assaulting flyers. I could definitely see an ork just yellin "Oy boss watch dis!" And just fling into a turbine pr cockpit and just getting utterly annihilated but having the potential to do some damage.

I believe Swooping Hawks used to have an Apoc Formation rule similar to this. Very risky however, required an Initiative test which if passed allowed a single Haywire attack hitting on 6's, if you failed the Initiative test you were killed with no saves allowed.

A tyranid Apoc formation gives gargoyles a way of assaulting flyers. A unit of gargoyles may assault a flyer and for every gargoyle that ends in base contact roll a d6, on a 1-3 the gargoyle is removed, on a 4-5 nothing happens, and on a 6 a single glancing hit is caused. I think those are the rolls (I don't have my Valedor book with me)