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It bugs me that random weapons profiles are always D3, D6, 2D6 etc.

Where are all the 3+D6, 1+D3, etc. weapons? If there are any, I haven't seen them.

This may seem petty, but if you think about it, having a small fixed number in addition to the random result you get at least some degree of predictability on your points investments, something other games do for, you know, having both balance and fun.

I refuse to believe that all rates of fire available in the universe can be represented only by dice. Stormsurge is a good example of a unit where a simple "D6" shouldn't cut it. It is balanced to (after CA 2019) perform well for its points only if you roll above average. But there is no "getting more than you pay for" with it. You can only really get less than you pay for, or break even, on a turn's worth of shooting. To me this is bad design. If there is no way to get more than you pay for, there shouldn't be a way to get less either. And this explains why nobody uses Stormsurges.

There are a few things that state "Treat damage rolls of 1 or 2 made by this weapon as 3 instead" (Neutron laser), they do seem to be moving towards multiple D3s for things now.

I think a very small number of these do exist - offhand, the only one that springs to mind is the Cerastus Knight-Atrapos, which fires 'D6+4' shots on one of its weapon profiles.

 Drachii wrote:
I think a very small number of these do exist - offhand, the only one that springs to mind is the Cerastus Knight-Atrapos, which fires 'D6+4' shots on one of its weapon profiles.

Oh cool. Hopefully that kind of design makes it into more armies going forward.

Some of the Custodes FW stuff has 3+D3 or 6+D3 damage. I do think there’s a at least a move towards more stuff like that.

Just get rid of random # of shots entirely. It slows down the game (rolling # of shots on multiple dice, adding that up, gathering dice when you could just be gathering dice), it averages out over time anyways, and it adds a 4TH LAYER of randomness to shooting (# of shots, to hit, to wound, saving throws). We don't need 4 layers of opportunities to fail on anything.

But how else can we balance things if we don't use randomisation?

pm713 wrote:
But how else can we balance things if we don't use randomisation?

Random shot numbers aren't about 'balance', they're about an effort to create the 'feel' of blast templates not being able to hit everyone/scattering off and hitting just a few people without actually using blast templates.

I'd rather they'd done it more like the Relic Contemptor Conversion Beamer (you get one powerful shot, and if it kills a model you get a random number of weaker hits) so you back-load the excess randomness (it's still there but you don't do it every time you fire the weapon) and so 'blast' weapons weren't as strong at being multi-purpose kill-everything guns.

 John Prins wrote:
Just get rid of random # of shots entirely. It slows down the game (rolling # of shots on multiple dice, adding that up, gathering dice when you could just be gathering dice), it averages out over time anyways, and it adds a 4TH LAYER of randomness to shooting (# of shots, to hit, to wound, saving throws). We don't need 4 layers of opportunities to fail on anything.

This.

I don't know but sometimes GW is strange. First they redo point costs of units to be 100pts or 150pts or 90pts etc to get round numbers for ease of counting points.And then they decide that from now one, basic nemezis weapons are going to be 1point each flipping the table on the whole easy and fast point costs.
I think they just don't care, or they have 3 people writing the same book, doing different things, but never talking to each other.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

pm713 wrote:
But how else can we balance things if we don't use randomisation?

Random shot numbers aren't about 'balance', they're about an effort to create the 'feel' of blast templates not being able to hit everyone/scattering off and hitting just a few people without actually using blast templates.

And they absolutely failed at it. By that logic Loota Deffguns are also blast weapons because of their RNG shots. Never in my time of playing Orks did I ever feel like Deffguns where sorta like grotzookas. I understand the point your making and I think that was GWs logic but GWs logic is flawed.

The real power of blast weapons was their area of effect and that scatters could hit other things, especially if you aim the thing into the middle of a target rich environment. Also it made BS matter less as scattering wasn't inherently a miss but just an opportunity to hit something else. It made those weapons play entirely differently and they had a fluxuation of power as the match went on as enemy concentrations fluxuated due to movement and casualties. GW completely missed the point of that entire set of weapons and turned them into Ork RNG garbage guns.

I mean, at some level all of 8e consists of missing the point of 40k in favour of simplifying it...

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I mean, at some level all of 8e consists of missing the point of 40k in favour of simplifying it...

Well, removing templates was good, because it removed scatter fudge factor and arguments over how many models got hit. The only problem is that the solution doesn't simulate the effect of the rules for blasts very well at all. It just makes those D6 weapons insanely deadly one round, but hilariously inept the next. I'd much rather have a gun with 3 reliable shots than D6 shots.

 Drachii wrote:
I think a very small number of these do exist - offhand, the only one that springs to mind is the Cerastus Knight-Atrapos, which fires 'D6+4' shots on one of its weapon profiles.

Pylon has 6+d3 damage.

Common theme: They are FW units. FW designers don't assume players are worse than kindergarden kids in math like GW designers do.

 John Prins wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I mean, at some level all of 8e consists of missing the point of 40k in favour of simplifying it...

Well, removing templates was good, because it removed scatter fudge factor and arguments over how many models got hit. The only problem is that the solution doesn't simulate the effect of the rules for blasts very well at all. It just makes those D6 weapons insanely deadly one round, but hilariously inept the next. I'd much rather have a gun with 3 reliable shots than D6 shots.

Templates were one of the places where things got really weird in 6th / 7th. You put the template over the unit to maximise the amount of models you hit, but when you remove the wounded models you take from the front of the unit as per normal wounding rules... Funny sort of blasts, going in a nice perpendicular line across the front of the unit... My mate and I always played it that you removed the models that were covered by the template, made much more sense.

Crispy78 wrote:

 John Prins wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I mean, at some level all of 8e consists of missing the point of 40k in favour of simplifying it...

Well, removing templates was good, because it removed scatter fudge factor and arguments over how many models got hit. The only problem is that the solution doesn't simulate the effect of the rules for blasts very well at all. It just makes those D6 weapons insanely deadly one round, but hilariously inept the next. I'd much rather have a gun with 3 reliable shots than D6 shots.

Templates were one of the places where things got really weird in 6th / 7th. You put the template over the unit to maximise the amount of models you hit, but when you remove the wounded models you take from the front of the unit as per normal wounding rules... Funny sort of blasts, going in a nice perpendicular line across the front of the unit... My mate and I always played it that you removed the models that were covered by the template, made much more sense.

That's what barrage did. Non barrage weapons where like rocket launchers or HE tank shells that direct fired. Say your firing into a mob of Boyz, the blast hits the front row because the shell hits them. Barrage weapons are your mortars and artillery that fire in an arc so the shell lands where the blast marker is and deals casualties from the impact site. The blast templates is used for the direct fire kind because it calculates density and if it scatters into a different unit.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I mean, at some level all of 8e consists of missing the point of 40k in favour of simplifying it...

Games Workshop's obsession with protecting us from kindergarten grade math?

I mean i agree, but the visible online community doesn't lend itself for a higher expectation now does it

Yep, modifiers vanished in 3rd for the sake of faster game play as if people weren't able to do simple additions or subtractions without a calculator.

But apparently such peeps really exist. When I did demo games in the past, there was a guy who didn't understand the tackle rules from BB and as a result was unable to do the math. Though it didn't help that I explained it to him FIVE times with examples.

He was one of the worst gamers which happened to cross my path and drove another fellow nuts in an 8th 40K game because he didn't know how his army worked.

My ideal change for blast weapons would be that they get their number of shots changed to account for the size of the target, but that would require a lot of math. Something like this:
"Small Blast" type weapons get one attack per five models in range (to a maximum of 4).
"Large Blast" type weapons get one attack per three models in range (to a maximum of eight).
"Template" weapons get one hit per three models in range (to a maximum of 4).
Vehicles count as ten models, and titanic models count as fifteen, for the purposes of this rule.

Salt and pepper to taste. It'd require some rebalancing and points adjusting, but it'd allow templates to feel appropriately killy against big units instead of feeling like a random crapshoot. (And the weapons which are supposed to feel like a random crapshoot, like Deffguns, would feel more unique again.)