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Looking through the new Imperial Armour Compendium, I noticed that nothing has a toughness greater than 8 now, with the exception of the Warlord Titan, which is now T9, down from T16. I'm unaware of any codex units with a toughness greater than 8, if there are any, please let me know. But it seems that, unless you play in a game big enough for a 5500 PPM titan, you'll never have to deal with anything with a toughness higher than 8 now. Gw seems to want to represent anything tougher than that with: more wounds, better armour saves, invuls, FNP, or rules like Duty Eternal, possibly because this gives them more "levers to pull" when designing units. Is this a good or bad approach? Do you like having these additional rules to represent a unit's durability, or would you prefer it represented primarily through toughness and armour saves?

GW made a big song and dance about how everything can wound everything (big mistake to begin with, but that's another discussion) but this was somewhat mitigated by the fact that now stats could go above 10. So sure, a Heavy Bolter could blow up a Land Raider, but if it's S5 vs a T10 Land Raider, then really does it matter that much. Since then they've been afraid to put anything at high toughness, which gives us the current situation of multi-shot mid-strength mid-damage weapons being the best choice in most situations.

The Leviathan and Redemptor are huge Dreads. They should be T8 as standard. So should a number of Tyranid beasties (why is the Trygon T6 FFS?). Something T9 in 3rd-7th would be rightly feared as you'd need S6 at a minimum to cause any damage to it. These days, not such an issue, and especially if weapons can hit S11+.

They should be more free with S, T and W. But they're not...

I think the problem is that GW has always preferred killiness over durability in their design paradigm for most units, since they hand out AP and damage like candy for many armies (though arguably mostly for marines). Barring exceptions like pre-nerf Iron Hands and arguably SM in general, they prefer thing die fast since it means the games become shorter over the course of the game due to less units being around.

I think a big problem is that they still have the pre-8th edition mentality where MC were considerably more durable than most vehicles since they could never take more than one wound from most anti-tank weapons, unlike vehicles which could explode from a lucky 5 or 6. Rather than factoring how there is now multi-damage weapons, often with a high rate of fire, and factoring either additional wounds or higher toughness to compensate, GW uses bespoke rules as a band-aid fixture because they want to keep the relatively high death rate. The problem is that it actually adds more dice rolling in many cases and usually it's not equally spread across units, meaning some vehicles or MC are dead in the water from lacking it, i.e. Haruspexes.

I'm amused at the people who hailed the removal of the 10 stat cap as a great era for expanding the design space, and statlines now are way flatter than they were even in 7e.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I'm amused at the people who hailed the removal of the 10 stat cap as a great era for expanding the design space, and statlines now are way flatter than they were even in 7e.

I mean it WAS a good thing, GW's just afraid to move into that design space.

IMHO the logical step since Marines are as tough as they are, is to massivly increase the toughness of tanks, AND increase the strength of single shot anti-tank guys a corrasponding amount. if a lemen russ had a otughness of 16 and a lascanon had a STR of 16 (just for example) it'd be preferable to shoot a LR with a lascanon then with, I dunno. a gatling canon.

Oh, I know, I just think it's funny that people thought GW saying "We're extending the design space, guys!" meant they were actually extending the design space.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I'm amused at the people who hailed the removal of the 10 stat cap as a great era for expanding the design space, and statlines now are way flatter than they were even in 7e.

It's not their fault that GW didn't make use of it.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Oh, I know, I just think it's funny that people thought GW saying "We're extending the design space, guys!" meant they were actually extending the design space.

Don't trust GW. Simple as that.

Well, in former editions strength was capped at 10.
I remember the Vindicator or the Wraithlord.

BrianDavion wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I'm amused at the people who hailed the removal of the 10 stat cap as a great era for expanding the design space, and statlines now are way flatter than they were even in 7e.

I mean it WAS a good thing, GW's just afraid to move into that design space.

IMHO the logical step since Marines are as tough as they are, is to massivly increase the toughness of tanks, AND increase the strength of single shot anti-tank guys a corrasponding amount. if a lemen russ had a otughness of 16 and a lascanon had a STR of 16 (just for example) it'd be preferable to shoot a LR with a lascanon then with, I dunno. a gatling canon.

Agreed on that, make the Wound value of vehicles go up, and the Toughness value, and make their Saves better, then make specific anti tank type weapons have Strength, Damage, and AP boosts to match. If a Leman Russ is T16, a wound value of 24, and a Save value of 2+, while a Lascannon is S20 and deals 6+1d6 damage, or 9+1d6 damage or the like, you get a situation where the anti tank weapon is clearly the better option than chipping with 1 damage weapons unless it is on its last one or two wounds. Also, ideally drastically reduce Invulnerable saves and replace them with additional wounds - vehicles and monsters with invulnerable saves are one of the things that make expensive, single fire anti tank weapons not as good as they could be and encourages spam of mid strength weapons.

Breaking these limits would also create more design space - bulky Guard tanks like Leman Russ and Baneblades could have high say the "balanced" measure of toughness, wounds, and saves but lack of maneuverability. On the flip side you could make a Tyranid beasty with light armor, but is a beefy boy with a high toughness and wound count - easier to penetrate its armor, but harder to deal lasting damage.

Unfortunately if anything it looks like GW is going the opposite direction and crunching down Toughness and making things more killy.

If/when we ever get back to a world when conventions exist, and we get back to having panels where we can ask questions of the Studio, I think "Why are you scared of toughness 9 and above?" is on my list.

Revenant and Phantom Titans are t9 as well.

The issue is their S vs T comparison table.

You need to be double strength to wound on a 2+. So it makes sense for strength to go up to 20, but toughness to only go up to 10.in this context.

The question is, does it really matter?
Do we need tanks that are wounded by anti-tank weapons on a 5+ or even 6+? Personally I think it's okay, a lascannon has a good chance to wound a titan, but you'll still need a lot of lascannons to kill it. That being said, with heavy bolters now having D2, wounds of many tanks should probably go up. I actually like more granularity with 2W marines, but they have to adjust in the higher wounds or else we end up in 6th/7th edition where tanks died to small arms fire.

Hellebore wrote:Revenant and Phantom Titans are t9 as well.

The issue is their S vs T comparison table.

You need to be double strength to wound on a 2+. So it makes sense for strength to go up to 20, but toughness to only go up to 10.in this context.

Whoops! Missed those two. So that's 1500 and 3000 PPM respectively, so I guess there's a chance you could run into T9, if someone is willing to spend 75% of their army on one unit, or in bigger games. And agreed on the wounding table.

Dysartes wrote:If/when we ever get back to a world when conventions exist, and we get back to having panels where we can ask questions of the Studio, I think "Why are you scared of toughness 9 and above?" is on my list.

I'd really like to hear their answer.

I agree with Cortez here. There are few toughness values which actually matter due to how the S/T comparison works.

T2-3 is easy to kill with everything
T4 is easy to kill with everything but rank and file guns
T5-7 makes anti-infantry guns ineffective and has a small resistance to anti-tank
T8 is hard to kill with anti-tank guns and mostly ignores rank&file guns
T9-15 makes anti-tank guns ineffective
T16+ is hard to wound with anything that's not a monster with a double strength melee weapon

Obviously, wound count and saves are factor as well, but the real question is whether you really want to have tanks or monsters you can't kill with anti-tank guns.
Right now S4, S7 and S8 are the most important strength values, so 4,8,16 are the breaking points which affect the most weapons aimed your way.
They could just double S&T for everyone to create more design space, but due to the "double or nothing" rules, you'd just create larger bubbles where having one T more or less doesn't really matter.

Their best bet for expanding design space is to remove the "double" or "half" mechanic and replace it with "2 higher" or "2 lower".

S = T-2 = 6+
S = T-1 = 5+
S = T = 4+
S = T+1 = 3+
S = T+2 = 6+

Then T8 has a real impact as S6 still needs 6's to wound it. lascannons do so on a 3+, and missiles on a 4+.

The problem with "double" and "half" is that it stretches. in an arms race of "to wound on a 2+" vs "to wound on a 6+":
T1 needs S2
S2 needs T4
T4 needs S8
S8 needs T16
T16 needs S32

The design space needed stretches, and as Jidmah said, you get big zones where the exact number becomes irrelevant.

Going back to my chart above, you have linear design space instead of exponential. It just grows steadily, so S20 vs T18 is the same as S6 vs T4.
The only one I'd look to add would be that if strength is too low, either it cannot wound (not the worst) or its AP is negated (which further disencourages mid-strength anti-elite weapons from being turned on tanks).

Putting in T9 just increases the absolute failure rates.

I mean you can give a vehicle T20 and a 2++ save - but it wouldn't be very fun. You would just be making doing any damage more and more dependent on luck.

I think a much better view would be to increase the number of wounds on most vehicles/monsters. 10-12 wounds was a reasonable amount at the start of 8th. Unfortunately it no longer reflects the absurd amount of damage in the game.

It's just a balance mechanic to prevent some units from being almost unkillable. Stats are just a generic representation anyway.

The problem with the theoretical ratio of damage of mid strengh weapons about tanks and vehicles as they are now, and many people is ignoring, is how easy most armies have access to stuff like bonus to wound or bonus AP.

4 havocs with chain cannons with VoTLW shoting double will shred any kind of vehicle, or even two light vehicles, and any kind of horde unit. And many armies have examples like that one, maybe not as exaggerated but still.

Thats why in general , at minimun, invulnerable saves in vehicles should go down or dissapear and wounds should go up a ton, with higher damage anti tank weapons.

It doesnt matter if a anti tank weapon does 1d6+3 or 2d6+3 damage in relation to characters or small stuff like infantry, it is gonna kill it in a single shot, so the damage should be balanced around how many shoots do we want to go trought saves to kill a heavy or medium vehicle/monster.

The one problem with that example is two of the most powerful stratagems in the game stacked on top of each other. It messes up the whole weapon balancing mechanism and would do so, no matter how you rework the rules. Both need to go away and CSM need to compensated by improving their units to have them work without CP super-charge.
Chain cannons shooting once without VotLW don't do jack about vehicles.

The big problem with weapons, as far as I can see, are the mid-range guns that have become anti-everything - weapons in the heavy bolter to autocannon range.

They're usually packing at least one, if not more, of a high ROF, mid-high S, decent AP, D2.

They're usually damaging tanks on a 5+ (possibly a 4+ in some cases, like the autocannon), and dropping the save to a 5+ (or into an inv, if there is one), and stripping wounds off en masse if they're D2.

As has been pointed out, if we push the T of a tank up on its own, then genuine anti-tank weapons - krak missiles and upward, basically - find it too difficult to wound vehicles.

The solution here seems to be ID which weapons are meant to be genuine AT guns, and ramp their S up at the same time as you ramp up vehicle T - figure out what your "tank" baseline is, and at what rate you want those weapons to wound them, and set the S accordingly.

A lascannon should still wound a Leman Russ easier than a krak missile does, for example, while at close range a meltagun should do more damage to the target than the krak missile. If the Russ moves to a theoretical T14 (so an autocannon requires a 6+, if that's your goal), then a melta weapon should also be S14. A lascannon might be S15, so it still wounds on a 3+.

If you want a Volcano Cannon to be able to hurt the Russ on a 2+, make it S28 - it's already over S10 now, so against most targets there'd not be much difference.

Yes, we'd need to look at S and T for a heck of a lot of units if this were to happen.

The other "simple" alternative is to give each weapon two S values depending on if it is attacking "infantry/cavalry/beast/swarm" or "Vehicle/Monster/Building" - I think Apoc might do this, though I'm not certain.

If we have more room to use because of the removal of the S and T cap, use it.

Which mid-strength weapons are *actually* a problem?

I mean I guess Marines in turn 1 - but that's magic Marines gonna break the game.

Against a T7/3+ hull, an HB does 0.66 damage before magic doctrines.

A lascannon expects to do 1.29, or about twice as much. Which seems reasonable. The issue you may have is that its easier to stack heavy bolters than lascannons - but that's a points issue, not a rules issue.

A multimelta expects to do 3.11 damage, or 4.88 damage in 12" - which is really putting that heavy bolter in its place. (Its also breaking the game, but what are you going to do.)

I really feel this is purely an issue of disintegrator cannons - and that's because dark lances *suck*.

Which competitive player out there has been having success spamming autocannons?

I don't think there's a problem with T capped at 8, the problem is ROF.

We can have T15-20 and then a player rolls tons of dice with little result. This is a very bad game design.

On the contrary I'd keep current values of T and S, but I'd reduce ROF. And I mean by a lot, like a TAC list could kill 10-30 boyz per turn at most and has 10ish anti tank shots for the entire army, so 1-shotting something like a LR could be possible only with very lucky rolls. Melta/Multimelta's range reduced significantly, like 6'' to 12''. Of course no re-rolls outside very few exceptions.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Dysartes wrote:


A lascannon should still wound a Leman Russ easier than a krak missile does, for example, while at close range a meltagun should do more damage to the target than the krak missile. If the Russ moves to a theoretical T14 (so an autocannon requires a 6+, if that's your goal), then a melta weapon should also be S14. A lascannon might be S15, so it still wounds on a 3+.

But why should an autocannon be S7 when meltas or lascannons are S14-15? The autocannon is an anti tank weapon too.

The problem with reducing ROF is that you can't go lower than 1 without making everything more expensive.

The only reason we won't see anti-tank weapons with damage 4D3 or 2D6+6 is because they don't want characters to get blown apart by a single shot so easily.

The simple solution to the problem is to give characters a simple rule called "Plot Armour(x)", which means that any weapons with a damage over "X" is reduced to "X", EG if a Damage 8 weapon hits a character with plot armour (3), the damage is reduced to 3. Snipers would ignore the Plot Armour rule.

Then we have the design space for the weapons that are supposed to be anti-tank to have huge damaged and then have vehicles with loads of wounds.

The statline cap infuriates me.

Land Raiders , no invuln and should be T 9!

Tyranid monsters should have middling armour and T, but a CRAP ton of wounds and more regen mechanics.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
The question is, does it really matter?
Do we need tanks that are wounded by anti-tank weapons on a 5+ or even 6+? Personally I think it's okay, a lascannon has a good chance to wound a titan, but you'll still need a lot of lascannons to kill it. That being said, with heavy bolters now having D2, wounds of many tanks should probably go up. I actually like more granularity with 2W marines, but they have to adjust in the higher wounds or else we end up in 6th/7th edition where tanks died to small arms fire.

Do you want game where best AT gun is not lascannon type of big shots but lots of medium rate of fire?

That answers your question.

tneva82 wrote:
Do you want game where best AT gun is not lascannon type of big shots but lots of medium rate of fire?

That answers your question.

But what's the actual example of this happening?

Is anyone stacking heavy bolters in a Marine army - or are they bringing MMs and Eradictators?

 Galas wrote:
The problem with reducing ROF is that you can't go lower than 1 without making everything more expensive.

And why is that a problem? IMHO having easy access of 30+ anti tank weapons, including some with multiple shots, is a bad game design. Make lascannons, meltas, etc harder to spam, like 2-5 of each per army. Same with anti infantry weapons: things like aggressors shouldn't exist, give them 30 shots instead of 70.

I'm pretty sure the brick that is the mastodon still has T9