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How do!

Nice bit of chit-chat-chin-wag lore discussion. And a topic with few parameters, and absolutely no Wrong Answers. As the title strongly suggests and I can now confirm, I want to know what your favourite weapon in 40K is. If you want to create your own categories and suggest one from each, go for it. Maybe you want to go into a forth about a particular super weapon described in the background, but never seen on the tabletop.

All I ask is that it’s from a Primary Source (so anything mentioned/statted by GW themself) or Secondary Source (stuff like FFG books, which was all approved and signed off on by GW). I’ve nowt against Fan Additions, but they’re not for this thread. And…this bit is important. Explain your why. Because the background is all about the why making things cool.

As is tradition…I’ll kick off.

The Lasgun

Far, far from the most individually powerful, by comparison, weapon in 40K. It’s often the butt of memes and jokes. But when we stop and think of why it’s so ubiquitous, it’s frankly an absolute wonder weapon.

Easy to use. Difficult to permanently damage. Incredibly reliable. I have no doubt at all in my mind that our modern militaries would love a basic infantry weapon in the same vein. So straight forward even Guardsmen recruited from the most primitive worlds can quickly learn how to use it safely. No need for gun oil. You don’t really need to field strip it. If the barrel is knackered, just unscrew the old, screw in a new.

It’s ammo, depending on exact model, is plentiful. And quite incredibly, rechargeable. Rechargeable ammo. That doesn’t necessarily need a specialised charging process. And those power packs are presumably pretty light, certainly in comparison to contemporary mags/clips* loaded with bullets/slugs/rounds. And hey, if your regiment is from a more advanced world, their Lasguns can have power and/or shot selectors.

And certainly for the majority of Imperial Guard units, it doesn’t matter if the Administratum got the wrong supply ship to you, you will more likely than not still be able to use the power packs that did arrive. Provided you don’t use a comparatively exotic model, any old power pack will, and indeed can, do.

If you absolutely, positively have to arm untold billions of soldiers? Why wouldn’t you choose the Lasgun as your infantry weapon of choice?

It’s such a rare example of Imperial Common Sense. When you look at the sheer, staggering, mindless bureaucracy that is The Imperium? It speaks volumes the adoption of the Lasgun as the standard Guard weapon was evidently a No Brainer.

It ain’t the deadliest weapon. But it’s still deadly. It’s practical. It….perfect.

Right, your turn!

Hmm, think I'll go for my vote for the "Nope..just Nope" category for horrific (yet stylish) melee weponry.

I speak of course of the most deadly mitten ever created...the "Harlequin's Kiss"!!!

What can be said about this utterly terrifying yet deceptively simple looking weapon? At heart its just a simple tube attached to a glove, but MY WORD does this thing give Tyranid Bioweapons a run for their money in the "most horrific ways to die" stakes.

Having all your innards instantly liquified by the worlds most dangerous slinky is not how I'd want to go out frankly (though at least I could appreciate being ended by a being with a great sense of fashion). Also, they are generally attached to demonic murder clowns.

(Second place ....tyranid devourer....slowly being eaten alive from the inside over the course of MINUTES...euurrrgghh)

Honourable mention...Chainaxe, because swords are so passe'.

Hellguns.

I really freaking love the name for some reason, and the way I was introduced to them is by using Kasrkins in DoW. The gun sounded aggressive, with a distinctive roar that always suggested really bad news for whatever it was shooting at.

TT wise, they're an interesting weapon, featuring really high armor piercing weapon, but with shorter range, that make Scions play in a quite unique way, imo, where their guns don't have the best damage, but will pierce most armors reliably, which I think is pretty cool.

Lorewise, roughly the same, I like that it allows Scions to operate independantly agaisn't more targets, able to help bridge the gap between them and other, more threatening enemies. I like the fact you can have both a cabled or an uncabled version (current Scions vs older metal Stormtroopers). It's a pretty great weapon to have, though not without its flaws, such as the pattern used by Krieg Grenadiers not being well liked, despite having superior firepower and a scope that allows them to see through smoke.

It's not a flawless weapon, and there's a reason it's not the IG's standard issue, but it's by far my favorite weapon.

I think my favourite is the assault cannon. Iconic weapon of Terminators and it has always been modelled as a meaty beast.

Honourable mention to the conversion Beamer as the mechanic of being more damaging the further away the target is entertaining, especially as It is essentially unexplainable

Oh shoot. I have to choose? Impossible! Here are a few that I have a special fondness for:

* Haywire grenades. Having started back in 5th edition, I've always really enjoyed these things. I loved being reliably able to stunlock vehicles with my swooping hawks. I loved giving them to dark eldar sergeants and characters. I loved shooting them out of scourge guns. In most editions, they weren't that good at *killing* a target, but they let you crowd control threats that you might not have enough fusion guns to handle. It was really satisfying. Kind of bummed that the actual grenade itself has been consigned to being a second-stringer stratagem these days.

* Deathspinners. And all things monofilament, really. The harlequin's kiss is iconic, but it misses out on the fun of the enemy functionally slicing themselves up as they try to struggle their way free of the web.

* Any of the old arcane haemonculus weapons. You've got a shard of glass that lets you shatter the enemy, a portal to Cthulhu's angriest tentacle, gauntlets that make the enemy explode from sudden tumors, daemon-in-a-bottle, and the crucible of malediction. Listen, I know it seems lame now, but the curcible used to be *really cool* you guys. It would go after the closest enemy psyker, and then just keep moving around the board giving psykers a hard time until it ran out of juice.

*Kruellagh the Vile's hand spikes from the 3rd edition dark eldar codex. These things popped out of her palms and got punched straight into the enemy. Then they'd sluuuuurp all the target's tasty life energy out and use it to supercharge Kruellagh herself. Before Ynnari or soul traps or pain tokens, Kruellagh was pioneering the dark eldar field of turning the enemy's suffering into buffs.

Very hard to say there are so many good ones

Shuriken Catapult, it’s the simple elegance I like

Jakoera digital weapons: flamers, laser guns and needlers all built into little rings

The shock attack gun: when you absolutely got to fill every MF in the room with snotlings

Volkite weapons - it's a 50s sci-fi ray gun, what's not to love?

On Harlequin’s Kiss and Deathspinners? It’s always going to be the Nightspinner for me.

Simply because it’s a well silent piece of frankly evil artillery. When first introduced in 2nd Ed Space Marine, it essentially farted a barely visible cloud of mono-filament wire into the air, and let careful aim, maths and gravity do the rest.

Whilst there’s absolutely something to the said for the relative horror of its smaller scale cousins? Imagine charging hell for leather over open ground for cover, just to see the troops in front of you get sliced and diced, and seeing no obvious cause unless the light hits the cloud of mono-filament just right.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ScarletRose wrote:
Volkite weapons - it's a 50s sci-fi ray gun, what's not to love?

For me, it’s the secondary effect that makes it truly terrifying. You hit me with it, and I explode into dust. Sucks to be me, but it’s unlikely I suffered overly long. But when I go? My squad mates might get caught in the eruption and die far more slowly, on fire.

Chainsword!

A chain saw as a sword!

Horrific, loud, gory, and yet still needs some finesse as it is a sword.

I will always be a fan of big guns... I'm particularly fond of the Leman Russ Vanquisher Cannon...just wish it was remotely worth fielding (it doesn't even need to be meta or semi meta lol)

Also, I wish they'd bring back the twin linked rules so we could go back to joking about our lasguns being twin linked when the guardsmen bolt flashlights onto their bayonet lugs

Probably the Shokk Attack Gun for me, as it's the quintessential Orky weapon. It highlights the Ork's predeliction to put any advanced technology to their single-minded focus on warfare. They have incredible teleport technology with various potential applications and instead choose to miniaturize it to be a super vaccuum cleaner that shoots out living ammunition in the form of snotlings into hapless opponents. It's the mixture of wacky and truly alien approach to war that isn't replicated by any other faction and I still remember its glory days in 8th ed when the Souped Up Shokk Attack Gun would spike the amount of shots and strength it would have and one shot a big scary unit T1.

For some odd reason: the Multilaser. I love the look and think a "las-machine-gun" in between lasgun and lascannon makes so much sense. Would be cool if one could take them on Ogryns and HWS (just visually).

Similarly I personally think the Exterminator Autocannon and Eradicator Novacannon are the best looking Leman Russ loadouts even if their rules are weak. And lorewise they fill interesting roles.

I like combi-bolters because it always reminds me of Ripley's duct taping skills in Aliens

I think an absolute favourite is difficult. I like anything that is big and loud, so the more dakka the merrier. Heavy bolters are a lot of fun.


As a little addition, I know this is 40k related but my favourite Warhammer weapon is the Doom Diver catapult. It's deeply amusing as a concept. Much the same as the Shokk attack gun.

Shokk Attak Gun is definitely a favourite of mine too. It’s just so incredibly 40K in its sheer level of bonkers. There’s also the implication Orks use it because it’s funny, rather than reliable. A properly anarchic weapon which might just terrify it’s living ammo, or materialise the same inside the target’s own body.

 Olthannon wrote:

Heavy bolters are a lot of fun.

These are my favorite. I always liked the look and sound of the heavy bolter lugging marines starting with the original dawn of war trailer.

All my favourites have been named already.
Harlequin's Kiss was my first idea (without even knowing its name because I don't play harlequins).
Shokk Attack gun is probably the main reason why I started Orks.
Autocannons... bot bot bot.

I'd also like to add the humble autogun. Yeah, I know it's just a normal assault gun. But I can model it as an AK-47. And so I did on my Cultists. AK's are cool.

As an aside:
I'd like to see a proper slow-motion of a Bolter firing. The Bolt ,,launching", the rocket kicking in, bullet hitting target, then exploding. Warhammer+ please do. (Or did they already?)

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

As an aside:
I'd like to see a proper slow-motion of a Bolter firing. The Bolt ,,launching", the rocket kicking in, bullet hitting target, then exploding. Warhammer+ please do. (Or did they already?)

Its not in slow motion per-se, but you can see this happening in Astartes which is on W+

Power Fists, Lightning Claws and Bolters.

Power Fists or Lightning Claws with Bolters on them are even better.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Shokk Attak Gun is definitely a favourite of mine too. It’s just so incredibly 40K in its sheer level of bonkers. There’s also the implication Orks use it because it’s funny, rather than reliable. A properly anarchic weapon which might just terrify it’s living ammo, or materialise the same inside the target’s own body.

Speaking of "living ammo," I really like a lot of the oldschool tyranid weapons. Fleshborers that basically just wake angry beetles up so they can crawl into your armor and chew into your flesh. Stranglethorn cannons and barbed stranglers that shoot the galaxy's most gnarly kidney stones out which then proceed to grow into an angry spike bush. I also really like the trygon prime's zappy bristles and all forms of bioplasma; mostly because I'm a sucker for Godzilla shooting energy beams.

I instantly thought of the Harlequin's Kiss, but so did everyone else...

Y'know, I've always thought the first version of the Cyclone missile launcher looked pretty sweet - the later ones seemed kind of awkwardly bolted on, but the v1 had this nice sleek, integrated look with the armour. I got a two-pack back in the day (this was a very old day), one's been in my marine chapter this whole time, but the other was miscast with the front of his helmet flattened, so I never did anything with him - since it's a mess anyway I'm not feeling bad about my current plan to saw the launcher off the top and give it to a chaos terminator.

The mole mortar, just for being the heavy weapon equivalent of telling a stupid joke with a completely straight face. Another one I want to get around to converting one of these days (maybe this month, since it's the painting theme, although I need to get another missile launcher to serve as the base for it, I accidentally used all three I had lying around in one go).

Psychotropic Grenades. My favorite piece of GK wargear(RIP), and they are buckets of fun in the RPGs too.

Something about a short-term hallucinogen grenade just seems both hilarious and terrifying. Giving your foe a bad trip right before you rip them up in melee combat is a special kind of horror.

Honourable mention to the conversion Beamer as the mechanic of being more damaging the further away the target is entertaining, especially as It is essentially unexplainable

If I remember the description in rogue trader, its releasing the energy all the way along the beam - so its disintegrating the odd atoms of atmospheric gas - and when it finally reached a dense enough mass to destabilise and explode it releases all the energy its picked up as well as a big chunk of the target's mass.

It used to have a second effect of 'the bigger you are the harder I hit' but that's been kinda separated off to be the gravity weapons 'thing'.




As a personal choice - D-Cannons. Whilst a source of endless 'the D' jokes from less mature opponents, the idea of Chunks of the target just calmly 'fwip'-ing out of existence is more terrifying that explosions.



Hellguns used to be Helguns because way back when in the age of STCs they were HELguns - High Energy Laser guns.

It looks like some of this names-came-from-dark-age-acronyms is coming back with the new squats.

locarno24 wrote:
Hellguns used to be Helguns because way back when in the age of STCs they were HELguns - High Energy Laser guns.

Where did that retcon creep in from? They were just a new name for the hot-shot lasgun when they originally appeared.

either Dark Heresy or Inquisitor is the first place I came across it.

It's worth noting that those games had both hot-shot packs for standard lasguns and helguns/hellguns as a separate entity (a distinction which full scale 40k doesnt make), much like the hotshot pack was an item in necromunda, and 2nd edition stormtroopers had fairly standard looking guns with a whacking great backpack power source rather than a distinctly different weapon.

I think my favourite esoteric “it works because the background says it does” weapon is the relatively modern Grav Torson Canon.

Creates three locations of Grav, then rotate that fish, tearing the target apart. I mean, in my head it looks wicked used against armour and bunkers. But truly horrific against living targets, including large Xenoforms. I always think of it being deployed against a Carnifex or similar, and a limb or limbs being wrenched and mangled into new, interesting and quite possibly jaunty angles, by an ultimately invisible force.

Think what Vecna does to his victims in Strange Things, but far gorier.

I've always been a fan of the Deffguns used by Lootas. Bands of Orks ransacking areas and putting heavy weapons to use by themselves has always been fun to me.

My favourite was the power axe in 2nd ed because you could use it one handed as an inferior power sword or two handed as a superior power sword.


The banshee exarch's power axe was the most stylish around.

that and the Maugetar, can't get edgier than a scythe cannon carried by the grim reaper.

2nd ed was where the eldar's weird wargear shined bright.

Also the 2nd ed multi melta that could also fire as a heavy flamer instead.

Definitely has to be Warboss Gritzgutz’s shooter. A weapon so good that the ork decided to kill his past self to get a copy of it. You can’t find a better endorsement for a weapon then that.

Also got love for the Ogryn Ripper Gun, especially the 2nd Edition design, with its frankly ridiculous bore.

Built to be robust, because the Orgyn can and absolutely will clobber enemies with it. Simple enough for their simple minds. And with a burst limiter because they tend to get carried away.

My favourite thing about them though is strictly 2nd Ed, where if you were within 6” of the foe? They hit automatically, because they were just that ridiculous.

The Photon Gauntlet. It's a Darkfire Cannon that fits on your hand, and if you mess up, you suffer a very painful demise. It also blinds people.