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The new Tau are Asuryani are sporting huge guns that ignore invul saves. These guns also have a lot of AP, so you probably won't get any saving throw if wounded by them. But what about weapons that only prevent invul but not the armor?

I propose a change to the Grey Knights Psilencer. Its current stat is too much like most normal boltguns and does not reflect the fact it is psychic bullets. I would like to see this changed to -1 or ignoring invul. This change would nerf the gun against all targets except Daemons which the Grey Knights are designed to fight in the first place.

Pretty sure there are a couple invuln-ignoring weapons scattered around out there.

The weird thing about reducing/ignoring invulns is that invulns represent such a wide variety of effects. It's easy enough to picture an anti-daemon weapon ignoring daemonic invuln saves, but should they work against dodge saves (like wyches') or necron phase shifters or terminator forcefields? It's already pretty weird that a tau railgun gets to ignore drukhari invuln saves that represent holoprojectors. So the railgun attack punches my holograms so hard that the hologram projector feels it, I guess.

In the case of psilencers, I don't know much about their lore. What exactly are they doing that makes them better against forcefields, dodging, phase shifting, etc? Rubricae have "magic bullets" too, but apparently that just translates to better AP for them. At a glance, I'd be reluctant to make GK worse against most factions but also miserable for harlequins and daemons. That seems like the worst of both worlds where you're either making the gun less worth it for GK players and frustrating for daemon/harlequin players.

How many armies and units would this actually matter against? I'm really struggling to think of examples.
Repentia?
Daemons?
Orks, specifically for the one turn that a KFF overloads to give a 5+ invuln, and the boys aren't in cover?

While it might make sense from a fluff perspective, practically speaking it's very poor design to have a weapon that is devastatingly good against one faction and useless against all others.

Wyldhunt wrote:
Pretty sure there are a couple invuln-ignoring weapons scattered around out there.

The weird thing about reducing/ignoring invulns is that invulns represent such a wide variety of effects. It's easy enough to picture an anti-daemon weapon ignoring daemonic invuln saves, but should they work against dodge saves (like wyches') or necron phase shifters or terminator forcefields? It's already pretty weird that a tau railgun gets to ignore drukhari invuln saves that represent holoprojectors. So the railgun attack punches my holograms so hard that the hologram projector feels it, I guess.

In the case of psilencers, I don't know much about their lore. What exactly are they doing that makes them better against forcefields, dodging, phase shifting, etc? Rubricae have "magic bullets" too, but apparently that just translates to better AP for them. At a glance, I'd be reluctant to make GK worse against most factions but also miserable for harlequins and daemons. That seems like the worst of both worlds where you're either making the gun less worth it for GK players and frustrating for daemon/harlequin players.

I agree. There needs to be a distinction between various saving throws. If not don´t bother coming up with clever rules.

 Strg Alt wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
Pretty sure there are a couple invuln-ignoring weapons scattered around out there.

The weird thing about reducing/ignoring invulns is that invulns represent such a wide variety of effects. It's easy enough to picture an anti-daemon weapon ignoring daemonic invuln saves, but should they work against dodge saves (like wyches') or necron phase shifters or terminator forcefields? It's already pretty weird that a tau railgun gets to ignore drukhari invuln saves that represent holoprojectors. So the railgun attack punches my holograms so hard that the hologram projector feels it, I guess.

In the case of psilencers, I don't know much about their lore. What exactly are they doing that makes them better against forcefields, dodging, phase shifting, etc? Rubricae have "magic bullets" too, but apparently that just translates to better AP for them. At a glance, I'd be reluctant to make GK worse against most factions but also miserable for harlequins and daemons. That seems like the worst of both worlds where you're either making the gun less worth it for GK players and frustrating for daemon/harlequin players.

I agree. There needs to be a distinction between various saving throws. If not don´t bother coming up with clever rules.

Funnily enough, I'm guessing that part of the reason GW didn't bother differentiating between invuln types was that there weren't enough exceptions to invulns out there to make those distinctions feel justified. Like, if you haven't given a lot of thought to drukhari and harlequins yet, you might feel odd adding bulk to the invulnerable save rule by trying to come up with a bunch of common keywords for types of invulns. So then you write an imperial 'dex and you maybe want to let flamers ignore dodge saves or something, but you don't have the levers to pull to do that without also making flamers curiously good against terminator forcefields. But then by the time you're creating a special anti-daemon relic weapon, you've already committed to not differentiating invuln saves, so you end up with blessed crossbow bolts that somehow ignore dodge saves.

But yeah. slapping a keyword on invuln saves would probably be a good idea.

Wyldhunt wrote:
It's already pretty weird that a tau railgun gets to ignore drukhari invuln saves that represent holoprojectors. So the railgun attack punches my holograms so hard that the hologram projector feels it, I guess.

Eh, there's precedent...

Tyranids have this abilaty. On on a relic gun for Kronos. One on bonesabers with a very low AP. Outside of very corner cases 5hey are considered quite rubbish.

Wyldhunt wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
Pretty sure there are a couple invuln-ignoring weapons scattered around out there.

The weird thing about reducing/ignoring invulns is that invulns represent such a wide variety of effects. It's easy enough to picture an anti-daemon weapon ignoring daemonic invuln saves, but should they work against dodge saves (like wyches') or necron phase shifters or terminator forcefields? It's already pretty weird that a tau railgun gets to ignore drukhari invuln saves that represent holoprojectors. So the railgun attack punches my holograms so hard that the hologram projector feels it, I guess.

In the case of psilencers, I don't know much about their lore. What exactly are they doing that makes them better against forcefields, dodging, phase shifting, etc? Rubricae have "magic bullets" too, but apparently that just translates to better AP for them. At a glance, I'd be reluctant to make GK worse against most factions but also miserable for harlequins and daemons. That seems like the worst of both worlds where you're either making the gun less worth it for GK players and frustrating for daemon/harlequin players.

I agree. There needs to be a distinction between various saving throws. If not don´t bother coming up with clever rules.

Funnily enough, I'm guessing that part of the reason GW didn't bother differentiating between invuln types was that there weren't enough exceptions to invulns out there to make those distinctions feel justified. Like, if you haven't given a lot of thought to drukhari and harlequins yet, you might feel odd adding bulk to the invulnerable save rule by trying to come up with a bunch of common keywords for types of invulns. So then you write an imperial 'dex and you maybe want to let flamers ignore dodge saves or something, but you don't have the levers to pull to do that without also making flamers curiously good against terminator forcefields. But then by the time you're creating a special anti-daemon relic weapon, you've already committed to not differentiating invuln saves, so you end up with blessed crossbow bolts that somehow ignore dodge saves.

But yeah. slapping a keyword on invuln saves would probably be a good idea.

You need to redo the "damage channels" first in order to implement the special saving throws. Just a few ideas:

Damage channels:
- Firearms/Kinetic
- Heat (Laser, Plasma & Melta)
- Biochemical (various Tyranid weapons)
- Haywire/Electrical

Type/Rate of Fire:
- Single shot
- Burst-/Rapid-/Multi-Fire
- Templates (Flamer & Blast)

So an Avatar would laugh at heat-based attacks while Necrons won´t leave their tombs because of fear of facing haywire weapons.

bibotot wrote:
The new Tau are Asuryani are sporting huge guns that ignore invul saves. These guns also have a lot of AP, so you probably won't get any saving throw if wounded by them. But what about weapons that only prevent invul but not the armor?

I propose a change to the Grey Knights Psilencer. Its current stat is too much like most normal boltguns and does not reflect the fact it is psychic bullets. I would like to see this changed to -1 or ignoring invul. This change would nerf the gun against all targets except Daemons which the Grey Knights are designed to fight in the first place.

I would prefer it to be more specific and use keywords - so say targets with the Daemon keyword do not get invulneable saves.

The Tau railgun ignoring any and all the myriad of magical, biological, tech and pyschic defences is just fething stupid.

 Strg Alt wrote:

You need to redo the "damage channels" first in order to implement the special saving throws. Just a few ideas:

Damage channels:
- Firearms/Kinetic
- Heat (Laser, Plasma & Melta)
- Biochemical (various Tyranid weapons)
- Haywire/Electrical

So an Avatar would laugh at heat-based attacks while Necrons won´t leave their tombs because of fear of facing haywire weapons.

Hmm. So are we talking about functionally giving units 4 different saves (probably more if we want to handle sonic, frost, dark matter, etc.) depending on what's shooting at them? Could be interesting in something like Necromunda, but probably too hard to balance at 40k's scale. Which factions end up with functionally better armor vs lasguns (heat), bolters, devourers, and tesla respectively?

Type/Rate of Fire:
- Single shot
- Burst-/Rapid-/Multi-Fire
- Templates (Flamer & Blast)

I think you lost me. What's the pitch with these?

What I'm picturing is something like this:
Give all invulns a keyword indicating their "type". These would probably break up something like:
* Evasion (dodging, phasing out of sync with matter, etc.)
* Forcefield
* Esoteric (daemon saves, supernatural effects, etc.)
* Chonky (really tough armor, chapter tactics related to tenacity, cybernetics, etc. Although these might be better represented by FNP rules.)

And then you could just have some weapons interact with those keywords. So blasts and weapons that hit automatically might impose a penalty to saves with the evasion keyword because of their splash damage. Sisters and GK would probably have lots of weapons that ignore or impose penalties on esoteric invulns. Any gun that you want to feel "hefty" could overcome Chonky invulns. Weapons that disable forcefields or use special ammo to bypass them would, er, do that. You get the idea.

This way, most of the weapons and saves in the game remain unchanged. You just have levers for interacting with the "special" invul saves rather than being torn between nonsensical interactions (railguns bypass holograms) and avoiding interacting with invulns all together.

Wyldhunt wrote:
I think you lost me. What's the pitch with these?

What I'm picturing is something like this:
Give all invulns a keyword indicating their "type". These would probably break up something like:
* Evasion (dodging, phasing out of sync with matter, etc.)
* Forcefield
* Esoteric (daemon saves, supernatural effects, etc.)
* Chonky (really tough armor, chapter tactics related to tenacity, cybernetics, etc. Although these might be better represented by FNP rules.)

And then you could just have some weapons interact with those keywords. So blasts and weapons that hit automatically might impose a penalty to saves with the evasion keyword because of their splash damage. Sisters and GK would probably have lots of weapons that ignore or impose penalties on esoteric invulns. Any gun that you want to feel "hefty" could overcome Chonky invulns. Weapons that disable forcefields or use special ammo to bypass them would, er, do that. You get the idea.

This way, most of the weapons and saves in the game remain unchanged. You just have levers for interacting with the "special" invul saves rather than being torn between nonsensical interactions (railguns bypass holograms) and avoiding interacting with invulns all together.

This.

Cover saves used to be a thing. There were ways to bypass them, falling back to using an armour save instead.
This all sounds a lot like that.

 Skinnereal wrote:
Cover saves used to be a thing. There were ways to bypass them, falling back to using an armour save instead.
This all sounds a lot like that.

Yep. Cover saves were essentially invulnerable saves with the "Cover" keyword, and flamers basically had a special rule saying they ignored invul saves with the Cover keyword. When cover saves worked well, they worked well. They probably went away because GW wanted cover to matter for armies that had good saves (like marines). Having a save that ignored AP but could be countered by certain weapons seemed like a decent mechanic overall.

@Wyldhunt:

No, not four different basic saves. All units would come with a standard saving throw with the exception of really poor units like Grots. Then depending on unit type (and if it would be appropriate) you may slap resistances/invulnerable saves and/or weaknesses upon them. These resistances/weaknesses would come in different levels. So one unit may have for example only an additional protection against heat-based attacks like Eldar Fire Dragons but the Avatar would take no damage at all against fire of any type. Though only few units should gain an immunity from an entire damage channel for obvious gameplay reasons.
That´s the way the video game Age of Wonders: Planetfall handles stuff and imo it´s a great system. Oh and I forgot another damage channel which would be Psionic. Here are a few examples:

Vehicles (enclosed), Mechanical:
These units are liable to haywire attacks but due to the fact that the crew is either protected by thick, strong armour or the unit is a mechanical entity psionic attacks have a hard time damaging their minds/circuits.

Psionic users, Daemons, Mindless (Plague Zombies/Servitors):
These units deal with psionic forces on a daily basis or are less susceptible due to being mindless. Therefore they are more resistant to such attacks. Fleshhounds of Khorne would be immune to psionic attacks due to the Collar of Khorne.


Type of Fire could have an impact of how useful a resistance is. For example Neo from Matrix can dodge bullets (single-shot and multi-shot) but his Evasion ability would be less useful against templates and blasts. To have full protection against templates and blasts you would need to have some sort of force field or have a super-dodge ability like Marvel´s Spiderman which is based on an inherent danger sense.

 Strg Alt wrote:
@Wyldhunt:

No, not four different basic saves. All units would come with a standard saving throw with the exception of really poor units like Grots. Then depending on unit type (and if it would be appropriate) you may slap resistances/invulnerable saves and/or weaknesses upon them. These resistances/weaknesses would come in different levels. So one unit may have for example only an additional protection against heat-based attacks like Eldar Fire Dragons but the Avatar would take no damage at all against fire of any type. Though only few units should gain an immunity from an entire damage channel for obvious gameplay reasons.
That´s the way the video game Age of Wonders: Planetfall handles stuff and imo it´s a great system. Oh and I forgot another damage channel which would be Psionic. Here are a few examples:

Vehicles (enclosed), Mechanical:
These units are liable to haywire attacks but due to the fact that the crew is either protected by thick, strong armour or the unit is a mechanical entity psionic attacks have a hard time damaging their minds/circuits.

Psionic users, Daemons, Mindless (Plague Zombies/Servitors):
These units deal with psionic forces on a daily basis or are less susceptible due to being mindless. Therefore they are more resistant to such attacks. Fleshhounds of Khorne would be immune to psionic attacks due to the Collar of Khorne.


Type of Fire could have an impact of how useful a resistance is. For example Neo from Matrix can dodge bullets (single-shot and multi-shot) but his Evasion ability would be less useful against templates and blasts. To have full protection against templates and blasts you would need to have some sort of force field or have a super-dodge ability like Marvel´s Spiderman which is based on an inherent danger sense.

It's not four basic types of saves. He's saying each invulnerable saves come with a specific flavor which certain weapons/abilities can ignore.

Each unit have standard armor save that can be modified by AP. For every invul save, it comes with the type - i.e. invulnerable save (evasion), which is ignored by weapons such as flamers that would have a weapon ability that ignores [Invulnerable save (evasion)], since it wouldn't really make sense to "dodge" a wave of flames that surround you. Such invulnerable save can be taken against any weapon EXCEPT the specific weapons that ignore it.

@skchsan, I think StrgAlt and you are talking about two different pitches. As I understand it, his pitch is that we give weapons various keywords related to the kind of damage they do (ballistic, heat, sonic, etc.) and then give some units special rules to interact with those keywords. So the Avatar of Khaine might have a rule that says they treat the Damage stat of weapons with the Heat keyword as 0. Sort of the inverse of my pitch where the keywords get added to invul saves specifically, and then weapons get special rules to interact with that.

"Reducing and or ignore invuln saves"
So then what the hell is the point of an invuln save if you start handing out ways to counter it all over the place.

Waaaghpower wrote:
How many armies and units would this actually matter against? I'm really struggling to think of examples.
Repentia?
Daemons?
Orks, specifically for the one turn that a KFF overloads to give a 5+ invuln, and the boys aren't in cover?

While it might make sense from a fluff perspective, practically speaking it's very poor design to have a weapon that is devastatingly good against one faction and useless against all others.

While it would be fairly useless against most factions it is an interesting design space that hasn't been explored.

Backspacehacker wrote:"Reducing and or ignore invuln saves"
So then what the hell is the point of an invuln save if you start handing out ways to counter it all over the place.

Well, "all over the place," is probably a misrepresentation of what proponents of the idea intend. The point would be that invulnerable saves would still ignore the most common form of save manipulation (AP), but could still interact with other mechanics. Did you play in an edition where cover saves were a thing? Pretty much that. It's a save that still helps you out even when weapons with good AP are bypassing your armor, but specialized weapons (like flamers and sonic weapons) could interact with/ignore it.

Jarms48 wrote:

Waaaghpower wrote:
How many armies and units would this actually matter against? I'm really struggling to think of examples.
Repentia?
Daemons?
Orks, specifically for the one turn that a KFF overloads to give a 5+ invuln, and the boys aren't in cover?

While it might make sense from a fluff perspective, practically speaking it's very poor design to have a weapon that is devastatingly good against one faction and useless against all others.

While it would be fairly useless against most factions it is an interesting design space that hasn't been explored.

I think you're both right. It's an interesting design space to consider, but we'd want to utilize it in a way that doesn't boil down to options that are crummy most of the time but OP against certain factions. You kind of see this with some of the invuln-ignoring mechanics already out there. Like Null Zone(?), that marine power that shuts off invulnerable saves near the psyker. Against terminators or incubi, you're just making those units more susceptible to weapons with good enough AP to weaken their armor beyond whatever their invuln was. So a solid benefit, but with a semi-niche application. Against harlequins or daemons, you're taking away the only save a (largely t3) army has against small arms fire.

 Backspacehacker wrote:
"Reducing and or ignore invuln saves"
So then what the hell is the point of an invuln save if you start handing out ways to counter it all over the place.

Exactly.
Invul saves should probably be strengthened a bit. If an demonsword attack is able to bypass a forcefield Invul save, it could still be dodged by an agility invul save.