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One thing that made the Impulsor in space marines lists unique is that it was like a rhino and the various models based on the rhino mixed into one, like the hunter, stalker and whirlwind depending on the load-out.

However during much of 8th and 9th ed. the king of the Impulsors war gear was the shield dome giving the Impulsor one of the few invulnerable saves available to a SM vehicle to protect it from the abundance of AP -3 and 4 attacks out there.

Then armor of contempt came along and made the shield pointless against AP -3 weapons. Cutting its usefulness by a lot.

This leads to the question into what do people think is going to be the next best option for the Impulsor; the versatile but expensive missile launcher, the rapid firing skytalon array, the oneshot and unpredictable mortal wounding obital array, still the shield dome, or is it now best to save the points and take nothing instead?

The most usefull I've ever seen an Impulsor be has been when it was equipped with the coms array.
The SM player went 1st, called down fire on one of my Grot Zapp Gun teams & wiped them out.
I killed the Impulsir on my turn & gained some scrap points from it. (Crusade game)

Any other time I've seen one on the table it's wandered about tossing out a few hits/wounds, but not really having much impact.
And those that had the shield? Had even less impact as they rolled less dice.

The ironhail stubber and the ironhail array are both Heavy and the 12 shots have decent range on a very mobile platform that benefit from Devestator Doctrine. It’s also cheap. I like that load out a lot.