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My suggestion is to remove most instances of Devastating Wounds, I don't think it makes sense for almost any weapons to ignore invulnerable saves. Devastating Wounds is also not a powerful enough ability to set apart psychic attacks from mundane attacks (also in part because mundane attacks can have the same ability), so my suggestion is for all wounds caused by a weapon with the Devastating Wounds ability to ignore armour and invulnerable saves. Weapons/units losing the ability would get a reworked profile or lowered points cost, the full list of changes is beyond the scope of this suggestion. What I would like to hear is arguments for why Devastating Wounds should not be limited more or less to psychic attacks and why psychic attacks should not ignore armour and invulnerable saves.

As for the psychic part:
Not every power is directly frying the victim's brain. If you just hurl a big ol' fireball into the general direction of the enemy, it can be dodged or absorbed like any other, physical attack.

For some powers it makes narrative sense to ignore it, for some it doesn't.

Yeah, there are invulnerable saves in the game that are psychic in nature and not just forcefields or "really strong armour", like Sisters of battle Acts of Faith, for example. Or the Invulnerable saves of Harlequins, which represent them dodging stuff. So, if you shoot a psychobullet at them, they might evade that. Does that logic always hold true? Probably not.

Invulns have always (well, maybe not in1st/2nd edition) been a pretty abstract part in 40Ks rules as they represent a lot of strange stuff from the lore, but sometimes are just plot armour for heroes. It's similar to poison in 3rd, where the Necron codex gave you a Designer's commentary that said: of course you don't actually poison robots, but we assume the opponent adjusted their poisoned weapons to fight robots instead.

so my suggestion is for all wounds caused by a weapon with the Devastating Wounds ability to ignore armour and invulnerable saves.

To clarify, your suggestion is for DW wounds to ignore armor but *NOT* invulns, right?

If so, I definitely understand the impulse and think it would make sense in more scenarios than not. That said:

* You're talking about dramatically changing the math for a lot of units in a lot of matchups. Suddenly making genestealers and harlequins significantly worse at hurting terminators, for instance, and essentially removing a level of offense boost when fighting something like harlies or daemons who *only* have invuln saves.

* As an extension of the first bullet point, you're looking at a lot of work to go through and update a lot of units or special rules that grant DW. So it's a pretty large undertaking for an increase in verisimilitude that might not be worth the amount of labor involved.

* I think making DWs not work in situations where they shouldn't work is only half the job. If your goal is to make things more fluffy, then you'd *also* want to make sure that certain attacks *do* ignore invulns when it makes sense for them to do so. Psychic powers fluffed as blowing up brains should bypass forcefields. Invulns that are fluffed as dodging should maybe possibly be ignored by some torrent weapons. Etc. So with that in mind, it's hard to support the idea of just blanket nerfing DW weapons when a more ideal fix would probably involve a more thorough overhaul of "invulnerable saves" in general. Possibly just breaking invuln saves up into a variety of save types that can each be interacted with by relevant rules/weapons. So an eldar warlock might have a 4+ Psy Save to reflect his runic armor and precognitive dodging, while a wych might have a 4+ Dodge Save. A flamer might ignore the wych's Dodge Save but not the warlock's Psy Save. And a culexus assassin might turn off Psy Saves within X" but not Dodge Saves.

I think dodge should be a penalty to hit rather than an invulnerable save. Invulnerable saves should be things that ignore how hard things hit, the ability to stop a lascannon or a lasgun equally well, either shorting out or providing limited coverage being represented by only working on a 4+ or 5+.

 a_typical_hero wrote:
As for the psychic part:
Not every power is directly frying the victim's brain. If you just hurl a big ol' fireball into the general direction of the enemy, it can be dodged or absorbed like any other, physical attack.

For some powers it makes narrative sense to ignore it, for some it doesn't.

But is it just a big ol' fireball or is it a psychic manifestation of fire? There is nothing psychic feeling or unique about a S4 AP- Torrent weapon with the PSYCHIC keyword. But make it ignore armour and invulnerable saves and you have a unique and potent weapon.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

so my suggestion is for all wounds caused by a weapon with the Devastating Wounds ability to ignore armour and invulnerable saves.

To clarify, your suggestion is for DW wounds to ignore armor but *NOT* invulns, right?

No both, same as currently, except not just on 6s to wound. But weapons like Doomsday cannons and railguns would lose the ability entirely and either become better in other ways or the unit carrying them would become cheaper.

If so, I definitely understand the impulse and think it would make sense in more scenarios than not. That said:

* You're talking about dramatically changing the math for a lot of units in a lot of matchups. Suddenly making genestealers and harlequins significantly worse at hurting terminators, for instance, and essentially removing a level of offense boost when fighting something like harlies or daemons who *only* have invuln saves.

* As an extension of the first bullet point, you're looking at a lot of work to go through and update a lot of units or special rules that grant DW. So it's a pretty large undertaking for an increase in verisimilitude that might not be worth the amount of labor involved.

* I think making DWs not work in situations where they shouldn't work is only half the job. If your goal is to make things more fluffy, then you'd *also* want to make sure that certain attacks *do* ignore invulns when it makes sense for them to do so. Psychic powers fluffed as blowing up brains should bypass forcefields. Invulns that are fluffed as dodging should maybe possibly be ignored by some torrent weapons. Etc. So with that in mind, it's hard to support the idea of just blanket nerfing DW weapons when a more ideal fix would probably involve a more thorough overhaul of "invulnerable saves" in general. Possibly just breaking invuln saves up into a variety of save types that can each be interacted with by relevant rules/weapons. So an eldar warlock might have a 4+ Psy Save to reflect his runic armor and precognitive dodging, while a wych might have a 4+ Dodge Save. A flamer might ignore the wych's Dodge Save but not the warlock's Psy Save. And a culexus assassin might turn off Psy Saves within X" but not Dodge Saves.

Now that you know what my intent is would you consider the change good for next edition or do you think the game needs AP- psychic attacks and that railguns should ignore invulnerable saves some of the time?

Psychic powers don't need tons of bespoke rules. Especially so when not every faction even HAS psykers.

I certainly don't think a blanket "You never get saves against Psychic attacks" is a good idea.

 vict0988 wrote:
I think dodge should be a penalty to hit rather than an invulnerable save. Invulnerable saves should be things that ignore how hard things hit, the ability to stop a lascannon or a lasgun equally well, either shorting out or providing limited coverage being represented by only working on a 4+ or 5+.

I get the impulse to make it a to-hit modifier, and I'd be open to seeing a mechanic that handles it that way, but I think you'd have a hard time finding a way to model it that works well with things like wyches and harlequins. If you change a wych's dodge save from a 4++ to a -1 to-hit and leave them with a measly 6+ save, they're just going to get steamrolled. If you make it a -2 to-hit, they probably still get steamrolled by most marine units hitting on 5s and wounding on 3s (with many characters still hitting them on 4s), but then you also have everything short of a marine hitting them on just 6s. Seems like a tough line to walk.

But is it just a big ol' fireball or is it a psychic manifestation of fire? There is nothing psychic feeling or unique about a S4 AP- Torrent weapon with the PSYCHIC keyword. But make it ignore armour and invulnerable saves and you have a unique and potent weapon.

Meh. I never read a Dresden Files scene where Harry barbequed the badguys with fire blasts and thought, "How non-magical. He could have just used a flamethrower."

I do get the appeal of making psychic effects feel special, but sometimes the fire blast is just a fire blast regardless of whether it's being produced by prometheum or conjured from warpstuff. Forcing every psychic power to be quirky for the sake of being quirky is artificially limiting and not particularly necessary. When pre-8th editions had a psyker fling a lightning bolt, it usually had stats comparable to a gun that shot a lightning bolt. This *added* to the flavor of such effects rather than detracting form them and worked fine.

No both, same as currently, except not just on 6s to wound. But weapons like Doomsday cannons and railguns would lose the ability entirely and either become better in other ways or the unit carrying them would become cheaper.
...
Now that you know what my intent is would you consider the change good for next edition or do you think the game needs AP- psychic attacks and that railguns should ignore invulnerable saves some of the time?

I think I have a harder time understanding what you're going for with that proposal, tbh. Something like a railgun knocking out an invulnerable save makes a certain amount of sense against certain kinds of invulns. Like, I can see the cartoon logic of the extra-strong-gun managing to smash through a forcefield and deal damage to the guy on the other side or wreaking so much havoc on the physical form of a daemon that said daemon has trouble rejecting enough reality to keep its ectoplasm puppet in one piece.

But if you're mainly looking to take DW away from weapons like that and then leave them on things like harlequins and genestealers and so forth, then it creates this weird situation where relatively unimpressive types of attacks are seemingly better at bypassing forcefields or daemon weirdness than extremely powerful attacks like railguns. It makes a certain amount of sense for things like invulsn that represent dodging, holograms, etc. (harder to dodge a horde of claws than a single big projectile), but it doesn't sound like that's really what you're going for.

So if the goal is to make devastating wounds more intuitive/fluffy, I don't think this proposal accomplishes its goal.

I don't know if I'd say that 11th edition "needs" AP- psychic attacks, but I think that AP- psychic attacks are theoretically *fine.* I play Thousand Sons and I definitely don't need all my psychic "guns" to ignore all saves for them to feel psychic. Ditto my farseer's eldritch storm. If anything, forcing all those powers to ignore saves would make them feel *less* fluffy to me because it homogenizes them all into these abstract, intangible vague things that ignore armor and misdirection and daemon weirdness in equal measure.

I didn't like 7th edition's psychic system, but the powers themselves felt very fluffy. The telekinetic power that felt like you were just lobbing a boulder at the enemy or crushing them to the ground with a telekinetic hand. The space wolf living lightning power that had a similar profile to necron tesla weapons. The pyromancy template power that was basically a suped-up flamer. They all "felt" like whatever effect they were supposed to represent.

When I think about psychic powers that felt bland, I think about smite spam from 8th edition and how everyone hated it. Making all psychic powers ignore all saves feels a lot like smite spam.

 vict0988 wrote:

 a_typical_hero wrote:
As for the psychic part:
Not every power is directly frying the victim's brain. If you just hurl a big ol' fireball into the general direction of the enemy, it can be dodged or absorbed like any other, physical attack.

For some powers it makes narrative sense to ignore it, for some it doesn't.

But is it just a big ol' fireball or is it a psychic manifestation of fire? There is nothing psychic feeling or unique about a S4 AP- Torrent weapon with the PSYCHIC keyword. But make it ignore armour and invulnerable saves and you have a unique and potent weapon.

I think that is more a problem with the underlying psychic system you want to fix the powers for. PSYCHIC is basically never a beneficial keyword and the surrounding mechanics from earlier editions (selecting your powers, manifesting, denying) have been stripped out, which gives these powers a feeling of just another aura or just another weapon (where the enemy sometimes has some special defense against it). You could rename a Librarian's Witchfire power to "Relic neo-volkite gun" and the profile wouldn't feel out of place.

Yes, you could differentiate them more by slapping "ignore defenses" on all offensive powers.

Without the roll to see if it goes off I don't see how 7th edition wasn't just a guy equipped with a flamer, especially in an edition where a lot of characters can provide support abilities that were previously unique to psykers. The only things I can see you being left with is psykers being toolboxes or their abilities being randomized at the start of a game.

Part of the suggestion is that I liked parts of the Smite power from 8th edition, you knew when the Thousand Sons were shooting bullets and when they were shooting doom bolts and that appeals to me. I am not really sure what I want from psychic powers. This thread is in large part exploring the topic. I do hate big guns randomly having devastating wounds and I don't buy the fact that it hits so hard that reality hits a being of thought.

I'm just tired of what they did to the Sisters of Silence and the Celexus Assassin.

Now they are just kinda resistant to Psychic Attacks.

 vict0988 wrote:
Without the roll to see if it goes off I don't see how 7th edition wasn't just a guy equipped with a flamer, especially in an edition where a lot of characters can provide support abilities that were previously unique to psykers. The only things I can see you being left with is psykers being toolboxes or their abilities being randomized at the start of a game.

Part of the suggestion is that I liked parts of the Smite power from 8th edition, you knew when the Thousand Sons were shooting bullets and when they were shooting doom bolts and that appeals to me. I am not really sure what I want from psychic powers. This thread is in large part exploring the topic. I do hate big guns randomly having devastating wounds and I don't buy the fact that it hits so hard that reality hits a being of thought.

I want to respond from a few angles. First, I think it's important to point out that a lot of the "normal" stuff in 40k is still pretty cool. A psyker with a torrent attack isn't "just" a guy with a flamethrower. He's a guy with a frickin' flamethrower! Heck yeah!

Second, I do think some powers feel more flashy or feel like they justify the use of psykers in-universe better than others. Cool as a guy with a flamethrower is, you probably don't need to risk training/keeping around a dangerous psyker just for that. But if the guy's main job is predicting the future or teleporting the squad around with Gate of Infinity or throwing up forcefields and the psychic flame-thrower just happens to a second nifty thing he can do, that works out just fine, I think.

Third, I think there are ways to make psykers "feel special" without leaning into the devastating wound thing. A few options I like:

1.) Let powers be bigger/flashier, and charge points accordingly. If the librarian who can teleport his squad around while throwing up forcefields needs to be 150 points for balance's sake, that's fine. In fact, putting more points into fewer models probably makes it easier to justify doing something slightly more time-consuming with their powers. Like, I don't know how you'd translate this meaningfully into 10th, but a farseer's Eldritch Storm used to have you roll a scatter die and spin any tank it hit around in that direction. It made the power much more "visceral"/less abstract (and also tied into AV mechanics of the time.) If farseers cost 200 points, you don't mind taking the time to resolve something like that because you've probably got a couple less infantry units to move/shoot/charge with during your turn.

2. Let psykers be swiss army knives. Rather than giving them a single psychic special rule (or a single rule and a gun), give psykers a list of like, 3-ish powers on their datasheets and let them choose which power they want to manifest on a given turn. This makes psykers feel like they're flexible characters with a deep bag of tricks that gives them more versatility than most wargear loadouts could. If you avoid giving similar mechanics to too many other units, then you also reinforce the idea that flexibility is a psyker thing.

3. Bring back psychic tests/perils; just do it better. Instead of a pass/fail mechanic where sometimes your psyker just looks dumb and doesn't cast powers... instead do a system where his powers are guaranteed to go off, but he accumulates "stress" each time he uses a power. Then have him make some kind of test at either the start or end of his turn that is harder to pass the more stress he has. If he fails, he takes damage or can't use powers for a turn or however you want to represent perils. Then have his accumulated stress either reset or go down by a certain amount. Now, you have this resource management mini-game with your psykers where you can opt to push them harder but may end up frying their brains if you overdo it, all without the awkward moment where your librarian suddenly forgets how to shoot lightning.